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the slave trade, was most strikingly indicated by their impressions of
the effect of emancipation, less lurid than Hammond’s picture, but as
strikingly incorrect.
“The paralysis of industry, which would ensue from the
emancipation of the slaves, would, in the course of a single year,
leave the whole country almost destitute of food and the wretched
inhabitants would perish by thousands with all the lingering tortures of
unsatisfied hunger.”[161]
When to this were added the effusions of men like Spratt, we can
scarcely realize, that this was from the State which had produced
Robert Barnwell, Joseph Alston, William Lowndes and Robert Y.
Hayne.
In the minority report, however, of an adopted son, J. Johnston
Pettigrew, who six years later fell with honor and renown, high in
rank, in the retreat from Gettysburg, the State found better
representation; while the brilliant Hammond, who had averred that
he: “endorsed without reserve the much abused sentiment of
Governor McDuffie, that ‘slavery is the corner-stone of our
republican edifice’;” nevertheless also had declared, in his
controversy with Clarkson: “I might say, that I am no more in favor of
slavery in the abstract, than I am of poverty, disease, deformity,
idiocy or any other inequality of the human family; that I love
perfection and I think I should enjoy a millennium such as God has
promised.”[162]
It was not then that men like Hammond, Adams and Robert G.
Harper, of Georgia, were blind to the abuses of slavery, for Adams,
the advocate of the re-opening of the slave trade, had in his
message to the General Assembly of South Carolina only the year
before declared:
“The administration of our laws in relation to our colored population
by our Courts of magistrates and free holders, as these Courts are at
present constituted, calls loudly for reform. Their decisions are rarely
in conformity with justice or humanity. I have felt constrained, in a
majority of the cases brought to my notice, either to modify the
sentence, or set it aside altogether.”[163]
Yet Governor Adams was willing to risk the frightful increase of
such recognized evils, by the flooding of the South with a host of
barbarians fresh from the jungles of Africa.
But against this, Harper, of Georgia, was a tower of strength.
Prof. DuBois declares that “although such hot-heads as Spratt
were not able, as late as 1859, to carry a substantial majority of the
South with them, in an attempt to reopen the trade at all hazards, yet
the agitation did succeed in sweeping away nearly all theoretical
opposition to the trade, and left the majority of Southern people in an
attitude, which regarded the opening of the African slave trade as
merely a question of expediency.”[164]
This he attempted to sustain by quotations from the Charleston
Standard, Richmond Examiner, New Orleans Delta, and other
Southern papers, intimating that Johnston Pettigrew’s minority report
cost him his re-election to the Legislature of South Carolina. As had
been shown, it did not, however, stand in the way of his elevation to
a high command of the forces South Carolina furnished for the War
between the States; while Senator Hammond, who had risen to the
highest honor his State could bestow, declared unequivocablly in
1858, with regard to the re-opening of the slave trade: “I once
entertained the idea myself, but on further investigation abandoned
it. I will not now go into the discussion of it further than to say that the
South is itself divided on that policy, and from appearances, opposed
to it by a vast majority.”[165]
James Chesnut, the other senator from South Carolina, also
announced himself publicly against it in the same year. But it was in
the profoundly thoughtful and admirably thorough argument of
Harper of Georgia, that the opponents of re-opening found the best
representation.
Southern to the core, it is a defense of slavery “as it existed in the
South,” that cannot be improved upon.
Harper knew that slave labor was not by any means cheap labor.
Like Hammond and other students of affairs, he knew that free labor
was cheaper both in Great Britain and the United States, but that the
reports of the parliamentary commission of 1842 had indicated that
the laboring classes of the United Kingdom were in a more miserable
condition, and were more degraded morally and physically than the
slaves of the South. He realized that capital would inevitably reach
out for cheap labor, which while a benefit to the employer and the
consumer, would slowly undermine the foundations of the republic,
bringing all labor down, while it built up a privileged class of idle rich.
He heard in this cry for the re-opening of the slave trade, the same
demand for cheap labor with all the ills which the South had freed
herself from, in the years in which she had trained and elevated her
expensive laboring class. He saw this cheap imported slave labor
invading the province of the remnant of the white working class of
the South, and rendering it inimical to the institution. But above and
beyond all this, he saw the slave trade, as his forbears had seen it in
the days the South produced her strongest men, and without any
reserve he declared:
“By the votes of Southern representatives as well as Northern, we
have stamped upon it the brand and penalty of the greatest of crimes
against mankind.... The change has not yet been worked in public
opinion in the South. It will be hard to produce it. When the attempt
shall be made, it will develop a division which ages of discussion will
utterly fail to overcome.”[166]
As objectionable as slavery is in the abstract, it is a debatable
question whether Harper of Georgia, advocate of slavery, as it
existed in the South in 1858, but determined opponent of the re-
opening of the slave trade, did not occupy higher ground from a
humanitarian standpoint, than did Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut in
1787, who was then, “for leaving the clause as it stands, let every
State import what it pleases.... As population increases poor laborers
will be so plenty as to render slaves useless.”
