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Naomi Ceder

Foreword by Nicholas Tollervey

MANNING

PRAISE FOR THE SECOND EDITION

The quickest way to learn the basics of Python.

—Massimo Perga, Microsoft

This is my favorite Python book ... a competent way into serious
Python programming.

—Edmon Begoli, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Great book...covers the new incarnation of Python.

—William Kahn-Greene, Participatory Culture Foundation

Like Python itself, the book’s emphasis is on readability and rapid

development.

—David McWhirter, Cranberryink

It’s definitely worth reading, and I would recommend that you buy it
if you are new to Python.

— Jerome Lanig, BayPiggies User Group

Python coders will love this nifty book.

—Sumit Pal, Leapfrogrx

If you’ve ever wanted to learn Python or have a convenient desktop

reference, this is the book for you. The author gives you a brief run-
through of the language syntax and functional capabilities, then re-
explores all aspects of the language as well as libraries and modules
that extend Python into the space of practical applications.

— Jim Kohli, Dzone This is the best book to learn Python for
professional programmers or people who already know how to
program in a different language … This won't be your only Python
book, but it definitely has to be your first!

—Amazon reader

The Quick Python Book

ii

The Quick Python Book

THIRD EDITION

NAOMI CEDER

FOREWORD BY NICHOLAS TOLLERVEY

MANNING

SHELTER ISLAND

For online information and ordering of this and other Manning books,
please visit

www.manning.com. The publisher offers discounts on this book when

ordered in quantity.

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©2018 by Manning Publications Co. All rights reserved.

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system, or transmitted, in any form or by means electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without prior written
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distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those
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Recognizing the importance of preserving what has been written, it is

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Typesetter and cover design: Marija Tudor

ISBN 9781617294037

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 – EBM – 23 22 21 20 19 18

brief contents

PAR T 1

STARTING OUT ............................................................ 1

1 ■ About Python

2 ■ Getting started

11

3 ■ The Quick Python overview

20

PAR T 2

THE ESSENTIALS ........................................................ 35

4 ■ The absolute basics

37

5 ■ Lists, tuples, and sets

49

6 ■ Strings
68

7 ■ Dictionaries

89

8 ■ Control flow

99

9 ■ Functions

113

10 ■ Modules and scoping rules

127

11 ■ Python programs

142

12 ■ Using the filesystem

158

13 ■ Reading and writing files

175

14 ■ Exceptions

190

PAR T 3

ADVANCED LANGUAGE FEATURES ............................. 205

15 ■ Classes and object-oriented programming

207

16 ■ Regular expressions

231

vi

BRIEF CONTENTS

17 ■ Data types as objects

241

18 ■ Packages

255

19 ■ Using Python libraries

264

PAR T 4

WORKING WITH DATA .............................................. 273

20 ■ Basic file wrangling

275

21 ■ Processing data files

283

22 ■ Data over the network

300
23 ■ Saving data

319

24 ■ Exploring data

337

Case study

354

contents

foreword

xvii

preface

xviii

acknowledgments

xix

about this book

xxi

about the cover illustration

xxvi

PART 1

STARTING OUT ................................................ 1

1 About Python 3
1.1

Why should I use Python?

1.2

What Python does well

Python is easy to use

4 ■ Python is expressive

4 ■ Python is

readable

5 ■ Python is complete—“batteries included”

Python is cross-platform

6 ■ Python is free

1.3

What Python doesn’t do as well

Python isn’t the fastest language

7 ■ Python doesn’t have the

most libraries

7 ■ Python doesn’t check variable types at compile

time 8 ■ Python doesn’t have much mobile support

Python doesn’t use multiple processors well

1.4

Why learn Python 3?

