The Life and Times of
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The Life and Times of
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Chapter Four If in the preceding chapters too much time and space have been given to the earlier years of William Lowndes, it has been not only from the wish to show as much as might be of a place and people whose peculiarities were then well marked, but also to show the influences of men and things under which he grew to manhood. Those influences must have been especially strong upon a youth whose want of health and strength made his life peculiarly a home one, and brought him into the close companionship of a father, said by his contemporaries to have been " of great power of mind and energy of character." Thus his training had been exclusively English and Carolinian ; there is no reason to suppose that up to his thirtieth year he had ever visited the Northern States, and all his teachers had been natives of Great Britain. Yet, as we shall see, William Lowndes's views were modified by the newer day about him; the concentrated patriotism of his father was widened by greater culture, and by a youth of lettered leisure such as Rawlins Lowndes had never known. But though widened it was not weakened. The habit of debating and weighing all questions as described had undoubtedly encouraged a dispassionate habit of mind in the young man, whose special characteristics were already great honesty of thought and a wise gravity beyond his years. In his town life he had seen the more recent events here related, and had heard the changing politics of the day discussed, while in the country, where the winter months were generally spent, he had read and thought. Those long plantation evenings, with only books and talk to occupy them, were great helps to study and reflection ; and the planter who read his Locke and Burke, or pondered over the " Wealth of Nations " or the " Esprit des Lois," came not unprepared to public life, when his neighbors summoned him " to serve the State." Since writing the above, I have found in the " History of Mr. Jefferson's Administration," by Mr. Henry Adams, a passage which sums up so admirably what I have tried to show of Carolina and its people that I may be pardoned for quoting some sentences here. In a sketch of the chief cities of the Union, about the year 1800, he says of Charleston: " Nowhere in the Union was intelligence, wealth, and education greater in proportion to numbers than in the little society of cotton and rice planters who ruled South Carolina. . . . Not even New York seemed more clearly marked for prosperity than this solitary Southern city, which already possessed banking capital in abundance, intelligence, enterprise, the traditions of high culture, and aristocratic ambition." And again: " The small society of rice and cotton planters at Charleston, with their cultivated tastes and hospitable habits, delighted in whatever reminded them of European civilization. They were travelers, readers, and scholars; the society of Charleston compared well in refinement with that of any city of its size in the world, and travelers long thought it the most agreeable in America. . . Before the Revolution large numbers of young men had been educated in England, and their influence was still strong in the society of Charleston. The younger generation inherited similar tastes. Of this class the best known name that will appear in this narrative was that of William Lowndes, and no better example could be offered of the serious temper which marked Carolinian thought than was given by the career of this refined and highly educated gentleman, almost the last of his school.' William Lowndes was at the time of his father's death just eighteen. He alludes to this in a letter written four years later to one of his brothers, who had referred to him some family disagreement which had arisen out of the settlement of the estate. " To the best of my recollection," he says, " the facts were" so and so, "but you know that, although named executor by the will, my minority prevented my acting in that capacity." It is peculiar that the brothers make this much younger half-brother the arbiter of their dispute, with a perfect trust in his ability and justice. A sharper grief than even the loss of his father was at hand, for a few months later, as he was driving his mother along a country road in a chair (as a high two-wheeled vehicle was then called), the horse took fright and dashed into the woods. The chair was overturned, and while the young man was taken up insensible, his mother, who had been thrown against the trunk of a tree, was killed on the spot. Mrs. Lowndes had been a most amiable woman; her son loved her passionately. It was months before he rallied from the shock of her death, and it made the lasting and painful impression on him that it was due to his own want of strength and skill. He never again, fond as he was of horses, would drive a lady or a child, invariably giving the reins to a coachman unless accompanied by men only. The sole letter of his remaining, which belongs to these early years, shows this feeling; it is a fragment and undated, but must have been written before his marriage in 1802. It is to a lady, a very distant connection.
