Contrasting Views on Slavery
A slave trade committee was set up in 1787 to discuss the barbarities of the slave trade. The Manchester Group sent Cooper and Thomas Walker to London to communicate with the Committee, to assist in its deliberations, and to attend Parliament while the slave trade was being discussed. Therefore, it is likely that Cooper was present when Pitt made the motion that Parliament consider the petitions that had been presented about the slave trade - the first legislative legislation reflecting the emancipation spirit that had flooded England. This biil, then pending in Parliament, undoubtedly gave rise to Coopers Letters on the Slave Trade.
In October of 1787 Cooper published Letters on the Slave Trade. The book paints in vivid colors the brutality of the slave trade and of slave life in the West Indies and America, computes the enormous losses of lives involved, and appeals to the commerical sense as well as the sympathies of his fellow townsmen to arrest the traffic. Cooper would later republish his work for free distribution in order to attract as much attention as possible. The pamphlet was composed of a brief, although inaccurate, historical sketch of the slave trade from it's beginning to contemporary times. The conclusion, a plea for more interest in reform and for more money to spread propaganda, is followed by an appendix that denies the moral right of one man to make a slave out of another.
A "Supplement" to the Letters was printed in 1788 which computes at length, with statistics, the number of negroes sacrificed, directly or indirectly, to the slave trade. "Hence, one million eight hundred thousand people are annully murdered...that the gentle folk of Europe may drink sugar in their tea."
According to Maurice Kelley of West Virginia University, "Coopers's prophecies regarding the future development of the trade show a disregard, if not an ignorance, of such American social conditions as made for the limitation of the traffic: the fear of slave insurrection, the efforts of some southern colonies to prohibit further importation, and the growing spirit for emancipation in the North were factors that should have influenced his computations." A third work, Considerations on the Slave Trade and the Consumption of West Indian Produce, was published at London in 1791.
Cooper was not long interested in this reform. The French Revolution, firing his radicalism, turned his humanitarian interests to politics. The movement toward abolition, however, went on without him, and in 1807 culminated in a bill that abolished the slave trade in England.
Reversal of Opinion
After Cooper moved to South Carolina, his views changed; he became pro-slavery. This is suprising because throughout his life Cooper had held strongly to his ideals (for example he was prisoned for libel against the President because he refused to falter on his beliefs). His Two Essays on Government, Lectures on the Elements of Politcal Economy, and his magazine articles, "Colored Marriages " and "Slavery" express this new pro-slavery attitude. The First is a mild arguement based on States' Rights; the second, and economic disccussion of slavery; and the third and fourth are spirited discussions compared in tone to his previous, anti-slavery, articles.
In dealing with anti-slavery agitators, Cooper, who was formerly anti-slavery, is unfair: he denies the honesty of their intentions, and brands abolition as philanthopy at the expense of others. "These arguments illustrates the narrowness of his point of view, and shows him a paradoxical advocate who saught to gain tolerance by arguments as intolerant as those he sought to refute," said Kelley.
Coopers contact with the negro partly accounts for his change of opinion. Nowhere in his late work appears the idealized primitivism of his Manchester days; the negro, whom he had once depicted as the noble child of Nature, is now a shiftless black, ignorant, and incapable of improvement, for, says Cooper, "the posterior position of the negro's brain renders him unfit for education and unable to appreciate the finer things of life". Cooper also held that marriage of a black with a white was not merely a breach of public decorum but an indictable offense.
To support his contentions for slavery, Cooper draws arguements from religion, from philosophy, and from economics. Cooper used the Bible as a sanction for slavery and held that since it was nowhere prohibited, and since the Patriarchs, the Jews, and the Christians at the time of Christ were slave-holders, slavery was not contrary to the will of God. Slave owners often commonly resorted to this arguement.
More significant is the argument based upon political philosophy. It represents not only a change of opinion on slavery, but also a renunciation involving many of Cooper's earlier political views and nowhere else in his defense of slavery is Cooper more certain of himself. "Slavery," he says, "is objected to because it is contrary to the Rights of Man and inconsistent with the Declaration of Independence." In the late 1790's, Cooper had defended these principles with the utmost vigor. He argues that "It will be time to argue this (the Rights of Man) when the enumeration of the Rights of Man is distinctly made and placed on an irrefragable basis. If the known laws of nature have anything to do with the Rights of Man,...the black race has always been inferior to and held in bondage with the white race." Furthermore, he denies the statement in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created free and equal. Where, he asks, is man free? "No two men," says Cooper, "were ever born equally strong, equally talented. If nature had ordained inferiority, that inferiority will tell its own story through life, and such is fact." Since Jefferson was a slaveholder, was the Declaration of Independence intended to include the black race? Did Jefferson say that his slaves were equal to himself? Most surpising of Cooper's retractions, however, is his objection even to congressional debates on the slave question. Whereas he had not only insisted on freedom of speech in his earlier days (as late as 1832 he had stood upon it as a constitutional right), he now declared that the question should not be discussed, and advocated a gag rule for legislative bodies.
Cooper next turned to the mistreatment of slaves. He argued that it was hardly conceivable that a master would mistreat his slaves: they represented property, and no man would willfully damage his own property. This arguement assumes that reason guides man's actions, and ignores the role passion or emotion plays on action.
Cooper's views on slavery become perplexing when contrasted with his contemporary views expressed in his Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy.(1826) "Slave labor," he asserted, "is undoubtedly the dearest kind. It is forced, and forced too, from a class of human beings who of all others, have the least propensity to voluntarily labor when it is to benefit themselves alone." In general then, Cooper denied the economy of slave labor. A white field-hand represents no investment and no risk; if he is unsatisfied, he may be discharged. The average slave, on the other hand, entails an investment of five hundred dollars; he is a continual risk, and becomes a dead expense after he has outlived his usefulness. The slave, moreover, accomplishes only two-thirds the work of a white, and this fact, coupled to the added cost of overseers, makes slave labor economically unsound. "Nothing then will justify slave labor, in point of economy but the nature of soul and climate with incapacitates a white man from laboring in the summer time." Thus he conculed that slave labor might be profitable on the rich lands of Georgia and Carolina, extending one hundred miles from the sea-board, but hardly so in Missouri, Maryland, and Virginia. Coopers justification of slavery then is far less sweeping than his religious or philanthopic sanctions because he limits the institution geographically. Thus, he was defending an institution that he had admitted was economically unsound in most localities.
Possible explanations for the transition
1. A growing aristocratic conservatism of old age?
2. A more intimate knowledge of slavery? When Cooper had written against the slave trade, he was young and had no contact with actual conditions. When he was older he saw it as an existing social institution, the abolition of which would present grave problems.
3. Perhaps his lifelong tendency to take his intellectual color from his social environment? In the 1780's Cooper was consortng with a group of Manchester radicals. However, in the 1830's he occupied a prominent public office in perhaps the most aristocratic and conservative of the slave-holding states.
4. States Rights? Politcally, slavery had begun to become associated with States Rights. Cooper was pro-State's Rights which presented him with a dillemma.