vii

viii

CONTENTS

2 Getting started 11

2.1

Installing Python

12

2.2

Basic interactive mode and IDLE

13

The basic interactive mode

13 ■ The IDLE integrated development

environment

14 ■ Choosing between basic interactive mode and

IDLE

15

2.3

Using IDLE’s Python shell window

15

2.4

Hello, world

17

2.5

Using the interactive prompt to explore Python

17

3 The Quick Python overview 20

3.1

Python synopsis

21

3.2

Built-in data types

21

Numbers

21 ■ Lists

23 ■ Tuples

24 ■ Strings

25

Dictionaries

26 ■ Sets

26 ■ File objects

27

3.3

Control flow structures

28

Boolean values and expressions

28 ■ The if-elif-else statement

28

The while loop

28 ■ The for loop

29 ■ Function definition

29
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
 In Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee; and there we find an
increase of nearly 85 per cent, or an addition to the Negro population
of something like 88,000.
These facts, therefore, disclose the weakness of the Southern
argument that the diffusion of slaves would not have resulted in any
extension of slavery. Theoretically it was a sound argument, that the
slaves being spread over the face of the country, they and their
masters would be brought more and more under the influences
which would work against slavery and for emancipation. But if illicit
importation from abroad was proceeding to any great extent, the
premise upon which the argument was based gave way, and this is
what must have been the case, as has been shown.
This is also where the argument of Prof. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
fails to convince, when he expresses the opinion, that “the
importance of the repeal, in 1818, of the law which had prohibited
the importation of slaves from other States into South Carolina has
been exaggerated.” He bases his reason for this view upon the claim
that “the Federal Censuses show that the average rate of increase of
the Negro population in South Carolina between 1810 and 1860,
was substantially smaller than that of the Negroes in the United
States at large, “which” he thinks, “indicates that South Carolina was
in that half century more of a slave exporting than a slave importing
State; and that a prohibition of slave imports would have had no
appreciable influence upon the ratio of increase of her Negro
population.”[45]
Unless it can be shown, however, that there were no accessions to
the Negro population of the United States from without, between the
periods selected by Prof. Phillips, the mere fact that the rate of
increase of the Negro population of South Carolina was substantially
smaller than that of the United States at large does not establish that
South Carolina was more of a slave exporting than importing State
for that period; for the greater increase without could well be due to
importation in great volume elsewhere, and that there was such was
asserted by many, notably by Henry Middleton, in Congress, the very
year of Hayne’s speech in the South Carolina Legislature against
importations from other States.[46] But apart from this, before this,
South Carolina had become the State with the largest Negro
population to its white population of all the States of the Union and
that, the rate of increase of her Negro population from this date, or
even a decade earlier, to 1860, “was substantially smaller than that
of the Negroes in the United States at large” was simply due to the
tremendous accessions of the Negro population of the four new
cotton States: Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana,
superimposed upon a Negro population originally much smaller than
that of South Carolina. The Negro population of those four States did
in that period increase 1,384,555; but in the same time their white
population increased 1,438,607; while in the same period the white
and Negro population of South Carolina increased respectively
53,860 and 147,028. And so difficult was it to overcome this
tremendous start attained by South Carolina in these early fatal
years, that in 1860 the excess of South Carolina’s colored population
over her white population was 121,029, as compared with an excess
of only 83,505 for Mississippi, the next greatest. Undoubtedly in the
period selected by Prof. Phillips many Negro slaves passed out of
South Carolina; but many whites did also; for “from 1820 to 1860,
South Carolina was a beehive from which swarms were continually
