“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives now met and sitting, and by the authority of the same: That from and after the passage of this Act, any slave or free person of color who shall commit an assault and battery on a white woman with intent to commit rape, on being thereof convicted, shall suffer death without benefit of clergy.”[68] For whites, it was not apparently necessary to raise the grade of the offense from that of a misdemeanor. But if the above Act was not a sufficient vindication of the opposition of Barnwell, Paul Hamilton, Alston and Hayne to the continued increase of the Negro population of South Carolina, Calhoun, himself, furnished something of an argument against the “best substratum” by his declaration only nine years after its discovery: “We know what we are about, we foresee what is coming, and move with no other purpose but to protect our portion of the Union from the greatest of calamities—not insurrection but something worse. I see the end if the process is to go on unresisted; it is to expel in time the white population of the Southern States and leave the blacks in possession.”[69] If this is a true picture of conditions in 1847, as black as we may consider the Abolitionists of that day, one thing is evident, and that is, that without such a mass of “the best substratum of population” to work upon, the Abolitionists could not possibly have effected what Calhoun feared: therefore, the statesmanship of William Smith, McDuffie, and Calhoun, which had favored and assisted in the gathering of it, to that extent was inferior to the statesmanship of Paul Hamilton, Barnwell, Alston and Hayne which had attempted to arrest the growth. But that was not apparent to the South in 1850, and it is doubtful whether it would be very generally admitted even today; for interest will color opinion and Negro cheap labor is still the first consideration to many people in the South, just as European pauper labor is to many in the North. Both North and South can see clearly the mote in their brother’s eye; but not the beam in their own eye. By the census of 1850, the population of the 33 States, which constituted the Union, summed up 22,969,603 persons, divided as follows: In the 19 Free States 13,230,231 whites; 213,346 free persons of color; 2,536 slaves. In the 14 Slave States there were: 6,113,068 whites; 210,085 free persons of color; 3,200,590 slaves. That meant that the South had invested in that species of property interest $1,280,200,000. By money values and population, at that time, that was an immense sum. The Democratic Review, in this same year, published an article which was republished in the Charleston _Mercury_, and commended by that paper. This article sets forth certain distinct claims of considerable interest: First that: