The slave trade

From a consideration of the wisdom, propriety and morality of importing African slaves as an article of commerce in 1787, the Negro Question in the United States had progressed to the wisdom and propriety of preventing any extension of the institution of slavery beyond those limits in which it existed in 1820, and from this, with repeated agitations, fairly shaking the Union to its foundation, followed by compromises satisfactory to none, there had flared up a consideration of the re-opening of the Slave Trade in 1856, swiftly followed by Secession and war in 1860, and Emancipation, as a war measure, in 1863, directed against the eleven Confederate States.

Throughout the four years of desperate struggle between the seceding States and the consolidated Northern and Western States, the slaves, by their behavior, illustrated moral character greatly to their credit, and indisputably indicative of the civilizing influences of the institution, in which they had been trained. But peace in 1865 at once precipitated the question of the status of the freedman. In the Northern States it was an important question. In the Southern States it beggared all other questions.

With a property loss running up into the billions and a loss in virile manhood almost incalculable and an indescribable uprooting and overturning of industrial conditions, the failure of Secession left the eleven States, which had constituted the Southern Confederacy, with a white population of about 5,000,000, and a colored population of about 4,000,000; but in three of them, South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana the colored population exceeded the white.

Was the forecast of Calhoun and de Tocqueville to be verified?

In no States was the outlook as dark as in South Carolina, where there could hardly have been more than 250,000 whites to 400,000 Negroes, and in Mississippi, where the colored majority was not quite so large, the proportions there being 350,000 white to some 430,000 Negroes. Yet of the colored population in South Carolina, judging from the number of free persons of color, in 1860, some 9,914,[178] and the number of house slaves and mechanics in Charleston returned for taxation in 1859,[179] in the great mass, there were those of the Negroes, who, on account of training, education and environment, together with inherited tradition, if they had only been left unplayed upon by those who knew them not, might have been relied upon in any great emergency. These, at an estimate, might have amounted to 30,000 in South Carolina; in Mississippi, less.

In both of these States, therefore, an earnest, thoughtful attempt was designed by the former ruling class of whites, to rebuild the political structure, at the same time readjusting the Negroes to the changed condition brought about by emancipation. But, before considering this much berated effort of the vanquished, a short sketch of conditions in South Carolina in the spring and summer of 1865 will show to some extent the increasing complexities and difficulties of the problem, which Lincoln’s death saved him from, and which Andrew Johnson had to face.

Even before Lincoln’s assassination there was evidence of a strong disposition, upon the part of the pronounced abolitionists, to humiliate the overthrown, and, in particular, that State and city which for three decades had led the fight for “Slavery as we know it in the Southern States.”

On April 6, 1865, William Lloyd Garrison, United States Senator Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts, Judge Kelly of Pennsylvania, Theodore Tilton and his intimate friend Rev. Henry Ward Beecher of New York, with George Thompson of England, visited Charleston.

By General Saxton of Massachusetts, they were personally conducted to the Citadel Green on Calhoun Street, a circumstance calling for some facetious remarks by Major Delany, a very remarkable colored member of the General’s Staff, and there the general presented the great abolitionist to the immense throng that had gathered to hear him. But, as thoroughly as the general and his distinguished guests considered that they understood conditions, it is possible, they were slightly surprised by the aplomb with which Samuel J. Dickerson (as a slave a bricklayer, but as a local freedman, dropping his tools for a higher pursuit and destined to become the mountebank of the bar) thrust himself and his two daughters into the very centre of the picture. In a fluent speech, Dickerson presented Garrison with a wreath. The great man complimented him in his reply, exalted the State of Massachusetts and himself introduced Senator Wilson, as one of the “mudsills” of Massachusetts, who had from such condition risen to the eminence he had attained. Then the great abolitionist gave way to the Senator, who proclaimed the occasion “the proudest day of his life.”