going forth to populate the newer growing cotton States of the
Southwest,” and “in 1860 there were then living in other States
193,389 white persons born in South Carolina.”[47] In the half century
the average rate of increase of South Carolina whites was between 7
and 8 per cent, colored 21. In Virginia and Maryland in 1810 the
Negro population amounted to 668,515. It increased by 1860 by an
addition of 151,523. In South Carolina in 1810 the Negro population
amounted to 200,919, by 1860 it had received an addition of
212,401, of which 64,382 had arrived in the decade of the repeal of
the law prohibiting importation from other States, and 58,021 in the
following decade. It is true that in the following decade from 1830 to
1840, the increase of the Negro population of South Carolina was
comparatively slight, being only 11,992, but it was followed in the
next decade by again an increase of 58,630, while the white
increase in the same two decades was respectively 2,221 and
15,479.
 But there was another way of measuring the importance of the
repeal. Necessarily with the inflowing tide came some such as
Denmark Vesey and Gullah Jack, slaves and free Negroes whose
past was not known, and according to the report of the
Massachusetts legislative committee in 1821, dealing with only 6,740
free persons of color in the State, among other “evils,” from such,
appeared, inter alia:
2. Collecting in the large towns an indolent and disorderly and
corrupt population.
3. Substituting themselves in many labors and occupations which
in the end it would be more advantageous to have performed by the
white and native population of the State.[48]
It is apparent then, from this, as well as from the arguments of Mr.
Sergeant, that the real situation of the representatives of the two
sections, in the great Missouri debate, has never been put with
absolute accuracy. It was an assertion upon the part of the
Southerners of their right to carry their property with them wherever
they went in the Union, and upon the part of the Northerners a denial
of this right. It precipitated an argument whether extension and
diffusion of slavery meant the same thing, many Southern men, of
eminence, contended that by the process of diffusion there would be
apt to be the beginning of the end of slavery, and if there had been
no illicit importation of slaves possible, there would have been great
merit in this suggestion. But beyond all these arguments on the part
of the Northerners, the Missouri Question indicated opposition to the
mere presence of the Negro, bond or free, in the Northwest. He was
an undesirable resident.
Up to this time, in the main, the attitude of the Southern statesmen
had been free from sectionalism. On the other hand, New England
had exhibited sectionalism, and it was New England’s deputies in the
Constitutional Convention, who joining with those of Maryland, North
Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, had “formed a bargain,”
abrogating the slave trade in such a way as practically to recognize
slavery as a property interest secured by the Constitution. The time
allowed the slave trade had been long enough, as Madison had said
it would be. As great as had been the rate of increase of the white
population, it had been exceeded by that of the colored in the
proportions of 90 to 95 per cent. What Col. Mason had prophesied
had also come to pass. He had declared in 1787: “The Western
people are already calling out for slaves for their new lands and will
fill that country with slaves, if they can be got through South Carolina
and Georgia.”
They had been got no doubt in large numbers through South
Carolina and Georgia; but also, in all probabilities, through
Louisiana, and if not through, to some extent from, Maryland and
Virginia. The Negro population had in the West, in three decades
sprung up from 16,322 to 385,825; while the seven States, Virginia,
North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and
Louisiana, held some 1,193,732 head of this species of property,
representing an investment of something like $477,492,800,
stamped as property by having been made dutiable under Federal
law up to 1808. Such a property interest was almost certain to
produce a sectional policy for its protection, and in the assertion of
such a policy, South Carolina having the largest stake and the most
forceful representatives, would naturally take the lead.
The consequences were that the broad national policy of
