In Delaware, however, the problem was hardly formidable, for at the time of the first federal census there were hardly nine thousand slaves and a third as many colored freemen in her gross population of some sixty thousand souls. Nevertheless a bill for gradual abolition considered by the legislature in 1786 appears not to have been brought to a vote,[12] and no action in the premises was taken thereafter. The retention of slavery seems to have been mainly due to mere public inertia and to the pressure of political sympathy with the more distinctively Southern states. Because of her border position and her dearth of plantation industry, the slaves in Delaware steadily decreased to less than eighteen hundred in 1860, while the free negroes grew to more than ten times as many.

[Footnote 12: J.R. Brackett, "The Status of the Slave, 1775-1789," in J.F. Jameson ed., Essays in the Constitutional History of the United States, 1775-1789 (Boston, 1889), pp. 300-302.]

In Maryland various projects for abolition, presented by the Quakers between 1785 and 1791 and supported by William Pinckney and Charles Carroll, were successively defeated in the legislature; and efforts to remove the legal restraints on private manumission were likewise thwarted.[13] These restrictions, which applied merely to the freeing of slaves above middle age, were in fact very slight. The manumissions indeed were so frequent and the conditions of life in Maryland were so attractive to free negroes, or at least so much less oppressive than in most other states, that while the slave population decreased between 1790 and 1860 from 103,036 to 87,189 souls the colored freemen multiplied from 8046 to 83,942, a number greater by twenty-five thousand than that in any other commonwealth.

[Footnote 13: J.R. Brackett, The Negro in Maryland (Baltimore, 1899), pp. 52-64, 148-155.]

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1785 that anti-slavery men were as scarce to the southward of Chesapeake Bay as they were common to the north of it, while in Maryland, and still more in Virginia, the bulk of the people approved the doctrine and a respectable minority were ready to adopt it in practice, "a minority which for weight and worth of character preponderates against the greater number who have not the courage to divest their families of a property which, however, keeps their conscience unquiet." Virginia, he continued, "is the next state to which we may turn our eyes for the interesting spectacle of justice in conflict with avarice and oppression, a conflict in which the sacred side is gaining daily recruits from the influx into office of young men grown and growing up. These have sucked in the principles of liberty as it were with their mother's milk, and it is to them that I look with anxiety to turn the fate of the question."[14] Jefferson had already tried to raise the issue by having a committee for revising the Virginia laws, appointed in 1776 with himself a member, frame a special amendment for disestablishing slavery. This contemplated a gradual emancipation of the after-born children, their tutelage by the state, their colonization at maturity, and their replacement in Virginia by white immigrants.[15] But a knowledge that such a project would raise a storm caused even its framers to lay it aside. The abolition of primogeniture and the severance of church from state absorbed reformers' energies at the expense of the slavery question.

[Footnote 14: Jefferson, Writings, P.L. Ford ed., IV, 82-83.]

[Footnote 15: Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, various editions, query 14.]

When writing his Notes on Virginia in 1781 Jefferson denounced the slaveholding system in phrases afterward classic among abolitionists: "With what execration should the statesman be loaded who, permitting one-half of the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots and these into enemies ... And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever."[16] In the course of the same work, however, he deprecated abolition unless it were to be accompanied with deportation: "Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state...? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made, and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race ... This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question 'What further is to be done with them?' join themselves in opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the Romans, emancipation required but one effort. The slave when made free might mix without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture."[17]

[Footnote 16: Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, query 18.]

[Footnote 17: Ibid., query 14.]

George Washington wrote in 1786 that one of his chief wishes was that some plan might be adopted "by which slavery may be abolished by slow, sure and imperceptible degrees." But he noted in the same year that some abolition petitions presented to the Virginia legislature had barely been given a reading.[18]

[Footnote 18: Washington, Writings, W.C. Ford ed., XI, 20, 62.]

Seeking to revive the issue, Judge St. George Tucker, professor of law in William and Mary College, inquired of leading citizens of Massachusetts in 1795 for data and advice, and undaunted by discouraging reports received in reply or by the specific dissuasion of John Adams, he framed an intricate plan for extremely gradual emancipation and for expelling the freedmen without expense to the state by merely making their conditions of life unbearable. This was presented to the legislature in a pamphlet of 1796 at the height of the party strife between the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans; and it was impatiently dismissed from consideration.[19] Tucker, still nursing his project, reprinted his "dissertation" as an appendix to his edition of Blackstone in 1803, where the people and the politicians let it remain buried. In public opinion, the problem as to the freedmen remained unsolved and insoluble.

[Footnote 19: St. George Tucker, A Dissertation on Slavery, with a proposal for the gradual abolition of it in the State of Virginia (Philadelphia, 1796, reprinted New York, 1860). Tucker's Massachusetts correspondence is printed in the Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, XLIII (Belknap papers), 379-431.]

Meanwhile the Virginia black code had been considerably moderated during and after the Revolution; and in particular the previous almost iron-clad prohibition of private manumission had been wholly removed in effect by an act of 1782. In spite of restrictions afterward imposed upon manumission and upon the residence of new freedmen in the state, the free negroes increased on a scale comparable to that in Maryland. As compared with an estimate of less than two thousand in 1782, there were 12,866 in 1790, 20,124 in 1800, and 30,570 in 1810. Thereafter the number advanced more slowly until it reached 58,042, about one-eighth as many as the slaves numbered, in 1860.

In the more southerly states condemnation of slavery was rare. Among the people of Georgia, the depressing experience of the colony under a prohibition of it was too fresh in memory for them to contemplate with favor a fresh deprivation. In South Carolina Christopher Gadsden had written in 1766 likening slavery to a crime, and a decade afterward Henry Laurens wrote: "You know, my dear son, I abhor slavery.... The day, I hope is approaching when from principles of gratitude as well as justice every man will strive to be foremost in showing his readiness to comply with the golden rule. Not less than twenty thousand pounds sterling would all my negroes produce if sold at public auction tomorrow.... Nevertheless I am devising means for manumitting many of them, and for cutting off the entail of slavery. Great powers oppose me—the laws and customs of my country, my own and the avarice of my countrymen. What will my children say if I deprive them of so much estate? These are difficulties, but not insuperable. I will do as much as I can in my time, and leave the rest to a better hand. I am not one of those ... who dare trust in Providence for defence and security of their own liberty while they enslave and wish to continue in slavery thousands who are as well entitled to freedom as themselves. I perceive the work before me is great. I shall appear to many as a promoter not only of strange but of dangerous doctrines; it will therefore be necessary to proceed with caution."[20] Had either Gadsden or Laurens entertained thoughts of launching an anti-slavery campaign, however, the palpable hopelessness of such a project in their community must have dissuaded them. The negroes of the rice coast were so outnumbering and so crude that an agitation applying the doctrine of inherent liberty and equality to them could only have had the effect of discrediting the doctrine itself. Furthermore, the industrial prospect, the swamps and forests calling for conversion into prosperous plantations, suggested an increase rather than a diminution of the slave labor supply. Georgia and South Carolina, in fact, were more inclined to keep open the African slave trade than to relinquish control of the negro population. Revolutionary liberalism had but the slightest of echoes there.

[Footnote 20: Frank Moore ed., Correspondence of Henry Laurens (New York, 1861), pp. 20, 21. The version of this letter given by Professor Wallace in his Life of Henry Laurens, p. 446, which varies from the present one, was derived from a paraphrase by John Laurens to whom the original was written. Cf. South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, X. 49. For related items in the Laurens correspondence see D.D. Wallace, Life of Henry Laurens, pp. 445, 447-455.]

In North Carolina the prevailing lack of enterprise in public affairs had no exception in regard to slavery. The Quakers alone condemned it. When in 1797 Nathaniel Macon, a pronounced individualist and the chief spokesman of his state in Congress, discussed the general subject he said "there was not a gentleman in North Carolina who did not wish there were no blacks in the country. It was a misfortune—he considered it a curse; but there was no way of getting rid of them." Macon put his emphasis upon the negro problem rather than upon the question of slavery, and in so doing he doubtless reflected the thought of his community.[21] The legislation of North Carolina regarding racial control, like that of the period in South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky, was more conservative than liberal.

