Volume Iii Part 12 (1/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: Locomotive, tender and two cars.]

Boston & Worcester Railroad, 1835.

From 1832 the railway system grew marvellously. The year 1833 saw completed the South Carolina Railroad between Charleston and the Savannah River, one hundred and thirty-six miles. This was the first railway line in this country to carry the mails, and the longest continuous one then in the world. Two years later Boston was connected by railway with Providence, with Lowell, and with Worcester, Baltimore with Was.h.i.+ngton, and the New York & Erie commenced. In 1839 Worcester was joined to Springfield in the same manner, and in 1841 a pa.s.senger could travel by rail from Boston to Rochester, changing cars, however, at least ten times.

PERIOD III.

THE YEARS OF SLAVERY CONTROVERSY 1840-1860

CHAPTER I.

SLAVERY AFTER THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE

[1820]

Slavery would most likely never have imperilled the life of this nation had it not been for the colossal industrial revolution sketched above.

Cotton had been grown here since, 1621, and some exportation of it is said to have occurred in 1747. Till nearly 1800 very little had gone from the United States to England, for by the old process a slave could clean but five or six pounds a day. In 1784, an American s.h.i.+p which brought eight bags to Liverpool was seized, on the ground that so much could not have been the produce of the United States. Jay's treaty, as first drawn, consented that no cotton should be exported from America.

It changed the very history of the country when, in 1793, Eli Whitney invented the saw-gin, by which a slave could clean 1,000 pounds of cotton per day. Slavery at once ceased to be a pa.s.sive, innocuous inst.i.tution, promising soon to die out, and became a means of gain, to be upheld and extended in all possible ways. The cotton export, but 189,316 pounds in 1791, and a third less in 1792, rose to 487,600 pounds in 1793, to 1,610,760 pounds in 1794, to 6,276,300 pounds in 1795, and to 38,118,041 pounds in 1804. Within five years after Whitney's invention, cotton displaced indigo as the great southern staple, and the slave States had become the cotton-field of the world. In 1869 the export was nearly 1,400,000,000 pounds, worth about $161,500,000.

[Footnote: Johnson, in Lalor's Cyclopaedia, Art. ”Slavery.”]

So profitable was slavery to vast numbers of individuals because of this its new status, that men would not notice how, after all, it militated against the nation's supreme interests. It polluted social relations in obvious ways, setting at naught among slaves family ties and the behests of virtue, influences that reacted terribly upon the whites. The entire government of slaves had a brutalizing tendency, more p.r.o.nounced as time pa.s.sed. ”Plantation manners” were cultivated, which, displaying themselves in Congress and elsewhere, in all discussions and measures relating to the execrable inst.i.tution, made the North believe that the South was drifting toward barbarism. This was an exaggeration, yet everyone knew that schools in the South were rare and poor, and thought and speech little free as compared with the same in the North. Political power, like the slaves, was in the hands of a few great barons, totally merciless toward even southerners who differed from them. It is of course not meant that virtue, kindliness, intelligence, and fair-mindedness were ever wanting in that section, but they flourished in spite of the slave-system.

Economically slavery was an equal evil, taking as was the superficial evidence to the contrary. No cruelty could make the slave work like a free man, while his power to consume was enormous. Infants, aged, and weak had to be supported by the owner. Even the best slaves were improvident. Everywhere slave labor tended to banish free. Upon slave soil scarcely an immigrant could be led to set foot. Poor whites grew steadily poorer, their lot often more wretched than that of slaves.

Invention, care, forethought were as good as unknown among them. Slave labor proved incompetent even for agriculture, impoveris.h.i.+ng the richest soil in comparatively few years, whence the perpetual impulse of the slave-owners to acquire new territory. The dishonesty of blacks and the danger of slave insurrections made property insecure, at the same time that the system diminished in every community the number of its natural defenders. The result was that the South, the superior of the North in natural resources, was, by 1800, rapidly becoming the inferior in every single element of prosperity.

[1831]

One of these insurrections was the event of 1831 in Virginia, originating near the southern border. Four slaves in alliance with three whites commenced it by killing several families and pressing all the slaves they could find into their service, until the force was nearly two hundred. They spread desolation everywhere. Fifty-five white persons were murdered before the insurrection was in hand. Virginia and North Carolina called out troops, and at last all the insurgents were captured or killed. The leader was a black named Nat Turner, who believed himself called of G.o.d to give his people freedom. He had heard voices in the air and seen signs on the sky, which, with many other portents, he interpreted as proofs of his divine commission. When all was over Turner escaped to the woods, dug a hole under some fence-rails and lived there for six weeks, coming out only at midnight for food. Driven thence by discovery, he still managed to hide here and there about the plantations in spite of a whole country of armed men in search of him, until at last he was accidentally confronted in the bush by a white man with levelled rifle. He was hanged, November 11th, and sixteen others later. His wife was tortured for evidence, but in vain. Twelve negroes were transported.

Very many were, without trial, punished in inhuman ways, the heads of some impaled along the highway as a warning. Partly in consequence of this horrible affair, originated a stout movement for the abolition of slavery in Virginia. This was favored by many of the ablest men in the Old Dominion, but they were overruled.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Turner, holding a short sword and another man pointing a rifle at him.]

The Discovery of Nat Turner.

Danger from the blacks necessitated the most rigid laws concerning them.

Time had been when it was thought not dangerous to teach slaves to read.

In 1742 Commissary Garden, of the English Society for Propagating the Gospel, founded a negro school in Charleston, where slaves were taught by slave teachers, these last being the society's property. Honest Elias Neale, the society's catechist in New York, engaged in the same work there, and afterward catechists were so employed in Philadelphia. That organization did much to stir up the planters to teach their slaves the rudiments of Christianity. [Footnote: Eggleston in Century, May, 1888.]

Now, all this was changed. The strictest laws were made to keep every slave in the most abject ignorance, to prevent their congregating, and to make it impossible for abolitionists or abolitionist literature or influence to get at them.

[1816]

Inconvenient and perilous as slavery was, southern devotion to it for many reasons strengthened rather than weakened. The ma.s.ses did not perceive the ruin the system was working, which, moreover, consisted with great profits to vast numbers of influential men and to many localities. Border States little by little gave up the hope of becoming free, the old anti-slavery convictions of their best men faltering, and the practical problem of emanc.i.p.ation, really difficult, being too easily decided insoluble. More significant, owing to a variety of circ.u.mstances, the abolition spirit itself greatly subsided early in the present century. Completion of the emanc.i.p.ation process in the North was a.s.sured by the action of New York in 1817, proclaiming a total end to slavery there from July 4, 1827. The view that each State was absolute sovereign over slavery within its own borders, responsibility for it and its abuses there ending with the State's own citizens, was now universally accepted. Success in securing the act of 1807, making the slave trade illegal from January 1, 1808, and affixing to it heavy penalties, lulled mult.i.tudes to sleep. This act, however, had effect only gradually, and its beneficence was greatly lessened in that it left confiscated negroes to the operation of the local law.

Such quietude was furthered through the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1816, by easy philanthropists and statesmen, North as well as South, who swore by the Const.i.tution as admitting no fundamental amendment, admired its three great compromises, loved all brethren of the Union except agitators, and deprecated slavery and the black race about equally; its mission negro deportation, but its actual efforts confined to the dumping of free blacks, reprobates, and castaways in some remote corner of the universe, for the convenience of slave-holders themselves. [Footnote: 3 Schouler's United States, 198.]