Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 27.djvu/108

 100 Southern Historical Society Papers.

cey, in an able and powerful speech, urged that the African slave trade be revived.*' Dr. McGuire has fallen into an error, not pecu- liar to himself, but one which greatly annoyed Mr. Yancey in his life- time, and which he studiously sought to correct at every opportunity. I will relate one example of his corrections. In the Alabama secession convention, Mr. Yancey warmly supported a resolution of instructions to the Alabama delegates to the proposed Provisional Congress of the Confederacy, requiring them to vote for a proviso of the Constitution of the Confederacy forever prohibiting the Afri- can slave trade. He said in that speech that he apprehended few public men had been more industriously misrepresented than himself on this subject of the resolutions; that he was not and never had been in favor of re-opening the trade; that Virginia and Maryland would continue to send all the negroes to the cotton States that it was desirable to have. (See Smith's Debates.)

Mr. Yancey's position may be briefly stated. He contended that it was a question for adjudication whether the Constitution gave Congress the right to make "piracy" of a trade for instance, the African slave trade upon which the social fabric of half the States was founded; whether Congress had the right to declare the particu- lar trade ' ' piracy ' ' which the Constitution specially forbid any hostile legislation against " prior to " 1808, twenty years after the formation of the government; whether the positive forbidding by the Constitu- tion of any interference with the African slave trade, a specially designated and protected trade, " prior to " 1808, left Congress free to forbid it after that date; whether the forbidding ultimately of an original constitutional guarantee, existing in the form of a compro- mise between the sections in an organic law, could become valid under any enactment less than a constitutional amendment.

Messrs. Pryor and Preston, of Virginia, and Mr. Hilliard, of Ala- bama, contended for unconstitutional rejection of De Bow's report favoring the re-opening of the trade.

Mr. Yancey saw his opportunity to discuss the encroachments of the Abolitionists upon the Constitution in resisting a summary rejec- tion of the motion of Mr. Pryor. Hence the debate and the final reference of the De Bow report to the Vicksburg convention.

Dr. McGuire is bold and opportune in denouncing the allegation of Fiske, and other so-called historians who falsely pretend that the South fought for the perpetuation of slavery. As I have just said, Alabama led in demanding that the constitution of the Confederacy should forever prohibit the African slave trade. That policy once