How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [82]
Hunter’s personality was ideally suited for the period in which he served in the House. “Mr. Hunter is a conservative Democrat, a calm, quiet, undemonstrative, practical politician,” the New York Herald wrote. “[He] speaks little and writes less.… Although strongly Southern in his sentiments … he draws a glowing picture of the future of the republic.”
Calm and undemonstrative he was, but not unfeeling nor without a sense of humor. He displayed both attributes as a college student in a letter to his widowed sister: “You seemed to be terribly in the dumps when you wrote. Are you still troubled with those thick-coming fancies, which are worse than real evils?… Have all the family feuds been appeased, so that you can no longer find amusement or occupation for your energies?… [If so] you may suppose me your opponent.”
Shortly before Hunter went to college, an upheaval resulting from the Louisiana Purchase had threatened to undo the nation. At issue was whether or not slavery would be permitted in the states being created from its land. Though the dispute was resolved by the Missouri Compromise, no one in Congress wanted to endure such rancor again. Unfortunately, the nation did endure it again, and again. The next major upheaval involved the same question as applied to the land acquired in the Mexican War.
That war began within a week of Hunter’s 1846 proposal for retrocession. Everyone in Congress knew that the United States would win the war and likely acquire vast territory.7 And everyone in Congress knew that such a victory would raise the old question of whether slavery would be permitted in the newly acquired lands. Thus, when Hunter presented his resolution, it was during the calm before the storm. Members of Congress were inclined to do anything that could be done to mitigate the expected storm.
One thing Congress could do was to appease Virginia by giving back the land it had ceded to create the District of Columbia. Such an action, at that point in time, would help Virginia in two significant ways.
The first benefit would be Virginia’s acquisition of additional proslavery voters electing representatives to its legislature. These votes were needed to counter those of the increasing population in Virginia’s mountainous western region (present-day West Virginia), an area not suitable for the large plantations needed to support slave labor. When Hunter presented his proposal, Virginia’s staunchly proslavery Democrats had recently lost their majority in the state’s House of Delegates.
The second significant benefit had to do with the slave trade. As Hunter stated in Congress, Alexandria was suffering economically, in part because no federal facilities had been built on the Virginia side of the Potomac. To make matters worse, Congress had begun to contemplate a prohibition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Were that to happen, it would be yet another blow to Alexandria’s economy.
Alexandria had been home to the nation’s largest slave-trading firm, Franklin & Armfield. Though the company had dissolved by the time Hunter proposed retrocession, its partners had sold their interests to a number of local slave traders. The size of the market served even by these smaller Alexandria companies, and by other slave dealers in the District of Columbia, was evidenced on a daily basis in the local papers:
CASH FOR NEGROES—I will give the highest cash price for likely NEGROES from 10 to 25 years of age. Myself or my agent can at all times be found at the establishment formerly owned by Armfield, Franklin & Co. at the west end of Duke Street, Alexandria.—GEORGE KEPHART
NEGROES WANTED—The subscriber wishes to purchase any number of Negroes for the New Orleans market, and will give at all times the highest market price in cash in likely