Wade Hampton, 1889
“The diffusion of the Negroes? It would deprive us of much of our labor
and make it a little harder for the present generation, but it would be
the salvation of the future.”

THE
SLAVE TRADE

Slavery and Color
BY
THEODORE D. JERVEY
COLUMBIA, S. C.
THE STATE COMPANY
1925

COPYRIGHT 1925
THE STATE COMPANY

TO

A. S. SALLEY, JR.

Secretary of the Historical Commission
of South Carolina

whose friendship has stood the test of
time and whose exact knowledge, those
standing high among the scholars of
American history have recognized, this
book is dedicated.

INTRODUCTORY

The following pages, from which an excerpt was published in 1913, under the title—The Railroad The Conqueror—constitute an attempt to put within short compass the main causes of the shifting sectionalism of the people of the United States.

The facts and assertions upon which this sketch is based have, with others not included, been gathered and pondered for at least sixteen years, during which period, much at times interwoven, has, from time to time been cut, for fear that consideration of such might lead the thoughts of the possible reader away from the main theme.

As to the workmanship few can see more clearly than the author, how much better that could have been, had he who undertook it been accommodated with more leisure and equipped with scholarship and means. Yet it is doubtful if any one could have approached the task and pursued it through the years which have intervened between its inception and completion with a firmer determination to present the truth and nothing but the truth, as the writer saw and still sees it.

To publish what is herein set out, in this day of rampant commercialism and often unconscious intolerance, requires character and courage in a publisher.

On the other hand, submission to some, holding themselves out as publishers and soliciting manuscripts, involves occasional risk, and in this connection, the author feels that he would be lacking in ordinary gratitude, did he not record the rescue of this manuscript, in an earlier form, from the clutch of a publishing house, which having obtained it on solicitation, for perusal and consideration, on terms declined, held it for a year, in spite of repeated requests for its return, replied to repeatedly, with untruthful assertions that it had been sent back. Without any knowledge of or interest in the contents, a stranger, to whose inquiries concerning local history, the author, from time to time had replied, C. W. Lewis, Esq., residing in the vicinity of the disreputable publishing house, upon request, by a personal call, forced the delivery of the manuscript and returned it to the author. Now complete it is submitted to the public without further comment to speak for itself.

THE SLAVE TRADE

Slavery and Color

CHAPTER I

In consideration of much that appears in the numerous contributions to the discussion of the Negro Question, it must be noticeable that in recent years, there has been quite a broadening of the field, and that, from what was in the past, mainly a question of slavery or freedom, for one particular class of people, in one great country, we have advanced to a consideration of what may effect the entire world in that, which has been entitled by some: “The Conflict of Color,” and by others not quite so pessimistic: “The Question of the Twentieth Century, the Question of Color.”

In such circumstances, an examination of the evolution of this question and a recital of some of the phases under which it has been brought up for discussion in the history of the United States, may tend to correct some misapprehensions and throw some additional light upon a subject, which, in spite of the efforts to suppress it, is continually forcing itself upon the attention of the world.

While freely admitting the impossibility of discussing this subject, within any reasonable limits, without necessarily omitting mention of many publications, containing an amount of extremely valuable information, the aim of this work will be to trace the evolution of the question as it has appeared, in the expression of both whites and Negroes, in that country in which public opinion is said to exercise the greatest influence upon government. In undertaking such an examination it would be hardly necessary to make any very close scrutiny of the Colonial period, from the fact that while there was opinion that found expression in acts, statements and laws, the colonies, being under the control of Great Britain, were subjected to her policies and representative of her civilization. The extraordinary case therefore of a Massachusetts slave-owner, Maverick, who simply for breeding purposes, in 1636, forced an African woman of high rank, owned by him, to accept the embraces of a common young Negro[1] was but a way of expressing contempt for the race. The Maryland Act of 1663, a far less coarse expression, involved all white women who failed to entertain it. In Stroud’s “Sketch of the laws of Slavery,” published in 1827, we find on page 2:

“Section 2. And forasmuch as divers free born English women forgetful of their free condition, and to the disgrace of our nation do intermarry with Negro slaves” such “free born women ... shall serve the master of such slave during the life of her husband and all the issue of such free born women, so married shall be slaves as their fathers were.”

Yet despite these two striking illustrations at these early dates, broadly speaking, we might claim that in British America “up to 1700 and perhaps beyond, the sentiment North and South concerning the Negro or his enslavement differed but slightly; for while the South Carolina Act of 1690 did provide severe regulations for Negro and Indian slaves, a study of the statutes from 1698”[2] “and later of the press, indicates a sentiment against the importation of Negroes, which however was forced upon that province, as upon others, by the British Government.”[3]

The Revolutionary war, which shook off this controlling force, associated the States together, under the Articles of Confederation, thus paving the way for that great experiment, the Constitutional Federal Republic, which succeeded it.

It was in the deliberations of the great Convention, which framed that “more perfect union”, that the Negro question really first arose, as a matter of vital political concern; nor among all the questions which confronted that extraordinary body, did there appear a graver one, than that affecting the status of the colored people of the Union.

This class represented, at that time, about one-fifth of the population of the thirteen States, which it was the aim to unite, or 737,208 blacks as against 3,172,006 whites[4], and while of these 737,208 colored persons some 59,527 were free, in every one of the thirteen States, except Massachusetts, there were slaves, and in only one State, outside of New England, Pennsylvania, were free persons of color more numerous than slaves.

In eight of the thirteen States the Negro slaves greatly outnumbered the free persons of color; while in still another, with a total of 5,572 colored persons, the colored freedmen exceeded the slaves by only 54.

Under these conditions, it was not unnatural that the question should have presented itself as one of slavery versus freedom, rather than Negroes versus whites, and for the seventy years in which slavery continued to exist, that fact served to obscure, to quite an extent, the appreciation of the distinct question of color and race. Yet by some, at an exceedingly early date, it was recognized, that apart from the consideration of how they might be held, the mere presence in the Republic of a large and growing number of people of an inferior race, presented a serious problem.

When the consideration of the basis upon which Federal representation should rest, and direct taxes be apportioned, was reached, the framers of the Constitution found themselves, therefore, confronted with a political question of the first magnitude, in the existence of the slave trade.

What was the slave? A man or a chattel?

The question was precipitated by a clause in the report of the committee of detail, presented by John Rutledge, of South Carolina, Article 7, Section 4. “No tax or duty shall be laid by the Legislature on articles exported from any State nor on the migration or importation of such persons as the several States shall think proper to admit, nor shall such migration or importation be prohibited.”[5]

In the light of what followed, of the existing legislation upon that subject in the State of South Carolina, and the history of the province and State, the introduction of the concluding clause of this section by her most distinguished representative was unfortunate. It gave rise to declarations concerning the State which not only do not seem to have been absolutely borne out by the facts; but which the actions and votes of her deputies themselves, to some extent stultified; yet the State was nevertheless stamped with an unenviable precedence in a matter in which she cast but one of the seven votes, in a total of eleven, by which the final decision was arrived at.

In the discussion which immediately arose upon the introduction of the report, four views with regard to this clause found expression.

Luther Martin, of Maryland, a Representative from a State, which, as will subsequently be shown, could have then been described as the most complete slave State of the thirteen, had nevertheless the discernment to realize the dangers of such a condition, and proposed to alter the section, so as to allow a prohibition or tax on the importation of slaves. He presented three grounds of objection to the denial of such: “1. As five slaves are to be counted as three free-men in the apportionment of Representatives, such a clause would leave an encouragement of the traffic. 2. Slaves weakened one part of the Union, which the other parts were bound to protect; the privilege of importing them was, therefore, unreasonable. 3. It was inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution and dishonorable to the American character to have such features in the Constitution.”

In defending the clause Mr. Rutledge was not conciliatory. He “did not see how the importation of slaves could be encouraged by this section. He was not apprehensive of insurrections and would readily exempt the other States from their obligations to protect the Southern States against them. Religion and humanity had nothing to do with the question. Interest alone is the governing principle with nations. The true question at present is whether the Southern States shall or shall not be parties to the Union. If the Northern States consult their interest they will not oppose the increase of slaves which will increase the commodities of which they will become the consumers.”

Mr. Ellsworth of Connecticut supported the clause in an argument pitched upon the same utilitarian plane, but strengthened with what was an assertion of the doctrine of States rights. He “was for leaving the clause as it stands. Let every State import what it pleases. The morality or wisdom of slavery are considerations belonging to the States themselves. What enriches a part enriches the whole, and the States are the best judges of their particular interests. The old Confederation had not meddled with this point and he did not see any greater necessity for bringing it within the policy of the new one.”

Mr. Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, while upholding the view of Mr. Rutledge, held out a hope of subsequent accord. He said “South Carolina can never receive the plan, if it prohibits the slave trade. In every proposed extension of the powers of Congress, that State has expressly and watchfully excepted that of meddling with the importation of Negroes. If the States be all left at liberty on the subject, South Carolina may perhaps by degrees do of herself what is wished, as Virginia and Maryland have already done.”[6]

Upon the following day the discussion was resumed.

Mr. Sherman, of Connecticut, “was for leaving the clause as it stands. He disapproved of the slave trade; yet as the States were now possessed of the right to import slaves, as the public good did not require it to be taken from them and as it was expedient to have as few objections as possible to the proposed scheme of Government, thought it best to leave the matter as we found it. He observed that the abolition of slavery seemed to be going on in the United States, and that the good sense of the several States would probably by degrees complete it. He urged upon the Convention the necessity of dispatching its business.”

Col. Mason, of Virginia, took very high ground. He declared: “This infernal traffic originated in the avarice of the British merchants. The British Government constantly checked the attempts of Virginia to put a stop to it. The present question concerns not the importing States alone, but the whole Union. The evil of having slaves was experienced during the late war. Had slaves been treated as they might have been by the enemy, they would have proved dangerous instruments in their hands. But their folly dealt by the slaves as it did by the Tories. He mentioned the dangerous insurrections of the slaves in Greece and Sicily, and the instructions given by Cromwell to the commissioners sent to Virginia to arm the servants and slaves in case other means of obtaining submission should fail. Maryland and Virginia, he said, had already prohibited the importation of slaves expressly. North Carolina had done the same in substance. All this would be vain, if South Carolina and Georgia be at liberty to import. The Western people are already calling out for slaves in their new lands, and will fill that country with slaves, if they can be got through South Carolina and Georgia. Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the immigration of whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on morals. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects Providence punishes national sins by national calamities. He lamented that some of our Eastern brethren had, from a lust of gain, embarked in this nefarious traffic. As to the States being in possession of the right to import, this was the case with many other rights now to be properly given up. He held it essential in every point of view that the General Government should have power to prevent the increase of slavery.”

