The Louisiana purchase and South Carolina's reopening of the slave trade in 1803

Journal of the Early Republic

Volumn 22, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 263-290

  Shugerman, Jed Handelsman ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33644623468     PISSN: 02751275     EISSN: 15530620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3125182     Document Type: Review

References (127)

1. Howard A. Ohline, "Georgetown, South Carolina: Racial Anxieties and Militant Behavior, 1802," South Carolina Historical Magazine, 73 (July 1972), 130-31
2. South Carolina General Assembly, Journal of the South Carolina Senate, Dec. 6, 1803 (South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia), 84 (hereinafter, Senate Journal)
3. South Carolina General Assembly, Journal of the South Carolina House of Representatives, Dec. 17, 1802, 134 (hereinafter House Journal)
4. House Journal, Dec. 17, 1803, 150-51. The senate in 1802 had voted to continue the ban without a roll call. The 1802 house vote was 86-11 to keep the trade closed, and the 1803 house vote was 55-46 to reopen. Because 1803 was not an election year, the membership of both houses was virtually identical from 1802 to 1803
5. Annals of Congress of the United States, 16th Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, DC, 1851), 77
6. Theodore Jervey, Slave Trade: Slavery and Color (Columbia, 1925), 31
7. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, 1974), 24-25
8. Most scholars who specialize on the history of South Carolina have overlooked the Louisiana Purchase, instead focusing on internal state issues. See Carl Harrison Brown, "The Reopening of the Foreign Slave Trade in South Carolina, 1803-1807" (M.A. thesis, University of South Carolina, 1968), 4-9
9. Patrick Brady, "The Slave Trade and Sectionalism in South Carolina," Journal of Southern History, 38 (Nov. 1972), 612-13
10. John Harold Wolfe, "Jeffersonian Democracy in South Carolina," in James Sprunt Studies in History and Political Science, 24 (Chapel Hill, 1940), 188-94
11. George Rogers, Evolution of a Federalist: William Loughton Smith of Charleston (Columbia, 1962), 372
12. William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Vol. 1, Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York, 1990), 136
13. Philip D. Morgan, "Black Society in the Low Country," in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, 1983), 109
14. Alan Kulikoff, "Uprooted Peoples: Black Migrants in the Age of the American Revolution, 1790-1820," ibid., 141
15. Rachel Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Back Country, 1760-1808 (Chapel Hill, 1990), 254-55
16. and Matthew E. Mason, "Slavery Overshadowed: Congress Debates Prohibiting the Atlantic Slave Trade to the United States, 1806-1807," Journal of the Early Republic, 20 (Spring 2000), 62
17. W. E. B. DuBois, David Brion Davis, and Donald Robinson each suggested in passing that the Louisiana Purchase was one cause of South Carolina's reopening. See W. E. B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1868-1870 (New York, 1896), 86
18. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, 1975), 121
19. and Donald Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics (New York, 1979), 320
20. Freehling, Road to Disunion, 136
21. William Freehling, "The Complex Career of Slaveholder Expansionism," in William W. Freehling, The Reintegration of American History (New York, 1994), 160
22. Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, 1980), 123
23. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, Aug. 30, 1784, in The Papers of James Madison, ed. Wiliam T. Hutchinson, William M. E. Rachal, and Robert A. Ruland (17 vols., Chicago, 1962-91), 8: 107-08
24. Max Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (3 vols., New Haven, 1911) 1: 398, 400, 585-86, 604-05
25. See also Paul Finkelman, "Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity," Journal of the Early Republic, 6 (Winter 1986), 343-70
26. Staughton Lynd, "The Compromise of 1787," Political Science Quarterly, 81 (Mar. 1966), 225
27. and Peter S. Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775-1787 (Philadelphia, 1983), 169-71
28. James Madison, Notes of Debate in the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Adrienne Koch (New York, 1966), 220-23, 502, 504 (quoting Gouverneur Morris, Luther Martin, and George Mason)
29. In addition to those ten states that banned the slave trade, North Carolina had passed a highly prohibitive duty upon imported slaves. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 297
30. Madison, Notes, 551 (emphasis added); Farrand, Records, 1:363-65, 371-75
31. Jonathan Elliott, The Debates in the Several State Convention on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution (5 vols., Buffalo, 1966), 5:477
32. For a compelling account of this compromise, see Paul Finkelman, "Slavery and the Constitutional Convention: Making a Covenant with Death," in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill, 1987), 209-23
33. Elliot, Debates, 4:286
34. The Debate on the Constitution, ed. Bernard Bailyn (2 vols., New York, 1993), 2: 25. To a lesser extent. New Hampshire also debated the slave trade in its ratifying convention, where antifederalists argued that the compromise was immoral
35. Stephen J. Goldfarb, "An Inquiry into the Politics of the Prohibition of the International Slave Trade," Agricultural History, 68 (Spring 1994), 26-27
36. Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (Baton Rouge, 1969), 92
37. Klein, Unification, 250, 253
