The Middle Period 1817-1858 Part 5

There is no doubt that the clock of the ages was turned back full half a century in regard to this great question by the Const.i.tution of 1787.

[Sidenote: Reaction against the humanitarian principles of the Revolution.]

From 1787 to 1808 the reactionary course was pursued almost without a single break. Kentucky was made a Commonwealth with the slave status.

The Congress accepted from North Carolina and Georgia cessions of the territory which lay to the west of them, and which they claimed as belonging to them, with a condition {51} that slavery should not be forbidden therein by Congress. The slave Commonwealth of Tennessee was immediately formed out of a part of this territory. The vast territory of Louisiana, in which slavery existed wherever it was inhabited, was added to the domain of the Union. The District of Columbia, the seat of the general Government, was made a slave-holding community, through the adoption by Congress of the laws of Maryland as the code of the District. A fugitive slave-law was pa.s.sed by Congress, which enabled any white man to seize, as his slave, any man of color, and bring him before any magistrate, and, upon proof satisfactory to the latter, to demand such papers and certificates as would legally warrant him in reclaiming the slave and transporting him to the place whence he was said to have escaped; and pet.i.tions to Congress complaining of the abuse of this arbitrary power were laid aside without consideration.

Even the Territory of Indiana prayed Congress to suspend for it that part of the Ordinance of 1787 which forbade slavery within its limits.

And South Carolina abolished her law against the importation of slaves, and opened the way wide for a vast increase of the slave population.

[Sidenote: Abolition of the foreign slave-trade by Congress.]

These last acts seem to have aroused the consciousness of the Congress to the rapidity with which the whole country was becoming again subject to the slave-holding interests. The Congress resisted the importunities of the Indiana leaders, and after giving South Carolina a reasonable time to re-enact her law abolishing the foreign slave-trade, without effect, proceeded itself to abolish the trade from the first moment that the Const.i.tution permitted this to be done, from January 1st, 1808.

[Sidenote: Cotton culture and the cotton-gin.]

[Sidenote: The effect of the return to the arts of peace upon the ideas concerning slavery.]

It has been customary to ascribe the great revulsion {52} of view in regard to slavery, which certainly manifested itself everywhere in the United States between 1790 and 1807, to cotton culture and the cotton-gin. The invention of the cotton-gin, in the first part of the last decade of the eighteenth century, and the increased demand for cotton fabrics throughout the world, had made the cultivation of cotton highly profitable. An increase in cotton culture was naturally encouraged by such enhanced profits, and this tendency produced an increased demand for negro labor and for new lands, since the cotton crop requires a warm climate and low lands, and exhausts the soil very rapidly. Those parts of the country adapted to cotton-raising felt, therefore, a renewed interest in the increase of negro labor and in territorial extension. And those parts not so adapted felt an indirect interest in the same, since the increased and still increasing profits of the cotton culture made a market for their slaves and a carrying trade for their shipowners. There is no doubt that such was the main cause of the great change of view in regard to the question of negro slavery which the country experienced between 1790 and 1810, but it was not the sole cause. It was inevitable that, when the men of that era pa.s.sed out of the excited state of mind and feeling produced by the War with the motherland, and came to the task of re-establishing the relations of peace and every-day life and business, they should regain a calmness of judgment, a respect for vested rights, and a regard for customary relations, which placed the political philosophy of 1776 under many limitations and qualifications, some of which, certainly, were sound and valuable. It is only when we take all of these considerations together that we comprehend the reasoning of the men of the first decade of this {53} century upon the great question.

They saw a great interest developing which was bringing wealth and comfort into an impoverished country. They knew that it could be then sustained only by negro labor. They did not believe that the negro would work unless forced to it by the white man. They thought it was better for the negro himself to have food, clothing, and shelter, in slavery, than to starve, or become a robber, in liberty. They felt, on the other hand, that the slavery of one human being to another was an exceptional relation in a political system which rested its own right to independent existence upon the doctrine of human freedom. It was not, then, unnatural that they arrived at the conclusion that to prohibit further importations of the barbarians from Africa was the only remedy for which the time was ripe. They sincerely believed that they would place themselves and their slaves in a far more advantageous position for the gradual elevation of the latter by having to deal only with negroes born and reared amid civilized surroundings, and that freedom would finally be attained by all, as the result of a gradual advancement in intelligence, morals, and industry, and would be thus attained without any shock to the civilization and welfare of the country.

