THE NORTH AND THE SOUTH: COMPARATIVE PROSPERITY: SOUTHERN
DISCONTENT: ITS TRUE CAUSE.
To show the working of the federal government is the design of
this View--show how things are done under it and their effects;
that the good may be approved and pursued, the evil condemned and
avoided, and the machine of government be made to work equally
for the benefit of the whole Union, according to the wise and
beneficent intent of its founders. It thus becomes necessary to
show its working in the two great Atlantic sections, originally
sole parties to the Union--the North and the South--complained of
for many years on one part as unequal and oppressive, and made so
by a course of federal legislation at variance with the objects of
the confederation and contrary to the intent or the words of the
constitution.
The writer of this View sympathized with that complaint; believed it
to be, to much extent, well founded; saw with concern the corroding
effect it had on the feelings of patriotic men of the South; and
often had to lament that a sense of duty to his own constituents
required him to give votes which his judgment disapproved and his
feelings condemned. This complaint existed when he came into the
Senate; it had, in fact, commenced in the first years of the federal
government, at the time of the assumption of the State debts, the
incorporation of the first national bank, and the adoption of the
funding system; all of which drew capital from the South to the
North. It continued to increase; and, at the period to which this
chapter relates, it had reached the stage of an organized sectional
expression in a voluntary convention of the Southern States. It had
often been expressed in Congress, and in the State legislatures,
and habitually in the discussions of the people; but now it took
the more serious form of joint action, and exhibited the spectacle
of a part of the States assembling sectionally to complain formally
of the unequal, and to them, injurious operation of the common
government, established by common consent for the common good, and
now frustrating its object by departing from the purposes of its
creation. The convention was called commercial, and properly, as the
grievance complained of was in its root commercial, and a commercial
remedy was proposed.
It met at Augusta, Georgia, and afterwards at Charleston, South
Carolina; and the evil complained of and the remedy proposed were
strongly set forth in the proceedings of the body, and in addresses
to the people of the Southern and Southwestern States. The changed
relative condition of the two sections of the country, before and
since the Union, was shown in their general relative depression
or prosperity since that event, and especially in the reversed
condition of their respective foreign import trade. In the colonial
condition the comparison was wholly in favor of the South; under the
Union wholly against it. Thus, in the year 1760--only sixteen years
before the Declaration of Independence--the foreign imports into
Virginia were £850,000 sterling, and into South Carolina £555,000;
while into New York they were only £189,000, into Pennsylvania
£490,000; and into all the New England Colonies collectively only
£561,000.
These figures exhibit an immense superiority of commercial
prosperity on the side of the South in its colonial state, sadly
contrasting with another set of figures exhibited by the convention
to show its relative condition within a few years after the Union.
Thus, in the year 1821, the imports into New York had risen to
$23,000,000--being about seventy times its colonial import at about
an equal period before the adoption of the constitution; and those
of South Carolina stood at $3,000,000--which, for all practical
purposes, may be considered the same that they were in 1760.
Such was the difference--the reversed conditions--of the
two sections, worked between them in the brief space of two
generations--within the actual lifetime of some who had seen their
colonial conditions. The proceedings of the convention did not
stop there, but brought down the comparison (under this commercial
aspect) to near the period of its own sitting--to the actual period
of the highest manifestation of Southern discontent, in 1832--when
it produced the enactment of the South Carolina nullifying
ordinance. At that time all the disproportions between the foreign
commerce of the two sections had inordinately increased. The New
York imports (since 1821) had more than doubled; the Virginia had
fallen off one-half; South Carolina two-thirds. The actual figures
stood: New York fifty-seven millions of dollars, Virginia half a
million, South Carolina one million and a quarter.
This was a disheartening view, and rendered more grievous by the
certainty of its continuation, the prospect of its aggravation, and
the conviction that the South (in its great staples) furnished
the basis for these imports; of which it received so small a
share. To this loss of its import trade, and its transfer to the
North, the convention attributed, as a primary cause, the reversed
conditions of the two sections--the great advance of one in wealth
and improvements--the slow progress and even comparative decline of
the other; and, with some allowance for the operation of natural
or inherent causes, referred the effect to a course of federal
legislation unwarranted by the grants of the constitution and the
objects of the Union, which subtracted capital from one section
and accumulated it in the other:--protective tariff, internal
improvements, pensions, national debt, two national banks, the
funding system and the paper system; the multiplication of offices,
profuse and extravagant expenditure, the conversion of a limited
into an almost unlimited government; and the substitution of power
and splendor for what was intended to be a simple and economical
administration of that part of their affairs which required a
general head.
These were the points of complaint--abuses--which had led to the
collection of an enormous revenue, chiefly levied on the products
of one section of the Union and mainly disbursed in another. So
far as northern advantages were the result of fair legislation for
the accomplishment of the objects of the Union, all discontent or
complaint was disclaimed. All knew that the superior advantages of
the North for navigation would give it the advantage in foreign
commerce; but it was not expected that these facilities would
operate a monopoly on one side and an extinction on the other; nor
was that consequence allowed to be the effect of these advantages
alone, but was charged to a course of legislation not warranted
by the objects of the Union, or the terms of the constitution,
which created it. To this course of legislation was attributed
the accumulation of capital in the North, which had enabled that
section to monopolize the foreign commerce which was founded upon
southern exports; to cover one part with wealth while the other was
impoverished; and to make the South tributary to the North, and
suppliant to it for a small part of the fruits of their own labor.
