The presidential election of 1852, tended at first to allay
excitement. A New Englander, affiliating closely with Southern men,
Franklin Pierce, of New Hampshire, won the Democratic nomination over
competitors much more prominent. Of these competitors Buchanan and
Cass had long and intimately been connected with the party leaders of
their States in the time of Andrew Jackson; trained in the old school
of politics; drawing what strength they had from faithful service. The
third competitor, a comparatively new leader in the West, forceful,
aggressive and impatient of restraint, Stephen A. Douglas, was of an
entirely different type. Determined to make a spoon or spoil a horn, he
evolved the doctrine of squatter sovereignty, and with it soon had the
country in a turmoil.
The condition was strange. The Georgians had a policy and the lead of
a section, but no man among them possessed the qualities essential for
such a task, as their bold program of pushing slavery to the Pacific
within the Union, demanded. Howell Cobb approached nearer the station
of leader than any other man of his State; but he scarcely measured
up to what was required. Besides as great as Georgia was among the
Southern States, second only to Virginia, in point of population, and
quite beyond in wealth and resources, among the States of the Union,
in point of population, she barely ranked tenth. From the continuous
stream of white immigrants pouring into Illinois that great State was,
however, rapidly moving up to the position of fourth in population,
while in Stephen A. Douglas, she possessed one of the most audacious
and resourceful of politicians who had ever moved in the affairs of the
Union, to a great height. Carrying at his heels some forty-two Northern
votes in Congress, he appeared to be just the man the Georgians
needed, and accordingly in the Congress which met in December, 1853,
he introduced his bill for the organization of the territory of
Nebraska, framing the provisions thereof upon the precedents set in
the organization of the territories of Utah and New Mexico four years
before. Of this bill, a distinguished author, later president of the
United States, has said:
“No bolder or more extraordinary measure had ever been proposed in
Congress, and it came upon the country like a thief in the night,
without warning or expectation, when parties were trying to sleep off
the excitement of former debates about the extension of slavery.”[152]
Mr. Woodrow Wilson was of the opinion that Southern members had never
dreamed of demanding such a measure and that no one but Douglas, would
have dreamed of offering it to them; but yet he says the President had
been consulted and had given his approval to it, upon the ground that
“it was founded upon a sound principle which the compromise of 1820
had infringed upon.”[153] And certain it is that the President had
consulted, concerning it, that Southerner who was destined to occupy
the most prominent position ever held by a Southerner. Jefferson Davis
knew of it.
Of the author of the bill, Robert Toombs declared some seven years
later, with his characteristic exaggeration, that the Apostle Paul was
about his only superior as a leader. While Alexander H. Stephens, with
absolute devotion, clung to him, until secession swept them apart,
Toombs was less faithful. Forty-four Northern Democrats, and all but
nine of the Southern members of the House of Representatives, supported
the bill, and in the popular branch of Congress, it prevailed, by a
majority of thirteen votes; in the Senate, by a vote of nearly three
to one.[154] But Mr. Wilson declares that the Act contained a fatal
ambiguity. When was squatter sovereignty to give its decision on the
question of slavery?
Here was where the break came, when the Act was being tried out in
practical operation.
The Southern members thought that Douglas represented their view. Mr.
Davis, Secretary of War at the time of its introduction, distinctly
declares, that, at Douglas’s request, he obtained the interview between
Douglas’s committee and the President on Sunday, January 22, 1854, by
which the President’s approval was secured, and he avers, that from the
terms of the bill and arguments used in its support, he thought its
purpose was to open the territory “to the people of all the States with
every species of property recognized by any of them.”[155]
But Douglas was not simply leading the Southern minority. He was
endeavoring to formulate a policy by means of which he could yoke both
sections to his triumphal car, and he was just as ready to use the
Southerners, as they were to use him. When the Southerners found out
how he proposed to over-reach them, Alexander H. Stephens still clung
to him; but Toombs, less faithful, vociferated that he “didn’t have a
leg to stand upon.”
The truth was, compromise upon compromise had so involved the question,
that it was almost impossible to disentangle it without the use of the
sword.
In 1787 there had been a compromise, by which slavery and the slave
trade had been both recognized; and over the Missouri question in 1820,
the Southern States had had a perfect constitutional right to dissolve
the Union; but again compromise had been accepted.