Shouting to the excitable throng before him that he felt “the slave power under his heel” he bellowed out his sentiments as follows:

He was followed by Judge Kelly, who denounced ex-President Buchanan and eulogized Sam Dickerson. Other speeches followed in a similar vein and to such an extent did the orgy of oratory extend that the apparently one sane member of the band felt himself impelled upon the occasion of a later address delivered at Zion Church to warn the Negroes against—

The war was not as yet absolutely over and this speech of Senator Wilson’s widely advertised must have rendered many Confederate officers desperate. Don C. Seitz in his very valuable volume, “Braxton Bragg, General of the Confederacy” gives a most interesting letter from Wade Hampton, not a fortnight later, to Jefferson Davis, arguing against acceptance of the terms of General Sherman to General Johnston, in which he pictures most effectively the conditions worse than war, which were foreshadowed by surrender. But fierce as was the blaze that Wilson and his like were fanning, it became a devouring flame with the assassination of Lincoln. This President Johnson, with the aid of Seward, strove earnestly to quench.

Born in North Carolina, the most democratic State of the old South, Andrew Johnson had raised himself from the humblest of origins to a position of distinct prominence in that western Southern State Tennessee, mainly peopled from North Carolina. Having been governor of and senator from Tennessee, he had been placed in the dangerous office of war governor in that State at a time, when through it echoed and reëchoed the continual tramp of opposing armies, as they reeled back and forward in contests rivalling those which soaked the soil of Virginia with blood.

With nothing of the personal magnetism or the attractive traits of his predecessor, the great rail splitter and wrestler of the West; immovable to every suggestion that he should purchase support with prostitution of the appointing power, even for a good end; giving out his sentiments with an aggressive honesty, which must have shocked the careless average; nothing could have more clearly marked the gulf between him and the sentimentality of the abolitionists, Garrison, Davis, Kelly and others, than his reception in the very first days of his presidency of the delegation of colored men who called upon him chiefly to indulge in that, to them the dearest right of freedom, free speech. To these and to the general public of the North, his reply must have been offensive, whatever truth it may have contained. He said in part:

It is almost idle, after the above, to state that Johnson was absolutely devoid of the kindly tact and vulgar humor, which had so endeared Lincoln, the supplest politician of his time, to the coarse mass of the electorate, as he had voiced for it, its thoughts in a tongue it could understand and appreciate.

When we reflect, that Johnson, a Southern man, the Vice President coming from the conquered South, was handed the reins at the moment when the victorious North, flushed with conquest, saw its great leader, identified with the West, hurled from his high position to bloody death, at the hands of a murderer, who proclaimed his sympathy with the vanquished South, the immensity of the difficulties about to confront him begins to appear. In addition, he, himself, before being steadied by the responsibilities of the office, had “breathed threatenings and slaughter.”

In a proclamation, claiming that Jefferson Davis and others had incited, concocted and procured the atrocious murder of President Abraham Lincoln and the attempted assassination of William H. Seward, ex-President Jefferson Davis had been held up to obloquy and, upon his capture, imprisoned and chained; but what was infinitely more horrible, Wirz, the Confederate officer in charge of Andersonville, was made a human sacrifice, under circumstances which have left an ineffaceable blot upon all in any way responsible for making him the scapegoat for the very effective military policy which refused the Confederate offer to exchange prisoners. If it took the magnanimity and fortitude of Seward to point out the method by which the Union might be saved from the fate in which the Congressional conspirators meant to involve it, for their own immediate ends, and if, in this hacked victim of the assassins, Johnson found the anchor by which he rode out the storm which burst upon him; yet it should be remembered that nothing but the sturdiest integrity and most indomitable courage could have nerved Johnson to even attempt the struggle, he fought out to the end. Conditions in the South were appalling. Bled to a whiteness, which not even France experienced in the Great War; with her labor system hopelessly disorganized by the Freedman’s Bureau; not only by its methods but by the openly announced suggestions of its head, General Howard, that the landholders should be compelled by the Federal Government to furnish their former slaves with land,[183] industry stood still. With Negro troops quartered in every direction under “the deliberate purpose to emphasize the completeness of the catastrophe which the war had brought upon the South,”[184] collisions between them and the whites were of almost daily occurrence. But these could not, in the bulk of cases, be attributed to the truculence of Southern slave holders from the fact that instances were not few, in which Northern troops, acting in the line of duty, were assailed by colored men. A Federal soldier, acting as guard and on his post at a house in Abbeville, was shot by colored soldiers,[185] incensed against the inmates. Sergeant Terry and four members of the 127th New York Volunteers, acting as a guard on the Battery at Charleston, were set upon by Negroes abetted by members of the 35th United States Colored Troops and two of the guard wounded, before the arrival of additional white troops scattered the assailants with five casualties and some arrests.[186] Later, Lieutenant A. S. Bodine, of the same regiment, for clearing a meeting of whites of uninvited Negroes, among whom appeared Negro soldiers with sidearms, was courtmartialed by order of General Hatch in command at Charleston, the court finding him guilty, on the flimsiest evidence, of “unwarrantable exercise of arbitrary power” and sentencing him to reprimand by his superior officer, which reprimand was immediately ordered to be withdrawn by the general in command of the department.[187]

