1808

    Lady Antebellum has changed their band’s name to Lady A … so as not to offend people, leading many people to wonder what the word Antebellum actually meant and why it would offend anyone.  “Ante-“ being a prefix meaning “before”; and “bellum” meaning “war”, antebellum simply means “before the war”, specifically used in America to mean before the Civil War, The War Between The States, The War of Secession, or The War of Northern Aggression as it has variously been called.

    A romantic name for a bygone era, a past golden age, in the South; leaving many young people wondering what was the least bit romantic about an era they imagine, having been told, consisted of nothing but slavery.

    To understand that we have to go back about a thousand years or more, and to another continent.  In medieval Europe developing the feudal era building a military, government, society, and economy upon the ownership of land and the leasing and subleasing thereof, possession of and interest in the land was key.

    It was from the owning of land where wealth was derived, knights were equipped, education was to be had, and influence wielded.  Over time, the aristocrat was born, the educated, sophisticated, mannered, and honorable descendants of those knights of yore who was well read, willing to duel for his honor, courteous and so forth an inheritor of the code of chivalry.

    What does this have to do with the South?  Well, when people were colonizing America in the New World, the South was largely settled by the minor aristocracts from England, and people aspiring to be the new aristocracy in the colonies, and the key to that was the acquisition of land, and the building of manorial estates upon the model of Europe, in land warm enough and fertile enough to produce wealth in time.

    This required not only land but people to farm the land for the owner, a proper education, manners, as well as that sense of pride, virtue, and honor.  Farm hands being a scarce commodity in the colonies and land being plentiful, how was an aspiring aristocrat to acquire serfs to work his fields and money to fill his purse?

    The demand for labor lead to the acceptance of indentured servants and even slaves, along with a reliance upon cash crops like tobacco, cotton, and indigo.  After all these aspiring southern aristocrats were playing catch-up with a Europe which had had over a thousand year head start in developing their estates.

    Thus, the southern plantation was born, together with the image of the southern gentleman and the southern belle.  It is this to which the antebellum romanticism alludes, for which the idea of slavery was but an unsavory means, and not really though about.

    At the same time a revolution in industry, commerce, and manufacture was taking place, mostly on the other side of the country, in the North, but also in Europe.  People in the north were getting wealthy in trade and with factories, the land being too rocky and the climate too cold for proper farming.

    Going back to those medieval images, merchants, traders, and bankers had a rather dishonest reputation of trying to cheat their customers, putting their thumbs on the scales, sometimes selling shoddy merchandise.  One must always be wary of such a shady and disreputable lot.  The fact that they now styled themselves as “industrialists” or “capitalists” did not dissuade the general public of their historical reputation, after all, they were still just fancy clerks and shopkeeps.

    As for those factories, dirty and smelly as they were, it was not even as reputable as the craftsmen of yore who took pride in their work, they were producing cheap tools, garments, and furniture even if they were producing a lot of it.  At least it was more honest work, quite suitable for the middle class drones.

    The North was settled by religious zealots, Puritans, Quakers, and the like, practical minded and hard working but hardly intellectual or of noble ancestry.  While it was settled first, thus housed most of the colonies’ population, they were a collection of small, even tiny states and not really expected to be prosper long term or sustain as large a population as well as those large warm sprawling southern states.

    Which gives the reader a little more perspective on the mentality of the general public in the colonial era leading up to and through the Revolution.  After all, while those New England states had some wealth, the intellectual weight of the colonies was in the South with the eloquent gentlemen rather than those shifty lawyers which filled the legislatures of the North.

    It was the South which had given us the most intellectual of the Founding Fathers of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, (all from Virginia) even though the North had provided Adams, Franklin, and Hamilton.  The southern gentleman farmer was the American aristocracy, the northerners were clerks, bankers, merchants, and craftsmen.

    While they were acquiring wealth with this new phenomena, it was quite uncertain that they would continue in that fashion, after all, the last thousand years of history showed quite clearly that the key to wealth was in the land, not commerce, and wealth was political influence.  This was a time of mercantilism where lucrative deals were expected to be granted by the government to those with influence to give them exclusive trading rights and other grants upon which fortunes could be built.

    Which bears closer attention to how those small, rocky New England states had acquired their wealth.  Having lots of trees, but not much farmable land, they turned first to timbering, then quickly to building ships to sell to Europe.  Having built ships, they used some of those ships to engage in commerce.  After all, why build a ship for the people in England so that they could ship the cotton, sugar and tobacco and make a profit if New England could sail their own ships?

    Of course, as lucrative as those cash crops were, you have to sell something valuable in exchange for those commodities.  After all, you couldn’t just ship things one way in exchange for silver, people would run out of silver and the trade would stop.  What did those southerners need and want?  They needed labor, so transporting people indentured servants and even slaves meant you were trading one commodity for another.  That’s how you make a profit trading.

    (The reason slavery was not popular in the North was that they had plenty of people for labor and not much land for them to farm.)

    Then the Revolution happened.  Which brings us to the actual topic of the day, a rather unique part of the Constitution, probably the most perused yet overlooked language of the document, a part of the infamous 3/5 compromise and how it may have entirely different implications than modern scholars are wont to credit it.

