THE SOUTH (1820-1830)
In the decade which forms the subject of this volume, no section
underwent more far-reaching changes than did the group of South
Atlantic states made up of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and
Georgia, with which this chapter will deal under the name of the
south. Then it was that the south came to appreciate the effect of
the westward spread of the cotton-plant upon slavery and politics.
The invention of the cotton-gin by Eli Whitney, [Footnote: Am. Hist.
Review, III., 99.] in 1793, made possible the profitable cultivation
of the short-staple variety of cotton. Before this, the labor of
taking the seeds by hand from this variety, the only one suited to
production in the uplands, had prevented its use; thereafter, it was
only a question of time when the cotton area, no longer limited to
the tidewater region, would extend to the interior, carrying slavery
with it. This invention came at an opportune time. Already the
inventions of Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Cartwright had worked a
revolution in the textile industries of England, by means of the
spinning-jenny, the power-loom, and the factory system, furnishing
machinery for the manufacture of cotton beyond the world's
supply.[Footnote: M. B. Hammond, Cotton Industry, chaps, i., ii.;
Von Halle, "Baumwollproduktion," in Schmoller, Staats und Social-
wissenschaftliche Forschungen, XV.] Under the stimulus of this
demand for cotton, year by year the area of slavery extended towards
the west. In the twenties, some of the southern counties of Virginia
were attempting its cultivation; [Footnote: Va. Const. Conv.,
Debates (1829-1830), 333, 336; Martin, Gazetteer of Va. and D. C.
(1836), 99.] interior counties of North Carolina were combining
cotton-raising with their old industries; in South Carolina the area
of cotton and slavery had extended up the rivers well beyond the
middle of the state; [Footnote: Schaper, "Sectionalism and
Representation in S. C.," in Am. Hist. Assoc. Report, 1900, I., 387-
393.] while in Georgia the cotton planters, so long restrained by
the Indian line, broke through the barriers and spread over the
newly ceded lands. [Footnote: Phillips, "Georgia and State Rights,"
in Ibid., 1901, II. 140 (map).] The accompanying table shows the
progress of this crop: It is evident from the figures that tidewater
South Carolina and Georgia produced practically all of the cotton
crop in 1791, when the total was but two million pounds. By 1821 the
old south produced one hundred and seventeen million pounds, and,
five years later, one hundred and eighty millions. But how rapidly
in these five years the recently settled southwest was overtaking
the older section cotton crop (in million pounds)[Footnote: Based on
MacGregor, Commercial Statistics, 462; cf. De Bow's Review, XVII.,
428; Von Halle, Baumwollproduktion, 169; Secretary of Treasury,
Report, 1855-1856, p. 116. There are discrepancies; the figures are
to be taken as illustrative rather than exact; e.g., De Bow gives
seventy million pounds for Mississippi in 1826.] [Table omitted] is
shown by its total of over one hundred and fifty millions. By 1834
the southwest had distanced the older section. What had occurred was
a repeated westward movement: the cotton-plant first spread from the
sea-coast to the uplands, and then, by the beginning of our period,
advanced to the Gulf plains, until that region achieved supremacy in
its production.
How deeply the section was interested in this crop, and how
influential it was in the commerce of the United States, appears
from the fact that, in 1820, the domestic exports of South Carolina
and Georgia amounted to $15,215,000, while the value of the whole
domestic exports for all the rest of the United States was
$36,468,000. [Footnote: Pitkin, Statistical View (ed. of 1835), p.
57.] This, however, inadequately represents the value of the exports
from these two cotton states, because a large fraction of the cotton
was carried by the coastwise trade to northern ports and appeared in
their shipments. Senator William Smith, of South Carolina, estimated
that in 1818 the real exports of South Carolina and Georgia amounted
to "more than half as much as that of the other states of the Union,
including the vast and fertile valley of the Mississippi." The
average annual amount of the exports of cotton, tobacco, and rice
from the United States between 1821 and 1830 was about thirty-three
million dollars, while all other domestic exports made a sum of but
twenty million dollars. [Footnote: Ibid., 518.] Even greater than
New England's interest in the carrying-trade was the interest of the
south in the exchange of her great staples in the markets of Europe.
Never in history, perhaps, was an economic force more influential
upon the life of a people. As the production of cotton increased,
the price fell, and the seaboard south, feeling the competition of
the virgin soils of the southwest, saw in the protective tariff for
the development of northern manufactures the real source of her
distress. The price of cotton was in these years a barometer of
southern prosperity and of southern discontent. [Footnote: See chap,
xix., below; M. B. Hammond, Cotton Industry, part i., App. i.;
Donnell, Hist. of Cotton; Watkins, Production and Prices of Cotton.]
