CHAPTER V
The Nullification episode has been generally treated as a struggle between Jackson and Calhoun. In its outward manifestations it was a contest between the President and the State of South Carolina; but in the settlement it really was a struggle between Calhoun and Clay.
The position of Henry Clay, in 1833, was one to test to the utmost the powers of that great politician. In the preceding year he had sternly refused Hayne’s amendment to his tariff bill, enacting his own view coupled with a threat of enforcement. He had, however, seen his Act nullified by the State of South Carolina, under the governorship of Hayne, and himself beaten overwhelmingly for the presidency by Jackson, who, while threatening coercion in South Carolina, had nevertheless, made Hayne’s amendment to the tariff the basis of his own recommendation on that subject to Congress. A bill had been introduced in the House, to restore the duties to the scale of 1816. What could Clay do to redeem himself and his cause? Back to the Senate, in Hayne’s vacant seat, was Clay’s “old companion at arms with a practical power of attorney from the recalcitrant State.”[82]
Clay at once entered into negotiations with Calhoun himself, introducing a bill in the Senate, to the two principles of which, viz., “that time should be given the manufacturers and that an ad valorem duty should be provided for”, Calhoun assented and the bill was referred to a select committee consisting of: Clay, Clayton, Calhoun, Grundy, Webster, Rives, and Dallas.
Then up came the Revenue Collection Bill, supported by thirty-two Senators, and passed with only seven besides Calhoun opposing, and the great politician from Kentucky had Calhoun safely tangled in his net. Against the protest of the latter, he amended his tariff bill with a provision that in the valuation of imported articles, “the valuation should be at the port in which the goods were imported.” Calhoun argued that this would be a great injustice to the South, as the price of goods being cheaper in the Northern than in the Southern cities, a home valuation would give the former a preference.[83] But that was exactly what Clay had proposed, and was determined to do, and although Webster and Silsbee of Massachusetts, Hill of New Hampshire, Dallas of Pennsylvania and Kane and Benton of Missouri came to Calhoun’s support, Calhoun fearing evidently to wreck his compromise with Clay, yielded this vital point. To consider all that was involved in the surrender of Calhoun, it will be necessary to revert to the past and to consider some political views emanating from the mightiest intellect South Carolina ever produced.
Prior to the framing of the Constitution of the United States and subsequent to the peace between Great Britain and the States, the value of the imports from Great Britain to America had exceeded the value of the exports from America to Great Britain to such an amount as to be nearly three times as great; while the commerce between the two countries was very nearly ten times as great as that between the States and the rest of the world. This condition had produced anything but prosperity for America.
The statesman who had contributed most to the framing of the Constitution, Charles Pinckney, in his effort to secure its ratification by his own State, had made among other things this remarkable statement:
“‘Foreign Trade’ is one of the enemies against which we must be extremely guarded, more so than against any other, as none will ever have a more unfavorable operation. I consider it as the root of our present public distress, as the plentiful source from which our future national calamities will flow, unless great care is taken to prevent it.”[84]
Thirty years later he warned Congress along similar lines, “that a country mainly agricultural and without mines of the precious metals, could not have its imports greatly in excess of its exports, without financial disaster.”[85]
From the time of the Union to the first embargo and the war of 1812, the immense preponderance of the value of imports had been greatly reduced from nearly treble to an excess of but twenty-five per cent; but in the two years which followed the peace they had increased to almost double the value of the exports. Under Lowndes’s tariff of 1816 they again fell to an excess of only about twenty per cent by 1821.[86]
From that period until the Compromise of 1833, they still further fell to an excess of about eight per cent; the value of the exports for these twelve years being $934,287,320, and that of the imports $1,007,853,830, a total excess of value for imports in the twelve years amounting to $73,566,502.
Considering the States through which this commerce moved, we find, with regard to Massachusetts, for this period, the value of exports, $125,378,462; imports, $182,861,825. Pennsylvania, exports, $86,062,157; imports, $139,891,027. Maryland, exports, $53,048,043; imports, $56,860,616. New York, exports, $267,371,444; imports, $473,671,382. An excess of imports at Northern ports of the value of $321,000,000.
