SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES BEFORE 1820
First Appearance of Slavery in the British North American
Colonies--Early Theory of the Benefits of Slavery--The Earliest Legal
Recognition of Slavery in the Colonies--Northern Colonies not well
Adapted to Negro Labor--The Southern Colonies well Adapted to Negro
Labor--Negro Slavery a Temporary Necessity in the South--Was Negro
Slavery an Error and an Evil from the first?--Slavery Legislation in
the Southern Colonies--Partus Sequitur Ventrem--Definitions of the
Slave Class--The Test of the Slave Status as Fixed by the Virginia
Statute--The Legal Position of the Slave--Tendency Toward Serfage in
the Code of 1705--Public Relations of the Slave System--The General
Object of the Laws in respect to Slaves--Slavery and the Revolutionary
Ideas of the Rights of Man--First Prohibition upon Slave
Importation--Abolition of Slavery in the Northern Commonwealths after
the Beginning of the Revolution--Slavery and the Constitution of
1787--Reaction against the Humanitarian Principles of the
Revolution--Abolition of the Foreign Slave-trade by Congress--Cotton
Culture and the Cotton-gin--The Effect of the Return to the Arts of
Peace upon the Ideas Concerning Slavery--Slavery During the War of
1812 and the Years just before and just after this War--Slavery in the
Louisiana Territory--Slavery in the territory West of North Carolina
and Georgia--Slavery in Louisiana a Different Question from Slavery in
the North Carolina and Georgia Cessions--Interest in Slavery in
Maryland and Virginia Increased by the Acquisition of Louisiana--The
Domestic Slave-trade--The Relation of Slavery to the Diplomacy of the
United States.
It is not easy to define the term slavery in the abstract without
unfitting it for application to the great majority {40} of the systems
of servitude which have ever existed. Especially will it be difficult
to gain a correct conception of the relation between the white man and
the negro in North America previous to 1860 by means of such a
definition.
The institution of negro slavery in the United States was an
historical growth, which was in some respects unique. We shall,
therefore, do better to follow the main stages of that development
than to attempt at the outset any definition whatsoever. We may, in
this manner, build up a true description of it, and escape the error
frequently contained in the brevity of a definition and in the nature
of an abstract proposition.
[Sidenote: First appearance of slavery in the British North American
colonies.]
[Sidenote: Early theory of the benefits of slavery.]
It began its existence, like most institutions and relations, as a
social custom. Most of the historians record the appearance of a Dutch
merchant ship at Jamestown, in the year 1619, having negroes on board,
and inform us that twenty of them were sold to the colonists. What
title the Dutch traders had to such property, exactly what they sold
to the colonists, and what rights the colonists acquired in or over
such property, were defined, guaranteed, and secured by no existing
statutes. If any of the parties to the transaction reflected upon
these subjects at all, they must have supposed that the right of
possession and the freedom of contract covered the whole case. There
is certainly no evidence that any of these parties, or anybody else,
had the faintest conception that the law of any state, or any
principle of natural justice, or of reason, was violated or impaired
by the procedure or the results of the procedure. It was a firmly and
universally established opinion of the time that the attachment of
infidels to Christians in a relation of servant to master was vastly
beneficial to the infidel, certainly so when {41} the infidel was also
a barbarian, and was taken out of slavery to a barbarian master, as
was the case in respect to almost all of the negroes brought to the
English colonies in North America.
We cannot dismiss this opinion as one of the errors of the dark ages.
It lives to-day as a principle of modern political science and
practical politics, under the form of statement that civilized people
have the right and duty to impose civilization upon uncivilized
populations by whatever means they may deem to be just and proper.
There can be no reasonable doubt that the negroes transferred from
slavery in Africa to slavery in the English-American colonies
themselves felt the amelioration of their condition, and were, in
general, entirely contented with their new lot.
[Sidenote: The earliest legal recognition of slavery in the colonies.]
