1. [The Ultimate Problem and the Missouri Compromise]
In a previous chapter[86] we have already indicated the rise of the Negro Problem in the last decade of the eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth century. And what was the Negro Problem? It was certainly not merely a question of slavery; in the last analysis this institution was hardly more than an incident. Slavery has ceased to exist, but even to-day the Problem is with us. The question was rather what was to be the final place in the American body politic of the Negro population that was so rapidly increasing in the country. In the answering of this question supreme importance attached to the Negro himself; but the problem soon transcended the race. Ultimately it was the destiny of the United States rather than of the Negro that was to be considered, and all the ideals on which the country was based came to the testing. If one studied those ideals he soon realized that they were based on Teutonic or at least English foundations. By 1820, however, the young American republic was already beginning to be the hope of all of the oppressed people of Europe, and Greeks and Italians as well as Germans and Swedes were turning their faces toward the Promised Land. The whole background of Latin culture was different from the Teutonic, and yet the people of Southern as well as of Northern Europe somehow became a part of the life of the United States. In this life was it also possible for the children of Africa to have a permanent and an honorable place? With their special tradition and gifts, with their shortcomings, above all with their distinctive color, could they, too, become genuine American citizens? Some said No, but in taking this position they denied not only the ideals on which the country was founded but also the possibilities of human nature itself. In any case the answer to the first question at once suggested another, What shall we do with the Negro? About this there was very great difference of opinion, it not always being supposed that the Negro himself had anything whatever to say about the matter. Some said send the Negro away, get rid of him by any means whatsoever; others said if he must stay, keep him in slavery; still others said not to keep him permanently in slavery, but emancipate him only gradually; and already there were beginning to be persons who felt that the Negro should be emancipated everywhere immediately, and that after this great event had taken place he and the nation together should work out his salvation on the broadest possible plane.
Into the agitation was suddenly thrust the application of Missouri for entrance into the Union as a slave state. The struggle that followed for two years was primarily a political one, but in the course of the discussion the evils of slavery were fully considered. Meanwhile, in 1819, Alabama and Maine also applied for admission. Alabama was allowed to enter without much discussion, as she made equal the number of slave and free states. Maine, however, brought forth more talk. The Southern congressmen would have been perfectly willing to admit this as a free state if Missouri had been admitted as a slave state; but the North felt that this would have been to concede altogether too much, as Missouri from the first gave promise of being unusually important. At length, largely through the influence of Henry Clay, there was adopted a compromise whose main provisions were (1) that Maine was to be admitted as a free state; (2) that in Missouri there was to be no prohibition of slavery; but (3) that slavery was to be prohibited in any other states that might be formed out of the Louisiana Purchase north of the line of 36° 30'.
By this agreement the strife was allayed for some years; but it is now evident that the Missouri Compromise was only a postponement of the ultimate contest and that the social questions involved were hardly touched. Certainly the significance of the first clear drawing of the line between the sections was not lost upon thoughtful men. Jefferson wrote from Monticello in 1820: "This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.... I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle that would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be."[87] For the time being, however, the South was concerned mainly about immediate dangers; nor was this section placed more at ease by Denmark Vesey's attempted insurrection in 1822.[88] A representative South Carolinian,[89] writing after this event, said, "We regard our Negroes as the Jacobins of the country, against whom we should always be upon our guard, and who, although we fear no permanent effects from any insurrectionary movements on their part, should be watched with an eye of steady and unremitted observation." Meanwhile from a ratio of 43.72 to 56.28 in 1790 the total Negro population in South Carolina had by 1820 come to outnumber the white 52.77 to 47.23, and the tendency was increasingly in favor of the Negro. The South, the whole country in fact, was more and more being forced to consider not only slavery but the ultimate reaches of the problem.