With such conditions in towns and cities it is scarcely surprising to read the account of the execution a little later of James Grippen and Ben Redding of Co. F, 104th United States Colored Troops, on charges of rape, arson and burglary, they with others, not apprehended, having broken into a house near McPhersonville, South Carolina, and there ravished four white women, named.[188] With such facts leaking out from time to time, in spite of the pressure from outside of his cabinet to induce him to leave South Carolina for a couple of years under military rule, President Johnson determined to appoint a provisional governor and, for this purpose, issued a proclamation which was in part as follows:

In the proclamation appeared the command that the military authorities should in no way obstruct, hinder or interfere with the above.[189] Just previously to Governor Perry’s proclamation calling such convention, a letter appeared contributing greatly to the success of the President’s plan in South Carolina. The writer of the letter was Wade Hampton, late Lieutenant General, C.S.A. The letter reveals the despairing condition of many, in its attempt to assuage such. It was widely reproduced and ran thus:

The convention was held and following it an election for governor and members of the General Assembly under the new Constitution and the most distinguished members of the convention, without regard to differences of opinion as to policies, united in recommending as candidate for governor Hon. James L. Orr, who prior to the war had been Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and with the organization of the Confederate States, a Senator from South Carolina and who had organized a command and seen service in the War between the States.

Despite these facts and in the teeth of his published declination of a nomination, in his absence, General Hampton was nominated for governor by the mechanics of Charleston and only defeated by 733 votes in a total of 19,113 cast, a vote measured by the white males of voting age just after the war and its disabilities, which must have been at least forty per cent of what could have possibly been polled.

A legislature most representative of the State assembled and from the names appended to the: “Act preliminary to the legislation induced by the emancipation of slaves,” passed Nov. 19, 1865, W. D. Porter, President of the Senate, C. H. Simonton, Speaker of the House, and James L. Orr, Governor, appear officially responsible for the legislation; but the main work of framing it was done by D. L. Wardlaw and Armistead Burt. Although continuously and often very incorrectly assailed, viewed by a critic in no way partial to the South, these efforts of the vanquished, before the flood of Reconstruction was let loose by Congress upon the South, do not appear as frightful as they still are alleged to be.

Professor Burgess, speaks of them in general in the following terms:

Professor Dunning in a later work states that:

The license required for a shopkeeper was substantial, also that for a pedlar. It was one hundred dollars a year. In both of these vocations the mass of the Negroes could be easily fleeced by the shrewd and unscrupulous members of the race; but in all other vocations, except those free, it was only ten dollars.[193]

While accusing Wilson, Sumner and other extremists of distorting the spirit and purpose of both the laws and the lawmakers of the South, Professor Dunning says:

In his opinion:

If there is ground for condemnation in the above, the South must be condemned for thinking better of their conquerors than they deserved. The South Carolina Act, above alluded to, excepted from the provisions of what has been called the “Black Code”—“every person who may have of Caucasian blood, seven-eighths or more,” who it provided “shall be deemed a white person,”[196] declaring, however, that: “all other free Negroes, mulattoes and mestizos, all freed women and all descendants through either sex of any of these, except as above, shall be known as persons of color.”

It declared that the statutes and regulations concerning slaves were inapplicable to persons of color and although such were not entitled to social or political equality with white persons, they were given the right to own and dispose of property, to make contracts, to enjoy the fruits of their labor, to sue and be sued, and to receive protection under the law in their persons and property.