This appeared to the men of that day, both of the North and of the South, to be the only safe way to proceed in solving the question of the relation between the highly civilized Anglo-American race and the grossly barbaric negro race in the United States. We think now that they might have done better, and some of the more unsympathetic critics of our history affirm that they did nothing of any consequence, and that in what they did do they acted with a consciously deceptive purpose. There may have been a few to whom this criticism can be justly applied, but there is no {54} sufficient evidence that the ma.s.s of them were insincere either in act or thought. The contention that they were is more partisan than truly historical.

[Sidenote: Slavery during the War of 1812, and the years just before and just after this war.]

The decade between 1807 and 1817 was filled with the questions of foreign relations, of foreign war, and of the results of foreign war.

The suspension, and then the almost entire destruction, of foreign commerce by the British Orders in Council, the Napoleonic decrees, the Jeffersonian embargo, and the War of 1812, reduced the exportation in cotton from about fifty millions of pounds in 1807 to less than twenty millions of pounds in 1814. The pecuniary interest in the maintenance of slavery declined thus quite materially, and the majority of the leading men, both North and South, still regarded negro slavery as only a temporary status, which would be gradually modified in the direction of freedom.

[Sidenote: Slavery in the Louisiana territory.]

Notwithstanding all this, however, the slavery interest was steadily waxing in influence and power throughout this period. First of all the existence and the extension of slavery in the vast territory purchased from France was secured. The custom of slave-holding had been introduced into this territory by the French and Spanish immigrants, while it was in the possession of France and Spain, before the year 1800. In that year Spain, as we have seen, receded it to France. Nine years before this date, slavery had been abolished in France by the National a.s.sembly. It is certainly a question, then, whether the re-establishment of French supremacy over Louisiana in 1800 did not produce the abolition of slavery there. It will be remembered that France was at that moment subject to the consular government of Bonaparte, and that the Consul was not an enthusiast for the revolutionary ideals. He did not disturb the custom of slave-holding {55} in Louisiana, and when he ceded this vast territory to the United States, in 1803, the custom existed in all its inhabited parts. The Treaty of cession contained a provision which pledged the Government of the United States to uphold the rights of property of the inhabitants of the province. It can be fairly said, therefore, that the United States Government obligated itself to France to maintain slavery within the territory ceded until it should be erected into a Commonwealth, or into Commonwealths, of the Union.

The United States Government might have violated the Treaty, if it had chosen to do so, and the question then raised would have been one of a purely diplomatic or international character. There would have been no question of const.i.tutional power involved. The act of the United States Government breaking the Treaty would have been the law of the land for the inhabitants of this territory.

The United States Government, however, not only permitted the continuance of the custom of slave-holding in Louisiana, but when, in 1804, Congress divided this vast region into two parts by the thirty-third parallel of lat.i.tude, and organized the southern portion as the Territory of Orleans, and placed the northern portion under the jurisdiction of the Governor and judges of the Territory of Indiana, it, at the same time, authorized citizens of the United States immigrating into the Territory of Orleans, for the purpose of actual settlement, to take their slaves with them, and provided that the French laws in force at the date of the division should continue in the northern part until repealed or modified by the Governor and judges of Indiana Territory. Any danger to slavery in this district of Louisiana, which might be contained in the power vested by Congress in the Governor and judges of the Territory of Indiana to {56} repeal or modify the French laws which Congress had allowed to continue in the district, was overcome, the following year, by the independent organization of this district as the Territory of Louisiana, and by a provision in the Act of Congress effecting this organization, which provided for the continuance in force of the laws of the district, until repealed or modified by the legislature of the Territory.

When, therefore, in 1812, the Territory of Orleans was erected into the Commonwealth of Louisiana, and the name of the Territory of Louisiana was changed to Missouri, there was no question about the status of the new Commonwealth. It was, both in fact and in law, a slave-holding Commonwealth; and the custom of slave-holding was perpetuated in the newly named Territory by the provision in the Act of Congress that the laws and regulations of the Territory of Louisiana should remain in force in the Territory of Missouri until repealed or modified by the legislature of the Territory of Missouri.

