Chapter 11
SLAVERY: ITS POLITICAL HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES (I.) Introductory--(II.) Introduction of Slavery into the Colonies --(III.) Declaration of Independence--(IV.) Continental Congress: Articles of Confederation--(V.) Ordinance of 1787--(VI.) Constitution of the United States--(VII.) Causes of Growth of Slavery--(VIII.) Fugitive-Slave Law, 1793--(IX.) Slave Trade Abolished--(X.) Louisiana Purchase--(XI.) Florida--(XII.) Missouri Compromise--(XIII.) Nullification--(XIV.) Texas--(XV.) Mexican War, Acquisition of California and New Mexico--(XVI.) Compromise Measures, 1850--(XVII.) Nebraska Act--(XVIII.) Kansas Struggle for Freedom--(XIX.) Dred Scott Case--(XX.) John Brown Raid--(XXI.) Presidential Elections, 1856-1860--(XXII.) Dissolution of the Union--(XXIII.) Secession of States--(XXIV.) Action of Religious Denominations--(XXV.) Proposed Concessions to Slavery--(XXVI.) Peace Conference--(XXVII.) District of Columbia--(XXVIII.) Slavery Prohibited in Territories--(XXIX.) Benton's Summary--(XXX.) Prophecy as to Slavery and Disunion.
I INTRODUCTORY
Slavery is older than tradition--older than authentic history, and doubtless antedates any organized form of human government. It had its origin in barbaric times. Uncivilized man never voluntarily performed labor even for his own comfort; he only struggled to gain a bare subsistence. He did not till the soil, but killed wild animals for food and to secure a scant covering for his body; and cannibalism was common. Tribes were formed for defence, and thus wars came, all, however, to maintain mere savage existence. Through primitive wars captives were taken, and such as were not slain were compelled to labor for their captors. In time these slaves were used to domesticate useful animals and, later, were forced to cultivate the soil and build rude structures for the comfort and protection of their masters. Thus it was that mankind was first forced to toil and ultimately came to enjoy labor and its incident fruits, and thus human slavery became a first step from barbarism towards the ultimate civilization of mankind.
White slavery existed in the English-American colonies antecedent to black or African slavery, though at first only intended to be conditional and not to extend to offspring. English, Scotch, and Irish alike, regardless of ancestry or religious faith, were, for political offenses, sold and transported to the dependent American colonies. They were such persons as had participated in insurrections against the Crown; many of them being prisoners taken on the battle- field, as were the Scots taken on the field of Dunbar, the royalist prisoners from the field of Worcester; likewise the great leaders of the Penruddoc rebellion, and many who were taken in the insurrection of Monmouth.
Of these, many were first sold in England to be afterwards re-sold on shipboard to the colonies, as men sell horses, to the highest bidder.
There was also, in some of the colonies, a conditional servitude, under indentures, for servants, debtors, convicts, and perhaps others. These forms of slavery made the introduction of negro and perpetual slavery easy.
Australasia alone, of all inhabited parts of the globe, has the honor, so far as history records, of never having a slave population.
Egyptian history tells us of human bondage; the patriarch Abraham, the founder of the Hebrew nation, owned and dealt in slaves. That the law delivered to Moses from Mt. Sinai justified and tolerated human slavery was the boast of modern slaveholders.
Moses, from "Nebo's heights," saw the "land of promise," where flowed "milk and honey" in abundance, and where slavery existed. The Hebrew people, but forty years themselves out of bondage, possessed this land and maintained slavery therein.
The advocates of slavery and the slave trade exultingly quoted:
"And I will sell your sons and your daughters into the hands of the children of Judah, and they shall sell them to the Sabeans, to a people far off; for the Lord hath spoken it."--Joel iii, 8.
They likewise claimed that St. Paul, while he preached the gospel to slaveholders and slaves alike in Rome, yet used his calling to enable him to return to slavery an escaped human being--Onesimus.( 1)
The advocates of domestic slavery justified it as of scriptural and divine origin.
From the Old Testament they quoted other texts, not only to justify the holding of slaves in perpetual bondage, but the continuance of the slave trade with all its cruelties.
"And he said, I am Abraham's servant."--Gen. xxiv., 34.
"And there was of the house of Saul a _servant_ whose name was Ziba. And when they had called him unto David, the King said unto him, Art thou Ziba? And he said, Thy servant is he. . . .
"Then the King called to Ziba, Saul's _servant_, and said unto him, I have given unto thy master's son all that pertained to Saul, and to all his house.
"Thou, therefore, and thy sons, and they servants shall till the land for him, and thou shalt bring in _the fruits_, that thy master's son may have food to eat," etc. "Now Ziba had fifteen sons and _twenty servants_."--2 Samuel ix., 2, 9-10.
"I got me servants and maidens and had servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of great and small cattle above all that were in Jerusalem before me."--Eccles. ii., 7.
"And he said, Hagar, Sarai's maid, whence comest thou? and she said, I flee from the face of my mistress Sarai.
"And the angel of the Lord said unto her, Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself to her hands."--Gen. xvi., 8, 9.
"A servant will not be corrected by words; for though he understand, he will not answer."--Prov. xxix., 19.
And from the New Testament they triumphantly quoted:
"Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. Art thou called being a servant? care not for it; but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather."--I Cor., vii., 20-22.
"Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ," etc.
"And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him."--Eph., vi., 5-9.
"Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with eye service, as men pleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God."--Col. iii., 22.
"Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven."--Col. iv., 1.
"Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrines be not blasphemed," etc.--I Tim., vi., 1, 2.
"Exhort servants to be obedient unto their own masters, and to please them well in all things; not answering again; not purloining, but showing all good fidelity; that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things."--Titus ii., 9, 10.
"Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward."--I. Pet. ii, 18.
The advocates of slavery maintained that Christ approved the calling as a slaveholder as well as the faith of the Roman centurion, whose servant, "sick of a palsy," Christ miraculously healed by saying: "_I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel_."--Matt. viii., 10.
They also cited Dr. Adam Clark, the great Bible commentator; Dr. Neander's work, entitled _Planting and Training the Church_, and Dr. Mosheim's _Church History_, as evidence that the Bible not only sanctioned slavery but authorized its perpetuation through all time.( 2) In other words, pro-slavery advocates in effect affirmed that these great writers:
"Torture the hollowed pages of the Bible, To sanction crime, and robbery, and blood, And, in oppression's hateful service, libel Both man and God."
While the teachings of neither the Old nor the New Testament, nor of the _Master_, were to overthrow or to establish political conditions as established by the temporal powers of the then age, yet it must be admitted that large numbers of people, of much learning and a high civilization, believed human slavery was sanctioned by divine authority.
The deductions made from the texts quoted were unwarranted. The principles of justice and mercy, on which the Christian religion is founded, cannot be tortured into even a toleration (as, possibly, could the law of Moses) of the existence of the unnatural and barbaric institution of slavery, or the slave trade.
Slavery was wrong _per se;_ wholly unjustifiable on the plainest principles of humanity and justice; and the consciences of all unprejudiced, enlightened, civilized people led them in time to believe that it had no warrant from God and ought to have no warrant from man to exist on the face of the earth.
The friends of freedom and those who believed slavery sinful never for a moment assented to the claim that it was sanctioned by Holy Writ, or that it was justified by early and long-continued existence through barbaric or semi-barbaric times. They denied that it could thus even be sanctified into a moral right; that time ever converted cruelty into a blessing, or a wrong into a right; that any human law could give it legal existence, or rightfully perpetuate it against natural justice; they maintained that a Higher Law, written in God's immutable decrees of mercy, was paramount to all human law or practice, however long continuing; that the lessons taught by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount and in all his life and teachings were a condemnation of it; and that an enlightened, progressive civilization demanded its final overthrow.
In America: Slavery is _dead_. We return to its history.
Greece had her slaves before tradition blended into history, though, four centuries before Christ, Alcidamas proclaimed: "_God has sent forth all men free: Nature has made no man slave_."
Alexander, the mighty Macedonian (fourth century B.C.), sold captives taken at Tyre and Gaza, the most accomplished people of that time, into slavery.( 3)
Rome had her slaves; and her slave-marts were open at her principal ports for traffic in men and women of all nationalities, especially Christians and captives taken in war.
The German nations of the shores of the Baltic carried on the desolating traffic. Russia recognized slavery and carried on a slave trade through her merchantmen.
The Turks forbade the enslaving of Mussulmans, but sold Christian and other captives into slavery. Christian and Moor, for seven hundred years in the doubtful struggle in Western Europe, respectively, doomed their captives to slavery.
Contemporary with the discovery of America, the Moors were driven from Granada, their last stronghold in Spain, to the north of Africa; there they became corsairs, privateers, and holders of Christian slaves. Their freebooter life and cruelty furnished the pretext, not only to enslave the people of the Moorish dominion, but of all Africa. The oldest accounts of Africa bear testimony to the existence of domestic slavery--of negro enslaving negro, and of caravans of dealers in negro slaves.
Columbus, whose glory as the discoverer of this continent we proclaim, on a return voyage (1494) carried five hundred native Americans to Spain, a present to Queen Isabella, and American Indians were sold into foreign bondage, as "spoils of war," for two centuries.
The Saxon carried slavery in its most odious form into England, where, at one time, not half the inhabitants were absolutely free, and where the price of a man was but four times the price of an ox.
He sold his own kindred into slavery. English slaves were held in Ireland till the reign of Henry II.
In time, however, the spirit of Christianity, pleading the cause of humanity, stayed slavery's progress, and checked the slave traffic by appeals to conscience.
Alexander III, Pope of Rome in the twelfth century, proclaimed against it, by writing: "_Nature having made no slaves, all men have an equal right to liberty_."
Efficacious as the Christian religion has been to destroy or mitigate evil, it has failed to render the so-called Christian slaveholder better than the pagan, or to improve the condition of the bondsmen.
It may be observed that when slavery seemed to be firmly planted in the Republic of the United States of America, Egypt, as one of the powers of the earth, had passed away; her slavery, too, was gone--only her Pyramids, Sphinx, and Monoliths have been spared by time and a just judgment. Greece, too, had perished, only her philosophy and letters survive; Israel's people, though the chosen of God, had, as a nation, been bodily carried into oriental Babylonian captivity, and in due time had, in fulfillment of divine judgment, been dispersed through all lands. God in his mighty wrath also thundered on Babylon's iniquity, and it, too, passed away forever, and the prophet gives as a reason for this, that Babylon dealt in "_slaves and the souls of men_."
Rome, once the mistress of the world, cased as a nation to live; her greatness and her glory, her slave markets and her slaves, all gone together and forever.
Germany, France, Spain, and other slave nations renounced slavery barely in time to escape the general national doom.
Russia, though her mighty Czars possessed absolute power to rule, trembled before the mighty insurrections of peasant-serfs that swept over the bodies of slain nobles and slave-masters from remote regions to the very gates of Moscow. Catherine II., Alexander I., Nicholas I., and Alexander II. listened to the threatened doom, and, to save their empire, put forth decrees to loosen and finally to break the chains of twenty millions of slaves and serfs. Even Moorish slavery in Northern Africa in large part passed away. Mohammedan,( 4) Brahmin, and Buddhist had no sanction for human slavery.
England heard the warning cry just in time to save the kingdom from the impending common destiny of slave nations.
It was not, however, until 1772, that Lord Mansfield, from the Court of the King's Bench of Great Britain, announced that no slave could be held under the English Constitution. This decision was of binding force in her American colonies when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, and the "Liberty Bell" proclaimed "_Liberty throughout all the land to all the inhabitants thereof_."
The argument that the institution of slavery was sanctified by age ceased, long since, to be satisfying to those who learned justice and mercy in the light of Christian love, and who could read, not only that human slavery had existed from the earliest times, but that it had existed without right, only by the power of might, not sanctioned by reason and natural justice, and that in its train a myriad of coincident evils, crimes, and immoralities had taken birth and flourished, blasting both master and slave and the land they inhabited, and that God's just and retributive judgment has universally been visited on all nations and peoples continuing to maintain and perpetuate it.
Murder has existed in the world since Cain and Abel met by the altar of God, yet no sane person for that reason justifies it. So slavery has stalked down the long line of centuries, cursing and destroying millions with its damning power, but time has not sanctioned it into a right. The longer it existed the more foul became the blot upon history's pages, and the deeper the damnation upon humanity it wrought.
When all the civilized nations of Europe, as well as the nations and even tribes of Asia, had either abolished slavery and taken steps effectually to do so, it remained for the _United States_ to stand alone upholding it in its direst form.
The nations of the ancient world either shook off slavery in attempts to wash away its bloody stain, or slavery wiped them from the powers of the earth. So of the more modern nations.
Our Republic, boastful of its free institutions, of its constitutional liberty, of its free schools and churches, of its glories in the cause of humanity, its patriotism, resplendent history, inventive genius, wealth, industry, civilization, and Christianity, maintained slavery until it was only saved from its common doom of slave nations by the atoning sacrifice of its best blood and the mercy of an offended God.
More than two centuries (1562) before Lord Mansfield judicially announced _freedom_ to be the universal law of England, Sir John Hawkins acquired the infamous distinction of being the first Englishman to embark in the slave trade, and the depravity of public sentiment in England then approved his action. He then seized, on the African coast, and transported a large cargo of negroes to Hispaniola and bartered them for sugar, ginger, and pearls, at great profit.( 5) Here commenced a traffic in human beings by English-speaking people (scarcely yet ceased) that involved murder, arson, theft, and all the cruelty and crimes incident to the capture, transportation, and subjection of human beings to the lust, avarice, and power of man.
Sir John Hawkins' success coming to the notice of the avaricious and ambitious Queen Elizabeth, she, five years later (1567), became the open protector of a new expedition and sharer in the nefarious traffic, thus becoming a promoter, abettor, and participant in all its crimes.
To the "African Company," for a long period, was granted by England a monopoly of the slave trade, but it could not be confined to this company. In 1698, England exacted a tariff on the slave cargoes of her subjects engaged in the trade.
From 1680 to 1700, by convention with Spain, the English, it is estimated, stole from Africa 300,000 negroes to supply the Spanish West Indies with slaves. By the treaty of Utrecht (1713) Spain granted to England, during thirty years, the absolute monopoly of supplying slaves to the Spanish colonies. By this treaty England agreed to take to the West Indies not less than 144,000 negroes, or 4800 each year; and, to guard against scandal to the Roman Catholic religion, heretical slave-traders were forbidden. This monopoly was granted by England to the "South Sea Company."
England did not confine her trade to the West Indies. In 1750, it was shown in the English Parliament that 46,000 negroes were annually sold to English colonies.( 6)
As early as 1565, Sir John Hawthorne and Menendez imported negroes as slaves into Florida, then a Spanish possession, and with Spain's sanction many were carried into the West Indies and sold into slavery.
( 1) Epistle to Philemon.
( 2) The references to the Bible are taken from the most learned advocates of the divinity of slavery, in its last years. _Ought American Slavery to be Perpetuated?_ (Brownlow and Pryne debate), p. 78, etc. _Slavery Ordained of God_ (Ross), 146, etc., 176, etc.
Rev. Frederick A. Ross, D. D. (the author), a celebrated Presbyterian minister, was arrested in 1862 at Huntsville, Alabama, while it was occupied by the Union forces, for praying from the pulpit for the success of secession.
Parson Brownlow was a Union man in 1861, was much persecuted at his home in Knoxville, Tenn., later advocated emancipation.
( 3) It is interesting to note that more than fifteen hundred years (twelfth century) after Alexander's conquests, Saladin, the great Sultan, and other Mohammedan rulers, and Richard Coeur de Lion, and other crusade leaders in Syria, respectively, doomed their captives to slavery, regardless of nationality or color.-- _Saladin_ (Heroes of Nations, Putnams), 229-232, 338.
( 4) Slavery and the slave trade, in spite of the teachings of the Koran, grew up in Mohammedan countries. The traffic in slaves, however, had been frequently proclaimed against by the Ottoman Porte.
( 5) But the first trace of negro slavery in America came in 1502, only ten years after its discovery, through a decree of Ferdinand and Isabella permitting negro slaves born in Spain, descendants of natives brought from Guinea, to be transported to Hispaniola.-- _Life of Columbus_, by Irving (Putnams), p. 275.
( 6) _History for Ready Reference_, vol. iv., p. 2923.
II INTRODUCTION OF SLAVERY INTO THE COLONIES
In August, 1619, a Dutch man-of-war sailed up the James River in Virginia, landed and sold to the colony at Jamestown _twenty_ negroes as slaves. This event marked the beginning of negro slavery in English-American colonies. Two centuries and a half did not suffice to put an end the Ethiopian slavery and the evils of a traffic begun on so small a scale.
One year later (1620) the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock, bringing with them stern religious convictions and severe morals which soon ripened into written laws and were likewise woven into social, political, and religious life, the resultant effect of which, on human existence in America, is never to end. One year later still, cotton was first planted in the virgin soil of America, where it grew to perfection, and thenceforth becoming the staple production, made slavery and slave-breeding profitable to the slaveholder.( 7)
The earliest importation of negro slaves into New England was to Providence Isle in the shp _Desire_ (1637).
From Boston, Mass. (1645), the first American ship from the colonies set sail to engage in the stealing of African negroes. Massachusetts then held, under sanction of law, a few blacks and Indians in bondage.( 8) But slavery did not flourish in New England. It was neither profitable nor in consonance with the judgment of the people generally. The General Court of Massachusetts, as early as 1646, "bearing witness against the heinous crimes of man-stealing, ordered the recently imported negroes to be restored, at the public charge, to their native country, with a _letter_ expressing the indignation of the General Court." Unfortunately, persons guilty of stealing men could not be tried for crimes committed in foreign lands.
But the African slave trade, early found to be extremely profitable, and hence popular, did not cease. England, then as now, the most enterprising of commercial nations on the high seas, engrossed the trade, in large part, from 1680 to 1780. In 1711, there was established a slave depot in New York City on or near what is now Wall Street; and about the same time a depot was established for receiving slaves in Boston, near where the old Franklin House stood. From New England ships, and perhaps from others, negroes were landed and sent to these and other central slave markets.
But few of these freshly stolen negroes were sold to Northern slaveholders. Slave labor was not even then found profitable in the climate of the North. The bondsman went to a more southern clime, and to the cotton, rice, and tobacco fields of the large plantations of the South.
As late as 1804-7, negroes from the coast of Africa were brought to Boston, Bristol, Providence, and Hartford to be sold into slavery.
Shipowners of all the coast colonies, and later of all the coast States of the United States, engaged in the slave trade.
But it was among the planters of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas that slaves proved to be most profitable. The people in these sections were principally rural; plantations were large, not subject to be broken up by frequent partition, if at all. The crops raised were better suited to cultivation by slaves in large numbers; and the hot climate was better adapted to the physical nature of the African negro.
The first inhabitants of the South preferred a rural life, and on large plantations. The Crown grants to early proprietors favored this, especially in the Virginia and Carolina colonies. The Puritans did not love or foster slavery as did the Cavalier of the South. Castes or classes existed among the Southern settlers from the beginning, which, with other favoring causes, made it easier for slavery to take root and prosper, and ultimately fasten itself upon and become a dominating factor in the whole social and political fabric of the South. Slavery there soon came to be considered of paramount importance in securing a high social status or a high, so-called, civilization.
But we have, by this brief _résumé_, sufficiently shown that the responsibility for the introduction and maintenance of slavery and the slave trade does not rest exclusively on any of our early colonies, North or South, nor on any one race or nationality of the world; it remains now to show, in a summary way, how slavery and the slave trade were treated and regarded by the different sections of the United States after allegiance to England was thrown off.
While slavery died out from local and natural causes, if not wholly for moral, social, and religious reasons, in the States north of Maryland, it flourished and ripened into strength and importance in States south, casting a controlling influence and power over the whole of the United States socially, and for the most part dominating the country politically. The greatest statesmen and brightest intellects of the North, though convinced of the evils of slavery and of its fatal tendencies, were generally too cowardly to attack it politically, although but about one fifth of the whole white population of the slave states in 1860, or perhaps at any time, was, through family relationship, or otherwise, directly or indirectly interested in slaves or slave labor.
Old political parties were in time disrupted, and new ones were formed on slavery issues.