Mr. Ellsworth spoke again, and quite to the point: “As he had never owned a slave, could not judge of the effect of slavery on character. He said, however, that if it was to be considered in a moral light, we ought to go further and free those already in the country. As slaves also multiply so fast in Virginia and Maryland that it is cheaper to raise than import them, whilst in the sickly swamps foreign supplies are necessary. If we go no further than is urged we shall be unjust to South Carolina and Georgia. Let us not intermeddle. As population increases, poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country. Provision is already made in Connecticut for abolishing it. And the abolition has already taken place in Massachusetts. As to the danger of insurrection from foreign influence that will become a motive to kind treatment of the slaves.”

Mr. Charles Pinckney said: “If slavery be wrong it is justified by the example of all the world. He cited the case of Greece, Rome and other States; the sanction given by France, England, Holland and other modern States. In all ages one half of mankind have been slaves. If the Southern States were left alone they will probably of themselves stop importation. He would himself, as a citizen of South Carolina, vote for it. An attempt to take away the right, as proposed, will produce serious objections to the Constitution which he wished to see adopted.”

Gen. C. C. Pinckney “declared it to be his firm opinion that if himself and all his colleagues were to sign the Constitution and use their personal influence it would be of no avail towards obtaining the assent of their constituents. South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves. As to Virginia, she will gain by stopping the importations. Her slaves will rise in value and she has more than she wants. It would be unequal to require South Carolina and Georgia to confederate on such unequal terms. He said the royal assent before the Revolution had never been refused to South Carolina as to Virginia. He contended that the importation of Slaves would be for the interest of the Whole Union. The more slaves the more produce to employ the carrying trade. The more consumption also, and the more of this the more of revenue for the common treasury. He admitted it to be reasonable that slaves should be dutied like other imports, but should consider a rejection of the clause as an exclusion of South Carolina from the Union.”

Mr. Baldwin, of Georgia, “had conceived national objects alone to be before the Convention, not such as like the present were of a local nature. Georgia was decided on this point. That State has always hitherto supposed a General Government to be the pursuit of the central States who wished to have a vortex for everything—that her distance would preclude her from equal advantage—and that she could not prudently purchase it by yielding national powers. From this it might be understood in what light she would view an attempt to abridge her favorite prerogative. If left to herself she may probably put a stop to the evil. As one ground for this conjecture he took notice of the sect of which he said was a respectable class of people who carried their ethics beyond the mere equality of men, extending their humanity to the claims of the whole animal creation.”

Mr. Wilson, of Pennsylvania, “observed that if South Carolina and Georgia were themselves disposed to get rid of the importation of slaves in a short time, as had been suggested, they would never refuse to unite because the importation might be prohibited. As the section now stands all articles imported are to be taxed. Slaves alone are exempt. This is in fact a bounty on that article.”

Mr. Gerry, of Massachusetts, “thought we had nothing to do with the conduct of the States as to slaves, but ought to be careful not to give any sanction to it.”

Mr. Dickinson, of Delaware, “considered it as inadmissible on every principle of honor and safety that the importation of slaves should be authorized to the States by the Constitution. The true question was whether the national happiness would be promoted or impeded by the importation, and the question ought to be left to the National Government, not to the States particularly interested. If England and France permit slavery, slaves are at the same time excluded from both these kingdoms. Greece and Rome were made unhappy by their slaves. He could not believe that the Southern States would refuse to confederate on the account apprehended; especially as the power was not likely to be immediately exercised by the General Government.”

Mr. Williamson, of North Carolina, “stated the law of North Carolina on the subject, to wit, that it did not directly prohibit the importation of slaves. It imposed a duty of five pounds on each slave imported from Africa. Ten pounds on each from elsewhere, and fifty pounds on each from a State licensing manumission. He thought the Southern States could not be members of the Union if the clause should be rejected, and that it was wrong to force anything down not absolutely necessary and which any State must disagree to.”

Mr. King, of Massachusetts, “thought the subject should be considered in a political light only. If two States will not agree to the Constitution as stated on one side, he could affirm with equal belief on the other that great and equal opposition would be experienced from the other States. He remarked on the exemption of slaves from duty, while every other import was subjected to it, as an inequality that could not fail to strike the commercial sagacity of the Northern and Middle States.”

Mr. Langdon, of New Hampshire, “was strenuous for giving the power to the General Government. He could not with a good conscience leave it with the States who could then go on with the traffic, without being restrained by the opinion here given that they will themselves cease to import slaves.”

Gen. Pinckney, “thought himself bound to declare candidly that he did not think South Carolina would stop her importation of slaves in any short time, but only stop them occasionally as she now does. He moved to commit the clause that slaves might be made liable to an equal tax with other imports, which he thought right, and which would remove one difficulty that had been started.”

Mr. Rutledge remarked: “If the Convention thinks that North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia will ever agree to the plan, unless their right to import slaves be untouched, the expectation is vain. The people of these States will never be such fools as to give up so important an interest. He was strenuous against striking out the section and seconded the motion of Gen. Pinckney for a commitment.”

Mr. Gouverneur Morris, of Pennsylvania, “wished the whole subject to be committed, including the clauses relating to taxes on exports, and on a Navigation Act. These things may form a bargain among the Northern and Southern States.”

Mr. Butler, of South Carolina, declared, “that he would never agree to the power of taxing exports.”

Mr. Sherman said: “It was better to let the Southern States import slaves than to part with them, if they made that a sine qua non. He was opposed to a tax on slaves imported as making the matter worse, because it implied they were property. He acknowledged that if the power of prohibiting the importation should be given to the General Government that it would be exercised. He thought it would be its duty to exercise the power.”

Mr. Reed, of Delaware, “was for the commitment provided the clause concerning taxes on exports should also be committed.”

Mr. Sherman, observed: “that that clause had been agreed to and therefore could not be committed.”

Mr. Randolph, of Virginia, “was for committing in order that some middle ground, if possible, be found. He could never agree to the clause as it stands. He would sooner risk the Constitution. He dwelt on the dilemma to which the Constitution was exposed by agreeing to the clause it would revolt the Quakers, the Methodists and many others in the States having no slaves. On the other hand, two States might be lost to the Union. Let us then,” he said, “try the chance of a commitment.”[7]

On the question of committing, the vote was: New Hampshire, no; Massachusetts, abstaining from voting; Connecticut, aye; New Jersey, aye; Pennsylvania, no; Delaware, no; Maryland, aye; Virginia, aye; North Carolina, aye; South Carolina, aye; Georgia, aye;[8] In a total of eleven States at Convention seven ayes, three noes, one not voting.

The clause having been referred to a committee consisting of Messrs. Langdon, King, Johnson, Livingston, Clymer, Dickinson, L. Martin, Madison, Williamson, C. C. Pinckney, and Baldwin, the committee reported in favor of the clause, with an amendment making it read: “The migration or importation of such persons as the several States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Legislature prior to the year 1800, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such migration or importation at a rate not exceeding the average of the duties laid on imports.”[9]

Gen. Pinckney moved to strike out the words “the year 1800 and to insert the words eighteen hundred and eight.”

Mr. Gorham, of Massachusetts, seconded the motion. This action brought from one, who up to that time does not appear to have participated in the discussion, Mr. Madison, the declaration that: “twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be more dishonorable to the national character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution.”[10]

The reported clause had been referred to the committee against the vote of New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Virginia and New Jersey both opposed the amendment; but as it received the vote of both New Hampshire and Massachusetts, which had not voted for the commitment, it was supported by seven out of the eleven States, the three New England States present and four of the five Southern States, the three Middle States present, and one Southern State, opposing.

While reasonable men must always be alive to the necessity of compromise, and while also the great responsibilities of the situation concerning this matter are apparent, yet this most important discussion and vote establishes some facts, with regard to the constitutional Union, which the honest historian cannot disregard.

First: The migration or importation of Negroes was prohibited in spite of the declaration of the representatives of the three Southern States, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, that some of the Southern States could not accept the Constitution if it did.

Second: A tax upon the importation was imposed through the aid of the vote of New England, whose representatives had warned the Convention that it would be a recognition of slavery to tax importation. The claim, therefore made, that South Carolina and Georgia forced the recognition of the slave trade is not borne out by the facts in the case. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia followed the suggestion of Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, and, abandoning the principles for which they had contended, “formed a bargain” by which the slave trade was surrendered for the recognition of slavery by the Constitution.

Upon considering the discussion, although Ellsworth’s shrewd criticism crippled, to some extent, the lofty flight of Mason of Virginia, yet the speech of the latter puts him upon a higher plane of statesmanship than that occupied by any deputy present. On the other hand, no matter how high their reputations otherwise may have been established, none descended to so low a plane as King, of Massachusetts and Rutledge of South Carolina; while no individual exhibited as much ignorance of the existing situation as he, who by the temperance of his utterance and the influence of his high personal character, most thoroughly mastered it.

Gen. C. C. Pinckney did not seem to know that South Carolina had not been permitted by Great Britain to throw off the slave trade, when, as a province, she sought to do so,[11] or that the sentiment of the people of his State, even while he was speaking, had found expression in an Act which prohibited the bringing into the State of “any Negro slave contrary to the Act to regulate the recovery of debts and prohibiting the importation of Negroes”[12] and which was sufficiently strong even after the above compromise to negative, by a vote of 93 to 40, Gillon’s attempt in the South Carolina Legislature in 1788, to repeal the law prohibiting importation.[13] No severer criticism of the General’s statesmanship on this point was ever promulgated than that, thirty-four years later, which his devoted brother, Gen. Thomas Pinckney, furnished, in some reflections, published by him[14] without any thought of how positively they ran counter to the dictum of his brother—“South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves”—he warned South Carolinians that Negro artisans were taking the places of whites.

But, turning from this discussion, it is of importance to consider just how the Negro population of the United States was located at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.

By the census taken in 1790 it was indicated that about six-sevenths of the entire colored population of the thirteen States constituting the Union, inhabited the four States of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, of which about one-half were found in Virginia, the population in the order of their numbers being as follows: Virginia 305,493; Maryland 111,099; South Carolina, 108,895; North Carolina, 105,547. The Negro population of Georgia at that date was but slightly in excess of the Negro population of New York, being only 29,662 to New York’s 25,978, while in the region north of Maryland there were nearly three times as many Negroes as in the region south of South Carolina.

Considering the percentage of blacks to whites in the different sections, South Carolina had the greatest, with a colored population rising as high as 44 per cent of the total. Virginia came second, with a percentage of 41, Georgia was third, with 36; Maryland fourth, with 35; North Carolina fifth, with 27; Delaware sixth, with 26; New Jersey seventh, with 9; New York eighth, with 8; Rhode Island ninth, with 7, and Pennsylvania tenth, with less than three per cent.