The relation was established in the Northern colonies, as well as in
the Southern, in the early years of their existence, and it was in
Massachusetts rather than in Virginia that it first received legal
recognition, and began to be changed from a purely domestic
institution by suffering governmental regulation. In the Massachusetts
"Fundamentals," or "Body of Liberties," passed by the General Court in
1641, the slavery of negroes and Indians, and the slave-trade, were
expressly legalized. In fact, so far as the colonists themselves were
responsible for the introduction of negro slavery among them, the
impartial historian must place the greater blame upon a Northern
colony. Its citizens were first to develop commerce, and it was their
ships which brought the slave cargoes from the coasts of Africa to all
of the colonies.
[Sidenote: Northern colonies not well adapted to negro labor.]
[Sidenote: The Southern colonies well adapted to negro labor.]
The negroes were not, however, fitted for labor in the Northern
colonies. In the first place, it was too cold for them to thrive
there. A warm, moist air is the natural climate for the negro. In the
second place, the {42} work to be done in these sections was not
suited to his capacity. The Northern colonies had not, indeed, at that
early day, developed the finer forms of industry which have
subsequently distinguished that part of the country. They were then,
as to their internal pursuits, almost as completely agricultural as
the colonies of the South. But their farming required a great deal
more of intelligence, thrift, and industry in the laborer than the
negro of that day possessed. The country was broken, the good soil was
limited in amount, the weather was capricious, and the management of
the crops demanded judgment and discretion. On the other hand, the
vast level areas of good soil, the warm, uniform climate, and the
simple crops of the Southern colonies furnished the conditions
favorable to the employment of negro labor.
[Sidenote: Negro slavery a temporary necessity in the South.]
It is not easy to see how the rich swamp-lands of these colonies could
ever have been reclaimed and made tributary to the civilization of the
world in any way but by the employment of negro labor. And it is no
easier to see how the pure negro could then have been brought to do
this great work save through slavery to the white race, save by being
forced to contribute the muscular effort, under the direction of the
superior intelligence of the white race, to the realization of objects
determined by that superior intelligence. The negro is proof against
malaria, and thrives under the burning sun. The white man is destroyed
by the former and greatly disabled by the latter. And the pure negro
would not at that period of his development labor voluntarily. These
were the elements of the problem which confronted those who undertook
to subject the vast marshes of the Southern colonies to cultivation
and to prepare them for the {43} production of their most valuable
contributions to the comforts of civilized man. The solution of the
problem was negro slavery.
[Sidenote: Was negro slavery an error and an evil from the first?]
We are most of us inclined, at this day, to hold that this was an
erroneous solution, and that we could have discovered a better one;
but it was the solution which was reached, and we shall be wiser if we
seek to understand it clearly, instead of wasting our energies in its
condemnation, remembering that many of the things of the past, which,
from the point of view of the present, we are prone to regard as
error, and even as sin, are only anachronisms. In fact, those who
founded the colony of Georgia thought _then_ that they had a better
solution of the problem. They prohibited slavery at the outset from
that colony. In fourteen years they came to regard this act as a great
mistake, and the noblest spirits among them acknowledged themselves in
error, and joined in the movement for the introduction of negro
slave-labor.
[Sidenote: Slavery legislation in the Southern colonies.]
The conditions above mentioned were undoubtedly the chief causes of
the more rapid and pronounced development of negro slavery in the
Southern colonies. And that more rapid and pronounced development
directs us rather to the legislation of the Southern colonies than to
that of the Northern, in following the legalization of the relation.
[Sidenote: Partus sequitur ventrem.]
Virginia naturally took the lead, and furnished the precedents for the
others. The first question, both as to time and importance, which
required legislative treatment, was the question of the status of the
children of slaves. Where legalized marriage does not exist, the only
certainty in respect to parentage is attained by regarding the mother.
Rights and status in such a condition of society are, therefore,
transmitted through the female line. _Partus sequitur ventrem_ is the
rule {44} not only of the civil law, but of every system of law
regulating the accidents of descent among people where the mingling of
the sexes is not controlled by civilized marriage. Insuperable
obstacles present themselves in the attempt to apply any other rule.