Lowndes, from this date gradually succumbed to the influences
which forced Calhoun away from it, despite his efforts to mould into
one form a national and sectional policy, based upon the declared
recognition of slavery, in place of, or in addition to, the implied
recognition furnished by the Constitutional compromise or “bargain”
over the sanction of the slave trade up to 1808. As the South drew
together in support of slavery, the overshadowing dimensions of its
greatest exponent cast into oblivion Barnwell, Hamilton and Alston,
who had so clearly perceived the dangers from its increase, and
even reduced the proportions of men as preëminently great as
Lowndes and his successor, Robert Y. Hayne.
As long as the tariff held the center of the stage, the change was
not so clearly apparent; but with the settling down, after the
explosion of sentiment which nullification occasioned, the division
between the sections was unmistakable. From that period the Lower
South presented an unbroken front in defence of slavery, under the
leadership of South Carolina.
From 1800 the South had, to a great extent, directed the policies
of the Republic, and, in the persons of Lowndes, Cheves and
Calhoun, South Carolina had from 1813 to 1820 been a potent
influence therein; but the Missouri Compromise and Taylor’s election
over Lowndes in 1820, for the Speakership, marked the beginning of
the change. No man saw it more clearly than the great man whom
Taylor defeated. His views on the condition of affairs at this time is
thus expressed by a contemporary: “The Northern people had
outstripped the Southern and desired to see the offices of the
Government in Northern hands. This inevitable result Mr. Lowndes
saw clearly forty years ago, and thought it wise for the South to yield
the hold she had so long possessed on political power, when she
was no longer able to retain it.”[49] The clear judgment of Lowndes
had revealed to him what the fatal brilliancy of Calhoun’s intellect
prevented him from perceiving, viz.: that there could not be
fashioned for the needs of imperfect humanity a perfectly
symmetrical policy. Lowndes had brought Webster and Clay together
and pushed through the tariff bill of 1816.[50]
Of that bill in reply to the fierce criticism that it was the worst thing
done since universal suffrage, he simply said, “neither was
altogether good, but the best possible for the time.” “He thought
some protection due to infant industries and that the question was,
what measure of protection do they require?” He held; “We are
obliged to leave some questions to posterity. We do our best with
those that come to us and future generations must bear their share
of the trouble.”[51] Accordingly, when the Baldwin bill of 1820 was
brought forward, “he opposed it on the ground that the increased
duties were not necessary.”[52] Before the tariff bill of 1824 could be
presented, he had passed away; but in his place, to share with
Webster, the honors of the splendid fight against it, South Carolina
had sent up to Congress Robert Y. Hayne, by Benton extolled as: “Of
all the young generation of statesmen coming on I consider him the
safest, the most like William Lowndes, and best entitled to future
eminent lead.”[53]
How well Hayne lived up to this a study of his achievements
exhibits. But while so good a judge as the late Edward M. Shepard,
in his Life of Van Buren, ranks Hayne’s effort in the Senate, against
the tariff of 1824, as fully up to, if not beyond, that of Webster in the
House, scarcely any attention is paid to it by those historians who
extoll the speech of Webster.
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.
[43] Charleston Courier, Dec. 22, 1818. Jervey, Hayne, p. 80.
[44] Niles’ Register, Vol. 18, p. 383.
[45] American Hist. Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, p. 630.
[46] Suppression of Slave Trade, DuBois, p. 124.
[47] McCrady, S. C. Under Proprietary Govt. p. 1.
[48] Studies American Race Problem, Stone, p. 57. Robert Y.
Hayne & His Times, Jervey, p. 114.
[49] Grayson, Memoir of James L. Petigru, p. 116.
[50] City Gazette, Sept. 16, 1820.
[51] Ravenel, Life & Times of William Lowndes, p. 154-5.
[52] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, p. 112.
[53] Benton, Thirty Years View, Vol. 2, p. 188.
 [54] Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne & His Times, pp. 205-209.
Abridgment of Debates of Congress, Vol. 9, p. 303, et seq.
[55] Calhoun’s Correspondence, p. 368.
 CHAPTER IV

