Again, while almost every history deals at length with the Senatorial debates, and elaborates Hayne’s speech on the Panama Mission in 1825, absolutely no mention appears concerning the far more important utterance with regard to the Colonization Society in 1827. Yet Hayne’s speech, in his debate with Chambers over the Colonization Society, is one of the most important utterances ever made by a Southern Statesman. It indicates what was the prevailing view with regard to the Negro Question, before the unfortunate episode of nullification, by which Calhoun fastened upon the South the belief that slavery as it existed in the Southern States, was a good. In the speech in 1827, Hayne first showed the absurdity of the scheme of transporting the blacks to Africa in such a number as to affect the situation. That the presence of Negroes in the country was an evil, he did not attempt to deny, but declared, “The progress of time and events is providing a remedy for the evil.” He showed by statistics that the relative increase of free white population was rising, while that of the colored, whether bond or free, was diminishing, and that “while this process is going on the colored classes are gradually diffusing themselves throughout the country, and are making steady advances in intelligence and refinement, and if half the zeal were displayed in bettering their condition that is wasted in the vain and fruitless effort of sending them abroad, their intellectual and moral improvement would be steady and rapid.”[54] Why is it that this utterance of the leader of his party in the Senate is never alluded to by historians? Is it because it invites investigation as to the condition of the blacks in the Northern and Western States at this period and for the twenty years which followed? It is difficult to tell. But from this time the question took a change. Subordinating to it the tariff and the interest in railroad development, with the conditions created by nullification by 1833, the State of South Carolina, and, by 1839, the South, was committed to the view of Calhoun: “Our fate as a people is bound up in the question. If we yield, we will be extirpated; but if we successfully resist, we will be the greatest and most flourishing people of modern time. It is the best substratum of population in the world, and one on which great and flourishing Commonwealths may be most easily and safely reared.”[55] And to this “Negro substratum population” policy both the tariff and the railroad development of the South were accordingly subordinated until Calhoun’s death, when Georgia, as a result of having outstripped South Carolina in both men and material, stepped into the place of leadership South Carolina could no longer fill, and with the ambitious scheme of forcing slavery to the Pacific, in ten years, produced the War Between the States. FOOTNOTES: [41] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 67. [42] Statutes of S. C. Vol. 7, p. 451.