CHAPTER IV
As has been shown, nine years subsequent to his unavailing struggle to restrict the swelling proportions of the Negro population in his own State, Robert Y. Hayne, in the United States Senate, stated his views concerning that class of our population with regard to the entire country. But before discussing that further it should be noted, that a renewed effort in 1822 had again been defeated by the narrow but effective majority of nine votes, drawing from Governor Bennett, of South Carolina the pessimistic declaration:
“The evil is entailed and we can do no more than steadily to pursue that course indicated by stern necessity and not less imperious policy.”[56]
Along another line, therefore, was the last peaceful effort to be made to solve the Negro Question. Taken in connection with the great industrial work, in which he literally wore out his life, in 1839, Hayne’s speech in the United States Senate in 1827 is most illuminating. Upon that occasion he said:
“The history of this country has proved that when the relative proportion of the colored population to the white is greatly diminished, slaves cease to be valuable, and emancipation follows of course, and they are swallowed up in the common mass. Wherever free labor is put in full and successful operation, slave labor ceases to be profitable. It is true that it is a very gradual operation and that it must be, to be successful or desirable.”[57]
Was it not the very irony of fate that, as this speaker, later, in 1839, lay dying at Asheville, North Carolina, while a wordy war was being waged over his great railroad to the West, criticism should have been “directed against the contracts given to planters to be executed with slave labor” by the chief lieutenant of that great South Carolinian, who had only the year before, in withdrawing from the enterprise, extolled Negro slaves as “the best substratum of population in the world?”
Col. Gadsden, from this time and on, more and more a confidant of Calhoun until they parted over Taylor’s candidacy for the Presidency, asked:
“Why had not the work been given to Northern contractors, who had offered to execute it at a price 12½ to 15 per cent cheaper? The answer was comprehensive. The planters objected to imported free labor being brought into contact with their slaves. This was unfortunate, but the company could not antagonize an element which practically controlled the State; and in addition they had in many instances given the right of way. But further still, when the chief engineer obtained the floor, he challenged the correctness of the charge.”[58]
Between 1830 and 1840, two Southern States, South Carolina and Maryland, leading the Union in railroad development, were endeavoring to effect railroad connection with the Northwest. A comparison of their conditions prior and subsequent to 1810, suggests one of the reasons why one succeeded and the other failed.
From 1790 to 1810 the white population of Maryland increased from 208,649 to 235,117, or about 11.10 per cent. In the same twenty years the white population of South Carolina rose from 140,178 to 214,196 or about 51.20 per cent. It is quite true that in the same period the Negro population in South Carolina increased from 108,805 to 200,919 or 85.6 per cent, while that of Maryland rose only from 111,079 to 145,129 or only 30.07 per cent. Yet, when we bear in mind that the area of South Carolina was two and a half times as great as Maryland, had the efforts which had been made in 1816 and in 1822 to stop Negro importation from outside succeeded, the economic conditions of South Carolina between 1830 and 1840 might have been stronger. Indeed in 1822 Gen. Thomas Pinckney declared cheap Negro labor, even then, was steadily undermining the white artisan class in South Carolina.[59] He was patriot enough to so declare, although his own great brother was more responsible than any one else for the evil.
In the three decades which followed 1810, and closed with the death of Hayne and the destruction of his five year effort to secure the Northwestern railroad connection, the colored population of Maryland, which did secure it, increased only 6,396, from 145,429 to 151,815, while its white population in the same period rose from 235,117 to 318,204, an increase of 83,087. In South Carolina in the same time the white population rising from 214,196 to 259,344 increased only 44,883, about one-half as much, while its Negro population rising from 200,314 to 335,344, or 134,395, about twenty times as much as Maryland. Viewed in the light of the unfair criticism directed against the South Carolina Railroad, was not the message of Governor Paul Hamilton in 1804, to the South Carolina Legislature, vindicated?
“Viewed with reference to population it increases our weakness, not our strength, for it must be admitted that in proportion as you add to the number of slaves, you prevent the influx of those men who would increase the means of defense and security.”[60]
How our forgotten great men fought to avoid the Nessus Shirt! Who remembers that Hamilton was big enough to be made Secretary of the Navy? Under the great upas tree of South Carolina all other greatness languished and by 1840 the property interests in Negroes had become so immense, that it not only paralyzed other industries, which could by any stretch of imagination be thought to threaten its efficiency, but it affected public opinion to a degree which now seems hardly credible.
