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.