With such views, what more natural than that Calhoun should view as a “humbug” the great railroad measure of Hayne, founded as it was in some degree upon the belief of the latter that “wherever free labor is put in full and successful operation, slave labor ceases to be profitable.” A railroad connecting Cincinnati with Charleston would certainly have tended to “put in full and successful operation free labor,” and slave labor ceasing more and more to be profitable would have gradually passed out of existence in that region.
Yet it must be admitted, that the greatest writer and thinker who has ever discussed America, viewing conditions at that time, while utterly opposed to slavery, practically endorsed Calhoun’s views. Summing up his conclusion in 1838, de Tocqueville writes:
“When I contemplate the condition of the South, I can only discover two alternatives which may be adopted by the white inhabitants of those States; either to emancipate the Negroes and to intermingle with them; or remain isolated from them to keep them in a state of slavery as long as possible. All intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extirpation of one or the other of the two races.”[66]
Time, however, has proven that both de Tocqueville and Calhoun were wrong.
From a Negro minority of 13,277 in 1810, the census indicated for South Carolina in 1840, a Negro majority of 76,230 an excess of the Negro population over the white of more than double what existed in Louisiana and quadruple that of Mississippi.
In 1843, for the better controlling of this “best substratum of population in the world”[67] only five years after its discovery as such, the following Act was passed by the General Assembly of South Carolina:
“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives now met and sitting, and by the authority of the same: That from and after the passage of this Act, any slave or free person of color who shall commit an assault and battery on a white woman with intent to commit rape, on being thereof convicted, shall suffer death without benefit of clergy.”[68]
For whites, it was not apparently necessary to raise the grade of the offense from that of a misdemeanor. But if the above Act was not a sufficient vindication of the opposition of Barnwell, Paul Hamilton, Alston and Hayne to the continued increase of the Negro population of South Carolina, Calhoun, himself, furnished something of an argument against the “best substratum” by his declaration only nine years after its discovery:
“We know what we are about, we foresee what is coming, and move with no other purpose but to protect our portion of the Union from the greatest of calamities—not insurrection but something worse. I see the end if the process is to go on unresisted; it is to expel in time the white population of the Southern States and leave the blacks in possession.”[69]
If this is a true picture of conditions in 1847, as black as we may consider the Abolitionists of that day, one thing is evident, and that is, that without such a mass of “the best substratum of population” to work upon, the Abolitionists could not possibly have effected what Calhoun feared: therefore, the statesmanship of William Smith, McDuffie, and Calhoun, which had favored and assisted in the gathering of it, to that extent was inferior to the statesmanship of Paul Hamilton, Barnwell, Alston and Hayne which had attempted to arrest the growth. But that was not apparent to the South in 1850, and it is doubtful whether it would be very generally admitted even today; for interest will color opinion and Negro cheap labor is still the first consideration to many people in the South, just as European pauper labor is to many in the North. Both North and South can see clearly the mote in their brother’s eye; but not the beam in their own eye.