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THE ABOLITION CRUSADE
AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

FOUR PERIODS OF AMERICAN HISTORY
BY

HILARY A. HERBERT, LL.D.

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1912

Copyright, 1912, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published April, 1912

TO MY GRANDCHILDREN
THIS LITTLE BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED IN THE HOPE THAT ITS PERUSAL WILL FOSTER IN THEM, AS CITIZENS OF THIS GREAT REPUBLIC, A DUE REGARD FOR THE CONSTITUTION OF THEIR COUNTRY AS THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND

PREFATORY NOTE
BY JAMES FORD RHODES

"Livy extolled Pompey in such a panegyric that Augustus called him Pompeian, and yet this was no obstacle to their friendship." That we find in Tacitus. We may therefore picture to ourselves Augustus reading Livy's "History of the Civil Wars" (in which the historian's republican sympathies were freely expressed), and learning therefrom that there were two sides to the strife which rent Rome. As we are more than forty-six years distant from our own Civil War, is it not incumbent on Northerners to endeavor to see the Southern side? We may be certain that the historian a hundred years hence, when he contemplates the lining-up of five and one-half million people against twenty-two millions, their equal in religion, morals, regard for law, and devotion to the common Constitution, will, as matter of course, aver that the question over which they fought for four years had two sides; that all the right was not on one side and all the wrong on the other. The North should welcome, therefore, accounts of the conflict written by candid Southern men.

Mr. Herbert, reared and educated in the South, believing in the moral and economical right of slavery, served as a Confederate soldier during the war, but after Appomattox, when thirty-one years old, he told his father he had arrived at the conviction that slavery was wrong. Twelve years later, when home-rule was completely restored to the South (1877), he went into public life as a Member of Congress, sitting in the House for sixteen years. At the end of his last term, in 1893, he was appointed Secretary of the Navy by President Cleveland, whom he faithfully served during his second administration.

Such an experience is an excellent training for the treatment of any aspect of the Civil War. Mr. Herbert's devotion to the Constitution, the Union, and the flag now equals that of any soldier of the North who fought against him. We should expect therefore that his work would be pervaded by practical knowledge and candor.

After a careful reading of the manuscript I have no hesitation in saying that the expectation is realized. Naturally unable to agree entirely with his presentation of the subject, I believe that his work exhibits a side that entitles it to a large hearing. I hope that it will be placed before the younger generation, who, unaffected by any memory of the heat of the conflict, may truly say:

Tros Tyriusve, mihi nullo discrimine agetur.

James Ford Rhodes.

Boston, November, 1911.

PREFACE

In 1890 Mr. L. E. Chittenden, who had been United States Treasurer under President Lincoln, published an interesting account of $10,000,000 United States bonds secretly sent to England, as he said, in 1862, and he told all about what thereupon took place across the water. It was a reminiscence. General Charles Francis Adams in his recent instructive volume, "Studies Military and Diplomatic," takes up this narrative and, in a chapter entitled "An Historical Residuum," conclusively shows from contemporaneous evidence that the bonds were sent, not in 1862, but in 1863, but that, as for the rest of the story, the residuum of truth in it was about like the speck of moisture that is left when a soap bubble is pricked by a needle.

General Adams did not mean that Mr. Chittenden knew he was drawing on his imagination. He was only demonstrating that one who intends to write history cannot rely on his memory.

The author, in the following pages, is undertaking to write a connected story of events that happened, most of them, in his lifetime, and as to many of the most important of which he has vivid recollections; but, save in one respect, he has not relied upon his own memory for any important fact. The picture he has drawn of the relations between the slave-holder and non-slave-holder in the South is, much of it, given as he recollects it. His opportunities for observation were somewhat extensive, and here he is willing to be considered in part as a witness. Elsewhere he has relied almost entirely upon contemporaneous written evidence, memory, however, often indicating to him sources of information.

Nowhere are there so many valuable lessons for the student of American history as in the story of the great sectional movement of 1831, and of its results, which have profoundly affected American conditions through generation after generation.

An effort is here made to tell that story succinctly, tracing it, step after step, from cause to effect. The subject divides itself naturally into four historic periods:

1. The anti-slavery crusade, 1831 to 1860.

2. Secession and four years of war, 1861 to 1865.

3. Reconstruction under the Lincoln-Johnson plan, with the overthrow by Congress of that plan and the rule of the negro and carpet-bagger, from 1865 to 1876.

4. Restoration of self-government in the South, and the results that have followed.

The greater part of the book is devoted to the first period—1831 to 1860, the period of causation. The sequences running through the three remaining periods are more briefly sketched.

Italics, throughout the book, it may be mentioned here, are the author's.

Now that the country is happily reunited in a Union which all agree is indissoluble, the South wants the true history of the times here treated of spread before its children; so does the North. The mistakes that were committed on both sides during that lamentable and prolonged sectional quarrel (and they were many) should be known of all, in order that like mistakes may not be committed in the future. The writer has, with diffidence, attempted to lay the facts before his readers, and so to condense the story that it may be within the reach of the ordinary student. How far he has succeeded will be for his readers to say. The verdict he ventures to hope for is that he has made an honest effort to be fair.

The author takes this occasion to thank that accomplished young teacher of history, Mr. Paul Micou, for valuable suggestions, and his friend, Mr. Thomas H. Clark, who with his varied attainments has aided him in many ways.

Hilary A. Herbert.

Washington, D. C., March, 1912.

CONTENTS

THE ABOLITION CRUSADE AND ITS
CONSEQUENCES

INTRODUCTION

The Constitution of the United States attempts to define and limit the power of our Federal Government.

Lord Brougham somewhere said that such an instrument was not worth the parchment it was written on; people would pay no regard to self-imposed limitations on their own will.

When our fathers by that written Constitution established a government that was partly national and partly federal, and that had no precedent, they knew it was an experiment. To-day that government has been in existence one hundred and twenty-three years, and we proudly claim that the experiment of 1789 has been the success of the ages.

Happy should we be if we could boast that, during all this period, the Constitution had never been violated in any respect!

The first palpable infringement of its provisions occurred in the enactment of the alien and sedition laws of 1798. The people at the polls indignantly condemned these enactments, and for years thereafter the government proceeded peacefully; the people were prosperous, and the Union and the Constitution grew in favor.

Later, there grew up a rancorous sectional controversy about slavery that lasted many years; that quarrel was followed by a bloody sectional war; after that war came the reconstruction of the Southern States. During each of these three trying eras it did sometimes seem as if that old piece of "parchment," derided by Lord Brougham, had been utterly forgotten. Nevertheless, and despite all these trying experiences, we have in the meantime advanced to the very front rank of nations, and our people have long since turned, not only to the Union, but, we are happy to think, to the Constitution as well, with more devotion than ever.

It may be further said that, notwithstanding all the bitter animosities that for long divided our country into two hostile sections, that wonderful old Constitution, handed down to us by our fathers, was always, and in all seasons, in the hearts of our people, and that never for a moment was it out of mind. Even in our sectional war Confederates and Federals were both fighting for it—one side to maintain it over themselves as an independent nation; the other to maintain it over the whole of the old Union. In the very madness of reconstruction the fundamental idea of the Constitution, the equality of the States, ultimately prevailed—this idea it was that imperatively demanded the final restoration of the seceded States, with the right of self-government unimpaired.

The future is now bright before us. The complex civilization of the present is, we do not forget, continually presenting new and complex problems of government, and we are mindful, too, that, for the people who must deal with these problems, a higher culture is required, but to all this our national and State governments seem to be fully alive. We are everywhere erecting memorials to our patriotic dead, we have our "flag day" and many ceremonies to stimulate patriotism, and, throughout our whole country, young Americans are being taught more and more of American history and American traditions.

The essence of these teachings presumably is that time has hallowed our Constitution, and that experience has fully shown the wisdom of its provisions. In this land of ours, where there are so much property and so many voters who want it, and where the honor and emoluments of high place are so tempting to the demagogue, there can be no such security for either life, liberty, or property as those safeguards which our fathers devised in the Constitution of the United States.

Our teachers of history must therefore expose fearlessly every violation in the past of our Constitution, and point out the penalties that followed; and, above all, they cannot afford to condone, or to pass by in silence, the conduct of those who have heretofore advocated, or acted on, any law which to them was higher than the American Constitution.

One of the most serious troubles in the past, many think our greatest, was our terrible war among ourselves. Perhaps, after the lapse of nearly fifty years, we can all now agree that if our people and our States had always, between 1830 and 1860, faithfully observed the Federal Constitution we should have not had that war. However that may be, the crusade of the Abolitionists, which began in 1831, was the beginning of an agitation in the North against the existence of slavery in the South, which continued, in one form or another, until the outbreak of that war.

The negro is now located, geographically, much as he was then. If another attempt shall be made to project his personal status into national politics, the voters of the country ought to know and consider the mistakes that occurred, North and South, during the unhappy era of that sectional warfare. This little book is a study of that period of our history. It concludes with a glance at the war between the North and South, and the reconstruction that followed.

The story of Cromwell and the Great Revolution it was impossible for any Englishman to tell correctly for nearly or quite two centuries. The changes that had been wrought were too profound, too far-reaching; and English writers were too human. The changes—economic, political, and social—wrought in our country by the great controversy over slavery and State-rights, and by the war that ended it, have been quite as profound, and the revolution in men's ideas and ways of looking at their past history has been quite as complete as those which followed the downfall of the government founded by Cromwell. But we are now in the twentieth century; history is becoming a science, and we ought to succeed better in writing our past than the Englishmen did.

The culture of this day is very exacting in its demands, and if one is writing about our own past the need of fairness is all the more imperative. And why not? The masses of the people, who clashed on the battlefields of a war in which one side fought for the supremacy of the Union and the other for the sovereignty of the States, had honest convictions; they differed in their convictions; they had made honest mistakes about each other; now they would like their histories to tell just where those mistakes were; they do not wish these mistakes to be repeated hereafter. Nor is there any reason why the whole history of that great controversy should not now be written with absolute fairness; the two sections of our country have come together in a most wonderful way. There has been reunion after reunion of the blue and the gray. The survivors of a New Jersey regiment, forty-four years after the bloody battle of Salem Church, put up on its site a monument to their dead, on one side of which was a tablet to the memory of the "brave Alabama boys," who were their opponents in that fight. One of those "Alabama boys" wrote the story of that battle for the archives of his own State, and the State of New Jersey has published it in her archives, as a fair account of the battle.

The author has attempted to approach his subject in a spirit like this, and while he hopes to be absolutely fair, he is perfectly aware that he sees things from a Southern view-point. For this, however, no apology is needed. Truth is many-sided and must be seen from every direction.