Unhappily there was some foundation for this view of the case;
and in this lies the root of the discontent of the South and its
dissatisfaction with the Union, although it may break out upon
another point. It is in this belief of an incompatibility of
interest, from the perverted working of the federal government, that
lies the root of southern discontent, and which constitutes the
danger to the Union, and which statesmen should confront and grapple
with; and not in any danger to slave property, which has continued
to aggrandize in value during the whole period of the cry of danger,
and is now of greater price than ever was known before; and such as
our ancestors would have deemed fabulous. The sagacious Mr. Madison
knew this--knew where the danger to the Union lay, when, in the 86th
year of his age, and the last of his life, and under the anguish
of painful misgivings, he wrote (what is more fully set out in the
previous volume of this work) these portentous words:
"_The visible susceptibility to the contagion of nullification
in the Southern States, the sympathy arising from known causes,
and the inculcated impression of a permanent incompatibility
of interest between the North and the South, may put it in the
power of popular leaders, aspiring to the highest stations, to
unite the South, on some critical occasion, in some course of
action of which nullification may be the first step, secession
the second, and a farewell separation the last._"
So viewed the evil, and in his last days, the great surviving
founder of the Union--seeing, as he did, in this inculcated
impression of a permanent incompatibility of interest between the
two sections, the fulcrum or point of support, on which disunion
could rest its lever, and parricidal hands build its schemes.
What has been published in the South and adverted to in this View
goes to show that an incompatibility of interest between the two
sections, though not inherent, has been produced by the working of
the government--not its fair and legitimate, but its perverted and
unequal working.
This is the evil which statesmen should see and provide against.
Separation is no remedy; exclusion of Northern vessels from Southern
ports is no remedy; but is disunion itself--and upon the very
point which caused the Union to be formed. Regulation of commerce
between the States, and with foreign nations, was the cause of the
formation of the Union. Break that regulation, and the Union is
broken; and the broken parts converted into antagonist nations,
with causes enough of dissension to engender perpetual wars, and
inflame incessant animosities. The remedy lies in the right working
of the constitution; in the cessation of unequal legislation in
the reduction of the inordinate expenses of the government; in
its return to the simple, limited, and economical machine it was
intended to be; and in the revival of fraternal feelings, and
respect for each other's rights and just complaints; which would
return of themselves when the real cause of discontent was removed.
The conventions of Augusta and Charleston proposed their remedy
for the Southern depression, and the comparative decay of which
they complained. It was a fair and patriotic remedy--that
of becoming their own exporters, and opening a direct trade
in their own staples between Southern and foreign ports.
It was recommended--attempted--failed. Superior advantages
for navigation in the North--greater aptitude of its people
for commerce--established course of business--accumulated
capital--continued unequal legislation in Congress; and increasing
expenditures of the government, chiefly disbursed in the North,
and defect of seamen in the South (for mariners cannot be made
of slaves), all combined to retain the foreign trade in the
channel which had absorbed it; and to increase it there with the
increasing wealth and population of the country, and the still
faster increasing extravagance and profusion of the government. And
now, at this period (1855), the foreign imports at New York are
$195,000,000; at Boston $58,000,000; in Virginia $1,250,000; in
South Carolina $1,750,000.
This is what the dry and naked figures show. To the memory and
imagination it is worse; for it is a tradition of the Colonies that
the South had been the seat of wealth and happiness, of power and
opulence; that a rich population covered the land, dispensing a
baronial hospitality, and diffusing the felicity which themselves
enjoyed; that all was life, and joy, and affluence then. And this
tradition was not without similitude to the reality, as this
writer can testify; for he was old enough to have seen (after the
Revolution) the still surviving state of Southern colonial manners,
when no traveller was allowed to go to a tavern, but was handed over
from family to family through entire States; when holidays were
days of festivity and expectation, long prepared for, and celebrated
by master and slave with music and feasting, and great concourse of
friends and relatives; when gold was kept in desks or chests (after
the downfall of continental paper) and weighed in scales, and lent
to neighbors for short terms without note, interest, witness, or
security; and on bond and land security for long years and lawful
usance: and when petty litigation was at so low an ebb that it
required a fine of forty pounds of tobacco to make a man serve as
constable.
The reverse of all this was now seen and felt,--not to the whole
extent which fancy or policy painted--but to extent enough to
constitute a reverse, and to make a contrast, and to excite the
regrets which the memory of past joys never fails to awaken. A
real change had come, and this change, the effect of many causes,
was wholly attributed to one--the unequal working of the Federal
Government--which gave all the benefits of the Union to the North,
and all its burdens to the South. And that was the point on which
Southern discontent broke out--on which it openly rested until 1835;
when it was shifted to the danger of slave property.
Separation is no remedy for these evils, but the parent of far
greater than either just discontent or restless ambition would fly
from. To the South the Union is a political blessing; to the North
it is both a political and a pecuniary blessing; to both it should
be a social blessing. Both sections should cherish it, and the
North most. The story of the boy that killed the goose that laid
the golden egg every day, that he might get all the eggs at once,
was a fable; but the Northern man who could promote separation by
any course of wrong to the South would convert that fable into
history--his own history--and commit a folly, in a mere profit and
loss point of view, of which there is no precedent except in fable.