While the Black Code did therefore regulate the relations and restrain persons of color, in Mr. Dunning’s and Mr. Burgess’s opinion, there was little in the South Carolina Act calculated to arouse any pronounced hostility in the North. In the opinion of the latter, indeed, it—

Two provisions it did contain of great importance, which it must be borne in mind were framed by the representatives of 250,000 whites surrounded by 400,000 Negroes, ninety per cent of whom were densely ignorant. The first of these was aimed to prevent the burden of this helpless ignorance from increasing; the second to secure to this population a measure of protection, which those who had emancipated the slaves had not granted to the freedmen in their own section, by their own laws, for the greater part of the time of their living in Free States.—

This act further provided that upon failure to furnish bond the free person of color could be ordered to leave the State, and, upon failure to leave, be subjected to corporal punishment within a certain time, and if still contumacious, could be imprisoned in the State Penitentiary for a period. The other act granted to the immense black majority what the laws of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, for almost half a century, had denied to the feeble minority of free blacks who had entered their borders:

In its day and since, this legislation has been roundly denounced. Those in control of Federal politics saw in it a peaceful settlement of great questions which threatened their supremacy, and bitterly and unreservedly reprobated it, stirring up public opinion in that section, which yet flushed with its conquest, was unwilling to permit any interference with its great mission of “putting the bottom rail on top.”

The conquerors had preserved the Union and abolished slavery. Those were two immense achievements, even if ruthlessly attained.

As terrible as was the price which the South paid for the abolition of slavery, it was not too great, taking all things into consideration; and the manner of the abolition was such, also, that in time it must have given rise to as it did eventually produce, that mutual respect between the sections which had not before existed.

While Emancipation, being confiscation of property without due process of law, can never be legally justified, and only can be excused as a war measure, yet, if the Southern people, white and black, could only be made to see conditions as they are now in the South and to realize that posterity does fairly demand some consideration from those who bring it into being, one hundred years will not have passed before it will have been incontrovertibly demonstrated that Emancipation was more beneficial to the South than to the North. This statement is made with a full appreciation of the fact that the War, Emancipation and Reconstruction so reduced the South and checked its industrial development, that thirty years were required from the inception of the War to bring that section again up to the position it had reached in 1860, in point of wealth and industry.

War and Emancipation can therefore be excused, but Reconstruction will ever remain an ineffaceable stain upon the conquerors. Yet, as an emetic sometimes produces good which nothing else can bring about, so Reconstruction may in time be shown to have been not without its good.

Just what might have been the effects of the attempt made by the Southern States to readjust the Negroes to the changed conditions of 1865 must now always remain a matter of surmise; for the differentiations of color, race and condition, which they attempted then to establish, were ruthlessly swept out of existence by military control and universal suffrage followed by the Civil Rights Bill.

But before considering that era of frantic sentimentality concerning the African people in the United States, the period of Congressional Reconstruction, a little more light should be thrown upon the struggle made by the surviving soldiery of the Confederacy, led by Wade Hampton of South Carolina and others less well remembered, as Wright of Georgia, to support the policy of Seward and President Johnson. Not unnaturally in so doing attention will be concentrated to a very great degree upon the Scape Goat, The Hot Bed of Secession, The Prostrate State, although it was from without, if upon her borders, the record was preserved by one of her sons, an almost forgotten soldier and scholar of the Old South, in his tireless, patriotic and absolutely sincere and highly intelligent effort to mentally avert the overthrow of the remnants of Southern civilization, threatened in the advance of the black horde of freedmen marching to plunder, under the leadership of Sumner, Stevens and Wilson and the half averted countenance of Grant.

This description by a Southern man may seem possibly too comprehensive and severe, until we read the declaration of that American Negro most generally esteemed in the North in his day, the leader of the Negro race in America:

How can the characterization be doubted when we remember Senator Wilson’s speech in Charleston and the fact that with such a record as he had and such a field to choose from, he was made Grant’s running mate, the Aaron for that Moses.

