About 1859 the frequent and notorious violations of our laws aroused even the Buchanan government; a larger appropriation was obtained, swift light steamers were employed, and, though we may well doubt whether after such a carnival illegal importations "entirely" ceased, as the President informed Congress,[84] yet some sincere efforts at suppression were certainly begun. From 1850 to 1859 we have few notices of captured slavers, but in 1860 the increased appropriation of the thirty-fifth Congress resulted in the capture of twelve vessels with 3,119 Africans.[85] The Act of June 16, 1860, enabled the President to contract with the Colonization Society for the return of recaptured Africans; and by a long-needed arrangement cruisers were to proceed direct to Africa with such cargoes, instead of first landing them in this country.[86]
90. ~Attitude of the Southern Confederacy.~ The attempt, initiated by the constitutional fathers, to separate the problem of slavery from that of the slave-trade had, after a trial of half a century, signally failed, and for well-defined economic reasons. The nation had at last come to the parting of the ways, one of which led to a free-labor system, the other to a slave system fed by the slave-trade. Both sections of the country naturally hesitated at the cross-roads: the North clung to the delusion that a territorially limited system of slavery, without a slave-trade, was still possible in the South; the South hesitated to fight for her logical object--slavery and free trade in Negroes--and, in her moral and economic dilemma, sought to make autonomy and the Constitution her object. The real line of contention was, however, fixed by years of development, and was unalterable by the present whims or wishes of the contestants, no matter how important or interesting these might be: the triumph of the North meant free labor; the triumph of the South meant slavery and the slave-trade.
It is doubtful if many of the Southern leaders ever deceived themselves by thinking that Southern slavery, as it then was, could long be maintained without a general or a partial reopening of the slave-trade. Many had openly declared this a few years before, and there was no reason for a change of opinion. Nevertheless, at the outbreak of actual war and secession, there were powerful and decisive reasons for relegating the question temporarily to the rear. In the first place, only by this means could the adherence of important Border States be secured, without the aid of which secession was folly. Secondly, while it did no harm to laud the independence of the South and the kingship of cotton in "stump" speeches and conventions, yet, when it came to actual hostilities, the South sorely needed the aid of Europe; and this a nation fighting for slavery and the slave-trade stood poor chance of getting. Consequently, after attacking the slave-trade laws for a decade, and their execution for a quarter-century, we find the Southern leaders inserting, in both the provisional and the permanent Constitutions of the Confederate States, the following article:--