Nearly all the school-books dealing with the period here treated of, and now considered as authority, have been written from a Northern stand-point; and many of the extended histories that are most widely read seem to the writer to be more or less partisan, although the authors were apparently quite unconscious of it. Attempts made here to point out some of the errors in these books are, as is conceived, in the interests of history.

Of course it is important that readers should know the stand-point of an author who writes at this day of events as recent as those here treated of. Dr. Albert Bushnell Hart, professor of history in Harvard University, in the preface to his "Slavery and Abolition" (Harper Brothers, 1906), says of himself: "It is hard for a son and grandson of abolitionists to approach so explosive a question with impartiality." Following this example, the writer must tell that he was born in the South, of slave-holding parents, three years after the Abolition crusade began in 1831. Growing up in the South under the stress of that crusade, he maintained all through the war, in which he was a loyal Confederate soldier, the belief in which he had been educated—that slavery was right, morally and economically.

One day, not long after Appomattox, he told his father he had reached the conclusion that slavery was wrong. The reply was, to the writer's surprise, that his mother in early life had been an avowed emancipationist; that she (who had lived until the writer was sixteen years old) had never felt at liberty to discuss slavery after the rise of the new abolitionists and the Nat Turner insurrection; and then followed the further information that when, in 1846, the family removed from South Carolina to Alabama, Greenville, Ala., was chosen for a home because it was thought that the danger from slave insurrections would be less there than in one of the richer "black counties."

What a creature of circumstances man is! The writer's belief about a great moral question, his home, his school-mates, and the companions of his youth, were all determined by a movement begun in Boston, Massachusetts, before he was born in the far South!

With a vivid personal recollection of the closing years of the great anti-slavery crusade always in his mind, the writer has studied closely many of the histories dealing with that movement, and he has found quite a consensus of opinion among Northern writers—a view that has even been sometimes accepted in the South—that it was not so much the fear of insurrections, created by Abolition agitation, that shut off discussion in the South about the rightfulness of slavery as it was the invention of the cotton-gin, that made cotton growing and slavery profitable. The cotton-gin was invented in 1792, and was in common use years before the writer's mother was born. A native of, she grew to maturity entirely in, the South, and in 1830 was an avowed emancipationist. The subject was then being freely discussed.

The author has ventured to relate in the pages that follow this introduction two or three incidents that were more or less personal, in the hope that their significance may be his sufficient excuse.

And now, having spoken of himself as a Southerner, the author thinks it but fair, when invoking for the following pages fair consideration, to add that, since 1865, he has never ceased to rejoice that slavery is no more, and that secession is now only an academic question; and, further, that he has, since Appomattox, served the government of the United States for twenty years as loyally as he ever served the Confederacy. He therefore respectfully submits that his experiences ought to render him quite as well qualified for an impartial consideration of the anti-slavery crusade and its consequences as are those who have never, either themselves or through the eyes of their ancestors, seen more than one side of those questions. Certain he is, in his own mind, that this Union has now no better friend than is he who submits this little study, conscious of its many shortcomings, claiming for it nothing except that it is the result of an honest effort to be fair in every statement of facts and in the conclusions reached.

Not much effort has been made in the direction of original research. Facts deemed sufficient to illustrate salient points, which alone can be treated of in a short story, have been found in published documents, and other facts have been purposely taken, most of them, from Northern writers; and the authorities have been duly cited. These facts have been compressed into a small compass, so that the book may be available to such students as have not time for a more extended examination.

Of the results of the crusade of the Abolitionists, and the consequent sectional war, George Ticknor Curtis, one of New England's distinguished biographers, says in his "Life of Buchanan," vol. II, p. 283:

"It is cause for exultation that slavery no longer exists in the broad domain of this republic—that our theory of government and practice are now in complete accord. But it is no cause for national pride that we did not accomplish this result without the cost of a million of precious lives and untold millions of money."

CHAPTER I

SECESSION AND ITS DOCTRINE

John Fiske has said in his school history: "Under the government of England before the Revolution the thirteen commonwealths were independent of one another, and were held together juxtaposed, rather than united, only through their allegiance to the British Crown. Had that allegiance been maintained there is no telling how long they might have gone on thus disunited."

They won their independence under a very imperfect union, a government improvised for the occasion. The "Articles of Confederation," the first formal constitution of the United States of America, were not ratified by Maryland, the last to ratify, until in 1781, shortly before Yorktown. In 1787 the thirteen States, each claiming to be still sovereign, came together in convention at Philadelphia and formed the present Constitution, looking to "a more perfect union." The Constitution that created this new government has been rightly said to be "the most wonderful work ever struck off, at a given time, by the brain and purpose of man."[1] And so it was, but it left unsettled the great question whether a State, if it believed that its rights were denied to it by the general government, could peaceably withdraw from the Union.

The Federal Government was given by the Constitution only limited powers, powers that it could not transcend. Nowhere on the face of that Constitution was any right expressly conferred on the general government to decide exclusively and finally upon the extent of the powers granted to it. If any such right had been clearly given, it is certain that many of the States would not have entered into the Union. As it was, the Constitution was only adopted by eleven of the States after months of discussion. Then the new government was inaugurated, with two of the States, Rhode Island and North Carolina, still out of the Union. They remained outside, one of them for eighteen months and the other for a year.

The States were reluctant to adopt the Constitution, because they were jealous of, and did not mean to give up, the right of self-government.

The framers of the Constitution knew that the question of the right of a State to secede was thus left unsettled. They knew, too, that this might give trouble in the future. Their hope was that, as the advantages of the Union became, in process of time, more and more apparent, the Union would grow in favor and come to be regarded in the minds and hearts of the people as indissoluble.

From the beginning of the government there were many, including statesmen of great influence, who continued to be jealous of the right of self-government, and insisted that no powers should be exercised by the Federal Government except such as were very clearly granted in the Constitution. These soon became a party and called themselves Republicans. Some thirty years later they called themselves Democrats. Those, on the other hand, who believed in construing the grants of power in the Constitution liberally or broadly, called themselves Federalists.

Washington was a Federalist, but such was his influence that the dispute between the Republicans and the Federalists about the meaning of the Constitution did not, during his administration, assume a serious aspect; but when a new president, John Adams, also a Federalist, came in with a congress in harmony with him, the Republicans made bitter war upon them. France, then at war with England, was even waging what has been denominated a "quasi war" upon us, to compel the United States, under the old treaty of the Revolution, to take her part against England; and England was also threatening us. Plots to force the government into the war as an ally of France were in the air.

Adams and his followers believed in a strong and spirited government. To strike a fatal blow at the plotters against the public peace, and to crush the Republicans at the same time, Congress now passed the famous alien and sedition laws.

One of the alien laws, June 25, 1798, gave the President, for two years from its passage, power to order out of the country, at his own will, and without "trial by jury" or other "process of law," any alien he deemed dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.

The sedition law, July 14, 1798, made criminal any unlawful conspiracy to oppose any measure of the government of the United States "which was directed by proper authority," as well as also any "false and scandalous accusations against the Government, the President, or the Congress."

The opportunity of the Republicans had come. They determined to call upon the country to condemn the alien and sedition laws, and at the presidential election in 1800 the Federalists received their death-blow. The party as an organization survived that election only a few years, and in localities the very name, Federalist, later became a reproach.

The Republicans began their campaign against the alien and sedition laws by a series of resolutions, which, drawn by Jefferson, were passed by the Kentucky legislature in November, 1798. Other quite similar resolutions, drawn by Madison, passed the Virginia assembly the next year; and these together became the celebrated Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798-9.[2] The alien and sedition laws were denounced in these resolutions for the exercise of powers not delegated to the general government. Adverting to the sedition law, it was declared that no power over the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of the press had been given. On the contrary, it had been expressly provided by the Constitution that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

The first of the Kentucky resolutions was as follows:

"Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government, but that by compact, under the style and title of a constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for specific purposes, delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no effect: That to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: That the government created by this compact, was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its direction, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has a right to judge for itself as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress."

Undoubtedly it is from the famous resolutions of 1798-9 that the secessionists of a later date drew their arguments. The authors of these celebrated resolutions were, both of them, devoted friends of the Union they had helped to construct. Why should they announce a theory of the Constitution that was so full of dangerous possibilities?

The answer is, they were announcing the theory upon which the States, or at least many of the States, had ten years before ratified the Constitution. A crisis in the life of the new government had now come. Congress had usurped powers not given; it had exercised powers that had been prohibited, and the government was enforcing the obnoxious statutes with a high hand. Dissatisfaction was intense.

Jefferson and Madison were undoubtedly Republican partisans, Jefferson especially; but it is equally certain that they were both friends of the Union, and as such they concluded, with the lights before them, that the wise course would be to submit to the people, in ample time for full consideration, before the then coming presidential election, a full, clear, and comprehensive exposition of the Constitution precisely as they, and as the people, then understood it. This they did in the resolutions of 1798 and 1799, and the very same voters who had created the Constitution of 1789, now, with their sons to aid them, endorsed these resolutions in the election of 1800, which had been laid before them by the legislatures of two Republican States as a correct construction of that instrument.

The Republicans under Jefferson came into power with an immense majority. The people were satisfied with the Constitution as it had been construed in the election of 1800, and the country under control of the Republicans was happy and prosperous for three decades. Then the party in power began to split into National Republicans and Democratic Republicans. The National Republicans favored a liberal construction of the Constitution and became Whigs; the Democratic Republicans dropped the name Republican and became Democrats.

The foregoing sketch has been given with no intent to write a political history, but only to show with what emphasis the American people condemned all violations of the Constitution up to the time when, in 1831, our story of the Abolitionists is to begin. The sketch has also served to explain the theory of State-rights, as it was held in early days, and later, by the Southern people.

Whether the union of the States under the Constitution as expounded by the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions would survive every trial that was to come, remained to be seen. The question was destined to perplex Mr. Jefferson himself, more than once.

Indeed, even while Washington was President there had been disunion sentiment in Congress. In 1794 the celebrated Virginian, John Taylor, of Caroline, shortly after he had expressed an intention of publicly resigning from the United States Senate, was approached in the privacy of a committee room by Rufus King, senator from New York, and Oliver Ellsworth, a senator from Massachusetts, both Federalists, with a proposition for a dissolution of the Union by mutual consent, the line of division to be somewhere from the Potomac to the Hudson. This was on the ground "that it was utterly impossible for the Union to continue. That the Southern and the Eastern people thought quite differently," etc. Taylor contended for the Union, and nothing came of the conference, the story of which remained a secret for over a hundred years.[3]

"In the winter of 1803-4, immediately after, and as a consequence of, the acquisition of Louisiana, certain leaders of the Federal party conceived the project of the dissolution of the Union and the establishment of a Northern Confederacy, the justifying causes to those who entertained it, that the acquisition of Louisiana to the Union transcended the constitutional powers of the government of the United States; that it created, in fact, a new confederacy to which the States, united by the former compact, were not bound to adhere; that it was oppressive of the interests and destructive of the influence of the northern section of the Confederacy, whose right and duty it was therefore to secede from the new body politic, and to constitute one of their own."[4]

This project did not assume serious proportions.