Calhoun’s view in 1838, that the Negro furnished “the best substratum of population in the world and the one on which commonwealths may be most easily and safely reared”[61] was not singular in the South at that date. The great meeting of Southern business men at Augusta, Ga. in 1838 put on record its belief:
“That of all the social conditions of man, the most favorable to the development of the cardinal virtues of the heart and the noblest faculties of the soul, to the promotion of private happiness and public prosperity, is that of slave holding communities under free political institutions.”[62]
Even Hayne, himself, despite his realization of South Carolina’s wasteful cultivation of her soil, was so affected by the tremendous interests involved in slavery, and the fearful shock of any such disturbance as the Abolitionists threatened in 1835, as to declare at that time:
“Slavery, as it now exists in the Southern States, which we all feel and know to be essential to the prosperity and welfare—nay to the very existence of the States—is so little understood in other portions of the Union that it has been lately assailed in a spirit which threatens, unless speedily arrested, to lead eventually to the destruction of the Union and all the evils which must attend so lamentable an occurrence.”[63]
By 1838, conditions had reached such a development that the abolition of slavery could come but in one of two ways, either peacefully, through the slow process of changing industrial conditions, or swiftly and forcibly, as a war measure; therefore, when Calhoun withdrew his support from Hayne’s railroad to the Northwest in 1838, the sensible course would have been to prepare for the inevitable conflict.
Allusion has been made to the Black Laws of Ohio, which had their counterpart in Indiana and Illinois, and reference had to the Report of the Massachusetts Legislative Committee in 1821, as indicative of feeling in the North and Northeast, concerning the Negro as a citizen, and, if we consider conditions in the Middle States at this period, we will find them hardly different. As depicted by the most highly educated member of the Negro race today in the United States, in Philadelphia conditions were as follows:
“By 1830 the black population of the city and districts had increased to 15,624, an increase of 27 per cent for the decade 1820-1830, and of 48 per cent since 1810. Nevertheless the growth of the city had far outstripped this; by 1830 the county had nearly 175,000 whites, among whom was a rapidly increasing contingent of 5,000 foreigners. So intense was the race antipathy among the lower classes, and so much countenance did it receive from the middle and upper classes, that there began in 1829 a series of riots directed chiefly against Negroes, which recurred frequently until about 1840, and did not wholly cease until after the war.”[64]
At this date, 1840, in ten of the eleven States which later constituted the Confederacy, there were 3,311,117 whites and 2,267,319 Negroes; and in three of them; South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana, the whites were in the minority, and they, therefore, best represented the condition which Calhoun in 1838 extolled.[65]
With such views, what more natural than that Calhoun should view as a “humbug” the great railroad measure of Hayne, founded as it was in some degree upon the belief of the latter that “wherever free labor is put in full and successful operation, slave labor ceases to be profitable.” A railroad connecting Cincinnati with Charleston would certainly have tended to “put in full and successful operation free labor,” and slave labor ceasing more and more to be profitable would have gradually passed out of existence in that region.
Yet it must be admitted, that the greatest writer and thinker who has ever discussed America, viewing conditions at that time, while utterly opposed to slavery, practically endorsed Calhoun’s views. Summing up his conclusion in 1838, de Tocqueville writes:
“When I contemplate the condition of the South, I can only discover two alternatives which may be adopted by the white inhabitants of those States; either to emancipate the Negroes and to intermingle with them; or remain isolated from them to keep them in a state of slavery as long as possible. All intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extirpation of one or the other of the two races.”[66]
Time, however, has proven that both de Tocqueville and Calhoun were wrong.
From a Negro minority of 13,277 in 1810, the census indicated for South Carolina in 1840, a Negro majority of 76,230 an excess of the Negro population over the white of more than double what existed in Louisiana and quadruple that of Mississippi.
