CHAPTER VII
The school of Georgia politicians in 1852 did not favor Secession. Their objection to it was that it would so reduce the value of slaves as to force the owners to emancipate them themselves; while, with the preservation of the Union, they believed they could force slavery to the Pacific.
Certainly Georgia was in many respects amply fitted to lead. By the census of 1850 it was disclosed that in the value of her personal property, returned for taxation, she led the Union with $213,499,486. Twelve million more than the old and wealthy State of Massachusetts, which returned $201,976,892. South Carolina came third with $178,130,217. Alabama fourth with $162,463,700. New York fifth with $150,719,379.[143]
In the value of their real estate, which could not be as well concealed as their personal property, the Northern States stood out richer, so that in her revenue, Georgia stood not higher than seventh, among the States of the Union; but, when revenue, expenditure and debt were considered together, no State in the Union was apparently in such an eminently sound and healthy condition; for, with her surplus, she could have extinguished her debt in five years.
Of course that which made the personal property returned for taxation by the residents of the Southern States, stand out so greatly in excess of that of the richer States of the North was the fact that the bulk of it was in slaves. But that fact reveals why the institution of slavery had such a hold upon the South, when not more than ten per cent of its inhabitants were slave holders. If the statesmen and politicians who supported and defended it demanded “a guarantee for property fairly acquired,” that property bore the bulk of the tax. That was not the condition of the North, and the vice of the more advanced civilization of that section was that, by every device which could be conceived, more and more the burden of taxation was thrown upon the poor.[144]
While not to the swollen condition that is apparent today, the North was, for thirty years and more prior to the War between the States, the land of the capitalist, the abode of American capital.
How far the determination of Northern capital to keep the South financially tributary to it was responsible for the rapid railroad development of the North and West, it will require much investigation to disclose. Whether, with a higher and nobler personnel among its leaders and greater regard for the toiling masses of its white population, it could have prepared the way so thoroughly for the conquest of the South is doubtful; but having been stricken a blow, even if a weak one, by the tariff of 1833, with a home valuation it had parried the blow and sustained itself on the increased import trade until it could enact the tariff of 1842; and when that was replaced by Calhoun’s tariff of 1846, marshalling its industrial dependents, it reached out with splendid energy, with one hand grasping the South and the other the West and bound them both to its girdle with bands of steel.
We have seen what was attempted in the South in the political commercial effort to stretch from the Atlantic to Arkansas, after the abandonment of the movement to Cincinnati in 1840. Now reverting to the West, we find that in Ohio, part of the Cincinnati, Sandusky and Cleveland Railroad was built in 1837; but it was not until 1848 that it was completed.[145]
In Kentucky, of the 97 miles projected, by 1839, there were in operation from Lexington to Frankfort, on one end, 28 miles; from Louisville to Portland on the other end, 3 miles.[146] But within nine years from the time at which the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad was stopped at Columbia, a railroad extended from Detroit across lower Michigan, and by 1851, Cleveland and Pittsburgh were connected by rail; while a second line from Toledo below Detroit, paralleled the road from Detroit to the lower end of Lake Michigan. By 1853, down from Lake Michigan to the junction of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, a line continued these two from Toledo and Detroit; while from Cleveland a network of roads reached Indianapolis, sending out from that city a line West to Terre Haute and one North to Lake Michigan. By 1857 this had become a perfect mesh of railroads, crossing and recrossing Ohio, Indiana and Illinois and reaching up into Wisconsin, while three constituent roads stretched across from the North Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River opposite Missouri.
The situation with regard to population was about as follows at this period: The three States mentioned above contained about 4,500,000 white inhabitants, which the population of Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa raised to about 6,000,000. Behind them were banked some 11,000,000 whites in New York, Pennsylvania and New England.
Meanwhile, to the Nashville Convention of 1850, South Carolina had sent a representative, who might have been considered a leaf from her great past, Langdon Cheves and against the independent secession of South Carolina, he strove successfully.
