Apprentice Days

WHILE HE LED the movement to promote Brunswick as a port, Thomas Butler King also engaged in a career in public life. He served five terms in the legislature as a senator from Glynn County, attended the constitutional convention of 1833, and campaigned for a seat in Congress in 1836 and 1838. During the latter half of the decade he represented his state and section in the commercial conventions that met in Augusta, Charleston, and Macon. By his speeches and actions in these various bodies, he was to reveal his basic political and economic convictions.

Georgia politics in the 1820’s was a struggle primarily between personal factions.¹ John Clark led the Clark party to victory as governor in 1819 and 1820; George Michael Troup and his followers triumphed in the elections of 1823 and 1825. The recurrent battles of these forces were bitter, and their victories were seldom decisive. Although interests and issues are hard to define, the Troup forces were generally thought to represent the tidewater in alliance with the expanding plantation area of central Georgia, while the Clark party spoke for the small farmer elements in the less fertile and less thickly populated areas of the piny woods, wiregrass, and frontier regions. Both parties claimed to support state aid to internal improvements, but neither could boast of its record. Both parties agreed that the federal government ought to extinguish the Indian title to unsettled land on the frontier. Both parties supported Andrew Jackson in the election of 1828.

Although Georgia politics could be explained largely in terms of personal leadership until 1828, the years that follow lack any such touchstone. One observer has characterized the course of the Troup faction for the period from 1828 to 1833 in the following words:

It was dragged from personalism into internal improvements, suffered a diversion on the tariff of 1828, drifted into the Central Bank issue of 1829, blundered through the Cherokee crisis, and side-stepped through a maze of irregular patterns in the nullification scare of 1830-1832.²

In the following six years, Troup party leaders gathered about them a new grouping of elements known as the State Rights party. They guided a disciplined organization that included anti-Jacksonians in national politics and supporters of economy and conservatism on the state level. Until 1838 the party scored no general victories, but the groups developed a corps of capable leaders, made inroads on the strength of their Union opponents, and fought the majority Unionists on state and national issues. By the end of the decade these almost equally balanced parties were approximately aligned with the national Whig and Democratic parties, but they contained factions that found the national alliances uncomfortable. It was a transitional era, and the shifting contests of the 1830’s often confounded contemporary observers; the passage of time has hardly clarified the picture.

Thomas Butler King first held elective office as a senator from Glynn County in the legislature of 1832. Of the several national questions that were considered, Indian policy, the tariff, and nullification were the most important. King and his colleagues unanimously endorsed Andrew Jackson’s attempts to induce the Cherokee Indians to move to a trans-Mississippi reservation.³ On the tariff and nullification issue, King introduced a resolution that called for a federal constitutional convention to pronounce upon the doctrine of implied powers. The Senate approved the resolution unanimously, but the House refused to concur. A set of compromise resolutions embracing both the tariff and nullification questions was brought up in place of King’s original proposal. King voted for a resolution declaring the tariff unconstitutional, and, when that failed, for another that disavowed the right of Georgia to condemn the actions being taken by the State of South Carolina. Subsequently, he voted against a statement of principles condemning the course of South Carolina as unwise and hypocritical. The compromise resolutions, combining censure for South Carolina and a protest against the tariff, were unacceptable to the gentleman from Glynn County, who aligned himself with the minority bloc of adamant State Rights partisans refusing to accept the compromise.⁴

The Troup party, which controlled the legislature, endorsed a movement for a convention to revise the Constitution of 1798. Like the citizens of other states during this era, Georgians sought to alter their basic law to conform with the needs of an expanding population and changing political ideals. Two specific features of the government were under attack: the size of the legislature, which promoted long and expensive sessions; and the inequality of representation by counties. So vigorous was the agitation on these points that an extra-legal convention was called to meet in Milledgeville in February 1833. Under this pressure the legislature issued a call for a convention. King was a member of the majority that approved the movement, legalized it, and set the date for the official convention in May 1833.⁵

An active delegate to the convention, King introduced the first motion after the swearing in of members and participated frequently in the week-long debates. On the question of senatorial representation he voted for revisions that would have set up a Senate of thirty or of thirty-six members, and against a forty-five-member group. To reduce the size of the House, the proposal was put forward that free white population, rather than the federal ratio which included three-fifths of the slaves, be used as the basis of representation. By both vote and argument King opposed the free white basis. His county, Glynn, was small in size, had the lowest free white population in the state, and counted the highest ratio of slaves to free. On the federal ratio basis, Glynn’s representative population was five times greater than it would have been under the new proposal.⁶ To judge from his actions, then, King favored a drastic reduction in the Senate, but defended the advantages which slave ownership conferred on some of the population.