The slavery question rent in twain the Methodist Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. The followers of Wesley and Calvin divided on slavery. It was always essentially an aristocratic institution, and hence calculated to benefit only a few of the great mass of freemen.
In 1860, there was in the fifteen slave States a white population of 8,039,000 and a slave population of 3,953,696. Of the white population only 384,884 were slaveholders, and, including their families, only about 1,600,000 were directly or indirectly interested in slaves or their labor. About 6,400,000 (80 per cent.) of the whites in these States had, therefore, no interest in the institution, and yet they were wholly subordinated to the few who were interested in it.
Curiously enough, slavery continued to exist, until a comparatively recent period, in many of the States that had early declared it abolished. The States formed out of the territory "Northwest of the River Ohio" cannot be said to have ever been slave States. The sixth section of the Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery forever therein. The slaves reported in such States were only there by tolerance. They were free of right. The Constitution of Illinois, as we shall presently see, did not at first abolish slavery; only prohibited the introduction of slaves.
The rebellion of the thirteen colonies in 1776 and the war for independence did not grow out of slavery; that war was waged neither to perpetuate nor to abolish it. The Puritan and Cavalier, the opponents and the advocates of slavery and the slave trade, alike, fought for independence, and, when successful, united in the purpose to foster and build up an American Republic, based on the sovereignty of individual citizenship, but ignoring the natural rights of the enslaved negro.
The following table, compiled from the United States Census Reports, may be of interest.
It shows the number of slaves reported in each State and Territory of the United States at each Federal census.( 9)
_North_ 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 Cal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conn. . . . 2,759 951 310 97 25 17 . . . . . . Ills. . . . . . . . . . 168 917 747 331 . . . . . . Ind. . . . . . . 135 237 190 3 3 . . . . . . Iowa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 . . . . . . Kansas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Maine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . . . . . . . . . Mass. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 . . . . . . . . . Mich. . . . . . . . . . 24 . . . 32 . . . . . . . . . Minn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Neb. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 N. H. . . . 158 8 . . . . . . 3 1 . . . . . . N. J. . . . 11,423 12,422 10,851 7,557 2,254 674 236 18 N. Y. . . . 21,324 20,343 15,017 10,088 75 4 . . . . . . Ohio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3 . . . . . . Oregon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Penn. . . . 3,737 1,706 796 211 403 64 . . . . . . R. I. . . . 952 381 108 48 17 5 . . . . . . Utah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 29 Vermont . . 17 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 . . . . . . ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ Totals . 40,370 35,646 27,510 19,108 3,568 1,129 262 64
/South/ 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 D. C. . . . . . . . . . 3,244 5,395 6,377 6,119 4,694 3,687 3,185 Ala. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41,879 117,549 253,532 342,844 435,080 Ark. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,617 5,476 19,935 47,100 111,115 Del. . . . . . . 8,887 6,153 4,177 4,509 3,292 2,605 2,290 1,798 Florida . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16,501 25,717 39,310 61,745 Ga. . . . . . . 29,264 59,404 105,218 149,654 217,531 280,944 381,682 462,198 Ky. . . . . . . 11,830 40,434 80,561 126,732 165,213 182,258 210,981 225,483 La. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34,660 69,064 109,588 168,452 244,809 331,726 Md. . . . . . . 103,036 105,635 111,502 107,397 102,994 89,737 90,368 87,189 Miss. . . . . . . . . . 3,489 17,088 32,814 65,659 195,211 309,878 436,631 Mo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,011 10,222 25,091 58,240 87,422 114,931 N. C. . . . . . 100,572 133,296 168,824 205,017 245,601 245,817 288,548 331,059 S. C. . . . . . 107,094 146,151 196,365 258,475 315,401 327,088 384,984 402,406 Tenn. . . . . . 3,417 13,584 44,535 80,107 141,603 183,059 239,459 275,719 Tex. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58,161 182,566 Va. . . . . . . 293,427 345,796 392,518 425,153 469,757 449,087 472,528 490,865 ------- ------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- Totals . . . . 657,527 857,095 1,163,854 1,519,017 2,005,475 2,486,326 3,204,051 3,953,696 ------- ------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- Grand totals . 697,897 892,741 1,191,364 1,538,125 2,009,043 2,487,455 3,204,313 3,953,760
( 7) It is curious to note that 1621 dates the first bringing into Virginia and America bee-hives for the production of honey.
( 8) The following letter of Cotton Mather will show the Puritan's intolerance of Wm. Penn and his Society of Friends, and the prevailing opinion in his time on slavery and the slave trade.
"Boston, Massachusetts, September, 3, 1681. "To ye Aged and Beloved John Higginson: There be now at sea a skipper (for our friend Esaias Holderoft of London did advise me by the last packet that it would sail sometime in August) called ye _Welcome_ (R. Green was master), which has aboard a hundred or more of ye heretics and malignants called Quakers, with W. Penn, who is ye scamp at ye head of them.
"Ye General court has accordingly given secret orders to master Malachi Huxtell of ye brig _Porpoise_ to waylaye ye said _Welcome_ as near ye coast of Codd as may be, and make captives of ye Penn and his ungodly crew, so that ye Lord may be glorified, and not mocked on ye soil of this new country with ye heathen worshippe of these people. Much spoil can be made by selling ye whole lot to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rumme and sugar. We shall not only do ye Lord great service by punishing the Wicked, but shall make gayne for his ministers and people. Yours in the bowels of Christ,
"Cotton Mather."
( 9) Slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia by law of Congress, passed April 16, 1862.
President Lincoln's proclamation of January 1, 1863, emancipated all slaves in the seceded States (save in Tennessee and in parts of Louisiana and Virginia excepted therefrom) to the number of 3,063,395; those remaining were freed by the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, December 18, 1865.
III DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
The Declaration of Independence, though accepted at once and to be regarded through all time by the liberty-loving world as the best and boldest declaration in favor of human rights, and the most pronounced protest against oppression of the human race, is totally silent as to the rights of the slaves in the colonies. It is true that Jefferson in his draft of this instrument, in the articles of indictment against King George III., used this language:
"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in the transportation thither, . . . determined to keep open a market where white men should be bought and sold; he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce."
To conciliate Georgia and South Carolina, this part of the indictment was struck out. These colonies had never sought to restrain, but had always fostered the slave trade. Jefferson, in his _Autobiography_ (vol. i, p. 19), suggests that other sections sympathized with Georgia and South Carolina in this matter.
"Our Northern brethren . . . felt a little tender under these censures: for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been considerable carriers of them to others."
Jefferson said King George preferred the advantage:
"of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American States and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice."(10)
While it is not true, as has often been claimed, that England is solely responsible for the introduction of slavery into her American colonies, it is true that her King and Parliament opposed almost every attempt to prohibit it or to restrict the importation of slaves. Colonial legislative enactments of Virginia and other colonies directed against slavery were vetoed by the King or by his command by his royal governors. Such governors were early forbidden to give their assent to any measure restricting slavery in the American colonies, and this policy was pursued until the colonies became independent.(11)
The treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States, signed at Paris, September 3, 1783, contained a stipulation that Great Britain should withdraw her armies from the United States "with all convenient speed, and without causing any destruction, or _carrying_ away any _negroes or other property_ of the American inhabitants." Both governments thus openly recognized, not only the existence of slavery in the United States, but that slaves were merely _property_.
While slavery was deeply seated in the colonies and had many advocates, including noted divines, who preached the "divinity of slavery," there were, in 1776, and earlier, many great men, South as well as North, who looked confidently to an early emancipation of slaves, and who were then active in suppressing the African slave trade, among whom were Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and the two Adamses.
Washington presided at a "Fairfax County Convention," before the Revolution. It resolved that "no slaves ought to be imported into any of the British colonies"; and Washington himself expressed "the most earnest wish to see an entire stop forever put to such a wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade."(12)
John Wesley, when fully acquainted with American slavery and the slave trade, pronounced the latter as "_the execrable sum of all villanies_," and he inveighed against the former as the wickedest of human practices.
The Continental Congress of 1776 resolved, "that no slaves be imported into any of the thirteen United Colonies."
There had then been imported by the cruel traffic above 300,000 blacks, bought or stolen from the African shore; and the blacks then constituted twenty per cent. of the total population, a greater per centum than at any time since.
During the century previous to 1776, English and colonial slavers had carried into the West Indies and to English colonies nearly 3,000,000 negroes; and it is estimated that a quarter of a million more died of cruel treatment on shipboard, and their bodies were cast into the sea.
The words of the Declaration: "We hold these truths to be self- evident: That _all men are created equal;_ that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are _life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,_" were not accepted in fact as a charter of freedom for the enslaved African, but it remained for a Chief-Justice of the United States (Taney) more than eighty years later (March 5, 1857), in the Dred Scott decision, that did so much (as we will hereafter show) to disrupt the Union, to say:
"The language used in the Declaration of Independence shows that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used."
And the Chief-Justice said further:
"They [the negroes] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."
Quoting the Declaration, "_that all men are created equal_," he continued:
"The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood. But it is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this Declaration."
Notwithstanding this interpretation of the Declaration, free negroes fought for American independence at Bunker Hill; and although later it was decided that colored men should not be accepted as enlisted soldiers, General Washington did accept them, and thereafter they served in his army to the end of the war,(13) notably in large numbers at Yorktown.
The Royal Governor of Virginia in vain tried to induce slaves to revolt against their masters by promising them their freedom.
During Lord Howe's march through Pennsylvania it is said the slaves prayed for his success, believing he would set them free.
The British Parliament discussed a measure to set the slaves in the colonies free with a view to weaken their masters' ardor for freedom. In Rhode Island slaves were, by law, set free on condition that they enlisted in the army for the war.
(10) Parton's _Life of Jefferson_, p. 138.
(11) _History Ready Reference_, etc., vol. iv., p. 2923.
(12) Sparks's _Life of Washington_, vol. ii., p. 494.
(13) Bancroft, _History of the United States_, vol. iv., 223,322.
IV CONTINENTAL CONGRESS--ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION 1774-1789
The Continental Congress, which assembled for the first time, September 5, 1774, at Carpenters' Hall, Philadelphia, assumed few powers, and its proceedings were, until the adoption by it of the Declaration of Independence, little more than protests against British oppression. Nor was any central government formed on the adoption of the Declaration. That Congress continued, by common agreement, to direct affairs, though, in the beginning, possessing no delegated political or governmental powers.
Slavery existed in the colonies or States prior to the Declaration by the connivance of British colonial authorities without the sanction of and against English law; and after the Declaration, by mere toleration as an existing domestic institution, not even by virtue of express colonial or State authority.
In 1772 Lord Mansfield, from the Court of the King's Bench, announced that slavery could not exist under the English Constitution.
The Articles of Confederation did nothing more than formulate, in a weak way, a government for the United States, solely through a Congress to which was delegated little political power. This Congress continued to govern (if government it could be called) until the Constitution went into effect, March 4, 1789.
The "_Articles of Confederation_," adopted (July 9, 1778) by the Continental Congress of the thirteen original States in the midst of the Revolution, were substantially silent on slavery. They constituted in all respects a weak and impotent instrument. But they recognized the existence of slavery by speaking of _free_ citizens (Art. 4).
They provided for a "Confederation and perpetual Union" between the thirteen States, but provided no power to raise revenue, levy taxes, or enforce law, save with the consent of nine of the States. The government created had power to contract debts, but no power to pay them; it could levy war, raise armies and navies, but it could not raise revenue to sustain them; it could make treaties, but could not compel their observance by the States; it could make laws, but could not enforce them.
Washington said of it:
"The Confederation appears to be little more than a shadow without the substance, and Congress a nugatory body."
Chief-Justice Story said:
"There was an utter want of all coercive authority to carry into effect its own constitutional measures."
The Articles were, professedly, not in the interest of the whole people.
They provided only for a "_league_" of states, guaranteeing to each state-rights in all things.
Art. IV. runs thus:
"The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different States of this Union, the _free_ inhabitants of each of these States, _paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted_, shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of _free_ citizens in the several States," etc.
What a classification of persons for exception from the privileges of government!
_Free_ negroes were not of the excepted class. Nor were criminals, unless they became fugitives from justice.
For ten years the new Republic existed under these Articles by the tolerance of a people bound together by the spirit of liberty and the cohesion of patriotism.
The Articles created no status for slavery, nor did they interfere with it in the States. They made no provision for a fugitive-slave law, if, indeed, such a law was dreamed of until after the Constitution went into effect.
The Articles of Confederation provided no executive head, no supreme judiciary, and they provided for no perfect legislative body, organized on the principle of checks and restraints, possessed of true republican representation. Congress--the sole governing power --was composed of one body, each State sending not less than two or more than seven representatives. The voting in this body was done by States, each State having one vote.
It therefore soon became necessary to frame and adopt a new organic act, supplementing the many deficiencies of these Articles.
V ORDINANCE OF 1787
The memorable Congress of 1776 was willing to do much to the end that slavery might be restricted, hence, as we have seen, it resolved "_that no slaves be imported into any of the thirteen United Colonies_."
Had it been possible thus early to stop effectually the slave trade, and to prevent the extension of slavery to new territory, slavery would have died out. Jefferson sought, shortly after the treaty of peace, to prohibit slavery extension, and to this end he prepared and reported an Ordinance (1784) prohibiting slavery _after the year 1800_ in all the territory then belonging to the United States above the parallel of 31° North latitude, which included what became the principal parts of the slave States of Alabama and Mississippi, all of Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as the whole Northwest Territory. In 1784 the United States owned no territory south of 31° North latitude.
This Ordinance of freedom was lost by a single vote. Had that one vote been reversed, what a "hell of agony" would have been closed, and what a sea of blood would have been saved! Slavery would have died in the hands of its friends and the new Republic would have soon been free in _fact_ as well as name.
Jefferson, though himself a slaveholder, was desperately in earnest in advocacy of this Ordinance, and, speaking of its prohibitory slave-clause two years later, he wrote:
"The voice of a single individual would have prevented that abominable crime. Heaven will not always be silent; the friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail."(14)
The most important victory for freedom in the civil history of the United States (until the Rebellion of 1861) was the Ordinance of 1787, reported by Nathan Dane,(15) of Massachusetts, as a substitute for the defeated one just referred to, but differing from it in two important respects:
(1) It applied only to the territory northwest of the River Ohio recently (March 1, 1784) ceded to the United States by Virginia;
(2) It prohibited slavery at once and forever therein. Its sixth section is in these words:
"There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."
But it has been, with much force, claimed by those who denied the binding character of this Ordinance, that as it was an act of the old Congress under the Articles of Confederation, and established a territorial form of government, not in all respects in conformity with the Constitution, it was necessarily superseded by it.
This view was general on the meeting of the First Congress (1789) under the Constitution, but the Ordinance, so dear to the hearts of Jefferson and other lovers of liberty, was early attended to.
On August 7, 1789, the eighth act of the First Congress, embodying a long explanatory and declaratory preamble, was passed, and approved by President Washington. This act in effect re-enacted the Ordinance of 1787, adapting and applying it, however, to the Constitution by requiring the Governor of the Northwest Territory to report and become responsible to the President of the United States, instead of to Congress as originally provided.(16)
The territory which the ordinance governed was in area 260,000 square miles, and included what is now the great states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, with, in 1890, 13,471,840 inhabitants.
The Ordinance is a model of perfection. It was the only great act of legislation under the Articles of Confederation. There is evidence that, as some members of the Congress that enacted the Ordinance were at the same time members of the Convention that framed the Constitution,(17) there was much intercommunication of views between the members of the two bodies, especially on the slavery clause of the Ordinance. It is probable that the clause of the Constitution respecting the rendition of slaves, as well as other provisions, was copied from the Ordinance.(18)
Upon the surpassing excellence of this Ordinance, no language of panegyric would be extravagant.
It is a matchless specimen of sagacious forecast. It provides for the descent of property, for the appointment of territorial officers, and for extending the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty by securing religious freedom in the inhabitants. It prohibits legislative interference with private contracts, secures the benefit of the writ of _habeas corpus_, trial by jury, and of the common law in judicial proceedings: it forbids the infliction of cruel or unusual punishments, and enjoins the encouragement of schools and the means of education.
The Ordinance has not only stood, unaltered, as the charter of government for the Northwest Territory, but its clause respecting slavery was incorporated into most of the acts passed prior to the Rebellion providing for territorial governments.
Historically, it will stand as the great _Magna Charta_, which, by the prescient wisdom of our fathers, dedicated in advance of the coming civilization the fertile and beautiful Northwest, with all its possibilities, for all time, to freedom, education, and liberty of conscience.
Frequent efforts to rescind or suspend the clause restricting slavery were made, especially after Indiana Territory was formed in 1800.
At the adoption of the Ordinance some slaves were held in what is now Indiana and Illinois by immigrants from Southern States. Slavery also existed at the Vincennes, Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and other French settlements, where it had been planted under the authority of the King of France while the territory was a part of the French possessions. The Government of Great Britain authorized the continuance of slavery when the territory was under its jurisdiction. Indians as well as black men were held as slaves in the French settlements.(19)
Immigrants and old inhabitants favorable to slavery united in memorials to Congress asking a suspension of the article prohibiting slavery. The first of these was reported on adversely by a committee of Congress, May 12, 1796. Governor William Henry Harrison, December, 1802, presided, at Vincennes, over a meeting of citizens of the Indiana Territory, at which it was resolved to make an effort to secure a suspension of this article. A memorial was drawn up, which Governor Harrison, with a letter of his own favoring it, forwarded to Congress. They were referred to a special committee, of which John Randolph, of Virginia, was chairman.
He, March 2, 1803, reported:
"That it is inexpedient to suspend, even for a limited time, the operation of the sixth article of the compact between the original States and the people and States west of the river Ohio."
Adding, by way of reason, that:
"The rapid population of the State of Ohio sufficiently evinces, in the opinion of your committee, that the labor of slaves is not necessary to promote the growth and settlement of the colonies in that region."
This did not end the effort to secure slavery in the Indiana Territory. In March, 1804, a special committee of Congress reported in favor of the suspension of the inhibition for ten years; a similar report was made in 1806 by Mr. Garnett, of Virginia; and in 1807 Mr. Parker, delegate from Indiana, reported favorably on a memorial of Governor Harrison and the Territorial Legislature, praying for a suspension of that part of the Ordinance relating to slavery. These reports were not acted on in the House. Subsequently, Governor Harrison and his Legislature appealed to the Senate and a special committee to suspend the article, but when the committee reported adversely, all efforts to break down the legal barrier to slavery in the Northwest Territory ceased.(20)
But notwithstanding the mandatory terms of the Ordinance, and the repeated failures in Congress to suspend the provision relating to slavery, it existed in the Northwest throughout its territorial existence and in the State of Illinois until 1844.(21) The early slaveholding inhabitants well understood the Ordinance to mean the absolute emancipation of their slaves, and hence manumitted them or commenced to remove them to the Spanish territory beyond the Mississippi. Some few of the inhabitants complained to Governor St. Clair that the inhibition against slavery retarded the growth of the Territory. He volunteered the opinion that the Ordinance was not retroactive; that it did not apply to existing conditions; that it was "a declaration of a principle which was to govern the Legislature in all acts respecting that matter (slavery) and the courts of justice in their decisions in cases arising after the date of the Ordinance"; and that if Congress had intended the immediate emancipation of slaves, compensation would have been provided for to their owners. But he admitted Congress "had the right to determine that _property_ of that kind afterwards acquired should not be protected in future, and that slaves imported into the Territory after that declaration might reclaim their freedom."(22) This unfortunate opinion operated to continue slavery in the Territory, and fostered the idea that the sixth article might be annulled and slavery be made perpetual in the Territory. Governor St. Clair was President of the Congress when the Ordinance was passed, and his opinion in relation to it was therefore given much weight.
By Act of Congress, passed May 7, 1800, what is now the State of Ohio became the Territory of Ohio, and that part of the Northwest Territory lying west and north of Ohio was erected into the Territory of Indiana; by like Acts, January 11, 1805, the Territory of Michigan was formed, and February 3, 1809, all that part lying west of Indiana and Lake Michigan became the Territory of Illinois. Prior, however, to the last Act, the Legislature of Indiana Territory (September 17, 1807) passed an act "to encourage emigration," making it lawful to bring negroes and mulattoes into the Territory, "owing service or labor as slaves."