There is still another standpoint, however, from which this population might be considered; that is with regard to the area of the State containing the same, and considered in this light, Maryland, with a Negro population in excess of that of South Carolina, and with an area of only one-third, was the most distinct Negro State of the Union. Delaware came second, and Virginia third. In the two States of Maryland and Virginia, with a combined area of 79,124 square miles, there was considerably more than one-half of the colored population of the United States, 416,572. In the region to the south, embracing the three States of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, with an area of 143,040 square miles, there were as yet but 244,104 Negroes, or about one-third of the number, considered with regard to the area they inhabited, which makes very obvious the contention of Ellsworth that the abrogation of the slave trade would have operated as a distinct commercial benefit to Maryland and Virginia, enabling them to supply to the region south of them, at enhanced prices, the slaves they might raise for market.

Virginia, Maryland and Delaware then constituted at this time the black belt, containing, as they did, four-sevenths of the colored population of the Union, three-fourths of the remainder being in the region below and one-fourth above.

In the first decade of the Constitution the density of this colored population in Virginia and Maryland was actually increased; while, at the same time, through an extraordinary accession to her white population, in spite of great gains to the colored, South Carolina’s colored percentage decreased, and it is on this account that what happened in the next decade of the Constitution in South Carolina is of so much importance. A consideration of these events will show, that, in spite of the declaration of her great deputies, that “South Carolina could not do without slaves,” and that her people “would never be such fools as to give up so important an interest” as “their right to import slaves,” they not only proposed to give up the right, but strove earnestly to do so, and only after thirty years of unavailing effort, accompanied by an ever increasing investment in that class of property, did the strong minority, which had opposed it, acquiesce in Calhoun’s most unwise view, that the blacks furnished “the best substratum of population, upon which great and flourishing Commonwealths may be most easily and safely reared.”[15]

Once it was accepted, the march was steadily on to disaster.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Phillips, American Negro Slavery, p. 361.

[2] Statutes of S. C., Vols. 2 & 7, pp. 153, 367, 370.

[3] S. C. Gazette, Feb. 26, 1732, McCrady, S. C. under the Royal Government, p. 378.

[4] Compendium of the Ninth Census of the United States, p. 13.

[5] Farrand. Records of the Federal Convention, Vol. 2, p. 183.

[6] Farrand. Records of the Federal Convention, Vol. 2, p. 364.

[7] Farrand. Records of the Federal Convention, Vol. 2, pp. 369, 374.

[8] Ibid. p. 374.

[9] Ibid. p. 400.

Prof. Farrand renders “abst” absent, which the context contradicts. King of Massachusetts, was put on the committee.

[10] Farrand. Records of the Federal Convention, Vol. 2, p. 415.

[11] S. C. Gazette, Feb. 19, 1732, Stat. S. C. Vol. 7, pp. 367-370. McCrady, S. C. Under the Royal Government, p. 378.

[12] Stat. S. C. Vol. 7, p. 430.

[13] State Gazette, Jan. 28, 1788.

[14] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne and His Times, p. 130.

[15] Calhoun’s Correspondence, p. 369.

CHAPTER II

Following Gillon’s unsuccessful attempt in 1788, to repeal the existing law, the State of South Carolina, by successive enactments, in spite of the implied sanction of the Constitution until 1808, prohibited the importation of slaves[16] up to the year 1803. In that year Governor James B. Richardson, in his annual message to the General Assembly, indirectly suggested the repeal of such legislation.

The language of this message is so involved that, considered without reference to its effect, it seems to indicate some sympathy with the prohibition of the importation; but carefully considered, the secret sympathy of this official with those he condemns is obvious. The promptness with which it was seized upon by the opponents of prohibition, and the arguments culled from it, indicate that it was the opening wedge by which the defence against the black flood, was split, to admit it in such volume, as to make subsequent efforts to stop the flow almost useless.

That portion of the message which dealt with the importation of Negro slaves reads as follows:

“All possible diligence and my best efforts have been used to carry effectually into operation the law prohibiting the importation of Negroes into the State, but it is with concern that I have here to state to you, that it has been without success; whether it must be attributed principally to the ill consequences that are apprehended would result from carrying the law into operation by emancipating the Negroes so brought in (a remedy deemed more mischievous than the evil of their introduction in servitude) or whether the interests of the citizens is so interwoven with that species of property, that it prevents their aiding the law in answering the salutary purposes, I will not presume to determine; but I am inclined to believe both causes operate as preventatives; for those people are continued to be brought into the State beyond the possibility of prevention. In all laws intended for the general benefit, they should be so calculated that their operation should be found equal in every part of the State; where this is not the case it means that there is some radical defect therein, or it is inimical to the interest of the citizens; with this law such is the situation; for in the present state of things, the citizens in the frontier and sea coast districts do accumulate this property without the possibility of being detected, while those of the interior and middle districts only experience the operation of that law from their remote situation, etc.... This indeed is a circumstance to be lamented, but such is the true state of our situation and therefore becomes a subject worthy of your consideration and one that I trust will engage your endeavors to render equally energetic in every part of the State that law which experience has proved partial in its operation and is oppressive upon such citizens in the interior districts as hold it the object of desire to augment their capital in the accumulation of such property.”[17]

This expression of opinion from the Governor brought up in the House the appointment of “a committee to inquire whether any and what amendments are necessary, to the Act entitled, ‘An Act to prevent Negro slaves from being brought into or entering this State’[18]; in the Senate a bill to permit their importation.”[19]

The leading opponent in the Senate of the bill to permit importation was State Senator Robert Barnwell, at that time in his forty-second year. He had served with credit in the Revolutionary war, in the course of which he had been seriously wounded; had been a delegate to the Continental Congress; and later a member of Congress from the 2nd Congressional district of South Carolina, later still he had been elected Speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives.[20] He is described by Edward Hooker as “a tall, portly, well-built man of about sixty years—a man of singular gravity, and possessed of great influence in the Senate. Said to be an eminent orator and very religious character.”[21]

A synopsis of Mr. Barnwell’s remarks on this occasion has been preserved, although, as became more and more the custom with regard to all utterances concerning slavery, in any way critical, much was suppressed. The account reads as follows: “He maintained that by the immense influx of these persons into the State, the value of this species of property would be considerably diminished, insomuch that he did believe Negroes would be soon not worth one half of what they might be sold for. The value of the produce raised by their labor would be in like manner depreciated. * * * The permission given by the bill would lead to ruinous speculation. Everyone would purchase Negroes. It was well known that those who dealt in this property would sell it at a very long credit. Our citizens would purchase at all hazards and trust to fortunate crops and favorable markets for making their payments and it would be found that South Carolina would in a few years, if this trade continued open, be in the same situation of debt, and subject to all the misfortunes which that situation had produced as at the conclusion of the Revolutionary war. The honorable member adduced in support of his opinion other arguments still more cogent and impressive, which from reasons very obvious, we decline making public.”[22]

The most prominent advocate of the bill was State Senator William Smith, the schoolmate of Andrew Jackson, later judge, and, later still, United States Senator, the most determined of Calhoun’s political opponents in after years. He was a native of North Carolina, of somewhat indefinite age, a reformed drunkard; but a man of firmness and power, and also of pleasing appearance.[23]

The report of his remarks upon this occasion is brevity itself, but sufficient to condemn him, as it is apparent that in a spirit of pessimism he voted against his convictions. The report is: “Mr. Smith said he would agree to put a stop to the importation of Negroes but he believed it to be impossible. For this reason he would vote for the bill.”[24] The House had meantime reported that “the laws prohibiting the importation of Negroes can be so amended as to prevent their introduction among us,” but a strong faction were for action on the Senate bill. “Mr. Drayton was of the opinion that the committee should proceed to consider the bill from the Senate rather than the report of the committee of this House. He confessed that he was a friend to that bill in its utmost latitude. Many of the planters had cash which they could not so well dispose of as in purchasing Negroes, and he did not see why they should not be allowed to improve their estates in the best manner they were able, as well as merchants or any other class of persons.”[25]

The House was not, however, swayed from its course. It proceeded to consider the report of the committee, and a bill in accordance therewith was arranged to be brought before the House on the 12th. On that date, upon a motion to postpone the second reading to February 1, 1804, the same was lost by a vote of 41 to 63; and upon the following day the bill from the Senate came up, and, by a vote of 55 to 46, became a law.[26] With the majority appears only one great name, Langdon Cheves. With the minority is recorded the name of a new member, Joseph Alston, destined to something of a career, who on this occasion, in opposition to the bill permitting importation, made a notable speech.[27]

From the achievement of her independence in 1783, South Carolina had legislated against the importation of Negro slaves with greater and greater severity. The indications are all that this reversal of her past policy was the result of the matter having been sprung as a surprise by Governor Richardson in the second year of his term of office, when the Senate was two to one in favor of such action as he suggested, and even in the more popular branch of the Legislature a majority of nine in one hundred and one votes could be secured. Under these conditions, that a strong effort should have been at once inaugurated by those who opposed the importation, to repeal the Act permitting same was natural, and, upon the reassembling of the Legislature in the fall of 1804, a bill having such for its purpose was introduced, pressed to a vote in the Senate, and lost by only one vote, the record being 16 for, 17 against repeal of Act permitting importation, and two absent.[28]

Four days later the House went into committee on the following resolution: “Resolved, that in the opinion of this House, it is inexpedient and impolitic to permit the importation of slaves into this State, and that a committee of five be appointed to bring in a bill for that purpose.”[29] The resolution was adopted by a vote of 69 to 39, and among the names of the majority appears that of William Lowndes. Thus the two Houses being unable to agree before adjournment, it was to be inferred, from the heavy majority in the House, against importation and the extremely narrow margin by which it had been sustained in the Senate, the fight would again be made, at the convening of the Legislature, in the fall of 1805. And so it was, for upon its reassembling Governor Paul Hamilton at once and pointedly referred to the subject in his message: “I should be wanting in my endeavors towards the public good were I to omit soliciting you to legislate on the importation of slaves. Abstractedly from other considerations of it, on which indeed much may be said, I feel myself bound to represent its continuance as productive of effects the most injurious, in draining us of our specie, thereby embarrassing our commercial men and naturally lessening the sales of our produce; that viewed with reference to population it increases our weakness not our strength; for it must be admitted that in proportion as you add to the number of slaves, you prevent the influx of those men who would increase the means of defence and security. I will add, that an immediate stop to this traffic is, in my judgment, on every principle of sound policy, indispensable.”[30]

The message at once engaged the attention of the newly elected House, to the Speakership of which Joseph Alston had been elected. The young Speaker was a most interesting personality. His father, with perhaps one exception, was the largest slave-owner in the State, and of the latter, we are informed, that “in his opinion the true interests of the planter were in exact accord with the dictates of an enlightened humanity. The consequence was that his numerous plantations were models of neatness and order and his slaves always exhibited an appearance of health and comfort, which spoke well for their treatment.”[31]

