Manigault Family Papers

abandon altogether his inland place, and he moved in the fall with his negroes to the Combahee river, where one or more of his brothers were already planting the tide lands of that region. He then utilized his negroes in some way and for several years superintended for one of his brothers.

Having formed a taste for city life during his boyhood and in consequence of his European tour, he would occasionally visit Charleston, and there he became the accepted suitor of Miss Harriet Manigault, one of the heiresses of the day. She was a grandaughter of Gabriel Manigault the rich old merchant, and her inheritance amounted to $40.000.

This sum of money was of vast importance to him and was at the foundation of his future success. He invested it judiciously in lands and recently imported Africans, buying out several of his neighbors, especially certain members of the Gibbes family, who were an inert and thriftless set, whose minds were more occupied with the capons they were having fattened for their next Sunday dinners, than with the attention which their planting interests demanded of them.

Mr Heyward was already doing well at the end of the century and whenever there was a war in Europe, breadstuffs always went up, and rice went along too. In 1805, the year of the battle of Austerlitz, rice sold for splendid prices and his crop was a large one. During the next twenty years his successes continued and he finished by becoming the largest rice planter in the State and one of the largest slaveowners in the South. At his death in 1851 he owned and planted 3000 acres in rice on the Combahee river - not all first class however - over 2300 slaves, and his income on a certain year which is not remembered, had been about $120.000. This amount in the hands of his factors in April 1851, the time of his death, proceeds of sale of crops, was $80.000.

An appraisement of his property at that time gave the following result Lands Slaves City property Bank stock and other investments.

The slave trade was allowed to continue at the South until 1808, and, as the latter year approached the price of able bodied men rose from $300 to $400. Whenever Mr Heyward went to the slave mart to purchase, he made his selections, probably buying an equal number of the two sexes. and the first thing to do afterwards was to name them all. Greek and Roman history as well

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unnecessary delay to a bath house. The cleansing process which is so characteristic of the Eastern or Turkish bath was satisfactorily performed, and as we had the sights of the city to see, without waste of time at the bath, we hurried out soon after we had been pronounced clean by the attendants, and did not linger in an anteroom where it is usual to recline on a couch for about a half hour before going out into the open air. The result of the hurry was that a few hours afterwards I felt sore at the throat, and I knew it to have ben cause by my imprudence in leaving while my system was relaxed and all the pores open. Bathing à la Turque is an operation that requires time, and it will never become naturalised in the western world as long as the life there is so feverish and full of hurry and anxiety.

Damascus is a typical Mohamedan city and in that respect alone is interesting. The Mosque is in an immense inclosure to which we were not admitted, and there is no other public building worthy of being visited. The bazaars we found very crowded and the number of camels that were continually passing through was v ery great. This was accounted for by the arrival a few days before us of a great caravan from Bagdad consisting of 1500 of those animals. We went to see where a large number of these were still tethered, but there were then not over 500, the others having been removed. My recollection is that all the camels were of the one humped variety or Egyptian, and that there were some of the two humped or Persian among them.

After a hurried walk through the principal parts of the city including a trip to the outside of the fortifications where the point from which St Paul was let down in a basket was shown us, we returned to our inn and dined. After dinner we went to the house of an old Syrian who dealt in articles that travellers usually buy in Damascus and examined some of his wares. These were not displayed so that we could see them, and upon explaining to him that Hambro wanted a Damascus blade, he said that he would bring some to our hotel the next afternoon. While at the old man’s house we were served to coffee and pipes by a little negro boy servant about fourteen years old. I asked whether he was a slave and was told that he was, and upon inquiring what had been paid for him, was told $300. The slave trade on the eastern coast of Africa is for the supply mainly of the servants required in the households of the various provinces of the Turkish empire. There is a constant demand for these and hence the difficulty of suppressing it.

Damascus like other eastern cities is divided into certain quarters which are separated from each other at night by closed gates, at each one of which there is always a guard. The streets are mere alleys and very confusing and complicated at first, although after a while it becomes easy enough to thread one’s way through them. The quiet and sedate people of the place are all at their homes at night, and it is considered that those persons who are on the move after dark are apt to be after some mischief. There is therefore always some risk in going out then, as has been explained in the account given of Constantinople. Having no desire to buy anything from the old man at whose house we were, and Hambro being interested in looking at some blades which were not of the best, I started to return, and had proceeded some distance when Abdallah came running after me and insisted that I should wait until we were all ready to return

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The existence of slavery in the Southern States had been a cause for agitation and trouble for many years preceding Secession, and that it was the real cause of the war is not a matter of doubt whatever to me. If slavery had not existed at the South there never would have been war between the two sections at that time, and had not the slaveholding interest been the most active one in bringing about secession, there was no other interest either influential and powerful enough or sufficiently menaced by any agitation at the North to have given success to such a movement.

