Chapter 4: The Engine of Southern Impoverishment

In June of 1788 a convention of the people of Virginia was called to consider if they would adopt a new form of government as outlined in the proposed Federal Constitution. One man stood head and shoulders above all others both in style, force of oration and in his wisdom and ability in sounding the depths of the danger of the proposed new government—that man was Patrick Henry. As noted by the citation above, Henry believed that Virginia and the South, being a minority in the new government, would be used as a tax source for the benefit of the North. When assured by Federalists (those in favor of the new government) that Virginia and the South would have representatives in congress to protect their interests and those representatives would be held responsible for any taxes passed, he replied:

When oppressions may take place, our representatives may tell us, We contended for your interest, but we could not carry our point, because the representatives from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, etc., were against us.

Thus, sir, you may see there is no real responsibility.²

Here, Henry is pointing out that when in the minority, a group’s rights and interests are not protected and secured just because they have elected a few representatives. The danger faced by the South from uniting in a government with the Northern majority motivated Henry’s opposition to adopting the Constitution. It was not the Constitution that Henry feared as much as it was the people with whom the South would be uniting because the new government would hand every issue to the “Northern majority.”³ Patrick Henry warned Southerners that the Northern majority, having a need to pass legislation favorable to its commerce and industry, even if it was harmful to the South, would eagerly do so. Henry predicted that by acceding to the new union as a minority section, the South was placing “unbounded power over our property”⁴ in the hands of those to whose benefit it would be to plunder and loot that property. Of great significance is Henry’s warning about an “oppressive mode of taxation”⁵ that the Northern majority could place upon Southerners because the South would not have enough votes in congress to prevent such oppressive taxation. Henry then gives an inspired warning: “Sir, this is a picture so horrid, so wretched, so dreadful, that I need no longer dwell upon it”⁶ [emphasis added]. Taxation with unlimited power in the hands of the Northern majority and not slavery is what Henry is warning Americans in general and Southerners in particular to fear. When Christians today decry the use of Federal power to enforce secular humanist views upon the nation, they should be reminded that it was Patrick Henry who warned Southerners what could and would happen in a democracy if one finds himself in the minority status. Henry was not alone in his warning about the South becoming the “milch cow” of the Union.

Patrick Henry’s warning of the tyranny of a Northern majority in Congress became a disastrous Southern reality by 1861 & continues today. (Courtesy LOC)

William Grayson, a delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention, also warned Southerners of the danger of Northern majority rule. He noted that there was a great difference between the States of the North and the States of the South. Like Henry, Grayson’s argument rested not upon the issue of slavery but upon economics and taxation. It should be remembered that slavery (“slavery” also includes the African slave-trade) existed in the vast majority of Northern States at that time and therefore was not a purely “Southern” issue. Grayson explains, “The interests of the carrying States [Northern States] are strikingly different from those of the productive States [Southern States]....The carrying States will assuredly unite and our situation will then be wretched indeed. We ought to be wise enough to guard against the abuse of such a government.”⁷ Both Henry and Grayson are warning of the inherent danger of the South being “unequally yoked together” with a Northern majority. As noted in chapter 3, the South was wealthy if not the wealthiest section of the new nation and these men believed they had just cause to fear the looting of the South by the Northern majority.

Rawlins Lowndes, SC. In 1788 he foresaw the sun of the South setting never to rise again. (Courtesy of South Carolina Legislative Manual)

It was not just the Virginians who feared the tyranny of the Northern majority. A representative sample of other Southern statesmen who feared the tyranny of a Northern majority will demonstrate this widely held Southern fear. From North Carolina Hugh Williamson was so concerned about the Northern majority’s ability to rob the South by “unequal taxes,”⁸ that he even suggested secession as an alternative to such abuse.⁹ Williamson not only warns that the North at that time (1789) was in the majority but it possessed the “means of perpetuating it.”¹⁰ Timothy Bloodworth, another North Carolinian, warned of the danger of the new government: “This Constitution, if adopted in its present mode, must end in the subversion of our liberties.”¹¹ Joseph Taylor of North Carolina warned, “We see plainly that men who come from New England are different from us....They cannot with safety legislate for us.”¹² Following up on Taylor’s statement, William Lancaster questioned the wisdom of placing taxing power in the hands of “Northern majorities...to overburden Southern agriculture.”¹³ From South Carolina General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney warned that [the South] “will be nothing more than overseers for the Northern States”¹⁴ if it entered into a government with the North as a minority partner. Rawlins Lowndes of South Carolina feared that the North’s majority in the new government would destroy any pretense of the Southern States living in a republic.¹⁵ Lowndes fear of the tyranny of the Northern majority in the new government under the Constitution is displayed in his assessment of the future of the South in this statement: “when this new Constitution should be adopted, the sun of the Southern States would set, never to rise again.”¹⁶