Ellsworth might have gone further and declared with truth, that, if
poor laborers were not sufficiently plenteous, they could be imported.
In 1912 they were being brought in in such swarms that our
civilization was said to be threatened thereby.
But while there was this pronounced opposition to the re-opening
of the slave trade in the South, there is not much room to doubt that
the slave population of the South had been largely recruited with
illicit importations from abroad from 1808. To what extent it is difficult
to arrive at with any degree of accuracy.
In his “Suppression of the Slave Trade,” Prof. DuBois quotes
Congressional documents, to indicate that from Amelia Island, on the
Gulf Coast, in 1817 the pirates had eleven armed vessels with which
they captured slavers, and brought their cargoes into the United
States[167] and that, a year after the capture of the island by United
States troops, African and West Indian Negroes were almost daily
illicitly introduced into Georgia.[168] He also claims that the estimates
of three representatives of Congress, Tallmadge of New York,
Middleton, of South Carolina, and Wright of Virginia, in the year
1819, were that slaves were then being brought into the country at
the rate of about 14,000 a year.[169] He thinks while smuggling never
entirely ceased, the participation of Americans declined between
1825 and 1835, when it again revived, reaching its highest activity
between 1840 and 1860, when the city of New York was “the
principal port of the world for this infamous commerce, although
Portland and Boston were only second.”[170] He quotes DeBow for
the statement that, in 1856, forty slavers cleared annually from
Eastern harbors, clearing yearly $17,000,000, and from the report of
the American Anti-Slavery Society, that between 1857 and 1858
twenty-one of the twenty-two slavers seized by the British cruisers
proved to be American, from New York, Boston and New Orleans;
[171] and Stephen A. Douglas claimed to have seen recently
U.S. 1860
WHITES
WHITES & BLACKS
NEGROES
RAILWAYS COMPLETED
” PROJECTED
The effort of the presidential campaign by the Democrats may
have been for an election in the House in 1860, and may have been
lost, as Prof. Dodd declares, “only by a narrow margin by the votes
of the foreigners, whom the railroads poured in numbers into the
contested region;” but that triumph at the most would have only
deferred the contest for another four years, for by its special
correspondent in the West, the Columbus, Georgia, Times had been
informed in 1854:
“If Kansas becomes a free soil State slavery will be doomed for
Missouri.”[177]
The attempt then, inaugurated in 1840, to parallel the Northern
systems, pouring population westward, was recognized as an
impossible task in 1860, and with the election of Lincoln, known as
the man who had declared a house divided against itself cannot
stand, the South attempted to end the division by Secession.
To such a solution the more powerful North was unwilling to
consent, and the war followed for the Union.
FOOTNOTES:
[152] Woodrow Wilson, Division and Reunion, p. 184.
[153] Ibid.
[154] Ibid. p. 185.
[155] Jefferson Davis, Rise & Fall of Confed. Gov. p. 29, Vol. I.
[156] Jervey, Hayne, p. 451.
[157] Message, President Tyler, Richardson, Vol. 4, p. 363.
[158] Jameson, Calhoun’s Correspondence, p. 665.
[159] Report Com. Religious Instruction Negroes, Jenkins, Vol.
23 pamphlets C. L. S. No. 10 p. 65.
[160] Appendix Report Special Com. House Rep. So. Ca.
Walker & Evans, 1857. p. 57. Message Gov. Adams of S. C.
1856, Vol. 23.
[161] Report Special Com. Reopening Slave Trade, 1857, p. 9.
Vol. 23.
[162] Hammond Speeches, p. 120.
[163] Gov. Adams of S. C. Message General Assembly 1855,
Vol. 15.
[164] DuBois, Suppression Slave Trade, p. 173.
[165] Hammond Speeches, p. 335.
[166] Robert G. Harper, Argument Slave Trade, Vol. 23,
pamphlet C. L. S. Hanleiter, Atlanta Ga. No. 8. p. 66.
[167] DuBois, Suppression Slave Trade, p. 113.
[168] Ibid. p. 114.
[169] Ibid. p. 124.
[170] Ibid. p. 179.
[171] Ibid.
[172] Ibid. p. 181.
[173] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 504.
[174] Charleston Mercury, May 26, 1849.
[175] Resolutions State of Arkansas, 1855, Vol. 15, pamphlets
C. L. S.
[176] Dodd, The Fight for the Northwest, 1860, Am. His.
Review Vol. XVI, p. 777.
[177] Columbus, Ga., Times, Nov. 19, 1854.
CHAPTER IX