This election to the Speakership was the beginning of a political career for Joseph Alston, which soon led to the Governorship and might well have extended into national fields, had it not been for the tragedy which cut it short. He had just married Theodosia Burr, the fascinating and accomplished daughter of Aaron Burr. But the death of his only son in 1812 and almost immediately after, the loss of his wife at sea, seemed literally to destroy all his interest in life and take it from him. This debate in 1805, in which he was the foremost figure, is alluded to in the diary of Edward Hooker, by whom we are informed that the principle speakers in the House were Simons, Alston, Miles, Taylor and Wright. The resolution under consideration, as drawn up by Joseph Alston, was prefaced with several considerations, such as the inconsistency of the slave trade with the precepts of Christianity—with justice, humanity, etc., and later with the true interests of the State. In the argument of Mr. Miles, of Richland, appear the extraordinary insinuations of Governor Richardson, as to the injustice of the law with regard to those who found it difficult to violate it, and whom it did prohibit from importing slaves. Of the members of the House and Senate who sufficiently struck the attention of Hooker to draw from him something like a pen portrait, Barnwell, Lowndes and Alston stand out the clearest. He estimated Alston to be about twenty-eight years of age. He was not quite twenty-seven. He describes him thus: “Mr. Alston is a short man and rather thick. Of a dark complexion, with thick black hair and a formidable pair of whiskers, that cover a great part of his face, and nearly meet at the chin. His dress and demeanor are well deserving the name buckish. When not in the legislative hall, he may be seen as often as anywhere, about the stables, looking at fine horses, dressed in a short jockey-like surtout or frock, and laced and tossled boots, with a segar in his mouth, and much more of the ‘gig and tandem’ levity than the austere virtues of a senatorial leader. Indeed he is one of the last persons that I should have picked out from the crowd of people in town for a president of one branch of the Legislature.”

Of the speech he says: “Alston’s speech appears to me more like an extemporaneous one, though it is said by such as are acquainted with him that he always, without exception, writes his speeches. He like Simons, used notes, but did not recur to them so often; nor did he confine himself so much to method, nor avoid so scrupulously every expression not stamped with elegance, yet his arrangement was not bad, nor his language undignified. He did not at first speak with uncommon fluency, indeed he stammered a little, but when he became once fairly engaged his words appeared to flow with great ease. His figures and allusions were eminently striking and beautiful, and his speech abounded with them. He dropped some excellent moral and political sentiments, quoted two or three texts of sublime morality from the Scriptures, and with great vehemence and apparent sincerity urged the House to consult the dictates of justice and humanity, in opposition to sordid interest. His manner of delivery was extremely good and his gestures forcible and expressive. He labored some time, and with success, to show that the increase of slaves tends to destroy that equality which is the basis of our republican institutions and insists that it is not only unjust to bring them in, but demonstrably injurious to the real interests of the State. In his argument was a fund of good sense and useful information. The utmost silence pervaded the House while he spoke thirty-five or forty minutes.”[32]

The resolution was adopted, and the bill prohibiting importation was sent to the Senate by a vote of 56 to 28.[33]

Later, by the same pen, we have a brief description of the last speech upon this bill of that Senator, who in opposition to it, may be said to have cast the most important vote he was ever called upon to give.

Allusion has been before made to the brief reason given by Senator William Smith for his vote, for opening the ports to importation of slaves, which he declared himself not in favor of, but thought it impossible to prevent, in 1803, when he, constituting one of the majority of two to one in that branch of the General Assembly, voted to open them. Public opinion had swept away that great majority, and from the House, with just such a vote, two to one, the bill to prohibit came to the Senate. The following is Hooker’s description of the situation, and the part played by Smith:

“The bill having passed the lower House, the public feeling is excited about its event here. Mr. Smith, a lawyer from York District, made a long and rather tedious speech against it. He is not fluent, nor does he use the handsomest language, but in the course of his argument gets out considerable that is to the purpose.”[34]

Smith’s vote was sufficient to kill the bill. It failed of passage by 15 to 16 in the Senate.[35] He thus, by his vote alone made impossible, what he claimed to favor, but declined to support, because he asserted he believed to be impossible. Later in the United States Senate he disclosed, that in the four years he thus secured for the slave trade to pour its flood upon South Carolina, in 202 vessels, 39,075 slaves were brought into the port of Charleston[36] for which he had the effrontery to hold almost everybody but himself responsible. This disastrous piece of legislation increased the Negro population of South Carolina in that decade 41 per cent, against an increase of only 9 per cent whites, and checked almost entirely the remarkable increase of whites, which had marked the previous decade. As to the effect upon the business of Charleston, in the reminiscence of one of the editors of the daily press, we have an illuminating illustration of the truth of Senator Barnwell’s prophecy. Says Mr. Thomas: “In November 1803, I returned from my fourth voyage with a printed catalogue of fifty thousand volumes of books in every branch of literature, arts and sciences, being by far the largest importation ever made into the United States. I had only got them opened and arranged for sale three days when news arrived from Columbia that the Legislature then in session had opened the port for the importation of slaves from Africa. The news had not been five hours in the city before two large British Guineamen that had been laying off and on the port for several days, expecting it, came up to town, and from that day my business began to decline, although then in a situation to carry it on to three times the extent I had ever done before. Previous to this the planters had large sums of money laying idle in the banks, which they liberally expended not only for their actual, but supposed wants. A great change at once took place in everything. Vessels were fitted out in numbers for the coast of Africa, and as fast as they returned their cargoes were bought up with avidity, not only consuming the large funds which had been accumulating, but all that could be procured, and finally exhausting credit and mortgaging the slaves for payment, many of whom were not redeemed for ten years afterwards to my knowledge.”[37]

On the other hand the State of Ohio, which had been admitted in 1800 with 45,628 whites and only 336 colored, was so disturbed by the growth of its colored population that before they reached in number two thousand, that State passed the notorious Black Laws of January 9, 1805, of which Section 4 reads as follows: “That no black or mulatto person shall hereafter be permitted to be sworn or give evidence in any Court of record or elsewhere in the State in any cause depending or matter of controversy, where either party to the same is a white person, or in any prosecution which shall be instituted in behalf of this State against any white person.”[38]

While South Carolina did not permit the full sweep of such in her Courts,[39] holding a free person of color born of a free white woman an admissible witness yet, with such legislation in Ohio, and Indiana, it is not surprising, Fiske, of New York, six years later failed to establish his contention that “color was a mere matter of accident * * * All men were born free and equal”; and that his attempt to reject the Senate amendment to the Orleans bill, i. e. the insertion of the word “white” before the words “free male inhabitants,” in defining the electorate, should have been brushed aside by Sheffey, of Virginia, with the simple declaration that “such doctrines would prostrate the civil institutions of Virginia.”[40] It was one thing to protest as Col. Mason did against the slave trade; but, with some four hundred thousand slaves, double what any other State possessed, Virginia was prepared to contend for her property rights, and the position seems to have been met with acquiescence by Congress.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Stat. S. C. Vol. 7 pp. 431-448.

[17] Charleston Courier, December 5, 1803.

[18] Ibid. December 6, 1803.

[19] Ibid. December 13, 1803.

[20] S. C. Hist. & Genealog. Mag. Vol. 2, p. 72.

[21] Annual Report American Hist. Ass. 1896, Vol. 1, p. 870.

[22] Charleston Courier, December 26, 1803.

[23] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 148.

[24] Charleston Courier, December 26, 1803.

[25] Ibid. January 2, 1804.

[26] City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, December 21, 1803.

[27] Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Vol. 2, p. 270.

[28] Charleston Courier, December 12, 1804.

[29] Ibid. December 24, 1804.

[30] Charleston Courier, December 2, 1805.

[31] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 534.

[32] Annual Report American Hist. Assn. 1896, Vol. 1, p. 868.

[33] Charleston Courier, December 13, 1805.

[34] Annual Report American Hist. Assn. Vol. 1, p. 878, 1896.

[35] Charleston Courier, December 9, 1805.

[36] Charleston Year Book, 1880, p. 263.

[37] Thomas’s Reminiscences, Case Tiffany & Burnham, Vol. 2, p. 35.

[38] C. L. Martzolff, Ohio University, Nov. 30, 1909.

[39] S. C. Reports, Brevard, Vol. 2, p. 145. State vs. McDowell.

[40] Charleston Courier, February 27, 1811.

CHAPTER III

Concerning free persons of color in the United States, of whom there were about 210,000, to 1,550,000 Negro slaves, in 1816, it was asserted, in the petition of the Kentucky Abolition Society to Congress, which asked that a suitable territory should be set apart as asylum for emancipated Negroes and mulattoes, “that when emancipated they were not allowed the privileges of free citizens and were prohibited from emigrating to other States and Territories.”[41]

Certainly if their testimony could only be received in courts of justice in cases, when not in opposition to the interests of the whites, which was the situation in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, their ability to protect themselves against injury from whites was seriously affected, but, at the same time, that this tiny stream, trickling into Ohio, was thus harshly dammed, the Negroes were pouring into South Carolina in such numbers, that legislation against their introduction from other States and Territories was passed.[42]

But again the same desire for ephemeral benefits to a class, which had sufficed to overthrow a wise law in 1803, induced action for repeal in 1818, and, with lamentable lack of foresight, the brilliant George McDuffie led the fight for the repeal of the law of 1816.

By the census of 1810, the colored population of South Carolina was 200,919, the white only 214,196.

With the exception of Louisiana, just admitted, with a colored population of 42,245, and a white population of 34,311, no State in the Union had, proportionately to its white, as great a Negro population as South Carolina. The increase of its colored population had been so accelerated by the mischievous action of Governor Richardson and his supporters in 1803, as to have increased almost two and a half times as much as that of Maryland, the Negro population of which, as has been before pointed out, was greater than that of South Carolina in 1790, and had increased from that day to 1800 in a greater proportion compared to its white population, than South Carolina.

It is true the increase of the colored population of North Carolina had also been very great; but, at the same time, the increase of the white population had been much greater than in South Carolina, and it had had originally so much larger a number of white inhabitants that they were still more than double the number of blacks.

To a large and important portion of South Carolina’s legislators, therefore, the evil of this continual increase of the Negro population was apparent, and these under the leadership of Robert Y. Hayne, at that time Speaker of the House, opposed the repeal of the law of 1816.

Unfortunately no Hooker was present to record his impressions of the discussion, and all that we know of this great struggle is, that the Act of 1816 was repealed after “one of the most eloquent and animated debates that has taken place on the floor for many years.”[43] In the Senate the repeal was only secured by a vote of 22 to 19.

