Again, there is no reason to believe that Calhoun sympathized at all with the ambitious scheme of forcing slavery to the Pacific. Whatever may have been the merits or demerits of his policies, they were strictly defensive, and he clung almost religiously to the phrase, “slavery as it exists in the South.”
What that was, to some extent was disclosed by the committee on religious instruction of the Negroes, which, in 1845 received reports from all quarters of the South.
Robert Barnwell Rhett, was at the head of one of the principal committees and among its members were D. E. Huger, Basil Gildersleeve, Robert W. Barnwell and many others prominent in affairs of State and matters of culture and religion in the South.
The account from Alabama of “the servant Ellis” is most interesting. His blood and color, it was claimed were unmixed, and he gave much aid in the meetings among the Negroes, though “more retiring and modest than most people of his condition, when they have ability above their fellows.”[159]
It is said he could read both Greek and Latin and was anxious to undertake Hebrew; and the synods of Alabama and Mississippi proposed to purchase him, in order to send him to Africa as a Missionary.
Conditions such as these reports revealed were absolutely ignored by the fanatical Abolitionists of that day although they are but some of the many indications how mild and humanizing slavery, as it then existed in the South, was.
But the question was, could it so continue? And by 1855 there were ominous signs of a change. Agitation began for the re-opening of the slave trade.
What a frightful moral injury to the South this would have been, is evidenced by the statement alone of those who advocated this course, and at the same time had the courage to express their views on the inadequacy of the laws then in existence for the proper protection of those of the inferior race, who were then in the South, improved as they had been by years of training.
In 1856, Governor James H. Adams, of South Carolina, had thus expressed himself:
“If we cannot supply the demand for slave labor, then we must expect to be supplied with a species of labor, we do not want, and which from the very nature of things is antagonistic to our institutions. It is much better that our drays should be driven by slaves—that our factories should be worked by slaves—that our hotels should be served by slaves—that our locomotives should be served by slaves, than that we should be exposed to the introduction, from any quarter, of a population alien to us by birth, training and education, and which, in the process of time, must lead to that conflict between capital and labor, which makes it so difficult to maintain free institutions in all wealthy and highly cultivated nations, where such institutions as ours do not exist.”