Even more important than the effect of cotton production upon the
prosperity of the south was its effect upon her social system. This
economic transformation resuscitated slavery from a moribund
condition to a vigorous and aggressive life. Slowly Virginia and
North Carolina came to realize that the burden and expense of
slavery as the labor system for their outworn tobacco and corn
fields was partly counteracted by the demand for their surplus
Negroes in the cotton-fields of their more southern neighbors. When
the lower south accepted the system as the basis of its prosperity
and its society, the tendency in the states of the upper south,
except in the pine barrens and the hill country, to look upon the
institution as a heritage to be reluctantly and apologetically
accepted grew fainter. The efforts to find some mode of removing the
Negro from their midst gradually came to an end, and they adjusted
themselves to slavery as a permanent system. Meanwhile, South
Carolina and Georgia found in the institution the source of their
economic well-being and hotly challenged the right of other sections
to speak ill of it or meddle with it in any way, lest their domestic
security be endangered. [Footnote: See Hart, Slavery and Abolition
(Am. Nation, XVI.)] When the south became fully conscious that
slavery set the section apart from the rest of the nation, when it
saw in nationalizing legislation, such as protection to manufactures
and the construction of a system of internal improvements, the
efforts of other sections to deprive the cotton states of their
profits for the benefit of an industrial development in which they
did not share, deep discontent prevailed. With but slight
intermission from the days of Washington to those of Monroe, the
tobacco planters under the Virginia dynasty had ruled the nation.
But now, when the center of power within the section passed from the
weakening hands of Virginia to those of South Carolina, the
aggressive leader of the Cotton Kingdom, the south found itself a
minority section in the Union. When it realized this, it denied the
right of the majority to rule, and proceeded to elaborate a system
of minority rights as a protection against the forces of national
development, believing that these forces threatened the foundations
of the prosperity and even the social safety of the south.
From the middle of the eighteenth century the seaboard planters had
been learning the lesson of control by a fraction of the population.
The south was by no means a unified region in its physiography. The
Blue Ridge cut off the low country of Virginia from the Shenandoah
Valley, and beyond this valley the Alleghenies separated the rest of
the state from those counties which we now know as West Virginia. By
the time of the Revolution, in the Carolinas and Georgia, a belt of
pine barrens, skirting the "fall line" from fifty to one hundred
miles from the coast, divided the region of tidewater planters of
these states from the small farmers of the up-country. This
population of the interior had entered the region in the course of
the second half of the eighteenth century. Scotch-Irishmen and
Germans passed down the Great Valley from Pennsylvania into
Virginia, and through the gaps in the Blue Ridge out to the Piedmont
region of the Carolinas, while contemporaneously other streams from
Charleston advanced to meet them. [Footnote: Bassett, in Am. Hist.
Assoc., Report 1894, p. 141; Schaper, ibid., 1900, I., 317;
Phillips, ibid., 1901, II., 88.] Thus, at the close of the
eighteenth century, the south was divided into two areas presenting
contrasted types of civilization. On the one side were the planters,
raising their staple crops of tobacco, rice, and indigo, together
with some cultivation of the cereals. To this region belonged the
slaves. On the other side was this area of small farmers, raising
livestock, wheat, and corn under the same conditions of pioneer
farming as characterized the interior of Pennsylvania.
From the second half of the eighteenth century down to the time with
which this volume deals, there was a persistent struggle between the
planters of the coast, who controlled the wealth of the region, and
the free farmers of the interior of Maryland, Virginia, the
Carolinas, and Georgia. The tidewater counties retained the
political power which they already possessed before this tide of
settlement flowed into the back-country. Refusing in most of these
states to reapportion on the basis of numbers, they protected their
slaves and their wealth against the dangers of a democracy
interested in internal improvements and capable of imposing a tax
upon slave property in order to promote their ends. In Virginia, in
1825, for example, the western men complained that twenty counties
in the upper country, with over two hundred and twenty thousand free
white inhabitants, had no more weight in the government than twenty
counties on tidewater, containing only about fifty thousand; that
the six smallest counties in the state, compared with the six
largest, enjoyed nearly ten times as much political power.
[Footnote: Alexandria Herald, June 13, 1825.] To the gentlemen
planters of the seaboard, the idea of falling under the control of
the farmers of the interior of the south seemed intolerable.