To this time belongs also another letter from his half-sister, Mrs. Brown, given to show the affectionate feeling between the different branches of the family. Mrs. Brown was a widow with one son, Lowndes Brown, who afterwards married a daughter of the Hon. John R. Livingston and removed to New York. I do not not know what was the " present" to which she refers.
For the next year Mr. Lowndes gave himself to reading and studying at home ; reading " particularly Greek and the works of La Place." Under this judicious regimen his mind recovered its tone, and he returned to his law books. He also fell in love with and proposed to Miss Elizabeth Pinckney, the eldest daughter of Major (afterwards General) Thomas Pinckney, a quiet, thoughtful girl about a year older than himself. The offer was very agreeable to the lady, and would have been accepted at once, but marriages were then family affairs, and "my dear papa " was by no means favorable. Major Pinckney objected first on the score of age. Great disparity of years in marriage was then common, and had the lover been twenty or even thirty years the senior, no one would have thought of objecting; but the superiority of even twelve months on the lady's side was held to be a monstrous drawback. Besides the elder gentleman thought the younger (of twenty) too young to be married at all, and few persons will disagree with him. A second well-founded objection was his health. How Mr. Lowndes argued Major Pinckney out of this point does not appear. On the first he is said to have asserted, very truly, that he was older than his years, and would soon be older still; but it is not easy to see how he could have established any reassuring fact about the latter, although this does seem to have been the strongest period of his life. The third objection, much worse than any other could possibly be, was his political degeneracy! The dreadful tale had gone forth that " Lowndes was a Republican," " a Republican-Democrat;" shocking but true! And, moreover, others of the younger men Joseph Alston (son-in-law to Aaron Burr), Daniel Huger and many more had wandered from the Federal fold, led by that wolf in sheep's clothing, the brilliant author of the Declacration of Independence. But though the new doctrines had made political way in the State, society in Charleston was still ruled by the older gentlemen, who had called Washington their friend and knew no faith but his. To them republicanism was synonymous with Robespierre, Danton, and all their wild deeds. It meant irreligion, immorality, and all that was bad. To bring such a thing into one's own household was not to be thought of, and Mr. Lowndes's suit was rejected. Besides his principles (or prejudices), which were those of his class, Major Pinckney had a personal reason for detesting the new party. The strongest affection of his life was perhaps that for his elder brother, General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. In 1801 this adored brother had been invited by the Federal party to stand for President, in the hope that the regard felt for him in the South would counteract the Republican influence. The hope was vain ; the Republicans offered to vote for him if he would allow his name to be associated on their ticket with Mr. Jefferson's instead of Mr. Adams's, but he firmly declined the offer as inconsistent with principle. He received the Federal votes, but the all-important casting vote fell to South Carolina, in which by that time the Republicans had the majority, and the State, to which political fidelity has always been the supreme duty, gave it, against her own son, to Jefferson. General Pinckney bore the defeat silently and proudly; saying, when it was pointed out to him that one of his own kinsmen had acted against him, " That a vote should express public policy, not private consideration." His brother felt the party action more keenly than he, and when very shortly after Mr. Lowndes's suit was presented, it was undoubtedly distasteful to him. However, ce que femme veut Dieu veut, and here the lady knew
her own mind. Moreover, the young man was, notwithstanding his politics,
too highly esteemed to be easily dismissed. His brother Thomas, and his
friend Mr. Frederick Rutledge, both stanch Federalists (the latter the son
of Governor John Rutledge, and the husband of General Pinckney's niece,
Miss Horry, and highly esteemed by him), exerted themselves in the lover's
behalf, declaring that " although a Republican, Lowndes was a moderate
one, and from his temper of mind would never be otherwise." The father
yielded and gave his consent, and the marriage took place on the 16th of
September, 1802; the groom still lacking five months of one-and-twenty. It
may " at once be said that it turned out a very happy marriage. Miss
Pinckney was intelligent, well educated, and sympathetic. During her
father's English ministry she had had the instructions of excellent
masters, and of a capable governess, and during his Spanish mission she
had remained for two years at the Parisian school of the famous Madame
Campan. To these advantages she owed her familiarity with and enjoyment of
the literature of both languages, an enjoyment which never failed her. She
