The slave trade

by Theodore D. Jervey

But against this, Harper, of Georgia, was a tower of strength.

Prof. DuBois declares that “although such hot-heads as Spratt were not able, as late as 1859, to carry a substantial majority of the South with them, in an attempt to reopen the trade at all hazards, yet the agitation did succeed in sweeping away nearly all theoretical opposition to the trade, and left the majority of Southern people in an attitude, which regarded the opening of the African slave trade as merely a question of expediency.”[164]

This he attempted to sustain by quotations from the Charleston Standard, Richmond Examiner, New Orleans Delta, and other Southern papers, intimating that Johnston Pettigrew’s minority report cost him his re-election to the Legislature of South Carolina. As had been shown, it did not, however, stand in the way of his elevation to a high command of the forces South Carolina furnished for the War between the States; while Senator Hammond, who had risen to the highest honor his State could bestow, declared unequivocablly in 1858, with regard to the re-opening of the slave trade: “I once entertained the idea myself, but on further investigation abandoned it. I will not now go into the discussion of it further than to say that the South is itself divided on that policy, and from appearances, opposed to it by a vast majority.”[165]

James Chesnut, the other senator from South Carolina, also announced himself publicly against it in the same year. But it was in the profoundly thoughtful and admirably thorough argument of Harper of Georgia, that the opponents of re-opening found the best representation.

Southern to the core, it is a defense of slavery “as it existed in the South,” that cannot be improved upon.

Harper knew that slave labor was not by any means cheap labor. Like Hammond and other students of affairs, he knew that free labor was cheaper both in Great Britain and the United States, but that the reports of the parliamentary commission of 1842 had indicated that the laboring classes of the United Kingdom were in a more miserable condition, and were more degraded morally and physically than the slaves of the South. He realized that capital would inevitably reach out for cheap labor, which while a benefit to the employer and the consumer, would slowly undermine the foundations of the republic, bringing all labor down, while it built up a privileged class of idle rich. He heard in this cry for the re-opening of the slave trade, the same demand for cheap labor with all the ills which the South had freed herself from, in the years in which she had trained and elevated her expensive laboring class. He saw this cheap imported slave labor invading the province of the remnant of the white working class of the South, and rendering it inimical to the institution. But above and beyond all this, he saw the slave trade, as his forbears had seen it in the days the South produced her strongest men, and without any reserve he declared:

“By the votes of Southern representatives as well as Northern, we have stamped upon it the brand and penalty of the greatest of crimes against mankind.... The change has not yet been worked in public opinion in the South. It will be hard to produce it. When the attempt shall be made, it will develop a division which ages of discussion will utterly fail to overcome.”[166]

As objectionable as slavery is in the abstract, it is a debatable question whether Harper of Georgia, advocate of slavery, as it existed in the South in 1858, but determined opponent of the re-opening of the slave trade, did not occupy higher ground from a humanitarian standpoint, than did Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut in 1787, who was then, “for leaving the clause as it stands, let every State import what it pleases.... As population increases poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless.”

Ellsworth might have gone further and declared with truth, that, if poor laborers were not sufficiently plenteous, they could be imported. In 1912 they were being brought in in such swarms that our civilization was said to be threatened thereby.

But while there was this pronounced opposition to the re-opening of the slave trade in the South, there is not much room to doubt that the slave population of the South had been largely recruited with illicit importations from abroad from 1808. To what extent it is difficult to arrive at with any degree of accuracy.