Now taking the Southern States for the same period, we find Virginia, exports, $47,535,525; imports, $7,093,499. South Carolina, exports, $93,018,377; imports, $20,625,049. Georgia, exports, $56,167,842; imports $5,828,581. Alabama, exports, $14,897,425; imports, $1,631,343. Louisiana, exports, $138,670,081; imports, $68,321,568. An excess of exports amounting to $247,000,000.[87]
While, therefore, a great amount of money from the South may have been expended for Northern manufactures, a great deal also went out for importation of goods through Northern markets.
The revision of the tariff was to correct both wrongs.
But the result was simply that in a period half as long, six years, the excess of the value of imports over exports for the whole country doubled and this without any appreciable gain in the exports of Virginia and but a slight gain, considering the agitation, for South Carolina; or totally a condition which, with even the greater gain of Georgia, still left the South Atlantic States in both import and export trade far behind the Gulf States, more rapidly developing, and fed by the great waterway of the Mississippi.
But it was when taking up for consideration the condition of the Northern States after 1833 that the absolute ineffectiveness of the revision of the tariff, at that time, to cure the wrongs of trade was most glaringly exhibited. Even with a declining export, Massachusetts, in the six years brought in goods to the amount of the value she had imported in the previous twelve, and with those of Maryland, exceeded those of the Gulf ports. The trade of Pennsylvania was indeed crippled. But while the exports of New York fell behind those of Louisiana, in the value of import goods in the six years, the importation of the previous twelve were exceeded. The revision of the tariff in 1833 had not only not got at the root of the trouble, it had apparently aggravated it; for it had while injuring Pennsylvania, stimulated Massachusetts, New York and Maryland to make on importation what they had lost on manufactures; while, in place of the money so expended remaining in circulation in the United States, a great volume of it must have gone abroad. The panic of 1837, which came in the spring, and which followed the greatest of New York’s importations, a figure not attained again in fourteen years of increasing population, had its origin in New York. It did much to cramp the Southern railroad movement of that date; but neither it nor the panic of 1839 did as much to ham-string Southern effort as the divided councils and unfortunate rivalries of South Carolina and Georgia and Hayne and Calhoun.
It might have been unreasonable to have expected Georgians to have assisted a road to the West to pass through North Carolina from Charleston, to the neglect of their own State, and they had every right to start their “rival system,” as an apologist styles it; but for South Carolinians to abandon what was under way in their own State backed by North Carolina and Tennessee, however weakly, and to pour their money into Georgia, when at the very threshold there was refusal to permit the bridging of the Savannah river for them, was the very extremity of folly, no matter by whom advocated, and for writers of history to characterize as a bubble and fiasco the great scheme launched by the Knoxville Convention in 1836, is simply to indicate a lack of understanding of all that was involved in that undertaking, and to resolutely shut eyes to the nature of the obstructions which blocked its progress at the time it was most essential to push it most determinedly.
As it was by the railroads that the Slavery Question was eventually settled, it is interesting to note that the first intelligent move towards railroad construction in the United States was contemporaneous with the great speech of Robert Y. Hayne in the United States Senate in 1827 on the Negro Question. Some evidence has been adduced to indicate the probability of his responsibility for the first suggestion of a railroad to be operated by steam power, in the United States, in 1821 to run from Charleston to Augusta, with a fork to Columbia.[88] While Hayne may have been this early suggester, it is quite possible and not all improbable that the suggester, “H”, might have been Elias Horry. But six years later, when the movement took definite shape, Hayne in the United States Senate made an utterance, which may be considered as, at that time, representing the view of his section concerning the Negro Question, viz., that:
“The history of the country has proved that where the relative proportion of the colored population to the white was greatly diminished, slaves ceased to be valuable and emancipation followed of course ... wherever free labor was put into full and successful operation, slave labor ceased to be valuable.”[89]
“Time and patience,” he had then contended, were alone necessary to solve the Negro Problem. But Nullification in 1832 and the Abolition ebullition of 1835 had, however, later affected the sections profoundly and from this latter date the political history of the Republic depended more and more upon the influences which could be brought to bear upon the West by the South and the North, and upon the South and the North by the West. Every influence which contributed to homogeniety was an influence towards peaceful development. That the Hayne of 1835 was, ipsissimus verbis, the Hayne of 1827 cannot be claimed; but to no statesman in the Union was the necessity more apparent for the promotion of this homogeneity than to him to whom had been confided by the representatives of nine States the stupendous task of pushing the great Western railroad from Charleston to Cincinnati, the front door of the great West for “free social and commercial intercourse,”[90] with:
“Reciprocal dependence from Michigan to Florida, by establishing connections in business, promoting friendships, abolishing prejudices, creating greater uniformity in political opinions and blending the feeling of distant portions of the country into a union of heart.”[91]
The “rival system,” in favor of which Calhoun abandoned Hayne’s railroad in 1838, was not in all probability originally designed for but eventually became the vehicle of a scheme of political conquest, which aimed at an approach to the back door of the West through the new State of Arkansas. This statement may be received with impatience, but examination will show its truth.