had also a good clear head for business, such as her grandmother Eliza
Pinckney's had been. In connection with this may be told an anecdote,
which she herself told to show how soon her father had begun to appreciate
her husband. It was, she said, but a few weeks after her marriage, and she
was busy writing in a blank book. In Mr. Lowndes's time these exotics had been replaced by oaks and orange-trees. A double row of the latter edged the river bank from the gate to the house, and fine oaks dotted the lawn. The road leading to this pretty home was beautiful with oaks, jessamines, and the Cherokee rose, and was for years the favorite drive in the environs of Charleston. The trees are almost all gone now from the road, and the place has long since passed from the family, yet they are still generally known as " Lowndes's Grove " and the " Grove Lane." It must be confessed that the place was not as healthy as beautiful in the late summer months it was liable to fevers; and much ill health in Mr. Lowndes and his family might have been traced to their residence there. In 1804, as has been said, Mr. Lowndes was admitted to the bar, and formed a copartnership with Mr. Cogdell, then city attorney. On proposing this partnership, Mr. Lowndes asked modestly to be taken as a nominal partner only, with no share of the profits of the firm, but receiving his reward in the advantage of the elder lawyer's advice and guidance. Mr. Cogdell, nevertheless, recognizing the young man's character and ability, refused the offer, and made liberal arrangements in his behalf. Mr. Lowndes soon found, however, that, although the science of law interested him greatly, the practice was most distasteful; and when a year later a hurricane which swept the coast ravaged his plantation and laid waste his fields, he resolved to withdraw from the bar, and devote himself to the restoration of his estate. This resolution distressed his friends, who had anticipated for him a brilliant success; and Mr. Fraser remarked to him that " his career was short." "Yes," he answered, "very-short ; and in that time I have had but one case in which my conscience and my duty concurred." From the time to 1810 he devoted himself to the restoration and improvement of his property. The plantation book shows every detail of work. The names and positions of the different fields, which needed ditching and banking, and which were in good condition. How many " squares " of rice were planted on each, what labor was spent on them, and what they yielded. Lists of negroes on each place, their ages, their children, their ailments, their needs; the Slings "given out," so many blankets, so many shoes, and so on. How many were coopers and carpenters, what houses were built or repaired, how many barrels made.for the rice. Now and then there are entries of experiments and a little theorizing on what might be done. His right hand was Alick, his colored overseer, or, as we should now say, " foreman; " a very intelligent, faithful negro, in whom he had great confidence. During this time two sons and a daughter, Rawlins, Thomas Pinckney, and Rebecca Motte, were born to him the last in 1810. These were the happiest and healthiest years of his life, but while thus busy and interested at home, he was watching with earnest, thoughtful eyes the course of public affairs. Those were by no means tranquil days when Mr. Jefferson held
sway at the White House, trying to rule his countrymen by a kindly but
somewhat impractical genius, and to combat those grim warriors, England
and France, by commercial restrictions and non-importation
acts. France, which then meant Napoleon, was the object of their dread and their hatred, and they could not but believe that Jefferson, who had openly professed " French ideas," was in some way the ally, or the tool, of the terrible Corsican. Jefferson, in truth, held and loved the theories of the Revolution, which were beautiful, but the practices and the excesses of the Revolutionists and of Bonaparte were abhorrent to his benevolent nature. In his youth he had believed that the " brotherhood of man " would make all peoples happy; but he was no youth now when he filled the presidential chair, and might have said, as Southey did, that he " was no more ashamed of having been a radical than of having been a boy." There can be no doubt that he immensely overrated the importance and influence of his own country with the great nations of Europe, and really believed in, and tried passionately to bring about an era of peace, a time when the kingdoms should stand back and hold their fleets and armies in check, lest they should lose the advantage of commerce with the still young and insignificant republic across the seas. So, he thought, might the awful miseries of war be averted, and peace and plenty bless his people. If ever this condition of things does come to pass, before the millennium, it should be remembered that it was the dream by night and aim by day of the much struggling Virginian, who left the White House a broken man, reviled by half the nation, but carrying with him the conscience of an honest endeavor for the good, or, as he would have said, " the happiness" of his countrymen. Virginia