The act provided that these people and their children should be held for a term of years, and if they refused to serve as slaves they might be removed, "within sixty days thereafter," to any place where they could be lawfully held. This statute was substantially re-enacted by the Legislature of the Territory of Illinois in 1812.
The first Constitution (1818) of Illinois did not prohibit slavery. The first section of Article VI, declared that: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude _shall hereafter be introduced_ into this State, otherwise than for the punishment of crimes." Slavery existed in Illinois after it became a State. The French and Canadian inhabitants or their descendants continued to hold colored and Indian slaves, and others were held under the Territorial Acts of 1807 and 1812. The old slaves and their descendants, held at the time of the cession by Virginia to the United States, were sold from hand to hand in the State, and transported to and sold in other slave States.(23)
The Constitution of Indiana (1816) prohibited slavery, but slaves were held therein until its Supreme Court in 1820, in a _habeas corpus_ case, held the Constitution freed all persons hitherto held in bondage, including the old French slaves, regardless of the Ordinance of 1787, of the deed of cession of Virginia, or of any treaty stipulations.(24)
After the separation (1805) of Michigan from Indiana, the former's Territorial Chief Justice held slavery existed in Michigan by virtue of the Jay treaty (1796) with Great Britain (not otherwise) notwithstanding the Ordinance of 1787,(25) but Michigan's Constitution (1837) put an end to slavery in the State, as did also the Constitution (1802) of Ohio, likewise the Constitution (1848) of Wisconsin. Slaves shown by census reports in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin after they became States, were there by tolerance, not by legal right.
Whatever contrariety of views obtained, and regardless of the conflicting opinions of the courts or judges as to the effect of the great Ordinance on the condition of the slaves in the Northwestern Territory, certain it is that the Ordinance operated to prevent, after its date, the legal importation of slaves into the Territory, and hence resulted in each of the States formed therefrom becoming free States. In the light of history it seems certain that at least Indiana and Illinois would have become slave States but for the Ordinance.(26)
This Ordinance contained a clause requiring the rendition of fugitives from "service or labor," and being applicable to only a part of the Territory of the United States, partook of the nature of a compromise on the slavery question,(27) and was the first of a series of compromises, some of which are found in the Federal Constitution, others in the Act of 1820 admitting Missouri as a State, and also the Compromise Measures of 1850, in which Clay, Webster, Calhoun, Seward, and others of the great statesmen of the Union participated, all of which were, however, ruthlessly overthrown by the Nebraska Act (1854), of which Douglas, of Illinois, was the author.
The slavery-restriction section of the Ordinance was copied into and became a part of the Act of 1848 organizing the Territory of Oregon, the champions of slavery, then in Congress, voting therefor; and three years after the enactment of the Compromise Measures of 1850, this provision of the Ordinance was again extended over the newly organized Territory of Washington by the concurrent votes of substantially the same persons who voted, a year later, that all such legislation was unconstitutional.
But neither origin, age, nor precedent then sanctified anything in the interest of freedom,--slavery only could appeal to such things for justification. The propagators of human slavery were on the track of this Ordinance; they overtook and overthrew it by Congressional legislation in 1854; then by the Dred Scott decision of 1857, as we shall soon see. But it reappeared in principle, in 1862, as we shall also see, and spread its wings of universal liberty (as was its great author's purpose in 1784) over all the territory belonging to the United States, to remain irrepealable through time, immortalized by the approval of President Lincoln, and endorsed by the just judgment of enlightened mankind.
Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia each held territory not subject to the Ordinance of 1787.
North Carolina (December, 1789), in ceding her territory west of her present limits, provided that:
"No regulations made or to be made by Congress shall tend to emancipate slaves."
Thus Tennessee became a slave State.
A year later (1790) Virginia consented to relinquish her remaining territory; as Kentucky it was (June 1, 1792) admitted into the Union and became a slave State, without ever having a separate territorial organization.
Georgia, in 1802, ceded the territory on her west to the United States, and provided that the Ordinance of 1787 should extend to the ceded territory, "the article only excepted which forbids slavery." Thus, later, Alabama and Mississippi each became a slave State.(28)
(14) Jefferson's _Works_, vol. ix., 276.
(15) The authorship of the admirably-drawn Ordinance has been much in dispute. Thomas H. Benton, Gov. Edward Coles, and others attribute the authorship to Jefferson; Daniel Webster and others to Nathan Dane, while a son of Rufus King claimed him to be the author of the article prohibiting slavery. Wm. Frederick Poole, in a contribution to the _North American Review_, gives much of the credit of authorship to Mr. Dane, but the chief credit for the formation and the entire credit for the passage of the Ordinance to Dr. Manasseh Cutler, _St. Clair Papers_, vol. i, p. 122.
(16) On the continuing binding force of the Ordinance on States formed out of the Northwest Territory there has been some contrariety of opinion. In Ohio it was early held the Ordinance was more obligatory than the State Constitution, which might be amended by the people of the State, whereas the Ordinance could not. (5 _Ohio_, 410, 416.) But see: 10 Howard (_U. S._), 82, and 3 Howard, 589.
(17) Madison of Virginia, Rufus King of New York, Johnson of Connecticut, Blount and Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, and Few of Georgia were members of both bodies.--_Historical Ex._, etc., Dred Scott Case (Benton), p. 37 _n_.
The Ordinance was adopted July 13, 1787; the Constitution was adopted by the Convention September 17, 1787.
(18) _St. Clair Papers_, vol. i, p. 134.
(19) Dunn's _Indiana_, p. 126.
(20) _St. Clair Papers_, vol. i, pp 120-1, note. _Historical Ex_., etc., Dred Scott Case, pp. 32-47, etc. _Political Text Book_, 1860 (McPherson), pp. 53-4.
(21) Not until 1844 did the highest court of Illinois decide (four to three) that a colored man, held as a slave by a descendant of an old French family, was free. Jarrot case (2 Gillman), 7 _Ill._, 1.
(22) _St. Clair Papers_, vol. i., pp. 120, 206, and vol. ii, pp. 117-119, 318, 331.
(23) Much valuable information in relation to the legal history of slavery in the Northwest has been obtained from the manuscript of "An Unwritten Chapter of Illinois," by ex-U. S. Judge Blodgett, of Chicago.
(24) State _vs_. Lasselle, 1 _Blatchford_, 60.
(25) Cooley's _Michigan_, pp. 136-7.
(26) For an exhaustive legal history of the slavery restriction clause of the Ordinance and its effect on slavery in the Northwest Territory, see Dunn's _Indiana_, pp. 219-260.
(27) _St. Clair Papers_, vol. i., p. 122, note.
(28) _Political Text-Book_, 1860 (McPherson), p. 53.
VI CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES
The Convention to frame the Constitution met in Philadelphia (1787). George Washington was its President; it was composed of the leading statesmen of the new nation, sitting in a delegate capacity, but in voting on measures the rule of the then Congress was observed, which was to vote by States.
The majority of the thirteen States were then slave States, and all, save Massachusetts, still held slaves; and all the coast States indulged in the African slave trade.
Massachusetts provided for the abolition of slavery in 1780 by constitutional provision declaring that:
"All men are born _free and equal_, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights," etc., by which declaration its highest judicial tribunal struck the shackles at once from every slave in the Commonwealth.
Connecticut provided in 1784 for freeing her slaves.
New Hampshire did not prohibit slavery by express law, but all persons born after her Constitution of 1776 were free; and slave importation was thereafter prohibited.
Pennsylvania, in 1780, by law provided for the gradual emancipation of slaves within her territory. To her German population and the Society of Friends the credit is mainly due for this act of justice. This Society had theretofore (1774) disowned, in its "yearly Meeting," all its members who trafficked in slaves; and later (1776) it resolved:
"That the owners of slaves, who refused to execute proper instruments for giving them their freedom, were to be disowned likewise."
New York adopted gradual emancipation in 1799, but final emancipation did not come until 1827.
Rhode Island, in the first year of the First Continental Congress (1774), enacted:
"That for the future no negro or mulatto slave shall be brought into the colony . . . and that all previously enslaved persons on becoming residents of Rhode Island should obtain their freedom."
New Jersey in 1778, through Governor Livingstone, made an attempt at emancipation which failed; it was not until 1804 that she prohibited slavery in what proved a qualified way, and it seems she held slaves at each census, including that of 1860, and possibly in some form human slavery was abolished there by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
The census of 1790 showed slaves in all the original States save Massachusetts alone; Vermont was admitted into the Union in 1790; her Constitution prohibited slavery, but she returned at that census seventeen slaves.
The first census under the Constitution, however, showed, in the Northern States, 40,370 slaves, and in the Southern States, 657,572; there being in Virginia alone 293,427, nearly one half of all.
The Convention closed its work September 17, 1787, and on the same date George Washington, its President, by letter submitted the "Constitution to the consideration of the United States in Congress assembled," saying:
"It is obviously impracticable in the Federal Government of these States to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each and yet provide for the interest and safety of all. . . . In all our deliberations on this subject we kept steadily in our view that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, _the consolidation of our Union_, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety; perhaps our national existence."
This Constitution by its preamble showed it was, in many things, to supersede and become paramount to State authority. It was to become a _charter of freedom_ for the people collectively, and in some sense individually. Its preamble runs thus:
"We, the _people_ of the United States, in order to form a _more_ perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Nine States were, by its seventh article, necessary to ratify it before it went into effect.
The ratification of the Constitution, on various grounds, was fiercely opposed by many patriotic men, Patrick Henry among the number. Some thought it did not contain sufficient guarantees for individual freedom, others that private rights of property were not adequately secured, and still others that States were curtailed or abridged of their governmental authority and too much power was taken from the people and centered in the Federal Government. Mason, of Virginia, a member of the Convention that framed it, led a party who opposed it on the ground, among others, that it authorized Congress to levy duties on imports and to thus encourage home industries and manufactories, promotive of free labor, inimical and dangerous to human slavery. The best efforts and influence of Washington and other friends of the Constitution would not have been sufficient to secure its ratification had they not placated many of its enemies by promising to adopt, promptly on its going into effect, the amendments numbered one to ten inclusive. (The First Congress, September 25, 1789, submitted those ten amendments according to the agreement, and they were shortly thereafter ratified and became a part of the Constitution.)
By a resolution of the Old Congress, of September 13, 1788, March 4, 1789, was fixed as the time for commencing proceedings under the Constitution. At the date of this resolution eleven of the thirteen States had ratified it. North Carolina ratified it November 21, 1789, and Rhode Island, the last, on May 29, 1790.
Vermont, not of the original thirteen States, ratified the Constitution January 10, 1791, over a month prior to her admission into the Union. This latter event occurred February 18, 1791.
Thus fourteen States became, almost at the same time, members of the Union under the Constitution, and each and all of which then held or had theretofore held slaves.
Notwithstanding all this, there were many of the framers of the Constitution and its warmest friends who sincerely desired to provide for the early abolition of slavery, some by gradual emancipation, others by heroic measures; and there were many from the South who favored emancipation, while by no means all the leading and influential citizens of the Northern States desired it.
It may, however, be assumed, in the light of authentic history, that the majority of the framers of the Constitution, and a majority of its friends in the States, hoped and believed that slavery would not be permanent under it. In this belief it was framed. Slavery was not affirmatively recognized in it, though there was much discussion as to it in the Constitutional Convention. There was no attempt to abolish it; such an attempt would have failed in the Convention, and the Constitution, so necessary to the new nation, had it even provided for gradual emancipation, would not have been ratified by the States.
It can hardly be said that the Constitution was framed on the line of compromise as to the preservation of human slavery, though it was necessary, in some occult ways, to recognize its existence. This was in the nature, however, of a concession to it; the word _slave_ or _slavery_ was not used in it.
The Supreme Court of the United States, however, early interpreted the third clause of Section IV., Article 2, as providing for the return from one State to another of fugitive slaves. This interpretation has been, on high authority, and with much reason, in the light of history, stoutly denied. The clause reads:
"No person _held to service or labor_ in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor is due."
The "service or labor" here referred to, it is claimed, was that owing by persons who were under indentures of some kind, growing out of contracts for transportation into the colonies of persons from the Old World, and possibly growing out of other contract obligations wherein they had agreed, for a long or short term, to perform "service or labor." Many such obligations then existed.
Slaves were not then nor since regarded by their owners as "_persons_" merely "held to service or labor," but they were held as personal chattels, owing no duty to their masters distinguishable from that owing by an ox, a horse, or an ass.
But the supreme judiciary and the executive and legislative departments of the government came soon to treat this as a fugitive- slave clause. It is only now interesting to examine its peculiar phraseology and the history and surrounding circumstances under which it became a part of the Constitution, to demonstrate the great care and desire of the eminent and liberty-loving framers of the Constitution to avoid the direct recognition of African slavery.
The only other clause in which the adherents of slavery claimed it was recognized is paragraph 3, Section 2, Article I., which provided that:
"Representation and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States . . . according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, _three fifths of all other persons_."
The "other persons" referred to here, if only slaves, are very delicately described. But this clause, too, came to be recognized by all the departments of the government as referring to slaves. It is quite sure that if the good and plain men of the Revolutionary period had been dealing with a subject not shocking to their consciences, sense of justice, and humanity, they would have dealt with it in plain words, of direct and not doubtful import.
The clause of the Constitution giving representation in the House of Representative of Congress and in the Electoral College in the choice of President and Vice-President, came soon to be regarded as unjust to the free States. Three fifths of all slaves were counted to give representation to free persons of the South; that is, three fifths of all _slave property_ was counted numerically, and thus, in many Congressional districts, the vote of one slaveholder was more than equal to two votes in a free State. For example, in 1850, the number of free inhabitants in the slave States was 6,412,605, and in the free States, 13,434,686, more than double. The representation in Congress from the slave States was 90 members, from the free States 144. Three fifths of the slaves were 1,920,182, giving the South 20 (a fraction more) members, the ratio of representation then being 93,420. If the 234 representatives had been apportioned equally, according to free inhabitants, the North would have had 159 and the South 75, a gain of fifteen to the free and a loss of that number to the slave States, a gain of 30 to the North.
The same injustice was shown in levying direct taxes. (All this, however, has been changed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.)
The same discriminating language is used (Sec. 9, Art. I.) when obviously referring to the African slave trade. A strong sentiment existed in favor of putting an end at once to the traffic in human being; the Christian consciences of our forefathers revolted at its wickedness, and there was then beginning a general movement throughout the civilized world against it. Some European countries had denounced it as piracy.
It was, however, profitable, and much capital was invested in it, and there was even then an increased demand for slaves in the cotton, rice, and tobacco States.
It was feared so radical a measure as the immediate stoppage of this trade would endanger the Constitution, and as to this, also, it was deemed wise to compromise; so Congress was prohibited from legislating to prevent it prior to the year 1808. This trade was not only then carried on by our own people, but, through ships of other countries, slaves were imported into the United States. Each State was left free to prohibit the importation of slaves within its limits.
We have now referred to all the clauses of the Constitution as originally adopted relating, by construction or possibility, to slavery or slave labor.
The Republic, under this _great charter_, set out upon the career of a nation, properly aspiring to become of the first among the powers of the earth, and succeeding in the higher sense in this ambition, it yet remains to be told how near our Republic came, in time, to the brink of that engulfing chasm which in past ages has swallowed up other nations for their wicked oppression and enslavement of man.
Slavery, thus delicately treated in our Constitution, brought that Republic, in less than three quarters of a century, to the throes of death, as we shall see.
VII CAUSES OF GROWTH OF SLAVERY
It may be well here, before speaking of slavery in its legislative history under the Constitution, to refer briefly to some of the more important causes of its growth and extension, other than political.
First in importance was cotton. It required cheap labor to cultivate it with profit, and even then, at first, it was not profitable. The invention by Whitney of the cotton-gin, in 1793, was the most important single invention up to that time in agriculture, if not the most important of any time, and especially is this true as affecting cotton planters.
Cotton was indigenous to America; the soil and climate of the South were well adapted to its growth. Its culture from the seed was there very easy, but the separation of the seed from the fibre was so slow that it required an average hand one day to secure one pound.
Whitney's cotton-gin, however, at once increased the amount from one to fifty pounds.
This invention came at a most opportune time for slavery in the United States, as the cheapness of rice, indigo, and other staples of the South were such as to prevent their large and profitable production even with the labor of slaves. Cotton was not, in 1794, the date of Jay's treaty with Great Britain, known to him as an article of export. Soon, by the use of the cotton-gin, cotton became the principal article of export from the United States; cotton plantations rapidly increased in size and number, and their owners multiplied their slaves and grew rich. Cotton production increased from 1793 to 1860 one thousand fold.
It is highly probably that Eli Whitney's cotton-gin operated to prevent the much-hoped-for early emancipation of slaves in America, and that thus the inventive genius of man was instrumental in forging the fetters of man.
Other products, such as rice and sugar, were successfully produced in the South, but the demand for them was limited by competition in other countries, in some of which slave labor was employed. The ease of producing cotton stimulated its common use throughout the world, and it soon became a necessary commodity in all civilized countries. "Cotton is king" was the cry of the slaveholder and the exporter. Southern aristocracy rested on it. In the more northern of the slave States, where cotton, on account of the climate, could not be successfully grown, the breeding of slaves with which to supply the cotton planters with the requisite number of hands became a source of great profit; and the slave trade was revived to aid in supplying the same great demand.
Tobacco and some of the cereals were also produced by slave labor, but they could be produced by free labor North as well as South. Of the above 3,000,000 slaves in the United States in 1850, it has been estimated that 1,800,000 were employed in the growth and preservation of cotton alone, and its value that year was $105,600,000, while the sugar product was valued, the same year, at only $12,400,000, and rice at $3,000,000. The total domestic exports for the year ending 1850 were $137,000,000, of which cotton reached $72,000,000, and all breadstuffs and provisions only $26,000,000.(29)
(29) DeBow's _Resource_, etc., vol. iii., p. 388.
VIII FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW--1793
Contemporaneous with the cotton-gin came, in 1793, the first fugitive- slave law.
The Constitution was not self-executing, if it really contained, as we have seen, a clause requiring escaped slaves to be surrendered from one State to their masters in another.
The Governor of the State of Virginia refused the rendition of three kidnappers of a free negro, on the requisition of the Governor of Pennsylvania, from which State he had been kidnapped, on the sole ground that no law required the surrender of fugitive slaves from Virginia. The controversy thus arising was called to the attention of President Washington and by him to Congress, and it ended by the passage of the first fugitive-slave act. It was for a time tolerably satisfactory to the different sections of the country, though in itself the most flagrant attempt to violate state-rights, judged from the more modern secession, state-rights standpoint, ever attempted by Federal authority.
It required _state magistrates_, who owed their offices solely to state law, to sit in judgment in fugitive-slave cases, and to aid in returning to slavery negroes claimed as slaves by masters from foreign States. The act provided for the return of fugitive apprentices as well as fugitive slaves.
In time the Northern States became free, and the public conscience in them became so changed that the magistrates were deterred or unwilling to act in execution of the law. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania each passed a law making it penal for any of their officers to perform any duties or to take cognizance of any case under the fugitive-slave law. Other States, through their judiciary, pronounced it unconstitutional, even some of the Federal judges doubted its consonance with the Constitution, but, such as it was, it lasted until 1850. It did not provide for a jury trial. The scenes enacted in its execution shocked the moral sense of mankind, and even the slaveholder often shrank from attempting its execution.
But it was not until about the time of the excitement of the fugitive- slave law of 1850 that the highest excitement prevailed in the North over its enforcement, and of this we shall speak hereafter.
IX SLAVE TRADE: ABOLISHED BY LAW
In the English Parliament, in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, the first motion was made towards the abolition of the slave trade, long theretofore fostered by English kings and queens, but not until 1807 did the British moral sense rise high enough to pass, at Lord Granville's instance, the famous act for "the Abolition of the Slave Trade." As early as 1794 the United States prohibited their subjects from trading in slaves to foreign countries; and in 1807, they prohibited the importation of slaves into any of the States, to take effect at the beginning of 1808, the earliest time possible, as we have seen, under the Constitution. But it was not until 1820 that slave-traders were declared pirates, punishable as such.