The admission of California and the law of 1850 was a distinct breach
of the second compromise and the right to secede was just as clear, as
it had been in 1820; but the expediency of such action was nothing like
as clear. There was no great and towering personality around which men
could gather. Rhett’s resolution in Congress in 1838 was the logical
result of Calhoun’s teaching since 1833; but Calhoun was not ready
to act. If ever secession was a practical policy it was in 1838 as
presented by Rhett in Congress.[156]
In South Carolina in 1850, Calhoun was dead, and there was the view of
Rhett and the view of Cheves. In Georgia there was the view of Cobb and
the view of Toombs, and the view of Hill and the view of Stephens.
Of the man who did more than any other to arrest secession in 1850, we
know least, and what we do know does not help us to any great extent to
understand him. What policy Howell Cobb represented is not very clear.
He was strong enough to be denounced as a traitor by those who could
not drive him from their path, and somewhat in the same way that Hayne
was taken out of national politics, when State politics required a man
of unusual force, Cobb stepped down in 1852 from the high station of
Speaker of the House of Representatives, to become Governor of Georgia;
while in the last four years before secession, he was silenced by his
position in Buchanan’s Cabinet.
But apart from leaders the country had changed, and in spite of the
declarations to the contrary, in nowhere more than in the South.
The continual increase of the Negro population and the immense sums
invested in that species of property had worked a disintegration of
former views.
Nullification had accelerated the change, for the views of Hayne in
1827 and Calhoun in 1836, were certainly wide apart.
In 1845 Calhoun had congratulated Hammond on the progress of opinion in
the South to the high ground he had held in advance; but it may well
be doubted whether Calhoun, himself, would not have been startled by
the progress disclosed in 1855, as evinced by the agitation for the
re-opening of the slave trade.
In 1845 when Wise, then United States Minister to Brazil, disclosed
the manner of conducting the slave trade in that country, in which
both Englishmen and Americans were implicated, the President, in whose
cabinet Calhoun then was Secretary of State, condemned it without
stint, rejoicing that “our own coasts are free from its pollution”;
although he was forced to admit that there were “many circumstances to
warrant the belief that some of our citizens are deeply involved in its
guilt.”[157]
Calhoun’s criticism of Wise on this occasion was only that he feared he
was injudicious, and that his declarations might affect the relations
between Brazil and the United States.[158]
Certainly Calhoun was not the man to have favored what his chief styled
“pollution,” and to have remained in his cabinet.
Again, there is no reason to believe that Calhoun sympathized at all
with the ambitious scheme of forcing slavery to the Pacific. Whatever
may have been the merits or demerits of his policies, they were
strictly defensive, and he clung almost religiously to the phrase,
“slavery as it exists in the South.”
What that was, to some extent was disclosed by the committee on
religious instruction of the Negroes, which, in 1845 received reports
from all quarters of the South.
Robert Barnwell Rhett, was at the head of one of the principal
committees and among its members were D. E. Huger, Basil Gildersleeve,
Robert W. Barnwell and many others prominent in affairs of State and
matters of culture and religion in the South.
The account from Alabama of “the servant Ellis” is most interesting.
His blood and color, it was claimed were unmixed, and he gave much aid
in the meetings among the Negroes, though “more retiring and modest
than most people of his condition, when they have ability above their
fellows.”[159]
It is said he could read both Greek and Latin and was anxious to
undertake Hebrew; and the synods of Alabama and Mississippi proposed to
purchase him, in order to send him to Africa as a Missionary.
Conditions such as these reports revealed were absolutely ignored by
the fanatical Abolitionists of that day although they are but some
of the many indications how mild and humanizing slavery, as it then
existed in the South, was.
But the question was, could it so continue? And by 1855 there were
ominous signs of a change. Agitation began for the re-opening of the
slave trade.
What a frightful moral injury to the South this would have been, is
evidenced by the statement alone of those who advocated this course,
and at the same time had the courage to express their views on the
inadequacy of the laws then in existence for the proper protection of
those of the inferior race, who were then in the South, improved as
they had been by years of training.
In 1856, Governor James H. Adams, of South Carolina, had thus expressed
himself:
“If we cannot supply the demand for slave labor, then we must expect
to be supplied with a species of labor, we do not want, and which
from the very nature of things is antagonistic to our institutions.
It is much better that our drays should be driven by slaves—that our
factories should be worked by slaves—that our hotels should be served
by slaves—that our locomotives should be served by slaves, than that
we should be exposed to the introduction, from any quarter, of a
population alien to us by birth, training and education, and which, in
the process of time, must lead to that conflict between capital and
labor, which makes it so difficult to maintain free institutions in
all wealthy and highly cultivated nations, where such institutions as
ours do not exist.”