It was no unusual or arbitrary enactment of the Virginia legislature
which, in 1662, prescribed the rule that the status of the slave
mother should determine that of her offspring. This rule was followed
in all the colonies, and many of them enacted it into statute law.
[Sidenote: Definitions of the slave class.]
So long as the slaves were few in number and were not Christians the
necessity for legislation defining the slave class was not felt; but
so soon as the slave-trade became more active, and slaves began to
receive Christian baptism, the old customary test in regard to this
matter, that of infidelity or heathenism, would no longer suffice. The
colonists of that day were too conscientious to cut the knot of this
difficulty by denying Christian baptism to any one seeking it. They
considered it their prime duty to lead the heathen to the knowledge of
Christ. It is evident that their consciences were greatly troubled
over the question of the effect of Christian baptism upon the slave
status. The colonial legislatures, the Home Government, and the Bishop
of London were appealed to for counsel in the dilemma. The answers
received from all of these were to the effect that the status of the
slave was not changed by Christian baptism or conversion.
[Sidenote: The test of the slave status as fixed by the Virginia
statute.]
The test of the slave status was then necessarily fixed by
legislation. The Virginia statute declared all servants brought into
the country by land or sea, who were not Christians in their native
country at the time when they were purchased or procured, nor free in
{45} England or some other Christian country, to be slaves. Exception
was made of Turks and Moors in amity with the King. This statute,
taken together with the rule _partus sequitur ventrem_, which rule was
re-enacted, became the test of the slave class. At the same time heavy
penalties were attached to the marriage or cohabitation of white women
with slaves.
[Sidenote: The legal position of the slave.]
Of course it very soon became necessary that the legal position of the
slave should be definitely fixed. The legislature of Virginia again
set the precedents. Concisely stated, this legislation provided that a
slave could have no standing in the ordinary courts, either as party
or witness; that a slave could own no property; that a slave owed
obedience to the master, who might force the slave to labor, and
chastise the slave even to the extreme of so injuring the slave that
the slave might die in consequence thereof, without incurring the
penalties of felony; that the slave could be sold or inherited as
personal property; and that the offspring of the female slave belonged
to the master owning her at the time of its birth.
[Sidenote: Tendency toward serfage in the Code of 1705.]
The wilful killing of a slave by anyone, even the master, was
accounted murder, and extraordinary tribunals, without a jury, were
constituted for the protection of his person. The Code of 1705 even
contained regulations which indicated that the trend of thought and of
legislation, at that juncture, was toward attaching the slave to the
soil, which would have been a step upward in a course, which, if
consistently followed, would have made the slave a serf. But the still
prevailing rules, which allowed the slave to be seized and sold for
the debts of the master, and regulated the inheritance of slaves
according to the {46} law governing the descent of personal property,
seem to have completely neutralized that tendency before the middle of
the century had been reached.
[Sidenote: Public relations of the slave system.]
Naturally the private law accidents of the relation were first
developed and fixed, but very soon the rights and powers of the
community in regard to the institution began to claim attention. The
public peace and welfare must be safeguarded against the possible
conduct of the slave, on the one hand, and of the master, on the
other.
The legislation of Virginia set the example in these respects also.
That legislation provided that no slave should have, or carry arms, or
go outside of the plantation of his master without a pass from his
master, or lift his hand against a Christian; that a sheriff should
arrest a runaway slave on the warrant of two justices, and might
lawfully kill any slave who resisted arrest; and that no slave should
be emancipated without the consent of the Governor and Council.
On the other hand, it provided that the master should be responsible
for all damage done by his slave at any place where there was no
Christian overseer, and required that any master giving freedom to his
slave should pay the cost of his transportation out of the colony.
[Sidenote: The general object of the laws in respect to slaves.]
Such was substantially the law of negro slavery in all of the colonies
at the beginning of the decade before the Revolution. It was perhaps
more severe than this in South Carolina, and it was certainly less so
in Massachusetts.
