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