38. William A. Schaper, Sectionalism and Representation in South Carolina (New York, 1968), 143
39. Wolfe, "Jeffersonian Democracy," 37
40. Brady, "Slave Trade," 603-04
41. Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America (Baton Rouge, 1988), 4, 40
42. D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires (2d ed., London, 1982) 120
43. DuBois, Suppression, 72
44. North Carolina prohibited bringing any black person from the West Indies into the state after 1794. Virginia, which had already ended its slave trade, tightened its non-importation laws in 1792, soon after the news of Haitian violence arrived. Then in 1793, both Georgia and Virginia banned the entry of free blacks from other states. In 1796, the wave of fear hit Maryland, which banned interstate importation. Georgia was temporarily the one exception to the banning of the African trade. In 1793, Georgia reopened the African slave trade, but then abolished it by statute and, even more significantly, by constitutional amendment in 1798. See Ruth Scarborough, The Opposition to Slavery in Georgia Prior to 1860 (Atlanta, 1933), 110
45. Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2d sess., 1529-31
46. Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill, 1993), ix
47. John S. Strickland, "The Great Revival and Insurrectionary Fears," paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (Atlanta, April 7, 1977)
48. cited in Hunt, Haiti's Influence, 118-19
49. Brady, "Slave Trade," 610
50. House Journal, Dec. 17, 1802, 134
51. John Drayton, A View of South Carolina (Charleston, 1802), 103, 112
52. Joseph W. Cox, Champion of Southern Federalism: Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina (Port Washington, NY, 1972), 54
53. John Garretson Clark, New Orleans, 1718-1812 (Baton Rouge, 1970), 210-12
54. McCoy, Elusive Republic, 196
55. Charleston (SC) Courier, Jan. 11, Feb. 2, 1803
56. Charleston Times, July 18, 1803
57. Charleston Courier, July 1803
58. Columbian Centinel (Boston, MA), July 2, 1803
59. Litchfield Monitor, Aug. 31, 1803 (reprinted from the Connecticut Courant [Hartford])
60. Connecticut Gazette (New Haven), Oct. 5, 1803 (emphasis in original)
61. Connecticut Courant, Aug. 31, 1803 (emphasis in original)
62. Governors' Message no. 866 to the South Carolina General Assembly, Nov. 24, 1803 (South Carolina Department of Archives and History)
63. An Account of Louisiana, Being an Abstract of Documents in the Offices of the Department of State and of the Treasury (Philadelphia, 1803), 10-11
64. David Ramsay, An Oration on the Cession of Louisiana to the United States (Charleston, 1804), 5, 14-15, 17 (the population of the United States was 76 million in 1900)
65. Statutes at Large of South Carolina, ed. Thomas Cooper and David J. McCord (Charleston, 1836-41), 450
66. Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States (1933; rep., Gloucester, MA, 1958), 682
67. Brown, "The Reopening," 8
68. Senate Journal, Dec. 6, 1804, 84
69. Edgar, ed., Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives, 4: 530-31
70. Jervey, Slave Trade, 26-31
71. Smith cast the deciding vote in the Senate in 1805. During the Missouri controversy, Smith presented in Congress documentation showing that from 1804 to 1807 most of the investment in the Charleston slave trade came from outside South Carolina. Annals of Congress, 16th Cong., 2d sess., 74-77
72. Everett Somerville Brown, The Constitutional History of the Louisiana Purchase (Berkeley, 1920), 116
73. Everett S. Brown, "Documents: The Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill for the Government of Louisiana, 1804," American Historical Review, 22 (Jan. 1917), 350
74. Paul F. Lachance, "The Politics of Fear: French Louisianians and the Slave Trade, 1786-1809," Plantation Society, 1 (June 1979), 179-80
75. William Plumer, Memorandum of the Proceedings in the United States Senate (New York 1969), 117 (emphasis in original)
76. and N. Louise Bailey, Mary L. Morgan, Carolyn R. Taylor, eds., Biographical Directory of the South Carolina Senate, 1776-1985 (3 vols., Columbia, 1986)
77. Annals of Congress, 16th Cong., 2d sess. 73-77
78. These records are also cited in Donnan, ed., Documents, 4:525 n.6
79. Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America (4 vols., New York, 1969), 4: 664 n440 (1)
80. Phillips, American Negro Slavery, 165-66
81. LaChance, "The Politics of Fear," 171, 180-81
82. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 341
83. Donnan, ed., Documents, 4: 513n, 665
84. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, "Louisiana Slave Database 1719-1820," in Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ed., Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1699-1860 (Baton Rouge, 2000). These numbers are less dramatic, but still impressive when 1811 and 1812 are included: 67 percent of the total came from Charleston, and only 17 percent came from other U. S. ports. This sample does not include slaves delivered by ships without a record of port of origin, nor does it include a large number of slaves who were bought at the port of origin and were not resold upon arrival in Louisiana. This sample also does not include the 3,300 slave refugees from St. Domingue arriving from Santiago de Cuba in 1809-10, which Hall decided not to include because they did not fit his parameters. This wave of immigration was the exception, not the rule
85. Lachance, "Politics of Fear," 196
86. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 342
87. Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison, WI, 1989), 12
88. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (New York, 1997), 548
89. Klein, Unification, 247, 249
90. George Rogers, Evolution, 370
91. South Carolina's exports increased from 9,840 pounds in 1790, to 93,540 pounds in 1793, then to 1,109,643 pounds in 1795, 6,425,000 in 1800, and 8,301,907 pounds in 1801. See Gray, History of Agriculture, 679
92. Joyce E. Chaplin, "Creating a Cotton South in Georgia and South Carolina," Journal of Southern History, 57 (May 1991), 191
93. Drayton, A View of South Carolina, 146
94. Governor A. Vander Horst to Senate, Senate Messages from the Governor (Dec. 3, 1795, No. 15), cited in Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 15
95. John Drayton, A View of South Carolina, 146
96. Frederic Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (New York, 1959), 22-23
97. Brady, "Slave Trade," 619
98. Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 12, 226
99. Gerald Friedman, "Fluctuations in the U. S. Production and Prices of Indigo, Rice and Tobacco," in Robert W. Fogel, Ralph A. Galantine, and Richard L. Manning, eds., Without Consent or Contract: Evidence and Methods (New York, 1992), 191
100. Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 227
101. Brady, "Slave Trade," 618
102. See Philip S. Morgan, "Black Society in the Low Country," 87
103. Philip Morgan, "Black Society in the Low Country," 87,92. Philip Morgan contended that his estimates that the low country was a net importer of slaves is "much more plausible" than Brady's calculations, but he did not offer a strong enough explanation for his estimates and his implausibly low "hypothetical rate of natural increase" of a mere 14 percent in the 1790s and 8 percent in the 1800s. Morgan explained that he used a 2 percent annual growth rate based upon the pattern in the 1770s and 1780s, but compounded over 10 years, a 2 percent annual rate yields a growth rate of 25 percent over a decade. This rate is almost identical to Brady's and Tadman's estimates. Perhaps Morgan decided to deflate the natural growth rate because of the low country's adverse swampy conditions, although he never provides this explanation. If this is the basis of his adjustment, one must still take into account the agricultural shift from rice and indigo to short-staple cotton after 1790, which would produce lower mortality rates. If Morgan rejects the low country's shift to short-staple cotton in order to keep the natural growth rate low, then he must explain why the low country would have any net migration at all in the first place, with the decline of all of the low country's other staples from 1790 to 1810. Even if one averages Morgan's estimates with Brady's and Tadman's, the results still demonstrate a net export of about 6,000 slaves out of the low country
104. Freehling, Prelude, 11
105. Philip D. Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade (Madison, 1970), 88
106. Annals of Congress, 8th Cong., 1st sess., 1004-36
107. Donnan, ed., Documents, 4:504
108. Brown, "Reopening," 22-26
109. Wolfe, Jeffersonian Democracy, 197-98
110. Edgar, ed., Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives, I, Sessions Lists, 259-67
111. House Journal, Dec. 7, Dec. 17, 1804, 211-13
112. Senate Journal, Dec. 8, 1804, 94
113. Governor's Message No. 921 to the General Assembly, Nov. 25, 1805, 8-9
114. Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), reprinted in the Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), Jan. 9, 1806
115. House Journal, Dec. 11, 1805, 150
116. Senate Journal, Dec. 14, 1805, 161
117. Charleston Courier, Dec. 1, 1806
118. National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser, Jan. 7, 1807
119. Brady, "Slave Trade," 620
120. Annals of Congress, 9th Cong., 2d sess., 14
121. Dubois, Suppression, 241-46. Only Beaufort was a net importer, because its population increase of 30 percent from 1800-1810 exceeded the natural growth rate (between 20-25 percent). Georgetown's growth rate was 12 percent, Charleston District's was 5 percent, and Colleton's was 7 percent, suggesting that the low country was selling over half of its natural increase of slaves out of their region. The following low country senators voted to keep the slave trade open: Thomas Porcher of Charleston (St. John, Berkeley) inherited 169 slaves in 1800; Samuel Warren of Charleston (St. James Santee) owned 100 slaves; Mathias Hutchinson of Colleton owned 51; William B. Mitchell of Colleton owned 85 in 1800; William C. Pinckney of Colleton, a plantation owner after the 1790s until his death, owned between 68 and 95 slaves in the 1820s, Paul Mitchell of Georgetown owned 32 slaves in 1800; and Leonard Dozier of Georgetown owned 14
122. Bailey, Morgan, and Taylor, eds., Biographical Directory of the South Carolina Senate, 1:415; 2:783, 1098, 1122, 1284; 3:1685
123. Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 158; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York, 1994), 96-97
124. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 48
125. Fogel and Engerman, Without Consent or Contract, 65
126. Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (New York, 1988), 102
127. Freehling, Reintegration of American History, 185. William Freehling writes, "The racial foundation of Southwide unity, however, was a two-edged sword. For racism to unite nonslaveholders and slaveholders, the black race had to be significantly present." As a result, the frontier created both the opportunity to expand slavery and the incentive to keep increasing the slave population in those areas