In 1843, for the better controlling of this “best substratum of population in the world”[67] only five years after its discovery as such, the following Act was passed by the General Assembly of South Carolina:
“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives now met and sitting, and by the authority of the same: That from and after the passage of this Act, any slave or free person of color who shall commit an assault and battery on a white woman with intent to commit rape, on being thereof convicted, shall suffer death without benefit of clergy.”[68]
For whites, it was not apparently necessary to raise the grade of the offense from that of a misdemeanor. But if the above Act was not a sufficient vindication of the opposition of Barnwell, Paul Hamilton, Alston and Hayne to the continued increase of the Negro population of South Carolina, Calhoun, himself, furnished something of an argument against the “best substratum” by his declaration only nine years after its discovery:
“We know what we are about, we foresee what is coming, and move with no other purpose but to protect our portion of the Union from the greatest of calamities—not insurrection but something worse. I see the end if the process is to go on unresisted; it is to expel in time the white population of the Southern States and leave the blacks in possession.”[69]
If this is a true picture of conditions in 1847, as black as we may consider the Abolitionists of that day, one thing is evident, and that is, that without such a mass of “the best substratum of population” to work upon, the Abolitionists could not possibly have effected what Calhoun feared: therefore, the statesmanship of William Smith, McDuffie, and Calhoun, which had favored and assisted in the gathering of it, to that extent was inferior to the statesmanship of Paul Hamilton, Barnwell, Alston and Hayne which had attempted to arrest the growth. But that was not apparent to the South in 1850, and it is doubtful whether it would be very generally admitted even today; for interest will color opinion and Negro cheap labor is still the first consideration to many people in the South, just as European pauper labor is to many in the North. Both North and South can see clearly the mote in their brother’s eye; but not the beam in their own eye.
By the census of 1850, the population of the 33 States, which constituted the Union, summed up 22,969,603 persons, divided as follows: In the 19 Free States 13,230,231 whites; 213,346 free persons of color; 2,536 slaves. In the 14 Slave States there were: 6,113,068 whites; 210,085 free persons of color; 3,200,590 slaves. That meant that the South had invested in that species of property interest $1,280,200,000. By money values and population, at that time, that was an immense sum.
The Democratic Review, in this same year, published an article which was republished in the Charleston Mercury, and commended by that paper. This article sets forth certain distinct claims of considerable interest:
First that:
“The face of affairs is entirely changed since General Pinckney, in convention assented to the proposition giving Congress the right to pass laws, regulating commerce by a simple majority, on the ground that it was a boon granted the North in consideration of the necessity which the weak South had for the strong North as a neighbor. The cotton trade then scarcely existed, but the material has since been spun into a web which binds the commercial world to Southern interests.”[70]
Figures were also introduced to show that the multiplication of free blacks in the Slave States was increasing upon the proportion of slaves and that it was observable that they did not emigrate from the Slave States, where it was claimed they must in time supplant the slaves as servants; and the laws of Ohio were pointed to as indicating an opposition, not to slavery, but to the presence of the Negro, which it claimed, had greatly retarded emancipation. In these claims truth was mingled with error.
As to the indisposition of the people of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, to admit any class of colored persons to enter as residents, there can be no doubt up to this date, although indications of a change of sentiment were appearing. The repeal of the Black Laws of Ohio was one illustration. With 1,955,059 whites to only 25,279 colored persons, the harsh provisions, which closed the mouths of these unfortunates when contending with the whites, in so called courts of justice, it was conceded by the whites of Ohio, could be safely done away with, and they had been repealed in 1848. It may also have been true that the free blacks did not emigrate from the Slave States; but that in that region they were gaining upon the slaves, and that there was any reasonable possibility of their supplanting them as servants, does hot seem to be borne out by examination of the census.
The Democratic Review claims that, while in 1800 there were in the Slave States 61,441 free persons of color to 73,100 in the Free States, that by 1830 the proportions were 182,070 in the Slave States to 137,525 in the Free States, a proportion raised by 1840 to 215,568 to 172,509. But this seems inexact. By the census of 1800 there were in the Slave States 52,188 free persons of color, to 55,464 in the Free States, and by 1830 the number in the Slave States had, it is true, surpassed the number in the Free States, such being respectively 160,063 to 153,384. But whether it was in consequence of the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831, or the Abolition ebullition of 1835, by 1840 there was a change in progress, the proportion being in that year 190,285 in the Slave States to 187,647 in the Free States, which, as has before been shown, by 1850 had changed to 210,085 in the Slave States to 213,346 in the Free States.