The prohibition of the slave trade by law did not effectually end it, nor was the law declaring it piracy wholly effectual, though the latter did much, through the co-operation of other nations, to restrict it.
There were active movements in 1852 and 1858, in the South, to revive the African slave trade, and especially was there fierce opposition to the "piracy act." Jefferson Davis, at a convention in Mississippi, July, 1858, advocated the repeal of the latter act, but doubted the practicability then of abrogating the law prohibiting slave traffic.(30)
It is worthy of mention here that April 20th, eight days after Sumter was fired upon, Commander Alfred Taylor, commanding the United States naval ship _Saratoga_, in the port of Kabenda, Africa, captured the _Nightingale of Boston_, flying American colors, with a cargo of 961 recently captured, stolen, or purchased African negroes, destined to be carried to some American part and there sold into slavery. This human cargo was sent to the humane Rev. John Seys, at Monrovia, Liberia, to be provided for. One hundred and sixty died on a fourteen-days' sea-voyage, from ship-fever and confinement, though the utmost care was taken by Lieutenant Guthrie and the crew of the slaver for their comfort.(31)
The laws abolishing the foreign slave trade and prohibiting the introduction of African slaves (after 1807) into the United States even helped to rivet slavery more firmly therein. They more than doubled the value of a slave, and, therefore, incited slave-breeding to supply the increasing demand in the cotton States, and in time this proved so profitable that the South sought new territory whence slavery could be extended, and out of which slave States could be formed.
The "_Declaration against the Slave Trade_" of the world, signed by the representatives of the "Powers" at the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, and repeated at the Congress of Paris at the end of the Napoleonic wars, was potential enough to abate but not to end this most inhuman and sinful trade.(32)
Even as late as 1816, English merchants, supported by the corporations of London and Liverpool, through mercantile jealousy, and pretending to believe that the very existence of commerce on the seas and their own existence depended on the continuance of the slave trade, not only opposed the abolition of the black slave traffic, but they opposed the abolition of _white slavery_ in Algiers.(33)
This nefarious traffic did not cease in the United States, although at the Treaty of Ghent (1815) it was declared that: "Whereas the traffic in slaves is irreconcilable with the principles of humanity and justice," and the two countries (Great Britain and the United States) therein stipulated to use their best endeavors to abolish it.
The revival of the slave trade was openly advocated by leading Southern politicians, and the illicit traffic greatly increased immediately after the admission into the Union of Texas as a State and the aggressions on Mexico for more slave territory, and especially just after the discussions over the Compromise measures of 1850 and the Nebraska Act of 1854, followed by the Dred Scott decision in 1857. It was principally carried on under the United States flag, the ships carrying it denying the right of search to foreign vessels engaged in suppressing the trade. British officials claimed in June, 1850, "that at least one half of the successful part of the slave trade was carried on under the American flag." The fitting out of slavers centred at New York city; Boston and New Orleans being good seconds. Twenty-one of twenty-two slavers taken by British cruisers in 1857-58 were from New York, Boston, and New Orleans.
"During eighteen months of the years 1859-60 eighty-five slavers are reported to have fitted out in New York harbor, and these alone transported from 30,000 to 60,000 slaves annually to America."(34)
The greed of man for gain has smothered and will ever smother the human conscience. The slave trade, under the denunciation of piracy, still exists, and will exist until African slavery ceases throughout the world. So long as there is a demand, at good prices, this wicked traffic will go on, and in the jungles of Africa there will be found stealers of human beings.
(30) Rhode's _Hist. United States_, vol. ii., p. 372.
(31) Official Records, etc., _Navies of the War of the Rebellion_, vol. i., p. 11.
(32) It stands to the eternal credit of Napoleon that on his return from Elba to Paris (1815) he decreed for France the total abolition of the slave-trade. This decree was confirmed by the Bourbon dynasty in 1818. _Suppression of African Slave Trade U. S._ (DuBois), p. 247.
(33) Osler's _Life of Exmouth_, p. 303; _Slavery, Letters_, etc., Horace Mann, p. 276.
(34) _Sup. of African Slave Trade_ (DuBois) pp. 135, 178-9.
X LOUISIANA PURCHASE
In 1803, Napoleon, fearing that he could not hold his distant American possession, known as the Louisiana Province, acquired from Spain, and which by treaty was to be re-ceded to Spain and not disposed of to any other nation, put aside all scruples and good faith, and for 60,000,000 francs, on April 30th signed a treaty of cession of the vast territory, then mostly uninhabited, to the United States. This was in Jefferson's administration.
The United States bought this domain and its people just as they might buy unoccupied lands with animals on it.
It was early claimed as slave territory. There were only a few slaves within its limits when purchased, though slavery was recognized there. This purchase was a most important one, although at the time it was not so regarded.
The Louisiana Purchase was much greater, territorially speaking, than all the States then in the Union, with all its other possessions.(35)
It comprised what are now the States of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, nearly all of Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming, large parts of Colorado and the Indian Territory, and a portion of Idaho. These States and Territories in 1890 contained 11,804,101 inhabitants.
At the time of this great acquisition a conviction prevailed that slavery was rapidly diminishing. Adams and Jefferson, each, while President, entertained the belief that slavery would, ere long, come to a peaceful end. It might then have been possible, by law of Congress, to devote this new region to freedom, but, as slavery existed at and around New Orleans in 1812 when the State of Louisiana was admitted into the Union, it became a slave State. This fate was largely due to the claim of its original inhabitants that they were secured the right to hold slaves by the treaty of cession from France.
Later on, the provision of this treaty, under which it was claimed slavery was perpetuated, was a subject of much discussion, and on it was founded the most absurd arguments on behalf of the slave power.
Its third article was the sole one referred to as fastening forever the institution of slavery on the inhabitants of this vast empire. There are those yet living who deny that, even under the present Constitution of the United States or the constitutions of the States since erected therein, slavery is _lawfully_ excluded therefrom.
This article reads:
"The inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States, and admitted as soon as possible, according to the principles of the Federal Constitution, to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens of the United States; and in the meantime they shall be maintained and protected in the enjoyment of their liberty, _property_, and the religion they profess."
Justice Catron, of the United States Supreme Court, speaking in the Dred Scott case, for the majority of the court and of this article, says:
"Louisiana was a province where slavery was not only lawful, but where property in slaves was the most valuable of all personal property. The province was ceded as a _unit_, with an equal right pertaining to all its inhabitants, in every part thereof, to own slaves."
He and others of the concurring justices held that the inhabitants at the time of the purchase, also all immigrants after the cession, were protected in the right to hold slaves in the entire purchase.
Near the close of his opinion, still speaking of this article and the acquired territory, he says:
"The right of the United States in or over it depends on the contract of cession, which operates to incorporate as well the Territory as its inhabitants into the Union.
"My opinion is that the third article of the treaty of 1803, ceding Louisiana to the United States, stands protected by the Constitution, and cannot be repealed by Congress."
This view was heroically combatted by a minority of the court, especially by Justices McLean and Curtis. The latter, in his opinion, said
"That a treaty with a foreign nation cannot deprive Congress of any part of its legislative power conferred by the people, so that it no longer can legislate as it is empowered by the Constitution."
Also, that if the treaty expressly prohibited (as it did not) the exclusion of slavery from the ceded territory the "court could not declare that an act of Congress excluding it was void by force of the treaty. . . . A refusal to execute such a stipulation would not be a judicial, but a political and legislative question. . . . It would belong to diplomacy and legislation, and not to the administration of existing laws."(36)
Plainly no part of the treaty of cession fastened slavery, or any other institution of France, on the territory ceded to the United States. If its provisions were violated by the United States, France, internationally, or the inhabitants at the date of the treaty, might have complained and had redress. Obviously the treaty had no bearing on the question of slavery in the United States, but its provisions were seized upon, as was every possible pretext, by the votaries of slavery to maintain and extend it.
It was also, by a majority of the court, held in this memorable case (hereafter to be mentioned) that under the third article of the cession slaves could be taken from any State into any part of the Louisiana Purchase during its territorial state, and there held, and hence that the Missouri Compromise, of 1820, forbidding slavery in the territory north of 36° 30´, was in violation of the treaty and was unconstitutional, as were all other acts of Congress excluding slavery from United States territory. This was in the heyday (1857) of the slave power, and when it aspired, practically, to make slavery national.
This aggressive policy, as we shall see when we come to consider the Nebraska Act of 1854 relating to a principal part of the Louisiana Purchase, led to a great uprising of the friends of freedom, the political overthrow of the advocates of slavery in most branches of the Union; then to secession; then to war, whence came, with peace, universal freedom, and slavery in the Republic forever dead.
(35) For map showing territory acquired by the U. S., by each treaty, etc., see _History Ready Ref._, vol. v., p. 3286, and _Louisiana Purchase_ (Hermann, Com. Gen. Land Office). The original thirteen States and Territories comprised 8,927,844 sq. mi. The Louisiana Purchase, 1,171,931, sq. mi.
(36) Dred Scott Case, 19 Howard, 393, etc.
XI FLORIDA
Florida did not become a slave colony even on being taken possession of by the English in 1763, nor on its re-conquest by Spain in 1781.
By the treaty of peace at the end of the war of the Revolution (1783) Great Britain recognized as part of the southern boundary of the United States a line due east from the Mississippi at 31° of latitude; and at the same time, by a separate treaty, she ceded to Spain the then two Floridas. Florida became a refuge for fugitive slaves from Georgia and South Carolina.
"Georgians could never forget that the _fugitive_ slaves were roaming about the Everglades of Florida."(37)
The Seminole Indians welcomed to their wild freedom the escaped negro from the lash of the overseer, and consequently the long and bloody Florida Indian wars were literally a slave hunt. The wild tribes of Indians knew no fugitive-slave law.
In the War of 1812, Spain permitted the English to occupy, for their purposes, some points in Florida. When the war ended they abandoned a fort on the Appalachicola, about fifteen miles above its mouth, with a large amount of arms and ammunition. This fort the fugitive negroes seized and held for about _three years_ as a refuge for escaped slaves, and, consequently, as a menace to slavery. It was during this time called "Negro Fort." At the instigation of slave owners, it was attacked by General Gaines of the United States Army.
"A hot shot penetrated one of the magazines, and the whole fort was blown to pieces, July 27, 1816. There were 300 negro men, women, and children, and 20 Choctaws in the fort; 270 were killed. Only three came out unhurt, and these were killed by the allied Indians."
Thus slavery established and maintained itself, through individual and national crime and blood, until the day when God's retributive justice should come. And we shall see how thoroughly His justice was meted out; how "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," measure of blood for measure of blood, anguish for anguish, came to the dominating white race!
It was not until February, 1821, that notice of the ratification of a treaty, made two years before, was received, by which Spain ceded Florida to the United States in consideration of their paying $5,000,000 in satisfaction of American claims against Spain.
This was not all the Republic paid for Florida. A second Seminole war (1835-43) ensued, the bloodiest and most costly of all our Indian wars, in which the Indians were assisted by fugitive slaves and their descendants, in whom the negro blood was admixed, often with the white blood of former masters, and again with the Indian.(38)
At the end of eight years, after many valuable lives had been lost, and $30,000,000 had been expended, but not until after the great Seminole leader (Osceola (39)) had been, by deliberate treachery and bad faith, captured, and the Indians had been worn out rather than conquered, Florida became an American province, and two years thereafter (1845) a slave State in the Union.
The extinction of the brave Seminole Indians left no _race_-friend of the poor enslaved negro. Untutored as they were, they knew what freedom was, and, until 1861, they were the only people on the American continent to furnish an asylum and to shed their blood for the wronged African.
Florida, as a slave State, was a factor in establishing a balance of power, politically, between the North and South.
As the war between the United States and Great Britain (1812-15) did not grow out of slavery, nor was it waged to acquire more slave territory, nor did it directly tend to perpetuate slavery where established, we pass it over.
(37) W. G. Summer's _Andrew Jackson_, ch. iii.
(38) In 1821 at Indian Springs, Florida, a forced treaty was negotiated with the Creek Indians for part of their lands by which the United States agreed to apply $109,000 of the purchase price as compensation to Georgia claimants for escaped slaves, and $141,000 for "_the offsprings which the females would have borne to their masters had they remained in bondage_."--_Rise and Fall of Slavery_ (Wilson), vol. i, 132,454.
(39) _Osceola_, or _As-Se-He-Ho-Lar_ (black drink), was the son of Wm. Powell, an English Indian-trader, born in Georgia, 1804, of a daughter of a Seminole chief. His mother took him early to Florida. He rose rapidly to be head war-chief, and married a daughter of a fugitive slave who was treacherously stolen from him, as a slave, while he was on a visit to Fort King. When he demanded of General Thompson, the Indian agent, her release, he was put in irons, but released after six days. A little later, December, 1835, he avenged himself by killing Thompson and four others outside of the fort, thus inaugurating the second Seminole war. He hated the white race, and his ambition was to furnish a safe asylum for fugitive slaves.
Surprises and massacres ensued for two years, Osceola showing great bravery and skill, and _not_ excelling his white adversaries in treachery. He fought Generals Clinch, Gaines, Taylor and Jesup, of the U. S. A. Jesup induced him (Oct. 21, 1837) under a flag of truce to hold a parley near St. Augustine, where Jesup treacherously caused him to be seized, and the U. S. authorities (treating him as England treated Napoleon) immured him in captivity for life, hopelessly, at Fort Moultrie. His free spirit could not endure this, and he died of a broken heart three months later (January 30, 1838), at thirty-four years of age. His body lies buried on Sullivan's Island, afterwards the scene of a larger struggle for human freedom.
The remains of the _civilized_ statesman-champion of perpetual _human_ slavery, Calhoun, and the remains of the savage, untutored Seminole _Chief_, Oscoeola, the champion of _human liberty_, lie buried near Charleston, S. C. Let the ages judge each--kindly!
XII MISSOURI COMPROMISE--1820
In pursuance of the policy of trying to balance, politically, freedom and slavery, and to deal tenderly with the latter, and not offend its champions, new States were admitted into the Union in pairs, one free and one slave.
Thus Vermont and Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio, Louisiana and Indiana, Mississippi and Illinois were coupled, preserving in the Senate an exact balance of power.(40)
When Missouri had framed a Constitution (1819) and applied for admission into the Union, Alabama was on the point of admission as a slave State, and was admitted the same year, and thus the usage required the admission of Missouri as a free State. In 1790 the two sections were nearly equal in population, but in 1820 the North had nearly 700,000 more inhabitants than the South.
Missouri was a part of the Louisiana Purchase, and she had in 1820 above 10,000 slaves.
The usual form of a bill was prepared admitting her, with slavery, on an equal footing with other States. It came up for consideration in the House during the session of 1818-1819, and Mr. Tallmadge, of New York, precipitated a controversy, which was participated in by all the great statesmen, North and South, who were then on the political stage.
He offered to amend the bill so as to prohibit the further introduction of slaves into Missouri, and providing that all children born in the State after its admission should be free at twenty-five years of age.
This amendment was a signal for the fiercest opposition. Clay and Webster, Wm. Pinckney of Maryland, and Rufus King of New York, John Randolph of Roanoke, Fisher Ames, and others, who were in the early prime of their manhood, were heard in the fray. In it the first real threats of disunion, if slavery were interfered with, were heard. It is more than possible those threats pierced the ears of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who still survived,(41) and caused them to despair of the Republic.
It is worthy of note that none of the great statesmen engaged in this first memorable combat in which the Union was threatened in slavery's cause, lived to confront disunion in fact, face to face.
Clay, then Speaker of the House, and possessed of great influence, spoke first in opposition to the amendment. Though his speech, like others of that time, was not reported, we know he denied the power of Congress to impose conditions upon a new State after its admission to the Union. He maintained the sovereign right of each State to be slave or free. He did not profess to be an advocate of slavery. He, however, vehemently asserted that a restriction of slavery was cruel to the slaves already held. While their numbers would be the same, it would so crowd them in narrow limits as to expose them "in the old, exhausted States to destitution, and even to lean and haggard starvation, instead of allowing them to share the fat plenty of the new West."(42) (What an argument in favor of perpetuating an immoral thing! So spread it over the world as to make it thin, yet fatten it!)
Clay's arguments were the most specious and weighty of those made against the amendment. And they did not fail to claim the amendment was in violation of the third article of the cession of Louisiana, already, in another connection, referred to.
The Missouri delegate denounced the amendment as a shameful discrimination against Missouri and slavery, which would endanger the Union; in this latter cry a member from Georgia joined.
The friends of the amendment fearlessly answered Clay's speech and the speeches of others. The House was reminded that the great Ordinance of 1787, passed contemporaneous with the adoption of the Constitution, and approved and enforced by its framers (some of whom were also then members of the Continental Congress) imposed an absolute inhibition on slavery forever, precedent to the admission of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the other States to be formed from the Northwest Territory; they showed the treaty with France did not profess to perpetuate slavery in the ceded Territory; they denounced slavery as an evil, unnatural, cruel, opposed to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and that it had only been tolerated, not approved, by the Constitution; and Mr. Talmadge closed the debate by characterizing slavery as a "scourge of the human race," certain to bring on "dire calamities to the human race"; ending by boldly defying those who threatened, if slavery were restricted, to dissolve the Union of the States. This amendment passed the House, 87 to 76, but was beaten, the same session, in the Senate, 22 to 16; one Senator from Massachusetts, one from Pennsylvania, and two from Illinois voted with the South. Again the too often easily frightened Northern statesmen struck their colors just when the battle was won.
In January (1820) of the succeeding Congress the measure was again under consideration in the Senate, then composed of only forty-four members. It was then that Rufus King and Wm. Pinckney, the former for, the latter against, the slavery restriction amendment, displayed their eloquence. Pinckney, a lawyer of much general learning, paraphrased a passage of Burke to the effect that "the spirit of liberty was more high and haughty in the slaveholding colonies than in those to the northward." He also planted himself, with others from the South, on state-sovereignty, afterwards more commonly called "state-rights," and in time tortured into a doctrine which led to nullification--Secession--_War_.
All these speeches were answered in both Houses by able opponents of slavery extension, but meantime a matter arose which did much to favor the admission of Missouri as a slave State.
Maine, but recently separated from Massachusetts, applied for statehood, and could not be refused.
A Senator from Illinois (Mr. Thomas) introduced a proviso which prohibited slavery north of 36° 30´ in the Louisiana acquisition, except in Missouri.
Here, again, at the expense of freedom, was an opportunity for _compromise_. It was promptly seized upon. It was agreed that Maine, where by no possibility slavery would or could go, should come into the Union as a free State; Missouri as a slave State, and the proviso limiting slavery in the remaining territory south of 36° 30´ should be adopted. This compromise was adopted in the Senate, and later, after close votes on amendments, the House also agreed to it. John Randolph and thirty-seven Southern members voted against it, and, but for weak-kneed Northern members, it would have failed. This compromise Randolph said was a "_dirty bargain_," and the Northern members who supported it he denounced as "doughfaces,"--a coined phrase still known to our political vocabulary.
Missouri, however, did not become a State until August, 1821. Thus, for the time only was this question settled.
Of it Jefferson wrote, as if in prophecy:
"This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it the knell of the Union."(43)
Clay wrote of the height to which the heated debate arose:
"The words civil war and disunion are uttered almost without emotion."(44)
(40) Later, Arkansas and Michigan (1836-7), Florida and Iowa (March 3, 1845) and Maine and Missouri were, in pairs--slave and free-- admitted as States.
(41) Both died July 4, 1826.
(42) Hildreth, vol. vi., p. 664.
(43) Jefferson's _Works_, vol. vii., p. 159.
(44) Clay's _Priv. Cor._, p. 61.
XIII NULLIFICATION--1832-3 (1835)
A debate arose in the United States Senate over a resolution of Senator Foote of Connecticut proposing to limit the sale of the public lands, which took a wide range. Hayne of South Carolina elaborately set forth the doctrine of nullification, claiming it inhered in each State under the Constitution. He boldly announced that the Union formed was only a _league_ or a _compact_. This called forth from Webster his celebrated "Reply to Hayne," of January 26, 1830, in which he assailed and apparently overthrew the then new doctrine of nullification. He denounced its exercise as incompatible with a loyal adherence to the Constitution, and showed historically that the government formed under it was not a mere "compact" or "_league_" between sovereign or independent States terminable at will. He then asserted that any attempt of any State to act on the theory of nullification would inevitably entail civil war or a dissolution of the Union.