John Fiske in his school history says: "John Quincy Adams, a supporter of the embargo act of 1807, privately informed President Jefferson (in February, 1809) that further attempts to enforce it in the New England States would be likely to drive them to secession. Accordingly, the embargo was repealed, and the non-intercourse act substituted for it."

The spirit of nationality was yet in its infancy, threats of secession were common, and they came then mostly from New England. These threats were in no wise connected with slavery; agitators had not then made slavery a national issue; the idea of separation was prompted by the fear that power in the councils of the Union would pass into the hands of other sections.

Massachusetts was heard from again in 1811, when the State of Louisiana, the first to be carved from the Louisiana purchase, asked to come into the Union. In discussing the bill for her admission, Josiah Quincy said: "Why, sir, I have already heard of six States, and some say there will be at no great distance of time more. I have also heard that the mouth of the Ohio will be far to the east of the contemplated empire.... It is impossible that such a power could be granted. It was not for these men that our fathers fought. It was not for them this Constitution was adopted. You have no authority to throw the rights and liberties and property of this people into hotchpot with the wild men on the Missouri, or with the mixed, though more respectable, race of Anglo-Hispano-Gallo-Americans who bask in the sands in the mouth of the Mississippi.... I am compelled to declare it as my deliberate opinion that, if this bill passes, the bonds of the Union are virtually dissolved; that the States which compose it are free from their moral obligations; and that, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, to prepare definitely for a separation—amicably, if they can; violently, if they must."

June 15, 1813, the Massachusetts legislature endorsed the position taken in this speech.[5]

Later, in 1814, a convention of representative New England statesmen met at Hartford, to consider of secession unless the non-intercourse act, which also bore hard on New England, should be repealed; but the war then pending was soon to close, and the danger from that quarter was over.

But secession was not exclusively a New England doctrine. "When the Constitution was adopted by the votes of States in popular conventions, it is safe to say there was not a man in the country, from Washington and Hamilton, on the one side, to George Clinton and George Mason, on the other, who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment, entered into by the States, and from which each and every State had the right to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised."[6]

As late as 1844 the threat of secession was to come again from Massachusetts. The great State of Texas was applying for admission to the Union. But Texas was a slave State; Abolitionists had now for thirteen years been arousing in the old Bay State a spirit of hostility against the existence of slavery in her sister States of the South, and in 1844 the Massachusetts legislature resolved that "the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, faithful to the compact between the people of the United States, according to the plain meaning and intent in which it was understood by them, is sincerely anxious for its preservation; but that it is determined, as it doubts not other States are, to submit to undelegated powers in no body of men on earth," and that "the project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested at the threshold, may tend to drive these States into a dissolution of the Union."

This was just seventeen years before the Commonwealth of Massachusetts began to arm her sons to put down secession in the South!

The Southern reader must not, however, conclude from this startling about-face on the question of secession, that the people of Massachusetts, and of the North, did not, in 1861, honestly believe that under the Constitution the Union was indissoluble, or that the North went to war simply for the purpose of perpetuating its power over the South. Such a conclusion would be grossly unjust. The spirit of nationality, veneration of the Union, was a growth, and, after it had fairly begun, a rapid growth. It grew, as our country grew in prestige and power. The splendid triumphs of our ships at sea, in the War of 1812, and our victory at New Orleans over British regulars, added to it; the masterful decisions of our great Chief Justice John Marshall, pointing out how beneficently our Federal Constitution was adapted to the preservation not only of local self-government but of the liberties of the citizen as well; peace with, and the respect of, foreign nations; free trade between the people of all sections, and abounding prosperity—all these things created a deep impression, and Americans began to hark back to the words of Washington in his farewell address: "The unity of our government, which now constitutes you one people, is also dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquillity at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize."

But far and away above every other single element contributing to the development of Union sentiment was the wonderful speech of Daniel Webster, January 26, 1830, in his debate in the United States Senate with Hayne, of South Carolina. Hayne was eloquently defending States' rights, and his argument was unanswerable if his premise was admitted, that, as had been theretofore conceded, the Constitution was a compact between the States. Webster saw this and he took new ground; the Constitution was, he contended, not a compact, but the formation of a government. His arguments were like fruitful seed sown upon a soil prepared for their reception. No speech delivered in this country ever created so profound an impression. It was the foundation of a new school of political thought. It concluded with this eloquent peroration: "When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gracious ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as 'What is all this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and folly, 'Liberty first and Union afterwards,' but everywhere, spread all over with living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every American heart—'Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.'"

For many years every school-house in the land resounded with these words. By 1861 they had been imprinted on the minds and had sunk into the hearts of a whole generation. Their effect was incalculable.

It is perfectly true that the secession resolution of the Massachusetts legislature of 1844 was passed fourteen years after Webster's speech, but the Garrisonians had then been agitating the slavery question within her borders for fourteen years, and the old State was now beside herself with excitement.

There was another great factor in the rapid manufacture of Union sentiment at the North that had practically no existence at the South. It was immigration.

The new-comers from over the sea knew nothing, and cared less, about the history of the Constitution or the dialectics of secession. They had sought a land of liberty that to them was one nation, with one flag flying over it, and in their eyes secession was rebellion. Immigrants to America, practically all settling in Northern States, were during the thirty years, 1831-1860, 4,910,590; and these must, with their natural increase, have numbered at least six millions in 1860. In other words, far more than one-fourth of the people of the North in 1860 were not, themselves or their fathers, in the country in the early days when the doctrine of States' rights had been in the ascendant; and, as a rule, to these new people that old doctrine was folly.

In the South the situation was reversed. Slavery had kept immigrants away. The whites were nearly all of the old revolutionary stock, and had inherited the old ideas. Still, love of and pride in the Union had grown in them too. Nor were the Southerners all followers of Jefferson. From the earliest days much of the wealth and intelligence of the country, North and South, had opposed the Democracy, first as Federalists and later as Whigs. In the South the Whigs have been described as "a fine upstanding old party, a party of blue broadcloth, silver buttons, and a coach and four." It was not until anti-slavery sentiment had begun to array the North, as a section, against the South, that Southern Whigs began to look for protection to the doctrine of States' rights.

Woodrow Wilson says, in "Division and Reunion," p. 47, of Daniel Webster's great speech in 1830: "The North was now beginning to insist upon a national government; the South was continuing to insist upon the original understanding of the Constitution; that was all."

And in those attitudes the two sections stood in 1860-61, one upon the modern theory of an indestructible Union; the other upon the old idea that States had the right to secede from the Union.

In 1848 there occurred in Ireland the "Rebellion of the Young Irishmen." Among the leaders of that rebellion were Thomas F. Meagher and John Mitchel. Both were banished to Great Britain's penal colony. Both made their way, a few years later, to America. Both were devotees of liberty, both men of brilliant intellect and high culture. Meagher settled in the North, Mitchel in the South. This was about 1855. Each from his new stand-point studied the history and the Constitution of his adopted country. Meagher, when the war between the North and South came on, became a general in the Union army. Mitchel entered the civil service of the Confederacy and his son died a Confederate soldier.

The Union or Confederate partisan who has been taught that his side was "eternally right, and the other side eternally wrong," should consider the story of these two "Young Irishmen."

How fortunate it is that the ugly question of secession has been settled, and will never again divide Americans, or those who come to America!

CHAPTER II

EMANCIPATION PRIOR TO 1831

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, English, and American vessels brought many thousands of negroes from Africa, and sold them as slaves in the British West Indies and in the British-American colonies. William Goodell, a distinguished Abolitionist writer, tells us[7] that "in the importation of slaves for the Southern colonies the merchants of New England competed with those of New York and the South" (which never had much shipping). "They appear indeed to have outstripped them, and to have almost monopolized at one time the profits of this detestable trade. Boston, Salem, and Newburyport in Massachusetts, and Newport and Bristol in Rhode Island, amassed, in the persons of a few of their citizens, vast sums of this rapidly acquired and ill-gotten wealth."[7]

The slaves coming to America went chiefly to the Southern colonies, because there only was slave labor profitable. The laws and conditions under which these negroes were sold in the American colonies were precisely the same as in the West Indies, except that the whites in the islands, so far as is known, never objected, whereas the records show that earnest protests came from Virginia[8] and also from Georgia[9] and North Carolina.[10] The King of England was interested in the profits of the iniquitous trade and all protests were in vain.

Of the rightfulness, however, of slavery itself there was but little question in the minds of Christian peoples until the closing years of the eighteenth century. Then the cruelties practised by ship-masters in the Middle Passage attracted attention, and then came gradually a revolution in public opinion. This revolution, in which the churches took a prominent part, originated in England, but it soon swept over America also, both North and South.

England abolished the slave trade in 1807. The United States followed in 1808; the Netherlands in 1814; France in 1818; Spain in 1820; Portugal in 1830. The great Wilberforce, Buxton, and others, who had brought about the abolition of the slave trade in England, continued their exertions in favor of the slave until finally, in 1833, Parliament abolished slavery in the British West Indies, appropriating twenty millions sterling ($100,000,000) as compensation to owners—this because investments in slave property had been made under the sanction of existing law.

"Great Britain, loaded with an unprecedented debt and with a grinding taxation, contracted a new debt of a hundred millions of dollars to give freedom, not to Englishmen, but to the degraded African. This was not an act of policy, but the work of statesmen. Parliament but registered the edict of the people. The English nation, with one heart and one voice, under a strong Christian impulse and without distinction of rank, sex, party, or religious names, decreed freedom to the slave. I know not that history records a national act so disinterested, so sublime."

So wrote Dr. Channing, the great New England pulpit orator, in his celebrated letter on Texas annexation, to Henry Clay, in 1837.

While the rightfulness of slavery was being discussed in England, the American conscience had also been aroused, and emancipation was making progress on this side of the water.

Emancipation was an easy task in the Northern States, where slaves were few, their labor never having been profitable, and by 1804 the last of these States had provided for the ultimate abolition of slavery within its borders. But the problem was more difficult in the Southern States, where the climate was adapted to slave labor. There slaves were numerous, and slavery was interwoven, economically and socially, with the very fabric of existence. Naturally, it occurred to thoughtful men that there ought to be some such solution as that which was subsequently adopted in England, and which, as we have seen, was so highly extolled by Dr. Channing—emancipation of the slaves with compensation to the owners by the general government. The difficulty in our country was that the Federal Constitution conferred upon the Federal Government no power over slavery in the States—no power to emancipate slaves or compensate owners; and that for the individual States where the negroes were numerous the problem seemed too big. Free negroes and whites in great numbers, it was thought, could not live together. To get rid of the negroes, if they should be freed, was for the States a very serious, if not an unsurmountable task.