As has been shown, nine years subsequent to his unavailing

struggle to restrict the swelling proportions of the Negro population in
his own State, Robert Y. Hayne, in the United States Senate, stated
his views concerning that class of our population with regard to the
entire country. But before discussing that further it should be noted,
that a renewed effort in 1822 had again been defeated by the narrow
but effective majority of nine votes, drawing from Governor Bennett,
of South Carolina the pessimistic declaration:
“The evil is entailed and we can do no more than steadily to pursue
that course indicated by stern necessity and not less imperious
policy.”[56]
Along another line, therefore, was the last peaceful effort to be
made to solve the Negro Question. Taken in connection with the
great industrial work, in which he literally wore out his life, in 1839,
Hayne’s speech in the United States Senate in 1827 is most
illuminating. Upon that occasion he said:
“The history of this country has proved that when the relative
proportion of the colored population to the white is greatly diminished,
slaves cease to be valuable, and emancipation follows of course, and
they are swallowed up in the common mass. Wherever free labor is
put in full and successful operation, slave labor ceases to be
profitable. It is true that it is a very gradual operation and that it must
be, to be successful or desirable.”[57]
Was it not the very irony of fate that, as this speaker, later, in 1839,
lay dying at Asheville, North Carolina, while a wordy war was being
waged over his great railroad to the West, criticism should have
been “directed against the contracts given to planters to be executed
with slave labor” by the chief lieutenant of that great South
Carolinian, who had only the year before, in withdrawing from the
enterprise, extolled Negro slaves as “the best substratum of
population in the world?”
 Col. Gadsden, from this time and on, more and more a confidant
of Calhoun until they parted over Taylor’s candidacy for the
Presidency, asked:
“Why had not the work been given to Northern contractors, who had
offered to execute it at a price 12½ to 15 per cent cheaper? The
answer was comprehensive. The planters objected to imported free
labor being brought into contact with their slaves. This was
unfortunate, but the company could not antagonize an element which
practically controlled the State; and in addition they had in many
instances given the right of way. But further still, when the chief
engineer obtained the floor, he challenged the correctness of the
charge.”[58]
Between 1830 and 1840, two Southern States, South Carolina and
Maryland, leading the Union in railroad development, were
endeavoring to effect railroad connection with the Northwest. A
comparison of their conditions prior and subsequent to 1810,
suggests one of the reasons why one succeeded and the other
failed.
From 1790 to 1810 the white population of Maryland increased
from 208,649 to 235,117, or about 11.10 per cent. In the same
twenty years the white population of South Carolina rose from
140,178 to 214,196 or about 51.20 per cent. It is quite true that in the
same period the Negro population in South Carolina increased from
108,805 to 200,919 or 85.6 per cent, while that of Maryland rose only
from 111,079 to 145,129 or only 30.07 per cent. Yet, when we bear in
mind that the area of South Carolina was two and a half times as
great as Maryland, had the efforts which had been made in 1816 and
in 1822 to stop Negro importation from outside succeeded, the
economic conditions of South Carolina between 1830 and 1840
might have been stronger. Indeed in 1822 Gen. Thomas Pinckney
declared cheap Negro labor, even then, was steadily undermining
the white artisan class in South Carolina.[59] He was patriot enough
to so declare, although his own great brother was more responsible
than any one else for the evil.
In the three decades which followed 1810, and closed with the
death of Hayne and the destruction of his five year effort to secure
the Northwestern railroad connection, the colored population of
Maryland, which did secure it, increased only 6,396, from 145,429 to
151,815, while its white population in the same period rose from
235,117 to 318,204, an increase of 83,087. In South Carolina in the
same time the white population rising from 214,196 to 259,344
increased only 44,883, about one-half as much, while its Negro
population rising from 200,314 to 335,344, or 134,395, about twenty
times as much as Maryland. Viewed in the light of the unfair criticism
directed against the South Carolina Railroad, was not the message
of Governor Paul Hamilton in 1804, to the South Carolina
Legislature, vindicated?
“Viewed with reference to population it increases our weakness, not
our strength, for it must be admitted that in proportion as you add to
the number of slaves, you prevent the influx of those men who would
increase the means of defense and security.”[60]
How our forgotten great men fought to avoid the Nessus Shirt!
Who remembers that Hamilton was big enough to be made
Secretary of the Navy? Under the great upas tree of South Carolina
all other greatness languished and by 1840 the property interests in
Negroes had become so immense, that it not only paralyzed other
industries, which could by any stretch of imagination be thought to
threaten its efficiency, but it affected public opinion to a degree which
now seems hardly credible.
Calhoun’s view in 1838, that the Negro furnished “the best
substratum of population in the world and the one on which
commonwealths may be most easily and safely reared”[61] was not
singular in the South at that date. The great meeting of Southern
business men at Augusta, Ga. in 1838 put on record its belief:
“That of all the social conditions of man, the most favorable to the
development of the cardinal virtues of the heart and the noblest
faculties of the soul, to the promotion of private happiness and public
prosperity, is that of slave holding communities under free political
institutions.”[62]
Even Hayne, himself, despite his realization of South Carolina’s
wasteful cultivation of her soil, was so affected by the tremendous
interests involved in slavery, and the fearful shock of any such
disturbance as the Abolitionists threatened in 1835, as to declare at
that time:
“Slavery, as it now exists in the Southern States, which we all feel
and know to be essential to the prosperity and welfare—nay to the
very existence of the States—is so little understood in other portions
of the Union that it has been lately assailed in a spirit which threatens,
unless speedily arrested, to lead eventually to the destruction of the
Union and all the evils which must attend so lamentable an
occurrence.”[63]
By 1838, conditions had reached such a development that the
abolition of slavery could come but in one of two ways, either
peacefully, through the slow process of changing industrial
conditions, or swiftly and forcibly, as a war measure; therefore, when
Calhoun withdrew his support from Hayne’s railroad to the Northwest
in 1838, the sensible course would have been to prepare for the
inevitable conflict.
Allusion has been made to the Black Laws of Ohio, which had
their counterpart in Indiana and Illinois, and reference had to the
Report of the Massachusetts Legislative Committee in 1821, as
indicative of feeling in the North and Northeast, concerning the
Negro as a citizen, and, if we consider conditions in the Middle
States at this period, we will find them hardly different. As depicted
by the most highly educated member of the Negro race today in the
United States, in Philadelphia conditions were as follows:
“By 1830 the black population of the city and districts had increased
to 15,624, an increase of 27 per cent for the decade 1820-1830, and
of 48 per cent since 1810. Nevertheless the growth of the city had far
outstripped this; by 1830 the county had nearly 175,000 whites,
among whom was a rapidly increasing contingent of 5,000 foreigners.
So intense was the race antipathy among the lower classes, and so
much countenance did it receive from the middle and upper classes,
that there began in 1829 a series of riots directed chiefly against
Negroes, which recurred frequently until about 1840, and did not
wholly cease until after the war.”[64]
At this date, 1840, in ten of the eleven States which later
constituted the Confederacy, there were 3,311,117 whites and
2,267,319 Negroes; and in three of them; South Carolina, Mississippi
and Louisiana, the whites were in the minority, and they, therefore,
best represented the condition which Calhoun in 1838 extolled.[65]
With such views, what more natural than that Calhoun should view
as a “humbug” the great railroad measure of Hayne, founded as it
was in some degree upon the belief of the latter that “wherever free
labor is put in full and successful operation, slave labor ceases to be
profitable.” A railroad connecting Cincinnati with Charleston would
certainly have tended to “put in full and successful operation free
labor,” and slave labor ceasing more and more to be profitable would
have gradually passed out of existence in that region.
Yet it must be admitted, that the greatest writer and thinker who
has ever discussed America, viewing conditions at that time, while
utterly opposed to slavery, practically endorsed Calhoun’s views.
Summing up his conclusion in 1838, de Tocqueville writes:
“When I contemplate the condition of the South, I can only discover
two alternatives which may be adopted by the white inhabitants of
those States; either to emancipate the Negroes and to intermingle
with them; or remain isolated from them to keep them in a state of
slavery as long as possible. All intermediate measures seem to me
likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars,
and perhaps in the extirpation of one or the other of the two races.”[66]
Time, however, has proven that both de Tocqueville and Calhoun
were wrong.
From a Negro minority of 13,277 in 1810, the census indicated for
South Carolina in 1840, a Negro majority of 76,230 an excess of the
Negro population over the white of more than double what existed in
Louisiana and quadruple that of Mississippi.
In 1843, for the better controlling of this “best substratum of
population in the world”[67] only five years after its discovery as such,
the following Act was passed by the General Assembly of South
Carolina:
“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:
“The face of affairs is entirely changed since General Pinckney, in
convention assented to the proposition giving Congress the right to
pass laws, regulating commerce by a simple majority, on the ground
that it was a boon granted the North in consideration of the necessity
which the weak South had for the strong North as a neighbor. The
cotton trade then scarcely existed, but the material has since been
spun into a web which binds the commercial world to Southern
interests.”[70]
Figures were also introduced to show that the multiplication of free
blacks in the Slave States was increasing upon the proportion of
slaves and that it was observable that they did not emigrate from the
Slave States, where it was claimed they must in time supplant the
slaves as servants; and the laws of Ohio were pointed to as
indicating an opposition, not to slavery, but to the presence of the
Negro, which it claimed, had greatly retarded emancipation. In these
claims truth was mingled with error.