at least was true to him, and it is pleasant to think that at Monticello he had peace and friends around him. England and France were then almost in the death grapple: all other interests circled round that great struggle. Each country claimed that whoever was not for, was against her; but America, safeguarded by the Atlantic, remained neutral; she even contended that neither combatant had the right to forbid her trading where and with whom she pleased. It was of special importance, because the rich products of the West Indies were locked up in their ports, and could seek no markets in their own ships. Jefferson's great doctrine, that " neutral flags make neutral goods," was of especial value here, and he was bent upon supporting it. For answer England simply seized and searched the vessels, and Napoleon jeeringly declared that what America called u her flag*' was " only a piece of striped bunting," since it could not protect the ships beneath it. The system was ably attacked in a very remarkable pamphlet called "War in Disguise, or the Fraud of the Neutral Flags," written by James Stephen, the distinguished father of a more distinguished son. Stephen denounced the whole theory as false, and claimed that in practice the ships were not really American, but French or Spanish, carrying the produce of their own countries and fraudulently covered by American flags. There probably was some truth and more exaggeration in what Stephen alleged; but the pamphlet gave Mr. Lowndes an opportunity of expressing his views on a subject of national interest. He wrote a series of articles in the " Charleston Courier," over the signature, "A Planter," examining and discussing the question. They were said at the time " to be good for any one, but excellent for so young a man." He himself afterwards wrote of them : " After all, though as an argument I think well of the ' Planter,' it was not adapted to its purpose, it was not adapted to the readers of a newspaper." The work, however, attracted public notice and approbation,
and he was elected a member of the General Assembly of the State, for the
parish of St. Bartholomew, in the year 1806. The legislature of South
Carolina, the lawmaking body of one of the smallest of States, has (or
rather had) peculiarities about it which I might try to describe, had not
that been already done by a pen which I cannot hope to emulate. In this sedate body William Lowndes sat, as his father had sat before him, as the member for St. Bartholomew's. Happily no such stormy scenes were to occur in his time as had marked the last year of Bawlins Lowndes's term of service. One matter only of more than usual importance came before him. It arose from the increase in population and importance of the upper part of the State. South Carolina had been settled originally by emigrants from England and other countries of Europe, all coming by sea, and landing at the port of Charles Town, or, as the old people used to say, " coming by the front door." They settled in the lower part of the State, which was afterwards divided into parishes; and these parishes, none of which lay more than a hundred miles from the sea, contained at the time of which we speak by far the greater number of wealthy men and large plantations. The great body of the negro population was massed here, along the rice rivers, upon the sea islands, and where the black seed cotton grew, all in the " low country." In the mean while the " up country," which might be said, roughly speaking, to begin about the latitude of the present city of Columbia, where " the ridge " crosses the State, had filled up with settlers who came down generally from North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. They began to come about 1750 (urged, it is said, by the Indian depredations upon the frontiers of those States), moving in wagons with teams of horses, driven by the long smacking whips which for generations gave the name of " crackers " to the country people. Hardy yeomen farmers, what were called " plain folk," they settled and throve in the healthy uplands above the ridge and back to the mountains, but with few exceptions they did not make large fortunes. Their farms were not as large, or their negroes as numerous, as those of their wealthy neighbors of the coast; but they fought splendidly at Hanging Rock and King's Mountain, and even claimed that they were better rebels than their more Europeanized countrymen. These people now had a grievance. Until the beginning of the
present century the legislative representation of the State was
apportioned by wealth alone. A parish or district (as the counties were
called after the Revolution), assessed at so much property, sent two
representatives; if richer it sent three, quite irrespective of
population. The parishes were rich, but small in extent, and often had but
comparatively few white inhabitants. The districts were large, poor, and
increasing in popular tion every year. The Senate was arranged in the same
way. Every parish had its senator, while Fairfield, Richland, and Chester
had between them but one member of the "Upper House," as the people still