The first real attempt, however, at nullification, or the first attempt of a State to declare laws of Congress nugatory and of no binding force when not approved by the State, was made in South Carolina in 1832, under the leadership of John C. Calhoun, then Vice-President of the United States, and hitherto a statesman of so much just renown, and esteemed so moderate and patriotic in his views on all national questions as to have been looked upon, with the special approval of the North, as eminently qualified for the Presidency. He hopefully aspired to it until he quarrelled with President Jackson; he had been in favor of a protective tariff.
Cotton was, as we have seen, the principal article of export, and the slaveholding cotton planters conceived the idea that to secure a market for it there must be no duties on imports, and that home manufactures of needed articles for consumption would restrict the foreign demand for the raw material. Besides, the South with its slave labor could not indulge in manufacturing. A tariff on imports meant protection to home industries and to free white labor, both inimical to slavery. Some leading Southern statesmen, adherents of slavery, had vehemently opposed the ratification of the Constitution of 1787, on the ground that as it empowered Congress to levy import duties, it would encourage and build up home industries, with free labor; and they prophesied that with them slavery would eventually become unprofitable and therefore unpopular, hence would die. This idea never left the Southern mind, so, when the Confederacy of 1861 was formed, its Constitution (framed at Montgomery, Alabama) prohibited such duties for the express reason that no branch of industry was to be promoted in the new slave government, using this language:
"Nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry."(45)
This was then supposed to be the highest bulwark of slavery. Its votaries understood its strength and weakness. Independent, well- paid free labor and industries (46) would ennoble the men of toil, bring wealth and power, build up populous towns and cities, and consequently overwhelm, politically and otherwise, the institution of slavery, or draw into successful social competition with plantation life wealthy inhabitants who knew not slavery and its demoralizing influences.
Already, in 1832, the effects of protection on the prosperity of our country were manifest, especially since the Tariff Act of 1828, which levied a duty equivalent to 45 per cent. ad valorem. The Act of 1832 made a small reduction in the duties, but because it was claimed it did not distribute them equally, nullification was determined on as the remedy.
It was agreed by the strict constructionists of that day that a State Legislature could not declare a law of the United States void, but to do this the _people_ must speak through a convention. Such a convention met in South Carolina, in November, 1832, and passed a Nullification Ordinance, declaring the tariff acts "null and void," not binding on the State, and that under them no duties should be paid in the State after February 1, 1833.
Immediately thereafter medals were struck, inscribed "_John C. Calhoun, first President of the Southern Confederacy_." Nullification, thus proclaimed, was the legitimate forerunner of secession.
President Jackson, with his heroic love of the Union, regarded the movement as only _treason;_ he called it that in his proclamations; he prepared to collect the duties in Charleston or to confiscate the cargoes; he warned the nullifiers by the presence of General Scott there that he would be promptly used to coerce the State into loyalty; and he seemed eager to find an excuse for arresting, condemning for treason, and hanging Calhoun, who then went to Washington as a Senator, resigning the Vice-Presidency.(47)
Jackson tersely said:
"To say that any State may, at pleasure, secede from the Union, is to say that the United States are not a nation."
The situation was too imminent for Calhoun's nerves. To confront an indignant nation, led by a fearless, never doubting President, was a different thing then from what it was in 1860-61 with Buchanan as President, surrounded as he was by traitors in his Cabinet. Calhoun and his State backed down, and import duties continued to be collected in South Carolina, although a gradual reduction of them was made an excuse for Calhoun and his friends in Congress, in 1833, to vote for a protective tariff act, so recently before by them declared unconstitutional.(48)
On a "Force Bill" and a new tariff act being passed (March 15, 1833) the Nullification Ordinance was repealed in South Carolina. The next Ordinance of Secession of this State (1860) was based on the principles of the first one and the doctrines of Calhoun, slavery being the direct, as it had been the indirect, cause of their first enunciation. We must not anticipate here.
In the debate, in 1833, between Webster and Calhoun, the former, as in his great reply to Hayne,(49) expounded the Constitution as a "Charter of Union for all the States."
"The Constitution does not provide for events that must be preceded by its own destruction.
"That the Constitution is not a league, confederacy, or compact between the people of the several States in their sovereign capacity, but a government proper, founded on the adoption of the people, and creating direct relations between itself and individuals. That no State authority has power to dissolve these relations. That as to certain purposes the people of the United States are one people."
Nullification, attempted first on account of a protective tariff to foster home and young industries and for needed revenue to carry on the Federal government, was in two years, by its author, Calhoun, transferred, for a new cause on which to attempt to justify it-- from the tariff to domestic slavery. Calhoun soon discovered and admitted that the South could not be united against the North and for _disunion_ on opposition to a protective tariff. He therefore promptly sought an opportunity to bring forward in Congress the slavery question, and to attack the "_agitators_" and opponents of slavery extension in the North, and to threaten disunion if the institution of slavery was not permitted to dictate the political policy of the Republic.
The exact method of reviving in Congress the whole subject of slavery so soon after nullification had been so signally suppressed by Jackson is worth briefly stating.
President Jackson, in his Annual Message, December, 1835, called attention to attempts to use the mails to circulate matter calculated to excite slaves to insurrection, but he did not recommend any legislation to prevent it. Mr. Calhoun moved in the Senate that so much of the message relating to mail transportation of incendiary publications be referred to a select committee of five.
He was made chairman of this committee, and, on his request, three others from the South, with but one from the North, were put on the committee, and he promptly made an elaborate and carefully- prepared report, going into the whole doctrine of states-rights and nullification.
In it he said:
"That the States which form our Federal Union are sovereign and independent communities, bound together by a constitutional _compact_, and are possessed of all the powers belonging to distinct and separate States, etc.
"The Compact itself expressly provides that all powers not delegated are reserved to the States and the people. . . . On returning to the Constitution, it will be seen that, while the power of defending the country against _external_ danger is found among the enumerated, the instrument is wholly silent as to the power of defending the _internal_ peace and security of the States: and of course reserves to the States this important power, etc.
"It belongs to slave-holding States, whose institutions are in danger, and not to _Congress_, as is supposed by the message, to determine what papers are incendiary and intended to excite insurrection among the slaves, etc.
"It has already been stated that the States which comprise our Federal Union are sovereign and independent communities, united by a constitutional compact. Among its members the laws of nations are in full force and obligation, except as altered or modified by the compact, etc.
"Within their limits, the rights of the slave-holding States are as full to demand of the States within whose limits and jurisdiction their peace is assailed, to adopt the measures necessary to prevent the same, and, if refused or neglected, _to resort to means to protect themselves_, as if they were separate and independent communities."
Here, perhaps, was the clearest statement yet made, not only of the independence of States from Federal interference and of their right, on their own whim, to break the "_compact_," but of the right of the slaveholding States to dictate to the other States legislation on the subject of slavery.
It was at once a declaration of independence for the Southern States, and a declaration of their right to hold all the Northern States so far subject to them as to be obliged, on demand, to pass and enforce any prescribed law in the interest of slavery. The South was to be the sole judge of what law on this subject was requisite for slavery's purposes.
No duty was demanded on this question of the Federal Government; and Southern States, according to Calhoun, owed it none where slavery was concerned.
Calhoun and his committee could discover no power in the Southern States to enforce their demands save to act as separate and independent communities--that is, by setting up for themselves. This led logically to disunion, the result intended.
There was much in this report setting forth and professing to believe that it was the purpose of the North to emancipate the slaves, and through the agencies of organized anti-slavery societies bring about slave insurrections. The fanaticism of the North was descanted on, and the character of slavery and its wisdom as a social institution upheld.
He further said:
"He who regards slavery in those States simply under the relation of master and slave, as important as that relation is, viewed merely as a question of property to the slave-holding section of the Union, has a very imperfect conception of the institution, and the impossibility of abolishing it without disasters unexampled in the history of the world. To understand its nature and importance fully, it must be borne in mind that slavery, as it exists in the Southern States, involves _not only the relation of master and slave, but also the social and political relation of the two races_, of nearly equal numbers, from different quarters of the globe, and the most opposite of all others in every particular that distinguishes one race of men from another."
The whole report was replete with accusations against the North, and full of warning as to what the South would do should its demands not be complied with. The bill brought in by the committee was more remarkable than the report itself, and wholly inconsistent with its doctrine.
The bill provided high penalties for any postmaster who should knowingly receive and put into the mail any publication or picture _touching the subject of slavery_, to go into any State or Territory in which its circulation _was forbidden by state law_.
The report concluded:
"Should such be your decision, by refusing to pass this bill, I shall say to the people of the South, look to yourselves.
"But I must tell the Senate, be your decision what it may, the South will never abandon the principles of this bill. . . . We have a remedy in our own hands."
Clay, Webster, Benton, and others ably and effectually combated both the report and the bill, and the latter failed (25 to 19) in the Senate.
Besides denying the doctrine of the report, they showed the evil was not in mailing, but in taking from the mails and circulating by their own citizens the supposed objectionable publications.
Benton, himself a slaveholder, then and in subsequent years assailed and pronounced the doctrine of this report as the "_birth of disunion_." He has also shown that Calhoun delighted over the agitation of slavery more than he deprecated it; that he profoundly hoped that on the slavery question the South would be united and a Slave-Confederacy formed.(50)
In support of this Mr. Benton quotes from a letter of Mr. Calhoun to a gentleman in Alabama (1847) in which he says:
"I am much gratified with the tone and views of your letter, and concur entirely in the opinion you express, that instead of shunning, we ought to court the issue with the North on the slavery question. I would even go one step further and add that it is our duty _to force the issue_ on the North. We are now stronger relatively than we shall be hereafter, politically and morally. Unless we bring on the issue, delay to us will be dangerous indeed. . . . Something of the kind was indispensable to the South. On the contrary, if we should not meet it as we ought, I fear, greatly fear, our _doom_ will be fixed."(51)
Comment is unnecessary, but the letter, almost exultantly, mentions as fortunate that the Wilmot Proviso was offered, as it gave an opportunity to unite the South.
It proceeds:
"With this impression, I would regard any compromise or adjustment of the proviso, _or even its defeat_, without meeting the danger in its whole length and breadth, as very unfortunate for us.
"This brings up the question, how can it be so met, without resorting to the dissolution of the Union.
"There is and can be but one remedy short of disunion, and that is to retaliate on our part by refusing to fulfill the stipulations in their (other States) favor, or such as we may select, as the most efficient."
The letter, still proceeding to discuss modes of dissolution or retaliation against Northern States, declares a convention of Southern States indispensable, and their co-operation absolutely essential to success, and says:
"Let that be called, and let it adopt measures to bring about the co-operation, and I would underwrite for the rest. The non- slaveholding States would be compelled to observe the stipulations of the Constitution _in our favor_, or abandon their trade with us, _or to take measures to coerce us_, which would throw on them the responsibility of dissolving the Union. Their unbounded avarice would in the end control them."(52)
It is certain that President Jackson's heroic proclamation of December, 1832, aborted the project of nullification under the South Carolina Ordinance, and certain it is, also, that the disappointed leaders of it turned from a protective tariff as a ground for it, to what they regarded as a better excuse, to wit: A slavery agitation, generated out of false alarms in the slave States.
After the tariff compromise of 1833, in which Calhoun sullenly acquiesced, he returned home and immediately announced that the South would never unite against the North on the tariff question, --"That the sugar interest of Louisiana would keep her out,--and consequently the basis of Southern union must be shifted to the slave question," which was then accordingly done.(53)
Jackson, discussing nullification, is reported to have said:
"It was the _tariff_ this time; next time it will be the _negro_."
This new and dangerous departure was not overlooked. The report and bill of 1835 relating to the use of the mails was only a chapter in execution of the new plan.
The observing friends of the Union did not overlook or misunderstand the movement. They at once took alarm. Mr. Clay, in May, 1833, wrote a letter to Mr. Madison expressing his apprehensions of the new danger, which brought from him a prompt response.
Mr. Madison in his letter said:
"It is painful to see the unceasing efforts to alarm the South by imputations against the North of unconstitutional designs on the subject of the slaves. You are right. I have no doubt that no such intermeddling disposition exists in the body of our Northern brethren. Their good faith is sufficiently guaranteed by the interest they have as merchants, ship-owners, and as manufacturers, in preserving a union with the slave-holding states. On the other hand, what madness in the South to look for greater safety in _disunion_."(54)
What Clay and Madison saw in 1833 as the real starting-point for ultimate secession proved true to history. From that time dates the machinations which led, through the steps that successively followed, to actual dissolution of the Union in 1860-61; then to coercion--War; then to the eradication of slavery. It was Southern madness that hastened the destruction of American slavery. "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."
The excuse for even this much significance given to "nullification" is, that in less than thirty years, under a new name--"state-rights" --it worked secession--disunion, and lit up the whole country with the flames and frenzy of internal war that did not die down for four years more; and then only when slavery was consumed.
The great abolition movement commenced in earnest, January 1, 1831. Wm. Lloyd Garrison published, at Boston, the _Liberator_, with the motto--"_Our countrymen are all mankind_." Benjamin Lundy, and perhaps others, had preceded Garrison, but not until after the Webster-Hayne debate did the abolition movement spread. Thenceforth it took deeper root in the human conscience, and it had advocates of determined spirit throughout the North, led on fearlessly, not alone by Garrison, but by Rev. Dr. Channing, Rev. James Freeman Clarke, and, later, by Rev. Samuel May (Syracuse, N. Y.), Gerritt Smith, the poet Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, Horace Mann, Charles Sumner, Joshua R. Giddings, Owen Lovejoy, and others, who spoke from pulpit, rostrum, and some in the halls of legislation; others in the courts and through the press. The enforcement of the fugitive-slave law was often violent, and always added new fuel to the fierce and constantly growing opposition to slavery.
The Anti-Slavery party was not one wholly built on abstract sentiment of philanthropists, but it involved physical resistance: Violence to violence.
The American Anti-Slavery Society was founded at a National Anti- Slavery Convention held in Philadelphia, in December, 1831.
Hard upon the establishment of the _Liberator_ came the Nat Turner insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia (August, 1831). This gave to the South a fresh ground to complain of the North. Turner's insurrection was held to be the legitimate fruit of abolition agitation. Turner was an African of natural capacity, who quoted the Bible fluently, prayed vehemently, and preached to his fellow slaves.
He told them, as did Joan of Arc, of "_Voices_" and "_Visions_," and of his communion with the Holy Spirit. An eclipse of the sun was the signal to strike their enemies and for freedom. The massacre lasted forty-eight hours, and sixty-one whites, women and children not spared, were victims. On the other hand, negroes were shot, tortured, hanged, and burned at the stake on whom the slightest suspicion of complicity fell.
The Nat Turner negro slave insurrection is the only one known to slavery in the United States. Others may possibly have been contemplated. The John Brown raid was not a negro insurrection. Even in the midst of the war (1861-65), believed by most slaves to be a war for their freedom, insurrections were unknown.(55)
The African race, the most wronged through the centuries, has been the most docile and the least revengeful of the races of the world.
(45) Confederate Con., Art. 1, Sec. 8, par. 1.
(46) The South in the days of slavery had, practically, no manufactories.
(47) Benton, _Thirty Years' View_, vol. i., p. 343.
(48) Rhodes, _Hist. U. S._, vol. i., pp. 49-50.
(49) January 26, 1830.
(50) For this report and history see Benton's _Thirty Years' View_, vol. i, pp. 580, etc.
(51) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., chap. clxxxix.; Historical, etc. Examination, _Dred Scott Case_ (Benton), p. 139.
(52) Historical, etc., Examination, _Dred Scott Case_ (Benton), p. 141-4.
(53) _Ibid_., p. 181.
(54) Historical, etc., Ex., _Dred Scott Case_, pp. 181-2.
(55) There were some small insurrections and some threatened ones in the colonies as early as 1660, the guilty negroes or Indians being then punished by crucifixion, burning, and by starvation; other insurrections took place in the Carolinas and Georgia in 1734, and the Cato insurrection occurred at Stono, S. C., in 1740. There was a wide spread "Negro Plot" in New York in 1712. These attempts alarmed the colonies and caused some of them to take steps to abolish slavery.--_Sup. of African Slave-Trade U. S._, pp. 6, 10, 22, 206.
XIV TEXAS--ADMISSION INTO THE UNION (1845)
Texas was a province of Mexico when the latter seceded from Spain through a "Proclamation of Independence" by Iturbide (February 24, 1821) with a view to establishing a constitutional monarchy. At the end of about two years of Iturbide's reign, this form of government was overthrown, and he was compelled (March 19, 1823) to resign his crown. Through the efforts, principally of General Santa Anna, a Republic was established under a Constitution, modelled, in large part, on that of the United States, which went into full effect October 4, 1824. Spain did not formally recognize the independence of Mexico until 1836. The Mexican Republic was opposed to slavery, and after some of her provinces had decreed freedom to slaves its President (Guerro), September 15, 1829, decreed its total abolition, but as Texas, on account of slave- holding settlers from the United States, demurred to the decree, another one followed, April 5, 1837, by the Mexican Congress, also abolishing slavery, without exception, in Texas. Despite these decrees the American settlers carried slaves into Texas, which became part of the State of Coahuila, whose Constitution also forbade the importation of slaves.
Thus was slavery extension to the southwest cut off by a power not likely ever to be in sympathy with it. It is worthy of note that neither the independent Spanish blood (notwithstanding Spain's deep guilt in the conduct of the slave trade), nor that blood as intermixed with the Indian, nor the Mexican Indians themselves, ever willingly maintained human slavery in America. Mexico's established religion under the Constitution, being Roman Catholic, did not permit its perpetuation. The Pope of Rome, in the nineteenth century and earlier, had denounced it as inhuman and contrary to the divine justice.
The maintenance of slavery in Texas was regarded as of paramount importance to the South, and as slavery could not exist in Texas under Mexican authority, efforts were put forth to secure her independence, then to annex her to the United States as a State wherein slavery should exist. Even Clay, as Secretary of State, under Adams, in 1827, proposed to purchase Texas. President Jackson, in 1830, offered $5,000,000 for Texas. The Mexican Government, foreseeing the coming danger, by law prohibited American immigration into Texas, but this was unavailing, as the ever-unscrupulous hand of slavery was reaching out for more room and more territory to perpetuate itself. Americans, like their natural kinsmen the Englishmen, then regarded not the rights of others, the weak especially, when the slave power was involved.
Sam Houston, of Tennessee, a capable man who had fought under Jackson in the Indian wars, inspired by his pro-slavery proclivities in 1835, went to Texas avowedly to wrest Texas from free Mexico, and, it is said, of his real intentions President Jackson was not ignorant.
The unfortunate internal political contentions in Mexico gave the intruding Americans pretexts for disputes which soon led to the desired conflicts with the Mexican authorities.
Santa Anna, who had, through a revolution, put himself at the head of the new Mexican Republic, attempted to coerce the invading settlers to observance of the laws, but in this was only partially successful. On March 2, 1836, a Texas _Declaration of Independence_ was issued, signed by about _sixty_ men, _two_ of whom only were Texas-Mexicans, and this was followed by a Constitution for the Republic of Texas, chief among its objects being the establishment of human slavery. Santa Anna, with the natural fierceness of the Spanish-Indian, waged a ferocious war on the revolutionists. A garrison of 250 men at "The Alamo," a small mission church near San Antonio, was taken by him after heroic resistance, and massacred to a man.
"Thermopylae had her messenger of defeat, but The Alamo had none."
