The slave trade

by Theodore D. Jervey

CHAPTER VIII

The presidential election of 1852, tended at first to allay excitement. A New Englander, affiliating closely with Southern men, Franklin Pierce, of New Hampshire, won the Democratic nomination over competitors much more prominent. Of these competitors Buchanan and Cass had long and intimately been connected with the party leaders of their States in the time of Andrew Jackson; trained in the old school of politics; drawing what strength they had from faithful service. The third competitor, a comparatively new leader in the West, forceful, aggressive and impatient of restraint, Stephen A. Douglas, was of an entirely different type. Determined to make a spoon or spoil a horn, he evolved the doctrine of squatter sovereignty, and with it soon had the country in a turmoil.

The condition was strange. The Georgians had a policy and the lead of a section, but no man among them possessed the qualities essential for such a task, as their bold program of pushing slavery to the Pacific within the Union, demanded. Howell Cobb approached nearer the station of leader than any other man of his State; but he scarcely measured up to what was required. Besides as great as Georgia was among the Southern States, second only to Virginia, in point of population, and quite beyond in wealth and resources, among the States of the Union, in point of population, she barely ranked tenth. From the continuous stream of white immigrants pouring into Illinois that great State was, however, rapidly moving up to the position of fourth in population, while in Stephen A. Douglas, she possessed one of the most audacious and resourceful of politicians who had ever moved in the affairs of the Union, to a great height. Carrying at his heels some forty-two Northern votes in Congress, he appeared to be just the man the Georgians needed, and accordingly in the Congress which met in December, 1853, he introduced his bill for the organization of the territory of Nebraska, framing the provisions thereof upon the precedents set in the organization of the territories of Utah and New Mexico four years before. Of this bill, a distinguished author, later president of the United States, has said:

“No bolder or more extraordinary measure had ever been proposed in Congress, and it came upon the country like a thief in the night, without warning or expectation, when parties were trying to sleep off the excitement of former debates about the extension of slavery.”[152]

Mr. Woodrow Wilson was of the opinion that Southern members had never dreamed of demanding such a measure and that no one but Douglas, would have dreamed of offering it to them; but yet he says the President had been consulted and had given his approval to it, upon the ground that “it was founded upon a sound principle which the compromise of 1820 had infringed upon.”[153] And certain it is that the President had consulted, concerning it, that Southerner who was destined to occupy the most prominent position ever held by a Southerner. Jefferson Davis knew of it.

Of the author of the bill, Robert Toombs declared some seven years later, with his characteristic exaggeration, that the Apostle Paul was about his only superior as a leader. While Alexander H. Stephens, with absolute devotion, clung to him, until secession swept them apart, Toombs was less faithful. Forty-four Northern Democrats, and all but nine of the Southern members of the House of Representatives, supported the bill, and in the popular branch of Congress, it prevailed, by a majority of thirteen votes; in the Senate, by a vote of nearly three to one.[154] But Mr. Wilson declares that the Act contained a fatal ambiguity. When was squatter sovereignty to give its decision on the question of slavery?

Here was where the break came, when the Act was being tried out in practical operation.

The Southern members thought that Douglas represented their view. Mr. Davis, Secretary of War at the time of its introduction, distinctly declares, that, at Douglas’s request, he obtained the interview between Douglas’s committee and the President on Sunday, January 22, 1854, by which the President’s approval was secured, and he avers, that from the terms of the bill and arguments used in its support, he thought its purpose was to open the territory “to the people of all the States with every species of property recognized by any of them.”[155]

But Douglas was not simply leading the Southern minority. He was endeavoring to formulate a policy by means of which he could yoke both sections to his triumphal car, and he was just as ready to use the Southerners, as they were to use him. When the Southerners found out how he proposed to over-reach them, Alexander H. Stephens still clung to him; but Toombs, less faithful, vociferated that he “didn’t have a leg to stand upon.”

The truth was, compromise upon compromise had so involved the question, that it was almost impossible to disentangle it without the use of the sword.

In 1787 there had been a compromise, by which slavery and the slave trade had been both recognized; and over the Missouri question in 1820, the Southern States had had a perfect constitutional right to dissolve the Union; but again compromise had been accepted.

