The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 1 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

by George Cary Eggleston

Thus while the holding of slaves in the more northerly colonies had proved to be unprofitable and had to a great extent ceased at the time of the Revolution, the traffic in slaves from Africa to the southern parts of this country was so profitable an industry that even the Declaration of Independence must be emasculated of one of its most virile features in deference to the greed of gain.

And this dominance of interest over principle continued for long years afterward. When the great convention that framed the Constitution was in session, it was at first proposed to put an end to the slave trade from Africa in the year 1800. An amendment was offered, extending the license of that infamous traffic to the year 1808, and this eight years' extension was adopted by a vote which included in the affirmative every New England state represented in the convention, Virginia voting steadfastly against it.

Those votes for the extension of the slave trade were given undoubtedly in behalf of the mercantile interest of the maritime states of the northeast, and they reflected no moral conviction whatsoever. For there was at that time no moral conviction of the wrongfulness of slavery anywhere in the country. The thought that the negro was a man, endowed by his Creator with an unalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," had not yet been born in America.

And even after thirty odd years, and a dozen years after the constitutional prohibition of the African slave trade had gone into effect, that unlawful traffic in human beings was still so gainful an occupation to merchants and shipmasters, that Mr. Justice Joseph Story, himself a New Englander and a judge of the Supreme Court of the United States, was bitterly denounced by the New England press and public as a judge who deserved to be "hurled from the bench," because he had instructed grand juries that it was their sworn duty to indict the men who were still engaged in the nefarious business of transporting slaves, under conditions of unspeakable cruelty, from Africa to these shores. The offense of that great jurist lay in the fact that he regarded the demands of the constitution and the law as more binding upon his character and conscience than the demands of the New England slave traders whose very profitable business his insistence upon the rigid enforcement of the law threatened to embarrass and destroy.

As there are now no advocates of slavery in our free land; as all of us, North and South alike, are agreed that the institution was a curse the maledictions of which endure to the present day in vexatious "race problems;" it is possible and proper now to record all facts respecting it with impartiality and without controversial intent. It is of supreme importance to any clear understanding of this matter to bear in mind the fact that our modern conceptions of human rights did not exist in the earlier times; that the recognition of the negro as "a man and a brother" is the birth of comparatively recent thought; that the traffic in black human beings, captured in Africa and brought hither for sale as laborers, excited no impulse of antagonism, offended no moral sentiment, and seemed to nobody in the earlier times a violation of those fundamental doctrines of human right upon which this Republic is based. All that has been a glorious after-thought, and it is solely with an expository purpose and not at all as a tu quoque that these facts of history are here set forth.

Surely the time is fully ripe in which men of the North and men of the South may sit together in an impartial study of the causes of a quarrel that brought them into armed conflict more than a generation ago and may calmly consider without offense the sins of their forefathers on either side, making due allowance for the lack of modern light and leading as a guide to those forefathers. We must do this in this spirit, if we would be fair. Still more imperatively must we do it if history is ever to be written.

The period of controversy is past. The time of reckoning has come. The time has come when the advocate holding a brief for the one or the other party to the controversy should give place to the historian intent only upon the task of discovering and recording fact. The circumstance that there was grievous wrong on both sides does not rob either of the credit due for the right that it supported.

After the revolution the great statesmen of our land manifested a determined eagerness to free the country from slavery. John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were not more energetic in this cause than were Jefferson and other Southerners. When Virginia ceded to the Federal Government all her claims to the territory northwest of the Ohio river, it was Thomas Jefferson, the Virginian slaveholder, who insisted upon writing into the deed of cession a provision that slavery should never be permitted in any part of that fair land which now constitutes the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.

George Wythe, under whose tuition Henry Clay studied law, was by all odds the greatest jurist that Virginia ever produced, with the single exception of John Marshall. George Wythe was one of those whom Mr. Carl Schurz has in our own times characterized as "the Revolutionary abolitionists." They were the men of the South who regarded slavery as an imposed and hereditary curse to be got rid of by any means that did not threaten the social fabric with destruction and the country itself with chaos and black night. George Wythe absolutely impoverished himself—born to vast wealth as he was—in setting free the negroes whom he had inherited as slaves and in providing them with the means of establishing themselves in bread-winning ways. For, as he expressed it, "I have no right to set these people free to starve."

He gave them their liberty and with it a piece of land for each, on which with ordinary industry and thrift they could surely make a living for themselves and their families. Then he set to work, a man stripped of all his ancestral possessions and impoverished by his own act of justice, to earn a living as a Virginian lawyer. So far from having offended his fellow Virginians by his act of emancipation, he had won their esteem and their reverence. He became their chancellor and the most honored judge upon their bench.