John Calhoun of Georgia.
The Southern Confederation Council is the legislature of the Southern Confederation. As originally established by the Britannic Design of 1781, the S.C. Council had five members, one appointed by each of the five provinces making up the N.C. The Council sent representatives to the other confederations of the C.N.A., and a nonvoting envoy to the British Parliament. Although it was based in the confederation capital of Norfolk, Virginia, the S.C. Council would periodically travel to Burgoyne to meet with the other confederation-level legislatures in a body called the Grand Council.
The S.C. Council has the power to levy militia from its individual provinces with the assent of their legislatures. The council could also levy taxes from the individual provinces, and had the power to veto taxes levied by Parliament by a vote of three quarters of its members. A majority vote of the S.C. Council was required to allow militia to serve elsewhere in the British Empire.
Although Sobel does not specifically say so, it is clear that after 1808, the membership of the S.C. Council was increased, although its members were apparently still chosen by the provincial legislatures rather than through direct election. The Design originally limited the size of the confederation councils to twenty members, but this may have been revised later. Initially, the royal governors of the provinces themselves served on the S.C. Council. When he chose to do so, Virginia Governor Theodorick Bland was able to persuade the other governors to follow his lead; otherwise the provinces of the S.C. tended to go their own way. This left the Governor of the Southern Confederation, initially John Connolly, with little power, a state of affairs that would continue down to the present day.
During the Trans-Oceanic War, Governor Bland was able to guide the S.C. Council into supporting his military operations against Spanish New Orleans and Louisiana. The end of the war brought a new era to the S.C. marked by a rapid and lucrative expansion of cotton cultivation and the expansion of Negro slavery to serve as a labor force on the newly-established cotton plantations in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia. The rising power of the cotton planters made itself felt in the provincial legislatures, and through them to the members they appointed to the S.C. Council. The cotton planters, together with their allies in the cities such as cotton factors, merchants, and lawyers, formed the Country Party, which became known as the Liberal Party after 1819. These men supported low tariffs, improvements to waterways and harbors, and large military expenditures to protect the African slave trade and to put down the growing number of slave insurrections. By the 1820s John Calhoun of Georgia had become the most important Liberal leader.
The Liberals were opposed by the Farmers Party, which consisted of small farmers, urban laborers and factory owners, and those free Negroes who had gained the franchise. These men, who became known as the Conservative Party after 1820, supported subsidies to industry, higher tariffs, a limit to the size of plantations, and reduced military expenditures. The economic interests of the Conservatives made them natural allies of the growing abolitionist movement in the S.C. which saw the creation of the Southern Union in 1825. Willie Lloyd of South Carolina became the leader of the Conservatives by vocally denouncing slavery. The Liberals were able to win enough seats in the provincial legislatures in 1833 to appoint a majority to the S.C. Council, which chose Calhoun, the Governor of Georgia, as Governor of the S.C.
The slavery question in the S.C. was upended by the Panic of 1836, a severe recession that closed down cotton mills in Great Britain and greatly reduced the demand for cotton. As the cotton boom ended, the demand for slaves dropped, and prices for slaves fell dramatically from before the Panic. A prime field hand who was worth N.A. £150 in the spring of 1835 had fallen in value to N.A. £30 by October 1837. By February 1838, the price of slaves had fallen below the cost of transporting them from Africa, and the slave trade collapsed the following year. By then, the falling price of cotton had forced many plantation owners to abandon its production in favor of vegetables and grains for their own consumption. Southern plantations resembled miniature feudal estates, as commerce collapsed and Southerners were forced to accept lower standards of living.
In August 1838, Lloyd denied that civilization in the S.C. would be threatened by manumission, and proposed that all the confederation's slaves be freed over a period of ten years, with the government compensating the owners. The following year, British Prime Minister Sir Duncan Amory called for the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, promising financial and administrative aid in manumission programs.
Citing Amory's pledge, Lloyd in the spring of 1840 proposed the payment of N.A. £35 per slave to any and all slaveholders who would accept the price, with the money to be raised through the sale of "manumission bonds" in Britain and the C.N.A. The offer would end on 1 January 1842, at which time all remaining slaves would be freed at a rate of N.A. £32. Since the price of slaves in the S.C. had declined to N.A. £19 two years before, manumission would be a way for cash-starved plantation owners to recoup their fortunes.
The Lloyd bill also arranged for the education and training of the former slaves, while a provision inserted into the bill by James Philipson required that former slaves be bound to their plantations until their period of education was over. The Philipson Provision would later be used to keep the former slaves and their descendants bound to the soil for another two generations.
After bitter wrangling in the S.C. Council, the Lloyd Bill was passed, and sent to Viceroy Sir Alexander Haven in Burgoyne for ratification, which he gave on 16 May. There was talk in the S.C. of revolution in the week before ratification, but in the event there were few disturbances. Within six months of the Lloyd Bill's passage, half of the slave owners in the S.C. had accepted the manumission program, and before the deadline almost every slave in the S.C. had been freed. However, under the Philipson Provision few of the freed slaves were permitted to leave the plantations.
In the wake of the disturbances caused by the Panic throughout the C.N.A., the various political leaders came together in 1841 to call for sweeping revisions in the Britannic Design to transform the country into a united self-governing dominion within the British Empire. The result was the Second Britannic Design of 1842, in which many of the powers of the confederation councils were ceded to a reformed Grand Council that would serve as a national legislature.