The objects which it had in view were to secure the master's property
in the slave, to enable the master to hold the slave in obedience and
force him, if necessary, to labor, and to protect the public peace and
welfare against the abuse of the relation by the master, and against
the vicious nature of the slave.
{47} It does certainly appear that the century of law-making upon the
subject had not ameliorated the condition of the slave. We must
remember, however, that the first stages in the legalization of any
relation sometimes make the situation appear worse than what obtained
before the movement began, although it may not be worse in fact.
[Sidenote: Slavery and the Revolutionary ideas of the rights of man.]
But the period of the Revolution brought with it a great change of
view in regard to the morality of slavery, and this change of idea
produced great modifications in the law of slavery, all of which
tended not only toward an improvement of the condition of the slave,
but also toward the ultimate extinction of slavery.
When we regard the Revolution of the colonies against the motherland
from the point of view of the present, we can easily see that its
purpose was very different from that of the French Revolution. What it
really sought and accomplished was national independence against
foreign rule. Those, however, who formulated the creed of the
Revolution sought its justification in the doctrine of human rights
rather than in that of national rights. The philosophy of the
eighteenth century was a humanitarian outburst. Politically and
legally it is summed up in the very misleading propositions that all
men are born equal and are endowed with freedom, and that the people
have the right to change or abolish existing government at their
pleasure. Whatever we may think of these doctrines now, our ancestors
professed to believe in them, and there is no reason to doubt the
sincerity of their profession, so far as their own consciousness went.
They saw also the inconsistency of slavery with these doctrines, and
quickly came to regard slavery as an evil which should be removed as
soon as possible.
{48} [Sidenote: First prohibition upon slave importation.]
The Continental Congress took the first step in this direction. Two
years before it declared independence it prohibited any further
importation of slaves, and repeated the prohibition two years later.
These acts are good evidence that, at the moment, the question of
slavery was regarded as a matter of national concern.
The Congress was, however, so occupied with the duties pertaining to
the prosecution of the war, that it failed to go forward in this
matter, as well as in many other matters of national concern; and when
the Confederate Congress succeeded the Continental Congress, it did so
upon the basis of a written constitution, or rather articles of union,
which vested no powers whatsoever in it over the subject of slavery.
[Sidenote: Abolition of slavery in the Northern Commonwealths after
the beginning of the Revolution.]
The separate colonies, now become "States" by the theory of the
Articles of Confederation, took up the question. Massachusetts
abolished slavery substantially by her constitution of 1780.
Pennsylvania provided for gradual emancipation by a statute of the
same year. Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire followed the
example of Pennsylvania. And New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland,
and Virginia forbade any further importation of slaves.
[Sidenote: The Ordinance of 1787.]
Under such impulses and influences the Confederate Congress, in spite
of the fact that no power in respect to slavery had been conferred
upon it, assumed to pass the famous Ordinance of 1787, decreeing the
free status exclusively in all of the territory then belonging to the
United States north of the Ohio River. The power to enact the
Ordinance could not even be derived by the most generous principles of
implication from any provision in the Articles of Confederation. To
justify the exercise of it by the Confederate {49} Congress it is
necessary to go back to the general principle of political science
that, as there was no government for this territory but the
Confederate Congress, and as there were no limitations in the Articles
of Confederation upon the powers of the Congress in this territory,
the powers of that Congress must have extended in this territory to
all subjects usually regulated by government.
The claim sometimes made that this Ordinance was a treaty between the
"States" forming the Confederation, or between them and the "States"
to be formed out of that territory in the future, is altogether
untenable. It was nothing more nor less than a legislative act of the
Congress.
It is an incontrovertible proof of the universality and intensity of
the opposition to the farther spread of slavery that the common
consciousness of the age acquiesced in this most latitudinarian
construction of the powers of the Confederate Congress, and that the
Congress itself voted the measure with but a single dissenting voice.
[Sidenote: Slavery and the Constitution of 1787.]