[Footnote 21: Annals of Congress, VII, 661. American historians, through preoccupation or inadvertence, have often confused anti-negro with anti-slavery expressions. In reciting the speech of Macon here quoted McMaster has replaced "blacks" with "slaves"; and incidentally he has made the whole discussion apply to Georgia instead of North Carolina. Rhodes in turn has implicitly followed McMaster in both errors. J.B. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, II, 359; J.F. Rhodes, History of the United States, I, 19.]

The central government of the United States during the Revolution and the Confederation was little concerned with slavery problems except in its diplomatic affairs, where the question was merely the adjustment of property in slaves, and except in regard to the western territories. Proposals for the prohibition of slavery in these wilderness regions were included in the first projects for establishing governments in them. Timothy Pickering and certain military colleagues framed a plan in 1780 for a state beyond the Ohio River with slavery excluded; but it was allowed to drop out of consideration. In the next year an ordinance drafted by Jefferson was introduced into Congress for erecting territorial governments over the whole area ceded or to be ceded by the states, from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi and from Canada to West Florida; and one of its features was a prohibition of slavery after the year 1800 throughout the region concerned. Under the Articles of Confederation, the Congress could enact legislation only by the affirmative votes of seven state delegations. When the ballot was taken on the anti-slavery clause the six states from Pennsylvania eastward voted aye: Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina voted no; and the other states were absent. Jefferson was not alone in feeling chagrin at the defeat and in resolving to persevere. Pickering expressed his own views in a letter to Rufus King: "To suffer the continuance of slaves till they can be gradually emancipated, in states already overrun with them, may be pardonable because unavoidable without hazarding greater evils; but to introduce them into countries where none already exist ... can never be forgiven." King in his turn introduced a resolution virtually restoring the stricken clause, but was unable to bring it to a vote. After being variously amended, the ordinance without this clause was adopted. It was, however, temporary in its provision and ineffectual in character; and soon the drafting of one adequate for permanent purposes was begun. The adoption of this was hastened in July, 1787, by the offer of a New England company to buy from Congress a huge tract of Ohio land. When the bill was put to the final vote it was supported by every member with the sole exception of the New Yorker, Abraham Yates. Delegations from all of the Southern states but Maryland were present, and all of them voted aye. Its enactment gave to the country a basic law for the territories in phrasing and in substance comparable to the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution. Applying only to the region north of the Ohio River, the ordinance provided for the erection of territories later to be admitted as states, guaranteed in republican government, secured in the freedom of religion, jury trial and all concomitant rights, endowed with public land for the support of schools and universities, and while obligated to render fugitive slaves on claim of their masters in the original states, shut out from the regime of slaveholding itself.[22] "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory," it prescribed, "otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." The first Congress under the new constitution reenacted the ordinance, which was the first and last antislavery achievement by the central government in the period.

[Footnote 22: A.C. McLaughlin, The Confederation and the Constitution (New York [1905]), chap. 7; B.A. Hinsdale, The Old Northwest (New York, 1888), chap. 15.]

By this time radicalism in general had spent much of its force. The excessive stress which the Revolution had laid upon the liberty of individuals had threatened for a time to break the community's grasp upon the essentials of order and self-restraint. Social conventions of many sorts were flouted; local factions resorted to terrorism against their opponents; legislatures abused their power by confiscating loyalist property and enacting laws for the dishonest promotion of debtor-class interests, and the central government, made pitiably weak by the prevailing jealousy of control, was kept wholly incompetent through the shirking of burdens by states pledged to its financial support. But populism and particularism brought their own cure. The paralysis of government now enabled sober statesmen to point the prospect of ruin through chaos and get a hearing in their advocacy of sound system. Exalted theorising on the principles of liberty had merely destroyed the old regime: matter-of-fact reckoning on principles of law and responsibility must build the new. The plan of organization, furthermore, must be enough in keeping with the popular will to procure a general ratification.

Negro slavery in the colonial period had been of continental extent but under local control. At the close of the Revolution, as we have seen, its area began to be sectionally confined while the jurisdiction over it continued to lie in the several state governments. The great convention at Philadelphia in 1787 might conceivably have undertaken the transfer of authority over the whole matter to the central government; but on the one hand the beginnings of sectional jealousy made the subject a delicate one, and on the other hand the members were glad enough to lay aside all problems not regarded as essential in their main task. Conscious ignorance by even the best informed delegates from one section as to affairs in another was a dissuasion from the centralizing of doubtful issues; and the secrecy of the convention's proceedings exempted it from any pressure of anti-slavery sentiment from outside.

On the whole the permanence of any critical problem in the premises was discredited. Roger Sherman of Connecticut "observed that the abolition of slavery seemed to be going on in the United States, and that the good sense of the people of the several states would by degrees compleat it." His colleague Oliver Ellsworth said, "The morality or wisdom of slavery are considerations belonging to the states themselves"; and again, "Let us not intermeddle. As population increases poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country." And Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts "thought we had nothing to do with the conduct of states as to slaves, but ought to be careful not to give any sanction to it." The agreement was general that the convention keep its hands off so far as might be; but positive action was required upon incidental phases which involved some degree of sanction for the institution itself. These issues concerned the apportionment of representation, the regulation of the African trade, and the rendition of fugitives. This last was readily adjusted by the unanimous adoption of a clause introduced by Pierce Butler of South Carolina and afterward changed in its phrasing to read: "No person held to service or labour in one state under the laws thereof escaping into another shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due." After some jockeying, the other two questions were settled by compromise. Representation in the lower house of Congress was apportioned among the states "according to their several members, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons ... three fifths of all other persons." As to the foreign slave trade, Congress was forbidden to prohibit it prior to the year 1808, and was merely permitted meanwhile to levy an import duty upon slaves at a rate of not more than ten dollars each. [23]

[Footnote 23: Max Farrand ed., The Records of the Federal Convention (New Haven, 1911), passim]

In the state conventions to which the Constitution was referred for ratification the debates bore out a remark of Madison's at Philadelphia that the real difference of interests lay not between the large and small states but between those within and without the slaveholding influence. The opponents of the Constitution at the North censured it as a pro-slavery instrument, while its advocates apologized for its pertinent clauses on the ground that nothing more hostile to the institution could have been carried and that if the Constitution were rejected there would be no prospect of a federal stoppage of importations at any time. But at the South the opposition, except in Maryland and Virginia where the continuance of the African trade was deprecated, declared the slavery concessions inadequate, while the champions of the Constitution maintained that the utmost practicable advantages for their sectional interest had been achieved. Among the many amendments to the Constitution proposed by the ratifying conventions the only one dealing with any phase of slavery was offered, strange to say, by Rhode Island, whose inhabitants had been and still were so active in the African trade. It reads: "As a traffic tending to establish and continue the slavery of the human species is disgraceful to the cause of liberty and humanity, Congress shall as soon as may be promote and establish such laws as may effectually prevent the importation of slaves of every description."[24] The proposal seems to have received no further attention at the time.

[Footnote 24: This was dated May 29, 1790. H.V. Ames, "Proposed Amendment to the Constitution of the United States," in the American Historical Association Report for 1896, p. 208]

In the early sessions of Congress under the new Constitution most of the few debates on slavery topics arose incidentally and ended without positive action. The taxation of slave imports was proposed in 1789, but was never enacted: sundry petitions of anti-slavery tenor, presented mostly by Quakers, were given brief consideration in 1790 and again at the close of the century but with no favorable results; and when, in 1797, a more concrete issue was raised by memorials asking intervention on behalf of some negroes whom Quakers had manumitted in North Carolina in disregard of legal restraints and who had again been reduced to slavery, a committee reported that the matter fell within the scope of judicial cognizance alone, and the House dismissed the subject. For more than a decade, indeed, the only legislation enacted by Congress concerned at all with slavery was the act of 1793 empowering the master of an interstate fugitive to seize him wherever found, carry him before any federal or state magistrate in the vicinage, and procure a certificate warranting his removal to the state from which he had fled. Proposals to supplement this rendition act on the one hand by safeguarding free negroes from being kidnapped under fraudulent claims and on the other hand by requiring employers of strange negroes to publish descriptions of them and thus facilitate the recovery of runaways, were each defeated in the House.

On the whole the glamor of revolutionary doctrines was passing, and self interest was regaining its wonted supremacy. While the rising cotton industry was giving the blacks in the South new value as slaves, Northern spokesmen were frankly stating an antipathy of their people toward negroes in any capacity whatever.[25] The succession of disasters in San Domingo, meanwhile, gave warning against the upsetting of racial adjustments in the black belts, and the Gabriel revolt of 1800 in Virginia drove the lesson home. On slavery questions for a period of several decades the policy of each of the two sections was merely to prevent itself from being overreached. The conservative trend, however, could not wholly remove the Revolution's impress of philosophical liberalism from the minds of men. Slavery was always a thing of appreciable disrelish in many quarters; and the slave trade especially, whether foreign or domestic, bore a permanent stigma.

[Footnote 25: E. g., Annals of Congress, 1799-1801, pp. 230-246.]



CHAPTER VIII

THE CLOSING OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE

The many attempts of the several colonies to restrict or prohibit the importation of slaves were uniformly thwarted, as we have seen, by the British government. The desire for prohibition, however, had been far from constant or universal.[1] The first Continental Congress when declaring the Association, on October 18, 1774, resolved: "We will neither import, nor purchase any slave imported, after the first day of December next; after which time we will wholly discontinue the slave trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves nor will we hire our vessels nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it."[2] But even this was mainly a political stroke against the British government; and the general effect of the restraint lasted not more than two or three years.[3] The ensuing war, of course, hampered the trade, and the legislatures of several Northern states, along with Delaware and Virginia, took occasion to prohibit slave importations. The return of peace, although followed by industrial depression, revived the demand for slave labor. Nevertheless, Maryland prohibited the import by an act of 1783; North Carolina laid a prohibitive duty in 1787; and South Carolina in the spring of that year enacted the first of a series of temporary laws which maintained a continuous prohibition for sixteen years. Thus at the time when the framers of the Federal Constitution were stopping congressional action for twenty years, the trade was legitimate only in a few of the Northern states, all of which soon enacted prohibitions, and in Georgia alone at the South. The San Domingan cataclysm prompted the Georgia legislature in an act of December 19, 1793, to forbid the importation of slaves from the West Indies, the Bahamas and Florida, as well as to require free negroes to procure magisterial certificates of industriousness and probity.[4] The African trade was left open by that state until 1798, when it was closed both by legislative enactment and by constitutional provision.

[Footnote 1: The slave trade enactments by the colonies, the states and the federal government are listed and summarized in W.E.B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States, 1638-1870 (New York, 1904), appendices.]

[Footnote 2: W.C. Ford, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress (Washington, 1904), I, 75, 77.]

[Footnote 3: DuBois, pp. 44-48.]

[Footnote 4: The text of the act, which appears never to have been printed, is in the Georgia archives. For a transcript I am indebted to the Hon. Philip Cook, Secretary of State of Georgia.]

The scale of the importation in the period when Georgia alone permitted them appears to have been small. For the year 1796, for example, the imports at Savannah were officially reported at 2084, including some who had been brought coastwise from the northward for sale.[5] A foreign traveler who visited Savannah in the period noted that the demand was light because of the dearth of money and credit, that the prices were about three hundred dollars per head, that the carriers were mainly from New England, and that one third of each year's imports were generally smuggled into South Carolina.[6]

[Footnote 5: American Historical Association Report for 1903, pp. 459, 460.]

[Footnote 6: LaRochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels in the United States (London, 1799), p. 605.]

In the impulse toward the prohibitory acts the humanitarian motive was obvious but not isolated. At the North it was supplemented, often in the same breasts, by the inhumane feeling of personal repugnance toward negroes. The anti-slave-trade agitation in England also had a contributing influence; and there were no economic interests opposing the exclusion. At the South racial repugnance was fainter, and humanitarianism though of positive weight was but one of several factors. The distinctively Southern considerations against the trade were that its continuance would lower the prices of slaves already on hand, or at least prevent those prices from rising; that it would so increase the staple exports as to spoil the world's market for them; that it would drain out money and keep the community in debt; that it would retard the civilization of the negroes already on hand; and that by raising the proportion of blacks in the population it would intensify the danger of slave insurrections. The several arguments had varying degrees of influence in the several areas. In the older settlements where the planters had relaxed into easy-going comfort, the fear of revolt was keenest; in the newer districts the settlers were more confident in their own alertness. Again, where prosperity was declining the planters were fairly sure to favor anything calculated to raise the prices of slaves which they might wish in future to sell, while on the other hand the people in districts of rising industry were tempted by programmes tending to cheapen the labor they needed.

The arguments used in South Carolina for and against exclusion may be gathered from scattering reports in the newspapers. In September, 1785, the lower house of the legislature upon receiving a message from the governor on the distressing condition of commerce and credit, appointed a committee of fifteen on the state of the republic. In this committee there was a vigorous debate on a motion by Ralph Izard to report a bill prohibiting slave importations for three years. John Rutledge opposed it. Since the peace with Great Britain, said he, not more than seven thousand slaves had been imported, which at L50 each would be trifling as a cause of the existing stringency; and the closing of the ports would therefore fail to relieve the distress[7] Thomas Pinckney supported Rutledge with an argument that the exclusion of the trade from Charleston would at once drive commerce in general to the ports of Georgia and North Carolina, and that the advantage of low prices, which he said had fallen from a level of L90 in 1783, would be lost to the planters. Judge Pendleton, on the other hand, stressed the need of retrenchment. Planters, he said, no longer enjoyed the long loans which in colonial times had protected them from distress; and the short credits now alone available put borrowers in peril of bankruptcy from a single season of short crops and low prices.[8] The committee reported Izard's bill; but it was defeated in the House by a vote of 47 to 51, and an act was passed instead for an emission of bills of credit by the state. The advocacy of the trade by Thomas Pinckney indicates that at this time there was no unanimity of conservatives against it.

[Footnote 7: Charleston Evening Gazette, Sept. 26 and 28, 1785.]

[Footnote 8: Ibid., Oct. 1, 1785.]

When two years later the stringency persisted, the radicals in the legislature demanded a law to stay the execution of debts, while the now unified conservatives proposed again the stoppage of the slave trade. In the course of the debate David Ramsay "made a jocose remark that every man who went to church last Sunday and said his prayers was bound by a spiritual obligation to refuse the importation of slaves. They had devoutly prayed not to be led into temptation, and negroes were a temptation too great to be resisted."[9] The issue was at length adjusted by combining the two projects of a stay-law and a prohibition of slave importations for three years in a single bill. This was approved on March 28, 1787; and a further act of the same day added a penalty of fine to that of forfeiture for the illegal introduction of slaves. The exclusion applied to slaves from every source, except those whose masters should bring them when entering the state as residents.[10]

[Footnote 9: Charleston Morning Post, March 23, 1787.]

[Footnote 10: Ibid., March 29, 1787; Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, VII, 430.]

Early in the next year an attempt was made to repeal the prohibition. Its leading advocate was Alexander Gillon, a populistic Charleston merchant who had been made a commodore by the State of South Carolina but had never sailed a ship. The opposition was voiced so vigorously by Edward Rutledge, Charles Pinckney, Chancellor Matthews, Dr. Ramsay, Mr. Lowndes, and others that the project was crushed by 93 votes to 40. The strongest weapon in the hands of its opponents appears to have been a threat of repealing the stay-law in retaliation.[11] At the end of the year the prohibitory act had its life prolonged until the beginning of 1793; and continuation acts adopted every two or three years thereafter extended the regime until the end of 1803. The constitutionality of the prohibition was tested before the judiciary of the state in January, 1802, when the five assembled judges unanimously pronounced it valid.[12]

[Footnote 11: Georgia State Gazette (Savannah), Feb. 17, 1788.]