On the seventeenth of January, 1824, the following resolutions, proposed as a solution of the problem, were passed by the legislature of Ohio:[11]

Resolved, That the consideration of a system providing for the gradual emancipation of the people of color, held in servitude in the United States, be recommended to the legislatures of the several States of the American Union, and to the Congress of the United States.

Resolved, That, in the opinion of the general assembly, a system of foreign colonization, with correspondent measures, might be adopted that would in due time effect the entire emancipation of the slaves of our country without any violation of the national compact, or infringement of the rights of individuals; by the passage of a law by the general government (with the consent of the slave-holding States) which would provide that all children of persons now held in slavery, born after the passage of the law, should be free at the age of twenty-one years (being supported during their minority by the persons claiming the service of their parents), provided they then consent to be transported to the intended place of colonization. Also:

Resolved, That it is expedient that such a system should be predicated upon the principle that the evil of slavery is a national one, and that the people and the States of the Union ought mutually to participate in the duties and burthens of removing it.

Resolved, That His Excellency the Governor be requested to forward a copy of the foregoing resolutions to His Excellency the Governor of each of the United States, requesting him to lay the same before the legislature thereof; and that His Excellency will also forward a like copy to each of our senators and representatives in Congress, requesting their co-operation in all national measures having a tendency to effect the grave object embraced therein.

By June of 1825 eight other Northern States had endorsed the proposition, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, Massachusetts. Six of the slave-holding States emphatically disapproved of the suggestion, viz., Georgia, South Carolina, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama.[12]

Reasons which in great part influenced all the Southern States thus rejecting the proposition may be gathered from the following words of Governor Wilson, of South Carolina, in submitting the resolutions: "A firm determination to resist, at the threshold, every invasion of our domestic tranquillity, and to preserve our sovereignty and independence as a State, is earnestly recommended."[13]

The resolutions required of the Southern States a complete surrender in this regard of their reserved rights; they feared what Governor Wilson called "the overwhelming powers of the general government," and were unwilling to make the admission required, that the slavery in the South was a question for the nation.

Another reason was that, although there was a quite common desire in the Southern States to get rid of slavery, the majority sentiment doubtless was not yet ready for the step.

Basing this plan on the "consent of the slave-holding States," as the Ohio legislature did, was an acknowledgment that the North had no power over the matter; while the proposition to share in the expense of transporting the negroes, after they were manumitted, seems to be a recognition of the joint responsibility of both sections for the existence of slavery in the South. However that may be, the generous concurrence of nine of the thirteen Northern States indicates how kindly the temper of the North toward the South was before the rise of the "New Abolitionism" in 1831. Had emancipation been, under the Federal Constitution, a national and not a local question, it is possible that slavery might have been abolished in America, as it was in the mother country, peacefully and with compensation to owners.

The Ohio idea of freeing and at the same time colonizing the slaves, was no doubt suggested by the scheme of the African Colonization Society. This Colonization Society grew out of a resolution passed by the General Assembly of Virginia, December 23, 1816. Its purpose was to rid the country of such free negroes and subsequently manumitted slaves as should be willing to go to Liberia, where a home was secured for them, and a government set up that was to be eventually controlled by the negro from America. The plan was endorsed by Georgia in 1817, Maryland in 1818, Tennessee in 1818, and Vermont in 1819.[14]

The Colonization Society was composed of Southern and Northern philanthropists and statesmen of the most exalted character. Among its presidents were, at times, President Monroe and ex-President Madison. Chief Justice Marshall was one of its presidents. Colonization, while relieving America, was also to give the negro an opportunity for self-government and self-development in his native country, aided at the outset by experienced white men, and Abraham Lincoln, when he was eulogizing the dead Henry Clay, one of the eloquent advocates of the scheme, seemed to be in love with the idea of restoring the poor African to that land from which he had been rudely snatched by the rapacious white man. The society, with much aid from philanthropists and some from the Federal Government, was making progress when, from 1831 to 1835, the Abolitionists halted it.[15] They got the ears of the negro and persuaded him not to go to Liberia. Its friends thought the enterprise would stimulate emancipation by furnishing a home for such negroes as their owners were willing to manumit; but the new friends of the negro told him it was a trick of the slave-holder, and intended to perpetuate slavery—it was banishment. And Dr. Hart now, in his "Abolition and Slavery," calls it a move for the "expatriation of the negro."

All together only a few thousand negroes went to Liberia. The enterprise lagged, and finally failed, partly because of opposition, but chiefly because the negroes were slothful and incapable of self-government. The word came back that they were not prospering. For a time, while white men were helping them in their government, the outlook for Liberia had more or less promise in it. When the whites, to give the negroes their opportunity for self-development withdrew their case was hopeless.[16]

In 1828, while emancipation was still being freely canvassed North and South, Benjamin Lundy, an Abolition editor in charge of The Genius of Emancipation, then being published at Baltimore, in a slave State, went to Boston to "stir up" the Northern people "to the work of abolishing slavery in the South." Dr. Channing, who has been previously quoted, wrote a letter to Daniel Webster on the 28th of May, 1828, in which, after reciting the purpose of Lundy, and saying that he was "aware how cautiously exertions are to be made for it in this part of the country," it being a local question, he said: "It seems to me that, before moving in this matter, we ought to say to them (our Southern brethren) distinctly, 'We consider slavery as your calamity, not your crime, and we will share with you the burden of putting an end to it. We will consent that the public lands shall be appropriated to this object; or that the general government shall be clothed with the power to apply a portion of revenue to it.'

"I throw out these suggestions merely to illustrate my views. We must first let the Southern States see that we are their friends in this affair; that we sympathize with them and, from principles of patriotism and philanthropy, are willing to share the toil and expense of abolishing slavery, or, I fear, our interference will avail nothing."[17] Mr. Webster never gave out this letter until February 15, 1851.[18]

In less than three years after that letter was written, Lundy's friend, William Lloyd Garrison, started in Boston a crusade against slavery in the South, on the ground that instead of being the "calamity," as Dr. Channing deemed it to be, it was the "crime" of the South. Had no such exasperating sectional cry as this ever been raised, the story told in this little book would have been very different from that which is to follow. Even Spain, the laggard of nations, since that day has abolished slavery in her colonies. Brazil long ago fell into line, and it is impossible for one not blinded by the sectional strife of the past, now to conceive that the Southern States of this Union, whose people in 1830 were among the foremost of the world in all the elements of Christian civilization, would not long, long ago, if left to themselves, have found some means by which to rid themselves of an institution condemned by the public sentiment of the world and even then deplored by the Southerners themselves.

The crime, if crime it was, of slavery in the South in 1830 was one for which the two sections of the Union were equally to blame. Abraham Lincoln said in his debate with Douglas at Peoria, Illinois, October 15, 1858: "When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely do not blame them for not doing what I would not know how to do myself."[19]

Prior to the rise of the Abolitionists in 1831, emancipationists in the South had been free to grapple with conditions as they found them. What they and what the people of the North had accomplished we may gather from the United States census reports. The tables following are taken from "Larned's History of Ready Reference," vol. V. The classifications are his. We have numbered three of his tables, for the sake of reference, and have added columns 4 and 5, calculated from Larned's figures, to show "excess of free blacks" and "increase of free blacks, South."

Let the reader assume as a fact, which will perhaps not be questioned, that "free blacks" in the census means freedmen and their increase, and these tables tell their own story, a story to which must be added the statement that slaves in the South had been freed only by voluntary sacrifices of owners.

It will be noted that in 1790 the total "blacks" in the North was 67,479, and, although emancipation in these States had begun some years before, the excess of "free blacks" in the South was over 5,000. Also that at every succeeding census, down to and including that of 1830, the "excess of free blacks" increased with considerable regularity until 1830, when that excess is 44,547.

There was always in the South, prior to 1831, an active and freely expressed emancipation sentiment. But there was not enough of it to influence legislation. In all but three or four of these States, emancipation was made difficult by laws which, among other conditions, required that slaves after being freed should leave the State.

Emancipation in the North had not been completed in 1830. Professor Ingram, president of the Royal Irish Academy, says in his "History of Slavery," London, 1895, p. 184: "The Northern States—beginning with Vermont in 1777 and ending with New Jersey in 1804—either abolished slavery or adopted measures to effect its gradual abolition within their boundaries. But the principal operation of (at least) the latter change was to transfer Northern slaves to Southern markets."

There had been in 1820 an angry discussion in Congress about the admission of Missouri—with or without slavery—which was finally settled by the Missouri Compromise. This dispute over the admission of Missouri is often said to have been the beginning of the sectional quarrel that finally ended in secession; but the controversy over Missouri and that begun by the "New Abolitionists" in 1831 were entirely distinct. They were conducted on different plans.

In the Missouri controversy the only questions were as to the expediency and constitutionality of denying to a new State the right to enter the Union, with or without slavery, as she might choose. The entire dispute was settled to the satisfaction of both sections by an agreement that States thereafter, south of 36° 30', might enter the Union with or without slavery; and nobody denied, during all that discussion about Missouri, or at any time previous to 1831, that every citizen was bound to maintain the Constitution and all laws passed in pursuance of it, including the fugitive slave law.

"The North submitted at that time (1828) to the obligations imposed upon it by the fugitive slave-catching clause of the Constitution and the fugitive slave law of 1793."[20] So say the biographers of William Lloyd Garrison for the purpose of establishing, as they afterwards do, their claim that Garrison conducted a successful revolt against that provision of the Constitution. What strengthens the statement that the North in 1828 submitted without protest to the "fugitive slave-catching clause of the Constitution," is that the Compromise Act of 1820 contained a provision extending the fugitive slave law over the territory made free by the act, while it should continue to be territory, and until there should be formed from it States, to which the existing law would automatically apply. Every subsequent nullification of the fugitive slave laws of the United States, whether by governors or state legislatures, was therefore a palpable violation of a provision that was of the essence of the Missouri Compromise.

The South was content with the Missouri Compromise, and from that date, 1820, until the rise of the "New Abolitionists," slavery was in all that region an open question. Judge Temple says in his "Covenanter, Cavalier, and Puritan," p. 208: "In 1826, of the 143 emancipation societies in the United States, 103 were in the South."

