But apart from leaders the country had changed, and in spite of the declarations to the contrary, in nowhere more than in the South. The continual increase of the Negro population and the immense sums invested in that species of property had worked a disintegration of former views. Nullification had accelerated the change, for the views of Hayne in 1827 and Calhoun in 1836, were certainly wide apart. In 1845 Calhoun had congratulated Hammond on the progress of opinion in the South to the high ground he had held in advance; but it may well be doubted whether Calhoun, himself, would not have been startled by the progress disclosed in 1855, as evinced by the agitation for the re-opening of the slave trade. In 1845 when Wise, then United States Minister to Brazil, disclosed the manner of conducting the slave trade in that country, in which both Englishmen and Americans were implicated, the President, in whose cabinet Calhoun then was Secretary of State, condemned it without stint, rejoicing that “our own coasts are free from its pollution”; although he was forced to admit that there were “many circumstances to warrant the belief that some of our citizens are deeply involved in its guilt.”[157] Calhoun’s criticism of Wise on this occasion was only that he feared he was injudicious, and that his declarations might affect the relations between Brazil and the United States.[158] Certainly Calhoun was not the man to have favored what his chief styled “pollution,” and to have remained in his cabinet. Again, there is no reason to believe that Calhoun sympathized at all with the ambitious scheme of forcing slavery to the Pacific. Whatever may have been the merits or demerits of his policies, they were strictly defensive, and he clung almost religiously to the phrase, “slavery as it exists in the South.” What that was, to some extent was disclosed by the committee on religious instruction of the Negroes, which, in 1845 received reports from all quarters of the South. Robert Barnwell Rhett, was at the head of one of the principal committees and among its members were D. E. Huger, Basil Gildersleeve, Robert W. Barnwell and many others prominent in affairs of State and matters of culture and religion in the South. The account from Alabama of “the servant Ellis” is most interesting. His blood and color, it was claimed were unmixed, and he gave much aid in the meetings among the Negroes, though “more retiring and modest than most people of his condition, when they have ability above their fellows.”[159] It is said he could read both Greek and Latin and was anxious to undertake Hebrew; and the synods of Alabama and Mississippi proposed to purchase him, in order to send him to Africa as a Missionary. Conditions such as these reports revealed were absolutely ignored by the fanatical Abolitionists of that day although they are but some of the many indications how mild and humanizing slavery, as it then existed in the South, was.