At the same moment that this measure was being considered in the
Congress, the Constitutional Convention, sitting at Philadelphia, was
framing the national Constitution of 1787. The attitude which the
nation would assume in this new instrument of its organic law toward
the subject of slavery was one of the most, if not the most, important
of the questions which the Convention was called upon to consider.
There can be little doubt that the men of 1787 had come to regard the
question of the rights of man a little more calmly than they did
during the heat of the battle with the motherland. In Luther Martin's
famous letter to the legislature of Maryland upon the work of the {50}
Convention of 1787, a very significant passage concerning the existing
views upon slavery occurs. He wrote: "At this time we do not generally
hold this commerce" (the slave-trade) "in so great abhorrence as we
have done. When our liberties were at stake we warmly felt for the
common rights of men. The danger being thought to be past which
threatened ourselves we are daily growing more insensible to those
rights."
The Constitution of 1787 contains evidence of the correctness of this
statement. Among its provisions were to be found three most important
compromises with the slavery interest, three most important
recognitions of slavery. The first was political in its nature. It
counted the negro for three-fifths of the white man in the
distribution of the representation in the House of Representatives and
in the Presidential Electoral Colleges. The second was commercial in
its nature. It forbade the Congress to prohibit, before the year 1808,
the migration or importation of such persons as the existing "States"
might see fit to admit. The third was a direct guarantee of slave
property. It required the surrender to his master of an escaped slave
wherever found in the United States. These were most momentous
provisions. They secured slave property, increased slave property, and
made slavery a vast political power in the hands of the slave-masters.
There is no doubt that the clock of the ages was turned back full half
a century in regard to this great question by the Constitution of
1787.
[Sidenote: Reaction against the humanitarian principles of the
Revolution.]
From 1787 to 1808 the reactionary course was pursued almost without a
single break. Kentucky was made a Commonwealth with the slave status.
The Congress accepted from North Carolina and Georgia cessions of the
territory which lay to the west of them, and which they claimed as
belonging to them, with a condition {51} that slavery should not be
forbidden therein by Congress. The slave Commonwealth of Tennessee was
immediately formed out of a part of this territory. The vast territory
of Louisiana, in which slavery existed wherever it was inhabited, was
added to the domain of the Union. The District of Columbia, the seat
of the general Government, was made a slave-holding community, through
the adoption by Congress of the laws of Maryland as the code of the
District. A fugitive slave-law was passed by Congress, which enabled
any white man to seize, as his slave, any man of color, and bring him
before any magistrate, and, upon proof satisfactory to the latter, to
demand such papers and certificates as would legally warrant him in
reclaiming the slave and transporting him to the place whence he was
said to have escaped; and petitions to Congress complaining of the
abuse of this arbitrary power were laid aside without consideration.
Even the Territory of Indiana prayed Congress to suspend for it that
part of the Ordinance of 1787 which forbade slavery within its limits.
And South Carolina abolished her law against the importation of
slaves, and opened the way wide for a vast increase of the slave
population.
[Sidenote: Abolition of the foreign slave-trade by Congress.]
These last acts seem to have aroused the consciousness of the Congress
to the rapidity with which the whole country was becoming again
subject to the slave-holding interests. The Congress resisted the
importunities of the Indiana leaders, and after giving South Carolina
a reasonable time to re-enact her law abolishing the foreign
slave-trade, without effect, proceeded itself to abolish the trade
from the first moment that the Constitution permitted this to be done,
from January 1st, 1808.
[Sidenote: Cotton culture and the cotton-gin.]
[Sidenote: The effect of the return to the arts of peace upon the
ideas concerning slavery.]
