Reopening of the African Slave-Trade and Action Concerning It

R.J. Walker, of Mississippi, had now succeeded Governor Geary, and when an election for a new Territorial Legislature occurred, he assured the people that justice should prevail. Encouraged by these assurances of an honest man, the friends of free-labor generally voted, and the law-makers then elected were composed chiefly of their political friends. They also elected their candidate for Congress. That Legislature ordered the Lecompton Constitution to be submitted to the people of Kansas for their adoption or rejection, and it was rejected by at least ten thousand majority. The President of the Republic, regardless of this expressed will of the people of Kansas, sent the rejected Constitution into Congress, with a message recommending its ratification. "It has been solemnly adjudged by the highest tribunal known to our laws," said President Buchanan, "that slavery exists in Kansas by virtue of the Constitution of the United States. Kansas is, therefore, at this moment as much a slave State as Georgia or South Carolina." Congress did not ratify it, but ordered it to be again submitted to the people of Kansas, when they rejected it by an overwhelming majority. From that hour the controlling political power in Kansas was wielded by the free-labor party. Their strength steadily increased, and at near the close of January, 1861, just as the great Civil War was a-kindling, that Territory was admitted into the Union as a free-labor State. The Republic was now composed of thirty-four States and several Territories. Six years after the decision of Judge Taney and the majority of the Supreme Court, which declared that it was impossible for a black man to become a citizen, that decision was practically set aside by the issuing of a passport by the Secretary of State, William H. Seward, to the descendant of a slave to travel abroad as a "citizen of the United States."

While the struggle for freedom was going on in Kansas, the friends of the slave-labor system, emboldened by the sympathy of the general government, formed plans for its perpetuity. These plans would practically disregard the plain requirements of the National Constitution and the laws made under it. They resolved to reopen the African slave-trade, which had been closed in 1808 by a provision of the Constitution. Leading citizens of Louisiana prepared to engage in it, under the guise of the "African Labor-Supply Association," and captives, as of old, were actually brought across the sea, landed on the shores of the Southern States, and sold into perpetual bondage. Newspapers in the slave-labor States openly defended the measure, and the pulpit uttered its approval.

The President of the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina, Dr. James H. Thornwell, who died at the beginning of the late Civil War, declared that it was his conviction that "the African slave-trade was the most worthy of all missionary societies." The "Southern Commercial Convention," held at Vicksburg in May, 1859, resolved that "all laws, State or Federal, prohibiting the African slave-trade, ought to be abolished." A grand jury in Savannah, who were compelled by law to indict several persons charged with complicity in the slave-trade, actually protested against the laws they were sworn to support, saying: "We feel humbled as men in the consciousness that we are freemen but in name, and that we are living, during the existence of such laws, under a tyranny as supreme as that of the despotic governments of the Old World. Heretofore the people of the South, firm in their consciousness of right and strength, have failed to place the stamp of condemnation upon such laws as reflect upon the institution of slavery, but have permitted, unrebuked, the influence of foreign opinion to prevail in their support." A Mississippi newspaper, the True Southron, in its earnestness for the cause, suggested the "propriety of stimulating the zeal of the pulpit by founding a prize for the best sermon in favor of free-trade in negroes," and the proposition was widely copied, with approval; while in many pulpits "zeal" was exhibited in the service of the slaveholders without the stimulus of an offered prize. And in the United States Senate, John Slidell, of Louisiana, one of the most effective civil leaders among the late Confederates, urged the propriety of withdrawing American cruisers from the coast of Africa, that the slave-traders there might not be molested; and President Buchanan's administration, inspired by men like Slidell, was made to serve the plans of the supporters of the slave-labor system, by protesting against the visitation, by British cruisers, of vessels bearing the American flag, on suspicion that they were "slavers." These visitations were made in accordance with a positive agreement between the two governments, that under such circumstances, visits should be made freely by either party.

This arrangement had been made for the purpose of more effectually suppressing the slave-trade then about to be opened by the "African Labor-Supply Association;" and in the summer of 1858, the British cruisers in the Gulf of Mexico were unusually vigilant. In the course of a few weeks they boarded about forty suspected American vessels. It was this activity which promised to be an effectual bar to the reviving trade in slaves, that gave a pretext for the President to enter his protest. There was a cry raised against the "odious British doctrine of the right of search," and the British government, for "prudential reasons," put a stop to it. In this case it was only "the end" that "justified the means."