David Crockett, an uneducated, eccentric Tennessean, who was a celebrated hunter, Indian fighter, story teller, wit, and member of Congress three terms (where he opposed President Jackson, and refused to obey any party commanding him "to-go-wo-haw-gee," just at his pleasure) here lost his life. On the 27th of the same month 500 more Americans at Goliad were also massacred. These atrocities were used successfully to produce sympathy and create excitement in the United States. On April 21, 1836, a decisive battle was fought at San Jacinto between Santa Anna's army of 1500 men and a body of 800 men under General Sam Houston, in which the former was defeated, and Santa Anna, the President of Mexico, captured. While a prisoner, to save his life he immediately concluded an armistice with Houston, agreeing to evacuate Texas and procure the recognition by Mexico of its independence. This the Mexican Congress afterwards refused. But in October, 1836, with a Constitution modelled on that of the United States, the Republic of Texas (recognizing slavery) was organized, with Houston as President, and forthwith the United States recognized its independence.
In a few months application was made to the United States to receive it into the Union, but on account of a purpose to divide Texas into a number of slave States to secure the preponderance of the slave political power in the Union, which for want of sufficient population was not immediately possible, her admission was delayed, and Sam Houston's Republic of Texas existed for above eight years. President Van Buren, who succeeded Jackson as President, was opposed to its annexation, and it was left to the apostate Tyler to take up the business.
He, too, would have failed but Mr. Upshur, his Secretary of State, being killed in 1844 by the accidental explosion of a cannon, John C. Calhoun became his successor. The latter at once arranged a treaty of annexation, but this the Senate rejected. Both Van Buren and Clay, leading candidates of their respective parties for the Presidency in 1844, were opposed to the annexation; the former was defeated for nomination, and the latter at the election, because, during the canvass, to please the slaveholding Whigs he sought to shift his position, thus losing his anti-slavery friends, "whose votes would have elected him"; and Polk became President. Annexation, however, did not wait for his administration.
In the House of Representatives, in December, 1844, an attempt was made to admit Texas, half to be free and half slave, making two States.
By resolutions of Congress, dated March 1, 1845, consent was given to erect Texas into a State with a view to annexation; and in order that she might be admitted into the Union such resolutions provided that thereafter four other States, with her consent, might be formed out of its territory. In August succeeding, a Constitution was framed prohibiting emancipation of slaves (56) and authorizing their importation into Texas, which was thereafter adopted by the people of the Republic of Texas, under which Congress, by resolution (December 29, 1845) formally admitted Texas into the Union--the last slave State admitted.
As a sop to Northern "dough-faces," and to induce them to vote for the resolutions of March 1st, it recited that the new States lying south of latitude 36° 30´ should be admitted with or without slavery as their inhabitants might decide, those north of the line without slavery. In the subsequent adjustment of the north boundary line of Texas, it was found _no part of it_ was within two hundred miles of 36° 30´; so all of Texas (in territory an empire, in area 240,000 square miles, six times greater than Ohio) was thus dedicated forever, by law, to human slavery, in the professed interest of the nineteenth century civilization. The intrigue, the bad faith, the perfidy by which this great political and moral wrong was consummated were laid up against the "day of wrath."
(56) How different is Texas' Constitution of 1876, the first paragraph of which runs: "Texas is a free and independent State."
XV MEXICAN WAR--ACQUISITION OF CALIFORNIA AND NEW MEXICO 1846-8
With Texas came naturally a desire for more slave territory. Wrong is never satiated; it hungers as it feeds on its prey.
Pretence for quarrel arose over the boundary between Texas and Mexico. The United States unjustly claimed that the Rio Grande was the southwestern boundary of Texas instead of the Nueces, as Mexico maintained. Mexico was invaded, her cities, including her ancient capital, were taken, and her badly-organized armies overthrown. Congress, by an Act of May 13, 1846, declared that "by the act of the Republic of Mexico a state of war existed between that government and the United States," and it virtually ended in September, 1847, though the final treaty of peace at Guadalupe Hidalgo was not signed until February 2, 1848. While the annexation of Texas was regarded by Mexico as a cause of war, yet she did not declare war on that ground.
The principle of "manifest destiny" was proclaimed for the United States. In the prosecution of the war, with shameless effrontery it was justified on the necessity that "_we want room_" for the two hundred millions of inhabitants soon to be under our flag.
Answering this cry, put up by Senator Cass of Michigan, Senator Thomas Corwin, in a spirit of prophecy, said:
"But you still say you want _room_ for your people. This has been the plea of every robber-chief from Nimrod to the present hour. I dare say, when Tamerlane descended from his throne, built of seventy thousand human skulls, and marched his ferocious battalions to further slaughter,--I dare say he said, 'I want room.' Alexander, too, the mighty 'Macedonian Madman,' when he wandered with his Greeks to the plains of India, and fought a bloody battle on the very ground where recently England and the Sikhs engaged in a strife for 'room' . . . Sir, he made quite as much of that sort of history as you ever will. Mr. President, do you remember the last chapter in that history? It is soon read. Oh! I wish we could understand its moral. Ammon's son (so was Alexander named), after all his victories, died drunk in Babylon. The vast empire he conquered to 'get room' became the prey of the generals he trained; it was desparted, torn to pieces, and so ended. Sir, there is a very significant appendix; it is this: The descendants of the Greeks-- of Alexander's Greeks--are now governed by a descendant of Attilla."
Through the greed of the slave power Texas was acquired, and they still longed for more slave territory, and weak Mexico alone could be depleted to obtain it.
Southern California and New Mexico had a sufficiently warm climate for slavery to flourish in.
The war was far from popular, though the pride of national patriotism supported it. Clay and Webster each opposed it, and each gave a son to it.(57)
Abraham Lincoln, then for a single term in Congress, spoke against it, but, like most other members holding similar views, voted men, money, and supplies to carry it on.
Senator Benton of Missouri, a party friend to the administration of Polk and favoring the war, said:
"The truth was, an intrigue was laid for peace before the war was declared! And this intrigue was even part of the scheme for making war. It is impossible to conceive of an administration less warlike, or more intriguing, than that of Mr. Polk. They were men of peace, with objects to be accomplished by means of war. . . . They wanted a small war, just large enough to require a treaty of peace, and not large enough to make military reputations dangerous for the Presidency."(58)
It was predicted the war would not last to exceed "90 to 120 days." The proposed conquest of Mexico was so inlaid with treachery that this prediction was justified. The Administration conspired with the then exiled Santa Anna "not to obstruct his return to Mexico."
"It was the arrangement with Santa Anna! We to put him back in Mexico, and he to make peace with us: of course an _agreeable peace_ . . . not without receiving a consideration: and in this case some millions of dollars were required--not for himself, of course, but to enable him to promote the peace at home."(59)
Accordingly, in August, 1846, before Buena Vista and other signal successes in the war, the President asked an appropriation of $2,000,000 to be used in promoting a peace.
But already jealousy and envy toward the generals in the field had arisen, which culminated in President Polk offering to confer on Senator Thomas H. Benton (of his own party) the rank of Lieutenant- General, with full command, thus superseding the Whig Generals, Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor, then possible Presidential candidates.(60)
The acquisition of more territory from Mexico being no secret, a bill for the desired appropriation precipitated, unexpectedly, a most violent discussion of the slavery question, never again allayed until slavery was eliminated from the Union.
A Democratic Representative from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, who favored the acquisition of California and New Mexico, for the purpose of "_preserving the equilibrium of States_," and as an offset to the already acquired slave State of Texas, which was then expected to be soon erected into five slave States, moved, August, 1846, the following proviso to the "two million bill":
"That no part of the territory to be acquired should be open to the introduction of slavery."
This famous "Wilmot Proviso" never became a part of any law; its sole importance was in its frequent presentation and the violent discussions over it.
Thus far the national wrong against Mexico had for its manifest object the spread of slavery.
The proposition to seize Mexican territory and dedicate it to freedom threw the advocates of slavery and the war into a frenzy, and consternation in high circles prevailed.
The proviso was adopted in the House, but failed in the Senate. It was, in February, 1847, again, by the House, tacked on the "three million bill," but being struck out in the Senate, the bill passed the House without it. But the proviso had done its work; the whole North was alive to its importance, and Presidential and Congressional _timber_ blossomed or withered accordingly as it did or did not fly a banner inscribed "_Wilmot Proviso_."
Calhoun, professing great alarm and great concern for the Constitution, on February 19, 1847, introduced into the Senate his celebrated resolution declaring, among other things, that the Territories belonged to the "several States . . . as their joint and common property." "That the enactment of any law which should . . . deprive the citizens of any of the States . . . from emigrating with their property [slaves] into any of the Territories . . . would be a violation of the Constitution and the rights of the States, . . . and would tend directly to subvert the Union itself."
Here was the doctrine of state-rights born into full life, with the old doctrine of nullification embodied. Benton, speaking of the dangerous character of Calhoun's resolution, said of them:
"As Sylla saw in the young Caesar many Mariuses, so did he see in them many nullifications."
Benton, quite familiar with the whole history of slavery before, during, and after the Mexican War, himself a Senator from a slave State, says the Wilmot proviso "was secretly cherished as a means of keeping up discord, and forcing the issue between the North and the South," by Calhoun and his friends, citing Mr. Calhoun's Alabama letter of 1847, already quoted, in proof of his statement.
By the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February, 1848) for $15,000,000 (above $3,000,000 more than was paid Napoleon for the Louisiana Purchase), New Mexico and Upper California were ceded by Mexico to the United States, and the Rio Grande from El Paso to its mouth became the boundary between the two countries. Upper California is now the State of California, and the New Mexico thus acquired included much of the present New Mexico, nearly all of Arizona, substantially all of Utah and Nevada, and the western portion of Colorado, in area 545,000 square miles, which, together with the Gadsden Purchase, by further treaty with Mexico (December 30, 1853) for $10,000,000 more, completed the despoiling of the sister Republic. The territory acquired by the last treaty now constitutes the southern part of Arizona and the southwest corner of New Mexico.
Almost contemporaneous with the invasion of Mexico, and as part of the plan for the acquisition of her territory, Buchanan, then Secretary of State, dispatched Lieutenant Gillespie, of the United States Army, _via_ Vera Cruz, the City of Mexico, and Mazatlan, to Monterey, Upper California, ostensibly with dispatches to a consul, but really for the purpose of presenting a mere _letter of introduction_ and a verbal request to Captain John C. Fremont, U.S.A., then on an exploring expedition to the Pacific Coast. The Lieutenant found Fremont at the north end of the Great Klamath Lake, Oregon, in the midst of hostile Indians. The _letter_ being presented, Gillespie verbally communicated from the Secretary a request for him to counteract any foreign scheme on California, and to cultivate the good-will of the inhabitants towards the United States.
On this information Fremont returned, in May, 1846 (the month the war opened on the Rio Grande), to the valley of the Sacramento. His arrival there was timely, as already the ever-grasping hand of the British was at work. There had been inaugurated (1) the massacre of American settlers, (2) the subjection of California to British protection, and (3) the transfer of its public domain to British subjects. Fremont did not even know war had broken out between the United States and Mexico, yet he organized at first a defensive war in the Sacramento Valley for the protection of American settlers, and blood was shed; then he resolved to overturn the Mexican authority, and establish "California Independence." The celerity with which all this was accomplished was romantic. In thirty days all Northern California was freed from Mexican rule--the flag of independence raised; American settlers were saved, and the British party overthrown.
Since its discovery by Sir Francis Drake--two hundred years--England had sought to possess the splendid Bay of California, with its great seaport and the tributary country. The war between the United States and Mexico seemed her opportune time for the acquisition, but her efforts, both by sea and land, were thwarted by her only less voracious daughter.(61)
Often in human affairs events concur to control or turn aside the most carefully guarded plans. California and the other Mexican acquisitions were by the war party--the slave propagandists--fore- ordained to be slave territory. The free State men had done little to favor its theft and purchase, and it was therefore claimed that they of right should have little interest in its disposition.
Just nine days (January 24, 1848) before the treaty of peace (Guadalupe Hidalgo), John A. Sutter, a Swiss by parentage, German by birth (Baden), American by residence and naturalization (Missouri), Mexican in turn, by residence and naturalization, together with James A. Marshall, a Jerseyman wheelwright in Sutter's employ, while the latter was walking in a newly-constructed and recently flooded saw-mill tail-race, in the small valley of Coloma, about forty-five miles from Sacramento (then Sutter's Fort), in the foot- hills of the Sierras, picked up some small, shining yellow particles, which proved to be free _gold_.(62)
"_The accursed thirst for gold_" was now soon to outrun the _accursed greed_ for more slave territory. The race was unequal. The whole world joined in the race for gold. The hunger for wealth seized all alike, the common laborer, the small farmer, the merchant, the mechanic, the politician, the lawyer and the clergyman, the soldier and the sailor from the army and navy; from all countries and climes came the gold seeker; only the slaveholder with his slaves alone were left behind. There was no place for the latter with freemen who themselves swung the pick and rocked the cradle in search of the precious metal.
California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona still give up their gold and their silver to the free miner; and the financial condition and prosperity of the civilized countries of the world have been favorably affected by these productions, but of this we are not here to speak. Slavery is our text, and we must not stray too far from it.
Turning back to the negotiations for the first treaty with Mexico, we find, to her everlasting credit, though compelled to part with her possessions, she still desired they should continue to be free.
Slavery, as has already been shown, did not exist in Mexico by law; and California and New Mexico held no slaves, so, during the negotiations, the Mexican representatives begged for the incorporation of an article providing that slavery should be prohibited in all the territory to be ceded. N. P. Trist, the American Commissioner, promptly and fiercely resented the bare mention of the subject. He replied that if the territory to be acquired were tenfold more valuable, and covered _a foot thick_ with pure gold, on the single condition that slavery was to be excluded therefrom, the proposition would not be for a moment entertained, nor even communicated to the President.(63)
Though the invocation was in behalf of humanity, the "invincible Anglo-Saxon race" (so cried Senator Preston in 1836) "could not listen to the prayer of superstitious Catholicism, goaded on by a miserable priesthood."
Now that California and New Mexico were United States territory, how was it to be devoted to slavery to reward the friends of its acquisition?
As slavery was prohibited under Mexican law, this territory must by the law of nations remain free until slavery was, by positive enactment, authorized therein. This ancient and universal law, however, was soon to be disregarded or denied by the advocates of the doctrine that the Constitution of the United States spread itself over territories, and, by force of it, legalized human slavery therein, and guaranteed to citizens of a State the right to carry their property--human slaves included--into United States territory and there hold it, by force of and protected by the Constitution, in defiance of unfriendly territorial or Congressional legislation. This novel claim also sprung from the brain of Calhoun, and was met with the true view of slavery, to wit: That it was a creature solely of law; that it existed nowhere of natural right; that whenever a slave was taken from a jurisdiction where slaves could be held by law, to one where no law made him a slave, his shackles fell off and he became a free man. The soundness of the rule that a citizen of a State could carry his personal property from his State to a Territory was admitted, but it was claimed he could not hold it there if it were not such as the laws of the Territory recognized as property. In other words, he might transfer his property from a State to a Territory, but he could not take with him the law of his State authorizing him to hold it as property. The law of the _situs_ is of universal application governing property.
It remains to briefly note the effort to extend and interpret the Constitution, with the sole view to establish and perpetuate human slavery.
Near the close of the session of Congress (1848-49), Mr. Walker of Wisconsin, at the instigation of Calhoun moved, as a rider on an appropriation bill, a section providing a temporary government for such Territories, including a provision to "_extend the Constitution of the United States to the Territories_." This astounding proposition was defended by Calhoun, and, with his characteristic straightforwardness, he avowed the true object of the amendment was to override the anti-slavery laws of the Territories, and plant the institution of slavery therein, beyond the reach of Congressional or territorial law.
Mr. Webster expounded the Constitution and combated the newly brought forward slave-extension doctrine, but a majority of the Senate voted for the amendment.
The House, however, voted down the rider, and between the two branches of Congress it failed. For a time appropriations of necessary supplies for the government were made to depend on the success of the measure.(64)
Thus again the newly acquired domain escaped the doom of perpetual slavery.
But we have done with the Mexican War and the acquisition of Mexican territory. It remains to be told how this vast domain was disposed of. No part of it ever became slave.
There was not time in Polk's administration to dispose of it. General Zachary Taylor, the hero of Palo Alto, Resaca, Monterey, and Buena Vista, became President, March 4, 1849. He was wholly without political experience and had never even voted at an election. He was purely a professional soldier, and a Southerner by birth and training; was a patriot, possessed of great common sense, and knew nothing of intrigue, and was endowed with a high sense of justice, and believed in the rights of the majority. He belonged to no cabal to promote, extend, or perpetuate slavery, and, probably, in his conscience was opposed to it. His Southern friends could not use him, and when they demanded his aid, as President, to plant slavery in California, he not only declined to serve them, but openly declared that California should be free. In different words, but words of like import, he responded to them, as he did to General Wool, at a critical moment in the battle of Buena Vista. Wool remarked: "_General, we are whipped_." Taylor responded: "_That is for me to determine_."(65)
(57) Lt.-Col. Henry Clay, Jr., fell at Buena Vista February 23, 1847, and Maj. Edward Webster died at San Angel, Mexico, January 23, 1848.
(58) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., p. 680.
(59) _Ibid_., p. 681.
(60) Taylor became President March, 1849, succeeding Polk, and died in office July 9, 1850. Scott was nominated by his party (Whig) in 1852, and defeated; Franklin Pierce, a subordinate General of the war, was elected by his party (Democrat) President in 1852.
(61) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., pp. 688-692.
(62) _Hist. Ready Ref._, vol. i, p. 350.
(63) Trist's letter to Buchanan, Secretary of State, Von Holst, vol. iii., p. 334.
(64) Historical Ex., etc., _Dred Scott Case_, pp. 151-9. This is the first Congress where its sessions were continued after twelve o'clock midnight, of March 3d, in the odd years. _Ibid_., pp. 136-9.
(65) _Hist. of Mexican War_ (Wilcox), p. 223.
XVI COMPROMISE MEASURES--1850
The slavery agitation first began in 1832 on a false tariff issue, and precipitated upon the country in 1835, on the lines of nullification and disunion, and was again revived at the close of the Mexican War, and continued violently through 1849 and 1850. The year 1850 will be ever memorable in the history of the United States as a year wherein all the baleful seeds of disunion were sown, which grew, to ripen, a little more than ten years later, into _disunion_ in fact. Prophetically, a leading South Carolina paper in its New Year-Day edition, said:
"When the future historian shall address himself to the task of portraying the rise, progress, and decline of the American union, the year _1850_ will arrest his attention, as denoting and presenting the first marshalling and arraying of those hostile forces and opposing elements which resulted in dissolution."
At the close of Polk's administration an inflammatory address, drawn and signed by Calhoun and forty-one other members of Congress from the slave States, was issued, filled with unfounded charges against the North, professing to be a warning to the South that a purpose existed to abolish slavery and bring on a conflict between the white and black races, and to San Domingoize the South, which could only be avoided, the address states:
"By fleeing the homes of ourselves and ancestors, and by abandoning our country to our slaves, to become the permanent abode of disorder, anarchy, poverty, misery, and wretchedness."
This manifesto did not go quite to the extent of declaring for a dissolution of the Union, but it appealed to the South to become united, saying, if the North did not yield to its demands, the South would be the assailed, and
"Would stand justified by all laws, human and divine, in repelling a blow so dangerous, without looking to consequences, and to resort to all means necessary for that purpose."(66)
The _Southern Press_ was set up in Washington to inculcate the advantages of disunion, and to inflame the South against the North. It portrayed the advantages which would result from Southern independence; and assumed to tell how Southern cities would recover colonial superiority; how ships of all nations would crowd Southern ports and carry off the rich staples, bringing back ample returns, and how Great Britain would be the ally of the new "United States South." In brief, it asserted that a Southern convention should meet and decree a separation unless the North surrendered to Southern demands for the extension of slavery, for its protection in the States, and for the certain return of fugitive slaves; it urged also that military preparation be made to maintain what the convention might decree.
A disunion convention actually met at Nashville, near the home of Jackson, but the old hero was then in his grave.(67) It assumed to represent seven States. It invited the assembling of a "Southern Congress." South Carolina and Mississippi alone responded to this call. In the Legislature of South Carolina secession and disunion speeches were delivered, and throughout the South public addresses were made, and the press advocated and threatened dissolution of the Union unless the North yielded all.(68)
All this and more to immediately effect the introduction of slavery into California and New Mexico. The South saw clearly that the free people of the Republic were resolved that there should be no more slave States, but believed that the mercantile, trading people, and small farmers of the North would not fight for their rights, and hence intimidation seemed to them to promise success.
