Part 9 (2/2)
Thus from Pennsylvania eastward the riddance of slavery was procured or put in train, generally by the device of emanc.i.p.ating the _post nati_; and in consequence the slave population in that quarter dwindled before the middle of the nineteenth century to a negligible residue. To the southward the tobacco states, whose industry had reached a somewhat stationary condition, found it a simple matter to prohibit the further importation of slaves from Africa. Delaware did this in 1776, Virginia in 1778, Maryland in 1783 and North Carolina in 1794. But in these commonwealths as well as in their more southerly neighbors, the contemplation of the great social and economic problems involved in disestablis.h.i.+ng slavery daunted the bulk of the citizens and impelled their representatives to conservatism. The advocacy of abolition, whether sudden or gradual, was little more than sporadic.
The people were not to be stampeded in the cause of inherent rights or any other abstract philosophy. It was a condition and not a theory which confronted them.
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 Const.i.tutional 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 disestablis.h.i.+ng slavery. This contemplated a gradual emanc.i.p.ation 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 cla.s.sic 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 G.o.d? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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, embarra.s.sed 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, emanc.i.p.ation 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 pet.i.tions presented to the Virginia legislature had barely been given a reading.[18]
[Footnote 18: Was.h.i.+ngton, _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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 Ma.s.sachusetts correspondence is printed in the Ma.s.sachusetts 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 grat.i.tude 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 ent.i.tled 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 p.r.o.nounced 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.]
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