[Footnote 12: Augusta, Ga., Chronicle, Jan. 30, 1802.]

But at last the advocates of the open trade had their innings. The governor in a message of November 24, 1803, recited that his best exertions to enforce the law had been of no avail. Inhabitants of the coast and the frontier, said he, were smuggling in slaves abundantly, while the people of the central districts were suffering an unfair competition in having to pay high prices for their labor. He mentioned a recently enacted law of Congress reinforcing the prohibitory acts of the several states only to pronounce it already nullified by the absence of public sanction; and he dismissed any thought of providing the emancipation of smuggled slaves as "a remedy more mischievous than their introduction in servitude."[13] Having thus described the problem as insoluble by prohibitions, he left the solution to the legislature.

[Footnote 13: Charleston Courier, Dec. 5, 1803.]

In spite of the governor's assertion, supported soon afterward by a statement of William Lowndes in Congress,[14] there is reason to believe that violations of the law had not been committed on a great scale. Slave prices could not have become nearly doubled, as they did during the period of legal prohibition, if African imports had been at all freely made. The governor may quite possibly have exaggerated the facts with a view to bringing the system of exclusion to an end.

[Footnote 14: Annals of Congress, 1803-1804, p. 992.]

However this may have been, a bill was promptly introduced in the Senate to repeal all acts against importations. Mr. Barnwell opposed this on the ground that the immense influx of slaves which might be expected in consequence would cut in half the value of slave property, and that the increase in the cotton output would lower the already falling prices of cotton to disastrous levels. The resumption of the great war in Europe, said he, had already diminished the supply of manufactured goods and raised their prices. "Was it under these circumstances that we ought to lay out the savings of our industry, the funds accumulated in many years of prosperity and peace, to increase that produce whose value had already fallen so much? He thought not. The permission given by the bill would lead to ruinous speculations. Everyone would purchase negroes. It was well known that those who dealt in this property would sell it at a very long credit. Our citizens would purchase at all hazards and trust to fortunate crops and favorable markets for making their payments; and it would be found that South Carolina would in a few years, if this trade continued open, be in the same situation of debt, and subject to all misfortunes which that situation had produced, as at the close of the Revolutionary war." The newspaper closed its report of the speech by a concealment of its further burden: "The Hon. member adduced in support of his opinion various other arguments, still more cogent and impressive, which from reasons very obvious we decline making public."[15] It may be surmised that the suppressed remarks dealt with the danger of slave revolts. In the further course of the debate, "Mr. Smith said he would agree to put a stop to the importation of slaves, but he believed it impossible. For this reason he would vote for the bill." The measure soon passed the Senate.

[Footnote 15: Charleston Courier, Dec. 26, 1803.]

Meanwhile the lower house had resolved on December 8, in committee of the whole, "that the laws prohibiting the importation of negroes and other persons of colour in this state can be so amended as to prevent their introduction amongst us," and had recommended that a select committee be appointed to draft a bill accordingly.[16] Within the following week, however, the sentiment of the House was swung to the policy of repeal, and the Senate bill was passed. On the test vote the ayes were 55 and the noes 46.[17] The act continued the exclusion of West Indian negroes, and provided that slaves brought in from sister states of the Union must have official certificates of good character; but as to the African trade it removed all restrictions. In 1805 a bill to prohibit imports again was introduced into the legislature, but after debate it was defeated.[18]

[Footnote 16: Ibid., Dec. 20, 1803.]

[Footnote 17: Charleston City Gazette, Dec. 22, 1803.]

[Footnote 18: "Diary of Edward Hooker" in the American Historical Association Report for 1896, p. 878.]

The local effect of the repeal is indicated in the experience of E.S. Thomas, a Charleston bookseller of the time who in high prosperity had just opened a new importation of fifty thousand volumes. As he wrote in after years, the news that the legislature had reopened the slave trade "had not been five hours in the city, before two large British Guineamen, that had been lying on and off the port for several days expecting it, came up to town; and from that day my business began to decline.... A great change at once took place in everything. Vessels were fitted out in numbers for the coast of Africa, and as fast as they returned their cargoes were bought up with avidity, not only consuming the large funds that had been accumulating, but all that could be procured, and finally exhausting credit and mortgaging the slaves for payment.... For myself, I was upwards of five years disposing of my large stock, at a sacrifice of more than a half, in all the principal towns from Augusta in Georgia to Boston."[19]

[Footnote 19: E.S. Thomas, Reminiscences, II, 35, 36.]

As reported at the end of the period, the importations amounted to 5386 slaves in 1804; 6790 in 1805; 11,458 in 1806; and 15,676 in 1807.[20] Senator William Smith of South Carolina upon examining the records at a later time placed the total at 39,310, and analysed the statistics as follows: slaves brought by British vessels, 19,449; by French vessels, 1078; by American vessels, operated mostly for the account of Rhode Islanders and foreigners, 18,048.[21] If an influx no greater than this could produce the effect which Thomas described, notwithstanding that many of the slaves were immediately reshipped to New Orleans and many more were almost as promptly sold into the distant interior, the scale of the preceding illicit trade must have been far less than the official statements and the apologies in Congress would indicate.

[Footnote 20: Virginia Argus, Jan. 19, 1808.]

[Footnote 21: Annals of Congress, 1821-1822, pp. 73-77.]

South Carolina's opening of the trade promptly spread dismay in other states. The North Carolina legislature, by a vote afterwards described as virtually unanimous in both houses, adopted resolutions in December, 1804, instructing the Senators from North Carolina and requesting her Congressmen to use their utmost exertions at the earliest possible time to procure an amendment to the Federal Constitution empowering Congress at once to prohibit the further importation of slaves and other persons of color from Africa and the West Indies. Copies were ordered sent not only to the state's delegation in Congress but to the governors of the other states for transmission to the legislatures with a view to their concurrence.[22] In the next year similar resolutions were adopted by the legislatures of New Hampshire, Vermont, Maryland and Tennessee;[23] but the approach of the time when Congress would acquire the authority without a change of the Constitution caused a shifting of popular concern from the scheme of amendment to the expected legislation of Congress. Meanwhile, a bill for the temporary government of the Louisiana purchase raised the question of African importations there which occasioned a debate in the Senate at the beginning of 1804[24] nearly as vigorous as those to come on the general question three years afterward.

[Footnote 22: Broadside copy of the resolution, accompanied by a letter of Governor James Turner of North Carolina to the governor of Connecticut, in the possession of the Pennsylvania Historical Society.]

[Footnote 23: H.V. Ames, Proposed Amendments to the Constitution, in the American Historical Association Report for 1896, pp. 208, 209.]

[Footnote 24: Printed from Senator Plumer's notes, in the American Historical Review, XXII, 340-364.]

In the winter of 1804-1805 bills were introduced in both Senate and House to prohibit slave importations at large; but the one was postponed for a year and the other was rejected,[25] doubtless because the time was not near enough when they could take effect. At last the matter was formally presented by President Jefferson. "I congratulate you, fellow-citizens," he said in his annual message of December 2, 1806, "on the approach of the period at which you may interpose your authority constitutionally to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country have long been eager to proscribe. Although no law you can pass can take effect until the day of the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, yet the intervening period is not too long to prevent, by timely notice, expeditions which cannot be completed before that day."[26] Next day Senator Bradley of Vermont gave notice of a bill which was shortly afterward introduced and which, after an unreported discussion, was passed by the Senate on January 27. Its conspicuous provisions were that after the close of the year 1807 the importation of slaves was to be a felony punishable with death, and that the interstate coasting trade in slaves should be illegal.

[Footnote 25: W.E.B. DuBois, Suppression of the African Slave Trade, p. 105.]