[Sidenote: Slavery in the territory west of North Carolina and Georgia.]

The Government of the United States had entered into obligations with North Carolina and Georgia, as we have seen, not to prohibit slavery in the territory ceded by them to the United States. Whatever we may think of the binding force of any such agreement from a legal point of view, certainly from an ethical point of view it could have been urged that the Government would have broken faith with some of the citizens of the United States had the Congress disregarded this understanding.

[Sidenote: Slavery in Louisiana a different question from slavery in the North Carolina and Georgia cessions.]

It cannot, however, be contended that there was any obligation, legal or moral, resting upon the Government of the United States toward any of the citizens of the United States, or any of the Commonwealths, to maintain slavery in the province of Louisiana and in the {57} Territories carved out of it. There was, as we have seen, a provision in the Treaty of cession of 1803, by which the United States Government obligated itself to France to protect the property of the inhabitants of the province. But the Government of the United States was under no obligation to any citizen of the United States, or to any Commonwealth of the Union, to keep this Treaty inviolate. It may be affirmed, then, that the United States Government had, in the case of Louisiana, for the first time, permitted and maintained slavery in territory where it was perfectly free to act in regard to this subject as it would, in so far as its own citizens were concerned. This certainly manifested a great increase in the power of the slave-holders over the general Government.

[Sidenote: Interest in slavery in Maryland and Virginia increased by the acquisition of Louisiana.]

In consequence of this vast territorial extension of slavery the interest of the more Northern of the old slave-holding Commonwealths in slavery was, during this period, greatly re-enlivened. Maryland and Virginia were already, in 1807, overstocked with slaves. The opening up of the virgin lands of the Southwest to the immigration of masters and slaves from the older Commonwealths, and the abolition of the foreign slave-trade, now made the Southwest an excellent market for the surplus slave population of these older Commonwealths.

[Sidenote: The domestic slave-trade.]

The domestic slave-trade began now to be one of the chief sources of the wealth of Maryland and Virginia especially. Those who partic.i.p.ated in this traffic justified it by the claim that it was better for the slaves themselves to be removed to new homes, where they could be better supported, than to be kept in their old homes and suffer for the want of the necessaries of life, and that the distribution of the slave {58} population over a larger area would make future emanc.i.p.ation easier, and less dangerous to the supremacy of the white race. There was a certain force in this reasoning. The ma.s.s of the slave-holders seem to have been fully convinced of its soundness, although it did not entirely quiet the consciences of the best men among them to the many painful incidents connected with the separation of the slaves, made subject to this traffic, from their old homes and a.s.sociations.

It is easy to see, however, that the raising of negro slaves, having become a most profitable industry in the older Commonwealths, acted as a vast bribe upon the ideas of men in regard to the questions of the perpetuation and extension of slavery, and beclouded their consciences in respect thereto.

[Sidenote: The relation of slavery to the diplomacy of the United States.]

Finally, the capture and abduction of negro slaves by the British forces during the War of 1812, and the demand of the slave-holders that the United States Government should secure the rest.i.tution of their slaves, or compensation for the loss of them, from the British Government, moved the United States Government to a.s.sume its att.i.tude toward slavery in the administration of the international affairs of the country. The cardinal political principle of the slave-holding statesmen, at that period, was that slavery was a "State" matter with which the United States Government had no concern, and in regard to which it had no powers. This appeal to the Government to voice and enforce their demands against Great Britain in respect to their slave property has seemed, therefore, to some of the later and more radical critics of American history to have been a gross inconsistency, and they have represented it as a proof of the insincerity of the slave-holders wherever their pecuniary interests were involved.

{59} This criticism is rather taking, but a sound view of the Const.i.tution will hardly support it. In making the United States Government the _exclusive_ organ for dealing with foreign countries, the Const.i.tution impliedly confers upon that Government a protectorate against foreign states over interests which are regulated, internally, only by the powers of the respective Commonwealths of the Union. It is true that this doctrine rests upon a national view of the federal system of government in the United States, a view which the slave-holding statesmen did not later share. From their later particularistic principle of the fundamental character of the Union, such a general protectorate over "State" interests by the United States Government against foreign countries could hardly be inferred from the Const.i.tution. If this principle could be a.s.sumed by these critics as having been held at that time by the slave-holding statesmen, their charge of inconsistency, if not of insincerity, would be fairly made out. But such, as we have seen, was not the case. Many of the slave-holding statesmen of 1816 were stronger in the national view of the character of the Union than were the statesmen of New England itself.

