| Reaction against the humanitarian principles of the Revolution. |
From 1787 to 1808 the reactionary course was pursued almost without a single break. Kentucky was made a Commonwealth with the slave status. The Congress accepted from North Carolina and Georgia cessions of the territory which lay to the west of them, and which they claimed as belonging to them, with a condition that slavery should not be forbidden therein by Congress. The slave Commonwealth of Tennessee was immediately formed out of a part of this territory. The vast territory of Louisiana, in which slavery existed wherever it was inhabited, was added to the domain of the Union. The District of Columbia, the seat of the general Government, was made a slave-holding community, through the adoption by Congress of the laws of Maryland as the code of the District. A fugitive slave-law was passed by Congress, which enabled any white man to seize, as his slave, any man of color, and bring him before any magistrate, and, upon proof satisfactory to the latter, to demand such papers and certificates as would legally warrant him in reclaiming the slave and transporting him to the place whence he was said to have escaped; and petitions to Congress complaining of the abuse of this arbitrary power were laid aside without consideration. Even the Territory of Indiana prayed Congress to suspend for it that part of the Ordinance of 1787 which forbade slavery within its limits. And South Carolina abolished her law against the importation of slaves, and opened the way wide for a vast increase of the slave population.
| Abolition of the foreign slave-trade by Congress. |
These last acts seem to have aroused the consciousness of the Congress to the rapidity with which the whole country was becoming again subject to the slave-holding interests. The Congress resisted the importunities of the Indiana leaders, and after giving South Carolina a reasonable time to re-enact her law abolishing the foreign slave-trade, without effect, proceeded itself to abolish the trade from the first moment that the Constitution permitted this to be done, from January 1st, 1808.
| Cotton culture and the cotton-gin. The effect of the return to the arts of peace upon the ideas concerning slavery. |
It has been customary to ascribe the great revulsion of view in regard to slavery, which certainly manifested itself everywhere in the United States between 1790 and 1807, to cotton culture and the cotton-gin. The invention of the cotton-gin, in the first part of the last decade of the eighteenth century, and the increased demand for cotton fabrics throughout the world, had made the cultivation of cotton highly profitable. An increase in cotton culture was naturally encouraged by such enhanced profits, and this tendency produced an increased demand for negro labor and for new lands, since the cotton crop requires a warm climate and low lands, and exhausts the soil very rapidly. Those parts of the country adapted to cotton-raising felt, therefore, a renewed interest in the increase of negro labor and in territorial extension. And those parts not so adapted felt an indirect interest in the same, since the increased and still increasing profits of the cotton culture made a market for their slaves and a carrying trade for their shipowners. There is no doubt that such was the main cause of the great change of view in regard to the question of negro slavery which the country experienced between 1790 and 1810, but it was not the sole cause. It was inevitable that, when the men of that era passed out of the excited state of mind and feeling produced by the War with the motherland, and came to the task of re-establishing the relations of peace and every-day life and business, they should regain a calmness of judgment, a respect for vested rights, and a regard for customary relations, which placed the political philosophy of 1776 under many limitations and qualifications, some of which, certainly, were sound and valuable. It is only when we take all of these considerations together that we comprehend the reasoning of the men of the first decade of this century upon the great question. They saw a great interest developing which was bringing wealth and comfort into an impoverished country. They knew that it could be then sustained only by negro labor. They did not believe that the negro would work unless forced to it by the white man. They thought it was better for the negro himself to have food, clothing, and shelter, in slavery, than to starve, or become a robber, in liberty. They felt, on the other hand, that the slavery of one human being to another was an exceptional relation in a political system which rested its own right to independent existence upon the doctrine of human freedom. It was not, then, unnatural that they arrived at the conclusion that to prohibit further importations of the barbarians from Africa was the only remedy for which the time was ripe. They sincerely believed that they would place themselves and their slaves in a far more advantageous position for the gradual elevation of the latter by having to deal only with negroes born and reared amid civilized surroundings, and that freedom would finally be attained by all, as the result of a gradual advancement in intelligence, morals, and industry, and would be thus attained without any shock to the civilization and welfare of the country.
This appeared to the men of that day, both of the North and of the South, to be the only safe way to proceed in solving the question of the relation between the highly civilized Anglo-American race and the grossly barbaric negro race in the United States. We think now that they might have done better, and some of the more unsympathetic critics of our history affirm that they did nothing of any consequence, and that in what they did do they acted with a consciously deceptive purpose. There may have been a few to whom this criticism can be justly applied, but there is no sufficient evidence that the mass of them were insincere either in act or thought. The contention that they were is more partisan than truly historical.