It had its effect on many, and, unfortunately, on some of America's greatest statesmen.
By a singular coincidence the Thirty-first Congress, which met December, 1849, embraced among its members Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Benton, Cass, Corwin, Seward, Salmon P. Chase, John P. Hale, Hamlin of Maine, James M. Mason, Douglas of Illinois, Foote and Davis of Mississippi, of the Senate; and Joshua R. Giddings, Horace Mann, Wilmot of Pennsylvania, Robert C. Schenck, Robert C. Winthrop, Alexander H. Stephens, and Thaddeus Stevens, of the House.
To avert the impending storm of slavery agitation then threatening disunion, Clay, by a set of resolutions, with a view to a "_lasting compromise_," on January 29, 1850, proposed in the Senate a general plan of compromise and a committee of thirteen to report a bill or bills in accordance therewith.
His plan was:
1. The admission of California with her free Constitution.
2. Territorial governments for the other territory acquired from Mexico, without any restriction as to slavery.
3. The disputed boundary between Texas and New Mexico to be determined.
4. The _bona fide_ public debt of Texas, contracted prior to annexation, to be paid from duties on foreign imports, upon condition that Texas relinquish her claim to any part of New Mexico.
5. The declaration that it was inexpedient to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, without the consent of Maryland and the people of the District, and without compensation to owners of slaves.
6. The prohibition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia.
7. A more effectual provision for the rendition of fugitive slaves.
8. A declaration that Congress has no power to interfere with the slave trade between States.
These resolutions and the plan embodied led to a most noteworthy discussion, chiefly participated in by Clay, Webster, Calhoun, Benton, Seward, and Foote. The debate was opened by Clay. He favored the admission of California with her already formed free State Constitution, but he exclaimed:
"I shall go with the Senator from the South who goes farthest in making penal laws and imposing the heaviest sanctions for the recovery of fugitive slaves and the restoration of them by their owners."
He, however, tried to hold the olive branch to both the North and the South, and pleaded for the Union. He pathetically pleaded for mutual concessions, and deprecated, what he then apprehended, _war_ between the sections, exclaiming:
"War and dissolution of the Union are identical."
After prophesying that if a war came it would be more ferocious, bloody, implacable, and exterminating than were the wars of Greece, the Commoners of England, or the Revolutions of France, Senator Clay predicted that it would be "not of two or three years' duration, but a war of interminable duration, during which some Philip or Alexander, some Caesar or Napoleon, would arise and cut the Gordian knot and solve the problem of the capacity of man for self-government, and crush the liberties of both the several portions of this common empire."
Happily, events have falsified most of these prophecies.
Then came the dying Calhoun, with a last speech in behalf of slavery and on the imaginary wrongs of the South. His last appearance in public life was pathetic. Broken with age and disease, enveloped in flannels, he was carried into the Capitol, where he tottered to the old Senate Hall and to a seat. He found himself too weak to even read his last warning to the North and appeal for his beloved institution. The speech was written, and was read in his presence by Senator Mason of Virginia. He referred to the disparity of numbers between the North and the South by which the "equilibrium between the two sections had been destroyed." He did not recognize the fact that slavery alone was the cause of this disparity. He professed to believe the final object of the North was "the abolition of slavery in the States." He contended that one of the "cords" of the Union embraced "plans for disseminating the Bible," and "for the support of doctrines and creeds."
He said:
"The first of these _cords_ which snapped under its explosive force was that of the powerful Methodist Episcopal Church. The next _cord_ that snapped was that of the Baptists, one of the largest and most respectable of the denominations. That of the Presbyterian is not entirely snapped, but some of its strands have given way. That of the Episcopal Church is the only one of the four great Protestant denominations which remains unbroken and entire."
He referred to the strong ties which held together the two great parties, and said:
"This powerful _cord_ has fared no better than the spiritual. To this extent the union has already been destroyed by agitation."
He laid at the door of the North all the blame for the slavery agitation.
The admission of California as a free State was the immediate, exciting cause for Calhoun's speech.
Already, on October 13, 1849, after a session of forty days, a Convention in California had, with much unanimity, framed a Constitution which, one month later, was, with like unanimity, adopted by her free, gold-mining people. It prohibited slavery. It had been laid before Congress by President Taylor, who recommended the immediate admission under it of California as a State.
President Taylor had not overlooked the disunion movements. In his first and only message to Congress he expressed his affection for the Union, and warningly said:
"In my judgment its dissolution would be the greatest of calamities, and to avert that should be the study of every American. Upon its preservation must depend our own happiness, and that of countless generations to come. Whatever dangers may threaten it, I shall stand by it and maintain it in its integrity, to the full extent of the obligations imposed and the power conferred on me by the Constitution."
Recommending specially that territorial governments for New Mexico and Utah should be formed, leaving them to settle the question of slavery for themselves, President Taylor, in his Message, said further:
"I repeat the solemn warning of the first and most illustrious of my predecessors against furnishing any ground for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations."
Alluding to these passages, Calhoun, in his last speech, said:
"It (the Union) cannot, then, be saved by eulogies on it, however splendid or numerous. The cry of 'Union, Union, the glorious Union,' can no more prevent _disunion_ than the cry of 'Health, Health, glorious Health,' on the part of the physician can save a patient from dying that is lying dangerously ill."
To the allusion of the President to Washington, Calhoun sneeringly said:
"There was nothing in _his_ history to deter us from seceding from the Union should it fail to fulfil the objects for which it was instituted."
The prime objects for which the Union was formed, were, as he contended, the preservation, perpetuation, and extension of the institution of human slavery. In the antithesis of this speech he asked and answered:
"How can the Union be saved?
"To provide for the insertion of a provision in the Constitution, by an amendment which will restore to the South in substance the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium between the sections was destroyed by the action of this government."
The speech did not state what, exactly, this amendment was to be, but it transpired that it was to provide for the election of _two_ Presidents, one from the free and one from the slave States, each to approve all acts of Congress before they became laws.
Of this device, Senator Benton said:
"No such double-headed government could work through even one session of Congress, any more than two animals could work together in the plough with their heads yoked in opposite directions."(69)
In the same month (March 31, 1850) the great political gladiator and pro-slavery agitator and originator and disseminator of disunion doctrines was dead;(70) but there were others to uphold and carry forward his work to its fatal ending.
Calhoun was early accounted a sincere and honest man, a patriot of moderate views, and at one time was much esteemed North as well as South. It is believed than an unfortunate quarrel with President Jackson dashed his hopes of reaching the Presidency, and so embittered him that he became the champion, first of nullification, then of disunion.
There is not room here to speak in detail of the other champions of the great debate on the Clay resolutions.
On the 18th of April these resolutions, and others of like import, were referred to a committee of thirteen, with Clay as its chairman. This was Clay's last triumph, and he accepted it with the greatest joy, though then in ill health and fast approaching the grave.(71)
Of his joy, Benton, in a speech at the time, said:
"We all remember that night. He seemed to ache with pleasure. It was too great for continence. It burst forth. In the fullness of his joy and the overflow of his heart he entered upon the series of congratulations."(72)
The sincere old hero was doomed to much disappointment; he did not live, however, to see his views on slavery contained in the Compromise measures (1) overthrown by an act of Congress four years later, (2) by a decision of the Supreme Court seven years later, and then (3) made an issue on which the South seceded from the Union and precipitated a war, in which for ferocity, duration, and bloodshed, his prophecies fell far short. On the 8th of May this memorable committee reported its recommendations somewhat different from his resolutions.
Its report favored:
1. The postponement of the subject of the admission of new States formed out of Texas until they present themselves, when Congress should faithfully execute the compact with Texas by admitting them.
2. The admission forthwith of California with the boundaries she claimed.
3. The establishment of territorial government, without the Wilmot Proviso, for New Mexico and Utah; embracing all territory acquired from Mexico not included in California.
4. The last two measures to be combined in one bill.
5. The establishment of the boundary of Texas by the exclusion of all New Mexico, with the grant of a pecuniary equivalent to Texas; also to be a part of a bill including the last two measures.
6. A more effectual fugitive-slave law.
7. To prohibit the slave trade, not slavery, in the District of Columbia.
Bills to carry out these recommendations were also reported.
A discussion ensued in both branches of Congress, which continued for five months; and daily Clay met and presided in caucus over what he called the Union men of the Senate, including Whigs and Democrats.
These measures were supported by Clay, Webster, Cass, Douglas, and Foote; opposed by Seward, Chase, Hale, Davis of Massachusetts, and Dayton, anti-slavery men; also by Benton, an independent Democrat, a slaveholder in Missouri and the District of Columbia,(73) and by Jefferson Davis, and others of the Calhoun Southern type.
President Taylor opposed the Clay plan. He denominated the blending on incongruous subjects as an "Omnibus Bill." He favored dealing with each subject on its own merits. He regarded the Texas and New Mexico boundary dispute as a question between the United States and New Mexico, not between Texas and New Mexico.(74) He favored the admission of California with her free State Constitution. Even earlier, he announced that he would approve a bill containing the Wilmot Proviso. He indignantly responded to Stephens' and Toombs' demands in the interests of slavery, coupled with threatened disunion, by giving them to understand he would, if necessary, take the field himself to enforce the laws, and if the gentlemen were taken in rebellion he would hang them as he had deserters and spies in Mexico.(75)
Taylor died (July 8, 1850) pending the great discussion, chagrined and mortified over the unsettled condition of his country. His last words were: "_I have always done my duty; I am ready to die. My only regret is for the friends I leave behind me_."
He was a great soldier and patriot, and his character hardly justified the whole of the common appellation, "Rough and Ready." He was perhaps always ready, but not rough; on the contrary, he was a man of peace and order. On his election to the Presidency he desired some plan to be adopted for California by which "to substitute the rule of law and order there for the bowie knife and revolver."(76)
In August, 1850, the great debate ceased, and voting in the Senate commenced. The plan of the "thirteen" underwent changes, their bills being segregated, substitutes were offered for them, and many amendments were made to the several bills. Davis of Mississippi insisted upon the extension of the Missouri Compromise line--36° 30´--to the Pacific Ocean. This brought out Mr. Clay's best sentiments. He said:
"Coming as I do from a slave State, it is my solemn, deliberate, and well matured determination that no power, no earthly power, shall compel me to vote for the positive introduction of slavery, either south or north of that line. Sir, while you reproach, and justly, too, our British ancestors for the introduction of this institution upon the continent of America, I am, for one, unwilling that the posterity of the present inhabitants of California and New Mexico shall reproach us for doing just what we reproach Great Britain for doing for us."
The Wilmot Proviso made its appearance for the last time when Seward offered it as an amendment. It failed in the Senate by a vote of 23 to 33.
Finally, when the bill for the admission of California was ready for a vote, Turney of Tennessee moved to limit the southern boundary of the State to 36° 30´, so as to allow slavery in all territory south of that line. This failed, 24 to 32, the South voting almost unitedly for the amendment.
Mr. Benton was a prominent exception. To him the friends of freedom owed much for support, by speech and vote. While he opposed Clay's plan, he voted with the free State party on all questions of slavery, save on the Wilmot Proviso, which he deemed unnecessary to the exclusion of slavery from territory where the laws of Mexico, still in force, excluded it.
The California bill passed, August 13th, 34 to 18. Clay is not recorded as voting. He may have been absent or paired. Webster had become Secretary of State, and Winthrop succeeded him in the Senate. To emphasize the opposition, ten Senators immediately had read at the Secretary's desk a protest, with a view to its being spread on the Journal. This was refused, after a most spirited debate, as being against precedent.(77) The protest was a long complaint against making the Territory of California a State without its being first organized, territorially, and an opportunity given to the South to make it a slave State, and for admitting it as a free State, thus destroying the equilibrium of the States; the protestors declaring that if such course were persisted in, it would lead to a dissolution of the Union. A bill establishing New Mexico with its present boundaries, also Utah, was passed in August, leaving both to become States with or without slavery. A fugitive- slave act was likewise passed at the same time in the Senate. The whole of the bills covered by the compromise having in some form passed the Senate, went to the House, where, after some animated discussion, they all passed, in September following, and were approved by President Fillmore.
It remains to speak briefly of the Fugitive-Slave Act. It was odious to the North in the extreme. United States Commissioners were provided for to act instead of state magistrates, on whom jurisdiction was attempted to be conferred by the Act of 1793. _Ex-parte_ testimony was made sufficient to determine the identity of the negro claimed, and the affidavit of an agent or attorney was made sufficient. The alleged fugitive was not permitted, under any circumstances, to testify. He was denied the right to trial by jury. The cases were to be heard in a summary manner. The claimant was authorized to use all necessary force to remove the fugitive adjudged a slave. All process of any court or judge was forbidden to molest the claimant, his agent or attorney, in carrying away the adjudged slave. United States marshals and their deputies were authorized to summon bystanders as a _posse comitatus_; and all good citizens were commanded, by the act, to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of the law; all under heavy penalty for failing to do so. The officers were liable, in a civil suit, for the value of the negro if he escaped. Heavy fine or imprisonment was to be imposed for hindering or preventing the arrest, or for rescuing or attempting to rescue, or for harboring or concealing the fugitive, and, if any person was found guilty of causing his escape, a further fine of $1000 by way of civil damages to the owner. In case the commissioner adjudged the negro was the claimant's slave, his fee was fixed at $10, and if he discharged the negro, it was only $5. The claimant had a right, in case of apprehended danger, to require the officer arresting the fugitive to remove him to the State from whence he fled, with authority to employ as many persons to aid him as he might deem necessary, the expense to be paid out of the United States Treasury. This act became a law September 18, 1850. The law contained so many odious provisions against all principles of natural justice and judicial precedents that it could not be executed in many places in the North. The consciences of civilized men revolted against it, and the Abolitionists did not fail to magnify its injustice; on the other hand, the pro-slavery agitators saw in its imperfect execution new and additional grounds for complaint against the North.
What, then, was intended to be a settlement of the slavery agitation proved to be really a most violent reopening of it.
Webster, like Clay, did not survive to witness the next great discussion in Congress on the slavery question, which resulted in overturning much that was supposed to have been settled; nor did they live to hear thundered from the supreme judicial tribunal of the Union the appalling doctrines of the Dred Scott decision. Webster died October 24, 1852. Benton lived to condemn the great tribunal for this decision in most vehement terms. He died April 10, 1858. But few of the leading participants of the 1850 debates lived to witness the final overthrow of slavery. Lewis Cass, however, who, though a Democrat, generally followed and supported Clay in his plan of compromise, not only lived to witness the birth of the new doctrine of "Squatter Sovereignty" (and to support it), but to hear that slavery was, according to our Supreme Court, almost national; then to see disunion in the _live tree;_ then war; then slaves proclaimed free as a war measure; then disunion overthrown on the battle-field; then restoration of a more perfect Union, wherein slavery and involuntary servitude was forbidden by the Constitution.(78)
In the succeeding Presidential election (1852) the two great parties endorsed the late action of Congress in relation to the Territories and slavery.
The Whig platform declared the acquiescence of the party in all its acts: "The act known as the Fugitive Slave Law included. . . . as a settlement in principle and substance of the dangerous and exciting questions which they embrace. . . . We will maintain them and insist on their strict enforcement."
On this platform General Winfield Scott was nominated for the Presidency.
The Democratic platform of the same year, having first denied that Congress had power under the Constitution to interfere with slavery in the States, declared also that the party would "abide by and adhere to a faithful execution of the acts known as the Compromise measures settled by the last Congress,--the act for reclaiming fugitives from service or labor included."
Franklin Pierce, of New Hampshire, a subordinate officer (Brigadier- General) under Scott in Mexico, of no special renown, but a polite and respectable gentleman, was nominated and elected on this platform by a decided vote; Scott carrying only Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The "Free-Soil" party nominated John P. Hale of New Hampshire on a platform repudiating the Compromise measures, declaring against the aggressions of the slave power and for:
"No more slave States, no slave territory, no nationalized slavery, and no national legislation for the extradition of slaves. That slavery is a sin against God, and a crime against man, which no human enactment or usage can make right; and that Christianity, humanity, and patriotism alike demand its abolition.
"That the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is repugnant to the Constitution, to the principles of the common law," etc.
The Whig party, with this election, disappeared; its great leaders were dead, and it could not vie with the Democratic party in pro- slavery principles. There was no longer room for two such parties. The American people were already divided and dividing on the living issue of freedom or slavery. Slavery, like all wrong, was ever aggressive, and demanded new constitutional expositions in its interest by Congress and the courts, and it tolerated no more temporizing or compromises. Its advocates tried for a time to unite in the Democratic party.
(66) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., pp. 733-6.
(67) Jackson died June 8, 1845, past seventy-eight years of age.
(68) _Thirty Years' View_, ii., p. 782.
(69) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., p. 747.
(70) His remains were entombed in St. Philip's churchyard, Charleston, S. C. In 1865, on that city's occupancy by the Union forces, friends seized and secreted them from fancied desecration by the conquerors.--Draper's _Civil War in Am._, vol. i., p. 565.
(71) Born April 12, 1777, died June 29, 1852.
(72) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., p. 764.
(73) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., p. 759.
(74) _Ibid_., p. 765.
(75) _Hist. of the U. S._ (Rhodes), vol. i., pp. 134 (190).
(76) _Hist. Pac. States_, H. H. Bancroft, vol. xviii., p. 262.
(77) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., p. 770.
(78) Cass died March 17, 1866, eighty-two years of age.
XVII NEBRASKA ACT--1854
Over the disposition of the Territory of Nebraska it remained to have the last Congressional struggle for the extension of slavery. This Territory in 1854 comprised what are now the States of Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. It was a large part of the Louisiana Purchase, in area 485,000 square miles, twelve times as large as Ohio, about ten times the size of New York, 140,000 square miles larger than the original thirteen States,(79) and more than four times the area of Great Britain and Ireland. It was what was left of the purchase after Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, and Indian Territory were carved out. It then had only about one thousand white inhabitants.
The desire to still placate the threatening South and to win its political favor, led some great and patriotic men of the North to attempt measures in the interest of slavery.
On January 4, 1854, Stephen A. Douglas, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, made a report embodying constitutional theories not hitherto promulgated, and questioning or repudiating others long supposed to have been settled.
The report announced the discovery of a new principle of the Compromise measures of 1850.
It declared:
"They were intended to have a far more comprehensive and enduring effect than the mere adjustment of difficulties arising out of the recent acquisition of Mexican territory. They were designed to establish certain great principles, which would not only furnish adequate remedies for existing evils, but in all time to come avoid the perils of similar agitation by withdrawing the question of _slavery_ from the halls of Congress and the political arena, committing it to the arbitration of those who are immediately interested in and alone responsible for its consequences. . . . A question has arisen in regard to the right to hold slaves in the Territory of Nebraska. . . . It is a disputed point whether slavery is prohibited in the Nebraska country by _valid_ enactment. In the opinion of eminent statesmen. . . . the eighth section of the act preparatory to the admission of Missouri is null and void."
The eighth section prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of 36° 30´, hence from the Nebraska Territory. The report reiterated the absurd doctrine:
"That the Constitution. . . . secures to every citizen an inalienable right to move into any of the Territories with his property, of whatever kind and description, and to hold and enjoy the same under the sanction of law."
(What law? The law of the place whence it came, or the law of the place to which it was taken? Not even an ox or an ass can be held as property save under the law of the place where it is; nor is the title to the soil valid except under the law of the place where it is located. As well as might a person claim the right to move to a Territory and there own the land by virtue of the Constitution and the laws of the State of his former residence as to claim under them the right to own and sell his slave in a Territory. The difficulty is, while the emigrant might take with him his human chattel, he could not take with him the law permitting him to hold it.)
The report did not, however, as presented, propose to repeal the Missouri Compromise line that had stood thirty-four years with the approval of the first statesmen of all parties in the Union.
It assumed simply to interpret for the dead Clay and Webster their only four-year-old work, and ran thus:
"The Compromise Measures of 1850 affirm and rest upon the following propositions:
"First--That all questions pertaining to slavery in the Territories, and the new States to be formed therefrom, are to be left to the decision of the people residing therein.