The United States Government recognized its duty to extend the protection demanded in the case, and it secured from the British Government compensation to the masters for the loss of slave property occasioned by the acts of the British officers during the War.

Such was the status of the slavery question at the close of the War of 1812-15, at the commencement, therefore, of the period when, withdrawing themselves from foreign complications, the people of the United States began to adjust the different parts of their political system, chiefly if not solely, to the demands of their internal interests, and to solve the problems of their {60} polity from the point of view of their domestic inst.i.tutions. It is not strange, then, that from this point of time onward the powerful inst.i.tution of negro slavery recognized more and more clearly its natural relations to all of these questions of internal policy and law, and sought more and more determinedly to bring the political system and the policies of the United States into accord with its own exclusive interests. For the first three or four years after the close of the War this tendency did not, as has been pointed out, appear upon the surface, but it was working in the depths. From 1820 to 1861, certainly, it furnishes the point of view for the correct elucidation of the majority of the great problems of the history of the United States.

{61}

CHAPTER IV.

THE CREATION OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF MISSOURI

The Growth of Slavery not Seriously Checked by the Prohibition of the Foreign Slave-trade--The General Government Powerless Against Slavery in the Existing Commonwealths--The Powers of the General Government in Respect to Slavery in the Territories--The Powers of Congress in the Admission of new "States" into the Union--Slavery in the Missouri Territory--The First Pet.i.tion from Missouri Territory for the Permission to form a Commonwealth--The Second Pet.i.tion, and the First Bill in Congress, for the Admission of Missouri--The Tallmadge Amendment to the Bill--Pa.s.sage of the Amendment by the House of Representatives--Pa.s.sage of the Original Bill by the Senate--The Missouri Bill during the Session of 1819-20--Mr. Taylor's Proposition--The Bill for the Admission of Maine Reported and Pa.s.sed by the House of Representatives--The Failure of Mr. Taylor's Plan--The Missouri Bill again before the House of Representatives--Mr. Taylor's Amendment to the Bill--The Independent Missouri Bill of the Senate--The Refusal of the Senate to Disconnect the two Measures--The Conference on the Subject, and the First Missouri Compromise--President Monroe's Approval of the Compromise--Review of the Points Involved in the Contest--The Revival of the Missouri Struggle--The Missouri Const.i.tution in Congress--Mr. Lowndes' Bill for the Admission of Missouri with the Instrument Unchanged--Defeat of the Lowndes Bill in the House--Pa.s.sage of the Senate Bill with a Proviso by the Senate--The Senate Bill Tabled by the House--Mr. Clay and the Second Missouri Compromise--Pa.s.sage of the Second Missouri Compromise Act--The General Effects of the Decisions Reached in the Missouri Question.

[Sidenote: The growth of slavery not seriously checked by the prohibition of the foreign slave-trade.]

Already before the year 1819, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, had it become manifest that the {62} influences and measures relied upon by the forefathers for the ultimate extirpation of negro slavery were not effecting the desired result in the Commonwealths south of the line of Pennsylvania and of the Ohio. It was evident that the revolutionary enthusiasm for universal liberty and the rights of man was not so strongly felt by the generation which grew up after "'76" as by the generation of "'76," that the laws against the importation of slaves were being evaded, and that the slaves were increasing by birth many times more rapidly than they were decreasing by emanc.i.p.ation and removal to the colonies of the American Society for Emanc.i.p.ation. Moreover, four new Commonwealths had been established--Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi--in which slavery was legalized, and a fifth--Alabama--was even then in process of creation. It was manifest from all sides to the friends of universal freedom that other means than those hitherto relied upon must be found, if any progress was to be made in the advancement of liberty, yea if the evident retrogression in respect to this prime element of political civilization was to be checked.

[Sidenote: The general Government powerless against slavery in the existing Commonwealths.]

