THE NEW WEST, THE SOUTH, AND THE WEST INDIES
The twenty years of the administrations of the first three presidents of the United States—or, we might say, the three decades between 1790 and 1820—constitute what might be considered the "Dark Ages" of Negro history; and yet, as with most "Dark Ages," at even a glance below the surface these years will be found to be throbbing with life, and we have already seen that in them the Negro was doing what he could on his own account to move forward. After the high moral stand of the Revolution, however, the period seems quiescent, and it was indeed a time of definite reaction. This was attributable to three great events: the opening of the Southwest with the consequent demand for slaves, the Haytian revolution beginning in 1791, and Gabriel's insurrection in 1800.
In no way was the reaction to be seen more clearly than in the decline of the work of the American Convention of Delegates from the Abolition Societies. After 1798 neither Connecticut nor Rhode Island sent delegates; the Southern states all fell away by 1803; and while from New England came the excuse that local conditions hardly made aggressive effort any longer necessary, the lack of zeal in this section was also due to some extent to a growing question as to the wisdom of interfering with slavery in the South. In Virginia, that just a few years before had been so active, a statute was now passed imposing a penalty of one hundred dollars on any person who assisted a slave in asserting his freedom, provided he failed to establish the claim; and another provision enjoined that no member of an abolition society should serve as a juror in a freedom suit. Even the Pennsylvania society showed signs of faintheartedness, and in 1806 the Convention decided upon triennial rather than annual meetings. It did not again become really vigorous until after the War of 1812.
1. [The Cotton-Gin, the New Southwest, and the First Fugitive Slave Law]
Of incalculable significance in the history of the Negro in America was the series of inventions in England by Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton in the years 1768-79. In the same period came the discovery of the power of steam by James Watt of Glasgow and its application to cotton manufacture, and improvements followed quickly in printing and bleaching. There yet remained one final invention of importance for the cultivation of cotton on a large scale. Eli Whitney, a graduate of Yale, went to Georgia and was employed as a teacher by the widow of General Greene on her plantation. Seeing the need of some machine for the more rapid separating of cotton-seed from the fiber, he labored until in 1793 he succeeded in making his cotton-gin of practical value. The tradition is persistent, however, that the real credit of the invention belongs to a Negro on the plantation. The cotton-gin created great excitement throughout the South and began to be utilized everywhere. The cultivation and exporting of the staple grew by leaps and bounds. In 1791 only thirty-eight bales of standard size were exported from the United States; in 1816, however, the cotton sent out of the country was worth $24,106,000 and was by far the most valuable article of export. The current price was 28 cents a pound. Thus at the very time that the Northern states were abolishing slavery, an industry that had slumbered became supreme, and the fate of hundreds of thousands of Negroes was sealed.
Meanwhile the opening of the West went forward, and from Maine and Massachusetts, Carolina and Georgia journeyed the pioneers to lay the foundations of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and Alabama and Mississippi. It was an eager, restless caravan that moved, and sometimes more than a hundred persons in a score of wagons were to be seen going from a single town in the East—"Baptists and Methodists and Democrats." The careers of Boone and Sevier and those who went with them, and the story of their fights with the Indians, are now a part of the romance of American history. In 1790 a cluster of log huts on the Ohio River was named in honor of the Society of the Cincinnati. In 1792 Kentucky was admitted to the Union, the article on slavery in her constitution encouraging the system and discouraging emancipation, and Tennessee also entered as a slave state in 1796.
Of tremendous import to the Negro were the questions relating to the Mississippi Territory. After the Revolution Georgia laid claim to great tracts of land now comprising the states of Alabama and Mississippi, with the exception of the strip along the coast claimed by Spain in connection with Florida. This territory became a rich field for speculation, and its history in its entirety makes a complicated story. A series of sales to what were known as the Yazoo Companies, especially in that part of the present states whose northern boundary would be a line drawn from the mouth of the Yazoo to the Chattahoochee, resulted in conflicting claims, the last grant sale being made in 1795 by a corrupt legislature at the price of a cent and a half an acre. James Jackson now raised the cry of bribery and corruption, resigned from the United States Senate, secured a seat in the state legislature, and on February 13, 1796, carried through a bill rescinding the action of the previous year,[64] and the legislature burned the documents concerned with the Yazoo sale in token of its complete repudiation of them. The purchasers to whom the companies had sold lands now began to bombard Congress with petitions and President Adams helped to arrive at a settlement by which Georgia transferred the lands in question to the Federal Government, which undertook to form of them the Mississippi Territory and to pay any damages involved. In 1802 Georgia threw the whole burden upon the central government by transferring to it all of her land beyond her present boundaries, though for this she exacted an article favorable to slavery. All was now made into the Mississippi Territory, to which Congress held out the promise that it would be admitted as a state as soon as its population numbered 60,000; but Alabama was separated from Mississippi in 1816. The old matter of claims was not finally disposed of until an act of 1814 appropriated $5,000,000 for the purpose. In the same year Andrew Jackson's decisive victories over the Creeks at Talladega and Horseshoe Bend—of which more must be said—resulted in the cession of a vast tract of the land of that unhappy nation and thus finally opened for settlement three-fourths of the present state of Alabama.
It was in line with the advance that slavery was making in new territory that there was passed the first Fugitive Slave Act (1793). This grew out of the discussion incident to the seizure in 1791 at Washington, Penn., of a Negro named John, who was taken to Virginia, and the correspondence between the Governor of Pennsylvania and the Governor of Virginia with reference to the case. The important third section of the act read as follows:
And be it also enacted, That when a person held to labor in any of the United States, or in either of the territories on the northwest or south of the river Ohio, under the laws thereof, shall escape into any other of the said states or territory, the person to whom such labor or service may be due, his agent or attorney, is hereby empowered to seize or arrest such fugitive from labor, and to take him or her before any judge of the circuit or district courts of the United States, residing or being within the state, or before any magistrate of a county, city or town corporate, wherein such seizure or arrest shall be made, and upon proof to the satisfaction of such judge or magistrate, either by oral testimony or affidavit taken before and certified by a magistrate of any such state or territory, that the person so seized or arrested, doth, under the laws of the state or territory from which he or she fled, owe service or labor to the person claiming him or her, it shall be the duty of such judge or magistrate to give a certificate thereof to such claimant, his agent or attorney, which shall be sufficient warrant for removing the said fugitive from labor, to the state or territory from which he or she fled.
It will be observed that by the terms of this enactment a master had the right to recover a fugitive slave by proving his ownership before a magistrate without a jury or any other of the ordinary forms of law. A human being was thus placed at the disposal of the lowest of courts and subjected to such procedure as was not allowed even in petty property suits. A great field for the bribery of magistrates was opened up, and opportunity was given for committing to slavery Negro men about whose freedom there should have been no question.