Mr. G. M. Pinckney, the most sympathetic of all Calhoun’s biographers, thus sums up the situation in 1850:
“If Mr. Calhoun had lived a little longer, it seems highly probable that history would have been different. He certainly would have forced matters to head at this session, and at this time, had the South taken definite action it seems probable that there was left genuine love enough for the Union on all sides to save it. To delay ten years was necessarily fatal. Every moment lost but added fuel to the kindling flame of sectional hatred. Mr. Calhoun’s death was a stunning blow. The South fell into confusion. Delay resulted and natural causes taking their course produced natural results.”[147]
Professor Paxson’s view of the situation for the same time seems somewhat in accord with the above:
“Had the secession movement of 1850 grown into war, none of these factors (i. e. railroads) would have been effective, and success for separation could hardly have been questioned. But in 1860 secession came too late. The Northwest was crossed and recrossed by an intricate entanglement of tracks.”[148]
Such a coincidence of view in such widely separated quarters is entitled to the highest respect; but it is not the view entertained by the writer of this work, to whom 1850 seems to have been too late to affect the situation favorably for secession, even if Calhoun had survived; for, judged by his career, it is exceedingly doubtful if he would have forced matters to a head. It would not have been in accord with his past. He was a great parliamentarian and an even greater debater; but all through his career his hand had been forced. He was never quite ready for the situation as it developed. It may have been greatly to his credit and consistent with his views; but he always consulted and pondered. His political methods so disclose him. McDuffie forced his hand with regard to Nullification. Clay forced his hand with regard to the tariff of 1833. For Rhett’s resolution of 1838, he was not ready, although that was the logical time and the logical course.
Those who feel, that for this great Republic a world task was and is reserved, may rejoice that no effort to secede was moved in 1838, but that does not effect the question of its possible success had it been attempted. Conditions in South Carolina were very much confused by Calhoun’s death. To supply his place in the United States Senate, Governor Seabrook first appointed F. H. Elmore and, upon his death in a month or two, Robert W. Barnwell, but upon the meeting of the General Assembly of South Carolina, six months later, that body elected R. Barnwell Rhett, who, for about a year and a quarter, strove for the accomplishment of the policy of secession and failing, resigned and gave way to W. F. DeSaussure, apparently in accord with the Georgia policy of pushing slavery to the Pacific, within the Union, and in the wake of Georgia, South Carolina moved until 1860, when her representatives again took the initiative with the full approval of the leaders of the Empire State of the South.[149]
For the carrying into effect, in 1850, of the Georgia scheme of pushing slavery to the Pacific there were in Missouri 592,004 whites, in Arkansas 163,189, and in Kentucky and Tennessee 1,518,247, to which the entire South remaining could add 3,422,923, and even if Arkansas had doubled her white population since 1840, the 450,000 whites with which Ohio’s population had been increased in the same time, put in that State one-tenth of the total white population of the Union, which, with that with which Indiana and Illinois disposed of in about the same space as Kentucky and Tennessee below, furnished fully two and a half times as many to draw upon. It should have been apparent, therefore, that it would take all that the South could do to hold Missouri, much less invade the further Northwest, even if Iowa, at that, time did not have very many more white inhabitants than Arkansas. There was a chance to have affected Ohio in 1840; but by 1855 the movement from the East and the railroads had made it the powerful advanced outpost of the Abolitionists. The ten years between 1838 and 1848 practically determined the course of events, making more and more for war between the slowly separating sections, and for the steadily increasing black population of slaves in the South.
If it is true that:
“Transportation, after all, has determined both the course and the period of Western development.”[150]
—the colonizing stream with which the great and populous State of Ohio, from 1840 fecundated the prairies of the West might have poured to a considerable extent into the valleys of the Blue Ridge, the Alleghany and the Cumberland mountains along the lines of the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad to meet and mingle with the stream which had been moving westward from South Carolina, since 1820.[151] In such a case the country might and in all probability would have developed at a slower pace; but it would have been as a more homogeneous people. It is idle to declare that there was an irrepressible conflict. That has always been the claim of those who are determined to precipitate such and are absolutely dead to—
“the influence of a free, social and commercial intercourse, in softening asperities, removing prejudices, extending knowledge and promoting human happiness.”