At the same time it could be noted that while the Negroes in the United States had increased by more than 28 per cent since 1840, the freedmen had increased by less than 13 per cent in the same time.
In the Free States of New York, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut the free colored population had decreased by 1,402. In the Slave States of Louisiana and Mississippi it had decreased by 8,174, and that State in the South which held more than one-fourth of the whole number in the Southern States, Virginia, had appropriated $30,000 a year for their removal.[71]
The South was apparently, therefore, committed to the institution of African Slavery, and in defense of it some of its champions were wild enough to waive the question of the inferiority of the Negro race and contend, “that slavery, whether of black or white, is a normal, proper institution in society.”[72]
The Richmond, Va., Inquirer, The Muscogee, Ala., Herald, The New Orleans, La., Delta and the Charleston, S. C., Standard, are all quoted by an English writer, whose work appeared in print about 1855.[73] The three first as sustaining the above extraordinary claim; while the fourth called for a revival of the Slave Trade.
Even if correctly quoted the comments of these papers do not establish the prevailing sentiment in the South at that time; for the publication at Charleston and reception of Dr. John Bachman’s work on the “Unity of the Human Race” would to some extent constitute an opinion to the contrary.
But that the South was positively, unreservedly, and even aggressively committed to the institution of African Slavery is indisputable.
It had not been so always. The change began in 1833, when the Charleston Mercury declared—“The institution of slavery is not an evil but a benefit.” That paper had upon that occasion admitted that in the past the South had entertained a view to the contrary; but asserted in 1833, that even in Virginia and North Carolina:
“The great mass of the South sanction no such admission, that Southern Slavery is an evil to be deprecated.”[74]
And, as the appetite grows by what it feeds upon, in 1855, The Richmond Examiner was quoted as declaring:
“It is all a hallucination that we are ever going to get rid of African Slavery, or that it will ever be desirable to do so.... True philanthropy to the Negro begins at home; and if every Southern man would act as if the canopy of Heaven were inscribed with a covenant in letters of fire, that the Negro is here and here forever; is our property and ours forever; is never to be emancipated; is to be kept hard at work and in rigid subjection all his days; and is never to go to Africa, to Polynesia, or to Yankee land,—far worse than either,—they would accomplish more good for the race in five years than they boast the institution itself to have accomplished in two centuries.”[75]
Yet as extreme as the above is, it is quite probable that the extravagance and injustice of the declaration against slavery in the Southern States, had exasperated those supporting it to utterances as extravagant.
In the opening of the year 1850 a resolution of the Legislature of Vermont was introduced in Congress which recited:
“That slavery is a crime against humanity, and a sore evil in the body politic, that was excused by the framers of the Federal Constitution as a crime entailed upon the country by their predecessors, and tolerated solely as a thing of inexorable necessity.”[76]
How Southern men must have felt this it is almost impossible for us to appreciate today. It was not only an indictment of the South at a bar where there was no provision for a trial; but it ended in a hypocritical falsehood; for slavery had not been, “tolerated solely as a thing of inexorable necessity.” Existing in every State except Massachusetts, the question whether the existing condition could be affected by permission to increase the slaves for a period by importation was committed with the clauses relating to taxes on exports and to a Navigation Act, that these things might “form a bargain between the Northern and Southern States.”
This motion by Gouverneur Morris, of Pennsylvania, was adopted by the vote of seven of the eleven States in Convention, against three opposing and one abstaining from voting, one of the delegates whereof seconded the motion of Pinckney to increase the period permitting importation, which he with one of the opponents of commitment voted for; so that actually slavery, with the right to increase it by the Slave Trade, was voted for by nine out of eleven States participating.
The Vermont resolution accomplished nothing; but to no individual in Congress could it have inflicted such a wound as it dealt to Calhoun. To him resolutions were of enormous importance, and yet he never seemed quite ready to follow them up with acts. He was at last in the grasp of that power which overcomes all things except God. Twelve years had elapsed since he had been called upon to decide between the policy of Hayne, based upon the effort to bind together in close commercial intercourse the leading Western and Southern States, by a railroad from Ohio to South Carolina, and the resolution of Rhett, to amend the Constitution or dissolve the Union.