The questions for Southern emancipationists were: How could the slaves be freed, and in what time? How about compensation to owners? Where could the freed slaves be sent, and how? And, if deportation should prove impossible, what system could be devised whereby the two races could dwell together peacefully? These were indeed serious problems, and required time and grave consideration.

"Who can doubt," says Mr. Curtis, to quote once more his "Life of Buchanan," "that all such questions could have been satisfactorily answered, if the Christianity of the South had been left to its own time and mode of answering them, and without any external force but the force of kindly, respectful consideration and forebearing Christian fellowship?"[21]

But this was not to be.

CHAPTER III

THE NEW ABOLITIONISTS

On the first day of January, 1831, there came out in Boston a new paper, The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, editor. That was the beginning, historians now generally agree, of "New Abolitionism." The editor of the new paper was the founder of the new sect.

Benjamin Lundy was a predecessor of Garrison, on much the same lines as those pursued by the latter. Lundy had previously formed many Abolition societies. The Philanthropist of March, 1828, estimated the number of anti-slavery societies as "upwards of 130, and most of them in the slave States, and of Lundy's formation, among the Quakers."[22] But Garrison became the leader and Lundy the disciple.

Garrison was a man of pleasing personal appearance, abstemious in habits, and of remarkable energy and will power. He was a vigorous and forceful writer. Denunciation was his chief weapon, and he had "a genius for infuriating his antagonists." The following is a fair specimen of his style. Speaking of himself and his fellow-workers as the "soldiers of God," he said: "Their feet are shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.... Hence, when smitten on one cheek they turn the other also, being defamed they entreat, being reviled they bless," etc. And on that same page,[23] and in the same prospectus, showing how he "blesses" those who, as he understands, are outside of the "Kingdom of God," he says: "All without are dogs and sorcerers, and ... and murderers, and idolaters, and whatsoever loveth a lie."

Mr. Garrison had no perspective, no sense of relation or proportion. In his eye the most humane slave-holder was a wicked monster. He had a genius for organization, and a year after the first issue of The Liberator he and his little body of brother fanatics had grown into the New England Anti-Slavery Society.

The new sect called themselves for a time the "New Abolitionists," because their doctrines were new. The principles upon which this organization was to be based were not all formulated at once. The key-note was sounded in Garrison's "Address to the Public" in the first number of The Liberator:

I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population. I shall be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice on this subject. I do not wish to think or speak or write with moderation.

In an earlier issue, after denouncing slavery as a "damning crime," the editor said: "Therefore my efforts shall be directed to the exposure of those who practise it."

The substance of Garrison's teachings was that slavery, anywhere in the United States, was the concern of all, and that it was to be put down by making not only slavery but also the slave-holder odious. And, further, it was the slave, not the slave-owner, who was entitled to compensation.

Thus the distinctive features of the new crusade were to be warfare upon the personal character of every slave-holder and the confiscation of his property. It was, too, the beginning of that sectional war by people of the North against the existence of slavery in the South, which, as we have seen, was deprecated by Dr. Channing in his letter three years before to Mr. Webster.

The new sect began by assailing slavery in States other than their own, and very soon they were openly denouncing the Constitution of their country because under it slavery in those sections was none of their business; and of course they repudiated the Missouri Compromise absolutely, the essence of that compromise being that slavery was the business of the States in which it existed.

It was a part of their scheme to send circulars depicting the evils of slavery broadcast through the South; and they were sent especially to the free negroes of that section.

"In 1820," says Dr. Hart in his "Slavery and Abolition," "at Charleston (South Carolina), Denmark Vesey, a free negro, made an elaborate plot to rise, massacre the white population, seize the shipping in the harbor, and, if hard pressed, to sail away to the West Indies. One of the negroes gave evidence, Vesey was seized, duly tried, and with thirty-four others was hanged."[24]

This plot, so nearly successful, was fresh in the minds of Southerners when the Abolitionists began their programme, and naturally, the South at once took the alarm—an alarm that was increased by the massacre, in the Nat Turner insurrection, of sixty-one men, women, and children, which took place in Virginia seven months after the first issue of The Liberator. One of Turner's lieutenants is stated to have been a free negro. This insurrection the South attributed to The Liberator. Professor Hart says a free negro named Walker had previously sent out to the South, from Boston, a pamphlet, "the tone of which was unmistakable," and that "this pamphlet is known to have reached Virginia, and may possibly have influenced the Nat Turner insurrection."[25]

If this surmise be correct, knowledge that Walker, a free negro, had been responsible for the Turner insurrection, would have lessened neither the guilt of the Abolitionists nor the fears of the Southerners.

But in 1832 Abolition agitation and the fears of insurrection had not as yet entirely stifled the discussion of slavery in the South. A debate on slavery took place that year in the Virginia Assembly, the immediate cause of which was no doubt the Turner insurrection. The members of that body had not been elected on any issue of that character. The discussion thus precipitated shows, therefore, the state of public opinion in Virginia on slavery. Of this debate a distinguished Northern writer says:[26]

"In the year 1832 there was, nowhere in the world, a more enlightened sense of the wrong and evil of slavery than there was among the public men and people of Virginia."

In the Assembly of that year Mr. Randolph brought forward a bill to accomplish gradual emancipation. Mr. Curtis continues:

"No member of the House defended slavery.... There could be nothing said anywhere, there had been nothing said out of Virginia, stronger and truer in deprecating the evils of slavery, than was said in that discussion, by Virginia gentlemen, debating in their own legislature, a matter that concerned themselves and their people."

The bill was not pressed to a vote, but the House, by a vote of 65 to 38, declared "that they were profoundly sensible of the great evils arising from the condition of the colored population of the Commonwealth and were induced by policy, as well as humanity, to attempt the immediate removal of the free negroes; but that further action for the removal of the slaves should await a more definite development of public opinion."

Mr. Randolph, who was from the large slave-holding county of Albemarle, was re-elected to the next assembly.

But when the early summer of 1835 had come the fear of insurrection had created such wide-spread terror throughout the whole South that every emancipation society in that region had long since closed its doors; and now the Abolitionists were sending South their circulars in numbers. Many were sent to Charleston, South Carolina,[27] where fifteen years before[28] the free negro, Denmark Vesey, had laid the plot to massacre the whites, that had been discovered just in time to prevent its consummation.

The President, Andrew Jackson, in his next message to Congress, December, 1835, called their "attention to the painful excitement produced in the South by attempts to circulate through the mails inflammatory appeals addressed to the passions of the slaves, in prints and in various sorts of publications calculated to stimulate them to insurrection and produce all the horrors of a servile war."

The good people of Boston were now thoroughly aroused. They had from the first frowned on the Abolition movement. Garrison was complaining that in all the city his society could not "hire a hall or a meeting-house." The Abolition idea had been for a time thought chimerical and therefore negligible. Later, civic, business, social, and religious organizations had all of them in their several spheres been earnest and active in their opposition; now it seemed to be time for concerted action.

In Garrison's "Garrison" (vol. I, p. 495), we read that "the social, political, religious and intellectual élite of Boston filled Faneuil Hall on the afternoon of Friday, August 3, 1835, to frame an indictment against their fellow-citizens."

This "indictment" the Boston Transcript reported as follows:

Resolved, That the people of the United States by the Constitution under which, by the Divine blessing, they hold their most valuable political privileges, have solemnly agreed with each other to leave to their respective States the jurisdiction pertaining to the relation of master and slave within their boundaries, and that no man or body of men, except the people of the governments of those States, can of right do any act to dissolve or impair the obligations of that contract.

Resolved, That we hold in reprobation all attempts, in whatever guise they may appear, to coerce any of the United States to abolish slavery by appeals to the terror of the master or the passions of the slave.

Resolved, That we disapprove of all associations instituted in the non-slave-holding States with the intent to act, within the slave-holding States, on the subject of slavery in those States without their consent. For the purpose of securing freedom of individual thought they are needless—and they afford to those persons in the Southern States, whose object is to effect a dissolution of the Union (if any such there may be now or hereafter), a pretext for the furtherance of their schemes.

Resolved, That all measures adopted, the natural and direct tendency of which is to excite the slaves of the South to revolt, or of spreading among them a spirit of insubordination, are repugnant to the duties of the man and the citizen, and that where such measures become manifest by overt acts, which are recognizable by constitutional laws, we will aid by all means in our power in the support of those laws.

Resolved, That while we recommend to others the duty of sacrificing their opinions, passions and sympathies upon the altar of the laws, we are bound to show that a regard to the supremacy of those laws is the rule of our conduct—and consequently to deprecate all tumultuous assemblies, all riotous or violent proceedings, all outrages on person and property, and all illegal notions of the right or duty of executing summary and vindictive justice in any mode unsanctioned by law.

The allusion in the last resolution is to a then recent lynching of negroes in Mississippi charged with insurrection.

In speaking to these resolutions, Harrison Gray Otis, a great conservative leader, denounced the Abolition agitators, accusing them of "wishing to 'scatter among our Southern brethren firebrands, arrows, and death,' and of attempting to force Abolition by appeals to the terror of the masters and the passions of the slaves," and decrying their "measures, the natural and direct tendency of which is to excite the slaves of the South to revolt," etc.

Another of the speakers, ex-Senator Peleg Sprague, said (p. 496, Garrison's "Garrison") that "if their sentiments prevailed it would be all over with the Union, which would give place to two hostile confederacies, with forts and standing armies."

These resolutions and speeches, viewed in the light of what followed, read now like prophecy.

It is a familiar rule of law that a contemporaneous exposition of a statute is to be given extraordinary weight by the courts, the reason being that the judge then sitting knows the surrounding circumstances. That Boston meeting pronounced the deliberate judgment of the most intelligent men of Boston on the situation, as they knew it to be that day; it was in their midst that The Liberator was being published; there the new sect had its head-quarters, and there it was doing its work.

Quite as strong as the evidence furnished by that great Faneuil Hall meeting is the testimony of the churches.

The churches and religious bodies in America had heartily favored the general anti-slavery movement that was sweeping over all America between 1770 and 1831, while it was proceeding in an orderly manner and with due regard to law.

In 1812 the Methodist General Conference voted that no slave-holder could continue as a local elder. The Presbyterian General Assembly in 1818 unanimously resolved that "slavery was a gross violation of the most precious and moral rights of human nature," etc.

These bodies represented both the North and the South, and this paragraph shows what was, and continued to be, the general attitude of American churches until after the Abolitionists had begun their assault on both slavery in the South and the Constitution of the United States, which protected it. Then, in view of the awful social and political cataclysm that seemed to be threatened, there occurred a stupendous change. We learn from Hart that Garrison "soon found that neither minister nor church anywhere in the lower South continued (as before) to protest against slavery; that the cloth in the North was arrayed against him; and that many Northern divines vigorously opposed him." Also that Moses Stuart, professor of Hebrew in Andover Theological Seminary; President Lord, of Dartmouth College, and Hopkins, the Episcopal bishop of Vermont, now became defenders of slavery. "The positive opposition of churches soon followed."