It was only as slavery spread into the uplands, with the cultivation
of cotton, that the lowlands began to concede and to permit an
increased power in the legislatures to the sections most nearly
assimilated to the seaboard type. South Carolina achieved this end
in 1808 by the plan of giving to the seaboard the control of one
house, while the interior held the other; but it is to be noted that
this concession was not made until slavery had pushed so far up the
river-courses that the reapportionment preserved the control in the
hands of slave-holding counties. [Footnote: Calhoun, Works, I., 401;
Schaper, Sectionalism and Representation in S. C., in Am. Hist.
Assoc., Report 1900, I., 434-437.] A similar course was followed by
Virginia in the convention of 1829-1830, when, after a long
struggle, a compromise was adopted, by which the balance of power in
the state legislature was transferred to the counties of the
Piedmont and the Valley. [Footnote: Va. Const. Conv., Debates (1829-
1830); Chandler, Representation in Va., in Johns Hopkins Univ.
Studies, XIV., 286-298.] Here slave-holding had progressed so far
that the interest of those counties was affiliated rather with the
coast than with the trans-Allegheny country. West Virginia remained
a discontented area until her independent statehood in the days of
the Civil War. These transmontane counties of Virginia were, in
their political activity during our period, rather to be reckoned
with the west than with the south. Thus the southern seaboard
experienced the need of protecting the interests of its slave-
holding planters against the free democracy of the interior of the
south itself, and learned how to safeguard the minority. This
experience was now to serve the south, when, having attained unity
by the spread of slavery into the interior, it found itself as a
section in the same relation to the Union which the slave-holding
tidewater area had held towards the more populous up-country of the
south.
The unification of the section is one of the most important features
of the period. Not only had the south been divided into opposing
areas, as we have seen, but even its population was far from
homogeneous. By the period of this volume, however, English, French-
Huguenots, Scotch-Irish, and Germans had become assimilated into one
people, and the Negroes, who in 1830 in the South Atlantic states
numbered over a million and a half in a white population of not much
over two millions, were diffusing themselves throughout the area of
the section except in West Virginia and the mountains.
Contemporaneously the pioneer farming type of the interior of the
section was replaced by the planter type. [Footnote: Niles'
Register, XXI., 132; cf. p. 55 below.] As cotton-planting and slave-
holding advanced into the interior counties of the old southern
states, the free farmers were obliged either to change to the
plantation economy and buy slaves, or to sell their lands and
migrate. Large numbers of them, particularly in the Carolinas, were
Quakers or Baptists, whose religious scruples combined with their
agricultural habits to make this change obnoxious. This upland
country, too distant from the sea-shore to permit a satisfactory
market, was a hive from which pioneers earlier passed into Kentucky
and Tennessee, until those states had become populous commonwealths.
Now the exodus was increased by this later colonization.[Footnote:
See chap. v. below.] The Ohio was crossed, the Mississippi-Missouri
ascended, and the streams that flowed to the Gulf were followed by
movers away from the regions that were undergoing this social and
economic reconstruction. This industrial revolution was effective in
different degrees in the different states. Comparatively few of
Virginia's slaves, which by 1830 numbered nearly half a million,
were found in her trans-Allegheny counties, but the Shenandoah
Valley was receiving slaves and changing to the plantation type. In
North Carolina the slave population of nearly two hundred and fifty
thousand, at the same date, had spread well into the interior, but
cotton did not achieve the position there which it held farther
south. The interior farmers worked small farms of wheat and corn,
laboring side by side with their Negro slaves in the fields.
[Footnote: Bassett, Slavery in N. C., in Johns Hopkins Univ.
Studies, XVII., 324, 399.] South Carolina had over three hundred
thousand slaves-more than a majority of her population--and the
black belt extended to the interior. Georgia's slaves, amounting to
over two hundred thousand, somewhat less than half her population,
steadily advanced from the coast and the Savannah River towards the
cotton-lands of the interior, pushing before them the less
prosperous farmers, who found new homes to the north or south of the
cotton-belt or migrated to the southwestern frontier.[Footnote:
Phillips, Georgia and State Rights, in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report
1901, II., 106.] Here, as in North Carolina, the planters in the
interior of the state frequently followed the plough or encouraged
their slaves by wielding the hoe. [Footnote: Phillips, Georgia and
State Rights, in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report 1901, II., 107.] Thus this
process of economic transformation passed from the coast towards the
mountain barrier, gradually eliminating the inharmonious elements
and steadily tending to produce a solidarity of interests. The south
as a whole was becoming, for the first time since colonial days, a
staple-producing region; and, as diversified farming declined, the
region tended to become dependent for its supplies of meat products,
horses, and mules, and even hay and cereals, upon the north and
west.