Only part of the story appears from individual votes. A closer examination of King’s record shows that he voted in the minority on every motion, except one, for which a roll-call was taken. Clearly, he was an obstructionist, and the explanation is to be found in the partisan aspects of the convention. Leaders of the Troup party had spearheaded the agitation for a convention, and the Troup majority in the legislature of 1832 had legitimized the movement. However, in the election of delegates the Clark-Union party gained control of the convention, and the proposal to use free white population as the basis for representation struck at the political strength of the Troupites in the plantation counties. From the outset, therefore, the Troup delegates obstructed the work of the convention, even going so far as to register a complaint in the journal against the partisan spirit of the deliberations. Unable to have their way, or even to secure an acceptable compromise, the Troup partisans led the campaign against the ratification of the amendments proposed by the convention. They succeeded in bringing about a decided rejection of the proposals, with the vote closely following the party lines of previous elections.⁷

The ratification vote on the amendments to the constitution was the last in which the followers of Troup maintained their unity. George Michael Troup retired from active political life in 1833, and John McPherson Berrien, former attorney general in Jackson’s cabinet, made a strong bid to convert the party into an anti-Jacksonian group. John Forsyth headed the Troup Unionists who refused to follow the rest of the party into opposition to Old Hickory. Out of this split came the formation of the State Rights party of Georgia. Thomas Butler King was one of the few old Troup leaders who won election to the Senate in 1834 as a State Rights candidate. The legislature was Unionist by a large majority, a Unionist governor already held office, and the entire Union congressional ticket was elected.⁸

The most prolonged and bitter party battle of the legislative session concerned the issue of federal relations. In 1834 the case of James Graves, a Cherokee Indian, threatened again to raise the question of Georgia’s jurisdiction over her Indian inhabitants.⁹ The governor’s message dealing with the Graves case was referred to the standing committee on the state of the Republic, which brought in general resolutions regretting the attempt of the United States Supreme Court to assume jurisdiction. William Crosby Dawson, a strong State Rights partisan, offered a substitute resolution declaring Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 “unconstitutional, inoperative, null, and void.”¹⁰

King spoke at length in support of Dawson’s report. He pointed out to his hearers that the Union was a compact of sovereign states, buttressing his argument with a long historical review. He hailed the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions as restatements confirming the sovereignty of the states and expressed surprise “to hear the old federal doctrine of 1789 advocated in the Senate of Georgia in 1834.”¹¹ Avowing himself unafraid of the word nullification, he urged his colleagues “to declare in the face of Congress and the world, that those acts [under which the Supreme Court assumed jurisdiction] are unconstitutional, null and void.”¹² South Carolina, King asserted, had found in nullification the only remedy against nationalizing tendencies. Warning his fellow senators that the economic and political life of the South was being threatened by the consolidationist interpretation of the Constitution, he made a forecast worthy of John C. Calhoun:

The time is rapidly approaching when the majority in Congress will be vastly increased from the non slave holding States; and unless the south shall soon rally round the Constitution, and confine the action of the General Government within its proper limits, it requires no spirit of prophecy to foresee that the time is not far distant when that majority, regardless of the interests of the slave holding States, will resort to a course of legislation for their own benefit, that may involve us in ruinous intestine wars, or in submission to a Government without limitation of powers.¹³

King’s argument elicited high praise from State Rights papers in the capital and in Savannah.¹⁴