called it. The point had been under discussion for some time, and there was much hard feeling excited between the sections. The legislature appointed a committee to find some plan of adjustment, and a bill was brought forward proposing that henceforward population and wealth should both be represented, and that (a new census being taken, and a new assessment made), to use the words of the act, "The House of Representatives shall consist of one hundred and twenty-four members: to be apportioned among the several election districts of the State, according to the number of white inhabitants contained, and the amount of all taxes raised by the legislature . . . paid in each. ... In assigning representatives to the several districts of this State, the legislature shall allow one representative for every sixty-second part of the whole number of white inhabitants in the State, and one representative also for every sixty-second part of the whole taxes raised by the legislature of the State." There are many careful details about fractions of representation, etc., but the above is the gist of the whole matter. The election districts remained the same, except in some small rectification of boundaries between some of the up-country divisions. This proposition brought peace, and became a law in 1808. It continued in force until 1866 swept all things away. The bill was reported to the House by Colonel Blanding, of Columbia, and Mr. Lowndes (although of the committee) never laid any claim to the credit of it. After his death, however, his friend, Judge Huger, who was in the House at the time, stated that the plan was Mr. Lowndes's, that the original draft was in his handwriting, with corrections and emendations, and that it was presented by Colonel Blanding because it was thought more likely to allay the irritation of the up-country men that " the proposition should have the approbation of a judicious member from that quarter." Both gentlemen being on the committee, and good friends, the arrangement (necessarily a private one) was made between them, and never divulged in the lifetime of either. The Honorable William Grayson, the biographer of Mr. Lowndes, to whom this statement was made by Judge Huger, examined the draft and recognized the handwriting. I have no wish to put forward any claim for Mr. Lowndes which he did not make for himself: but as the above has been published by Mr. Chase in his " Lowndes of South Carolina," I give it here from deference to the memory of the two gentlemen on whose authority the account rests. Possibly the scheme may have been a joint work, suggested by the brain of each, put on paper by the hand of one. Mr. Lowndes claimed no share of it, and Colonel Blanding was of much too high character to have maintained pretensions to which he had no good right. I may say here that the plan had the high approbation of Mr. Calhoun, who said of it years afterward, that it was the best system of representation ever devised. At the time when Mr. Lowndes thus entered public life, the aggressions of England had become yet more open and violent. Claiming the high seas as her kingdom, she there knew no will but her own. Ships might sail here, and might not sail there, as she bade them, and anywhere or everywhere she would search an American vessel, whether man-of-war or merchantman, and take from it sailors whom she called hers. In the discrimination a British officer was not nice: an able-bodied blue-jacket was apt to be carried off, whether he hailed from Old or New London,from Boston in Lincolnshire or Boston in Massachusetts. They were clapped, despite papers and protestations, into English frigates, and set to work the English guns. Several of these men were killed serving under the Union Jack at Trafalgar. The wonder was that New England, the nursery of seamen, stood it. She nevertheless deprecated resistance, advised every possible concession, bore the insolence of Canning and the irony of Wellesley, saw her sons imprisoned, and her commerce ruined, and yet endured, so averse was she to quarrel with the only power which openly resisted France. Some years later one of her representatives actually called the wrong " endurable," since " only twenty-five men had been taken in the last twelve months." It is hard to believe that such things were only ninety years ago. Fancy Germany, for instance, stopping the Pacific fleet, and carrying off any American born Hans or Fritz, who might be found under the Stars and Stripes. The country was roused, however, when in 1807 occurred the intolerable outrage of the massacre of the Chesapeake by the Leopard at the very doors of New York. The justly enraged people demanded the vengeance due on those who " shed the blood of war in peace," and it was only the strong aid of the Federalists which strengthened Jefferson to resist their cries. England, tardily, and with great reservations, disowned the
act of her officer, and apologized lamely enough. The government professed
itself satisfied, but the people were not, and the angry feeling grew. In
South Carolina, always prompt to take the sword, it had the very fortunate
effect of calling attention to the militia. Drilling and training took a
new impulse ; for, despite the apology, the scent of war was in the air.