As to the indisposition of the people of Massachusetts,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, to admit any class of
colored persons to enter as residents, there can be no doubt up to
this date, although indications of a change of sentiment were
appearing. The repeal of the Black Laws of Ohio was one illustration.
With 1,955,059 whites to only 25,279 colored persons, the harsh
provisions, which closed the mouths of these unfortunates when
contending with the whites, in so called courts of justice, it was
conceded by the whites of Ohio, could be safely done away with,
and they had been repealed in 1848. It may also have been true that
the free blacks did not emigrate from the Slave States; but that in
that region they were gaining upon the slaves, and that there was
any reasonable possibility of their supplanting them as servants,
does hot seem to be borne out by examination of the census.
The Democratic Review claims that, while in 1800 there were in
the Slave States 61,441 free persons of color to 73,100 in the Free
States, that by 1830 the proportions were 182,070 in the Slave
States to 137,525 in the Free States, a proportion raised by 1840 to
215,568 to 172,509. But this seems inexact. By the census of 1800
there were in the Slave States 52,188 free persons of color, to
55,464 in the Free States, and by 1830 the number in the Slave
States had, it is true, surpassed the number in the Free States, such
being respectively 160,063 to 153,384. But whether it was in
consequence of the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831, or the Abolition
ebullition of 1835, by 1840 there was a change in progress, the
proportion being in that year 190,285 in the Slave States to 187,647
in the Free States, which, as has before been shown, by 1850 had
changed to 210,085 in the Slave States to 213,346 in the Free
States.
At the same time it could be noted that while the Negroes in the
United States had increased by more than 28 per cent since 1840,
the freedmen had increased by less than 13 per cent in the same
time.
In the Free States of New York, New Hampshire, Vermont and
Connecticut the free colored population had decreased by 1,402. In
the Slave States of Louisiana and Mississippi it had decreased by
8,174, and that State in the South which held more than one-fourth
of the whole number in the Southern States, Virginia, had
appropriated $30,000 a year for their removal.[71]
The South was apparently, therefore, committed to the institution
of African Slavery, and in defense of it some of its champions were
wild enough to waive the question of the inferiority of the Negro race
and contend, “that slavery, whether of black or white, is a normal,
proper institution in society.”[72]
The Richmond, Va., Inquirer, The Muscogee, Ala., Herald, The
New Orleans, La., Delta and the Charleston, S. C., Standard, are all
quoted by an English writer, whose work appeared in print about
1855.[73] The three first as sustaining the above extraordinary claim;
while the fourth called for a revival of the Slave Trade.
Even if correctly quoted the comments of these papers do not
establish the prevailing sentiment in the South at that time; for the
publication at Charleston and reception of Dr. John Bachman’s work
on the “Unity of the Human Race” would to some extent constitute
an opinion to the contrary.
But that the South was positively, unreservedly, and even
aggressively committed to the institution of African Slavery is
indisputable.
It had not been so always. The change began in 1833, when the
Charleston Mercury declared—“The institution of slavery is not an
evil but a benefit.” That paper had upon that occasion admitted that
in the past the South had entertained a view to the contrary; but
asserted in 1833, that even in Virginia and North Carolina:
“The great mass of the South sanction no such admission, that
Southern Slavery is an evil to be deprecated.”[74]
And, as the appetite grows by what it feeds upon, in 1855, The
Richmond Examiner was quoted as declaring:
“It is all a hallucination that we are ever going to get rid of African
Slavery, or that it will ever be desirable to do so.... True philanthropy to
the Negro begins at home; and if every Southern man would act as if
the canopy of Heaven were inscribed with a covenant in letters of fire,
that the Negro is here and here forever; is our property and ours
forever; is never to be emancipated; is to be kept hard at work and in
rigid subjection all his days; and is never to go to Africa, to Polynesia,
or to Yankee land,—far worse than either,—they would accomplish
more good for the race in five years than they boast the institution
itself to have accomplished in two centuries.”[75]
Yet as extreme as the above is, it is quite probable that the
extravagance and injustice of the declaration against slavery in the
Southern States, had exasperated those supporting it to utterances
as extravagant.
 In the opening of the year 1850 a resolution of the Legislature of
Vermont was introduced in Congress which recited:
“That slavery is a crime against humanity, and a sore evil in the
body politic, that was excused by the framers of the Federal
Constitution as a crime entailed upon the country by their
predecessors, and tolerated solely as a thing of inexorable
necessity.”[76]
How Southern men must have felt this it is almost impossible for
us to appreciate today. It was not only an indictment of the South at
a bar where there was no provision for a trial; but it ended in a
hypocritical falsehood; for slavery had not been, “tolerated solely as
a thing of inexorable necessity.” Existing in every State except
Massachusetts, the question whether the existing condition could be
affected by permission to increase the slaves for a period by
importation was committed with the clauses relating to taxes on
