History of Kansas (Holloway 1868)/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III.
INTRODUCTION AND ESTABLISHMENT OF AFRICAN SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES AGAINST THE WISHES OF THE PEOPLE
African slavery has always met with a spirited, yet compromising opposition from the American people. From the time it first began to attract attention in the English colonies, the earnest prayer and efforts of the inhabitants have been to prevent its extension, and provide for its ultimate extinction. But the history of this foul institution will show that whenever by its growth the bonds of legislation have become too tight, it has broken them; that whenever the patriotic and freedom-loving people of this country have met its advance with a determined resistance, it has, by menacing the existence of the General Government, or brandishing aloft the sword of disunion, compelled them in order to avert the threatened danger, to acquiesce in its demands; that thus it ruled the founders of our Republic and the Congress of the United States, until it challenged a contest with Freedom at the ballot-box in the distant field of Kansas; that here, discarding its chosen weapon, and trampling under foot the sanctity of the ballot-box—the palladium of American liberty—it sought to attain its ends by its usual tactics,—intimidation, force and fraud; that here, Freedom, driven to the very door of her temple, comprehending the real character of the monster with which she had to grapple, fought with the valor and prowess of an angel, combatting Satan and his demons in their approach upon the battlements of Heaven; that, its loathsome and blighting presence driven back from the sacred soil of Kansas, smarting from defeat, with its ungovernable spirit enraged by opposition, it attacked the life of the beneficent government which had fostered its growth through forbearance, and perished from the sword of its own drawing.
The odious distinction of establishing negro slavery in the thirteen colonies belongs to England. Although the Dutch were the first to engage in transporting Africans to the colonies, yet, under their commerce alone, it languished, and slavery thus introduced could easily have been removed by the benevolent spirit of colonial legislation. It was not until after the treaty of Utrecht, under English monopoly, that the slave trade with the colonies acquired its importance. By the decisions of her chief counsellors, York and Talbot, England legalized it; by her sovereignty the American ports were thrown open to the slave trade, and the prohibitions of the colonies against such importation annulled; by her Queens and Lords, the business was carried on and profits shared; by her ministers, a cloak of religion was thrown around its foulness, and they called it a mode to evangelize the heathen; by her merchants it was declared that “negro labor will keep our colonies in due subserviency to their mother country; for while our plantations depend only on planting by the negro, our colonies can never prove injurious to British manufactories, never become independent of their kingdom.” In 1702 Queen Anne instructed the governor of New York and New Jersey to “give due encouragement to slave merchants, and in particular to the royal African Company of England.” In 1775 the Earl of Dartmouth declares “we can not allow the colonies to check, or discourage in any degree, a traffic so beneficial to the nation.” Prior to 1740 England had introduced into the colonies about one hundred and thirty thousand blacks; by 1776 it had increased to three hundred thousand. The population of negro slaves among the thirteen colonies in 1754 stood as follows: New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine, 3,000; Rhode Island, 4,500; Connecticut 3,500; New York 11,000; New Jersey 5,500; Pennsylvania and Delaware 11,000; Maryland 4,400; Virginia 116,000; North Carolina 20,000; South Carolina 40,000; Georgia 2,000. Between 1754 and 1776 these numbers must have been greatly augmented, as that was the most flourishing time for slave merchants. We have no means of ascertaining what number there was at the time the colonies declared their independence; but by the census taken in 1790 the population of slaves was returned as follows; New Hampshire 158; Rhode Island 952; Connecticut 2,759; Massachusetts emancipated hers in 1780; New York 21,324; New Jersey 11,423; Pennsylvania 3,737; Delaware 8,887; Maryland 103,036; Virginia 293,427; North Carolina 100,572; South Carolina 107,094; Georgia 29,264. It must be borne in mind that many had been emancipated by the northern States during and after the Revolution, and others had been taken into new States and Territories.