It has been customary to ascribe the great revulsion {52} of view in
regard to slavery, which certainly manifested itself everywhere in the
United States between 1790 and 1807, to cotton culture and the
cotton-gin. The invention of the cotton-gin, in the first part of the
last decade of the eighteenth century, and the increased demand for
cotton fabrics throughout the world, had made the cultivation of
cotton highly profitable. An increase in cotton culture was naturally
encouraged by such enhanced profits, and this tendency produced an
increased demand for negro labor and for new lands, since the cotton
crop requires a warm climate and low lands, and exhausts the soil very
rapidly. Those parts of the country adapted to cotton-raising felt,
therefore, a renewed interest in the increase of negro labor and in
territorial extension. And those parts not so adapted felt an indirect
interest in the same, since the increased and still increasing profits
of the cotton culture made a market for their slaves and a carrying
trade for their shipowners. There is no doubt that such was the main
cause of the great change of view in regard to the question of negro
slavery which the country experienced between 1790 and 1810, but it
was not the sole cause. It was inevitable that, when the men of that
era passed out of the excited state of mind and feeling produced by
the War with the motherland, and came to the task of re-establishing
the relations of peace and every-day life and business, they should
regain a calmness of judgment, a respect for vested rights, and a
regard for customary relations, which placed the political philosophy
of 1776 under many limitations and qualifications, some of which,
certainly, were sound and valuable. It is only when we take all of
these considerations together that we comprehend the reasoning of the
men of the first decade of this {53} century upon the great question.
They saw a great interest developing which was bringing wealth and
comfort into an impoverished country. They knew that it could be then
sustained only by negro labor. They did not believe that the negro
would work unless forced to it by the white man. They thought it was
better for the negro himself to have food, clothing, and shelter, in
slavery, than to starve, or become a robber, in liberty. They felt, on
the other hand, that the slavery of one human being to another was an
exceptional relation in a political system which rested its own right
to independent existence upon the doctrine of human freedom. It was
not, then, unnatural that they arrived at the conclusion that to
prohibit further importations of the barbarians from Africa was the
only remedy for which the time was ripe. They sincerely believed that
they would place themselves and their slaves in a far more
advantageous position for the gradual elevation of the latter by
having to deal only with negroes born and reared amid civilized
surroundings, and that freedom would finally be attained by all, as
the result of a gradual advancement in intelligence, morals, and
industry, and would be thus attained without any shock to the
civilization and welfare of the country.
This appeared to the men of that day, both of the North and of the
South, to be the only safe way to proceed in solving the question of
the relation between the highly civilized Anglo-American race and the
grossly barbaric negro race in the United States. We think now that
they might have done better, and some of the more unsympathetic
critics of our history affirm that they did nothing of any
consequence, and that in what they did do they acted with a
consciously deceptive purpose. There may have been a few to whom this
criticism can be justly applied, but there is no {54} sufficient
evidence that the mass of them were insincere either in act or
thought. The contention that they were is more partisan than truly
historical.
[Sidenote: Slavery during the War of 1812, and the years just before
and just after this war.]
The decade between 1807 and 1817 was filled with the questions of
foreign relations, of foreign war, and of the results of foreign war.
The suspension, and then the almost entire destruction, of foreign
commerce by the British Orders in Council, the Napoleonic decrees, the
Jeffersonian embargo, and the War of 1812, reduced the exportation in
cotton from about fifty millions of pounds in 1807 to less than twenty
millions of pounds in 1814. The pecuniary interest in the maintenance
of slavery declined thus quite materially, and the majority of the
leading men, both North and South, still regarded negro slavery as
only a temporary status, which would be gradually modified in the
direction of freedom.
[Sidenote: Slavery in the Louisiana territory.]
Notwithstanding all this, however, the slavery interest was steadily
waxing in influence and power throughout this period. First of all the
existence and the extension of slavery in the vast territory purchased
from France was secured. The custom of slave-holding had been
introduced into this territory by the French and Spanish immigrants,
while it was in the possession of France and Spain, before the year
1800. In that year Spain, as we have seen, receded it to France. Nine
years before this date, slavery had been abolished in France by the
National Assembly. It is certainly a question, then, whether the
re-establishment of French supremacy over Louisiana in 1800 did not
produce the abolition of slavery there. It will be remembered that
France was at that moment subject to the consular government of
Bonaparte, and that the Consul was not an enthusiast for the
revolutionary ideals. He did not disturb the custom of slave-holding
{55} in Louisiana, and when he ceded this vast territory to the United
States, in 1803, the custom existed in all its inhabited parts. The
Treaty of cession contained a provision which pledged the Government
of the United States to uphold the rights of property of the
inhabitants of the province. It can be fairly said, therefore, that
the United States Government obligated itself to France to maintain
slavery within the territory ceded until it should be erected into a
Commonwealth, or into Commonwealths, of the Union.