The Southerner who preserved this record of the aspirations of the Old South was so identified with the political thought of the great State of North Carolina, that, like Andrew Jackson, whom he knew and asserted to be a South Carolinian, he also, though such, was thought to be a North Carolinian. But Daniel Harvey Hill was, on July 12, 1821, born in South Carolina, at Hill’s Iron Works, an iron manufacturing establishment founded in the New Acquisition (later York District), by his grandfather, prior to the Revolutionary War, where cannon were forged for the American army. A graduate of West Point and a distinguished veteran of the Mexican War, in which he rose to the brevet of Major, he resigned from the United States army to embrace the highest avocation a man may follow and became in 1849 a professor of mathematics at Washington College, Lexington, “the Athens” of Virginia, and later, was put in control of the Military Institute of North Carolina; whence he entered the Confederate Army, served through the war with distinction, rising to the rank of lieutenant general, and issuing from Charlotte, May, 1866, the first number of the monthly magazine, The Land We Love, published by him from that place until April, 1869, through which he voiced the aspirations, hopes and resolves, in the main, of the disbanded forces of the Confederacy, probably, at that date constituting seventy per cent or more of the white manhood of the South. If the magazine was modeled upon an English rather than an American type, it was the more representative of the South Atlantic States at that time. If forty per cent or more of its contents bore upon the recent war, considering the times and the conditions of the section upon which it was dependent for support, that was most natural.

In it can be found not infrequent contributions from that Georgian said by Professor Trent to have been the one poet the War produced from the South; also some papers from that novelist of South Carolina whom Lewisohn has mentioned in his article on South Carolina, in The Nation in 1922; and one from that Northern adopted son of South Carolina, to whom the State owes the great institution, Clemson College, for the aims of which General Hill strove so hard in his opening article on “Education.” Space will not admit of more than three extracts; the discussion by General Hill of education; an allusion to E. G. Lee’s “Maximilian and His Empire,” and a still briefer allusion to and endorsement of Wade Hampton and his policy concerning the freedmen. The first is the most important. After discussing the number of presidents from the South, including Lincoln and Johnson, eleven out of the seventeen, up to that time elected, coming from the South and an even greater proportion of secretaries of state and attorney generals, General Hill indicates, that when business ability was desired, as in the offices of secretary of the treasury and postmaster general, the situation was at once reversed, and thus proceeds:

Is it surprising that a man who thus exhorted the South in that day and hour should have been condemned by both Sumner of Massachusetts and Pollard of Virginia?

For three years, the worst in the history of the South, he kept his magazine before the people of South with a circulation of 12,000 copies and agents in every Southern State and in addition in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California. He never gave up the fight and in the year of his death saw his dream come true, but he did not get that support his cause would have entitled him to particularly expect from the then leading port of the South Atlantic. For even a devoted citizen of Charleston must admit, that Charleston, by such evidences as exist, was rather cold to this voice of the South. For a few months Burke and Boinest were the agents in that city, then no names appear as representatives in the greatest city of the South, with the exception of New Orleans; while, at little places in South Carolina, Mayesville, Edgefield, Society Hill and Kingstree, the agents held on to the end, faithful unto death. But in Charleston, within one month from the suspension of The Land We Love, a new Southern magazine was launched, The XIX Century, edited by F. G. DeFontaine, distinctly lighter, and, as events indicated, with less lasting power.

Returning to General Hill’s magazine, if manual and industrial training was a hobby and if his criticism of the former political training and lack of industrial enterprise was too sweeping; yet in his columns was afforded space for the most interesting illustration of what that political training could flower into, which can be found anywhere in the printed page in the United States. This is a sweeping statement itself; but if the highest type of cultivated diplomat, thoroughly conversant with the haute politique will read and ponder “Maximilian and His Empire” contributed by Gen. E. G. Lee, Feb. 1867, he would be curious to know who this Gen. E. G. Lee was and what were his opportunities for gathering the political knowledge which appears most interestingly spread with something of the assurance of a political seer, as time has shown.

E. G. Lee was a Virginian, only a brigadier. Born at Leeland, May 25, 1835, a graduate of William and Mary College, he served under Stonewall Jackson in the Valley campaign. Forced by ill health to withdraw from military service between 1863 and 1864, he was, in the latter part of the last mentioned year, sent to Canada on secret service for the Confederate Government, just about the time at which Blair approached the officials of the Confederacy, according to Alex. H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, aiming to bring about—