Although King’s speech enhanced his reputation it failed to convince his colleagues. The State Rights minority stood firm for a while on the principles set forth in Dawson’s resolutions, but in the final balloting they supported milder resolutions that merely protested against the interference of the Supreme Court in a state criminal prosecution. State Rights and Unionist members were almost unanimous in opposing federal intervention; they differed only in the terms of their protest.¹⁵

Besides gaining fame as a State Rights orator, King registered his opposition to the Bank of the United States and voted to censure President Andrew Jackson on four counts: for removing the deposits, for requiring the resignation of the Secretary of the Treasury, for retaining the Postmaster General in his cabinet, and for attempting to have a protest recorded in the journal of the Senate of the United States.¹⁶ Several local bills that King proposed were defeated, but on the last day of the session he pushed through an act giving state aid to the opening of the port of Brunswick.¹⁷

When King returned to Milledgeville in November 1835, he devoted his major attention to the question of aid to internal improvements. He proposed three bills connected with the Brunswick schemes. Most important was the act incorporating the Brunswick and Florida Railroad Company, which passed early in the session. Closely related was the act permitting the sale of three hundred acres of the Brunswick town commons, thus making good waterfront acreage available to private owners. Finally, a move to repeal the act of the previous session granting state aid for the opening of the port of Brunswick was successfully blocked.¹⁸

During the preceding summer much excitement had arisen in Georgia over the use of the mails to distribute abolition literature. In King’s home county of Glynn, three separate meetings in August and September had endorsed resolutions assailing William Lloyd Garrison, the Tappan brothers, and other abolitionists and calling on the governor and the legislature to take action to preserve the peace of the state.¹⁹ In his annual message Governor Lumpkin took notice of the agitation of abolitionists and suggested that the legislature consider what steps should be taken to combat the danger. Lumpkin’s Democratic floor leader introduced seven resolutions on the subject, firm, but far from bellicose. King and eighteen other State Rights doctrinaires offered amendments that strengthened the original wording and called on citizens of the northern states to pass positive laws against abolitionists. However, when their amendments were rejected, they joined in the unanimous approval of McAllister’s resolutions.²⁰

In 1836, when he was seeking outside capital to be invested in the Brunswick schemes, King did not seek reelection, but when he returned to the Senate in 1837 he enjoyed increased prominence. Of the first three proposals submitted to the Senate after its organization, King offered two, one of which was to occupy the legislators for the greater part of the session. Although there was a standing committee on internal improvements, King moved the appointment of a joint select committee of forty-two to consider the subject, and the motion carried. The following Saturday, King presented to the committee his views on the needs of the state; McAllister, the Democratic floor leader, then opened the hearing for the representatives of different Georgia towns to present their views; finally, Seaborn Jones placed before the group a detailed plan for the blanket extension of state credit to private companies. Out of this concerted and bipartisan effort the committee fashioned a bill that looked not only to the completion of the state-owned Western and Atlantic railroad, but also to state aid for privately owned companies in general. King was given credit for the form which the bill finally took, and he piloted it carefully through many parliamentary shoals. He preserved it intact, but never brought it to the floor for final action; apparently the response on amendment test votes led him to withhold the measure from immediate decision. On the last day of the session, he called up a somewhat similar substitute bill from the House, but it failed to pass.²¹

Before the end of the session King successfully sponsored amendments to the charters of the Bank of Brunswick, the Brunswick and Altamaha Canal and Railroad Company, and the Central Bank of Georgia. In addition, he secured charter authorization for the Brunswick Lumber Company and introduced an act to set up limited partnerships. His proposal that the court records of Glynn County be kept at the town of Brunswick was endorsed, as well as his resolution to rent a house for the governor until the new mansion should be completed. As a legislator he suffered no outright defeats, although his amendment of the charter of the Brunswick and Florida Railroad Company, like the general railroad bill, was never brought to a final vote.²²