The fear expressed by these Southern Founding Fathers was real. In 1789 the Congress of the new government consisted of 26 senators and 65 representatives. In 1789 out of the 26 senators, 14 were from the North and 12 from the South. In the House of Representatives, the 65 congressmen consisted of 35 Northerners and 30 Southerners. This clearly demonstrates that, yes indeed, the South was already in the minority—that is, it could be out voted by the Northern majority.

But these same Southern Founding Fathers warned that not only was the North in the majority in Congress but they also had the “means of perpetuating it.”¹⁷ Thirty-four years after the meeting of the first Congress of the United States the following breakdown of Senators and Representatives by region proves that Williamson was correct in predicting the South would remain a minority in the Union. In 1823 there were 24 states with 48 Senators and 213 Representatives. The breakdown was 24 North and 24 South in the Senate and, in the House of Representatives 123 from the North and 90 from the South. Notice that only in the Senate has the South maintained equality with the North, but in the House the North has a major “majority” advantage. The one thing desired by the North at this time was to control the Senate as well as the House of Representatives. But how could they do that if for every time a Northern State was added to the Union a Southern State was added? In the fevered mind of a Northern radical the answer oozed forth, slavery! Deny the movement of slaves into the territories, teach Northerners to hate not only slavery but also Southerners, and fewer Southerners would settle in the new territories. With fewer Southern settlers than Northern settlers moving into the territories, Northerners could outvote Southerners in the new states. The new states would be “free” states, that is, free of Southerners, free of African-Americans, and free of new Southern Senators!

Although the Southern opponents of the new Constitution failed in their attempt to keep the South out of a union with the Northern majority, they were very successful in one major area of American Constitutional history. The Bill of Rights exists today because of the fear of a consolidated and centralized Federal government that could not be controlled by “we the people” of the states. The first ten amendments of the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, was an attempt to boldly define where the Federal government could not assert its power. Notice that the very first words of the First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law....” These words are followed in the Second Amendment by noting that since a free State must have an armed militia, therefore the people’s right to “keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” The Third Amendment puts the Federal government on notice that: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” Remember, the only standing army, i.e., soldiers, allowed by the Constitution were Federal; therefore the Third Amendment is another limitation on Federal power. A final and bold limitation on Federal power is asserted in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. These Amendments are a clear warning to the new Federal government that it holds only delegated powers and all undelegated powers remain with the people of the states of the union to be used by them at their volition. In 1789, just two years after the adoption of the Constitution, an attempt was made to have the Bill of Rights applied to the States as well as the Federal government but that effort was rejected by Congress.¹⁸ The fact that the Bill of Rights applied only to the Federal government was confirmed in 1833 by none other than the Federal Supreme Court in Barron v. Baltimore.¹⁹

The Anti-Federalists’ warnings of an all-powerful Federal government under the proposed constitution were surmounted only by a conditional ratification. Not only did the Anti-Federalists obtain the assurance of the addition of the Bill of Rights but they also ratified the Constitution by asserting that each state was acting as a sovereign and could at its volition recall any “delegated” right or power. These measures won over enough Anti-Federalists to assure the adoption of the Constitution, but as history proves, men such as Patrick Henry (“a picture so horrid, so wretched, so dreadful”) and Rawlins Lowndes (“the sun of the Southern States would set”) proved to be painfully correct.