Mr. Lowndes, thus introduced to the notice of his fellow-citizens, seems to have increased in their esteem, and in 1810, " as soon as he was old enough," as one of his biographers remarks, he was chosen to represent " Beaufort and Colleton of South Carolina " (the district in which his property lay) in the national Congress, and took his seat in November, 1811. His elder brother, Mr. Thomas Lowndes, had represented Charleston in Congress from 1800 to 1805. See Appendix II. In the last two years the condition of the country had gone from bad to worse, the greatest evils coming from the French and English wars, and from the dissentient feeling at home concerning them, and the efforts of both powers to implicate America in the conflict. Besides the annoyances already mentioned, England had declared a blockade, mostly upon paper, of all ports " under French influence' which meant practically western Europe, and forbade intercourse with French or Spanish colonies ; while Napoleon retaliated with his Berlin and Milan decrees, forbidding all nations to trade with England, and asserting his right (or power) to seize all vessels from her ports. Between them the Yankee skipper had a dreadful life. If he tried to take his salt fish to Barcelona or Marseilles, an English cruiser pounced upon him even in mid-ocean, under the plea that he was " breaking the blockade," and not only impressed his men but confiscated his ship. If he tried to run a cargo of cotton or lumber into Liverpool or Bristol, a French corvette would bear down upon him, declare his goods "colonial," and therefore "contraband of war," and carry him a prize to Havre or Bordeaux. Still, America adhered steadily to her peace policy, and to all these grievances opposed only the remonstrances of her ministers and a (constantly evaded) non-importation act, to which had latterly been added an embargo. This peace policy had been inaugurated by Mr. Jefferson, who in so doing had doubtless remembered the example of his great predecessor in signing the Jay treaty, which, while it sacrificed much, secured that peace without which the infant country could not have grown to manhood. It had now so grown, but the policy remained, and induced a passivity which, to countries accustomed to win every advantage, and defend every right at the point of the sword, seemed pusillanimous in the extreme. They could not understand how a people, which apparently cared for trade alone, could aspire to treat with them on an equal footing, and ask position and respect for her envoys at their warlike courts. The unfortunate envoys endured much and gained little, although many of them were men of tact and talent. The taunts and sneers borne by William Pinkney, of Maryland, and by Mr. Monroe in England, and by General Armstrong in France, are hardly to be believed today. Their most reasonable demands were scorned or slighted, and their complaints treated as impertinence. In that very amusing book, the " Bath Archives," Sir George Jackson says: " Such is the exasperation felt at the impertinent conduct of the Yankees that there exists a general inclination to give them a drubbing." The impertinent conduct consisted in remonstrating on the injuries detailed above, and on the insolence of Captain Douglass, who had threatened to burn down the city of Norfolk because his watering casks had been damaged. America was simply despised. If these measures of commercial retaliation had resulted in prosperity and unanimity at home, they might have proved acceptable to those members of the community who preferred peace to praise; but the last measure, the embargo, had been to a large part of the country an almost intolerable burden; a burden which, instead of oppressing England and France, paralyzed many of the American States. It had been supposed that New England, which Quincy had described in picturesque language, as living by the ocean alone, would suffer most. " Of the land," he said, " they think very little. It is, in fact, to them only a shelter from the storm, a perch on which they build their eyrie and leave their mate and their young, while they skim the surface, or hunt in the deep." But with characteristic cleverness New England turned to manufactures, her genius took a new development, she made shoes, hats, cotton goods, etc., and throve by supplying the wants of her neighbors. The embargo proved the beginning of her great wealth, and when a few years later it was proposed to remove the non-importation act which she had so fiercely opposed, it was found that her interests had changed, and she now listed upon its retention. On the agricultural States the embargo bore hear vily. Virginia, perhaps, suffered most of all; Carolina suffered also. Neither possessed the flexible habit of mind and hand of their Northern