To neither could he agree. For Hayne’s connection with Ohio through North Carolina, he substituted a connection with Arkansas through Georgia.
To the warning of his closest intimate that it was “better to part peaceably than to live in the state of indecision we do,” he could only reply with the vague allusion to:
“The many bleeding pores which must be taken up in passing the knife through a body politic, in order to make two of one, which had been so long bound together by so many ties, political, social and commercial.”[77]
In this declaration there is unmistakably intense feeling for the Union; but also some indecision; for what could have been a more practical application of Calhoun’s teaching than Rhett’s amendment to Slade’s bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia? That was a resolution upon which some strong action could be erected. Twelve years had passed, nothing had been done, and now came the resolution of the Vermont Legislature. In the first shock which it gave him, Calhoun was unjust to his own following. He said:
“Mr. President, I intended not to say a word on this subject. I have long labored faithfully to repress the encroachments of the North, at the commencement I saw where it would end and must end; and I despair of ever seeing it ended in Congress. It will go to its end, for gentlemen have already yielded to the current of the North which they admit they cannot resist, Sir, what the South will do is not for me to say. They will meet it, in my opinion, as it ought to be met.”[78]
A month later he reviewed the political situation in a most elaborate and searching analysis, his last great speech, read for him by Senator Mason, of Virginia. “How Can the Union be Preserved?” In endeavoring to give an “answer to this great question,” he asserted that the discontent of the South was due to the fact that political power had been taken from that section and transferred to the North, not through natural causes, but by legislation which could be classed under three heads, the first of which was exclusion from common territory; second a system of revenue under which an undue portion of the burden of taxation had been imposed upon the South, and the proceeds appropriated to the North; third a system of measures changing the original character of the government. The result, he claimed, had been a change from a Constitutional Federal Republic to the despotism of a numerical majority in which a question of vital importance to the minority was threatened:
“The relation between the races in the Southern section ... which cannot be destroyed without subjecting the two races to the greatest calamity, and the section to poverty, desolation and wretchedness.”[79]
Whether right or wrong, the first of these claims had been settled by the Missouri Compromise in 1820, which the South had acquiesced in. The second Calhoun, himself, had undertaken to right in 1832, and if there had been a failure it was due in some measure to his inability to diagnose with sufficient accuracy the situation at that time.
Along two lines from 1827 there had proceeded the effort of the South to recover her power and increase her population; to restore her waning political influence and rebuild her commercial strength. One was through revision of the tariff, the other through internal improvement by means of railroad development. The first, despite all the interest it attracted and the splendid forensic display it gave rise to, not only was a lamentable failure in its curative effect, but very probably added somewhat to the difficulties which hampered the other. Now with regard to the first, Calhoun had mapped out the plan, and undertook the responsibility through the nullification project, with which he effected the relegation of Hayne to the post of Governor of the State of South Carolina from the United States Senate, to which he, himself, repaired with almost ambassadorial powers. The effect of Nullification on the Tariff should be analysed before considering the railroad campaign, with which Calhoun could not refrain from interfering, with results most disappointing to those he induced to accept his view and abandon that of his faithful friend and quondam supporter, made by the Knoxville Convention of 1836, much more thoroughly the commercial leader of the South than Calhoun had ever been made its political guide.
Mr. John B. Cleveland says in his pamphlet on the “Controversy between John C. Calhoun and Robert Y. Hayne:
“There can be no question as to the sincerity of purpose or integrity of character of Mr. Calhoun. At the same time as the common saying is ‘he was set in his ideas’ and he could not bear opposition.”[80]
Upon many questions he could change and did change his views, but these changes all seem to have proceeded from a certain development of the man himself, not from any contact with others. So confident was he of his own powers that he could never profit by the realization of his mistakes. If in one of the greatest eulogies ever delivered by a great follower over a great leader, it could be asserted that:
“It is due to truth, to history and to him, to declare that he assisted powerfully in giving currency to opinions and building up systems that have proved seriously injurious to the South and probably to the stability of the existing Union.”[81]—
a critical investigation of Calhoun’s failure in the revision of the tariff may not be without instruction; for it was for the purpose of securing a proper framing of such that Nullification was launched. Later we may consider the railroad.