EDITOR’S NOTE: This article may include historical materials that could contain offensive language or negative stereotypes. Such materials must be viewed in the context of the relevant time period. The Georgetown Times does not endorse the views expressed in such materials.

I tremble for my country when I recall that God is just.

Thomas Jefferson

By Tom Rubillo

Slavery sickened the nation’s soul from the outset. Apologists for it needed only to honestly answer this question: Would they choose bondage for themselves and their children as they had done unto others? The moral question was straightforward enough.

Instead of facing the issue squarely, men of the cloth like South Carolina’s own Richard Furman, skirted it. In an Exposition of the Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States addressed to the Governor in 1823, he opined that the Golden Rule was “never to be urged against that order of things which the Divine Government has established; nor do our desires become a standard to us, under this rule, unless they have due regard to justice, propriety, and the general good …”

God’s law, he argued, does not require anyone “to release his debtors or sell his lands and houses to distribute the proceeds among the poor,” Matthew 19:16,28 notwithstanding. (The conversation between Jesus and the young rich man.)

Likewise emancipation of slaves was not a moral imperative. Any relief from the burdens of slavery, should it occur, would constitute a “personal act” of “piety and benevolence,” and nothing more. It was not a mandate of the Christian faith in Furman’s mind or times.

Furman concluded by noting that his convention was … particularly unhappy in considering that an idea of the Bible teaching the doctrine of emancipation as necessary, and tending to make servants insubordinate to proper authority, has obtained access to any mind; both on account of its direct influence on those who admit it, and the fear it excites in others, producing the effects before noticed [rebellion and its violent suppression].

In truth, the best that can be said of human bondage prior to 1865 is the same that can be said of abortion and capital punishment today. It was legal in America. But legality and morality can be very different things, just like economics and empathy. The sorry fact is that money mixed with politics and/or the pulpit advances the rule of gold, not the Golden Rule. Social turmoil is frequently the result.

Like Judas, captors, captains, crews, warehousemen, auctioneers and others trading in human suffering expected to be paid for each of their millions of betrayals of their fellow men, women and children. Over the centuries, that proved to be an awful lot of lucre for the sellers.

On the other side of the economic transaction, buyers logically (in economic terms) sought to protect the capital they had invested and then to maximize the return on it. The fact that the investment resulted in human suffering was of concern only to the extent that it might impact on profits.

Furman’s Exposition came at the same time as fears of slave uprisings were reaching their peak in South Carolina. It also came shortly after U.S. Census figures, in 1820, revealed that enslaved people outnumbered their captors in South Carolina. The count was 265,301 to 237,400. Some found that statistic troubling, possibly out of a subliminal fear that what they (or their neighbors) were doing to others might soon be done unto them.

At least equally disturbing to many, slave uprisings were on the rise. Noted ones had been thwarted in Columbia in 1805, Camden in 1816 and at Ashepoo in 1816. Although harshly repressed, plotting continued, all in the predictable cycle in which (a) cruelty and oppression produced (b) resentment and resistance which, in turn, resulted in (c) rebellion, producing (d) more repression arousing (e) more violent uprising, and so on. South Carolina then. Libya yesterday. Syria today. And tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow ... until the last syllable of recorded time (an expression stolen from Shakespeare).

Shortly after the census was published, in 1822, Denmark Vesey’s planned uprising in Charleston was uncovered. As a result, 35 people were sentenced to die (of which 22 were killed in a mass public execution) and 37 more were sold out of state.

Furman’s commentary defending slavery was published and praised by the Governor the following year. It did little to persuade the enslaved. Six years later, in 1829, a planned uprising by Georgetown slaves was uncovered. It was the subject of two previous episodes of this local history.

In 1831, the Nat Turner Revolt in Virginia caused “a panic throughout the South” to use a characterization of its effects used by South Carolina’s preeminent historian, Walter Edgar.

Storm clouds were gathering.

Part of the reaction to the Denmark Vesey plot in South Carolina was passage of the Seamen’s Act. Aimed at suppressing talk between free blacks and slaves about the possibilities of a life lived in freedom, the law required all black seamen arriving in South Carolina be jailed until their ship departed with them aboard. If the unfortunate sailor’s room and board at the jail were not paid by his captain, the captain could be arrested and fined and the sailor sold into slavery.

Passage of this law sparked protests in Washington and abroad. It violated several foreign treaties. It also intruded into realms reserved for regulation by the Federal government by the U.S. Constitution — it interfered with interstate commerce and foreign trade. Calls for its repeal were ignored. It was not. Fear had replaced reason.

Meanwhile, a little earlier in the era, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. An opponent of slavery, Whitney had fashioned the device to ease the burdens of slaves on cotton plantations. Ironically, his invention had the opposite effect from that which he intended.

Cotton is easier to grow than rice. Swamps do not have to be cleared of ancient timber. An elaborate agricultural infrastructure of canals, levees, gates and paddies does not have to be built and maintained year after year. Fields do not have to be flooded and drained to get a bountiful harvest.