Thus did England plant “the great evil of Slavery” in the constitution of her colonies; and that in many cases against their earnest and filial remonstrance. Massachusetts always opposed the introduction of slaves from abroad, and in 1701 instructed her representatives “to put a period to negroes being slaves.” But the Earl of Dartmouth interposes his edict, “we cannot allow the colonies to check, or discourage, in any degree, a traffic so beneficial to the nation.” In 1645 two reputable townsmen of Boston, “sailed for Guinea to trade for negroes.” But when it is noised abroad, public sentiment pronounces them malefactors and murderers, and a worthy magistrate denounces their act as contrary to the law of God and the law of the country, “and committed the guilty men for the offense.” After advice with the elders and representatives of the people “bearing witness against the heinous crime of man-stealing,” ordered the negroes to be restored at the public charge “to their native country, with a letter expressing the indignation of the court” at their wrongs. But Queen Anne admonishes the governor “to give due encouragement to slave merchants.” In Virginia slavery built up a landed aristocracy who loved “the institution.” But such was the spirit of popular liberty that it demands of the legislature to suppress the importation of slaves. The legislature yielding to some extent to the voice of its constituency levies a tax on each negro imported, but the Governor soon announces that “the interfering interests of the African company has obtained a repeal of that law.” Whereupon a statesman of Virginia, despairing of success, declares that “the British government of Virginia constantly checks the attempts of Virginia to put a stop to the infernal traffic.” In Georgia from the very first the colonists prohibited the introduction of slaves by law. James Oglethorpe writes, “my friends and I settled the colony of Georgia, and by charter were established trustees. We determined not to suffer slavery there; but the slave merchants and their adherents not only occasioned us much trouble, but at last got the government to sanction them.” In New York the Dutch offered to furnish slaves to the colonists, but the rigor of the climate more than the humanity of the people, prevented the rapid growth of slavery there. But notwithstanding the obstacles which the climate interposed, the governor is instructed by royal authority to encourage the importation of negroes. In 1712 Pennsylvania circulates a general petition for the gradual emancipation of slaves by law. In the New England States laws were framed prohibiting the holding of negroes as slaves. Every man owning slaves was required after ten years to emancipate them; and every one failing to comply with this regulation was fined twice the value of each slave thus held. Although this law was not strictly enforced, still it shows the feeling of the colony relative to slavery. Even South Carolina, where slavery is coeval with the settlement on Ashley River, and where it was found to be “very profitable,” complains in 1727 of “the vast importation of slaves,” and when she seeks to apply a restriction, she is met by a rebuke from the English ministry.
The immortal Declaration of Independence contains a clear and familiar expression of the sentiments of the colonists upon the natural rights of men at that time. That “all men are created equal, with certain inalienable rights” was no new conception of Jefferson; it was the embodiment of the deeply rooted convictions of the American people; an idea that had been fully discussed in their conventions. Even Georgia had, just the year previous, resolved in the Darien committee, “at all times to use our utmost efforts for the manumission of our slaves in this colony upon the most safe and equitable footing for the masters and themselves.” The clause in the original draft of the Declaration indicting George III, as the patron and upholder of the African slave trade, which was stricken out to satisfy South Carolina and Georgia, whose people had found slavery “profitable,” expresses clearly the feelings of the majority of the colonists in regard to this horrible traffic in human flesh. It reads as follows:
“Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for every legislative attempt to prohibit, or restrain this excerable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us, and purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
The first Continental Congress in which the colonists enjoyed, for the first time, an unrestrained legislation, in accordance with the long expressed wish of the country, resolved “that no slaves be imported into any of the thirteen united colonies.”
After the Revolution was over, the colonies having achieved their independence, the vast lands lying between the Alleghanies and Mississippi were held by certain members of the Confederacy. As the charters by which these lands were held conflicted; the whole having been won by the common valor of all the colonies; it was agreed, to avoid disputes and settle the matter upon equitable principles, that the colonies, thus holding lands, should cede their right over to the General Government. Accordingly in 1784 Mr. Jefferson reported “An Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded already, or to be ceded, by individual States to the United States; specifying that such territory extends from the 31st to the 47th degree of latitude, so as to include what now constitutes the States of Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi;” the fifth article of which ordinance declares “that after the year 1800 of the Christian era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States”—that is States formed from the said territory. The southern members generally voted against this bill, but it came so near being the fundamental law of the land, thus restricting slavery forever where the mother country had planted it, that it only lacked one vote, occasioned by the absence of a member from New Jersey.
In 1787 the last Continental Congress passed a law prohibiting slavery in the territory north-west of the Ohio River which Virginia had ceded to the United States, and to which other States had relinquished their claims. The prohibition reads as follows:
“There shall be neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in punishment of crime, whereof the parties shall be duly convicted.”
In the constitutional convention that framed the government under which we now live, the triumph of slavery over the prevailing sentiment of the American people by the same tactics which is successfully employed for the next seventy years, is, for the first time, witnessed. Although our fathers were unable to abolish slavery at once, so great was the magnitude to which it had attained, and so deeply had it rooted itself in the interest of some of the southern colonies, still they expected that the northern states would continue to emancipate their slaves as some of them already had done, and by a prudential legislation to restrict slavery in the southern states, so that for the want of territory it would ultimately become extinct. But after the constitution had been framed, with an utter silence in regard to slavery, except a clause which contained an article against an immediate and absolute prohibition to importing negro slaves, the representatives of Georgia and South Carolina came forward and declared “that their constituents can never accede to a constitution containing such an article;”[1] that if such a clause is retained they might regard these two States out of the Union. To obviate the objections of these two factious colonies, a compromise was effected, extending the slave trade franchise twenty years, with the implication that at the expiration of that time Congress might prohibit it. Encouraged by the success of their demand, they now make an humble request on the plea of equity, for the rendition of fugitive slaves from one state to another, as a kind of sugar-coat to the constitution for the tender stomachs of the southern colonies. The horror of slave-catching was not then realized by the northern states, the most of whom owned slaves, after some modifications the clause is inserted without much opposition.
In 1789 South Carolina, who had continued to hold her land grants in the West, which covered the territory of the present State of Tennessee, ceded them to the United States on the condition among others “that no regulation made or to be made by Congress, shall tend to emancipate slaves.” The western territory held by Georgia, comprising the States of Alabama and Mississippi, was ceded to the Union in 1802, upon about the same condition. There was no alternative but to accept these cessions with their conditions. If the States held the lands, they would plant slavery there themselves, and thus increase their own greatness; and the United States could not secure the territory without the conditions.
Thus has slavery in the infant days of our Republic, by menaces and strategy triumphed over Congress and the will of the majority of our people.
The framers of our Constitution thought that they had laid a legislative coil which would sometime restrict the growth of slavery when they limited slave importation to twenty years; and they were no sanguinary visionists, but based their judgement upon the teachings of history. “In all former ages,” says Greeley in his “American Conflict:” “slavery so long as it existed and flourished, was kept alive by a constant or frequent enslavement of captives, or by importation of bondmen. Whenever that enslavement, that importation, closed, slavery began to decline.” But American slavery has set at naught the teachings of history and baffled the calculations of statesmen. The acquisition of Louisiana, thus opening a vast territory for the introduction of slaves, and the invention of the Cotton Gin, thus increasing the value of slave labor, rendered the commerce in human flesh as profitable as in the days of the African West India Company. Rapacious avarice unable longer to satisfy its greediness for gain by importation, invents a new system for multiplying human chattels. “Slave-breeding for gain, deliberately proposed and systematically pursued, appears to be among the late devices and illustrations of human depravity. Neither Cowper nor Wesley, nor Jonathan Edwards, nor Granville Sharp, nor Clarkson, nor any of the philanthropists or divines, who, in the last century, bore fearless and emphatic testimony to the iniquity of slave-making, slave-holding and slave-selling seemed to have had any clear conception of it. For the infant slave of the past ages was rather an encumbrance and a burden, than a valuable addition to his master's stock. To raise him, however roughly, would cost all he would ultimately be worth. That it was cheaper to buy slaves than to rear them, was quite generally regarded as self-evident. But the suppression of the African slave-trade, coinciding with the rapid settlement of the Louisiana purchase, and the triumph of the Cotton-Gin, wrought here an entire transformation. When a field hand brought from ten to fifteen hundred dollars, and young negroes were held at about ten dollars per pound, the new born infant, if healthy, well formed, and likely to live, was deemed an addition to his master's wealth of not less than one hundred dollars even in Virginia or Maryland. It had now become the interest of the master to increase the number of births in his slave cabin; and few evinced scruples whereby this result was obtained. The chastity of female slaves was never deemed of much account, even where they were white; and, now that it had become an impediment to the increase of their master's wealth, it was wholly disregarded. No slave girl, however young, was valued lower for having become a mother, without waiting to be first made a wife; nor were many masters likely to rebuke this as a fault, or brand it as a shame. Women were publicly advertised as extraordinary breeders, and commanded a higher price on that account. Wives, sold in separation from their husbands, were imperatively required to accept new partners, in order that the fruitfulness of the plantation might not suffer.”
- ↑ The African trade in slaves had long been odious to most of the states, and the importation of slaves into them had been prohibited. Particular states, however, continued the importation and were extremely averse to any restriction on their power to do so. In the convention the former states were anxious in framing a new constitution, to insert a provision for an immediate and absolute stop to the trade. The latter were not only averse to any interference on the subject, but solemnly declared that their constituents would never accede to a constitution containing such an article. Out of this conflict grew a middle measure providing that Congress should not interfere until 1808. Writings and Times of Madison 111.150.