Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 27.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

Sir,—You have incalculably increased the obligations of the country to your custom of printing fragmentary examples of Southern history in the publication of Dr. Hunter McGuire's report, in your issue of Sunday, October 15th, instant.

The vast and wonderfully rich field of historical incident connected with the Southern movement in the decade next before the erection of the Confederacy is sufficiently explained in the activity at that time of the remarkable men who came forward in large numbers to discuss public questions. In evidence of this phenomenon, stands the Southern Commercial Convention, a meeting of planters and lawyers. At the Knoxville meeting of 1857 a committee was apppointed to report on the policy of re-opening the African slave trade and to consider the constitutionality of the act of Congress which pronounced the trade piracy. The report was to be made to the next annual meeting of the convention, appointed for Montgomery, Alabama, in May, 1858. The significance of the discussion of this subject [99] lay in the movement, already more or less advanced, to secure Cuba for the United States, and also in the then pending scheme of General William Walker to conquer the Central American States and erect a government there with institutions similar to those of the Southern States. African slavery, it was believed, would flourish well in those tropical, yet fruitful agricultural regions, while the Southern States were much in need of sympathy in the fast ripening purpose of the Northern States to invade our institutions and destroy them. More than that, it was hoped that if Texas could be well supplied with African slaves in order to protect herself against Northern interference, she would readily consent to divide her vast and bounteous area into five slave States, thus checking in the Senate the tide of Congressional usurpation of Southern rights.

The Southern Commercial Convention of 1858, met, according to appointment, at Montgomery. The membership was so great that the State capitol could not by any means contain the meeting. It was the annual season of empty cotton warehouses at that cotton shipping port, when, perhaps, 100,000 bales each year were loaded on steamers for Mobile. An immense brick cotton warehouse, thoroughly lighted, was hastily floored, and plank benches provided for the meetings of the convention. It was a most noble gathering of men—the educated, earnest, prosperous democracy of the South, come to deliberate for a week in a pending crisis which involved their all. They felt deeply the awe of the situation. They acted calmly.

It was at this great and decisive meeting that the memorable debate occurred between Mr. Roger A. Pryor, the young editor of The South, a weekly, published at Richmond, of extreme Southern rights' character, supported by William Ballard Preston, and Henry W. Hilliard, on our side, and William Lowndes Yancey, a lawyer, of Montgomery, on the other side. The report of the committee from the Knoxville meeting of the year before was submitted by its chairman, J. D. B. De Bow, editor of De Bow's Review, a South Carolinian then domiciled in New Orleans. The report was favorable to the re-opening of the trade. Just about that time some five hundred Africans had been landed from a slaver on the coast of Georgia, and prominent Georgians were being pursued in the Federal courts as participants in the crime of importing them.

De Bow's report was debated and postponed for action until the meeting of 1859, appointed for Vicksburg, Miss.

Referring to Mr. Yancey's speech, or rather speeches, for he spoke the greater part of two days, Dr. McGuire says: ‘Mr. Yancey, [100] in an able and powerful speech, urged that the African slave trade be revived.’ Dr. McGuire has fallen into an error, not peculiar to himself, but one which greatly annoyed Mr. Yancey in his lifetime, and which he studiously sought to correct at every opportunity. I will relate one example of his corrections. In the Alabama secession convention, Mr. Yancey warmly supported a resolution of instructions to the Alabama delegates to the proposed Provisional Congress of the Confederacy, requiring them to vote for a proviso of the Constitution of the Confederacy forever prohibiting the African slave trade. He said in that speech that he apprehended few public men had been more industriously misrepresented than himself on this subject of the resolutions; that he was not and never had been in favor of re-opening the trade; that Virginia and Maryland would continue to send all the negroes to the cotton States that it was desirable to have. (See Smith's Debates.)

Mr. Yancey's position may be briefly stated. He contended that it was a question for adjudication whether the Constitution gave Congress the right to make ‘piracy’ of a trade—for instance, the African slave trade—upon which the social fabric of half the States was founded; whether Congress had the right to declare the particular trade ‘piracy’ which the Constitution specially forbid any hostile legislation against ‘prior to’ 1808, twenty years after the formation of the government; whether the positive forbidding by the Constitution of any interference with the African slave trade, a specially designated and protected trade, ‘prior to’ 1808, left Congress free to forbid it after that date; whether the forbidding ultimately of an original constitutional guarantee, existing in the form of a compromise between the sections in an organic law, could become valid under any enactment less than a constitutional amendment.

Messrs. Pryor and Preston, of Virginia, and Mr. Hilliard, of Alabama, contended for unconstitutional rejection of De Bow's report favoring the re-opening of the trade.

Mr. Yancey saw his opportunity to discuss the encroachments of the Abolitionists upon the Constitution in resisting a summary rejection of the motion of Mr. Pryor. Hence the debate and the final reference of the De Bow report to the Vicksburg convention.

Dr. McGuire is bold and opportune in denouncing the allegation of Fiske, and other so-called historians who falsely pretend that the South fought for the perpetuation of slavery. As I have just said, Alabama led in demanding that the constitution of the Confederacy should forever prohibit the African slave trade. That policy once [101] put into effect, time was the inevitable emancipation of African slavery. A property status could not possibly attract to labor the moment the property value became higher than the value of the products of the labor. Cotton could be kept at ten cents by white producers and by improved methods of cultivation. Negro slave cotton producers could not be kept down to $1,000 per head, when coal mining, iron manufacture, railroad building, etc., came in to compete for negro slave labor. In the Birmingham district to-day, are many coal mine and ore mine operators who owned in 1860, a quarter of a million dollars in cotton field negroes. Must they not have sold them by now to have invested in wage employing mines, rather than retain them in the less profitable employment of the cotton field?

The record stands, General Lee, the commanding general of the Confederate armies, voluntarily manumitted his slaves. Mr. Yancey, the oratorical agitator of the constitutional principles which were attempted by the Confederacy was a leader in the policy of rejection by the Confederacy of the African slave trade, thus hastening the maturity of the institution of slavery and providing for the industrial economy which must have worked out the final emancipation of labor from the status of prosperity to the status of wages.

Dr. McGuire relates that President Lincoln pronounced the Union indissoluble because the Southern ports on 10 per cent. duties would cut off this revenue of the port of New York and starve the northern nation. It is important to remember that upon the organization of the Provisional Government at Montgomery and the appointment of Mr. Yancey at the head of the commission to go to Europe to sue for recognition of the new born Republic, he asked to be instructed to offer to the commercial nations of Europe, England and France, a treaty quite similar to the treaty which General Washington asked, successfully, the Congress to negotiate with France and Spain.

Mr. Yancey, at the suggestion of Mr. Rhett, of South Carolina, asked to be permitted to offer European powers a contract of twenty years duration, fixing the duties at all Southern ports at 20 per cent. ad valorem. A bill was offered in Congress embodying these views, but reducing the time to six years. Mr. Rhett refused to accept this reduction of time, and this bill failed. The commission to Europe was thus doomed to failure, and with this fore knowledge, Mr. Yancey went upon it, consenting to his own sacrifice with characteristic valor.