In the year which followed came in Congress the first great sectional struggle over the Missouri Question, involving the right of Southern men to move into the Northwest with their slaves, with regard to which some of them argued, that, in the long run, such diffusion of slaves would not increase their number or result in the extension of slavery, but rather tend to check the increase.

In his contemporaneous publication of speeches from both sides, the editor of Niles’ Register regrets his inability to secure a copy of the speech of William Lowndes, which, in all probability would have been the most illuminating exposition of the Southern view, which could have been submitted; but the speech of Tucker, of Virginia, does put forward the idea as about stated; while Sergeant, of Pennsylvania, the leading speaker on the Northern side, combats the same at sufficient length to create the impression, that it was held by more than one. But what is of greater interest is the distinct note of racial inferiority, which Sergeant sounds loudly. It is not only objection to the Negro slave; but to the Negro per se; ... “Nature has placed upon them an unalterable mark ... They are and must forever remain distinct.”[44]

Senator Smith, who, by his vote in the South Carolina Legislature in 1805 had most materially assisted in setting aside the South Carolina law in opposition to African importation, while at the same time fatuously declaring that he only did so because he thought it impossible to prevent it, now, in the United States Senate, refused all compromise, declaring that by sanctioning the slave trade in the Constitution, the Federal Government was responsible for existing conditions. But a compromise was effected, and in the year 1820, the Union, then consisting of just double the number of the original thirteen States, adjusted the difference on the Negro Question.

Geographically considered it was apparent that the black belt had slipped a little lower down upon the body politic. The total colored population of the Union was 1,771,856, more than half of whom were to be found in the three States of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. In Virginia, 402,031; in South Carolina, 265,301; in North Carolina, 219,629; a total of 886,961. Southwest of this section and south of the Ohio River, the Negro population amounted to 529,856; but in no State in the Union had the increase since 1800 been so enormous as in South Carolina; for with an area and white population only two-fifths of Virginia, the increase of the Negro population of the two States had practically been the same, viz.: 156,538 for Virginia, 156,457 for South Carolina. Nor could any comforting reassurance have been drawn from the fact that the percentage of increase of the same species of population in the States of Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky had been greater; for such had been accompanied, in these newer States, with an even greater increase of their white population, and was based upon an original Negro population very small indeed, when compared to that of South Carolina in 1800. When comparison was made with Maryland, on the other hand, where the number of Negroes had originally been greater than in South Carolina, with the increase of the whites in the three decades not so great, small as had been the increase of the whites, it was yet greater than that of the colored, and originally the proportion of whites had been greater.

From all these causes South Carolina was becoming in place of Virginia the State most identified with the Negro question, in a section where it was becoming a larger and more important property interest.

Yet, while the increase of the Negro population in the lower South and Middle and Southwest had been very great, the census furnished no evidence of that movement of Negroes from North to South which has been so often alluded to. The Negro population of New York had increased by more than 50 per cent; New Jersey by at least 43; Connecticut, 40; and Delaware 38. Pennsylvania’s increase in the 30 years had been 200 per cent, and even in Massachusetts the increase had been 22 per cent. The only State in which there had been a decrease, which could be attributed to a movement to another section, was Rhode Island, and it was not large enough to be considered, amounting in all to less than a thousand. Considering the population of the Southern States, however, the census afforded information well warranting the assumption that from Virginia and Maryland between the years 1810 and 1820 some 30,000 colored people had moved out. In the same time the colored population of North Carolina had increased by an accession of about 40,000; South Carolina, 65,000; Georgia, 44,000; Alabama, 24,000; Mississippi, 16,000; Louisiana, 35,000; Tennessee, 37,000; and Missouri, 7,000; the percentage of increase being, North Carolina 24 per cent; South Carolina 32 per cent; Georgia 42 per cent; Mississippi 95 per cent; Louisiana 55 per cent; Tennessee 80 per cent; Kentucky 58 per cent; and Missouri nearly 300 per cent, with no basis with which to estimate the 42,000 of Alabama.

These figures establish a movement from Virginia and Maryland but also from without, to the eight States of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Kentucky, averaging about 45 per cent increase in the decade, and with every reasonable allowance for the movement from Virginia and Maryland and New York, of which at least one-third must have gone to the Northwest and Missouri, illegal importation must have been proceeding apace. Now, if there was illegal importation, where would it be most likely to occur?

In Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee; and there we find an increase of nearly 85 per cent, or an addition to the Negro population of something like 88,000.

These facts, therefore, disclose the weakness of the Southern argument that the diffusion of slaves would not have resulted in any extension of slavery. Theoretically it was a sound argument, that the slaves being spread over the face of the country, they and their masters would be brought more and more under the influences which would work against slavery and for emancipation. But if illicit importation from abroad was proceeding to any great extent, the premise upon which the argument was based gave way, and this is what must have been the case, as has been shown.

This is also where the argument of Prof. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips fails to convince, when he expresses the opinion, that “the importance of the repeal, in 1818, of the law which had prohibited the importation of slaves from other States into South Carolina has been exaggerated.” He bases his reason for this view upon the claim that “the Federal Censuses show that the average rate of increase of the Negro population in South Carolina between 1810 and 1860, was substantially smaller than that of the Negroes in the United States at large, “which” he thinks, “indicates that South Carolina was in that half century more of a slave exporting than a slave importing State; and that a prohibition of slave imports would have had no appreciable influence upon the ratio of increase of her Negro population.”[45]

Unless it can be shown, however, that there were no accessions to the Negro population of the United States from without, between the periods selected by Prof. Phillips, the mere fact that the rate of increase of the Negro population of South Carolina was substantially smaller than that of the United States at large does not establish that South Carolina was more of a slave exporting than importing State for that period; for the greater increase without could well be due to importation in great volume elsewhere, and that there was such was asserted by many, notably by Henry Middleton, in Congress, the very year of Hayne’s speech in the South Carolina Legislature against importations from other States.[46] But apart from this, before this, South Carolina had become the State with the largest Negro population to its white population of all the States of the Union and that, the rate of increase of her Negro population from this date, or even a decade earlier, to 1860, “was substantially smaller than that of the Negroes in the United States at large” was simply due to the tremendous accessions of the Negro population of the four new cotton States: Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, superimposed upon a Negro population originally much smaller than that of South Carolina. The Negro population of those four States did in that period increase 1,384,555; but in the same time their white population increased 1,438,607; while in the same period the white and Negro population of South Carolina increased respectively 53,860 and 147,028. And so difficult was it to overcome this tremendous start attained by South Carolina in these early fatal years, that in 1860 the excess of South Carolina’s colored population over her white population was 121,029, as compared with an excess of only 83,505 for Mississippi, the next greatest. Undoubtedly in the period selected by Prof. Phillips many Negro slaves passed out of South Carolina; but many whites did also; for “from 1820 to 1860, South Carolina was a beehive from which swarms were continually going forth to populate the newer growing cotton States of the Southwest,” and “in 1860 there were then living in other States 193,389 white persons born in South Carolina.”[47] In the half century the average rate of increase of South Carolina whites was between 7 and 8 per cent, colored 21. In Virginia and Maryland in 1810 the Negro population amounted to 668,515. It increased by 1860 by an addition of 151,523. In South Carolina in 1810 the Negro population amounted to 200,919, by 1860 it had received an addition of 212,401, of which 64,382 had arrived in the decade of the repeal of the law prohibiting importation from other States, and 58,021 in the following decade. It is true that in the following decade from 1830 to 1840, the increase of the Negro population of South Carolina was comparatively slight, being only 11,992, but it was followed in the next decade by again an increase of 58,630, while the white increase in the same two decades was respectively 2,221 and 15,479.

But there was another way of measuring the importance of the repeal. Necessarily with the inflowing tide came some such as Denmark Vesey and Gullah Jack, slaves and free Negroes whose past was not known, and according to the report of the Massachusetts legislative committee in 1821, dealing with only 6,740 free persons of color in the State, among other “evils,” from such, appeared, inter alia:

2. Collecting in the large towns an indolent and disorderly and corrupt population.

3. Substituting themselves in many labors and occupations which in the end it would be more advantageous to have performed by the white and native population of the State.[48]

It is apparent then, from this, as well as from the arguments of Mr. Sergeant, that the real situation of the representatives of the two sections, in the great Missouri debate, has never been put with absolute accuracy. It was an assertion upon the part of the Southerners of their right to carry their property with them wherever they went in the Union, and upon the part of the Northerners a denial of this right. It precipitated an argument whether extension and diffusion of slavery meant the same thing, many Southern men, of eminence, contended that by the process of diffusion there would be apt to be the beginning of the end of slavery, and if there had been no illicit importation of slaves possible, there would have been great merit in this suggestion. But beyond all these arguments on the part of the Northerners, the Missouri Question indicated opposition to the mere presence of the Negro, bond or free, in the Northwest. He was an undesirable resident.

Up to this time, in the main, the attitude of the Southern statesmen had been free from sectionalism. On the other hand, New England had exhibited sectionalism, and it was New England’s deputies in the Constitutional Convention, who joining with those of Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, had “formed a bargain,” abrogating the slave trade in such a way as practically to recognize slavery as a property interest secured by the Constitution. The time allowed the slave trade had been long enough, as Madison had said it would be. As great as had been the rate of increase of the white population, it had been exceeded by that of the colored in the proportions of 90 to 95 per cent. What Col. Mason had prophesied had also come to pass. He had declared in 1787: “The Western people are already calling out for slaves for their new lands and will fill that country with slaves, if they can be got through South Carolina and Georgia.”

They had been got no doubt in large numbers through South Carolina and Georgia; but also, in all probabilities, through Louisiana, and if not through, to some extent from, Maryland and Virginia. The Negro population had in the West, in three decades sprung up from 16,322 to 385,825; while the seven States, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, held some 1,193,732 head of this species of property, representing an investment of something like $477,492,800, stamped as property by having been made dutiable under Federal law up to 1808. Such a property interest was almost certain to produce a sectional policy for its protection, and in the assertion of such a policy, South Carolina having the largest stake and the most forceful representatives, would naturally take the lead.

The consequences were that the broad national policy of Lowndes, from this date gradually succumbed to the influences which forced Calhoun away from it, despite his efforts to mould into one form a national and sectional policy, based upon the declared recognition of slavery, in place of, or in addition to, the implied recognition furnished by the Constitutional compromise or “bargain” over the sanction of the slave trade up to 1808. As the South drew together in support of slavery, the overshadowing dimensions of its greatest exponent cast into oblivion Barnwell, Hamilton and Alston, who had so clearly perceived the dangers from its increase, and even reduced the proportions of men as preëminently great as Lowndes and his successor, Robert Y. Hayne.

As long as the tariff held the center of the stage, the change was not so clearly apparent; but with the settling down, after the explosion of sentiment which nullification occasioned, the division between the sections was unmistakable. From that period the Lower South presented an unbroken front in defence of slavery, under the leadership of South Carolina.