Whatever one might think of the conclusion—and in this case the speaker was pleading for colonization—no statement of the problem as it impressed men about 1820 or 1830 was clearer than that of Rev. Dr. Nott, President of Union College, at Albany in 1829.[90] The question, said he, was by no means local. Slavery was once legalized in New England; and New England built slave-ships and manned these with New England seamen. In 1820 the slave population in the country amounted to 1,500,000. The number doubled every twenty years, and it was easy to see how it would progress from 1,500,000 to 3,000,000; to 6,000,000; to 12,000,000; to 24,000,000. "Twenty-four millions of slaves! What a drawback from our strength; what a tax on our resources; what a hindrance to our growth; what a stain on our character; and what an impediment to the fulfillment of our destiny! Could our worst enemies or the worst enemies of republics, wish us a severer judgment?" How could one know that wakeful and sagacious enemies without would not discover the vulnerable point and use it for the country's overthrow? Or was there not danger that among a people goaded from age to age there might at length arise some second Toussaint L'Ouverture, who, reckless of consequences, would array a force and cause a movement throughout the zone of bondage, leaving behind him plantations waste and mansions desolate? Who could believe that such a tremendous physical force would remain forever spell-bound and quiescent? After all, however, slavery was doomed; public opinion had already pronounced upon it, and the moral energy of the nation would sooner or later effect its overthrow. "But," continued Nott, "the solemn question here arises—in what condition will this momentous change place us? The freed men of other countries have long since disappeared, having been amalgamated in the general mass. Here there can be no amalgamation. Our manumitted bondmen have remained already to the third and fourth, as they will to the thousandth generation—a distinct, a degraded, and a wretched race." After this sweeping statement, which has certainly not been justified by time, Nott proceeded to argue the expediency of his organization. Gerrit Smith, who later drifted away from colonization, said frankly on the same occasion that the ultimate solution was either amalgamation or colonization, and that of the two courses he preferred to choose the latter. Others felt as he did. We shall now accordingly proceed to consider at somewhat greater length the two solutions that about 1820 had the clearest advocates—Colonization and Slavery.
2. [Colonization]
Early in 1773, Rev. Samuel Hopkins, of Newport, called on his friend, Rev. Ezra Stiles, afterwards President of Yale College, and suggested the possibility of educating Negro students, perhaps two at first, who would later go as missionaries to Africa. Stiles thought that for the plan to be worth while there should be a colony on the coast of Africa, that at least thirty or forty persons should go, and that the enterprise should not be private but should have the formal backing of a society organized for the purpose. In harmony with the original plan two young Negro men sailed from New York for Africa, November 12, 1774; but the Revolutionary War followed and nothing more was done at the time. In 1784, however, and again in 1787, Hopkins tried to induce different merchants to fit out a vessel to convey a few emigrants, and in the latter year he talked with a young man from the West Indies, Dr. William Thornton, who expressed a willingness to take charge of the company. The enterprise failed for lack of funds, though Thornton kept up his interest and afterwards became a member of the first Board of Managers of the American Colonization Society. Hopkins in 1791 spoke before the Connecticut Emancipation Society, which he wished to see incorporated as a colonization society, and in a sermon before the Providence society in 1793 he reverted to his favorite theme. Meanwhile, as a result of the efforts of Wilberforce, Clarkson, and Granville Sharp in England, in May, 1787, some four hundred Negroes and sixty white persons were landed at Sierra Leone. Some of the Negroes in England had gained their freedom in consequence of Lord Mansfield's decision in 1772, others had been discharged from the British Army after the American Revolution, and all were leading in England a more or less precarious existence. The sixty white persons sent along were abandoned women, and why Sierra Leone should have had this weight placed upon it at the start history has not yet told. It is not surprising to learn that "disease and disorder were rife, and by 1791 a mere handful survived."[91] As early as in his Notes on Virginia, privately printed in 1781, Thomas Jefferson had suggested a colony for Negroes, perhaps in the new territory of Ohio. The suggestion was not acted upon, but it is evident that by 1800 several persons had thought of the possibility of removing the Negroes in the South to some other place either within or without the country.