And then we have cited, condemnations of Abolitionism by the Methodist Conference of 1836, by the New York Methodist Conference of 1838, by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, by the American Home Missionary Society, the American Bible Society, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the Baptists. See for these statements, Hart, pp. 211-12.

The import of all this is unmistakable; and this "about-face" of religious organizations on the question of the morality of slavery has no parallel in all the history of Christian churches. Its significance cannot be overstated. It took place North and South. It meant opposition to a movement that was outside the church and with which religion could have no concern, except in so far as it was a vital assault upon the State, and the peace of the State. To make their opposition effective the Christians of that day did this remarkable thing. They reversed their religious views on slavery, which the Abolitionists were now assailing, and which they themselves had previously opposed. They re-examined their Bibles and found arguments that favored slavery. These arguments they used in an attempt to stem an agitation that, as they saw it, was arraying section against section and threatening the perpetuity of the Union.

United testimony from all these Christian bodies is more conclusive contemporaneous evidence against the agitators and their methods than even the proceedings of all conservative Boston at Faneuil Hall in August, 1835.

This new attitude of the church toward slavery meant perhaps also something further—it meant that slavery, as it actually existed, was not then as horrible to Northerners, who could go across the line and see it, which many of them did, as it is now to those whose ideas of it come chiefly from "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

In view of this phenomenal movement of Northern Christians it is not strange that Southern churches adhered, throughout the deadly struggle that was now on, to the position into which they had been driven—that slavery was sanctioned by the Bible—nor is it matter of wonder that, as Professor Hart makes prominent on p. 137, "not a single Southern man of large reputation and influence failed to stand by slavery."

Historians of to-day usually narrate without comment that nearly all the American churches and divines at first opposed the Abolitionists. It illustrates the courage with which the Abolitionists stood, as Dr. Hart delights to point out, "for a despised cause." They assuredly did stand by their guns.

Later, another change came about in the attitude of the churches. In 1844 the Abolitionists were to achieve their first victory in the great religious world. The Methodist Church was then disrupted, "squarely on the question whether a bishop could own slaves, and all the Southern members withdrew and organized the Methodist Episcopal Church, South." Professor Hart, p. 214, says of this: "Clearly, the impassioned agitation of the Abolitionists had made it impossible for a great number of Northern anti-slavery men to remain on terms of friendship with their Southern brethren."

That great Faneuil Hall meeting of August 31, 1835, was followed some weeks later by a lamentable anti-Garrison mob, which did not stand alone. In the years 1835, 1836, and 1837 a great wave of anti-Abolition excitement swept over the North. In New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Alton (Illinois), and many other places, there were anti-Abolition riots, sometimes resulting in arson and bloodshed.

The heart of the great, peace-loving, patriotic, and theretofore happy and contented North, was at that time stirred with the profoundest indignation against the Abolitionists. Northern opinion then was that the Abolitionists, by their unpatriotic course and their nefarious methods, were driving the South to desperation and endangering the Union. If the North at that time saw the situation as it really was, the historian of the present day should say so. If, on the other hand, the people of both the North and South were then laboring under delusions, as to the facts that were occurring among them, those of this generation, who are wiser than their ancestors, should give us the sources of their information. To know the lessons of history we must have the facts.[29]

In 1854, at Framingham, Massachusetts, the Abolitionists celebrated the Fourth of July thus: Their leader, William Lloyd Garrison, held up and burned to ashes, before the applauding multitude, one after another, copies of

1st. The fugitive slave law.

2d. The decision of Commissioner Loring in the case of Burns, a fugitive slave.

3d. The charge to the Grand Jury of Judge Benjamin R. Curtis in reference to the effort of a mob to secure a fugitive slave.

4th. "Then, holding up the United States Constitution, he branded it as the source and parent of all other atrocities, 'a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,' and consumed it to ashes on the spot, exclaiming, 'So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say, Amen!' A tremendous shout of 'Amen!' went up to heaven in ratification of the deed, mingled with a few hisses and wrathful exclamations from some, who evidently were in a rowdyish state of mind, but who were at once cowed by the popular feeling."[30]

The Abolitionist movement was radical; it was revolutionary. When an accredited teacher of history, in one of the greatest of our universities, writes a volume on "Abolition and Slavery," why should he restrict himself in comment, as Dr. Hart thus does in his preface? The book is "intended to show that there was more than one side to the controversy, and that both the milder form of opposition called anti-slavery and the extreme form called Abolition, were confronted by practical difficulties which to many public men seemed insurmountable."

Why should not the historian, in addition to pointing out the "difficulties" encountered by these extremists, show how and why the people of that day condemned their conduct?

Condonation of the Abolitionists, and a proper regard for the Constitution of the United States, cannot be taught to the youth of America at one and the same time.

The writer has been unable to find any of the incendiary pamphlets that had proved so inflammatory. He has, however, before him a little anonymous publication entitled "Slavery Illustrated in its Effects upon Woman," Isaac Knapp, Boston, 1837. It was for circulation in the North, being "Affectionately Inscribed to all the Members of Female Anti-Slavery Societies," and it is only cited here as an illustration of the almost inconceivable venom with which the crusade was carried on to embitter the North against the South. It is a vicious attack upon the morality of Southern men and women, and upon Southern churches. None of its charges does it claim to authenticate, and it gives no names or dates. One incident, related as typical, is of two white women, all the time in full communion with their church, under pretence of a boarding-house, keeping a brothel, negro women being the inmates.

In the chapter entitled "Impurity of the Christian Churches" is this sentence: "At present the Southern Churches are only one vast consociation of hypocrites and sinners."

The booklet was published anonymously, but at that time any prurient story about slavery in the South would circulate, no matter whether vouched for or not.

CHAPTER IV

FEELING IN THE SOUTH—1835

Not stronger than the proceedings of a great non-partisan public meeting, or than the action of religious bodies, but going more into detail as to public opinion in the South and the effect upon it of Abolition agitation, is the evidence of a quiet observer, Professor E. A. Andrews, who, in July, 1835, had been sent out as the agent of "The Boston Union for the Relief and Improvement of the Colored Race." His reports from both Northern and Southern States, consisting of letters from various points, constitute a book, "Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade," Boston, 1836.

July 17, 1835, from Baltimore, Professor Andrews reports that a resident clergyman, who appears to have his entire confidence, says, among other things, "that a disposition to emancipate their slaves is very prevalent among the slave-holders of this State, could they see any way to do so consistently with the true interest of the slave, but that it is their universal belief that no means of doing this is now presented except that of colonizing them in Africa."

From the same city, July 17, 1835, he writes, p. 53: "In this city there appears to be no strong attachment to slavery and no wish to perpetuate it."

Again, on p. 95: "There is but one sentiment amongst those with whom I have conversed in this city, respecting the possibility of the white and colored races living peaceably together in freedom, nor during my residence at the South and my subsequent intercourse with the Southern people, did I ever meet with one who believed it possible for the two races to continue together after emancipation.... When the slaves of the South are liberated they form an integral part of the population of the country, and must influence its destiny for ages—perhaps forever."

From Fredericksburg, Virginia, Professor Andrews writes:

Since I entered the slave-holding country I have seen but one man who did not deprecate wholly and absolutely the direct interference of Northern Abolitionists with the institutions of the South. "I was an Abolitionist," has been the language of numbers of those with whom I have conversed; "I was an Abolitionist, and was laboring earnestly to bring about a prospective system of emancipation. I even saw, as I believed, the certain and complete success of the friends of the colored race at no distant period, when these Northern Abolitionists interfered, and by their extravagant and impracticable schemes frustrated all our hopes.... Our people have become exasperated, the friends of the slaves alarmed, etc....[31] Equally united are they in the opinion that the servitude of the slaves is far more rigorous now than it would have been had there been no interference with them. In proportion to the danger of revolt and insurrection, have been the severity of the enactments for controlling them and the diligence with which the laws have been executed."

From a private letter, written at Greenville, Alabama, August 30, 1835, by a distinguished lawyer, John W. Womack, to his brother, we quote:

The anti-slavery societies in the Northern and Middle States are doing all they can to destroy our domestic harmony by sending among us pamphlets, tracts, and newspapers—for the purpose of exciting dissatisfaction and insurrection among our slaves.... Meetings have been held in Mobile, in Montgomery, in Greensboro, and in Tuscaloosa, and in different parts of all the Southern States. At these meetings resolutions have been adopted, disclaiming (sic) and denying the right of the Northern people to interfere in any manner in our internal domestic concerns.... It is my solemn opinion that this question (to wit, slavery) will ultimately bring about a dissolution of the Union of the States.

It should be remembered that in 1832 the massacre in Santo Domingo of all the whites by the blacks was fresh in mind. It had occurred in 1814—after manumission—and had produced, especially in the minds of statesmen and of all observers of the many signs of antagonism between the two races, a profound and lasting impression.

The fear that the races, both free, could not live together was in the mind of Thomas Jefferson, of Henry Clay, and of every other Southern emancipationist. And deportation, its expense, and the want of a home to which to send the negro—here was a stumbling-block in the way of Southern emancipation.

Indeed, the incompatibility of the races was an appalling thought in the minds of Southerners for the whole thirty years of anti-slavery agitation. It was even with Abraham Lincoln, and weighed upon his mind when, at last, in 1862, military necessity placed upon his shoulders the responsibility of emancipating the Southern slaves. Serious as was the responsibility, the question was not new to him. When Mr. Lincoln said, in his celebrated Springfield speech in 1858, "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," and added that he did not expect the government to fail, he certainly expected that emancipation in the South was coming; and, of course, he thought over what the consequences might be.

In that same debate with Douglas, in his speech at Charleston, Illinois, Mr. Lincoln said: "There is a physical difference between the white and black races, which, I believe, will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality."

In his memorial address on Henry Clay, in 1852, he had said: "If, as the friends of colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen shall by some means succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery, and at the same time in restoring a captive people to their long lost father-land, ... it will, indeed, be a glorious consummation. And if to such a contribution the efforts of Mr. Clay shall have contributed ... none of his labors will have been more valuable to his country and his kind."

In his famous emancipation proclamation he promised "that the effort to colonize persons of African descent upon this continent or elsewhere, with the consent of the government existing there, will be continued."