All had been done by the United States Government, however, against slavery within the existing Commonwealths that the Const.i.tution allowed. Before anything more could be undertaken, the Const.i.tution itself would have to be so amended as to authorize it. The extraordinary majorities required for the initiation and adoption of amendments made it practically impossible to effect anything by such means. Of the thirteen original Commonwealths, seven had abolished slavery and six had retained it. To these had now been added four--Vermont, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois--in {63} which slavery was forbidden, and five in which it was permitted--Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama--making thus the number upon each side the same. And although the population in the Commonwealths north of the line of Pennsylvania and the Ohio had outstripped, in increase, that in those south of this line by near half a million of souls in thirty years, and the representation in the national House of Representatives stood consequently in favor of the former section in the ratio of 104 to 79, still the method of representation in the Senate, and the equality in the number of the Commonwealths permitting, with those prohibiting, slavery, stood firmly in the way of any amendment of the Const.i.tution, either favorable or unfavorable to the slavery interest.

[Sidenote: The powers of the general Government in respect to slavery in the Territories.]

The Const.i.tution furnished, however, an indirect way of reaching the desired result. It gave the Congress general powers within the Territories and did not restrict these powers in behalf of slavery.

Congress might thus prohibit slavery in the Territories, and the Territories would thus become settled by a free population, an anti-slavery population, which would form Commonwealths at the proper time, in which the free status would be perpetuated by Commonwealth law. And when a sufficient number of free Commonwealths had been thus created to give the necessary majorities to amend the Const.i.tution in the direction of abolition, slavery might be extinguished in the Commonwealths which had already legalized it. But the first difficulty in the way of the effectiveness of this line of action was the fact that Congress had already forfeited, in part, the opportunity, by failing to keep the southern portion of Louisiana Territory under a Territorial organization until slavery could have been eradicated in it. And it was probably, in {64} 1819, already too late to attempt to keep the remaining parts of this vast region, so far as it had been settled at all, under Territorial organization until this result could have been effected. At least, the advocates of freedom in 1819 evidently thought so, for they searched the Const.i.tution to find some other power in the general Government by which to deal with the question.

[Sidenote: The powers of Congress in the admission of new "States"

into the Union.]

There was another provision which had been already several times applied to this very subject and to other subjects. It was the provision which conferred upon Congress the power to create, or co-operate in creating, new Commonwealths out of the Territories of the United States. This power is expressed in general terms, and in its employment Congress had imposed a number of limitations upon the powers of the new Commonwealths which the Const.i.tution did not impose upon those of the original Commonwealths. Here, then, was a possible way for those seeking the advancement of liberty to effect their purpose. If their interpretation of the Const.i.tution, in regard to the extent of this power, was correct, and they could only command the President and a simple majority in both branches of Congress, they could abolish slavery in every new Commonwealth at the time of its creation, and make the continuance of the free status the perpetual condition of its continued existence as a Commonwealth. It would then be only a question of time when sufficient majorities would be secured for so amending the Const.i.tution of the United States as to expel slavery from the old Commonwealths through the regular forms for const.i.tutional development. It was an attractive scheme, and appeared to provide the means for ridding the country peaceably of its great evil at no very far distant day. It was the last possible means which the Const.i.tution afforded. It was {65} tried in the creation of the Commonwealth of Missouri and it failed. It is this which const.i.tutes the significance of the great movement. The result attained made the abolition of slavery by the United States Government, through legal and peaceable means, an utter impossibility. It contributed, at least, toward making the War of 1861 an historical necessity.

As we have seen in the preceding chapter, slaveholding had become established by custom in the vast region known as the Louisiana province, wherever it was inhabited, during the periods when it belonged to Spain and France, and had been permitted to continue after its acquisition by the United States; and that in 1812 this province was divided into one slave-holding Commonwealth, Louisiana, and one slave-holding Territory, Missouri.

[Sidenote: Slavery in the Missouri Territory.]

From 1812 to 1818 Congress did nothing toward the extinction of slavery in the Missouri Territory, or preventing the free immigration of masters with their slaves into the Territory. Neither had the legislature of the Territory done anything touching these subjects. It may, therefore, be a.s.sumed that in the year 1818, the holding of negroes as slaves was legal by custom, if not by positive law, in the whole of the Missouri Territory, so far as it had been settled, and that unless something should thereafter be done, either by the United States Government or by the Territorial government, forbidding it, slavery would be likewise legal wherever the Territory might become settled.