The legislature of 1837 faced many problems arising out of the financial crisis that had struck the country some eight months earlier. Although Georgia felt the effects of the panic less than many of her sister states, only three banks, including the state-owned Central Bank, were maintaining specie payment. Since most of the banks were subject to forfeiture of their charters if they suspended specie payment, only action by the legislature could save them. Governor William Schley, whose term of office expired while the legislature sat, recommended that the legislators fix on some method of relief. He also recommended that the Central Bank be given more latitude in the issuance of bank notes. The Senate considered a measure that set a date for the uniform resumption of specie payment by the banks of the state. King joined his State Rights colleagues in opposing and delaying the bill, which was frequently amended and finally killed. He cast similar dilatory votes against a bill penalizing the Insurance Bank of Columbus, which was controlled by Nicholas Biddle, and this administration measure also was defeated. The Senate finally adopted a motion to lay all banking resolutions on the table for the balance of the session.²³

The legislature of 1838 followed the pattern of the previous year. A State Rights governor, George Gilmer, occupied the executive chair, but both houses of the legislature remained Democratic. However, the Democratic party was plagued with internal divisions, and the State Rights leaders took advantage of every opportunity to improve their position. One of them, Charles Dougherty, was named to the presidency of the Senate, while Thomas Butler King was virtually the floor leader of the session.

The senators took up the banking question where they had left it the year before. In the face of a continuing depression, various proposals were put forward in regard to banking, some providing relief for existing institutions, others suggesting new principles of control. The Committee on Banks, of which King was a member, reported a number of these measures for action. The State Rights party continued the obstructive tactics that it had pursued in 1837, exploiting the divisions within the ranks of both parties to preserve the status quo. King joined the majority who denied special privileges to the Central Bank, which was regarded as a Democratic institution; he also voted with the majority who opposed relief for banks that had suspended specie payment. On the other hand, he voted for an act to permit free banking and for an unsuccessful bill to speed the collection of bank notes.²⁴ Although these votes are not conclusive, they indicate that King opposed governmental interference in banking, particularly action that was aimed at relieving legal obligations.

King set forth his views on banking more clearly in a series of resolutions founded more on sectional and political bases than on economic theory. In the preamble, he condemned the Bank of the United States because its policies had injured the South, but he emphasized the need for a large banking capital to promote the commerce of the South. He suggested that the governor appoint a commission to draw up the charter for an exclusively southern bank, the total capital to be equal to the value of southern exports. Each southern state was to have a branch of this bank, the stock to be divided according to the value of exports. This stock, in turn, was to be held half by the state government, half by the citizens of that state. Each state was to have the right to withdraw from the scheme at any time, and other states might join. This contribution to banking policy found an early grave. The motion to print the resolutions failed, forty to thirty-seven, and the measure did not arise again.²⁵

When the national banking system came up for consideration, King voted for resolutions that declared the Bank of the United States to have been “unconstitutional, inexpedient, and dangerous to the liberty of the people.”²⁶ The pet bank system was declared a failure, and the issue of Treasury notes unconstitutional. Another resolution called for the appointment and removal of the Secretary of the Treasury by the United States Senate, rather than the President. Such an attack on the policies of the Van Buren administration was unpalatable to the Democrats, who countered with a set of resolutions asserting that the Bank of the United States had been unconstitutional and the pet banks inexpedient. The Independent Treasury was endorsed, as well as the issue of Treasury notes redeemable in specie. Although King missed the final roll-call on these resolves, his earlier votes leave no doubt that he disapproved of their adoption.²⁷

Governor George R. Gilmer’s message gave encouragement to the supporters of internal improvement, for he called for support of the state-owned Western and Atlantic to be supplemented by aid to private companies. King, as chairman of the Joint Select Committee on Internal Improvements, reported a bill embodying the executive recommendations. The prospects for passage were clouded by several factors: the continuing financial depression, the need for the state to concentrate its resources behind the Western and Atlantic, and other piecemeal legislation. This last, in fact, seems to have been decisive; Savannah, Macon, Brunswick, and other towns were unable to agree. The Chatham County (Savannah) delegation showed more interest in a bill favoring the powerful Central Railroad, and the old rivalry with Brunswick flared up again. King’s bill combining the interests of the state works and private companies was broken up; the Western and Atlantic received support, but the general aid feature was defeated. He had to be content with amendments to the charter of the Brunswick canal and railroad companies and a new charter for the Brunswick Insurance and Trust Company.²⁸