It must have been with a heavy heart that the great President announced the failure of all his efforts to find a home outside of America for the freedmen, when he informed Congress in his December message, 1862, that all in vain he had asked permission to send the negroes, when freed, to the British, the Danish, and the French West Indies; and that the Spanish-American countries in Central America had also refused his request. He could find no places except Hayti and Liberia. He even made the futile experiment of sending a ship-load to a little island off Hayti.[32] Hume, in "The Abolitionists," tells us that Mr. Lincoln for a time considered setting Texas apart as a home for the negroes—so much was he disturbed by this trouble.

CHAPTER V

ANTI-ABOLITION AT THE NORTH

Southerners, save perhaps a few who were wise enough to foresee what the consequences might be, were deeply gratified when they read (1835-1838) of the violent opposition in the North to the desperate schemes of the Abolitionists. Surely these mobs fairly represented public opinion, and that public opinion certainly was a strong guaranty to the South of future peace and security.

But the Abolitionists themselves were not dismayed. They may have misread, indeed it is certain they did misunderstand, the signs of the times. Garrison in his Liberator took the ground—as do his children in their life of him, written fifty years later—that the great Faneuil Hall meeting of August 31, 1835, which they themselves declare represented "the intelligence, the wealth, the culture, and the religion of Boston," was but an indication of the "pro-slavery" sentiment then existing. In reality it was just what it purported to be—an authoritative condemnation, not of the anti-slavery opinions, but of the avowed purposes and methods of the new sect. The mobbing of Garrison and the sacking of his printing office in Boston on September 26th, however, and the lawless violence to Abolitionists that followed the denunciations of that despised sect by speakers, and by the public press, in New York, in Philadelphia, in Cincinnati, and elsewhere in the North, proved disastrous in the extreme.

While that great wave of anti-Abolition feeling was sweeping over that whole region from East to West, there were many good people who deluded themselves with the idea that this new sect with its visionary and impracticable ideas was being consigned to oblivion, but in what followed we have a lesson that unfortunately some of our people have not yet fully learned. Mob law in any portion of our free country, where there is law with officers to enforce it, is a mistake, a mistake that is likely to be followed sooner or later by most disastrous results. The mobs that marked the beginning of our Revolution in 1774 were legitimate; they meant revolt, revolt against constituted authorities. But where a mob does not mean the overthrow of government, where it only means to substitute its own blind will for the arm of the law, not good but evil—it may be long deferred, but evil eventually—is sure to follow. When mobs assailed Abolitionists because they threatened the peace and tranquillity of the country, evil followed swiftly.

Violent and harsh treatment of these mischievous agitators almost everywhere in the North, and the heroism with which they endured ignominy and insult, brought about a revulsion of public sentiment. To understand the philosophy of this, read two extracts from the writings of that great, and universally admired, pulpit orator, Dr. William E. Channing of Boston, the first written sometime prior to that August meeting:

The adoption of the common system of agitation by the Abolitionists has not been justified by success. From the beginning it has created alarm in the considerate, and strengthened the sympathies of the Free States with the slave-holder. It has made converts of a few individuals, but alienated multitudes. Its influence at the South has been almost wholly evil. It has stirred up bitter passions, and a fierce fanaticism, which have shut every ear and every heart against its arguments and persuasions. These efforts are more to be deplored, because the hope of freedom to the slave lies chiefly in the dispositions of his master. The Abolitionist proposed indeed to convert the slave-holder; and for this end he approached them with vituperation, and exhausted upon them the vocabulary of reproach. And he has reaped as he sowed.... Perhaps (though I am anxious to repel the thought) something has been lost to the cause of freedom and humanity.[33]

These were Dr. Channing's opinions of the Abolitionists prior to August, 1835, and he seems to have kept silent for a time after the mobbing that followed that great Faneuil Hall meeting; but a year later, when many other things had happened along the same line, he spoke out in an open letter to James G. Birney, an Abolitionist editor who had been driven from Cincinnati, and whose press, on which The Philanthropist was printed, had been broken up. In that letter, p. 157, supra, speaking of course not for himself alone, Dr. Channing says:

I think it best ... to extend my remarks to the spirit of violence and persecution which has broken out against the Abolitionists throughout the whole country. Of their merits and demerits as Abolitionists I have formerly spoken.... I have expressed my fervent attachment to the great end to which they are pledged and at the same time my disapprobation, to a certain extent, of their spirit and measures.... Deliberate, systematic efforts have been made, not here and there, but far and wide, to wrest from its adherents that liberty of speech and the press, which our fathers asserted in blood, and which our National and State Governments are pledged to protect as our most sacred right. Its most conspicuous advocates have been hunted and stoned, its meetings scattered, its presses broken up, and nothing but the patience, constancy and intrepidity of its members has saved it from extinction.... They are sufferers for the liberty of thought, speech and press; and in maintaining this liberty, amidst insult and violence, they deserve a place among its honorable defenders.

Still admitting that "their writings have been blemished by a spirit of intolerance, sweeping censure, and rash, injurious judgment," this great man now threw all the weight of his influence on the side of the Abolitionists, because they were the champions of free speech. Their moral worth and steady adherence to their ideas of non-resistance he pointed to admiringly, and it must always be remembered to their credit that the private lives of Garrison and his leading co-workers were irreproachable. Indeed, the unselfish devotion of these agitators and their high moral character were in themselves a serious misfortune. They soon attracted a lot of zealots, male and female, who became as reckless as they were. And these out-and-out fanatics were not themselves office-seekers. What they feared, they said, was that a "lot of soulless scamps would jump on to their shoulders to ride into office";[34] and there really was the great danger, as appeared later.

In the results that followed the mobbing of Abolitionists in the North, from 1834 to 1836, is to be found another lesson for those voters of this day who can profit by the teachings of history. The violent assaults on the Abolitionists by the friends of the Constitution and the Union constituted an epoch in the lives of these people. It gave them a footing and a hearing and many converts.

We have already noted some wonderful and instructive changes in the tide of events set in motion by the radical teachings of the New Abolitionists. The churches, as has been shown, to save the country, North and South, changed their attitude on slavery itself. Dr. Channing, who had opposed the methods of the Abolitionists, became, as many others did with him, when mobs had assailed these people, their defender and eulogist, because they were martyrs for the sake of free speech; and now we are to see in John Quincy Adams another change, equally notable, a change that was to make Mr. Adams thenceforward the most momentous figure, at least during its earlier stages, in the tragic drama that is the subject of our story.

Elected to the House of Representatives after the expiration of his term as President, Mr. Adams was not in sympathy with the methods of the Abolitionists. Indeed, prior to December 31, 1831, he had shown as little interest in slavery as he did when on that day in presenting to the House fifteen petitions against slavery he "deprecated a discussion which would lead to ill-will, to heart-burning, to mutual hatred ... without accomplishing anything else."[35]

The petitions presented by Mr. Adams were referred to a committee.

The Southerners had not then become so exasperated as to insist on Congress refusing to receive Abolition petitions. But multiplying these petitions was a ready means of provoking the slave-holders, and soon petitions poured in from many quarters, couched, most of them, in language, not disrespectful to Congress but provoking to slave-holders.

Unfortunately, the lower house of Congress on May 26, 1836, which was while mobs in the North were still trying to put down the Abolitionists, passed a resolution that all such petitions, etc., should thereafter be laid upon the table, without further action. Adams voted against it as "a direct violation of the Constitution of the United States." The Constitution forbids any law "abridging the freedom of speech ... or the right ... to petition the government for a redress of grievances." The resolution to lay all anti-slavery petitions on the table without further action was passed, "with the hope that it might put a stop to the agitation that seemed to endanger the existence of the Union." But it had the opposite effect. It soon became known as the "gag resolution," and was, for years, the centre of the most aggravating discussions that had, up to that time, ever occurred in Congress. Mr. Adams in these debates became, without, it seems, ever having been in full sympathy with the agitators, thenceforward their champion in Congress, and so continued until the day of his death in 1848.

The Abolitionists were happy. They were succeeding in their programme—making the Southern slave-holder odious by exasperating him into offending Northern sentiment.

CHAPTER VI

A CRISIS AND A COMPROMISE

In 1840 there were 200 Abolition societies, with a membership of over 200,000. Agitation had created all over the North a spirit of hostility to slavery as it existed in the South, and especially to the admission of new slave States into the Union. In 1840 the struggle over the application of Texas for admission into the Union had already, for three years, been mooted. Objections to the admission of the new State were many, such as: American adventurers had wrongfully wrested control of the new State from Mexico; boundary lines were unsettled; war with Mexico would follow, etc.; but chiefly, Texas was a slave State, which was, in the South, a strong reason for annexation. There were, however, many sound and unanswerable arguments for the admission of the new State, just such as had influenced Jefferson in purchasing the Louisiana territory: Texas was contiguous, her territory and resources immense.

On the issue thus joined the first great gun had been fired by Dr. Channing, who, though still more moderate than some, might now be classed as an Abolitionist. August 1, 1837, he wrote a long open letter to Henry Clay against annexation, and in that letter he said:

To me it seems not only the right but the duty of the Free States, in case of the annexation of Texas, to say to the slave-holding States, "We regard this act as the dissolution of the Union; the essential conditions of the National Compact are violated."[36]

This was very like the pronunciamento already made by Garrison—"no union with slavery."

The underlying reasons that controlled Southern statesmen in this contest over Texas, and the motives that animated them in the fierce battles they fought later for new slave States, are thus stated by Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, of New England.[37]

It should in justice be remembered that the effort at that period to enlarge the area of slavery was an effort on the part of the South, dictated by a desire to remain in the Union, and not to accept the issue of an inherent incompatibility of a political union between slave-holding and non-slave-holding States.

In 1840 the first effort for the annexation of Texas, by treaty, was defeated in the Senate.

If the Southerners had been as ready to accept the doctrine of an inherent incompatibility between slave and free States as were Dr. Channing and those other Abolitionists who were now declaring for "no union with slave-holders," they would at once have seceded and joined Texas; but the South still loved the Union, and strove, down to 1860, persistently, and often passionately, for power that would enable it to remain safely in its folds.

Texas was finally admitted in 1845, after annexation had been passed on by the people in the presidential election of 1844. In that election Clay was defeated by the Abolitionists. Because Clay was not unreservedly against annexation the Abolitionists drew from the Whigs in New York State enough votes, casting them for Birney, to defeat Clay and elect Polk; and now Abolitionism was a factor in national politics.

The two great national parties were the Democrats and the Whigs, the voters somewhat equally divided between them. For years both parties had regarded the Abolitionists precisely as did the non-partisan meeting at Faneuil Hall, in August, 1835—as a band of agitators, organized for the purpose of interfering with slavery where it was none of their business; and both parties had meted out to this new and, as they deemed it, pestilent sect, unstinted condemnation. But at last the voters of this despised cult had turned a presidential election and were making inroads in both parties. Half a dozen Northern States, in which in 1835 "no protest had been made against the fugitive slave law of 1793," had already passed "personal liberty laws" intended to obstruct and nullify that law. And now it was "slave-catchers" and not Abolitionists who were being mobbed in the North.