In all slave holding States true policy dictates, that the superior
race should direct, and the inferior perform all menial service.
Competition between the white and the black man for this service may
not disturb Northern sensibility, but it does not suit our latitude.
Irrespective, however, of interest, the Act of Congress declaring the
slave trade piracy, is a brand upon us, which I think it important
to remove. If the trade be piracy, the slave must be plunder; and no
ingenuity can avoid the logical necessity of such conclusion.
My hopes and fortunes are indissolubly associated with this form
of society. I feel that I should be wanting in duty, if I did not
urge you to withdraw your assent to an Act which is itself a direct
condemnation of your institutions.”[160]
That was the true, the honest, the intelligent and the reasonable
statement of the case; the hopes and fortunes of those in control were
indissolubly associated with the form of society which slavery had
erected in the South.
In the elaborate report of the committee of the General Assembly of
South Carolina, in reply to the message, in which the said Act was
recommended to be nullified; while the honesty and sincerity of the
members may not be questioned, their woeful unfitness for the position
of responsibility placed upon them, has, in the light of time, been
made almost ludicrously apparent. Their utter inability to appreciate
the terrific evils, to the civilization they thought they were
defending and strengthening by their advocacy of the re-opening of the
slave trade, was most strikingly indicated by their impressions of
the effect of emancipation, less lurid than Hammond’s picture, but as
strikingly incorrect.
“The paralysis of industry, which would ensue from the emancipation
of the slaves, would, in the course of a single year, leave the whole
country almost destitute of food and the wretched inhabitants would
perish by thousands with all the lingering tortures of unsatisfied
hunger.”[161]
When to this were added the effusions of men like Spratt, we can
scarcely realize, that this was from the State which had produced
Robert Barnwell, Joseph Alston, William Lowndes and Robert Y. Hayne.
In the minority report, however, of an adopted son, J. Johnston
Pettigrew, who six years later fell with honor and renown, high
in rank, in the retreat from Gettysburg, the State found better
representation; while the brilliant Hammond, who had averred that
he: “endorsed without reserve the much abused sentiment of Governor
McDuffie, that ‘slavery is the corner-stone of our republican
edifice’;” nevertheless also had declared, in his controversy with
Clarkson: “I might say, that I am no more in favor of slavery in the
abstract, than I am of poverty, disease, deformity, idiocy or any other
inequality of the human family; that I love perfection and I think I
should enjoy a millennium such as God has promised.”[162]
It was not then that men like Hammond, Adams and Robert G. Harper, of
Georgia, were blind to the abuses of slavery, for Adams, the advocate
of the re-opening of the slave trade, had in his message to the General
Assembly of South Carolina only the year before declared:
“The administration of our laws in relation to our colored population
by our Courts of magistrates and free holders, as these Courts are
at present constituted, calls loudly for reform. Their decisions
are rarely in conformity with justice or humanity. I have felt
constrained, in a majority of the cases brought to my notice, either
to modify the sentence, or set it aside altogether.”[163]
Yet Governor Adams was willing to risk the frightful increase of
such recognized evils, by the flooding of the South with a host of
barbarians fresh from the jungles of Africa.
But against this, Harper, of Georgia, was a tower of strength.
Prof. DuBois declares that “although such hot-heads as Spratt were
not able, as late as 1859, to carry a substantial majority of the
South with them, in an attempt to reopen the trade at all hazards,
yet the agitation did succeed in sweeping away nearly all theoretical
opposition to the trade, and left the majority of Southern people in
an attitude, which regarded the opening of the African slave trade as
merely a question of expediency.”[164]
This he attempted to sustain by quotations from the Charleston
_Standard_, Richmond _Examiner_, New Orleans _Delta_, and other
Southern papers, intimating that Johnston Pettigrew’s minority report
cost him his re-election to the Legislature of South Carolina. As had
been shown, it did not, however, stand in the way of his elevation to a
high command of the forces South Carolina furnished for the War between
the States; while Senator Hammond, who had risen to the highest honor
his State could bestow, declared unequivocablly in 1858, with regard
to the re-opening of the slave trade: “I once entertained the idea
myself, but on further investigation abandoned it. I will not now go
into the discussion of it further than to say that the South is itself
divided on that policy, and from appearances, opposed to it by a vast
majority.”[165]
James Chesnut, the other senator from South Carolina, also announced
himself publicly against it in the same year. But it was in the
profoundly thoughtful and admirably thorough argument of Harper of
Georgia, that the opponents of re-opening found the best representation.