With the end of his Senate term in 1838, Thomas Butler King brought to a close one phase of his public career and embarked on another. In six years he had grown from an inexperienced candidate to a veteran politician, disciplined in the school of adversity as a member of the minority party. In the workshop of state politics the apprentice learned his trade, and year by year he gained the journeyman skill that was to serve him in his later work. He had emerged as the foremost leader of those who wished to see private enterprise, aided by the state, develop a transportation network. Although his general aid bill had not passed, he had secured privileges for the corporations that rested on the development of Brunswick. He gained some fame as a nullificationist orator and always stood with the most obdurate State Rights partisans. Insofar as national issues had entered into Georgia politics, he had voted against the policies of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. The distinguishing marks of his career had been party loyalty and persistent pursuit of his aims. With the close of the session of 1838, he left the legislative halls at Milledgeville for the wider arena of the Twenty-sixth Congress.

When he had been named to the platform committee in 1835, King joined the inner circle of State Rights leaders. The party caucus chose him as a candidate for Congress the following year, on a ticket that carried electors for Hugh Lawson White and Philip P. Barbour for President and Vice-President. From Boston, where he was seeking capital for the Brunswick development schemes, King issued a strong State Rights declaration, denying the power of Congress to legislate on slavery in the District of Columbia and the territories and denouncing the petitions of abolitionists. This statement was not even presented to the public until after the elections took place, and the candidate must have expected the defeat that he met. As the time for the State Rights convention of 1837 approached, King’s name was put forward as a worthy choice for governor, and newspaper reports identified him as the favorite of the southern part of the state. In the convention, however, he ran an honorable fifth in the field of nine, with George R. Gilmer receiving the final approval.²⁹

In 1838 the State Rights party once again presented Thomas Butler King to the voters as a candidate for Congress. This time King campaigned vigorously. During the summer and fall of 1838 he travelled about southern Georgia promoting local subscriptions for the Brunswick and Florida Railroad Company and keeping himself before the eyes of the voters. In a personal platform he stated his views on current political issues. He declared the establishment of a national bank unconstitutional and inexpedient and attacked the pet bank system. He opposed the Independent Treasury as it had been presented by the Van Buren administration, but qualified his opposition by saying that he objected most to the excessive concentration of power in the hands of the President. He surveyed the leading presidential candidates and concluded that all had been guilty of unpardonable sins against the South. Clay was unacceptable because of his high tariff views and his championship of a national bank. Webster he considered too much of a Federalist to deserve the support of Georgia. Harrison he dismissed as entertaining the same opinions as Clay and Webster. Van Buren he called unprincipled. He concluded that none of the candidates inspired his confidence, but that he would support any candidate who received Georgia’s electoral vote.³⁰

Under the general ticket system then in use, the entire congressional delegation of the State Rights party was elected. King received 32,090 votes, standing fifth in the field of eighteen candidates.³¹ His popularity in his home county was noteworthy. The Brunswick Advocate expressed gratification that

the vote for Mr. King is nearly unanimous, and indeed the few Union votes that were polled, could only be procured by placing Mr. King’s name on the same ticket, thus affording to the whole state a convincing proof of the manner in which he is appreciated by his immediate neighbors and constituents.³²

With this encouraging evidence of local and state-wide support, King entered a new sphere of political activity.

Another measure of his growing stature as a local and sectional leader was to be found in his participation in the commercial conventions that took place between 1837 and 1839. In a broad sense these conventions dealt with the changes wrought by the industrial revolution, and the central theme about which they revolved was the growing divergence in the economic interests of the North and the South. Consulting together in non-political gatherings, leaders of the agricultural South considered their problems of credit, marketing, and transportation, and debated the means by which the South might escape its dependence on the North. As sectional movements, the conventions marked a step in the development of a distinct nationalism for the South.³³