The westward migration of its people checked the growth of the
south. It had colonized the new west at the same time that the
middle region had been rapidly growing in population, and the result
was that the proud states of the southern seaboard were reduced to
numerical inferiority. Like New England, it was an almost stationary
section. Prom 1820 to 1830 the states of this group gained little
more than half a million souls, hardly more than the increase of the
single state of New York. Virginia, with a population of over a
million, increased but 13.7 per cent., and the Carolinas only 15.5
per cent. In the next decade these tendencies were even more clearly
shown, for Virginia and the Carolinas then gained but little more
than 2 per cent.
Georgia alone showed rapid increase. At the beginning of the decade
the Indians still held all of the territory west of Macon, at the
center of the state, with the exception of two tiers of counties
along the southern border; and, when these lands were opened towards
the close of the decade, they were occupied by a rush of settlement
similar to the occupation of Oklahoma and Indian Territory in our
own day. What Maine was to New England, that Georgia was to the
southern seaboard, with the difference that it was deeply touched by
influences characteristically western. Because of the traits of her
leaders, and the rude, aggressive policy of her people, Georgia
belonged at least as much to the west as to the south. From colonial
times the Georgia settlers had been engaged in an almost incessant
struggle against the savages on her border, and had the instincts of
a frontier society. [Footnote: Ibid., II., 88; Longstreet, Georgia
Scenes; Gilmer, Sketches; Miss. Hist. Soc., Publications, VIII.,
443.]
From 1800 to 1830, throughout the tidewater region, there were clear
evidences of decline. As the movement of capital and population
towards the interior went on, wealth was drained from the coast;
and, as time passed, the competition of the fertile and low-priced
lands of the Gulf basin proved too strong for the outworn lands even
of the interior of the south. Under the wasteful system of tobacco
and cotton culture, without replenishment of the soil, the staple
areas would, in any case, have declined in value. Even the corn and
wheat lands were exhausted by unscientific farming. [Footnote:
Gooch, Prize Essay on Agriculture in Va., in Lynchburg Virginian,
July 4, 1833; Martin, Gazetteer of Va., 99, 100.] Writing in 1814 to
Josiah Quincy, [Footnote: E Quincy, Josiah Quincy, 353.] John
Randolph of Roanoke lamented the decline of the seaboard planters.
He declared that the region was now sunk in obscurity: what
enterprise or capital there was in the country had retired westward;
deer and wild turkeys were not so plentiful anywhere in Kentucky as
near the site of the ancient Virginia capital, Williamsburg. In the
Virginia convention of 1829, Mr. Mercer estimated that in 1817 land
values in Virginia aggregated two hundred and six million dollars,
and Negroes averaged three hundred dollars, while in 1829 the land
values did not surpass ninety millions, and slaves had fallen in
value to one hundred and fifty dollars. [Footnote: Va. Const. Conv.,
Debates (1829-1830), 178; Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, 26.]
In a speech in the Virginia House of Delegates, in 1832, Thomas
Marshall [Footnote: Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, 24, cited from
Richmond Enquirer, February, 2, 1832.] asserted that the whole
agricultural product of Virginia did not exceed in value the exports
of eighty or ninety years before, when it contained not one-sixth of
the population. In his judgment, the greater proportion of the
larger plantations, with from fifty to one hundred slaves, brought
the proprietors into debt, and rarely did a plantation yield one and
a half per cent. profit on the capital. So great had become the
depression that Randolph prophesied that the time was coming when
the masters would run away from the slaves and be advertised by them
in the public papers. [Footnote: Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, 26.]
It was in this period that Thomas Jefferson fell into such financial
embarrassments that he was obliged to request of the legislature of
Virginia permission to dispose of property by lottery to pay his
debts, and that a subscription was taken up to relieve his distress.
[Footnote: Randall, Jefferson, III., 527, 561.] At the same time,
Madison, having vainly tried to get a loan from the United States
Bank, was forced to dispose of some of his lands and stocks;
[Footnote: Hunt, Madison, 380.] and Monroe, at the close of his term
of office, found himself financially ruined. He gave up Oak Hill and
spent his declining years with his son-in-law in New York City. The
old-time tide-water mansions, where, in an earlier day, everybody
kept open house, gradually fell into decay.