The United States Government might have violated the Treaty, if it had
chosen to do so, and the question then raised would have been one of a
purely diplomatic or international character. There would have been no
question of constitutional power involved. The act of the United
States Government breaking the Treaty would have been the law of the
land for the inhabitants of this territory.
The United States Government, however, not only permitted the
continuance of the custom of slave-holding in Louisiana, but when, in
1804, Congress divided this vast region into two parts by the
thirty-third parallel of latitude, and organized the southern portion
as the Territory of Orleans, and placed the northern portion under the
jurisdiction of the Governor and judges of the Territory of Indiana,
it, at the same time, authorized citizens of the United States
immigrating into the Territory of Orleans, for the purpose of actual
settlement, to take their slaves with them, and provided that the
French laws in force at the date of the division should continue in
the northern part until repealed or modified by the Governor and
judges of Indiana Territory. Any danger to slavery in this district of
Louisiana, which might be contained in the power vested by Congress in
the Governor and judges of the Territory of Indiana to {56} repeal or
modify the French laws which Congress had allowed to continue in the
district, was overcome, the following year, by the independent
organization of this district as the Territory of Louisiana, and by a
provision in the Act of Congress effecting this organization, which
provided for the continuance in force of the laws of the district,
until repealed or modified by the legislature of the Territory.
When, therefore, in 1812, the Territory of Orleans was erected into
the Commonwealth of Louisiana, and the name of the Territory of
Louisiana was changed to Missouri, there was no question about the
status of the new Commonwealth. It was, both in fact and in law, a
slave-holding Commonwealth; and the custom of slave-holding was
perpetuated in the newly named Territory by the provision in the Act
of Congress that the laws and regulations of the Territory of
Louisiana should remain in force in the Territory of Missouri until
repealed or modified by the legislature of the Territory of Missouri.
[Sidenote: Slavery in the territory west of North Carolina and
Georgia.]
The Government of the United States had entered into obligations with
North Carolina and Georgia, as we have seen, not to prohibit slavery
in the territory ceded by them to the United States. Whatever we may
think of the binding force of any such agreement from a legal point of
view, certainly from an ethical point of view it could have been urged
that the Government would have broken faith with some of the citizens
of the United States had the Congress disregarded this understanding.
[Sidenote: Slavery in Louisiana a different question from slavery in
the North Carolina and Georgia cessions.]
It cannot, however, be contended that there was any obligation, legal
or moral, resting upon the Government of the United States toward any
of the citizens of the United States, or any of the Commonwealths, to
maintain slavery in the province of Louisiana and in the {57}
Territories carved out of it. There was, as we have seen, a provision
in the Treaty of cession of 1803, by which the United States
Government obligated itself to France to protect the property of the
inhabitants of the province. But the Government of the United States
was under no obligation to any citizen of the United States, or to any
Commonwealth of the Union, to keep this Treaty inviolate. It may be
affirmed, then, that the United States Government had, in the case of
Louisiana, for the first time, permitted and maintained slavery in
territory where it was perfectly free to act in regard to this subject
as it would, in so far as its own citizens were concerned. This
certainly manifested a great increase in the power of the
slave-holders over the general Government.
[Sidenote: Interest in slavery in Maryland and Virginia increased by
the acquisition of Louisiana.]