Although the conventions that met in Augusta, Charleston, and Macon from 1837 to 1839 assumed a greater significance in the light of later events, they were called primarily to deal with immediate problems arising out of the Panic of 1837. The suspension of specie payment and the stringency of credit combined with a prolonged decline in the price of cotton to render the lot of the planter almost insupportable. On October 16, 1837, delegates from Georgia and South Carolina met in Augusta, Georgia, to consult about means of relief from current ills. King was one of the most active members, serving on both the resolutions committee and the publicity committee, participating in the debates, and speaking at the dinner given by the citizens of Augusta. On the opening day of the convention, George McDuffie presented an analysis of the economic condition of the South. For the section’s dependence on the North, he blamed the protectionist tariff, the discriminatory financial policy of the federal government, and—most of all—the lack of enterprise of planters and merchants of the South. The resolutions committee presented a verbose report that recited anew the ills of the South. To avoid dependency on the North, the South should establish direct trade with Europe. Profits from southern staples would then no longer flow out of the section, and credit and imported goods would be available through the local financial and commercial communities. It was realized that these ends could not be attained overnight, but Southerners were urged to support the objectives set forth. Committees were appointed to publicize the work of the convention and to memorialize the legislatures of South Carolina and Georgia for laws permitting limited co-partnerships.³⁴ The delegates adjourned to meet again in six months.

At the second direct trade convention in Augusta, some two hundred delegates from seven states met on April 2, 1838. Thomas Butler King was unanimously chosen as president of the body. He named Robert Young Hayne as chairman of the committee on resolutions, which brought in a report repeating and emphasizing the earlier resolutions. The convention specifically called for the establishment of agencies in southern ports by European manufacturers and urged the founding of banks to handle foreign exchanges, but the delegates confined themselves to exhortation rather than planning.³⁵

King served as temporary chairman for a somewhat similar convention at Macon, Georgia, in October 1839. This Cotton Convention met in answer to a call issued by a group of cotton planters who had consulted together in New York the previous July. There they had worked out a scheme to support the price of cotton in the foreign market and had sent General James Hamilton, Jr., to Europe to make the necessary arrangements abroad. The Macon Cotton Convention heard a report from General Hamilton and a detailed presentation of the plan by Thomas Butler King, who served as chairman of the Resolutions Committee. The committee report called for the banks of the South voluntarily to join in a uniform plan to advance money to planters on cotton, which designated agents in Europe would hold off the market until the best price could be obtained. In a transaction of this kind, the committee argued, no one could lose. The borrowing would be kept at home and the marketing abroad; the planter would have his money from the bank; the bank would issue its notes secured by bills of lading and insurance; the consignee would make an adequate commission by holding his cotton for the best price; and the whole credit structure would be self-cancelling when specie was remitted in payment. Such a plan would revolutionize the system of cotton marketing by shifting the burden of credit from the planters to the banks.

The planters who met at Macon adopted the plan of action put forward by King. Standing committees of merchants and bankers were appointed in the major cotton ports of the South to make financial arrangements, and a central committee was appointed to handle inter-city cooperation.³⁶ Yet despite the ambitious planning of King, Hamilton, and their associates, this scheme to control the cotton market in the interest of the planters never materialized. Two weeks previously the Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania had suspended specie payment, and even as the convention was meeting banks in the South began to follow suit. Thus was precipitated the sharp secondary depression that was to bring years of hard times to the cotton producing areas. On the Liverpool market cotton dropped by one fourth to one third, to continue its downward trend to the 5-cent low of 1844–1845.³⁷ Even while they were planning so elaborately at Macon, King and his fellow-planters must have realized the probability of failure. In the words of one analyst: “Here, as later, cotton planters talked much but did little.…”³⁸

Although long on talk and short on performance, the southern commercial conventions of 1837-1839 pointed up the growing divergence of the sectional economies and foreshadowed the later crisis of the Union. So far as Thomas Butler King was concerned, none of his previous activities had spread his name so widely before the public. For the ex-Senator from Glynn County and untried member of Congress it must have been gratifying to find himself ranked with George McDuffie, Robert Y. Hayne, and James Gadsden, his co-officials in the conventions. It was a resounding send-off as a sectional spokesman for the newly elected gentleman from Georgia.