From 1800 the South had, to a great extent, directed the policies of the Republic, and, in the persons of Lowndes, Cheves and Calhoun, South Carolina had from 1813 to 1820 been a potent influence therein; but the Missouri Compromise and Taylor’s election over Lowndes in 1820, for the Speakership, marked the beginning of the change. No man saw it more clearly than the great man whom Taylor defeated. His views on the condition of affairs at this time is thus expressed by a contemporary: “The Northern people had outstripped the Southern and desired to see the offices of the Government in Northern hands. This inevitable result Mr. Lowndes saw clearly forty years ago, and thought it wise for the South to yield the hold she had so long possessed on political power, when she was no longer able to retain it.”[49] The clear judgment of Lowndes had revealed to him what the fatal brilliancy of Calhoun’s intellect prevented him from perceiving, viz.: that there could not be fashioned for the needs of imperfect humanity a perfectly symmetrical policy. Lowndes had brought Webster and Clay together and pushed through the tariff bill of 1816.[50]

Of that bill in reply to the fierce criticism that it was the worst thing done since universal suffrage, he simply said, “neither was altogether good, but the best possible for the time.” “He thought some protection due to infant industries and that the question was, what measure of protection do they require?” He held; “We are obliged to leave some questions to posterity. We do our best with those that come to us and future generations must bear their share of the trouble.”[51] Accordingly, when the Baldwin bill of 1820 was brought forward, “he opposed it on the ground that the increased duties were not necessary.”[52] Before the tariff bill of 1824 could be presented, he had passed away; but in his place, to share with Webster, the honors of the splendid fight against it, South Carolina had sent up to Congress Robert Y. Hayne, by Benton extolled as: “Of all the young generation of statesmen coming on I consider him the safest, the most like William Lowndes, and best entitled to future eminent lead.”[53]

How well Hayne lived up to this a study of his achievements exhibits. But while so good a judge as the late Edward M. Shepard, in his Life of Van Buren, ranks Hayne’s effort in the Senate, against the tariff of 1824, as fully up to, if not beyond, that of Webster in the House, scarcely any attention is paid to it by those historians who extoll the speech of Webster.

Again, while almost every history deals at length with the Senatorial debates, and elaborates Hayne’s speech on the Panama Mission in 1825, absolutely no mention appears concerning the far more important utterance with regard to the Colonization Society in 1827. Yet Hayne’s speech, in his debate with Chambers over the Colonization Society, is one of the most important utterances ever made by a Southern Statesman. It indicates what was the prevailing view with regard to the Negro Question, before the unfortunate episode of nullification, by which Calhoun fastened upon the South the belief that slavery as it existed in the Southern States, was a good. In the speech in 1827, Hayne first showed the absurdity of the scheme of transporting the blacks to Africa in such a number as to affect the situation. That the presence of Negroes in the country was an evil, he did not attempt to deny, but declared, “The progress of time and events is providing a remedy for the evil.” He showed by statistics that the relative increase of free white population was rising, while that of the colored, whether bond or free, was diminishing, and that “while this process is going on the colored classes are gradually diffusing themselves throughout the country, and are making steady advances in intelligence and refinement, and if half the zeal were displayed in bettering their condition that is wasted in the vain and fruitless effort of sending them abroad, their intellectual and moral improvement would be steady and rapid.”[54] Why is it that this utterance of the leader of his party in the Senate is never alluded to by historians? Is it because it invites investigation as to the condition of the blacks in the Northern and Western States at this period and for the twenty years which followed? It is difficult to tell. But from this time the question took a change. Subordinating to it the tariff and the interest in railroad development, with the conditions created by nullification by 1833, the State of South Carolina, and, by 1839, the South, was committed to the view of Calhoun: “Our fate as a people is bound up in the question. If we yield, we will be extirpated; but if we successfully resist, we will be the greatest and most flourishing people of modern time. It is the best substratum of population in the world, and one on which great and flourishing Commonwealths may be most easily and safely reared.”[55] And to this “Negro substratum population” policy both the tariff and the railroad development of the South were accordingly subordinated until Calhoun’s death, when Georgia, as a result of having outstripped South Carolina in both men and material, stepped into the place of leadership South Carolina could no longer fill, and with the ambitious scheme of forcing slavery to the Pacific, in ten years, produced the War Between the States.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 67.

[42] Statutes of S. C. Vol. 7, p. 451.

[43] Charleston Courier, Dec. 22, 1818. Jervey, Hayne, p. 80.

[44] Niles’ Register, Vol. 18, p. 383.

[45] American Hist. Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, p. 630.

[46] Suppression of Slave Trade, DuBois, p. 124.

[47] McCrady, S. C. Under Proprietary Govt. p. 1.

[48] Studies American Race Problem, Stone, p. 57. Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, Jervey, p. 114.

[49] Grayson, Memoir of James L. Petigru, p. 116.

[50] City Gazette, Sept. 16, 1820.

[51] Ravenel, Life & Times of William Lowndes, p. 154-5.

[52] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 112.

[53] Benton, Thirty Years View, Vol. 2, p. 188.

[54] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, pp. 205-209. Abridgment of Debates of Congress, Vol. 9, p. 303, et seq.

[55] Calhoun’s Correspondence, p. 368.

CHAPTER IV

As has been shown, nine years subsequent to his unavailing struggle to restrict the swelling proportions of the Negro population in his own State, Robert Y. Hayne, in the United States Senate, stated his views concerning that class of our population with regard to the entire country. But before discussing that further it should be noted, that a renewed effort in 1822 had again been defeated by the narrow but effective majority of nine votes, drawing from Governor Bennett, of South Carolina the pessimistic declaration:

“The evil is entailed and we can do no more than steadily to pursue that course indicated by stern necessity and not less imperious policy.”[56]

Along another line, therefore, was the last peaceful effort to be made to solve the Negro Question. Taken in connection with the great industrial work, in which he literally wore out his life, in 1839, Hayne’s speech in the United States Senate in 1827 is most illuminating. Upon that occasion he said:

“The history of this country has proved that when the relative proportion of the colored population to the white is greatly diminished, slaves cease to be valuable, and emancipation follows of course, and they are swallowed up in the common mass. Wherever free labor is put in full and successful operation, slave labor ceases to be profitable. It is true that it is a very gradual operation and that it must be, to be successful or desirable.”[57]

Was it not the very irony of fate that, as this speaker, later, in 1839, lay dying at Asheville, North Carolina, while a wordy war was being waged over his great railroad to the West, criticism should have been “directed against the contracts given to planters to be executed with slave labor” by the chief lieutenant of that great South Carolinian, who had only the year before, in withdrawing from the enterprise, extolled Negro slaves as “the best substratum of population in the world?”

Col. Gadsden, from this time and on, more and more a confidant of Calhoun until they parted over Taylor’s candidacy for the Presidency, asked:

“Why had not the work been given to Northern contractors, who had offered to execute it at a price 12½ to 15 per cent cheaper? The answer was comprehensive. The planters objected to imported free labor being brought into contact with their slaves. This was unfortunate, but the company could not antagonize an element which practically controlled the State; and in addition they had in many instances given the right of way. But further still, when the chief engineer obtained the floor, he challenged the correctness of the charge.”[58]

Between 1830 and 1840, two Southern States, South Carolina and Maryland, leading the Union in railroad development, were endeavoring to effect railroad connection with the Northwest. A comparison of their conditions prior and subsequent to 1810, suggests one of the reasons why one succeeded and the other failed.

From 1790 to 1810 the white population of Maryland increased from 208,649 to 235,117, or about 11.10 per cent. In the same twenty years the white population of South Carolina rose from 140,178 to 214,196 or about 51.20 per cent. It is quite true that in the same period the Negro population in South Carolina increased from 108,805 to 200,919 or 85.6 per cent, while that of Maryland rose only from 111,079 to 145,129 or only 30.07 per cent. Yet, when we bear in mind that the area of South Carolina was two and a half times as great as Maryland, had the efforts which had been made in 1816 and in 1822 to stop Negro importation from outside succeeded, the economic conditions of South Carolina between 1830 and 1840 might have been stronger. Indeed in 1822 Gen. Thomas Pinckney declared cheap Negro labor, even then, was steadily undermining the white artisan class in South Carolina.[59] He was patriot enough to so declare, although his own great brother was more responsible than any one else for the evil.

In the three decades which followed 1810, and closed with the death of Hayne and the destruction of his five year effort to secure the Northwestern railroad connection, the colored population of Maryland, which did secure it, increased only 6,396, from 145,429 to 151,815, while its white population in the same period rose from 235,117 to 318,204, an increase of 83,087. In South Carolina in the same time the white population rising from 214,196 to 259,344 increased only 44,883, about one-half as much, while its Negro population rising from 200,314 to 335,344, or 134,395, about twenty times as much as Maryland. Viewed in the light of the unfair criticism directed against the South Carolina Railroad, was not the message of Governor Paul Hamilton in 1804, to the South Carolina Legislature, vindicated?

“Viewed with reference to population it increases our weakness, not our strength, for it must be admitted that in proportion as you add to the number of slaves, you prevent the influx of those men who would increase the means of defense and security.”[60]

How our forgotten great men fought to avoid the Nessus Shirt! Who remembers that Hamilton was big enough to be made Secretary of the Navy? Under the great upas tree of South Carolina all other greatness languished and by 1840 the property interests in Negroes had become so immense, that it not only paralyzed other industries, which could by any stretch of imagination be thought to threaten its efficiency, but it affected public opinion to a degree which now seems hardly credible.

Calhoun’s view in 1838, that the Negro furnished “the best substratum of population in the world and the one on which commonwealths may be most easily and safely reared”[61] was not singular in the South at that date. The great meeting of Southern business men at Augusta, Ga. in 1838 put on record its belief:

“That of all the social conditions of man, the most favorable to the development of the cardinal virtues of the heart and the noblest faculties of the soul, to the promotion of private happiness and public prosperity, is that of slave holding communities under free political institutions.”[62]

Even Hayne, himself, despite his realization of South Carolina’s wasteful cultivation of her soil, was so affected by the tremendous interests involved in slavery, and the fearful shock of any such disturbance as the Abolitionists threatened in 1835, as to declare at that time:

“Slavery, as it now exists in the Southern States, which we all feel and know to be essential to the prosperity and welfare—nay to the very existence of the States—is so little understood in other portions of the Union that it has been lately assailed in a spirit which threatens, unless speedily arrested, to lead eventually to the destruction of the Union and all the evils which must attend so lamentable an occurrence.”[63]

By 1838, conditions had reached such a development that the abolition of slavery could come but in one of two ways, either peacefully, through the slow process of changing industrial conditions, or swiftly and forcibly, as a war measure; therefore, when Calhoun withdrew his support from Hayne’s railroad to the Northwest in 1838, the sensible course would have been to prepare for the inevitable conflict.

