CHAPTER VIII THE CIVIL WAR: ECONOMIC CAUSES AND RESULTS Slavery versus Free Labor Livermore, the Founders, Writings of washington, X, 220; XI, 25, 30; XIV, 272, 281. Jefferson's Trend of Southern Opinion. In the first decade of our Ingle, national history, antislavery sentiment was stronger in Vir- Ch. VIII. ginia than in New England. Washington repeatedly expressed his conviction that slavery should be abolished, and directed his heirs to set free his slaves and provide for their education and maintenance out of the estate. Jefferson regarded slavery as degrading to master and man alike, and introduced in the convention that formulated a state government for Virginia a bill providing for gradual emancipation. Children of slaves born after the passage of the act were to be educated at the public expense "to tillage, Writings, arts, or sciences, according to their geniusses, till the females III, 192, 243should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, 250, 266-268; IV, 82-84, when they should be colonized to such place as the circum184-185. stances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, etc., to declare them a free and independent people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they have acquired strength; and to send vessels at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants; to induce whom to migrate hither, proper encouragements were to be proposed." The measure failed because of the opposition of the tobacco planters, but Jefferson hoped for ultimate success. A bill for the emancipation of slaves was brought before the Virginia legislature in 1831. A similar proposition was debated in the Kentucky assem Writings of IV, 303. Thom, Spring. tions under Freedom. bly as late as 1849. Virginia prohibited the importation of slaves from abroad (1778), and Maryland followed her example in 1783. The twenty years extension of the slave trade conceded by the Federal Constitution was condemned by prominent Southerners. James Madison declared: "Twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be more dishonorable to the national character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution." A considerable number of slaves were being emancipated by the voluntary act of their owners. John Randolph had signalized his detestation of slavery by freeing his negroes and bequeathing $8000 for settling them on free soil. This "shocking example" was followed by other conscientious planters. The Friends of Sandy Spring, Maryland, freed their slaves early in the nineteenth century. The hospitable reputation of the Friends of Cass County, Michigan, attracted thither a number of freedmen. One wealthy Washington, Virginian emancipated his forty-one slaves by will and proTwo Genera- vided for their transportation to Cass County and for the purchase of land for their use. The number of manumissions steadily increased until they amounted to from two to U.S. Census, three thousand a year. It is estimated that in the last decade before the Civil War some twenty thousand negroes were so set free. The number of slaves escaping to the North was by comparison inconsiderable; the total reported for 1850 was 1011, and for 1860, 803. In 1860 the free colored population of the United States reached a total of 125-133, 633- 500,000, of whom 250,000 were found in the Southern states and 11,000 at the national capital. The presence of this large body of freedmen, neither citizens nor slaves, and having, therefore, no political status, caused considerable uneasiness to the ruling class, and laws regulating their conduct passed by several states, were hardly less severe than the slave code itself. 1860, Population, xv, xvi. Olmsted, Slave States, 637. De Bow, De Bow, To Southern statesmen the insuperable obstacle to general emancipation was the difficulty of providing for African freedmen in the American social and industrial order. Henry Clay hated slavery and ardently hoped to "eradicate this deepest stain upon the character of our country"; Speeches of nevertheless, he assured the Colonization Society of Ken- Henry Clay, Dec. 17, 1829. tucky: "If the question were submitted whether there should be either immediate or gradual emancipation of all the slaves in the United States without their removal or colonization, painful as it is to express the opinion, I have no doubt that it would be unwise to emancipate them. For I believe that the aggregate of all the evils which would be engendered upon society upon the supposition of such general emancipation and of the liberated slaves remaining promiscuously among us, would be greater than all the evils of slavery, great as they unquestionably are." Clay favored the colonization of emancipated slaves in the land from which they had been originally abducted, and urged upon Speeches of Congress the duty of furnishing the means of transportation Henry Clay, for at least 52,000 each year the equivalent of the annual Jan. 20, 1827. increase in the colored population. He believed that if this opportunity to dispose of the freedmen safely were given, the slave states would enact laws providing for gradual emancipation, and thus ultimately rid themselves "of a universally acknowledged curse.” The American Colonization Society was organized at Washington in 1815, in the hope of founding a freedmen's colony on the west coast of Africa, under conditions that should secure their immediate comfort and give some assurance of eventual self-support. The first settlement at Liberia was made in 1822. Seven years later, according to Clay, there were fifteen hundred freedmen in residence. They were successfully cultivating cotton, rice, and sugar, and were maintaining a fully constituted government together with schools, churches, and a public library. In 1849, when Liberia became an independent state, there were but eighteen thousand blacks of American origin in its population. The deportations had amounted to far less than the anticipated fifty-two thousand a year, and it became evident that the solution offered by the American Colonization Society was utterly inadequate. S De Bow, II, 234, 267, 309-310, 342. Brown, in Am. Hist., 50-83. Meantime, as the interests of the cotton planters gained Lower South ascendency in the councils of the South, a vigorous agitation in favor of the "peculiar institution" took the place of emancipation projects. The capital invested in cotton plantations amounted, in 1840, to $327,000,000, and the annual product represented a gross income of twenty, and a net income of eight, per cent. De Bow, II, 253, III, 131. De Bow, II, 235. Large-scale production seemed to necessitate slave labor. Governor Hammond of South Carolina declared that the cotton industry would be ruined by the emancipation of the negroes. "The first and most obvious effect would be to put an end to the cultivation of our great southern staple. And this would be equally the result, if we suppose the emancipated negroes to be in no way distinguished from the free laborers of other countries, and that their labor would be equally effective. In that case, they would soon cease to be laborers for hire, but would scatter themselves over our unbounded territory, to become independent landowners themselves. The cultivation of the soil on an extensive scale can only be carried on where there are slaves, or in countries superabounding with free labor. No such operations are carried on in any portion of our own country where there are not slaves. Such are carried on in England, where there is an overflowing population and intense competition for employment. And our institutions seem suited to the exigencies of our respective situations. There, a much greater number of laborers is required at one season of the year than at another, and the farmer may enlarge or diminish the quantity of labor he employs, as circumstances may require. Here, about the same quantity of labor is required at every season, and the planter suffers no inconvenience from retaining his laborers throughout the year. Imagine an extensive rice or cotton plantation cultivated by free laborers, who might perhaps strike for an increase in wages at a season when the neglect of a few days would insure the destruction of the whole crop: even if it were possible to secure laborers at all, what planter would venture to carry on his operations under such circumstances? I |