CHARLES COTESWORTH PINCKNEY.
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, the eldest son of a chief
justice of that Colony, distinguished both as a soldier and a civilian,
was educated in England, and read law at the Temple. He returned to his
native province in 1769, and commenced the practice of his profession;
which, like many of the young American barristers of that day, he was
obliged to abandon for the duties of the camp, when the troubles of the
Revolution began. He became colonel of the first regiment of the
Carolina infantry, and served under General Moultrie in the defence of
the fort on Sullivan's Island. This gallant resistance having freed the
South, for a time, from invasion, Pinckney repaired to the Northern
army, and was made aide-de-camp to General Washington; in which capacity
he served at the battles of the Brandywine and Germantown. He afterwards
acquired great distinction in the defence of South Carolina against the
British under Sir Henry Clinton.
On the return of peace, he devoted himself to the law, in which he
became eminent. He belonged to that school of public men, who had been
trained in the service of the country under the eye of Washington, and
who had experienced with him the fatal defects of the successive
governments which followed the Declaration of Independence. Of his
abilities, patriotism, and purity of character we have the strongest
evidence, in the repeated efforts made by Washington, after the
establishment of the Constitution, to induce him to accept some of the
most important posts in the government.
He was, indeed, one of that order of men to whom Washington gave his
entire confidence from the first. A ripe scholar, a profound lawyer,
with Revolutionary laurels of the most honorable kind,--wise, energetic,
and disinterested,--it is not singular that the people of South Carolina
should have selected him as one of their delegates to an assembly, which
was to frame a new constitution of government for the country to whose
service his earlier years had been devoted.
General Pinckney entered the Convention with a desire to adhere, if
possible, to the characteristic principles of the Confederation; but
also with the wish to make that government more effective, by giving to
it distinct departments and enlarged powers.[444] But in the progress of
the discussions, he surrendered these views, and became a party to those
arrangements by which mutual concessions between the opposing sections
of the Union made a different form of government a practicable result.
He was a strenuous supporter of the interests of the slaveholding
States, in all that related to their right to hold and increase their
slave population. He contended earnestly against a grant of authority to
the general government to prohibit the importation of slaves; for he
supposed that his constituents would not surrender that right. But he
finally entered into the arrangement, by which the postponement of the
power to prohibit the slave-trade to the year 1808 was made a ground of
consent on the part of the Southern States to give the regulation of
commerce to the Union. He considered it, he said, the true interest of
the Southern States to have no regulation of commerce; but he yielded
it, in consideration of the losses brought upon the commerce of the
Eastern States by the Revolution, and of their liberality towards the
interests of the Southern portion of the Confederacy.
The framers of the Constitution of the United States have often been
bitterly reproached for permitting the slave-trade to be carried on for
twenty years after the period of its formation; and the Eastern States
have been especially accused of a sordid spirit of trade in purchasing
for themselves the advantage of a national regulation of commerce by
this concession. It is the duty of History, however, to record the facts
in their true relations.
At the time when the Convention for framing our Constitution was
assembled, no nation had prohibited the African slave-trade. The English
Quakers, following the example of their American brethren, had begun to
move upon the subject, but it was not brought formally before Parliament
until 1788; the trade was not abolished by act of Parliament until 1807,
nor made a felony until 1810. Napoleon's decree of 1815 was the first
French enactment against the traffic.
But in 1787, many of the members of the American Convention insisted
that the power to put an end to this trade ought to be vested in the new
government which they were endeavoring to form. But they found certain
of the Southern States unwilling to deprive themselves of the supply of
this species of labor for their new and yet unoccupied lands. Those
States would not consent to a power of immediate prohibition, and they
were extremely reluctant to yield even a power that might be used at a
future period. They preferred to keep the whole subject in their own
hands, and to determine for themselves when the importation should
cease. The members of the Convention, therefore, who desired the
abolition of this trade, found that, if they attempted to force these
States to a concession that it ought to be immediately prohibited,
either the regulation of commerce--the chief object for which the
Convention had been called--could not be obtained for the new
Constitution, or, if it were obtained, several of the Southern States
would be excluded from the Union. The question, then, that presented
itself to them was a great question of humanity and public policy, to be
judged and decided upon all the circumstances that surrounded it.