The report of proceedings in the House was now full, now scant. The paragraph of the President's message was referred on December 3 to a committee of seven with Peter Early of Georgia as chairman and three other Southerners in the membership. The committee's bill reported on December 15, proposed to prohibit slave importations, to penalize the fitting out of vessels for the trade by fine and forfeiture, to lay fines and forfeitures likewise upon the owners and masters found within the jurisdictional waters of the United States with slaves from abroad on board, and empowered the President to use armed vessels in enforcement. It further provided that if slaves illegally introduced should be found within the United States they should be forfeited, and any person wittingly concerned in buying or selling them should be fined; it laid the burden of proof upon defendants when charged on reasonable grounds of presumption with having violated the act; and it prescribed that the slaves forfeited should, like other goods in the same status, be sold at public outcry by the proper federal functionaries.[27]

[Footnote 26: Annals of Congress, 1806-1807, p. 14.]

[Footnote 27 Ibid., pp. 167, 168.]

Mr. Sloan of New Jersey instantly moved to amend by providing that the forfeited slaves be entitled to freedom. Mr. Early replied that this would rob the bill of all effect by depriving it of public sanction in the districts whither slaves were likely to be brought. Those communities, he said, would never tolerate the enforcement of a law which would set fresh Africans at large in their midst. Mr. Smilie, voicing the sentiment and indicating the dilemma of most of his fellow Pennsylvanians, declared his unconquerable aversion to any measure which would make the federal government a dealer in slaves, but confessed that he had no programme of his own. Nathaniel Macon, the Speaker, saying that he thought the desire to enact an effective law was universal, agreed with Early that Sloan's amendment would defeat the purpose. Early himself waxed vehement, prophesying the prompt extermination of any smuggled slaves emancipated in the Southern states. The amendment was defeated by a heavy majority.

Next day, however, Mr. Bidwell of Massachusetts renewed Sloan's attack by moving to strike out the provision for the forfeiture of the slaves; but his colleague Josiah Quincy, supported by the equally sagacious Timothy Pitkin of Connecticut, insisted upon the necessity of forfeiture; and Early contended that this was particularly essential to prevent the smuggling of slaves across the Florida border where the ships which had brought them would keep beyond the reach of congressional laws. The House finding itself in an impasse referred the bill back to the same committee, which soon reported it in a new form declaring the illegal importation of slaves a felony punishable with death. Upon Early's motion this provision was promptly stricken out in committee of the whole by a vote of 60 to 41; whereupon Bidwell renewed his proposal to strike out the forfeiture of slaves. He was numerously supported in speeches whose main burden was that the United States government must not become the receiver of stolen goods. The speeches in reply stressed afresh the pivotal quality of forfeiture in an effective law; and Bidwell when pressed for an alternative plan could only say that he might if necessary be willing to leave them to the disposal of the several states, but was at any rate "opposed to disgracing our statute book with a recognition of the principle of slavery." Quincy replied that he wished Bidwell and his fellows "would descend from their high abstract ground to the level of things in their own state—such as have, do and will exist after your laws, and in spite of them." The Southern members, said he, were anxious for nothing so much as a total prohibition, and for that reason were insistent upon forfeiture. For the sake of enforcing the law, and for the sake of controlling the future condition of the smuggled slaves, forfeiture was imperative. Such a provision would not necessarily admit that the importers had had a title in the slaves before capture, but it and it alone would effectively divest them of any color of title to which they might pretend. The amendment was defeated by a vote of 36 to 63.

When the bill with amendments was reported to the House by the committee of the whole, on December 31, there was vigorous debate upon the question of substituting imprisonment of from five to ten years in place of the death penalty. Mr. Talmadge of Connecticut supported the provision of death with a biblical citation; and Mr. Smilie said he considered it the very marrow of the bill. Mr. Lloyd of Maryland thought the death penalty would be out of proportion to the crime, and considered the extract from Exodus inapplicable since few of the negroes imported had been stolen in Africa. But Mr. Olin of Vermont announced that the man-stealing argument had persuaded him in favor of the extreme penalty. Early now became furious, and in his fury, frank. In a preceding speech he had pronounced slavery "an evil regretted by every man in the country."[28] He now said: "A large majority of the people in the Southern states do not ... believe it immoral to hold human flesh in bondage. Many deprecate slavery as an evil; as a political evil; but not as a crime. Reflecting men apprehend, at some future day, evils, incalculable evils, from it; but it is a fact that few, very few, consider it as a crime. It is best to be candid on this subject.... I will tell the truth. A large majority of people in the Southern states do not consider slavery as an evil. Let the gentleman go and travel in that quarter of the Union; let him go from neighborhood to neighborhood, and he will find that this is the fact. Some gentlemen appear to legislate for the sake of appearances.... I should like to know what honor you will derive from a law that will be broken every day of your lives."[29] Mr. Stanton said with an air of deprecation on behalf of his state of Rhode Island: "I wish the law made so strong as to prevent this trade in future; but I cannot believe that a man ought to be hung for only stealing a negro. Those who buy them are as bad as those who import them, and deserve hanging quite as much." The yeas and nays recorded at the end of the exhausting day showed 63 in favor and 53 against the substitution of imprisonment. The North was divided, 29 to 37, with the nays coming mostly from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Connecticut; the South, although South Carolina as well as Kentucky was evenly divided, cast 34 yeas to 16 nays. Virginia and Maryland, which might have been expected to be doubtful, virtually settled the question by casting 17 yeas against 6 nays.

[Footnote 28: Annals of Congress, 1806-1807, p. 174.]

[Footnote 29: Ibid., pp. 238, 239.]

When the consideration of the bill was resumed on January 7, Mr. Bidwell renewed his original attack by moving to strike out the confiscation of slaves; and when this was defeated by 39 to 77, he attempted to reach the same end by a proviso "That no person shall be sold as a slave by virtue of this act," This was defeated only by the casting vote of the Speaker. Those voting aye were all from Northern states, except Archer of Maryland, Broom of Delaware, Bedinger of Kentucky and Williams of North Carolina. The noes were all from the South except one from New Hampshire, ten from New York, and one from Pennsylvania. The outcome was evidently unsatisfactory to the bulk of the members, for on the next day a motion to recommit the bill to a new committee of seventeen prevailed by a vote of 76 to 46. Among the members who shifted their position over night were six of the ten from New York, four from Maryland, three from Virginia, and two from North Carolina. In the new committee Bedinger of Kentucky, who was regularly on the Northern side, was chairman, and Early was not included.

This committee reported in February a bill providing, as a compromise, that forfeited negroes should be carried to some place in the United States where slavery was either not permitted or was in course of gradual extinction, and there be indentured or otherwise employed as the President might deem best for them and the country. Early moved that for this there be substituted a provision that the slaves be delivered to the several states in which the captures were made, to be disposed of at discretion; and he said that the Southern people would resist the indenture provision with their lives. This reckless assertion suggests that Early was either set against the framing of an effective law, or that he spoke in mere blind rage.

Before further progress was made the House laid aside its bill in favor of the one which the Senate had now passed. An amendment to this, striking out the death penalty, was adopted on February 12 by a vote of 67 to 48. The North gave 31 ayes and 36 noes, quite evenly distributed among the states. The South cast 37 ayes to 11 noes, five of the latter coming from Virginia, two from North Carolina, and one each from Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and South Carolina. A considerable shifting of votes appeared since the ballot on the same question six weeks before. Knight of Rhode Island, Sailly and Williams of New York, Helms of New Jersey and Wynns of North Carolina changed in favor of the extreme penalty; but they were more than offset by the opposite change of Bidwell of Massachusetts, Van Cortlandt of New York, Lambert of New Jersey, Clay and Gray of Virginia and McFarland of North Carolina. Numerous members from all quarters who voted on one of these roll-calls were silent at the other, and this variation also had a net result against the infliction of death. The House then filled the blank it had made in the bill by defining the offense as a high misdemeanor and providing a penalty of imprisonment of not less than five nor more than ten years. John Randolph opposed even this as excessive, but found himself unsupported. The House then struck out the prohibition of the coasting trade in slaves, and returned the bill as amended to the Senate. The latter concurred in all the changes except that as to the coastwise trade, and sent the bill back to the House.

