American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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[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.