Were they to form a Union that should include only those States willing
to consent to an immediate prohibition of the slave-trade, and thus
leave the rest of the States out of that Union, and independent of its
power to restrain the importation of slaves? Were they to abandon the
hope of forming a new Constitution for the thirteen States that had gone
together through all the conflicts and trials and sacrifices of the
Revolution, or were they to form such a government, and secure to it the
power at some early period of putting an end to this traffic? If they
were to do the latter,--if the cause of humanity demanded action upon
this and all the other great objects dependent upon their
decisions,--how could the commercial interests of the country be better
used, than in the acquisition of a power to free its commerce from the
stain and reproach of this inhuman traffic? By the arrangement which was
to form one of the principal "compromises" of the Constitution, American
commerce might achieve for itself the opportunity to do what no nation
had yet done. By this arrangement, it might be implied in the
fundamental law of the new government about to be created for the
American people, that the abolition of the slave-trade was an object
that ought to engage the attention of Christian states. Without it, the
abolition of this trade could not be secured within any time or by any
means capable of being foreseen or even conjectured.
That the framers of the Constitution judged wisely: that they acted upon
motives which will enable History to shield them from all reasonable
reproach; and that they brought about a result alike honorable to
themselves and to their country,--will not be denied by those who
remember and duly appreciate the fact, that the Congress of the United
States, under the Constitution, was the first legislative body in the
world to prohibit the carrying of slaves to the territories of foreign
countries.[445]
It is no inconsiderable honor to the statesmen situated as General
Pinckney and other representatives of the Southern States were, that
they should have frankly yielded the prejudices, and what they supposed
to be the interests, of their constituents, to the great object of
forming a more perfect union. Certainly they could urge, with equal if
not greater force and truth, the same arguments for the continuance of
the slave-trade, which for nearly twenty years afterwards were
continually heard in the British Parliament, and which postponed its
abolition until long after the people of England had become satisfied
both of its inhumanity and its impolicy. Whether General Pinckney was
right or wrong in the opinion that his constituents needed no national
regulation of commerce, there can be no doubt of his sincerity when he
expressed it. Nor can there be any doubt that he was fully convinced of
the fact, when he asserted that they would not adopt a constitution
that should vest in the national government an immediate power to
prohibit the importation of slaves. He made, therefore, a real
concession, when he consented to the prohibition at the end of twenty
years, and he made it in order that the union of the thirteen States
might be preserved under a Constitution adequate to its wants.
For this, as well as for other services, he is entitled to a place of
honor among the great men who framed the charter of our national
liberties; and when we recollect that by his action he armed the
national government with a power to free the American name from the
disgrace of tolerating the slave-trade, before it was effectually put
down by any other people in Christendom, we need not hesitate to rank
him high among those who made great sacrifices for the general welfare
of the country and the general good of mankind.[446]
FOOTNOTES:
[444] Madison, Elliot, V. 133.
[445] Denmark, it is said, abolished the foreign slave-trade and the
importation into her colonies in 1792, but the prohibitions were not to
take effect until 1804. 1 Kent's Commentaries, 198, note (citing Mr.
Wheaton).
[446] In the first draft of the Constitution reported by the Committee
of Detail, it was provided that the importation of such persons as the
States might think proper to admit should not be prohibited. When the
committee to arrange, if possible, certain compromises between the
Northern and Southern States was raised, this provision, with other
matters, was referred, and it was finally agreed that the importation
should not be prohibited before the year 1808. After the adoption of the
Constitution, Congress, by the acts of March 22d, 1794, and May 10,
1800, prohibited the citizens and residents of the United States from
carrying slaves to any foreign territory for the purpose of traffic. By
the act of March 2, 1807, the importation of slaves into the United
States after January 1, 1808, was prohibited under severe penalties. In
1818 and 1819 these penalties were further increased, and in 1820, the
offence was made piracy. Although the discussion of the subject
commenced in England at about the same time (1788), it was nearly twenty
years before a bill could be carried through Parliament for the
abolition of the traffic. Through the whole of that period, and down to
the very last, counsel were repeatedly heard at the bar, in behalf of
interested parties, to oppose the reform. The trade was finally
abolished by act of Parliament in March, 1807; it was made a felony in
1810, and declared to be piracy in 1824. While, therefore, the
representatives of a few of the Southern States of this Union refused to
consent to an immediate prohibition, they did consent to engraft upon
the Constitution what was in effect a declaration that the trade should
be prohibited at a fixed period of time; and the trade was thus
abolished by the United States, under a government of limited powers,
with respect to their own territories, as soon as it was abolished by
the "omnipotent" Parliament of Great Britain. Moreover, by consenting to
give to the Union the power to regulate commerce, the Southern States
enabled Congress to abolish the slave-trade with foreign countries
thirteen years before the same trade was made unlawful to British
vessels.