The admission of California and the law of 1850 was a distinct breach of the second compromise and the right to secede was just as clear, as it had been in 1820; but the expediency of such action was nothing like as clear. There was no great and towering personality around which men could gather. Rhett’s resolution in Congress in 1838 was the logical result of Calhoun’s teaching since 1833; but Calhoun was not ready to act. If ever secession was a practical policy it was in 1838 as presented by Rhett in Congress.[156]

In South Carolina in 1850, Calhoun was dead, and there was the view of Rhett and the view of Cheves. In Georgia there was the view of Cobb and the view of Toombs, and the view of Hill and the view of Stephens.

Of the man who did more than any other to arrest secession in 1850, we know least, and what we do know does not help us to any great extent to understand him. What policy Howell Cobb represented is not very clear. He was strong enough to be denounced as a traitor by those who could not drive him from their path, and somewhat in the same way that Hayne was taken out of national politics, when State politics required a man of unusual force, Cobb stepped down in 1852 from the high station of Speaker of the House of Representatives, to become Governor of Georgia; while in the last four years before secession, he was silenced by his position in Buchanan’s Cabinet.

But apart from leaders the country had changed, and in spite of the declarations to the contrary, in nowhere more than in the South.

The continual increase of the Negro population and the immense sums invested in that species of property had worked a disintegration of former views.

Nullification had accelerated the change, for the views of Hayne in 1827 and Calhoun in 1836, were certainly wide apart.

In 1845 Calhoun had congratulated Hammond on the progress of opinion in the South to the high ground he had held in advance; but it may well be doubted whether Calhoun, himself, would not have been startled by the progress disclosed in 1855, as evinced by the agitation for the re-opening of the slave trade.

In 1845 when Wise, then United States Minister to Brazil, disclosed the manner of conducting the slave trade in that country, in which both Englishmen and Americans were implicated, the President, in whose cabinet Calhoun then was Secretary of State, condemned it without stint, rejoicing that “our own coasts are free from its pollution”; although he was forced to admit that there were “many circumstances to warrant the belief that some of our citizens are deeply involved in its guilt.”[157]

Calhoun’s criticism of Wise on this occasion was only that he feared he was injudicious, and that his declarations might affect the relations between Brazil and the United States.[158]

Certainly Calhoun was not the man to have favored what his chief styled “pollution,” and to have remained in his cabinet.

Again, there is no reason to believe that Calhoun sympathized at all with the ambitious scheme of forcing slavery to the Pacific. Whatever may have been the merits or demerits of his policies, they were strictly defensive, and he clung almost religiously to the phrase, “slavery as it exists in the South.”

What that was, to some extent was disclosed by the committee on religious instruction of the Negroes, which, in 1845 received reports from all quarters of the South.

Robert Barnwell Rhett, was at the head of one of the principal committees and among its members were D. E. Huger, Basil Gildersleeve, Robert W. Barnwell and many others prominent in affairs of State and matters of culture and religion in the South.

The account from Alabama of “the servant Ellis” is most interesting. His blood and color, it was claimed were unmixed, and he gave much aid in the meetings among the Negroes, though “more retiring and modest than most people of his condition, when they have ability above their fellows.”[159]

It is said he could read both Greek and Latin and was anxious to undertake Hebrew; and the synods of Alabama and Mississippi proposed to purchase him, in order to send him to Africa as a Missionary.

Conditions such as these reports revealed were absolutely ignored by the fanatical Abolitionists of that day although they are but some of the many indications how mild and humanizing slavery, as it then existed in the South, was.

But the question was, could it so continue? And by 1855 there were ominous signs of a change. Agitation began for the re-opening of the slave trade.

What a frightful moral injury to the South this would have been, is evidenced by the statement alone of those who advocated this course, and at the same time had the courage to express their views on the inadequacy of the laws then in existence for the proper protection of those of the inferior race, who were then in the South, improved as they had been by years of training.