Boston had reversed its attitude toward the Abolitionists. On May 31, 1849, the New England Anti-Slavery Society was holding its annual convention in that very Faneuil Hall where, in 1835, Abolitionism had been so roundly condemned; and now Wendell Phillips, pointing to one of two fugitive slaves, who then sat triumphantly on the platform, said, "amid great applause, ... 'We say that they may make their little laws in Washington, but that Faneuil Hall repeals them, in the name of the humanity of Massachusetts.'"[38]

Poets headed by Whittier and Longfellow, authors like Emerson and Lowell, and orators like Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips, had joined the agitators, and all united in assaulting the fugitive slave law. The following, from James Russell Lowell's "Biglow Papers," No. 1, June, 1840, is a specimen of the literature that was stirring up hostility against slavery and the "slave-catcher" in the breasts of many thousands, who were joining in an anti-slavery crusade while disdaining companionship with the Abolitionists:

"Ain't it cute to see a Yankee
Take such everlastin' pains
All to get the Devil's Thankee
Helpin' on 'em weld their chains?"
W'y it's jest es clear es figgers,
Clear es one and one makes two,
Chaps that makes black slaves of niggers
Want to make w'ite slaves o' you.

In the meantime the people of the South, much excited, were resorting to repression, passing laws to prevent slaves from being taught to read, and laws, in some States, inhibiting assemblages of slaves above given numbers, unless some white person were present—all as safeguards against insurrection. Thus, in 1835, an indictment was found in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, against one Williams, who had never been in Alabama, for circulating there an alleged incendiary document, and Governor Gayle made requisition on Governor Marcy, of New York, for the extradition of Williams. Governor Marcy denied the request. The case was the same as that more recently decided by the Supreme Court of the United States, when it held that editors of New York and Indiana papers could not be brought to the District of Columbia for trial.

The South, all the while clamoring to have the agitators put down, had by still other means than these contributed to the ever-increasing excitement in the North. Southerners had mobbed Abolitionists, and whipped and driven out of the country persons found in possession of The Liberator or suspected of circulating other incendiary literature. And violence in the South against the Abolitionists had precisely the same effect on the Northern mind as the violence against them in the North had from 1835 to 1838, but there was this difference: the refugee from the distant South, whether he were an escaped slave or a fleeing Abolitionist, could color and exaggerate the wrongs he had suffered and so parade himself as a martyr. While this was true, it was also quite often true that the outrage committed in the South against the suspect was real enough—a mob had whipped and expelled him without any trial. And this is another of the lessons as to the evil effects of mob law that crop out all through the history of the anti-slavery crusade. No good can come from violating the law.

In 1848 another presidential election turned on the anti-slavery vote, this time again in New York State. Anti-slavery Democrats bolted the Democratic ticket, thus electing General Taylor, the Whig candidate.

In the canvass preceding this election originated, we are told, the catch-phrase applied to Cass, the Democratic candidate—"a Northern man with Southern principles." The phrase soon became quite common, South and North—"a Southern man with Northern principles," and vice versa.

The invention and use of it in 1848 shows the progress that had been made in arraying one section of the Union against the other. Later, a telling piece of doggerel in Southern canvasses, and it must also have been used North, was

He wired in and wired out,
Leaving the people all in doubt,
Whether the snake that made the track
Was going North, or coming back.

Over the admission of California in 1849 there was another battle. California, 734 miles long, with about 50,000 people (less than the usual number), and with a constitution improvised under military government, applied for admission as a State. Southerners insisted on extending the line of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific, thereby making of the new territory two States. The South had been much embittered by the opposition to the admission of Texas. Texas was, nearly all of it, below the Missouri Compromise line, and the South thought it was equitably entitled to come in under that agreement. Its case, too, differed from that of Missouri, which already belonged to the United States when it applied for admission as a State. Texas, with all its vast wealth, was asking to come in without price.

Another continuing and increasing cause of distraction had been the use made by Abolitionists of the right of petition. As already shown, petitions to Congress against slavery had been received without question till 1836, when Northern conservatives and Southern members, hoping to abate this source of agitation, had combined to pass a resolution to lay them on the table, which meant that they were to be no further noticed. The Abolitionists were so delighted over the indefensible position into which they had driven the conservatives—the "gag law"—that they continued, up to the crisis of 1850, with unflagging zeal to hurry in monster petitions, one after another. The debates provoked by the presentation of these petitions, and the more and more heated discussions in Congress of slavery in the States, which was properly a local and not a national question, now attracted still wider public attention. The Abolitionists had almost succeeded in arraying the entire sections against each other, in making of the South and North two hostile nations. Professor John W. Burgess, dean of the Faculty of Political Science in Columbia University, says: "It would not be extravagant to say that the whole course of the internal history of the United States from 1836 to 1861 was more largely determined by the struggle in Congress, over the Abolition petitions and the use of the mails for the Abolition literature, than anything else."[39]

The South had its full share in the hot debates that took place over these matters in Congress. Its congressmen were quite as aggressive as those from the North, and they were accused of being imperious in manner, when demanding that a stop should be put to Abolition petitions, and Abolition literature going South in the mails.

There was another cause of complaint from the South, and this was grave. By the "two underground railroads" that had been established, slaves, estimated at 2,000 annually, abducted or voluntarily escaping, were secretly escorted into or through the free States to Canada. To show how all this was then regarded by those who sympathized with the Abolitionists, and how it is still looked upon by some modern historians, the following is given from Hart's "Abolition and Slavery":

"The underground railroad was manned chiefly by orderly citizens, members of churches, and philanthropical citizens. To law-abiding folk what could be more delightful than the sensation of aiding an oppressed slave, exasperating a cruel master, and at the same time incurring the penalties of defying an unrighteous law?"

Southerners at that time thought that conductors on that line were practising, and readers of the above paragraph will probably think that Dr. Hart in his attractive rhetoric is now extolling in his history, "higher law doctrines."

It is undoubtedly true that, in 1850, a large majority of the Northern people strongly disapproved of the Abolitionists and their methods. Modern historians carefully point out the difference between the great body of Northern anti-slavery people and the Abolitionists. Nevertheless, here were majorities in eleven Northern States voting for, and sustaining, the legislators who passed and kept upon the statute books laws which were intended to enable Southern slaves to escape from their masters. The enactment and the support of these laws was an attack upon the constitutional rights of slave-holders; and Southern people looked upon all the voters who sustained these laws, and all the anti-slavery lecturers, speakers, pulpit orators, and writers of the North, as engaged with the Abolitionists in one common crusade against slavery. From the Southern stand-point a difference between them could only be made by a Hudibras:

He was in logic a great critic
Profoundly skilled in analytic,
He could distinguish and divide
A hair 'twixt South and South West side.

As to how much of the formidable anti-slavery sentiment of that day had been created by the Abolitionists, we have this opinion of a distinguished English traveller and observer. Mr. L. W. A. Johnston was in Washington, in 1850, studying America. He says:

"Extreme men like Garrison seldom have justice done to them. It is true they may be impracticable, both as to their measures and their men, but that unmixed evil is the result of their exertions, all history of opinion in every country, I think, contradicts. Such ultra men are as necessary as the more moderate and reasonable advocates of any growing opinion; and, as an impartial person, who never happened to fall in with one of the party in the course of my tour, I must express my belief that the present wide diffusion of anti-slavery sentiment in the United States is, in no small degree, owing to their exertions."[40]

And Professor Smith, of Williams College, speaking of the anti-slavery feeling in the North in 1850, says:

"This sentiment of the free States regarding slavery was to a large degree the result of an agitation for its abolition which had been active for a score of years (1831-1850) without any positive results."[41]

But no matter what had produced it, the anti-slavery sentiment that pervaded the North in 1850 boded ill to slavery and to the Constitution, and the South was bitterly complaining. Congress met in December, 1849, and was to sit until October, 1850. Lovers of the Union, North and South, watched its proceedings with the deepest anxiety. The South was much excited. The continual torrent of abuse to which it was subjected, the refusal to allow slavery in States to be created from territory in the South-west that was below the parallel of the Missouri Compromise, and the complete nullification of the fugitive slave law, seemed to many to be no longer tolerable, and from sundry sources in that section came threats of secession.

In 1849-50 the South was demanding a division of California, an efficient fugitive slave law, and that the territories of New Mexico and Arizona should be organized with no restrictions as to slavery. Other minor demands were unimportant.

Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Stephen A. Douglas, Lewis Cass, and other conservative leaders came forward and, after long and heated debates in Congress, the Compromise of 1850 was agreed on. To satisfy the North, California, as a whole, came in as a free State, and the slave trade was abolished in the District of Columbia. To satisfy the South, a new and stringent fugitive slave law was agreed on, and the territories of New Mexico and Arizona were organized with no restrictions as to slavery.

In bringing about this compromise, Daniel Webster was, next to Clay, the most conspicuous figure. He was the favorite son of New England and the greatest statesman in all the North. On the 7th of March, 1850, Mr. Webster made one of the greatest speeches of his life on the Compromise measures. Rising above the sectional prejudices of the hour, he spoke for the Constitution and the Union. The manner in which he and his reputation were treated by popular historians in the North, for half a century afterward, on account of this speech, is the most pathetic and, at the same time, the most instructive story in the whole history of the anti-slavery crusade.

Mr. Webster was under the ban of Northern public opinion for all this half a century, not because of inconsistency between that speech and his former avowals, an averment often made and never proven, but because he was consistent. He stood squarely upon his record, and the venom of the assaults that were afterward made upon him was just in proportion to the love and veneration which had been his before he offended. His offence was that he would not move with the anti-slavery movement.[42] He did not stand with his section in a sectional dispute.

Henry Clay, old and feeble, had come back into the Senate to render his last service to his country. He was the author of the Compromise. Daniel Webster was everywhere known as the champion of the Union. Henry Clay was known as the "Old Man Eloquent," and he now spoke with all his old-time fire; but Webster's great speech probably had more influence on the result.

Before taking up Mr. Webster's speech his previous attitude toward slavery must be noted. The purpose of the friends of the Union was, of course, to effect a compromise that would, if possible, put an end to sectional strife. Compromise means concession, and a compromise of political differences, made by statesmen, may involve some concession of view previously held by those who advocate as well as by those who accept it. Webster thought his section of the Union should now make concessions.

Fanaticism, however, concedes nothing; it never compromises, although statesmanship does. One of the most notable utterances of Edmund Burke was: