of the last decade of the eighteenth century, and the increased demand for cotton fabrics throughout the world, had made the cultivation of cotton highly profitable. An increase in cotton culture was naturally encouraged by such enhanced profits, and this tendency produced an increased demand for negro labor and for new lands, since the cotton crop requires a warm climate and low lands, and exhausts the soil very rapidly. Those parts of the country adapted to cotton-raising felt, therefore, a renewed interest in the increase of negro labor and in territorial extension. And those parts not so adapted felt an indirect interest in the same, since the increased and still increasing profits of the cotton culture made a market for their slaves and a carrying trade for their shipowners. There is no doubt that such was the main cause of the great change of view in regard to the question of negro slavery which the country experienced between 1790 and 1810, but it was not the sole cause. It was inevitable that, when the men of that era passed out of the excited state of mind and feeling produced by the War with the motherland, and came to the task of re-establishing the relations of peace and every-day life and business, they should regain a calmness of judgment, a respect for vested rights, and a regard for customary relations, which placed the political philosophy of 1776 under many limitations and qualifications, some of which, certainly, were sound and valuable. It is only when we take all of these considerations together that we comprehend the reasoning of the men of the first decade of this century upon the great question. They saw a great interest developing which was bringing wealth and comfort into an impoverished country. They knew that it could be then sustained only by negro labor. They did not believe that the negro would work unless forced to it by the white man. They thought it was better for the negro himself to have food, clothing, and shelter, in slavery, than to starve, or become a robber, in liberty. They felt, on the other hand, that the slavery of one human being to another was an exceptional relation in a political system which rested its own right to independent existence upon the doctrine of human freedom. It was not, then, unnatural that they arrived at the conclusion that to prohibit further importations of the barbarians from Africa was the only remedy for which the time was ripe. They sincerely believed that they would place themselves and their slaves in a far more advantageous position for the gradual elevation of the latter by having to deal only with negroes born and reared amid civilized surroundings, and that freedom would finally be attained by all, as the result of a gradual advancement in intelligence, morals, and industry, and would be thus attained without any shock to the civilization and welfare of the country.
This appeared to the men of that day, both of the North and of the South, to be the only safe way to proceed in solving the question of the relation between the highly civilized Anglo-American race and the grossly barbaric negro race in the United States. We think now that they might have done better, and some of the more unsympathetic critics of our history affirm that they did nothing of any consequence, and that in what they did do they acted with a consciously deceptive purpose. There may have been a few to whom this criticism can be justly applied, but there is no sufficient evidence that the mass of them were insincere either in act or thought. The contention that they were is more partisan than truly historical.
| Slavery during the War of 1812, and the years just before and just after this war. |
The decade between 1807 and 1817 was filled with the questions of foreign relations, of foreign war, and of the results of foreign war. The suspension, and then the almost entire destruction, of foreign commerce by the British Orders in Council, the Napoleonic decrees, the Jeffersonian embargo, and the War of 1812, reduced the exportation in cotton from about fifty millions of pounds in 1807 to less than twenty millions of pounds in 1814. The pecuniary interest in the maintenance of slavery declined thus quite materially, and the majority of the leading men, both North and South, still regarded negro slavery as only a temporary status, which would be gradually modified in the direction of freedom.
| Slavery in the Louisiana territory. |
Notwithstanding all this, however, the slavery interest was steadily waxing in influence and power throughout this period. First of all the existence and the extension of slavery in the vast territory purchased from France was secured. The custom of slave-holding had been introduced into this territory by the French and Spanish immigrants, while it was in the possession of France and Spain, before the year 1800. In that year Spain, as we have seen, receded it to France. Nine years before this date, slavery had been abolished in France by the National Assembly. It is certainly a question, then, whether the re-establishment of French supremacy over Louisiana in 1800 did not produce the abolition of slavery there. It will be remembered that France was at that moment subject to the consular government of Bonaparte, and that the Consul was not an enthusiast for the revolutionary ideals. He did not disturb the custom of slave-holding in Louisiana, and when he ceded this vast territory to the United States, in 1803, the custom existed in all its inhabited parts. The Treaty of cession contained a provision which pledged the Government of the United States to uphold the rights of property of the inhabitants of the province. It can be fairly said, therefore, that the United States Government obligated itself to France to maintain slavery within the territory ceded until it should be erected into a Commonwealth, or into Commonwealths, of the Union.
The United States Government might have violated the Treaty, if it had chosen to do so, and the question then raised would have been one of a purely diplomatic or international character. There would have been no question of constitutional power involved. The act of the United States Government breaking the Treaty would have been the law of the land for the inhabitants of this territory.
The United States Government, however, not only permitted the continuance of the custom of slave-holding in Louisiana, but when, in 1804, Congress divided this vast region into two parts by the thirty-third parallel of latitude, and organized the southern portion as the Territory of Orleans, and placed the northern portion under the jurisdiction of the Governor and judges of the Territory of Indiana, it, at the same time, authorized citizens of the United States immigrating into the Territory of Orleans, for the purpose of actual settlement, to take their slaves with them, and provided that the French laws in force at the date of the division should continue in the northern part until repealed or modified by the Governor and judges of Indiana Territory. Any danger to slavery in this district of Louisiana, which might be contained in the power vested by Congress in the Governor and judges of the Territory of Indiana to repeal or modify the French laws which Congress had allowed to continue in the district, was overcome, the following year, by the independent organization of this district as the Territory of Louisiana, and by a provision in the Act of Congress effecting this organization, which provided for the continuance in force of the laws of the district, until repealed or modified by the legislature of the Territory.
When, therefore, in 1812, the Territory of Orleans was erected into the Commonwealth of Louisiana, and the name of the Territory of Louisiana was changed to Missouri, there was no question about the status of the new Commonwealth. It was, both in fact and in law, a slave-holding Commonwealth; and the custom of slave-holding was perpetuated in the newly named Territory by the provision in the Act of Congress that the laws and regulations of the Territory of Louisiana should remain in force in the Territory of Missouri until repealed or modified by the legislature of the Territory of Missouri.
| Slavery in the territory west of North Carolina and Georgia. |
The Government of the United States had entered into obligations with North Carolina and Georgia, as we have seen, not to prohibit slavery in the territory ceded by them to the United States. Whatever we may think of the binding force of any such agreement from a legal point of view, certainly from an ethical point of view it could have been urged that the Government would have broken faith with some of the citizens of the United States had the Congress disregarded this understanding.
| Slavery in Louisiana a different question from slavery in the North Carolina and Georgia cessions. |
It