In 1856, Governor James H. Adams, of South Carolina, had thus expressed himself:

“If we cannot supply the demand for slave labor, then we must expect to be supplied with a species of labor, we do not want, and which from the very nature of things is antagonistic to our institutions. It is much better that our drays should be driven by slaves—that our factories should be worked by slaves—that our hotels should be served by slaves—that our locomotives should be served by slaves, than that we should be exposed to the introduction, from any quarter, of a population alien to us by birth, training and education, and which, in the process of time, must lead to that conflict between capital and labor, which makes it so difficult to maintain free institutions in all wealthy and highly cultivated nations, where such institutions as ours do not exist.”

In all slave holding States true policy dictates, that the superior race should direct, and the inferior perform all menial service. Competition between the white and the black man for this service may not disturb Northern sensibility, but it does not suit our latitude. Irrespective, however, of interest, the Act of Congress declaring the slave trade piracy, is a brand upon us, which I think it important to remove. If the trade be piracy, the slave must be plunder; and no ingenuity can avoid the logical necessity of such conclusion.

My hopes and fortunes are indissolubly associated with this form of society. I feel that I should be wanting in duty, if I did not urge you to withdraw your assent to an Act which is itself a direct condemnation of your institutions.”[160]

That was the true, the honest, the intelligent and the reasonable statement of the case; the hopes and fortunes of those in control were indissolubly associated with the form of society which slavery had erected in the South.

In the elaborate report of the committee of the General Assembly of South Carolina, in reply to the message, in which the said Act was recommended to be nullified; while the honesty and sincerity of the members may not be questioned, their woeful unfitness for the position of responsibility placed upon them, has, in the light of time, been made almost ludicrously apparent. Their utter inability to appreciate the terrific evils, to the civilization they thought they were defending and strengthening by their advocacy of the re-opening of 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 imported slaves at Vicksburg and Memphis in 1859.[172]

The Charleston Courier in 1839 printed an extract from the New York Journal of Commerce, to the effect that twenty-three vessels under the American flag had sailed about that time from Havana on the slave trade[173]. And the Charleston Mercury in 1849 declared: “The slave trade is again very active in Cuba.”[174]

In support of these claims it can be said:

Of the increase of the colored population of the United States from 1850 to 1860, more than one-half was in the four States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas, into which slaves could most easily be imported, and the temper of the most northerly of those was becoming extremely sensitive upon the subject of allusions to the institution of slavery, as the following extract of a resolution adopted by the Legislature of that State, and sent to the other States of the Union, indicates:

“Whereas the right of property in slaves is expressly recognized by the Constitution of the United States, and is by virtue of such recognition guaranteed against unfriendly action on behalf of the General Government; and whereas, each State of the Union, by the fact of being a party to the federal compact, is also a party to the recognition and guaranty aforesaid.... Resolved: That the citizens of the State of Ohio have pursued a course peculiarly unjust and odious, in their fanatical hostility to institutions for which they are not responsible; in their encouragement of known felons and endorsement of repeated violations of law and decency, and in their establishment of abolition presses, and circulation of incendiary documents, urging a servile population to bloodshed and rapine, and by reason of the premises, it is the duty and interest of the people of Arkansas to discontinue all social and commercial relations with the citizens of the said State.” etc.[175]

It is interesting to note that in his very able and extremely interesting paper on “The Fight for the Northwest,” 1860, the map which accompanies the article of Prof. W. E. Dodd, does not include Ohio.

Quoting from a speech of Senator Hammond in 1858, in which the latter declared: “The most valuable part of the Mississippi belongs to us, and although those who have settled above us, are now opposed to us, another generation will tell another tale,”[176] Mr. Dodd draws from it the conclusion that “Hammond’s idea was that the railroads connecting the West and the South, would so stimulate reciprocal trade between the farmers and the planters, that the resistance of the Chicago-Detroit region would be overcome.”

But it should be borne in mind that in 1858-1860, between the West and the South there stretched a great tract of country over six hundred miles in length, and nearly three hundred miles in breadth, through the whole extent of which not a single railroad stretched across from the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry to the junction of the Ohio River with the Mississippi, near the northeastern corner of Arkansas.

To have crossed this great stretch just about the center at its widest part was the scheme of Hayne’s road which had been abandoned for a scheme of weakly paralleling below, the network stretching west above.

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.