Southern to the core, it is a defense of slavery “as it existed in the
South,” that cannot be improved upon.
Harper knew that slave labor was not by any means cheap labor. Like
Hammond and other students of affairs, he knew that free labor was
cheaper both in Great Britain and the United States, but that the
reports of the parliamentary commission of 1842 had indicated that
the laboring classes of the United Kingdom were in a more miserable
condition, and were more degraded morally and physically than the
slaves of the South. He realized that capital would inevitably reach
out for cheap labor, which while a benefit to the employer and the
consumer, would slowly undermine the foundations of the republic,
bringing all labor down, while it built up a privileged class of idle
rich. He heard in this cry for the re-opening of the slave trade, the
same demand for cheap labor with all the ills which the South had
freed herself from, in the years in which she had trained and elevated
her expensive laboring class. He saw this cheap imported slave labor
invading the province of the remnant of the white working class of the
South, and rendering it inimical to the institution. But above and
beyond all this, he saw the slave trade, as his forbears had seen it in
the days the South produced her strongest men, and without any reserve
he declared:
“By the votes of Southern representatives as well as Northern, we
have stamped upon it the brand and penalty of the greatest of crimes
against mankind.... The change has not yet been worked in public
opinion in the South. It will be hard to produce it. When the attempt
shall be made, it will develop a division which ages of discussion
will utterly fail to overcome.”[166]
As objectionable as slavery is in the abstract, it is a debatable
question whether Harper of Georgia, advocate of slavery, as it existed
in the South in 1858, but determined opponent of the re-opening of
the slave trade, did not occupy higher ground from a humanitarian
standpoint, than did Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut in 1787, who was
then, “for leaving the clause as it stands, let every State import what
it pleases.... As population increases poor laborers will be so plenty
as to render slaves useless.”
Ellsworth might have gone further and declared with truth, that, if
poor laborers were not sufficiently plenteous, they could be imported.
In 1912 they were being brought in in such swarms that our civilization
was said to be threatened thereby.
But while there was this pronounced opposition to the re-opening of
the slave trade in the South, there is not much room to doubt that the
slave population of the South had been largely recruited with illicit
importations from abroad from 1808. To what extent it is difficult to
arrive at with any degree of accuracy.
In his “Suppression of the Slave Trade,” Prof. DuBois quotes
Congressional documents, to indicate that from Amelia Island, on
the Gulf Coast, in 1817 the pirates had eleven armed vessels with
which they captured slavers, and brought their cargoes into the
United States[167] and that, a year after the capture of the island
by United States troops, African and West Indian Negroes were almost
daily illicitly introduced into Georgia.[168] He also claims that the
estimates of three representatives of Congress, Tallmadge of New York,
Middleton, of South Carolina, and Wright of Virginia, in the year 1819,
were that slaves were then being brought into the country at the rate
of about 14,000 a year.[169] He thinks while smuggling never entirely
ceased, the participation of Americans declined between 1825 and 1835,
when it again revived, reaching its highest activity between 1840
and 1860, when the city of New York was “the principal port of the
world for this infamous commerce, although Portland and Boston were
only second.”[170] He quotes DeBow for the statement that, in 1856,
forty slavers cleared annually from Eastern harbors, clearing yearly
$17,000,000, and from the report of the American Anti-Slavery Society,
that between 1857 and 1858 twenty-one of the twenty-two slavers seized
by the British cruisers proved to be American, from New York, Boston
and New Orleans;[171] and Stephen A. Douglas claimed to have seen
recently imported slaves at Vicksburg and Memphis in 1859.[172]
The Charleston _Courier_ in 1839 printed an extract from the New York
_Journal of Commerce_, to the effect that twenty-three vessels under
the American flag had sailed about that time from Havana on the slave
trade[173]. And the Charleston _Mercury_ in 1849 declared: “The slave
trade is again very active in Cuba.”[174]
In support of these claims it can be said:
Of the increase of the colored population of the United States from
1850 to 1860, more than one-half was in the four States of Louisiana,
Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas, into which slaves could most easily be
imported, and the temper of the most northerly of those was becoming
extremely sensitive upon the subject of allusions to the institution
of slavery, as the following extract of a resolution adopted by the
Legislature of that State, and sent to the other States of the Union,
indicates:
“Whereas the right of property in slaves is expressly recognized
by the Constitution of the United States, and is by virtue of such
recognition guaranteed against unfriendly action on behalf of the
General Government; and whereas, each State of the Union, by the
fact of being a party to the federal compact, is also a party to the
recognition and guaranty aforesaid.... Resolved: That the citizens of
the State of Ohio have pursued a course peculiarly unjust and odious,
in their fanatical hostility to institutions for which they are not
responsible; in their encouragement of known felons and endorsement
of repeated violations of law and decency, and in their establishment
of abolition presses, and circulation of incendiary documents, urging
a servile population to bloodshed and rapine, and by reason of the
premises, it is the duty and interest of the people of Arkansas to
discontinue all social and commercial relations with the citizens of
the said State.” etc.[175]
It is interesting to note that in his very able and extremely
interesting paper on “The Fight for the Northwest,” 1860, the map which
accompanies the article of Prof. W. E. Dodd, does not include Ohio.