countrymen: their laborers were negroes, good at their own work, but hard to turn to unaccustomed ways. They manufactured nothing, and their tobacco hogsheads and cotton bales stood piled in their barns, while the necessaries of life were wanting. They did not repine, and each man among his own people did what he could. The people had to be clothed, and the planters hunted out their old looms and set the women to work. They wove not only cotton homespun, but a serviceable stuff of wool and cotton something like jeans, eking out the scanty supply of wool by recourse to the high-piled mattresses on the old-fashioned bedsteads. Wool was indeed so scarce that the sheep led charmed lives, and even the locks left on the brier patches were gathered up, as by the pious " shepherd of Salisbury Plain." Some weavers acquired a certain degree of skill: the present writer has seen a very decent tablecloth, of a wide-checked pattern, woven on her grandmother's plantation at this time. Ladies and children wore shoes from the hides of their own cattle, tanned and made by the plantation craftsmen. " If the embargo had lasted long enough we should have been a manufacturing people," the old men used to say. But, in truth, their works did not amount to more than home industries; there was no concerted action, the intense individualism of their training prevented that, and except these few plain things, they went without, or bought from their clever neighbors. In South Carolina, trade resolved itself into a species of barter in which new men made great fortunes. Shopkeepers who had laid in a good stock of goods before the ports were closed could sell them for what they liked. I have seen some coarse, horn-handled knives (inferior kitchen knives now) which were bought a dozen of them for three bales of cotton, equal to about one hundred and twenty dollars. If money had to be raised (taxes, for instance, must be paid), the same obliging shopkeeper would possibly give five dollars for a couple of tierces of rice worth perhaps fifty. When the embargo was removed, these men had their yards piled with bales and barrels of price, which had cost them hardly anything, while the planters were impoverished and their debts had accumulated. Many such tales were told fifty years ago. They were impoverished, but they took it with wonderful spirit and firmness. The older men, stanch Federalists though they were, shook their heads grimly and cursed the French (it was always the French who were supposed to have done the harm), but made no resistance, for these were political experiments, and, in such, Carolina is always interested; and was not the President, whose plan it was, a Virginian, and is not Virginia the chief of all the Southern States ? Dr. Eamsay, writing while the trouble was fresh, says:
The effect upon the younger men, although Republican-Democrats, was to give them an intense dislike to all these measures, by which their so-called party had striven to avoid the taking of arms. With clearer sight than their fathers, or than their Federal contemporaries, they saw that the time had come when the country must assert herself or lose her self-respect forever. The new representatives sent by South Carolina to the Twelfth Congress were Langdon Cheves, William Lowndes, and John C. Calhoun, all young, able, and ardent, unshackled by previous bonds, and owing allegiance to no especial leader. Calhoun and Lowndes were nine-and-twenty, born within a month of each other; Cheves, about five years older. There was also David R. Williams, a man of much force and integrity, who had vainly endeavored to rouse the spirit of the last inert Eleventh Congress. The desire of all these men was to awaken the patriotism of the country and achieve for her a place among the nations, without regard to politics or party. They had set themselves no easy task. To those who have lived through the great changes of the last fifty years, it is curious to look back to the great excitements and agitations which very slight causes produced when this government was new. Men, not foreseeing the wonderful way in which a free and self-governing people can adapt itself and its laws to the exigencies of an untried system, thought every new move a mighty matter, and cried ruin and disaster whenever their theories were opposed. The Louisiana purchase, whereby territory large ! as an empire was secured on the easiest and hon-estest possible terms, had, in 1800, driven the Northern Federalists to fury; and now the application of the southernmost portion of that territory to be admitted as a State renewed their agitation. Their opposition was based on the point that such an acquisition, not having been provided for in the Constitution, must be repugnant to it, and they seem really to have believed that " the