John Randolph now led in the insistence that the House stand firm. If the bill should pass without the amendment, said he, the Southern people would set the law at defiance, and he himself would begin the violation of so unconstitutional an infringement of the rights of property. The House voted to insist upon its amendment, and sent the bill to conference where in compromise the prohibition as to the coastwise carriage of slaves for sale was made to apply only to vessels of less than forty tons burthen. The Senate agreed to this. In the House Mr. Early opposed it as improper in law and so easy of evasion that it would be perfectly futile for the prevention of smuggling from Florida. John Randolph said: "The provision of the bill touched the right of private property. He feared lest at a future period it might be made the pretext of universal emancipation. He had rather lose the bill, he had rather lose all the bills of the session, he had rather lose every bill passed since the establishment of the government, than agree to the provision contained in this slave bill. It went to blow up the Constitution in ruins."[30] Concurrence was carried, nevertheless, by a vote of 63 to 49, in which the North cast 51 ayes to 12 noes, and the South 12 ayes to 37 noes. The Southern ayes were four from Maryland, four from North Carolina, two from Tennessee, and one each from Virginia and Kentucky. The Northern noes were five from New York, two each from New Hampshire and Vermont, and one each from Massachusetts, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

[Footnote 30: Annals of Congress, 1806-1807, p. 626.]

The bill then passed the House. Its variance from the original House bill was considerable, for it made the importation of slaves from abroad a high misdemeanor punishable with imprisonment; it prohibited the coastwise trade by sea in vessels of less than forty tons, and required the masters of larger vessels transporting negroes coastwise to deliver to the port officials classified manifests of the negroes and certificates that to the best of their knowledge and belief the slaves had not been imported since the beginning of 1808; and instead of forfeiture to the United States it provided that all smuggled slaves seized under the act should be subject to such disposal as the laws of the state or territory in which the seizure might be made should prescribe.[31] Randolph, still unreconciled, offered an explanatory act, February 27, that nothing in the preceding act should be construed to affect in any manner the absolute property right of masters in their slaves not imported contrary to the law, and that such masters should not be liable to any penalty for the coastwise transportation of slaves in vessels of less than forty tons. In attempting to force this measure through, he said that if it did not pass the House at once he hoped the Virginia delegation would wait on the President and remonstrate against his approving the act which had passed.[32] By a vote of 60 to 49 this bill was made the order for the next day; but its further consideration was crowded out by the rush of business at the session's close. The President signed the prohibitory bill on March 2, without having received the threatened Virginia visitation.

[Footnote 31: Ibid., pp. 1266-1270.]

[Footnote 32: Annals of Congress, 1806-1807, p. 637.]

Among the votes in the House on which the yeas and nays were recorded in the course of these complex proceedings, six may be taken as tests. They were on striking out the death penalty, December 31; on striking out the forfeiture of slaves, January 7; on the proviso that no person should be sold by virtue of the act, January 7; on referring the bill to a new committee, January 8; on striking out the death penalty from the Senate bill, February 12; and on the prohibition of the coasting trade in slaves in vessels of under forty tons, February 26. In each case a majority of the Northern members voted on one side of the question, and a yet larger majority of Southerners voted on the other. Twenty-two members voted in every case on the side which the North tended to adopt. These comprised seven from Massachusetts, six from Pennsylvania, three from Connecticut, and one or two from each of the other Northern states except Rhode Island and Ohio. They comprised also Broom of Delaware, Bedinger of Kentucky, and Morrow of Virginia; while Williams of North Carolina was almost equally constant in opposing the policies advocated by the bulk of his fellow Southerners. On the other hand the regulars on the Southern side comprised not only ten Virginians, all of the six South Carolinians, except three of their number on the punishment questions, all of the four Georgians, three North Carolinians, two Marylanders and one Kentuckian, but in addition Tenney of New Hampshire, Schuneman, Van Rensselaer and Verplanck of New York on all but the punishment questions.

On the whole, sectional divergence was fairly pronounced, but only on matters of detail. The expressions from all quarters of a common desire to make the prohibition of importations effective were probably sincere without material exception. As regards the Virginia group of states, their economic interest in high prices for slaves vouches for the genuine purpose of their representatives, while that of the Georgians and South Carolinians may at the most be doubted and not disproved. The South in general wished to prevent any action which might by implication stigmatize the slaveholding regime, and was on guard also against precedents tending to infringe state rights. The North, on the other hand, was largely divided between a resolve to stop the sanction of slavery and a desire to enact an effective law in the premises directly at issue. The outcome was a law which might be evaded with relative ease wherever public sanction was weak, but which nevertheless proved fairly effective in operation.

When slave prices rose to high levels after the war of 1812 systematic smuggling began to prevail from Amelia Island on the Florida border, and on a smaller scale on the bayous of the Barataria district below New Orleans; but these operations were checked upon the passage of a congressional act in 1818 increasing the rewards to informers. Another act in the following year directed the President to employ armed vessels for police in both African and American waters, and incidentally made provisions contemplating the return of captured slaves to Africa. Finally Congress by an act of 1820 declared the maritime slave trade to be piracy.[33] Smuggling thereafter diminished though it never completely ceased.

[Footnote 33: DuBois, Suppression of the Slave Trade, pp. 118-123.]

As to the dimensions of the illicit importations between 1808 and 1860, conjectures have placed the gross as high as two hundred and seventy thousand.[34] Most of the documents in the premises, however, bear palpable marks of unreliability. It may suffice to say that these importations were never great enough to affect the labor supply in appreciable degree. So far as the general economic regime was concerned, the foreign slave trade was effectually closed in 1808.

[Footnote 34: W.H. Collins, The Domestic Slave Trade of the Southern States (New York [1904], pp. 12-20). See also W.E.B. DuBois, "Enforcement of the Slave Trade Laws," in the American Historical Association Report for 1891, p. 173.]

At that time, however, there were already in the United States about one million slaves to serve as a stock from which other millions were to be born to replenish the plantations in the east and to aid in the peopling of the west. These were ample to maintain a chronic racial problem, and had no man invented a cotton gin their natural increase might well have glutted the market for plantation labor. Had the African source been kept freely open, the bringing of great numbers to meet the demand in prosperous times would quite possibly have so burdened the country with surplus slaves in subsequent periods of severe depression that slave prices would have fallen virtually to zero, and the slaveholding community would have been driven to emancipate them wholesale as a means of relieving the masters from the burden of the slaves' support. The foes of slavery had long reckoned that the abolition of the foreign trade would be a fatal blow to slavery itself. The event exposed their fallacy. Thomas Clarkson expressed the disappointment of the English abolitionists in a letter of 1830: "We certainly have been deceived in our first expectations relative to the fruit of our exertions. We supposed that when by the abolition of the slave trade the planters could get no more slaves, they would not only treat better those whom they then had in their power, but that they would gradually find it to their advantage to emancipate them. A part of our expectations have been realized; ... but, alas! where the heart has been desperately wicked, we have found no change. We did not sufficiently take into account the effect of unlimited power on the human mind. No man likes to part with power, and the more unbounded it is, the less he likes to part with it. Neither did we sufficiently take into account the ignominy attached to a black skin as the badge of slavery, and how difficult it would be to make men look with a favourable eye upon what they had looked [upon] formerly as a disgrace. Neither did we take sufficiently into account the belief which every planter has, that such an unnatural state as that of slavery can be kept up only by a system of rigour, and how difficult therefore it would be to procure a relaxation from the ordinary discipline of a slave estate."[35]

[Footnote 35: MS. in private possession.]

If such was the failure in the British West Indies, the change in conditions in the United States was even greater; for the rise of the cotton industry concurred with the prohibition of the African trade to enhance immensely the preciousness of slaves and to increase in similar degree the financial obstacle to a sweeping abolition.