    When you research the Constitution, certain language is often a different color, italicized, or footnoted to indicate that it is no longer applicable and effective as a matter of law.  Usually this means that a later Amendment has superceded that provision with something new and different.  However, there is a unique section of the Constitution which was not superceded but included in itself an expiration date.

    “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.”  Para. 1, Sect. 9, Art. I, US Constitution.

    It was part of the three-fifths compromise:  “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States . . . which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”  Para. 3, Sect. 2, Art. I, US Constitution.

    (Note that both of these provisions pertain to taxation, the importance of which will be discussed hereafter.)

    This three-fifths compromise was so important that there was another unique provision, that it alone in the Constitution was protected from being amended:  “Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; . . . .”  Art. V, US Constitution.

    There is that date again, the year 1808.  Why is that significant?  Well, in part it was the Constitutional Convention kicking the can down the road a bit, but it was also there to allow states in both the north and the south to get prepared to the economic impact of the dramatic change that no new slaves or indentured servants were going to be imported into the country after that time.

    The Convention being held in the summer of 1787, that gave twenty years, a full generation, for people to work out and plan for this change.  They did not particularly like this peculiar institution they had inherited but their economies were inextricably tied to it.

    History books tell how the South responded and adapted to this change.  Over ninety-five percent of people in the South did not own and could not afford a slave; those well off enough who could afford a slave usually could still only have one or two; but there were those top wealthy individuals who owned most of the slaves.  It is there that they bred slaves like livestock as a way to compensate for the loss of the supply from importation.

    The question people do not ask is how the North handled this radical change.  Remember all of those ships engaged in commerce, making those shipping magnates in those northern harbor towns of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Providence, and others which had been making hefty profits from trading in those slaves?  They could still make money, but not nearly the money they used to be making.

    The North was still developing things like textile mills so they were still dependent for their profits upon buying that cotton produced by those southern plantations, but there is no doubt that the end of the slave trade made commerce less lucrative.  Much of the wealth of the North had been created from the triangle trade.

    So take a moment, as a mental exercise, to look at the slaves not as people but as a commodity.  The South was now producing their own, the North lost their customer base. (Yeah, the vast majority of the slave trade was not to the southern states but to the Caribbean and South America, but that was being cut off, already in other English colonies by The Slave Trade Act of 1807.)

    In the competitive mercantilist climate of the 18th and 19th Century, wealth was the source of political influence.  Now note the taxes imposed upon the slaves as a production input; those northern ships were not being taxed by the federal government, nor the factories, nor the bankers’ interest.  Taxation at this time was an economic weapon in the war for mercantile supremacy.

    Does this mean that the effects of that three-fifths compromise stopped at 1808?  Remember that generational delay instilled by the writers of the Constitution?  What happened about a generation after 1808?  That’s right, as I’m sure you know the abolitionist movement began in and around 1830, one generation after the importation of slaves ended.

    It does not strike me as a coincidence that the aversion to slavery only came about as a political movement after the North ceased to able to make a profit on the trade.

    If viewed as a cynical political ploy, the northerners, having made their fortune off of the slave trade, they now sought to force their former customers turned competitors into financial ruin by taking away their property.

    After all, the Constitution itself provides that if the government takes a person’s property, the government is required to compensate them for the value of that property.  By the Constitution, an abolitionist government could have met with far less resistence to ending slavery had they offered to compensate the owners for the loss of their property.

    In the North, this generation lagging the 1808 provision became enthralled with ending that institution which their parents had made money.  Was it to assuage their guilt or was it a sincere belief?  Had they forgotten that their family fortunes were often built upon that trade or were they trying to erase the evidence?

    Which begs the question of why the northerners cared so much about their money that they would not part with a penny of it to effect the outcome that they desired?  (This is not reflective of all individuals by any means as many times a slave’s freedom was purchased by those opposed to the institution, for example Frederick Douglas.)

    While it makes little or no sense why the northern politicians did not seek such a peaceful, and Constitutional financial solution rather than resorting to war and conflict when viewed from the perspective of fellow Americans; it does make sense from a competitive stance of ruining the aristocrats financially and politically by the rising merchant class.

    It is a different aspect of the class warfare occurring in America from both a class and a regional perspective which casts the war of that generation following the rise of the abolitionist movement.

    From a southern perspective it has always been rather one sided that the ownership of slaves by the South keeps getting derided while the trading in slaves by the North keeps getting ignored.  Of course, it gets even more complicated and convoluted in the generations following the Civil War.

    It does place into context the sentiment of President Lincoln seeking a reconciliation between the North and the South if you realize that neither side really came to the conflict with clean hands, and that a nation can never truly heal so long as people try to project all of the ills of society upon others.

    The South was certainly guilty of owning slaves.  The North was just as guilty of trading in slaves.  The overwhelming majority of the common folk of both regions did neither.  The actions of the Founding Fathers in 1787 affected change in 1808 which set off a movement in 1830 which lead to a war in 1860.  What is clear is that the actions, for good and for ill of one generation are often a reaction to the actions of the previous generation.

    A little food for thought.