Quoting from a speech of Senator Hammond in 1858, in which the latter
declared: “The most valuable part of the Mississippi belongs to us,
and although those who have settled above us, are now opposed to us,
another generation will tell another tale,”[176] Mr. Dodd draws from it
the conclusion that “Hammond’s idea was that the railroads connecting
the West and the South, would so stimulate reciprocal trade between the
farmers and the planters, that the resistance of the Chicago-Detroit
region would be overcome.”
But it should be borne in mind that in 1858-1860, between the West and
the South there stretched a great tract of country over six hundred
miles in length, and nearly three hundred miles in breadth, through the
whole extent of which not a single railroad stretched across from the
Potomac at Harper’s Ferry to the junction of the Ohio River with the
Mississippi, near the northeastern corner of Arkansas.
To have crossed this great stretch just about the center at its widest
part was the scheme of Hayne’s road which had been abandoned for a
scheme of weakly paralleling below, the network stretching west
above.
[Illustration: U.S. 1860
WHITES
WHITES & BLACKS
NEGROES
RAILWAYS COMPLETED
” PROJECTED]
The effort of the presidential campaign by the Democrats may have been
for an election in the House in 1860, and may have been lost, as Prof.
Dodd declares, “only by a narrow margin by the votes of the foreigners,
whom the railroads poured in numbers into the contested region;” but
that triumph at the most would have only deferred the contest for
another four years, for by its special correspondent in the West, the
Columbus, Georgia, _Times_ had been informed in 1854:
“If Kansas becomes a free soil State slavery will be doomed for
Missouri.”[177]
The attempt then, inaugurated in 1840, to parallel the Northern
systems, pouring population westward, was recognized as an impossible
task in 1860, and with the election of Lincoln, known as the man who
had declared a house divided against itself cannot stand, the South
attempted to end the division by Secession.
To such a solution the more powerful North was unwilling to consent,
and the war followed for the Union.
FOOTNOTES:
[152] Woodrow Wilson, Division and Reunion, p. 184.
[153] Ibid.
[154] Ibid. p. 185.
[155] Jefferson Davis, Rise & Fall of Confed. Gov. p. 29, Vol. I.
[156] Jervey, Hayne, p. 451.
[157] Message, President Tyler, Richardson, Vol. 4, p. 363.
[158] Jameson, Calhoun’s Correspondence, p. 665.
[159] Report Com. Religious Instruction Negroes, Jenkins, Vol. 23
pamphlets C. L. S. No. 10 p. 65.
[160] Appendix Report Special Com. House Rep. So. Ca. Walker & Evans,
1857. p. 57. Message Gov. Adams of S. C. 1856, Vol. 23.
[161] Report Special Com. Reopening Slave Trade, 1857, p. 9. Vol. 23.
[162] Hammond Speeches, p. 120.
[163] Gov. Adams of S. C. Message General Assembly 1855, Vol. 15.
[164] DuBois, Suppression Slave Trade, p. 173.
[165] Hammond Speeches, p. 335.
[166] Robert G. Harper, Argument Slave Trade, Vol. 23, pamphlet C. L.
S. Hanleiter, Atlanta Ga. No. 8. p. 66.
[167] DuBois, Suppression Slave Trade, p. 113.
[168] Ibid. p. 114.
[169] Ibid. p. 124.
[170] Ibid. p. 179.
[171] Ibid.
[172] Ibid. p. 181.
[173] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 504.
[174] _Charleston Mercury_, May 26, 1849.
[175] Resolutions State of Arkansas, 1855, Vol. 15, pamphlets C. L. S.
[176] Dodd, The Fight for the Northwest, 1860, Am. His. Review Vol.
XVI, p. 777.
[177] Columbus, Ga., _Times_, Nov. 19, 1854.