Gabriel's insurrection in 1800 again forced the idea concretely forward. Virginia was visibly disturbed by this outbreak, and in secret session, on December 21, the House of Delegates passed the following resolution: "That the Governor[92] be requested to correspond with the President of the United States,[93] on the subject of purchasing land without the limits of this state, whither persons obnoxious to the laws, or dangerous to the peace of society may be removed." The real purpose of this resolution was to get rid of those Negroes who had had some part in the insurrection and had not been executed; but not in 1800, or in 1802 or 1804, was the General Assembly thus able to banish those whom it was afraid to hang. Monroe, however, acted in accordance with his instructions, and Jefferson replied to him under date November 24, 1801. He was not now favorable to deportation to some place within the United States, and thought that the West Indies, probably Santo Domingo, might be better. There was little real danger that the exiles would stimulate vindictive or predatory descents on the American coasts, and in any case such a possibility was "overweighed by the humanity of the measures proposed." "Africa would offer a last and undoubted resort," thought Jefferson, "if all others more desirable should fail."[94] Six months later, on July 13, 1802, the President wrote about the matter to Rufus King, then minister in London. The course of events in the West Indies, he said, had given an impulse to the minds of Negroes in the United States; there was a disposition to insurgency, and it now seemed that if there was to be colonization, Africa was by all means the best place. An African company might also engage in commercial operations, and if there was coöperation with Sierra Leone, there was the possibility of "one strong, rather than two weak colonies." Would King accordingly enter into conference with the English officials with reference to disposing of any Negroes who might be sent? "It is material to observe," remarked Jefferson, "that they are not felons, or common malefactors, but persons guilty of what the safety of society, under actual circumstances, obliges us to treat as a crime, but which their feelings may represent in a far different shape. They are such as will be a valuable acquisition to the settlement already existing there, and well calculated to coöperate in the plan of civilization."[95] King accordingly opened correspondence with Thornton and Wedderbourne, the secretaries of the company having charge of Sierra Leone, but was informed that the colony was in a languishing condition and that funds were likely to fail, and that in no event would they be willing to receive more people from the United States, as these were the very ones who had already made most trouble in the settlement.[96] On January 22, 1805, the General Assembly of Virginia passed a resolution that embodied a request to the United States Government to set aside a portion of territory in the new Louisiana Purchase "to be appropriated to the residence of such people of color as have been, or shall be, emancipated, or may hereafter become dangerous to the public safety." Nothing came of this. By the close then of Jefferson's second administration the Northwest, the Southwest, the West Indies, and Sierra Leone had all been thought of as possible fields for colonization, but from the consideration nothing visible had resulted.
Now followed the period of Southern expansion and of increasing materialism, and before long came the War of 1812. By 1811 a note of doubt had crept into Jefferson's dealing with the subject. Said he: "Nothing is more to be wished than that the United States would themselves undertake to make such an establishment on the coast of Africa ... But for this the national mind is not yet prepared. It may perhaps be doubted whether many of these people would voluntarily consent to such an exchange of situation, and very certain that few of those advanced to a certain age in habits of slavery, would be capable of self-government. This should not, however, discourage the experiment, nor the early trial of it; and the proposition should be made with all the prudent cautions and attentions requisite to reconcile it to the interests, the safety, and the prejudices of all parties."[97]
From an entirely different source, however, and prompted not by expediency but the purest altruism, came an impulse that finally told in the founding of Liberia. The heart of a young man reached out across the sea. Samuel J. Mills, an undergraduate of Williams College, in 1808 formed among his fellow-students a missionary society whose work later told in the formation of the American Bible Society and the Board of Foreign Missions. Mills continued his theological studies at Andover and then at Princeton; and while at the latter place he established a school for Negroes at Parsippany, thirty miles away. He also interested in his work and hopes Rev. Robert Finley, of Basking Ridge, N.J., who "succeeded in assembling at Princeton the first meeting ever called to consider the project of sending Negro colonists to Africa,"[98] and who in a letter to John P. Mumford, of New York, under date February 14, 1815, expressed his interest by saying, "We should send to Africa a population partly civilized and christianized for its benefit; and our blacks themselves would be put in a better condition."