The Charleston and Hamburg Railroad was chartered in 1828, and by 1831 was making fair progress. There must have been in contemplation at that date, the original plan of the fork to Columbia, and a continuation West, through North Carolina and Tennessee; for the first projector in Georgia, James A. Merriwether, mentions it in a letter to Elias Horry of date June 8th, 1831.[92] In answer Elias Horry advises him distinctly that the company desires “the completion of a railroad, if possible, by way of the Saluda Gap,” but sees the importance of the one across Georgia, and advises that connection be made with Savannah, which should reap some of the advantages which she is entitled to.[93]
U. S. 1830
WHITES
WHITES & BLACKS
NEGROES
RAILWAYS COMPLETED
” PROJECTED
In the very year in which Calhoun was advising the people:—
“if all other effectual resistance should fail, it would be their duty to take measures to concentrate the voice of the South, which should plainly announce to their Northern brethren that either the Bill (Force) or the political connection must yield:—”[94]
in his report on the completion of the Charleston and Hamburg Railroad in 1833, Elias Horry alludes to the “Western and Atlantic Railroad Convention” held in Asheville, North Carolina, September 3rd, 1832, for a “Railroad up the French Broad River,” at which were pointed out the many and great advantages that would be produced ... not less in a political than in a commercial point of view, so indissolubly connecting the Southern and Western interests, strengthening the bonds of union and thereby perpetuating all the blessings of our valuable institutions.[95]
But with the death of Horry in 1834, the project seems to have slumbered until, in October, 1835, a well thought out statement, emanating from a group of citizens of Ohio, one of whom was General Harrison, brought the matter up again,[96] and on July 4th, 1836, delegates from Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, at Knoxville, launched the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad to connect the West and South. Hayne became President of the company and Calhoun a Director. From the outset, however, Calhoun was a continually disturbing element. He was never able to shake off the view that railroads, if not adjuncts to water courses, would be failures. It was a natural view in his day, if it was an ignorant one, and one honestly held; but it was injurious to the enterprise.
His known distrust of the route through North Carolina chilled the enthusiasm of the people of North Carolina.[97] He deserted the South Carolina Company at the most critical time, when the prospects of the rival enterprise through Georgia seemed fairest. His powerful obstructive force arrested the Carolina road at Columbia, by a declaration pertinaciously sought to be made in advance that it should not go further[98] and by so doing diverted to the “rival system” in Georgia, funds in South Carolina which most materially aided in preserving the Georgia venture from utter failure, when it had collapsed, with unaccounted funds, to the extent of $2,602,457,26;[99] while his sadly triumphant designation of Hayne’s road as an ended “humbug,” one year after Hayne’s death, when it was at last determined that it should not go beyond Columbia, has been accepted at its face value by those more inclined to believe it, than to take the trouble to examine the facts.