In consequence of this vast territorial extension of slavery the
interest of the more Northern of the old slave-holding Commonwealths
in slavery was, during this period, greatly re-enlivened. Maryland and
Virginia were already, in 1807, overstocked with slaves. The opening
up of the virgin lands of the Southwest to the immigration of masters
and slaves from the older Commonwealths, and the abolition of the
foreign slave-trade, now made the Southwest an excellent market for
the surplus slave population of these older Commonwealths.
[Sidenote: The domestic slave-trade.]
The domestic slave-trade began now to be one of the chief sources of
the wealth of Maryland and Virginia especially. Those who participated
in this traffic justified it by the claim that it was better for the
slaves themselves to be removed to new homes, where they could be
better supported, than to be kept in their old homes and suffer for
the want of the necessaries of life, and that the distribution of the
slave {58} population over a larger area would make future
emancipation easier, and less dangerous to the supremacy of the white
race. There was a certain force in this reasoning. The mass of the
slave-holders seem to have been fully convinced of its soundness,
although it did not entirely quiet the consciences of the best men
among them to the many painful incidents connected with the separation
of the slaves, made subject to this traffic, from their old homes and
associations.
It is easy to see, however, that the raising of negro slaves, having
become a most profitable industry in the older Commonwealths, acted as
a vast bribe upon the ideas of men in regard to the questions of the
perpetuation and extension of slavery, and beclouded their consciences
in respect thereto.
[Sidenote: The relation of slavery to the diplomacy of the United
States.]
Finally, the capture and abduction of negro slaves by the British
forces during the War of 1812, and the demand of the slave-holders
that the United States Government should secure the restitution of
their slaves, or compensation for the loss of them, from the British
Government, moved the United States Government to assume its attitude
toward slavery in the administration of the international affairs of
the country. The cardinal political principle of the slave-holding
statesmen, at that period, was that slavery was a "State" matter with
which the United States Government had no concern, and in regard to
which it had no powers. This appeal to the Government to voice and
enforce their demands against Great Britain in respect to their slave
property has seemed, therefore, to some of the later and more radical
critics of American history to have been a gross inconsistency, and
they have represented it as a proof of the insincerity of the
slave-holders wherever their pecuniary interests were involved.
{59} This criticism is rather taking, but a sound view of the
Constitution will hardly support it. In making the United States
Government the _exclusive_ organ for dealing with foreign countries,
the Constitution impliedly confers upon that Government a protectorate
against foreign states over interests which are regulated, internally,
only by the powers of the respective Commonwealths of the Union. It is
true that this doctrine rests upon a national view of the federal
system of government in the United States, a view which the
slave-holding statesmen did not later share. From their later
particularistic principle of the fundamental character of the Union,
such a general protectorate over "State" interests by the United
States Government against foreign countries could hardly be inferred
from the Constitution. If this principle could be assumed by these
critics as having been held at that time by the slave-holding
statesmen, their charge of inconsistency, if not of insincerity, would
be fairly made out. But such, as we have seen, was not the case. Many
of the slave-holding statesmen of 1816 were stronger in the national
view of the character of the Union than were the statesmen of New
England itself.
The United States Government recognized its duty to extend the
protection demanded in the case, and it secured from the British
Government compensation to the masters for the loss of slave property
occasioned by the acts of the British officers during the War.
Such was the status of the slavery question at the close of the War of
1812-15, at the commencement, therefore, of the period when,
withdrawing themselves from foreign complications, the people of the
United States began to adjust the different parts of their political
system, chiefly if not solely, to the demands of their internal
interests, and to solve the problems of their {60} polity from the
point of view of their domestic institutions. It is not strange, then,
that from this point of time onward the powerful institution of negro
slavery recognized more and more clearly its natural relations to all
of these questions of internal policy and law, and sought more and
more determinedly to bring the political system and the policies of
the United States into accord with its own exclusive interests. For
the first three or four years after the close of the War this tendency
did not, as has been pointed out, appear upon the surface, but it was
working in the depths. From 1820 to 1861, certainly, it furnishes the
point of view for the correct elucidation of the majority of the great
problems of the history of the United States.
{61}