CHAPTER IX

THE INTRODUCTION OF COTTON AND SUGAR

The decade following the peace of 1783 brought depression in all the plantation districts. The tobacco industry, upon which half of the Southern people depended in greater or less degree, was entering upon a half century of such wellnigh constant low prices that the opening of each new tract for its culture was offset by the abandonment of an old one, and the export remained stationary at a little less than half a million hogsheads. Indigo production was decadent; and rice culture was in painful transition to the new tide-flow system. Slave prices everywhere, like those of most other investments, were declining in so disquieting a manner that as late as the end of 1794 George Washington advised a friend to convert his slaves into other forms of property, and said on his own account: "Were it not that I am principled against selling negroes, as you would cattle in a market, I would not in twelve months hence be possessed of a single one as a slave. I shall be happily mistaken if they are not found to be a very troublesome species of property ere many years have passed over our heads."[1] But at that very time the addition of cotton and sugar to the American staples was on the point of transforming the slaveholders' prospects.

[Footnote 1: New York Public Library Bulletin, 1898, pp. 14, 15.]

For centuries cotton had been among the world's materials for cloth, though the dearth of supply kept it in smaller use than wool or flax. This continued to be the case even when the original sources in the Orient were considerably supplemented from the island of Bourbon and from the colonies of Demarara, Berbice and Surinam which dotted the tropical South American coast now known as Guiana. Then, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the great English inventions of spinning and Weaving machinery so cheapened the manufacturing process that the world's demand for textiles was immensely stimulated. Europe was eagerly inquiring for new fiber supplies at the very time when the plantation states of America were under the strongest pressure for a new source of income.

The green-seed, short-staple variety of cotton had long been cultivated for domestic use in the colonies from New Jersey to Georgia, but on such a petty scale that spinners occasionally procured supplies from abroad. Thus George Washington, who amid his many activities conducted a considerable cloth-making establishment, wrote to his factor in 1773 that a bale of cotton received from England had been damaged in transit.[2] The cutting off of the foreign trade during the war for independence forced the Americans to increase their cotton production to supply their necessities for apparel. A little of it was even exported at the end of the war, eight bags of which are said to have been seized by the customs officers at Liverpool in 1784 on the ground that since America could not produce so great a quantity the invoice must be fraudulent. But cotton was as yet kept far from staple rank by one great obstacle, the lack of a gin. The fibers of the only variety at hand clung to the seed as fast as the wool to the sheep's back. It had to be cut or torn away; and because the seed-tufts were so small, this operation when performed by hand was exceedingly slow and correspondingly expensive. The preparation of a pound or two of lint a day was all that a laborer could accomplish.

[Footnote 2: MS. in the Library of Congress, Washington letter-books, XVII, 90.]

The problem of the time had two possible solutions; the invention of a machine for cleaning the lint from the seed of the sort already at hand, or the introduction of some different variety whose lint was more lightly attached. Both solutions were applied, and the latter first in point of time though not in point of importance.

About 1786 seed of several strains was imported from as many quarters by planters on the Georgia-Carolina coast. Experiments with the Bourbon variety, which yielded the finest lint then in the market, showed that the growing season was too short for the ripening of its pods; but seed procured from the Bahama Islands, of the sort which has ever since been known as sea-island, not only made crops but yielded a finer fiber than they had in their previous home. This introduction was accomplished by the simultaneous experiments of several planters on the Georgia coast. Of these, Thomas Spaulding and Alexander Bissett planted the seed in 1786 but saw their plants fail to ripen any pods that year. But the ensuing winter happened to be so mild that, although the cotton is not commonly a perennial outside the tropics, new shoots grew from the old roots in the following spring and yielded their crop in the fall.[3] Among those who promptly adopted the staple was Richard Leake, who wrote from Savannah at the end of 1788 to Tench Coxe: "I have been this year an adventurer, and the first that has attempted on a large scale, in the article of cotton. Several here as well as in Carolina have followed me and tried the experiment. I shall raise about 5000 pounds in the seed from about eight acres of land, and the next year I expect to plant from fifty to one hundred acres."[4]

[Footnote 3: Letter of Thomas Spaulding, Sapelo Island, Georgia, Jan. 20, 1844, to W.B. Scabrook, in J.A. Turner, ed., The Cotton Planter's Manual (New York, 1857), pp. 280-286.]

[Footnote 4: E.J. Donnell, Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton (New York, 1872), p. 45.]

The first success in South Carolina appears to have been attained by William Elliott, on Hilton Head near Beaufort, in 1790. He bought five and a half bushels of seed in Charleston at 14s per bushel, and sold his crop at 10-1/2d per pound. In the next year John Screven of St. Luke's parish planted thirty or forty acres, and sold his yield at from 1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d. sterling per pound. Many other planters on the islands and the adjacent mainland now joined the movement. Some of them encountered failure, among them General Moultrie of Revolutionary fame who planted one hundred and fifty acres in St. John's Berkeley in 1793 and reaped virtually nothing.[5]

[Footnote 5: Whitemarsh B. Seabrook, Memoir on the Origin, Cultivation and Uses of Cotton (Charleston, 1844), pp. 19, 20.]

The English market came promptly to esteem the long, strong, silky sea-island fiber as the finest of all cottons; and the prices at Liverpool rose before the end of the century to as high as five shillings a pound. This brought fortunes in South Carolina. Captain James Sinkler from a crop of three hundred acres on his plantation, "Belvedere," in 1794 gathered 216 pounds to the acre, which at prices ranging from fifty to seventy-five cents a pound brought him a gross return of $509 per laborer employed.[6] Peter Gaillard of St. John's Berkeley received for his crop of the same year an average of $340 per hand; and William Brisbane of St. Paul's earned so much in the three years from 1796 to 1798 that he found himself rich enough to retire from work and spend several years in travel at the North and abroad. He sold his plantation to William Seabrook at a price which the neighbors thought ruinously high, but Seabrook recouped the whole of it from the proceeds of two years' crops.[7]

[Footnote 6: Samuel DuBose, Address delivered before the Black Oak Agricultural Society, April 28, 1858, in T.G. Thomas, The Huguenots of South Carolina (New York, 1887).]

[Footnote 7: W.B. Seabrook, Memoir on Cotton, p. 20.]

The methods of tillage were quickly systematized. Instead of being planted, as at first, in separate holes, the seed came to be drilled and plants grown at intervals of one or two feet on ridges five or six feet apart; and the number of hoeings was increased. But the thinner fruiting of this variety prevented the planters from attaining generally more than about half the output per acre which their upland colleagues came to reap from their crops of the shorter staple. A hundred and fifty pounds to the acre and three or four acres to the hand was esteemed a reasonable crop on the seaboard.[8] The exports of the sea-island staple rose by 1805 to nearly nine million pounds, but no further expansion occurred until 1819 when an increase carried the exports for a decade to about eleven million pounds a year. In the course of the twenties Kinsey Burden and Hugh Wilson, both of St. John's Colleton, began breeding superfine fiber through seed selection, with such success that the latter sold two of his bales in 1828 at the unequaled price of two dollars a pound. The practice of raising fancy grades became fairly common after 1830, with the result, however, that for the following decade the exports fell again to about eight million pounds a year.[9]

[Footnote 8: John Drayton, View of South Carolina (Charleston, 1802), p. 132; J.A. Turner, ed., Cotton Planter's Manual, pp. 129, 131.]

[Footnote 9: Seabrook, pp. 35-37, 53.]

Sea-island cotton, with its fibers often measuring more than two inches in length, had the advantages of easy detachment from its glossy black seed by squeezing it between a pair of simple rollers, and of a price for even its common grades ranging usually more than twice that of the upland staple. The disadvantages were the slowness of the harvesting, caused by the failure of the bolls to open wide; the smallness of the yield; and the necessity of careful handling at all stages in preparing the lint for market. Climatic requirements, furthermore, confined its culture within a strip thirty or forty miles wide along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. In the first flush of the movement some of the rice fields were converted to cotton;[10] but experience taught the community ere long that the labor expense in the new industry absorbed too much of the gross return for it to displace rice from its primacy in the district.