Yet Calhoun, himself, although he survived Hayne eleven years, died before the “rival system” was assured; and nine years after his own death, when, as yet, no great benefits to South Carolina trade had accrued from the construction of the Georgia road, a vigorous attempt was made to resurrect the French Broad route, with a declaration that only the gap from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to Paint Rock, on the Tennessee-North Carolina line, remained to be closed, C. G. Memminger, in opposing the resurrection of the L. C. & C. R. R., made the statement concerning it, that “it had been the mother of all our interior railroads, and had not cost the State a dollar of her money.”[100]
If such a statement could be made in 1858 by one who, while he had materially assisted it up to 1839, had then opposed it, it may be well to consider how the scheme was regarded in Europe, at the date at which Mr. Memminger led the movement for the stopping it at Columbia, evidently so as to concentrate all effort on the route through Georgia.
In the work of Alexander Trotter, of London, England, published in 1839, appears three allusions to Hayne’s Western road. One in the general discussion of conditions in the United States at large; one in the chapter treating of the State of South Carolina; and one in that discussing Ohio. The first is as follows:
“Besides the outlet for their produce which the Ohio and Mississippi afford to cultivators, the State of Pennsylvania has established a communication on the former river by a series of canals and railroads, and has opened to them the market of the Atlantic cities. The State of New York, by means of the Erie Canal, has procured for them a similar advantage at a port more to the North, while a still more gigantic undertaking than either of these works is now in progress to connect the city of Cincinnati with Charleston, which will bring the products of these distant lands to the markets of the Southern Atlantic States.”[101]
In that portion of his work which treats of South Carolina, Mr. Trotter enters more particularly into the plan of the connection:
“The work contemplated by this company (The Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad) is the establishment of a railroad communication between the city of Charleston and the Ohio. The distance between Charleston and Cincinnati in a straight line, is about five hundred miles. Several routes have been surveyed by which the length of the railroad will be about six hundred, but no line seems to have been definitely fixed upon. A railroad called the South Carolina, already exists between Charleston and Hamburg, a town situated on the Savannah opposite to Augusta, in Georgia, this railroad has been purchased by the company, and will be made use of as far as Branchville or Aiken. One plan is to carry the road projected from the former to Columbia, the seat of Government in South Carolina, and then up the valley of the Broad river into the State of North Carolina. After surmounting the Blue Ridge by inclined planes with stationary engines, the road would by this plan, be carried down the valley of the French Broad River to Knoxville, in Tennessee, and thence through Cumberland Gap, to Lexington in Kentucky; from the latter city separate roads would proceed to Louisville, Cincinnati and Mayesville. The distance from Charleston to Cincinnati by this route would be 607 miles.”[102]
Alluding to the Georgia route, he indicates the first as likely the route to be decided upon finally, and in the remarkably accurate map, for that date, shows that the line through North Carolina, is shorter by something like a fifth of the distance and that “the success of the South Carolina Railroad holds out a fair prospect for that of the greater work” as it—
“although thus successful had to contend with great disadvantages; it was not only the first railroad attempted in the Southern States, but was at the time it was completed the longest railroad that had been constructed in any part of the world ... so that the projectors could derive little benefit from the experience of other works of a similar nature—the whole work too, which is a singular circumstance, was executed by the black population. In addition to these drawbacks, the limited means of the company caused the work to be executed in a very imperfect manner.... The original cost of the road was $904,500.00 but the filling up of the spaces between the piles and other expenses increased the cost up to the 31st of October 1834 to $1,336,615.09. The present company have almost reconstructed the whole work; two-thirds of the purchase money which has been paid, together with the expenses which have already been incurred, having amounted to nearly two million of dollars.”[103]
Georgia had started its system from a point afterwards becoming Atlanta, towards which two roads were pointing, one from Augusta about due west and another from Savannah northwest to Macon, from which by an inclination north it moved towards the same point.