framers" expected the country to retain always its original bounds, despite the designs upon Canada which had been agitated from the beginning of the Union. They especially dreaded the addition of a State southern in position and institutions; and unconscious of the extraordinary powers of assimilation to be developed by the United States, they regarded the Spanish and French people, language and laws of the newcomer, as the Hebrews regarded the wedge of Achan. They could never consider it a State like their own, they said; its people would be natives " of a foreign country girt upon us, but never citizens of the United States." One such violation of the Constitution, as they deemed it, broke, they thought, all bonds, and in their indignation they were ready to dissolve the Union, lest they themselves should be corrupted. Nor did they consider this as any desperate deed. We must remember that no peculiar sanctity attached to the Union in the minds of the men who made it. They had bound their States together for mutual advantage: should that advantage cease to exist, they were ready with small scruple to cut the bonds themselves had made. Jefferson and Fisher Ames might be held to represent the' political poles: but in 1803 Ames gravely declared, " Our country is too big for Union ;" and Jefferson, also alarmed at what seems to us thisyery moderate vastness, said, a little later, " Whether we remain in one confederacy, or break into Atlantic and Mississippi confederations, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part." These were geographical considerations, more important were the political ones; but the famous Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 were moderate in comparison with the demands and plans of Pickering, Griswold, Quincy, and others, men of New England, "where there is," says Cabot, " among the body of the people more wisdom and virtue than in any other part of the United States/' They, in 1804, in order to "save New England" (by which they meant the Federal party), decided that they must part her from the South and West as from an evil thing, and they prepared to form a New England Confederacy (hoping much to carry New York with them), with as strong a sense of right as the Southerners had in 1861. They were held in check by the wiser heads among them, George Cabot, Adams, etc., not that their plan was wrong, but that the time was not yet ripe; " although," Cabot says, " a separation at some period not very remote may probably take place." They desisted for the moment, but not until their understanding with the English cabinet was such that there can be little doubt that if the " Essex Junto " had carried its measures, it would have done so under the protection of a British fleet. It seemed as if Lord North's " rope of sand " was beginning already to dissolve. The South was tranquil; wishing for relief from its financial embarrassments, but not willing to force the President's hand, or depart from those "peace principles" which formed the guiding star of the Jeffersonian Democracy. The West had rejoiced at the purchase of Louisiana (Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee were then the West), securing to them as it did the free navigation of the Mississippi and unlimited commerce. It had never felt safe before, remembering Jay's proposition to surrender this right to Spain in order to secure the Spanish trade to New England. The Pinckney treaty of 1795 had indeed assured, as well as might be, the free navigation and " right of deposit" (i. e. of warehouses) at New Orleans, but treaties are but paper and may be broken : the purchase made it sure. The West, therefore, was willing to admit the new State; but the feeling of apprehension was general, for, although the proceedings of the Essex Junto were not known, Quincy's famous speech, eloquently declaring the right of a State to shape her own destiny, had startled all men. In January, 1811, in the last session of the Eleventh Congress, he had said: " I hold my life, liberty, and property, and the people whom I have the honor to represent hold theirs, by a better tenure than any which this national government can give. . . . We hold them by the laws and customs of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Behind her ample shield we find refuge and feel safety. ... If this bill passes [viz. to admit the State of Louisiana], it is my deliberate opinion that it is virtually a dissolution of this Union, that it will free the States from their moral obligations, and as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, definitely to prepare for a separation, amicably if they can, forcibly if they must." Such was the feeling at home and abroad when the Twelfth Congress met. |
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