THE SOUTH AND THE SLAVE-TRADE.
With such extraordinary results attained, the natural desire of slave-holders was to strive for development and expansion. They had in the South more land than could be cultivated by the slaves they then owned, or by their natural increase within any calculable period. So great was the excess of land that, at the time Texas was annexed, Senator Ashley of Arkansas declared that his State alone could, with the requisite labor, produce a larger cotton-crop than had ever been grown in the whole country. In the minds of the extreme men of the South the remedy was to be found in re- opening the African slave-trade. So considerate and withal so conservative a man as Alexander H. Stephens recognized the situation. When he retired from public service, at the close of the Thirty- sixth Congress, in 1859, he delivered an address to his constituents, which was in effect a full review of the Slavery question. He told them plainly that they could not keep up the race with the North in the occupation of new territory "unless they could get more Africans." He did not avowedly advocate the re-opening of the slave-trade, but the logic of his speech plainly pointed to that end.
John Forsythe of Alabama, an aggressive leader of the most radical pro-slavery type, carried the argument beyond the point where the prudence of Mr. Stephens permitted him to go. In recounting the triumphs of the South, he avowed that one stronghold remained to be carried, "the abrogation of the prohibition of the slave-trade." So eminent a man as William L. Yancey formally proposed in a Southern commercial convention, in 1858, that the South should demand the repeal of the laws "declaring the slave-trade to be piracy;" and Governor Adams of South Carolina pronounced those laws to be "a fraud upon the slave-holders of the South." The Governor of Mississippi went still farther, and exhibited a confidence in the scheme which was startling. He believed that "the North would not refuse so just a demand if the South should unitedly ask it." Jefferson Davis did not join in the movement, but expressed a hearty contempt for those "who prate of the inhumanity and sinfulness of the slave-trade."
Quotations of this character might be indefinitely multiplied. The leaders of public opinion in the Cotton States were generally tending in the same direction, and, in the language of Jefferson Davis, were basing their conclusion on "the interest of the South, and not on the interest of the African." Newspapers and literary reviews in the Gulf States were seconding and enforcing the position of their public men, and were gradually but surely leading the mind of the South to a formal demand for the privilege of importing Africans. A speaker in the Democratic National Convention at Charleston, personally engaged in the domestic slave-trade, frankly declared that the traffic in native Africans would be far more humane. The thirty thousand slaves annually taken from the border States to the cotton-belt represented so great an aggregation of misery, that the men engaged in conducting it were, even by the better class of slave-holders, regarded with abhorrence, and spoken of as infamous.
It is worthy of observation that the re-opening of the African slave-trade was not proposed in the South until after the Dred Scott decision. This affords a measure of the importance which pro-slavery statesmen attached to the position of the Supreme Court. In the light of these facts, the repeated protests of Senator Douglas "against such schemes as the re-opening of the African slave-trade" were full of significance; nor could any development of Southern opinion have vindicated more completely the truth proclaimed by Mr. Lincoln, that the country was destined to become wholly anti-slavery or wholly pro-slavery. The financial interest at stake in the fate of the institution was so vast, that Southern men felt impelled to seek every possible safeguard against the innumerable dangers which surrounded it. The revival of the African slave-trade was the last suggestion for its protection, and was the immediate precursor of its destruction.
In reckoning the wealth-producing power of the Southern States, the field of slave labor has been confined to the cotton-belt. In the more northern of the slave-holding States, free labor was more profitable, and hence the interest in Slavery was not so vital or so enduring as in the extreme South. There can be little doubt that the slave States of the border would have abolished the institution at an early period except for the fact that their slaves became a steady and valuable source of labor-supply for the increased demand which came from the constantly expanding area of cotton. But his did not create so palpable or so pressing an interest as was felt in the Gulf States, and the resentment caused by the election of Lincoln was proportionately less. The border States would perhaps have quietly accepted the result, however distasteful, except for the influence brought upon them from the extreme South, where the maintenance of Slavery was deemed vital to prosperity and to safety.
In the passions aroused by the agitation over slavery, Southern men failed to see (what in cooler moments they could readily perceive) that the existence of the Union and the guaranties of the Constitution were the shield and safeguard of the South. The long contest they had been waging with the anti-slavery men of the free States had blinded Southern zealots to the essential strength of their position so long as their States continued to be members of the Federal Union. But for the constant presence of national power, and its constant exercise under the provisions of the Constitution, the South would have had no protection against the anti-slavery assaults of the civilized world. Abolitionists from the very beginning of their energetic crusade against slavery had seen the Constitution standing in their way, and with the unsparing severity of their logic had denounced it as "a league with hell and a covenant with death." The men who were directing public opinion in the South were trying to persuade themselves, and had actually persuaded many of their followers, that the election of Lincoln was the overthrow of the Constitution, and that their safety in the Union was at an end. They frightened the people by Lincoln's declaration that the Republic could not exist half slave, half free. They would not hear his own lucid and candid explanation of his meaning, but chose rather to accept the most extreme construction which the pro-slavery literature and the excited harangues of a Presidential canvass had given to Mr. Lincoln's language.
SOUTHERN CONFIDENCE IN SECESSION.
The confidence of Southern men in their power to achieve whatever end they should propose was unbounded. They apparently did not stop to contemplate the effect upon slavery which a reckless course on their part might produce. Having been schooled to the utmost conservatism in affairs of government, they suddenly became rash and adventurous. They were apparently ready to put every thing to hazard, professing to believe that nothing could be as fatal as to remain under what they termed the "Government of Lincoln." They believed they could maintain themselves against physical force, but they took no heed of a stronger power which was sure to work against them. They disregarded the enlightened philanthropy and the awakened conscience which had abolished slavery in every other Republic of America, which had thrown the protection of law over the helpless millions of India, which had moved even the Russian Autocracy to consider the enfranchisement of the serf. They would not realize that the contest they were rashly inviting was not alone with the anti-slavery men of the free States, not alone with the spirit of loyalty to the Republic, but that it carried with it a challenge to the progress of civilization, and was a fight against the nineteenth century.