Hayne’s review of the commercial situation in the spring of 1838 indicated how clearly he grasped the fact that the revision of the tariff had failed to cure the conditions under which the South labored; for exporting more than a sixth of the total exports of the country, the three States of Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia imported less than one fortieth. If the South could only have been made to see it before the opportunity passed. His comment put it fairly:
“Look at the present course of trade between the South and the West. The importations from Tennessee and Kentucky into South Carolina and Georgia amount to millions of dollars, but instead of their being paid for in foreign goods imported directly into Charleston and Savannah in exchange for our own cotton and rice, we pay for them in gold or silver or in bills upon the North, thereby losing entirely the profits on the importation and greatly embarrassing our merchants by the operation. Now if we only had the means of transporting these goods by railroad to the West, everything would be changed. Not only would we pay for Western production consumed by the South, in foreign goods received in exchange for our own produce, but we should be able to supply a large portion of the Western country with all the goods now obtained by them from abroad, receiving in exchange their products to be distributed in Southern ships throughout the world. The truth is that all our efforts to establish a direct trade with Europe must in a great measure be unavailing unless we can provide a market in the West for the goods we may import. Our railroad with the aid of the South Western Railroad Bank, will achieve for us this important and peaceful victory.”[104]
But Kentucky and Tennessee did not constitute all that the railroad to Cincinnati led to. The description given by the English student of American affairs in 1839, shows what Ohio was at that date:
“Of the 75 counties of which it is composed, 14 lie upon the Ohio River, which in its windings bounds the State for 436 miles; while seven which border on Lake Erie possess a coast of upwards of 200 miles in extent. The great works which have been described, and others the result of private enterprise, have given almost equal advantage to the interior districts. Canals now made or making pass through 32 counties, railroads through six, and macadamized roads through five, so that of the 75 counties into which the State is divided, there are only 11 which do not benefit from either natural or improved means of communication, and many even of these are traversed or bounded by rivers of inferior magnitude. While its natural advantages and the industry of its inhabitants have thus secured for this State the benefits of an easy internal communication, its position is no less favorable for external commerce. The Ohio River affords a direct communication with all the country in the valley of the Mississippi, which requires much of its agricultural produce and of its manufactures while by means of Lake Erie, which has several good natural or artificial harbors, it communicates with Canada and New York on the one side and with the country of the upper lakes on the other.... When the communication is complete between the Ohio and Pennsylvania lines, and still more when the railroad is finished which is meant to connect Cincinnati with Charleston, in South Carolina, an additional stimulus will be given to the industry of the State. The completion of the latter work, by the importance it will confer on Cincinnati, is scarcely of less interest to Ohio than it is to the States whose territories it traverses.”[105]
It was from Ohio in 1835 that the movement had come headed by General Harrison, for railroad connection with South Carolina. We have discussed commercial conditions. What of political? Professor Paxson says:
“The Southern counties of the old Northwest were never unanimous for slavery, but they were thoroughly impregnated with the ideals of the South before the Northern tier of counties had been surveyed or cleared of Indians. North of the National Road (from Wheeling to Columbus, Indianapolis, Vandalia and St. Louis) roughly speaking, was the zone of the Erie Canal—by 1840 a new New England stood rival to a northern South within the three oldest States of the old Northwest. For another twenty years, from the election of Harrison to that of Lincoln, the political future of the section was indeterminate.”[106]
But in 1835 Calhoun had been convinced that the movement of population and industry was towards Arkansas,[107] and that consequently “we should look much further West than Cincinnati or Lexington”.[108] This he announced in his letter to Hayne resigning from his position as one of the directors of the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad in 1838.
On what did he base the view? The Census figures of 1830 as compared with those of 1820 indicated that the increase of population of Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, were all greater than the increase in Arkansas, even if the increase of Ohio’s 581,295 to 937,903 was not as great a percentage of increase as that of Arkansas from 14,314, to 33,388 in the same period. Nevertheless at the time when the road was determined to be stopped at Columbia, South Carolina, in favor of the movement to be worked out through Georgia to Arkansas, the white population of Ohio was 1,502,122, the colored 17,345. At the same date the white population of Arkansas was 77,174, the colored 20,865. If it be claimed that north of Arkansas was Missouri with a white population of 323,888 and a colored population of 61,388; yet, if we took the three States just north of Kentucky and across the Ohio River and the State of Michigan just beyond, we will know that the region which held 2,864,634 whites and 29,483 colored was abandoned to build to a region inhabited by 401,662 whites and 82,253 colored persons. Was this a reasonable commercial movement? If it was not, what was it? An attempt will be made to answer these two questions in the two following chapters, which attempt should open with some description of railroad movement in the North and West.