The North Star (Rochester)/1848/01/14/Statistics and History of Slavery
From Parker's Letter on Slavery.
STATISTICS AND HISTORY OF SLAVERY.
I will first call year attention to the history and statistics of slavery. Is 1790, there were but 697,897 slaves in the Union; in 1840, 2,487,355. At the present day, their number probably is not far from 3,000,000. In 1790, Mr. Gerry estimated their value at $10,000,000; in 1840, Mr. Clay fixed it at $1,200,000,000. They are owned by a population of perhaps about 300,000 persons, and represented by about 100,000 voters.
At the time of the Declaration of Independence, slavery existed in all the States; it gradually receded from the North. In the religious colonies of New England it was always unpopular and odious. It was there seen and felt to be utterly inconsistent with the ideas and spirit of their institutions, their churches, and their state itself. After the revolution, therefore, it speedily disappeared; here perishing by default, there abolished by statute. Thus it successively disappeared from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. By the celebrated ordinance of 1787, involuntary servitude, except as a punishment, after legal conviction of crime, was forever prohibited in the Northwest Territory. Thus the new states, formed in the western parallels, were, by the action of the federal government, at once cut off from that institution. Besides, they were mainly settled by men from the Eastern States, who had neither habits nor principles which favored slavery. Thus Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa have been without any legal slaves from the beginning.
In the South, the character of the people was different; their manners, their social and political ideas, were unlike those of the North. The Southern States were mainly colonies of adventurers, rather than establishments of men who for conscience sake fled to the wilderness. Less pains were taken with the education—intellectual, moral and religious—of the people. Religion never held so prominent a place in the consciousness of the mass as in the sterner and more austere colonies of the North. In the Southern States—New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia—slavery easily found a footing at an early day. It was not at all repulsive to the ideas, the institutions and habits of Georgia and South Carolina. The other Southern States protested against it; they never.
Consequences follow causes; it is not easy to avoid the results of a first principle. The Northern States, in all their constitutions and social structures, consistently and continually tend to democracy—the government of all, for all, and by all; to equality before the state and its laws; to moral and political ideas of universal application. In the meantime, the Southern States, in their constitutions and social structure, as consistently tend to oligarchy—the government over all, by a few, and for the sake of that few; to privilege, favoritism and class legislation; to conventional limitations; to the rule of force, and inequality before the law. In such a state of things, when slavery comes, it is welcome, In 1787, South Carolina and Georgia refused to accept the federal constitution, unless the right of importing slaves was guaranteed to them for twenty years. The new states formed in the southern parallels—Kentucky Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi—retaining the ideas and habits of their parents, kept also the institution of slavery.
At the time of forming the Federal Constitution, some of the Southern statesmen were hostile to slavery, and would gladly have got rid of it. Economical considerations prevailed in part, but political and moral objections to it extended yet more widely. The ordinance of 1787, the work mainly of the same man who drafted the Declaration of Independence, passed with little opposition. The proviso for surrendering fugitive slaves came from a Northern hand. Subsequently, opposition to slavery in the North and the South, became less. The culture of cotton, the wars in Europe creating a demand for the productions of American agriculture, had rendered slave labor more valuable. The day of our own oppression was more distant and forgotten. So in 1802, when Congress purchased from Georgia the western part of her territory, it was easy for the South to extend slavery over that virgin soil. In 1803, Louisiana was purchased from France; then, or in 1804, when it was organized into two Territories, it would have been easy to apply the ordinance of 1787, and prevent slavery from extending beyond the original thirteen States. But though some provisions restricting slavery were made, the ideas of that ordinance were forgotten. Since that time, five new States have been formed out of territory acquired since the revolution: Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, all slave States—the last two with Constitutions aiming to make slavery perpetual. The last of these was added to the Union on the 22d of December, 1845, two hundred and twenty-five years after the day when the Forefathers first set foot on Plymouth Rock; while the sons of the Pilgrims were eating and drinking and making merry, the deed of annexation was completed, and slavery extended over nearly 400,000 square miles of new territory, whence the semi-barbarous Mexicans had driven it out.
Slavery might easily have been abolished at the time of the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, in 1774, the Continental Congress, in their celebrated "non-importation agreement," resolved never to import or purchase any slaves after the last of December, in that year. In 1775, they declare in a "report" that it is not possible "for men who exercise thelf reason to believe that the Divine Author of our existence intended a part of the human race to hold an absolute property in an unbounded power over others." Indeed, the Declaration itself is a denial of the national right to allow the existence of slavery: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are [the right to] life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
But the original draft of this paper combined a condemnation yet more explicit: "He [the King of England] has waged cruel war against human nature itself: violating most sacred rights of life and liberty is the persons of a distant people who never offended him; captivating and carrying them into slavery. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce." This clause, says its author himself, "was struck out in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia, who never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under these censures; for though their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."
These were not the sentiment of a single enthusiastic young Republican. Dr. Rush, in the Continental Congress, wished "the Colonies to discourage slavery, and encourage the increase of the free inhabitants." Another member of the American Congress declared, in 1779, "Men are by nature free;" "the right to be free can never be alienated." In 1776, Dr. Hopkins, the head of the New England divines, declared that "Slavery is, in every instance, wrong, unrighteous, and oppressive; a very great and crying sin."
In the articles of Confederation, adopted in 1778, no provision is made for the support of slavery; none for the delivery of fugitives. Slavery is not once referred to in that document. The General Government had nothing to do with it. "If any slave elopes to those States where slaves are free," said Mr. Madison in 1787, "he becomes emancipated by their laws."
[to be continued.]