It may seem strange for me to be making this assertion, but I do it because it is the fashion of the day to deny that slavery was the cause of the war. People appear to have become ashamed of having once owned slaves, and consequently attribute the war to some other cause, but with me there is nothing in the fact of my having been an owner of slaves of which I am now ashamed. The slaves were first brought to the colony of South Carolina under British rule, when all the European States that had American colonies imported negroes from Africa, without considering that there was any wrong in it, and their introduction into the tropical and sub-tropical possessions of England was absolutely necessary to the starting of their prosperity. Without negroes from equatorial Africa, accustomed to the malarious atmosphere of the banks of the Congo, the swamps of the rice region of the two Carolinas never would have been cleared, and the colony of Georgia which, under Oglethorpe, was started with the intention of excluding slavery, made such slow progress that repeated petitions were sent to England asking that the slave trade be permitted before it was finally allowed. During the 50 or 60 years that followed the revolution the slave power had rizen to great proportions, and while it is generally admitted that, if it had not been agreed at the formation of the government that the trade should be allowed to continue until 1808, certain Southern States would not have adopted the federal constitution, it is nevertheless true that the money value of the slaves then was not large, and that the area in which their employment was profitable was small also. It was the discovery of the cotton gin and the possibility thus created of furnishing to England especially, the raw material which she required for her cotton factories, that gave an impetus to the cultivation of that staple, and in all of the States south of Virginia made it the leading industry.

At the same time the tobacco planters of Virginia and N Carolina, the rice planters of the Carolinas and Georgia and the sugar planters of Louisiana all competed for the ownership of additional slaves, and, as new lands were being cleared for cotton culture in the cotton belt west of Georgia the larger prices which could be offered for slaves there induced many planters in the older States to part with their surplus labor.

The money value of the slaves at the South, in consequence of all the important industries being agricultural and depending on slave labor, therefore became very great, and in South Carolina alone was estimated at $400.000.000. The slaveholders possessed most of the wealth of the South and were necessarily the leading and most important class. When their property was jeapordised by the determination of the North to restrict them to a limited area, and by tampering with the slaves in the border States, induce a disposition to insurrection, and thus render their ownership insecure, it cannot be a matter of surprise that the slaveowners, when Lincoln was elected, were ready for secession, and that South Carolina where more slaves were owned in proportion to the whites than in the other States, should have been the first to take that important step. With these facts thus briefly stated, and so clearly and undeniably true, I cannot see how for a moment it can be doubted that the existence of slavery at the South and the dangers that menaced that property were the real and only cause of the war.

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one State, notwithstanding the boasting of President Jackson as to number of men that he could pour into the limits of the State, if she was guilty of any overt act of opposition to a law of Congress, and it was generally conceded that the victory remained with South Carolina, as what she had struggled for, viz. the reduction in the tariff, had been conceded by the Compromise.

Things looked very stormy for a while when the nullification agitation was at its height; and both parties to the controversy, the State as well as the general government, were much pleased at the peaceful settlement. The conclusion was such that South Carolina continued to believe that her sovereignty would not be violated by the Washington government, in the event of other and more serious disagreements, and the latter remained in a state of uncertainty as to her right to attempt the coercion of a sovereign State, in case her dismemberment was threatened by a resort to secession.

It should here be explained that the Statesmen of the States Rights school, at the head of whom was Mr Calhoun, in justification of the right of nullification and secession, maintained that, when the Federal compact was formed, the States did not surrender the rights with which the general government was clothed, but merely delegated them, and that they could be resumed by each State whenever the necessity for so doing should arize. All the States that seceded acted up to this conviction, and it was an accepted truth by the northern democrats until hostilities had actually commenced. In justice to Mr Calhoun however, it can be said that he never contemplated secession as a possibility. His writings lead to that conclusion, and he believed in the necessity for a weak Federal government, but in case of disagreement he thought that a convention where all the States would be represented would be able to arrange matters amicably.

Another case which was still more striking than nullification as showing the relative strength of a state and of the general government occurred a few years after 1832 - in 1838 I think. This time it was in Georgia, and the incident was as follows. There were still in the limits of that State a good many Cherokee Indians whom the Legislature desired should be removed, and, upon application, the General government undertook their transportation. They were sent to one of the Indian reservations, and when this was completed the general government sent some troops to take possession of the vacated lands. This was immediately resisted by the State authorities and Gov Troup then Executive ordered out the State militia to prevent it by force. The general government finding that a conflict would ensue, unless they gave up the attempt to occupy the lands, withdrew their military, and the incident ended there.

These instances of friction however between a single State and the general government were trifling as compared with the interests that were at stake in the slavery agitation. This commenced soon after nullification and reached its height between 1850 and 1860. It had commenced in England at the end of the last century in a movement for the cessation of the slave trade, and was followed by another successful movement for the emancipation of the slaves which was decreed by Parliament in all the British slave colonies between 1820 and 30.

All of the northern States had freed their slaves by this time, and the va-

Negroes purchased at Gowrie (Savannah River) Jany 1st 1833

same family