Sad indeed was the spectacle of Virginia's ancient aristocracy. It
had never been a luxurious society. The very wealthy planters, with
vast cultivated estates and pretentious homes, were in the minority.
For the most part, the houses were moderate frame structures, set at
intervals of a mile or so apart, often in park like grounds, with
long avenues of trees. The plantation was a little world in itself.
Here was made much of the clothing for the slaves, and the mistress
of the plantation supervised the spinning and weaving. Leather was
tanned on the place, and blacksmithing, wood-working, and other
industries were carried on, often under the direction of white
mechanics. The planter and his wife commonly had the care of the
black families whom they possessed, looked after them when they were
sick, saw to their daily rations, arranged marriages, and determined
the daily tasks of the plantation. The abundant hospitality between
neighbors gave opportunity for social cultivation, and politics was
a favorite subject of conversation.
The leading planters served as justices of the peace, but they were
not dependent for their selection upon the popular vote. Appointed
by the governor on nomination of the court itself, they constituted
a kind of close corporation, exercising local judicial, legislative,
and executive functions. The sheriff was appointed by the governor
from three justices of the peace recommended by the court, and the
court itself appointed the county clerk. Thus the county government
of Virginia was distinctly aristocratic. County-court day served as
an opportunity for bringing together the freeholders, who included
not only the larger planters, but the small farmers and the poor
whites--hangers-on of the greater plantations. Almost no large
cities were found in Virginia. The court-house was hardly more than
a meeting-place for the rural population. Here farmers exchanged
their goods, traded horses, often fought, and listened to the stump
speeches of the orators. [Footnote: Johnson, Robert Lewis Dabney,
14-24; Smedes, A Southern Planter, 34-37.]
Such were, in the main, the characteristics of that homespun
plantation aristocracy which, through the Virginia dynasty, had
ruled the nation in the days of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and
Monroe. As their lands declined in value, they naturally sought for
an explanation and a remedy. [Footnote: Randall, Jefferson, III.,
532.] The explanation was found most commonly in the charge that the
protective tariff was destroying the prosperity of the south; and in
reaction they turned to demand the old days of Jeffersonian rural
simplicity, under the guardianship of state rights and a strict
construction of the Constitution. Madison in vain laid the fall in
land values in Virginia to the uncertainty and low prices of the
crops, to the quantity of land thrown on the market, and the
attractions of the cheaper and better lands beyond the mountains.
[Footnote: Madison, Writings (ed. of 1865), III., 614.]
Others called attention to the fact that the semi-annual migration
towards the west and southwest, which swept off enterprising
portions of the people and much of the capital and movable property
of the state, also kept down the price of land by the great
quantities thereby thrown into the market. Instead of applying a
system of scientific farming and replenishment of the soil, there
was a tendency for the planters who remained to get into debt in
order to add to their possessions the farms which were offered for
sale by the movers. Thus there was a flow of wealth towards the west
to pay for these new purchases. The overgrown plantations soon began
to look tattered and almost desolate. "Galled and gullied hill-sides
and sedgy, briary fields" [Footnote: Lynchburg Virginian, July 4,
1833.] showed themselves in every direction. Finally the planter
found himself obliged to part with some of his slaves, in response
to the demand from the new cotton-fields; or to migrate himself,
with his caravan of Negroes, to open a new home in the Gulf region.
During the period of this survey the price for prime field-hands in
Georgia averaged a little over seven hundred dollars. [Footnote:
Phillips, in Pol. Sci. Quart., XX., 267.] If the estimate of one
hundred and fifty dollars for Negroes sold in family lots in
Virginia is correct, it is clear that economic laws would bring
about a condition where Virginia's resources would in part depend
upon her supply of slaves to the cotton-belt. [Footnote: Collins,
Domestic Slave Trade, 42-46.] It is clear, also, that the Old
Dominion had passed the apogee of her political power.
It was not only the planters of Virginia that suffered in this
period of change. As the more extensive and fertile cotton-fields of
the new states of the southwest opened, North Carolina and even
South Carolina found themselves embarrassed. With the fall in cotton
prices, already mentioned, it became increasingly necessary to
possess the advantages of large estates and unexhausted soils, in
order to extract a profit from this cultivation. From South Carolina
there came a protest more vehement and aggressive than that of the
discontented classes of Virginia. Already the indigo plantation had
ceased to be profitable and the rice planters no longer held their
old prosperity.