[Footnote 10: F.A. Michaux, Travels, in R.G. Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, III, 303.]

In the Carolina-Georgia uplands the industrial and social developments of the eighteenth century had been in marked contrast with those on the seaboard. These uplands, locally known as the Piedmont, were separated from the tide-water tract by a flat and sandy region, the "pine barrens," a hundred miles or more in breadth, where the soil was generally too light for prosperous agriculture before the time when commercial fertilizers came into use. The Piedmont itself is a rolling country, extending without a break from Virginia to Alabama and from the mountains of the Blue Ridge to the line of the lowest falls on the rivers. The soil of mingled clay and sand was originally covered with rich forest mold. The climate was moderately suited to a great variety of crops; but nothing was found for which it had a marked superiority until short-staple cotton was made available.

In the second half of the eighteenth century this region had come to be occupied in scattered homesteads by migrants moving overland from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, extending their regime of frontier farms until the stubborn Creek and Cherokee Indian tribes barred further progress. Later comers from the same northeastward sources, some of them bringing a few slaves, had gradually thickened the settlement without changing materially its primitive system of life. Not many recruits had entered from the rice coast in colonial times, for the regime there was not such as to produce pioneers for the interior. The planters, unlike those of Maryland and Virginia, had never imported appreciable numbers of indentured servants to become in after years yeomen and fathers of yeomen; the slaves begat slaves alone to continue at their masters' bidding; and the planters themselves had for the time being little inducement to forsake the lowlands. The coast and the Piedmont were unassociated except by a trickle of trade by wagon and primitive river-boat across the barrens. The capture of Savannah and Charleston by the British during the War for Independence, however, doubtless caused a number of the nearby inhabitants to move into the Piedmont as refugees, carrying their slaves with them.

The commercial demands of the early settlers embraced hardly anything beyond salt, ammunition and a little hardware. The forest and their half-cleared fields furnished meat and bread; workers in the households provided rude furniture and homespun; and luxuries, except home-made liquors, were unknown. But the time soon came when zealous industry yielded more grain and cattle than each family needed for its own supply. The surplus required a market, which the seaboard was glad to furnish. The road and river traffic increased, and the procurement of miscellaneous goods from the ports removed the need of extreme diversity in each family's work. This treeing of energy led in turn to a search for more profitable market crops. Flax and hemp were tried, and tobacco with some success. Several new villages were founded, indeed, on the upper courses of the rivers to serve as stations for the inspection and shipment of tobacco; but their budding hopes of prosperity from that staple were promptly blighted. The product was of inferior grade, the price was low, and the cost of freightage high. The export from Charleston rose from 2680 hogsheads in 1784 to 9646 in 1799, but rapidly declined thereafter. Tobacco, never more than a makeshift staple, was gladly abandoned for cotton at the first opportunity.[11]

[Footnote 11: U.B. Phillips, History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860 (New York, 1908), pp. 46-55.]

At the time of the federal census of 1790 there were in the main group of upland counties of South Carolina, comprised then in the two "districts" of Camden and Ninety-six, a total of 91,704 white inhabitants, divided into 15,652 families. Of these 3787 held slaves to the number of 19,934—an average of 5-1/4 slaves in each holding. No more than five of these parcels comprised as many as one hundred slaves each, and only 156 masters, about four per cent, of the whole, had as many as twenty each. These larger holdings, along with the 335 other parcels ranging from ten to nineteen slaves each, were of course grouped mainly in the river counties in the lower part of the Piedmont, while the smallest holdings were scattered far and wide. That is to say, there was already discoverable a tendency toward a plantation regime in the localities most accessible to market, while among the farmers about one in four had one or more slaves to aid in the family's work. The Georgia Piedmont, for which the returns of the early censuses have been lost, probably had a somewhat smaller proportion of slaves by reason of its closer proximity to the Indian frontier.

A sprinkling of slaves was enough to whet the community's appetite for opportunities to employ them with effect and to buy more slaves with the proceeds. It is said that in 1792 some two or three million pounds of short-staple cotton was gathered in the Piedmont,[12] perhaps in anticipation of a practicable gin, and that the state of Georgia had appointed a commission to promote the desired invention.[13] It is certain that many of the citizens were discussing the problem when in the spring of 1793 young Eli Whitney, after graduating at Yale College, left his home in Massachusetts intending to teach school in the South. While making a visit at the home of General Greene's widow, near Savannah, he listened to a conversation on the subject by visitors from upland Georgia, and he was urged by Phineas Miller, the manager of the Greene estate, to apply his Yankee ingenuity to the solution. When Miller offered to bear the expenses of the project, Whitney set to work, and within ten days made a model which met the essential requirements. This comprised a box with a slatted side against which a wooden cylinder studded with wire points was made to play. When seed cotton was fed into the box and the cylinder was revolved, the sharp wires passing between the slats would engage the lint and pull it through as they passed out in the further revolution of the cylinder. The seed, which were too large to pass through the grating, would stay within the hopper until virtually all the wool was torn off, whereupon they would fall through a crevice on the further side. The minor problem which now remained of freeing the cylinder's teeth from their congestion of lint found a solution in Mrs. Greene's stroke with a hearth-broom. Whitney, seizing the principle, equipped his machine with a second cylinder studded with brushes, set parallel to the first but revolving in an opposite direction and at a greater speed. This would sweep the teeth clean as fast as they emerged lint-laden from the hopper. Thus was the famous cotton-gin devised.[14]

[Footnote 12: Letter of Phineas Miller to the Comptroller of South Carolina, in the American Historical Review, III, 115.]

[Footnote 13: M.B. Hammond, The Cotton Industry (New York, 1807), p. 23.]

[Footnote 14: Denison Olmstead, Memoir of Eli Whitney, Esq. (New Haven, 1846), reprinted in J.A. Turner, ed., Cotton Planter's Manual, pp. 297-320. M.B. Hammond, The Cotton Industry, pp. 25, 26.]

Miller, who now married Mrs. Greene, promptly entered into partnership with Whitney not only to manufacture gins but also to monopolize the business of operating them, charging one-third of the cotton as toll. They even ventured into the buying and selling of the staple on a large scale. Miller wrote Whitney in 1797, for example, that he was trying to raise money for the purchase of thirty or forty thousand pounds of seed cotton at the prevailing price of three cents, and was projecting a trade in the lint to far-off Tennessee.[15] By this time the partners had as many as thirty gins in operation at various points in Georgia; but misfortune had already begun to pursue them. Their shop on the Greene plantation had been forced by a mob even before their patent was procured in 1793, and Jesse Bull, Charles M. Lin and Edward Lyons, collaborating near Wrightsboro, soon put forth an improved gin in which saw-toothed iron discs replaced the wire points of the Whitney model.[16] Whitney had now returned to New Haven to establish a gin factory, and Miller wrote him in 1794 urging prompt shipments and saying: "The people of the country are running mad for them, and much can be said to justify their importunity. When the present crop is harvested there will be a real property of at least fifty thousand dollars lying useless unless we can enable the holders to bring it to market," But an epidemic prostrated Whitney's workmen that year, and a fire destroyed his factory in 1795. Meanwhile rival machines were appearing in the market, and Whitney and Miller were beginning their long involvement in lawsuits. Their overreaching policy of monopolizing the operation of their gins turned public sentiment against them and inclined the juries, particularly in Georgia, to decide in favor of their opponents. Not until 1807, when their patent was on the point of expiring did they procure a vindication in the Georgia courts. Meanwhile a grant of $50,000 from the legislature of South Carolina to extinguish the patent right in that state, and smaller grants from North Carolina and Tennessee did little more than counterbalance expenses.[17] A petition which Whitney presented to Congress in 1812 for a renewal of his expired patent was denied, and Whitney turned his talents to the manufacture of muskets.