With cotton, once high ground has been cleared, cotton is a plow, plant and pick crop. Ginning — getting the seed out of the boll — was the most time-consuming part of preparing it for sale. While it did nothing to ease the many burdens of producing the crop, Whitney made the chore of seed removal easier, speeding up the process of getting the crop to market.

Rather than lightening the work load of those sowing, tending and harvesting the crop, the cotton gin increased the demand for acreage to plant more cotton for shipment to spinning mills in the northern states and in England. More cotton meant more profits. The demand for more land sparked movement westward toward already treeless land in Texas and other places west of the Mississippi River.

Movement west raised the issue of whether slavery would grow along with the United States, putting the issue of slavery back on the national agenda, albeit for a brief time. The question was mostly practical and political and only a little bit moral. Planters could not afford to pay wages, even if they could find enough workers willing to raise and pick cotton. Slave labor was the practical, already available alternative to that.

The concern up North was not really the burdens or plight of slaves. It was political. If slavery spread to all the new western territories, the influence of northern states in national affairs would wane. The concern in the South was that if the practice did not spread to the west, the influence of slave-holding states would be diminished. If moral questions ever became predominant in Congress, the continued existence of the institution of slavery wherever it existed could be threatened.

There was a heated national debate. As usual, morality took a back seat. Budding northern textile magnates wanted more cotton. Southern plantation barons wanted cheap labor. There was a lot of lobbying. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 resulted. It banned slavery in territory north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, allowing it below that geographical line. Stating the very obvious once again, economics, legality, politics and morality are decidedly different subjects.

But the pesky moral issue did not go away entirely. Four years later, in 1824, the State of Ohio called for the abolition of slavery. It did so in response to passage of South Carolina’s Seaman’s Act. Tempers began to flare again. The simmering continued through the establishment of the American Colonization Society in 1827, the purpose of which was to free slaves and ship them back to Africa in what, in truth, was America’s first “not in my neighborhood” movement, self-righteous proclamations of religious purity by its advocates notwithstanding.

In November 1827, the schooner Randolf arrived in Georgetown to pick up 25 newly-freed slaves from Marlborough to be shipped to Liberia. They had been transported to Georgetown down the Pee Dee River, causing curiosity and talk all along the waterway. The Winyah Observer noted the event, editorializing only that “The subject admits commentary, but we forbear.” The Kensington Conspiracy — Georgetown’s own planned slave uprising — followed two years later.

Fear took over. Harsh repression followed.

 What brought regional rivalries to a boil during the period were divergent economic interests, not human suffering. The Industrial Revolution was beginning to take hold in the North. The South remained largely agricultural. Both wanted cheap labor. Northern industrialists had an endless flow of immigrants to exploit. Child labor was legal, unions and strikes were illegal. There was no minimum wage. Troublemakers were blacklisted and left to fend for themselves.

The South had a captive labor force held in check by overseers, drivers, “beat companies,” whips and worse. Troublemakers were lynched.

The result: As often happens, morality took a back seat to greed, this time all without regard to geography.

Political controversy of the era centered on foreign trade. Northern manufacturers wanted protection from imported factory goods from Europe. They called for protective import tariffs to make imported goods more expensive than what they had to offer on the domestic market. Higher profits for northern manufacturers (but not higher wages for those working in their sweat shops) would be made this way. More money, more money, more money.

Large southern planters made their huge profits by exporting the rice, cotton, tobacco and other crops that slave labor cultivated and harvested to foreign markets. They feared that import tariffs would result in retaliation by foreign governments in the form of high tariffs on American crops. This would make southern agricultural products more expensive abroad, cutting demand for them. A drop in foreign demand could dramatically cut profits at home.

Meanwhile, small farmers everywhere, including those in the western half of Georgetown County, were indifferent to the tariff question. They had to be self-reliant and had more immediate concerns. They had little money for manufactured goods, no matter where made. They relied on neighbors to buy and sell what they had, made or needed. As far as politics were concerned, they just wanted to be left alone so they could live their lives in peace, tend their fields and feed their families. Because they did, they appreciated the freedom to live, work, speak and worship without government interference guaranteed by the very Bill of Rights they had championed. To the extent that they had a political allegiance, most were called “Unionists” in those days. They knew how highhanded the highbrow could become, so they supported maintenance of the federal system of government to keep the delusions of grandeur of the locally moneyed from getting too far out of proportion.

Returning to the political controversy, beginning in the late 1700s, the federal government started imposing tariffs to pay its electees, appointees, employees, its small (by today’s standards) military and its debts. (There was no income tax.) When, in response to lobbying by northern industrialists, a sharply divided Congress imposed high import tariffs, large planters from the South balked. The result was the “nullification” movement — the claim of each State’s right to nullify or ignore any federal law, tax or tariff they did not like. Georgetown’s large planters joined that movement under a banner of “State’s Rights.”

Tempers flared, but the subject was money, not morality. Profits were threatened. The seeds of war had been planted. It would take a generation for them to germinate. The result would be what became known at the time as “a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.” How and why it came to pass will be the subject of future episodes.

Tom Rubillo used to practice law, but is now retired. He has held public office, taught government, ethics and law at area colleges and has published several books. The episodes written in connection with this project will be, at its conclusion, available in one volume, or at least that is his best laid plan.