Charleston was peculiarly suited to lead in a movement of revolt. It
was the one important center of real city life of the seaboard south
of Baltimore. Here every February the planters gathered from their
plantations, thirty to one hundred and fifty miles away, for a month
in their town houses. At this season, races, social gayeties, and
political conferences vied with one another in engaging the
attention of the planters. Returning to their plantations in the
early spring, they remained until June, when considerations of
health compelled them either again to return to the city, to visit
the mountains, or to go to such watering-places as Saratoga in New
York. Here again they talked politics and mingled with political
leaders of the north. It was not until the fall that they were able
to return again to their estates. [Footnote: Hodgson, Letters from
North America, I.,50.] Thus South Carolina, affording a combination
of plantation life with the social intercourse of the city, gave
peculiar opportunities for exchanging ideas and consolidating the
sentiment of her leaders.
The condition of South Carolina was doubtless exaggerated by Hayne,
in his speech in the Senate in 1832, when he characterized it as
"not merely one of unexampled depression, but of great and all-
pervading distress," with "the mournful evidence of premature
decay," "merchants bankrupt or driven away--their capital sunk or
transferred to other pursuits--our shipyards broken up--our ships
all sold!" "If," said he, "we fly from the city to the country, what
do we there behold? Fields abandoned; the hospitable mansions of our
fathers deserted; agriculture drooping; our slaves, like their
masters, working harder, and faring worse; the planter striving with
unavailing efforts to avert the ruin which is before him." He drew a
sad picture of the once thriving planter, reduced to despair,
gathering up the small remnants of his broken fortune, and, with his
wife and little ones, tearing himself from the scenes of his
childhood and the bones of his ancestors to seek in the wilderness
the reward for his industry of which the policy of Congress had
deprived him. [Footnote: Register of Debates, VIII., pt. i., 80; cf.
Houston, Nullification in S.C., 46; McDuffie, in Register of
Debates, 18th Cong., 2 Sess., 253.]
The genius of the south expressed itself most clearly in the field
of politics. If the democratic middle region could show a multitude
of clever politicians, the aristocratic south possessed an abundance
of leaders bold in political initiative and masterful in their
ability to use the talents of their northern allies. When the
Missouri question was debated, John Quincy Adams remarked "that if
institutions are to be judged by their results in the composition of
the councils of this Union, the slave-holders are much more ably
represented than the simple freemen." [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs,
IV., 506.]
The southern statesmen fall into two classes. On the one side was
the Virginia group, now for the most part old men, rich in the
honors of the nation, still influential, but, except for Monroe, no
longer directing party policy. Jefferson and Madison were in
retirement in their old age; Marshall, as chief-justice, was
continuing his career as the expounder of the Constitution in
accordance with Federalist ideals; John Randolph, his old
eccentricities increased by disease and intemperance, remained to
proclaim the extreme doctrines of southern dissent and to impale his
adversaries with javelins of flashing wit. A maker of phrases which
stung and festered, he was still capable of influencing public
opinion somewhat in the same way as are the cartoonists of modern
times. But "his course through life had been like that of the arrow
which Alcestes shot to heaven, which effected nothing useful, though
it left a long stream of light behind it." [Footnote: Lynchburg
Virginian, May 9, 1833.] In North Carolina, the venerable Macon
remained to protest like a later Cato against the tendencies of the
times and to raise a warning voice to his fellow slave-holders
against national consolidation.
In the course of this decade, the effective leadership of the south
fell to Calhoun and Crawford. [Footnote: See chap. xi. below.] About
these statesmen were grouped energetic and able men like Hayne,
McDuffie, and Hamilton of South Carolina, and Cobb and Forsyth of
Georgia--men who sometimes pushed their leaders on in a sectional
path which the latter's caution or personal ambitions made them
reluctant to tread. Nor must it be forgotten that early in the
decade the south lost two of her greatest statesmen, the wise and
moderate Lowndes, of South Carolina, and Pinkney, the brilliant
Maryland orator. In the course of the ten years which we are to
sketch, the influence of economic change within this section
transformed the South Carolinians from warm supporters of a liberal
national policy into the straightest of the sect of state-
sovereignty advocates, intent upon raising barriers against the
flood of nationalism that threatened to overwhelm the south. In
relating the changing policy of the southern political leaders, we
shall again observe the progress and the effects of the economic
transformations which it has been the purpose of this chapter to
portray.