Allusion has been made to the Black Laws of Ohio, which had their counterpart in Indiana and Illinois, and reference had to the Report of the Massachusetts Legislative Committee in 1821, as indicative of feeling in the North and Northeast, concerning the Negro as a citizen, and, if we consider conditions in the Middle States at this period, we will find them hardly different. As depicted by the most highly educated member of the Negro race today in the United States, in Philadelphia conditions were as follows:

“By 1830 the black population of the city and districts had increased to 15,624, an increase of 27 per cent for the decade 1820-1830, and of 48 per cent since 1810. Nevertheless the growth of the city had far outstripped this; by 1830 the county had nearly 175,000 whites, among whom was a rapidly increasing contingent of 5,000 foreigners. So intense was the race antipathy among the lower classes, and so much countenance did it receive from the middle and upper classes, that there began in 1829 a series of riots directed chiefly against Negroes, which recurred frequently until about 1840, and did not wholly cease until after the war.”[64]

At this date, 1840, in ten of the eleven States which later constituted the Confederacy, there were 3,311,117 whites and 2,267,319 Negroes; and in three of them; South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana, the whites were in the minority, and they, therefore, best represented the condition which Calhoun in 1838 extolled.[65]

With such views, what more natural than that Calhoun should view as a “humbug” the great railroad measure of Hayne, founded as it was in some degree upon the belief of the latter that “wherever free labor is put in full and successful operation, slave labor ceases to be profitable.” A railroad connecting Cincinnati with Charleston would certainly have tended to “put in full and successful operation free labor,” and slave labor ceasing more and more to be profitable would have gradually passed out of existence in that region.

Yet it must be admitted, that the greatest writer and thinker who has ever discussed America, viewing conditions at that time, while utterly opposed to slavery, practically endorsed Calhoun’s views. Summing up his conclusion in 1838, de Tocqueville writes:

“When I contemplate the condition of the South, I can only discover two alternatives which may be adopted by the white inhabitants of those States; either to emancipate the Negroes and to intermingle with them; or remain isolated from them to keep them in a state of slavery as long as possible. All intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extirpation of one or the other of the two races.”[66]

Time, however, has proven that both de Tocqueville and Calhoun were wrong.

From a Negro minority of 13,277 in 1810, the census indicated for South Carolina in 1840, a Negro majority of 76,230 an excess of the Negro population over the white of more than double what existed in Louisiana and quadruple that of Mississippi.

In 1843, for the better controlling of this “best substratum of population in the world”[67] only five years after its discovery as such, the following Act was passed by the General Assembly of South Carolina:

“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives now met and sitting, and by the authority of the same: That from and after the passage of this Act, any slave or free person of color who shall commit an assault and battery on a white woman with intent to commit rape, on being thereof convicted, shall suffer death without benefit of clergy.”[68]

For whites, it was not apparently necessary to raise the grade of the offense from that of a misdemeanor. But if the above Act was not a sufficient vindication of the opposition of Barnwell, Paul Hamilton, Alston and Hayne to the continued increase of the Negro population of South Carolina, Calhoun, himself, furnished something of an argument against the “best substratum” by his declaration only nine years after its discovery:

“We know what we are about, we foresee what is coming, and move with no other purpose but to protect our portion of the Union from the greatest of calamities—not insurrection but something worse. I see the end if the process is to go on unresisted; it is to expel in time the white population of the Southern States and leave the blacks in possession.”[69]

If this is a true picture of conditions in 1847, as black as we may consider the Abolitionists of that day, one thing is evident, and that is, that without such a mass of “the best substratum of population” to work upon, the Abolitionists could not possibly have effected what Calhoun feared: therefore, the statesmanship of William Smith, McDuffie, and Calhoun, which had favored and assisted in the gathering of it, to that extent was inferior to the statesmanship of Paul Hamilton, Barnwell, Alston and Hayne which had attempted to arrest the growth. But that was not apparent to the South in 1850, and it is doubtful whether it would be very generally admitted even today; for interest will color opinion and Negro cheap labor is still the first consideration to many people in the South, just as European pauper labor is to many in the North. Both North and South can see clearly the mote in their brother’s eye; but not the beam in their own eye.

By the census of 1850, the population of the 33 States, which constituted the Union, summed up 22,969,603 persons, divided as follows: In the 19 Free States 13,230,231 whites; 213,346 free persons of color; 2,536 slaves. In the 14 Slave States there were: 6,113,068 whites; 210,085 free persons of color; 3,200,590 slaves. That meant that the South had invested in that species of property interest $1,280,200,000. By money values and population, at that time, that was an immense sum.

The Democratic Review, in this same year, published an article which was republished in the Charleston Mercury, and commended by that paper. This article sets forth certain distinct claims of considerable interest:

First that:

“The face of affairs is entirely changed since General Pinckney, in convention assented to the proposition giving Congress the right to pass laws, regulating commerce by a simple majority, on the ground that it was a boon granted the North in consideration of the necessity which the weak South had for the strong North as a neighbor. The cotton trade then scarcely existed, but the material has since been spun into a web which binds the commercial world to Southern interests.”[70]

Figures were also introduced to show that the multiplication of free blacks in the Slave States was increasing upon the proportion of slaves and that it was observable that they did not emigrate from the Slave States, where it was claimed they must in time supplant the slaves as servants; and the laws of Ohio were pointed to as indicating an opposition, not to slavery, but to the presence of the Negro, which it claimed, had greatly retarded emancipation. In these claims truth was mingled with error.

As to the indisposition of the people of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, to admit any class of colored persons to enter as residents, there can be no doubt up to this date, although indications of a change of sentiment were appearing. The repeal of the Black Laws of Ohio was one illustration. With 1,955,059 whites to only 25,279 colored persons, the harsh provisions, which closed the mouths of these unfortunates when contending with the whites, in so called courts of justice, it was conceded by the whites of Ohio, could be safely done away with, and they had been repealed in 1848. It may also have been true that the free blacks did not emigrate from the Slave States; but that in that region they were gaining upon the slaves, and that there was any reasonable possibility of their supplanting them as servants, does hot seem to be borne out by examination of the census.

The Democratic Review claims that, while in 1800 there were in the Slave States 61,441 free persons of color to 73,100 in the Free States, that by 1830 the proportions were 182,070 in the Slave States to 137,525 in the Free States, a proportion raised by 1840 to 215,568 to 172,509. But this seems inexact. By the census of 1800 there were in the Slave States 52,188 free persons of color, to 55,464 in the Free States, and by 1830 the number in the Slave States had, it is true, surpassed the number in the Free States, such being respectively 160,063 to 153,384. But whether it was in consequence of the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831, or the Abolition ebullition of 1835, by 1840 there was a change in progress, the proportion being in that year 190,285 in the Slave States to 187,647 in the Free States, which, as has before been shown, by 1850 had changed to 210,085 in the Slave States to 213,346 in the Free States.

At the same time it could be noted that while the Negroes in the United States had increased by more than 28 per cent since 1840, the freedmen had increased by less than 13 per cent in the same time.

In the Free States of New York, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut the free colored population had decreased by 1,402. In the Slave States of Louisiana and Mississippi it had decreased by 8,174, and that State in the South which held more than one-fourth of the whole number in the Southern States, Virginia, had appropriated $30,000 a year for their removal.[71]

The South was apparently, therefore, committed to the institution of African Slavery, and in defense of it some of its champions were wild enough to waive the question of the inferiority of the Negro race and contend, “that slavery, whether of black or white, is a normal, proper institution in society.”[72]

The Richmond, Va., Inquirer, The Muscogee, Ala., Herald, The New Orleans, La., Delta and the Charleston, S. C., Standard, are all quoted by an English writer, whose work appeared in print about 1855.[73] The three first as sustaining the above extraordinary claim; while the fourth called for a revival of the Slave Trade.

Even if correctly quoted the comments of these papers do not establish the prevailing sentiment in the South at that time; for the publication at Charleston and reception of Dr. John Bachman’s work on the “Unity of the Human Race” would to some extent constitute an opinion to the contrary.

But that the South was positively, unreservedly, and even aggressively committed to the institution of African Slavery is indisputable.

It had not been so always. The change began in 1833, when the Charleston Mercury declared—“The institution of slavery is not an evil but a benefit.” That paper had upon that occasion admitted that in the past the South had entertained a view to the contrary; but asserted in 1833, that even in Virginia and North Carolina:

“The great mass of the South sanction no such admission, that Southern Slavery is an evil to be deprecated.”[74]

And, as the appetite grows by what it feeds upon, in 1855, The Richmond Examiner was quoted as declaring:

“It is all a hallucination that we are ever going to get rid of African Slavery, or that it will ever be desirable to do so.... True philanthropy to the Negro begins at home; and if every Southern man would act as if the canopy of Heaven were inscribed with a covenant in letters of fire, that the Negro is here and here forever; is our property and ours forever; is never to be emancipated; is to be kept hard at work and in rigid subjection all his days; and is never to go to Africa, to Polynesia, or to Yankee land,—far worse than either,—they would accomplish more good for the race in five years than they boast the institution itself to have accomplished in two centuries.”[75]

Yet as extreme as the above is, it is quite probable that the extravagance and injustice of the declaration against slavery in the Southern States, had exasperated those supporting it to utterances as extravagant.

In the opening of the year 1850 a resolution of the Legislature of Vermont was introduced in Congress which recited:

“That slavery is a crime against humanity, and a sore evil in the body politic, that was excused by the framers of the Federal Constitution as a crime entailed upon the country by their predecessors, and tolerated solely as a thing of inexorable necessity.”[76]

How Southern men must have felt this it is almost impossible for us to appreciate today. It was not only an indictment of the South at a bar where there was no provision for a trial; but it ended in a hypocritical falsehood; for slavery had not been, “tolerated solely as a thing of inexorable necessity.” Existing in every State except Massachusetts, the question whether the existing condition could be affected by permission to increase the slaves for a period by importation was committed with the clauses relating to taxes on exports and to a Navigation Act, that these things might “form a bargain between the Northern and Southern States.”

This motion by Gouverneur Morris, of Pennsylvania, was adopted by the vote of seven of the eleven States in Convention, against three opposing and one abstaining from voting, one of the delegates whereof seconded the motion of Pinckney to increase the period permitting importation, which he with one of the opponents of commitment voted for; so that actually slavery, with the right to increase it by the Slave Trade, was voted for by nine out of eleven States participating.

The Vermont resolution accomplished nothing; but to no individual in Congress could it have inflicted such a wound as it dealt to Calhoun. To him resolutions were of enormous importance, and yet he never seemed quite ready to follow them up with acts. He was at last in the grasp of that power which overcomes all things except God. Twelve years had elapsed since he had been called upon to decide between the policy of Hayne, based upon the effort to bind together in close commercial intercourse the leading Western and Southern States, by a railroad from Ohio to South Carolina, and the resolution of Rhett, to amend the Constitution or dissolve the Union.

