In all slave holding States true policy dictates, that the superior race should direct, and the inferior perform all menial service. Competition between the white and the black man for this service may not disturb Northern sensibility, but it does not suit our latitude. Irrespective, however, of interest, the Act of Congress declaring the slave trade piracy, is a brand upon us, which I think it important to remove. If the trade be piracy, the slave must be plunder; and no ingenuity can avoid the logical necessity of such conclusion.
My hopes and fortunes are indissolubly associated with this form of society. I feel that I should be wanting in duty, if I did not urge you to withdraw your assent to an Act which is itself a direct condemnation of your institutions.”[160]
That was the true, the honest, the intelligent and the reasonable statement of the case; the hopes and fortunes of those in control were indissolubly associated with the form of society which slavery had erected in the South.
In the elaborate report of the committee of the General Assembly of South Carolina, in reply to the message, in which the said Act was recommended to be nullified; while the honesty and sincerity of the members may not be questioned, their woeful unfitness for the position of responsibility placed upon them, has, in the light of time, been made almost ludicrously apparent. Their utter inability to appreciate the terrific evils, to the civilization they thought they were defending and strengthening by their advocacy of the re-opening of the slave trade, was most strikingly indicated by their impressions of the effect of emancipation, less lurid than Hammond’s picture, but as strikingly incorrect.
“The paralysis of industry, which would ensue from the emancipation of the slaves, would, in the course of a single year, leave the whole country almost destitute of food and the wretched inhabitants would perish by thousands with all the lingering tortures of unsatisfied hunger.”[161]
When to this were added the effusions of men like Spratt, we can scarcely realize, that this was from the State which had produced Robert Barnwell, Joseph Alston, William Lowndes and Robert Y. Hayne.
In the minority report, however, of an adopted son, J. Johnston Pettigrew, who six years later fell with honor and renown, high in rank, in the retreat from Gettysburg, the State found better representation; while the brilliant Hammond, who had averred that he: “endorsed without reserve the much abused sentiment of Governor McDuffie, that ‘slavery is the corner-stone of our republican edifice’;” nevertheless also had declared, in his controversy with Clarkson: “I might say, that I am no more in favor of slavery in the abstract, than I am of poverty, disease, deformity, idiocy or any other inequality of the human family; that I love perfection and I think I should enjoy a millennium such as God has promised.”[162]
It was not then that men like Hammond, Adams and Robert G. Harper, of Georgia, were blind to the abuses of slavery, for Adams, the advocate of the re-opening of the slave trade, had in his message to the General Assembly of South Carolina only the year before declared:
“The administration of our laws in relation to our colored population by our Courts of magistrates and free holders, as these Courts are at present constituted, calls loudly for reform. Their decisions are rarely in conformity with justice or humanity. I have felt constrained, in a majority of the cases brought to my notice, either to modify the sentence, or set it aside altogether.”[163]
Yet Governor Adams was willing to risk the frightful increase of such recognized evils, by the flooding of the South with a host of barbarians fresh from the jungles of Africa.