exports and to a Navigation Act, that these things might “form a
bargain between the Northern and Southern States.”
This motion by Gouverneur Morris, of Pennsylvania, was adopted
by the vote of seven of the eleven States in Convention, against
three opposing and one abstaining from voting, one of the delegates
whereof seconded the motion of Pinckney to increase the period
permitting importation, which he with one of the opponents of
commitment voted for; so that actually slavery, with the right to
increase it by the Slave Trade, was voted for by nine out of eleven
States participating.
The Vermont resolution accomplished nothing; but to no individual
in Congress could it have inflicted such a wound as it dealt to
Calhoun. To him resolutions were of enormous importance, and yet
he never seemed quite ready to follow them up with acts. He was at
last in the grasp of that power which overcomes all things except
God. Twelve years had elapsed since he had been called upon to
decide between the policy of Hayne, based upon the effort to bind
together in close commercial intercourse the leading Western and
Southern States, by a railroad from Ohio to South Carolina, and the
resolution of Rhett, to amend the Constitution or dissolve the Union.
 To neither could he agree. For Hayne’s connection with Ohio
through North Carolina, he substituted a connection with Arkansas
through Georgia.
To the warning of his closest intimate that it was “better to part
peaceably than to live in the state of indecision we do,” he could only
reply with the vague allusion to:
“The many bleeding pores which must be taken up in passing the
knife through a body politic, in order to make two of one, which had
been so long bound together by so many ties, political, social and
commercial.”[77]
In this declaration there is unmistakably intense feeling for the
Union; but also some indecision; for what could have been a more
practical application of Calhoun’s teaching than Rhett’s amendment
to Slade’s bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia? That was
a resolution upon which some strong action could be erected.
Twelve years had passed, nothing had been done, and now came
the resolution of the Vermont Legislature. In the first shock which it
gave him, Calhoun was unjust to his own following. He said:
“Mr. President, I intended not to say a word on this subject. I have
long labored faithfully to repress the encroachments of the North, at
the commencement I saw where it would end and must end; and I
despair of ever seeing it ended in Congress. It will go to its end, for
gentlemen have already yielded to the current of the North which they
admit they cannot resist, Sir, what the South will do is not for me to
say. They will meet it, in my opinion, as it ought to be met.”[78]
A month later he reviewed the political situation in a most
elaborate and searching analysis, his last great speech, read for him
by Senator Mason, of Virginia. “How Can the Union be Preserved?”
In endeavoring to give an “answer to this great question,” he
asserted that the discontent of the South was due to the fact that
political power had been taken from that section and transferred to
the North, not through natural causes, but by legislation which could
be classed under three heads, the first of which was exclusion from
common territory; second a system of revenue under which an
undue portion of the burden of taxation had been imposed upon the
South, and the proceeds appropriated to the North; third a system of
measures changing the original character of the government. The
result, he claimed, had been a change from a Constitutional Federal
Republic to the despotism of a numerical majority in which a
question of vital importance to the minority was threatened:
“The relation between the races in the Southern section ... which
cannot be destroyed without subjecting the two races to the greatest
calamity, and the section to poverty, desolation and wretchedness.”[79]
Whether right or wrong, the first of these claims had been settled
by the Missouri Compromise in 1820, which the South had
acquiesced in. The second Calhoun, himself, had undertaken to right
in 1832, and if there had been a failure it was due in some measure
to his inability to diagnose with sufficient accuracy the situation at
that time.
Along two lines from 1827 there had proceeded the effort of the
South to recover her power and increase her population; to restore
her waning political influence and rebuild her commercial strength.
One was through revision of the tariff, the other through internal
improvement by means of railroad development. The first, despite all
the interest it attracted and the splendid forensic display it gave rise
to, not only was a lamentable failure in its curative effect, but very
probably added somewhat to the difficulties which hampered the
other. Now with regard to the first, Calhoun had mapped out the
plan, and undertook the responsibility through the nullification
project, with which he effected the relegation of Hayne to the post of
Governor of the State of South Carolina from the United States
Senate, to which he, himself, repaired with almost ambassadorial
powers. The effect of Nullification on the Tariff should be analysed
before considering the railroad campaign, with which Calhoun could
not refrain from interfering, with results most disappointing to those
he induced to accept his view and abandon that of his faithful friend
and quondam supporter, made by the Knoxville Convention of 1836,
much more thoroughly the commercial leader of the South than
Calhoun had ever been made its political guide.
Mr. John B. Cleveland says in his pamphlet on the “Controversy
between John C. Calhoun and Robert Y. Hayne: