Chapter VI

EARLY APPROACH TO THE NEGRO PROBLEM

1. The Ultimate Problem and the Missouri Compromise

Into the agitation was suddenly thrust the application of Missouri for entrance into the Union as a slave state. The struggle that followed for two years was primarily a political one, but in the course of the discussion the evils of slavery were fully considered. Meanwhile, in 1819, Alabama and Maine also applied for admission. Alabama was allowed to enter without much discussion, as she made equal the number of slave and free states. Maine, however, brought forth more talk. The Southern congressmen would have been perfectly willing to admit this as a free state if Missouri had been admitted as a slave state; but the North felt that this would have been to concede altogether too much, as Missouri from the first gave promise of being unusually important. At length, largely through the influence of Henry Clay, there was adopted a compromise whose main provisions were (1) that Maine was to be admitted as a free state; (2) that in Missouri there was to be no prohibition of slavery; but (3) that slavery was to be prohibited in any other states that might be formed out of the Louisiana Purchase north of the line of 36° 30'.

2. Colonization

Dr. Finley's meeting at Princeton was not very well attended and hence not a great success. Nevertheless he felt sufficiently encouraged to go to Washington in December, 1816, to use his effort for the formation of a national colonization society. It happened that in February of this same year, 1816, General Charles Fenton Mercer, member of the House of Delegates, came upon the secret journals of the legislature for the period 1801-5 and saw the correspondence between Monroe and Jefferson. Interested in the colonization project, on December 14 (Monroe then being President-elect) he presented in the House of Delegates resolutions embodying the previous enactments; and these passed 132 to 14. Finley was generally helped by the effort of Mercer, and on December 21, 1816, there was held in Washington a meeting of public men and interested citizens, Henry Clay, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, presiding. A constitution was adopted at an adjourned meeting on December 28; and on January 1, 1817, were formally chosen the officers of "The American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States." At this last meeting Henry Clay, again presiding, spoke in glowing terms of the possibilities of the movement; Elias B. Caldwell, a brother-in-law of Finley, made the leading argument; and John Randolph, of Roanoke, Va., and Robert Wright, of Maryland, spoke of the advantages to accrue from the removal of the free Negroes from the country (which remarks were very soon to awaken much discussion and criticism, especially on the part of the Negroes themselves). It is interesting to note that Mercer had no part at all in the meeting of January 1, not even being present; he did not feel that any but Southern men should be enrolled in the organization. However, Bushrod Washington, the president, was a Southern man; twelve of the seventeen vice-presidents were Southern men, among them being Andrew Jackson and William Crawford; and all of the twelve managers were slaveholders.

3. Slavery

We have seen that from the beginning there were liberal-minded men in the South who opposed the system of slavery, and if we actually take note of all the utterances of different men and of the proposals for doing away with the system, we shall find that about the turn of the century there was in this section considerable anti-slavery sentiment. Between 1800 and 1820, however, the opening of new lands in the Southwest, the increasing emphasis on cotton, and the rapidly growing Negro population, gave force to the argument of expediency; and the Missouri Compromise drew sharply the lines of the contest. The South now came to regard slavery as its peculiar heritage; public men were forced to defend the institution; and in general the best thought of the section began to be obsessed and dominated by the Negro, just as it is to-day in large measure. In taking this position the South deliberately committed intellectual suicide. In such matters as freedom of speech and literary achievement, and in genuine statesmanship if not for the time being in political influence, this part of the country declined, and before long the difference between it and New England was appalling. Calhoun and Hayne were strong; but between 1820 and 1860 the South had no names to compare with Longfellow and Emerson in literature, or with Morse and Hoe in invention. The foremost college professor, Dew, of William and Mary, and even the outstanding divines, Furman, the Baptist, of South Carolina, in the twenties, and Palmer, the Presbyterian of New Orleans, in the fifties, are all now remembered mainly because they defended their section in keeping the Negro in bonds. William and Mary College, and even the University of Virginia, as compared with Harvard and Yale, became provincial institutions; and instead of the Washington or Jefferson of an earlier day now began to be nourished such a leader as "Bob" Toombs, who for all of his fire and eloquence was a demagogue. In making its choice the South could not and did not blame the Negro per se, for it was freely recognized that upon slave labor rested such economic stability as the section possessed. The tragedy was simply that thousands of intelligent Americans deliberately turned their faces to the past, and preferred to read the novels of Walter Scott and live in the Middle Ages rather than study the French Revolution and live in the nineteenth century. One hundred years after we find that the chains are still forged, that thought is not yet free. Thus the Negro Problem began to be, and still is, very largely the problem of the white man of the South. The era of capitalism had not yet dawned, and still far in the future was the day when the poor white man and the Negro were slowly to realize that their interests were largely identical.