To neither could he agree. For Hayne’s connection with Ohio through North Carolina, he substituted a connection with Arkansas through Georgia.

To the warning of his closest intimate that it was “better to part peaceably than to live in the state of indecision we do,” he could only reply with the vague allusion to:

“The many bleeding pores which must be taken up in passing the knife through a body politic, in order to make two of one, which had been so long bound together by so many ties, political, social and commercial.”[77]

In this declaration there is unmistakably intense feeling for the Union; but also some indecision; for what could have been a more practical application of Calhoun’s teaching than Rhett’s amendment to Slade’s bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia? That was a resolution upon which some strong action could be erected. Twelve years had passed, nothing had been done, and now came the resolution of the Vermont Legislature. In the first shock which it gave him, Calhoun was unjust to his own following. He said:

“Mr. President, I intended not to say a word on this subject. I have long labored faithfully to repress the encroachments of the North, at the commencement I saw where it would end and must end; and I despair of ever seeing it ended in Congress. It will go to its end, for gentlemen have already yielded to the current of the North which they admit they cannot resist, Sir, what the South will do is not for me to say. They will meet it, in my opinion, as it ought to be met.”[78]

A month later he reviewed the political situation in a most elaborate and searching analysis, his last great speech, read for him by Senator Mason, of Virginia. “How Can the Union be Preserved?” In endeavoring to give an “answer to this great question,” he asserted that the discontent of the South was due to the fact that political power had been taken from that section and transferred to the North, not through natural causes, but by legislation which could be classed under three heads, the first of which was exclusion from common territory; second a system of revenue under which an undue portion of the burden of taxation had been imposed upon the South, and the proceeds appropriated to the North; third a system of measures changing the original character of the government. The result, he claimed, had been a change from a Constitutional Federal Republic to the despotism of a numerical majority in which a question of vital importance to the minority was threatened:

“The relation between the races in the Southern section ... which cannot be destroyed without subjecting the two races to the greatest calamity, and the section to poverty, desolation and wretchedness.”[79]

Whether right or wrong, the first of these claims had been settled by the Missouri Compromise in 1820, which the South had acquiesced in. The second Calhoun, himself, had undertaken to right in 1832, and if there had been a failure it was due in some measure to his inability to diagnose with sufficient accuracy the situation at that time.

Along two lines from 1827 there had proceeded the effort of the South to recover her power and increase her population; to restore her waning political influence and rebuild her commercial strength. One was through revision of the tariff, the other through internal improvement by means of railroad development. The first, despite all the interest it attracted and the splendid forensic display it gave rise to, not only was a lamentable failure in its curative effect, but very probably added somewhat to the difficulties which hampered the other. Now with regard to the first, Calhoun had mapped out the plan, and undertook the responsibility through the nullification project, with which he effected the relegation of Hayne to the post of Governor of the State of South Carolina from the United States Senate, to which he, himself, repaired with almost ambassadorial powers. The effect of Nullification on the Tariff should be analysed before considering the railroad campaign, with which Calhoun could not refrain from interfering, with results most disappointing to those he induced to accept his view and abandon that of his faithful friend and quondam supporter, made by the Knoxville Convention of 1836, much more thoroughly the commercial leader of the South than Calhoun had ever been made its political guide.

Mr. John B. Cleveland says in his pamphlet on the “Controversy between John C. Calhoun and Robert Y. Hayne:

“There can be no question as to the sincerity of purpose or integrity of character of Mr. Calhoun. At the same time as the common saying is ‘he was set in his ideas’ and he could not bear opposition.”[80]

Upon many questions he could change and did change his views, but these changes all seem to have proceeded from a certain development of the man himself, not from any contact with others. So confident was he of his own powers that he could never profit by the realization of his mistakes. If in one of the greatest eulogies ever delivered by a great follower over a great leader, it could be asserted that:

“It is due to truth, to history and to him, to declare that he assisted powerfully in giving currency to opinions and building up systems that have proved seriously injurious to the South and probably to the stability of the existing Union.”[81]—

a critical investigation of Calhoun’s failure in the revision of the tariff may not be without instruction; for it was for the purpose of securing a proper framing of such that Nullification was launched. Later we may consider the railroad.

FOOTNOTES:

[56] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 135.

[57] Ibid. p. 208. Abridgment of Debates of Congress, Vol. 19. p. 303 et seq.

[58] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 511.

[59] Ibid. p. 130.

[60] Charleston Courier, Dec. 2, 1805.

[61] Calhoun’s Correspondence, p. 368.

[62] Charleston Courier, April 9, 1838.

[63] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 389.

[64] DuBois; The Philadelphia Negro, p. 26.

[65] Calhoun’s Correspondence, p. 368.

[66] Tocqueville: Democracy in America, Vol. 2, p. 245.

[67] Calhoun’s Correspondence, p. 368.

[68] Statutes of S. C. Vol. XI, p. 279.

[69] Pinckney: Life of Calhoun, p. 161.

[70] Charleston Mercury, Feb. 15, 1850.

[71] Ibid.

[72] Chambers: American Slavery & Color, p. 1.

[73] Ibid, pp. 1-2.

[74] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 366.

[75] Chambers; American Slavery & Color, p. 7.

[76] Charleston Mercury, Jan. 12, 1850.

[77] Calhoun’s Correspondence, p. 391.

[78] Charleston Mercury, Jan. 12, 1850.

[79] Pinckney; Life of Calhoun, pp. 167-181.

[80] Cleveland; Controversy between Calhoun & Hayne p. 7.

[81] Hammond; Oration on Calhoun, Press of Walker & James 1850, C. L. S. Vol. XV p. 23.

CHAPTER V

The Nullification episode has been generally treated as a struggle between Jackson and Calhoun. In its outward manifestations it was a contest between the President and the State of South Carolina; but in the settlement it really was a struggle between Calhoun and Clay.

The position of Henry Clay, in 1833, was one to test to the utmost the powers of that great politician. In the preceding year he had sternly refused Hayne’s amendment to his tariff bill, enacting his own view coupled with a threat of enforcement. He had, however, seen his Act nullified by the State of South Carolina, under the governorship of Hayne, and himself beaten overwhelmingly for the presidency by Jackson, who, while threatening coercion in South Carolina, had nevertheless, made Hayne’s amendment to the tariff the basis of his own recommendation on that subject to Congress. A bill had been introduced in the House, to restore the duties to the scale of 1816. What could Clay do to redeem himself and his cause? Back to the Senate, in Hayne’s vacant seat, was Clay’s “old companion at arms with a practical power of attorney from the recalcitrant State.”[82]

Clay at once entered into negotiations with Calhoun himself, introducing a bill in the Senate, to the two principles of which, viz., “that time should be given the manufacturers and that an ad valorem duty should be provided for”, Calhoun assented and the bill was referred to a select committee consisting of: Clay, Clayton, Calhoun, Grundy, Webster, Rives, and Dallas.

Then up came the Revenue Collection Bill, supported by thirty-two Senators, and passed with only seven besides Calhoun opposing, and the great politician from Kentucky had Calhoun safely tangled in his net. Against the protest of the latter, he amended his tariff bill with a provision that in the valuation of imported articles, “the valuation should be at the port in which the goods were imported.” Calhoun argued that this would be a great injustice to the South, as the price of goods being cheaper in the Northern than in the Southern cities, a home valuation would give the former a preference.[83] But that was exactly what Clay had proposed, and was determined to do, and although Webster and Silsbee of Massachusetts, Hill of New Hampshire, Dallas of Pennsylvania and Kane and Benton of Missouri came to Calhoun’s support, Calhoun fearing evidently to wreck his compromise with Clay, yielded this vital point. To consider all that was involved in the surrender of Calhoun, it will be necessary to revert to the past and to consider some political views emanating from the mightiest intellect South Carolina ever produced.

Prior to the framing of the Constitution of the United States and subsequent to the peace between Great Britain and the States, the value of the imports from Great Britain to America had exceeded the value of the exports from America to Great Britain to such an amount as to be nearly three times as great; while the commerce between the two countries was very nearly ten times as great as that between the States and the rest of the world. This condition had produced anything but prosperity for America.

The statesman who had contributed most to the framing of the Constitution, Charles Pinckney, in his effort to secure its ratification by his own State, had made among other things this remarkable statement:

“‘Foreign Trade’ is one of the enemies against which we must be extremely guarded, more so than against any other, as none will ever have a more unfavorable operation. I consider it as the root of our present public distress, as the plentiful source from which our future national calamities will flow, unless great care is taken to prevent it.”[84]

Thirty years later he warned Congress along similar lines, “that a country mainly agricultural and without mines of the precious metals, could not have its imports greatly in excess of its exports, without financial disaster.”[85]

From the time of the Union to the first embargo and the war of 1812, the immense preponderance of the value of imports had been greatly reduced from nearly treble to an excess of but twenty-five per cent; but in the two years which followed the peace they had increased to almost double the value of the exports. Under Lowndes’s tariff of 1816 they again fell to an excess of only about twenty per cent by 1821.[86]

From that period until the Compromise of 1833, they still further fell to an excess of about eight per cent; the value of the exports for these twelve years being $934,287,320, and that of the imports $1,007,853,830, a total excess of value for imports in the twelve years amounting to $73,566,502.

Considering the States through which this commerce moved, we find, with regard to Massachusetts, for this period, the value of exports, $125,378,462; imports, $182,861,825. Pennsylvania, exports, $86,062,157; imports, $139,891,027. Maryland, exports, $53,048,043; imports, $56,860,616. New York, exports, $267,371,444; imports, $473,671,382. An excess of imports at Northern ports of the value of $321,000,000.

Now taking the Southern States for the same period, we find Virginia, exports, $47,535,525; imports, $7,093,499. South Carolina, exports, $93,018,377; imports, $20,625,049. Georgia, exports, $56,167,842; imports $5,828,581. Alabama, exports, $14,897,425; imports, $1,631,343. Louisiana, exports, $138,670,081; imports, $68,321,568. An excess of exports amounting to $247,000,000.[87]

While, therefore, a great amount of money from the South may have been expended for Northern manufactures, a great deal also went out for importation of goods through Northern markets.

The revision of the tariff was to correct both wrongs.

But the result was simply that in a period half as long, six years, the excess of the value of imports over exports for the whole country doubled and this without any appreciable gain in the exports of Virginia and but a slight gain, considering the agitation, for South Carolina; or totally a condition which, with even the greater gain of Georgia, still left the South Atlantic States in both import and export trade far behind the Gulf States, more rapidly developing, and fed by the great waterway of the Mississippi.