In his “Suppression of the Slave Trade,” Prof. DuBois quotes Congressional documents, to indicate that from Amelia Island, on the Gulf Coast, in 1817 the pirates had eleven armed vessels with which they captured slavers, and brought their cargoes into the United States[167] and that, a year after the capture of the island by United States troops, African and West Indian Negroes were almost daily illicitly introduced into Georgia.[168] He also claims that the estimates of three representatives of Congress, Tallmadge of New York, Middleton, of South Carolina, and Wright of Virginia, in the year 1819, were that slaves were then being brought into the country at the rate of about 14,000 a year.[169] He thinks while smuggling never entirely ceased, the participation of Americans declined between 1825 and 1835, when it again revived, reaching its highest activity between 1840 and 1860, when the city of New York was “the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce, although Portland and Boston were only second.”[170] He quotes DeBow for the statement that, in 1856, forty slavers cleared annually from Eastern harbors, clearing yearly $17,000,000, and from the report of the American Anti-Slavery Society, that between 1857 and 1858 twenty-one of the twenty-two slavers seized by the British cruisers proved to be American, from New York, Boston and New Orleans;[171] and Stephen A. Douglas claimed to have seen recently imported slaves at Vicksburg and Memphis in 1859.[172]
The Charleston Courier in 1839 printed an extract from the New York Journal of Commerce, to the effect that twenty-three vessels under the American flag had sailed about that time from Havana on the slave trade[173]. And the Charleston Mercury in 1849 declared: “The slave trade is again very active in Cuba.”[174]
In support of these claims it can be said:
Of the increase of the colored population of the United States from 1850 to 1860, more than one-half was in the four States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas, into which slaves could most easily be imported, and the temper of the most northerly of those was becoming extremely sensitive upon the subject of allusions to the institution of slavery, as the following extract of a resolution adopted by the Legislature of that State, and sent to the other States of the Union, indicates:
“Whereas the right of property in slaves is expressly recognized by the Constitution of the United States, and is by virtue of such recognition guaranteed against unfriendly action on behalf of the General Government; and whereas, each State of the Union, by the fact of being a party to the federal compact, is also a party to the recognition and guaranty aforesaid.... Resolved: That the citizens of the State of Ohio have pursued a course peculiarly unjust and odious, in their fanatical hostility to institutions for which they are not responsible; in their encouragement of known felons and endorsement of repeated violations of law and decency, and in their establishment of abolition presses, and circulation of incendiary documents, urging a servile population to bloodshed and rapine, and by reason of the premises, it is the duty and interest of the people of Arkansas to discontinue all social and commercial relations with the citizens of the said State.” etc.[175]
It is interesting to note that in his very able and extremely interesting paper on “The Fight for the Northwest,” 1860, the map which accompanies the article of Prof. W. E. Dodd, does not include Ohio.
Quoting from a speech of Senator Hammond in 1858, in which the latter declared: “The most valuable part of the Mississippi belongs to us, and although those who have settled above us, are now opposed to us, another generation will tell another tale,”[176] Mr. Dodd draws from it the conclusion that “Hammond’s idea was that the railroads connecting the West and the South, would so stimulate reciprocal trade between the farmers and the planters, that the resistance of the Chicago-Detroit region would be overcome.”
But it should be borne in mind that in 1858-1860, between the West and the South there stretched a great tract of country over six hundred miles in length, and nearly three hundred miles in breadth, through the whole extent of which not a single railroad stretched across from the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry to the junction of the Ohio River with the Mississippi, near the northeastern corner of Arkansas.
To have crossed this great stretch just about the center at its widest part was the scheme of Hayne’s road which had been abandoned for a scheme of weakly paralleling below, the network stretching west above.