The great fear of these men, that the new government would be used by the Northern majority to enrich itself at the expense, that is, the impoverishment, of the South, was soon to be realized. By using their control of the Federal Congress, Northern politicians began to propose laws and measures that were very advantageous to them while doing damage to the interests of the South. Even the cod and mackerel fishing industries of the New England States were given a “bounty” drawn from the Federal treasury and disproportionately paid for by duties drawn from Southern ports.²⁰

The impoverishment of the South began in earnest as the North gained control of Congress. During the years following the adoption of the Constitution a host of schemes, from banking and monetary systems which benefitted the banking and commercial interest of the North to tariffs that protected Northern industry but increased prices for Southern consumers, were passed through the Federal Congress. Raphael Semmes points out the toxic results to the South of these measures: “Under the wholesale system of spoliation, which was now practiced, the South was becoming poorer and poorer.”²¹ Semmes is pointing out that economically the South was unfairly losing ground to the North. This economic downturn fell upon not just the rich white plantation owners but also on the average white non-slave holder as well as on the free and enslaved black people of the South—Northern-imposed poverty is an equal opportunity villain.

Long before Semmes wrote his famous memoirs, Thomas Hart Benton, Senator from Missouri, was denouncing the treatment the South was receiving at the hands of the Northern majority. In a speech before the U. S. Senate in 1828 notice how Benton points out that the rich South was being plundered by the Northern majority:

I feel for the sad changes, which have taken place in the South, during the last fifty years. Before the Revolution, it was the seat of wealth, as well as hospitality. Money, and all it commanded, abounded there. But how is it now? All this is reversed. Wealth has fled from the South, and settled in regions north of the Potomac; and this in the face of the fact, that the South, in four staples alone, has exported produce, since the Revolution, to the value of eight hundred millions, of dollars;²² and the North has exported comparatively nothing....Under Federal legislation, the exports of the South have been the basis of the Federal revenue....Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, may be said to defray three-fourths, of the annual expense of supporting the Federal Government; and of this great sum, annually furnished by them, nothing, or next to nothing is returned to them, in the shape of government expenditures. That expenditure flows in an opposite direction—it flows northwardly, in one uniform, uninterrupted, and perennial stream. This is the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up in the

North...taking from the South, and returning nothing to it.²³

Senator Thomas H. Benton, MO. He protested the impoverishment of the South by the Northern majority. (Photo Courtesy LOC)

Senator Benton began his discussion by noting the harmful changes that had taken place in the South during the past fifty years.

Benton was speaking in 1828; fifty years prior to his speech would have been 1778, two years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. As was noted in chapter 3, the South was the wealthiest section of this country during the colonial era. What happened to the wealth? Just as the patriots debating the adoption of the Constitution warned, the Northern majority in Congress began to extract wealth from the South via Federal legislation. The South was not impoverished at this time but it was becoming obvious to Southerners that if something was not done, poverty or near poverty would become commonplace in the South. As Benton noted, “the South must be exhausted of its money, and its property, by a course of legislation....every new tariff increases the force of this action.”²⁴

Upon recounting Senator Benton’s message to Congress in Memoirs of Service Afloat, Semmes opined: “No wonder that Mr. Lincoln, when asked “why not let the South go?” replied, “Let the South go! where then shall we get our revenue?”²⁵ Revenue, money, tariffs, and filthy lucre are what pushed Lincoln and the North to wage aggressive war upon the South. Protecting itself from the rapacious hands of those seeking to gain at her expense is what ultimately pushed the South to, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “alter or abolish” a government they found unsuitable to govern the free and still prosperous people of the South.

7 William Grayson as cited in Bledsoe, Albert T., Is Davis a Traitor? (1866, The Advocate Publishing House :1879), 262.

8 Hugh Williamson as cited in Bradford, M. E., Founding Fathers (University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, Kansas: 1994), 178.

11 Timothy Bloodworth as cited in The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution as Recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia in 1787, ed., Jonathan Elliot (J. B. Lippincott, NY: 1876), IV, 286, 316.

12 Joseph Taylor as cited in Bradford, M. E., Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution, (University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA: 1993), 80.

18 McDonald, Forrest, A Constitutional History of the United States (Robert E. Krieger Publishing Co., Malabar, FL: 1982), 37.

20 Semmes, Raphael, Memoirs of Service Afloat, (1868, The Blue and Gray Press, Secaucus, NJ: 1987), 59.