"Second--That 'all cases involving the title to slaves' and 'questions of personal freedom' are to be referred to the jurisdiction of the local tribunals, with the right to appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States.
"Third--That the provisions of the Constitution, in respect to fugitives from service, are to be carried into faithful execution in all 'the organized Territories,' the same as in the States."
The first of these propositions, in another form, announced the new doctrine of popular sovereignty, soon thereafter popularly called "Squatter Sovereignty," in derision of the rights thus to be vested in the territorial _squatter_, however temporary his stay might be. It was opposed to the principle of Congressional right (expressly granted by the Constitution (80)) to provide rules (laws) and regulations for United States territory until it became clothed with statehood.
The second proposition announced nothing new, as cases involving titles to slaves, or questions of personal freedom, must necessarily go for final determination to the courts, with a right of appeal.
The third proposition, like the second, was a mere platitude.
The bill accompanying the report, as first presented, required that any part of Nebraska Territory admitted as a state (as provided in the New Mexico and Utah Acts of 1850) "shall be received into the Union with or without slavery, as its Constitution may prescribe at the time of admission." This, too, was not new in any sense, as new States had ever been thus received. The anti-slavery press and societies, and all people opposed to further slavery aggression and extension, at once took alarm and violently assailed the new doctrines of the report; the South, too, at first viewed them with surprise, denominating them "a snare set for the South," yet later regarded them as favorable to the extension of slavery. Southern statesmen, however, determined to force Douglas to amend them so as to accomplish the ends of the South. Accordingly, Senator Dixon of Kentucky, on January 16th, offered an amendment to the Nebraska Bill providing for the absolute repeal of the Missouri Compromise line. This amendment Douglas, apparently with reluctance,(81) accepted, after a consultation with Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, and President Pierce, both of whom promised it their support.(82)
January 23, 1854, Douglas presented a substitute for his original bill, wherein it was provided that the restriction of the Missouri Compromise "was superseded by the principles of the legislation of 1850, and is hereby declared inoperative."
The new bill divided the Territory in two parts; the southern, called Kansas, lay between 37° and 40° of latitude, extending west to the Rocky Mountains, and the northern was still called Nebraska.
As early as 1853 a movement in Missouri was started, avowedly to make Nebraska slave Territory, and this was well known to Douglas and the supporters of his newly announced doctrines. Kansas, lying farthest south, was climatically better suited for slavery than the new Nebraska. Before the bill passed, plans were made to invade Kansas from Missouri and Arkansas by slaveholders with their slaves.
January 24, 1854, the _Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States_ was published.
Chase and Giddings of Ohio were its authors; some verbal additions, however, were made to it by Sumner and Gerritt Smith.(83)
This _Appeal_ was signed by S. P. Chase, Charles Sumner, Joshua R. Giddings, Edward Wade, Gerritt Smith, and Alexander De Witt; three at least of whom were then, or soon became first among the great statesmen opposed to human slavery. The _Appeal_ declared the new Nebraska Bill would "open all the unorganized Territories of the Union to the ingress of slavery." A plot to convert them "into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves," to the exclusion of immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States. It reviewed the history of Congressional legislation on slavery in the Territories, reciting, among other things, that President Monroe approved the Missouri Compromise after his Cabinet had given him a written opinion that the section restricting slavery was constitutional.
John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State, John C. Calhoun, Secretary of War, Wm. H. Crawford, Secretary of the Treasury, and Wm. Wirt, Attorney-General--three from slave States--then constituted Monroe's Cabinet.
The _Appeal_ warningly proceeded:
"The dearest interests of freedom and the Union are in imminent peril. Demagogues may tell you that the Union can be maintained only by submitting to the demands of slavery. We tell you that the Union can only be maintained by the full recognition of the just claims of freedom and man. When it fails to accomplish these ends it will be worthless, and when it becomes worthless it cannot long endure. . . . Whatever apologies may be offered for the toleration of slavery in the States, none can be offered for its extension into the Territories where it does not exist, and where that extension involves the repeal of ancient law and the violation of solemn compact.
"For ourselves, we shall resist it by speech and vote, and with all the abilities which God has given us. Even if overcome in the impending struggle, we shall not submit. We shall go home to our constituents, erect anew the standard of freedom, and call on the people to come to the rescue of the country from the dominion of slavery. We will not despair; for the cause of human freedom is the cause of God."
These patriotic expressions electrified the whole country. The North was aroused to their truth, the South seized upon them as threats of disunion, and still louder than before, if possible, called for a united South to vindicate slavery's rights in the Territories. Douglas attempted in the Senate to answer the _Appeal_. This led to an acrimonious debate, participated in by Chase, Sumner, Seward, Everett, and others, too long to be reviewed here.
Senator Benjamin F. Wade, of Ohio, took a prominent part in the memorable debate over the Douglas-Nebraska Bill. He was bold, and never dealt in sophistry, but in plain speech.
Mr. Badger, of North Carolina, while making a slavery-dilution argument, appealingly said:
"Why, if some Southern gentleman wishes to take the nurse who takes charge of his little baby, or the old woman who nursed him in childhood, and whom he called 'Mammy' until he returned from college, . . . and whom he wishes to take with him . . . into one of these new Territories, . . . why, in the name of God, should anybody prevent it?"
Mr. Wade responded:
"The Senator entirely mistakes our position. We have not the least objection, and would oppose no obstacle to the Senator's migrating to Kansas and taking his old 'Mammy' along with im. We only insist that he shall not be empowered to _sell_ her after taking her there."
Mr. Chase moved to amend the bill by adding the words:
"Under which the people of the Territories, through their appropriate representatives, may, if they see fit, prohibit the existence of slavery therein."
This amendment failed, but it served to test the good faith of those who supported the squatter sovereignty feature of the bill.
After a long struggle the bill passed, and was approved by the President in May, 1854.
(79) Area of original thirteen States, 354,504 square miles.
(80) "Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States," etc.--Art. IV., Sec. 3, Con. U. S.
(81) _Three Decades of Fed. Leg._ (Cox), p. 49.
(82) _Rise and Fall Con. Government_ (Davis), vol. i., p. 28.
(83) Schucker's _Life of Chase_, p. 140.
XVIII KANSAS' STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM
The storm that arose over the Nebraska Act was ominous of the future. Public meetings in New York and other great cities of the North were held, where it and slavery were denounced. The clergyman from the pulpit, the orator from the rostrum, and the great press of the North vehemently denounced the measure. Anti-slavery movements appeared everywhere.
And as Kansas was thrown open to settlement, with Missouri slaveholders already moved and organized to move in and take possession of and dedicate it to slavery under the new doctrine of Popular Sovereignty, emigration at once commenced from the North, encouraged and promoted by aid societies.
Douglas, in the next Congress (March, 1856), as Chairman of the Committee on Territories, made a report on Kansas affairs, condemning the action of the free State people and of the aid societies, referring especially to an imaginary "Emigration Aid Company" of Massachusetts, with a capital of $5,000,000, and in consequence holding their existence justified the Border Ruffians of Missouri. The crack of the rifle was soon to be heard on the plains of Kansas.
The first election in Kansas was held in November, 1854, when, by fraud and violence, Whitfield, a pro-slavery man, was elected delegate to Congress. Non-residents from Missouri cast the majority of votes at this election. Though not of the requisite population, this was regarded as the opportune time for Kansas' admission as a slave State. Douglas in his report so recommended.
The House, the political complexion of which had changed at the recent election, appointed Howard of Michigan, Sherman of Ohio, and Oliver of Missouri a special committee to investigate the Kansas outrages and election frauds.
A majority of this committee, July 1, 1856, reported, showing in a most conclusive way that frauds and outrages had been perpetrated to control the several Kansas elections.
From this report it appeared that in February, 1855, the total population of Kansas was 8501; slaves 242, free negroes 151. A lengthy debate ensued over the report and over Kansas affairs, Wade, Seward, Sumner, and others participating.
Presidents Pierce and Buchanan successively appointed governor after governor of their party--Reeder, Shannon, Geary, Walker, Stanton--all of whom resigned or were removed because they each failed to support or endorse the determined and fraudulent efforts to make Kansas a slave State against the will of the majority of the resident people. Hon. J. W. Denver of Ohio, a sensible, quiet man, was the last of this long line of governors. One of them, Andrew Reeder, who was indicted with others for high treason on the ground of their participation in the organization of a free State government under the Topeka Constitution, for fear of assassination fled the territory in disguise. Robert J. Walker, though himself pro-slavery, firmly refused to participate in forcing the Lecompton Constitution on Kansas, even after President Buchanan, at the demand of his pro-slavery party friends, had decided Kansas should be admitted under it without its submission to a vote of the people. This Constitution was framed at Lecompton by fraudulently elected delegates to a pro-slavery convention, and it provided for perpetual slavery in the State. In Governor Walker's letter of resignation, December 16, 1857, he said:
"I state it as a fact . . . that an overwhelming majority of the people (of Kansas) are opposed to the Lecompton Constitution. . . . but one out of twenty of the press of Kansas sustains it. . . . Any attempt by Congress to force this Constitution upon the people of Kansas will be an effort to substitute the will of a small minority for that of an overwhelming majority of the people."
It is due to Douglas to say that he was opposed to the Lecompton Constitution scheme of admission. He was doubtless disappointed in not having the South rally to his support and nominate him for President in 1856. A more pliant tool of the pro-slavery party from the North was given the preference in the person of Buchanan.
President Buchanan, having early expressed the purpose to support the Lecompton plan, announced this purpose to Douglas, and urged him to co-operate in admitting Kansas as a State under it, which, being refused, terminated their party relations. Douglas did not go far enough. Popular Sovereignty was only recognized by pro- slavery advocates when it insured the success of slavery; and it was now certain to make Kansas a free State if the actual settlers alone were permitted to vote unintimidated and their votes were honestly counted and returned.
On December 9, 1857, Douglas, almost heroically, in opposition to President Buchanan and his administration and the majority of his party in the Senate, denounced the Lecompton scheme, and showed that it was an attempt to foist slavery on Kansas against the will of the people.
The peculiar feature of the Lecompton Constitution was that, while it was submitted to the vote of the people of Kansas, they were required to vote for it or not vote at all. The ballot provided required them to vote "_For the Constitution with Slavery_," or "_For the Constitution without Slavery_." Thus the Constitution must be adopted, and necessarily with slavery, as there was no provision for excluding the clauses authorizing it. At an election, where for fraud and violence nothing thitherto had approached it, and by the special feature of ballot-box stuffing (actual settlers generally being driven from the polls when willing to vote), this Constitution was returned adopted by about 6000 majority in favor of slavery.(84)
The Senate, March 23, 1858, passed (33 to 25) a bill to admit Kansas as a State under the Lecompton Constitution, _with slavery;_ but notwithstanding the active efforts of the Administration, the House (120 to 112) so amended the Senate bill as to require it, before the State was admitted, to be voted on by the people, the ballot to be--"For the Constitution" or "Against the Constitution." This amendment the Senate reluctantly concurred in.
On January 4, 1858, according to an act of the Territorial Legislature, a vote was again taken and, notwithstanding many temptations offered in lands, etc., and the desire for statehood, this Constitution was rejected by over 10,000 majority.
February 11, 1859, the Territorial Legislature authorized another convention to form a constitution. Fifty-two delegates were elected, and they met July 5, 1859, at Wyandotte, and on the 27th adjourned after framing a constitution prohibiting slavery, and limiting and establishing the western boundary of Kansas as it now is. This Constitution was ratified at an election held in October following. April 11, 1860, the House of Representatives passed a bill (134 to 73) for the admission of Kansas under this Wyandotte Constitution, but a similar bill failed in the Senate, and both Houses adjourned, still leaving Kansas a Territory.
January 29, 1861, when secession had depleted Congress of many members, Kansas was admitted under the Wyandotte Constitution--_a free State_.
This last struggle for slavery extension was by no means bloodless. The angry flash of Sharps' rifles was seen on the plains; the Bible and the shot-gun were companions of the free State advocate, and many were the daring deeds of men, and women, too, to save fair Kansas to liberty. John Brown (Osawatomie) here first became famous for his zeal in the cause of freedom; and it is said he did not fail to retaliate, blood for blood, man for man.
Douglas, who, by his "Popular Sovereignty" invention, brought on the contest over Kansas which came so near making it slave, lived to see his new doctrine fail in practice, but first to be cast down by the Supreme Court, as we shall presently see.
Douglas, however, cannot, in justice to him, be thus carelessly dismissed. After being defeated in the previous election, he held his great opponent's hat when the latter was inaugurated President, and gave him warm assurance of support in maintaining the Union, personally and by speech and votes in Congress; and, on the war breaking out, in April, 1861, he proclaimed to the people, from the political rostrum, that "there are now only two parties in this country: _patriots and traitors_." He appealed to his past party friends to stand by the Union and fight for its integrity, come what might. But he, too, did not live to see the triumph of freedom and of his country. He died June 3, 1861.
It is believed by many that if slavery had been forced upon California and into the New Mexico and Nebraska Territories four more slave States would soon have been admitted from Texas (as the act of annexation provided), and that thus the slave power having secured such domination in the Union as was desired and expected by its leaders, there would have been no secession,--no rebellion, but, instead, slavery would have become _national_.
But with California free and Kansas free, all hope of further extending slavery in the United States was forever gone.
Had Kansas even become slave, what then?
The final contest in Kansas was augmented and intensified by a national event partly passed over.
During the Kansas struggle the excitement of debate in Congress rose to its zenith, surpassing any other period.
The North had been bullied into a frenzy over the demands of those desiring the extension of slavery. The anti-slavery members of Congress met this in many instances by sober, candid discussion, but in others by sharp invective, dealt out by superior learning and consummate skill in the use of the English language.
Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was a profound student and scholar, and an inveterate hater of slavery and all that was incident to it.
On May 19 and 20, 1856, he pronounced his famous philippic against slavery and its supporters. Regarding the opening of the Kansas- Nebraska Territory to the influx of slavery, and the evident purpose of the Administration to dedicate it to slavery, he poured out warning invectives against all who in any way favored the new policy of opening this Territory to the chance of coming into the Union as slave States. Mr. Sumner's remarks were personal in the extreme, only justified by the general dictatorial and bullying attitude of some Southern Senators. A mere extract here would do him and the occasion injustice. Senators Cass and Douglas, on the floor of the Senate, resented this speech of Sumner.
On the 22nd of May, two days after the speech, at the close of a session of the Senate, while Sumner was seated at his desk in the Senate chamber writing, he was approached by Preston Brooks, a member of the House from South Carolina, who accosted him: "I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine," and he forthwith assaulted Mr. Sumner by blows on the head with a gutta-percha cane one inch in diameter at the larger end. The blows were repeated, the cane broken, and Brooks still continued to strike with the broken parts of it. Sumner, thus taken by surprise, and being severely injured, could not defend himself, and soon, after vain efforts to protect himself, fell prostrate to the floor, covered with his own blood. He was severely injured, and though he lived for many years, he never wholly recovered from the injuries. He died March 11, 1874.
This outrage did much to precipitate events and to intensify hostility to slavery. Southern Senators and Representatives assumed to justify the assault.(85)
The House did not expel Brooks, as the requisite two thirds vote was not obtained. He resigned, and was re-elected by his district, six votes only being cast against him, but he died in January, 1857. Butler, of South Carolina, the alleged immediate cause of Brooks' assault on Sumner, died in the same year.
The whole North looked upon the personal assault upon Sumner as not only brutal, but as intended to be notice to other Senators and members of Congress of a common design and plan to intimidate the friends of freedom. The assault was largely justified throughout the South, also by leading Southern statesmen in both branches of Congress.(86)
Remarks on the manner of Brooks' assault in the House made by Burlingame of Massachusetts led to a challenge from Brooks, which was accepted, the duel to be fought near the Clifton House, Canada; but Brooks declined to fight at the place named, alleging a fear to go there through the enraged North.
Brooks also, for remarks in the Senate characterizing the assault, challenged Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, but the latter declined the challenge because he "regarded duelling as the lingering relic of a barbarous civilization, which the law of the country has branded as a crime."(86)
So threatening, then, was the attitude of the Southern members of both Senate and House that Senators Wade of Ohio, Chandler of Michigan, and Cameron of Pennsylvania made a compact to resent any insult from a Southerner by a challenge to fight.(87)
A last attempt was made in Buchanan's administration, pending the Kansas agitation, to buy and annex Cuba in the interest of the slave power. It was then a province of Spain. Buchanan was both dull and perverse in obeying the demands of his party, especially on the slavery issue. In his Annual Message of 1858 he expressed satisfaction that the Kansas question no longer gave the country trouble. He also expressed gratitude to "Almighty Providence" that it no longer threatened the peace of the country, and congratulated himself over his course in relation to the Lecompton policy, saying, "it afforded him heartfelt satisfaction." He, in the same message, set forth his anxiety to acquire Cuba, assigning as a reason that it was "the only spot in the civilized world where the African slave trade is tolerated."
Cuba was wanted simply to make more slave States to extend the waning slave power, and thus to offset the incoming new free States, which then seemed to the observing as inevitable.
Buchanan suggested that circumstances might arise where the law of self-preservation might call on us to acquire Cuba by force, thus affirming the policy set forth in the Ostend Manifesto, prepared and signed by Mason, Soulé, and himself four years earlier.
Slidell of Louisiana, from the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Senate, promptly reported a bill appropriating $30,000,000 to be used by the President to obtain Cuba; and it soon transpired that Southern Senators were willing to make the sum $120,000,000.
The introduction of the bill caused a sensation in Spain, and her Cortes voted at once to support her King in maintaining the integrity of the Spanish dominions.
A most violent debate ensued in Congress, reopening afresh the slavery question.
The bill was antagonized by the friends of a homestead bill--"A question of homes; of lands for the landless freemen." The friends of the latter bill denominated the Cuba bill a "question of slaves for the slaveholders."
Toombs of Georgia, ever a fire-eater, save in war,(88) vehemently denounced the opponents of the Cuba appropriation and the friends of "lands for the landless" as the "shivering in the wind of men of particular localities." This brought to his feet Senator Wade of Ohio, impetuous to meet attacks from all quarters, who exclaimed:
"I am very glad this question has at length come up. I am glad, too, it has antagonized with the nigger question. We are 'shivering in the wind,' are we, sir, over your Cuba question? You may have occasion to shiver on that question before you are through with it. The question will be, shall we give niggers to the niggerless, or land to the landless, etc. . . . When you come to niggers to the niggerless, all other questions sink into perfect insignificance."(89)
Although a majority of the Senate seemed to favor the bill, Mr. Slidell withdrew it after much discussion, declaring it was then impracticable to press it to a final vote.
The once famous Ostend Manifesto, dated October 18, 1854, was a remarkable document, prepared and signed by Pierre Soulé, John Y. Mason, and James Buchanan, then Ministers, respectively, to Spain, France, and England, at a conference held at Ostend and Aix-la- Chapelle, France. It assumed to offer $120,000,000 for Cuba, and, if this were refused, it announced that it was the duty of the United States to apply the "great law" of "self-preservation" and take Cuba in "disregard of the censures of the world." The further excuse stated in the Manifesto was that "Cuba was in danger of being Africanized and become a second St. Domingo."
The real purpose, however, was to acquire it, and then admit it into the Union as two or more slave States.
Buchanan, as Secretary of State under Polk, had offered $100,000,000 for Cuba. His efforts to obtain Cuba secured for him the support of the South for President in 1856.
There was no special instance of acquiring or attempting to acquire territory by the United States authorities to dedicate to freedom.
Cuba is still Spanish (though not slave) (90) and just now in the throes of insurrection, and the Congress of the United States has just voted (April, 1896) to grant the Cuban Provisional Government belligerent rights.(91)
(84) From one election, held in 1857 at Oxford, Kansas, a roll was returned on which 1624 persons' names appeared which had been copied in alphabetical order from a Cincinnati directory. These persons were reported as voting with the anti-slavery party.
(85) Keitt of South Carolina and Edmundson of Virginia stood by during the assault, in a menacing manner, to protect Brooks from assistance that might come to Sumner.
(86) _Life of Sumner_ (Lesten), pp. 250, etc.
(87) Appleton's _Cyclop. Am. Biography_, vol. vi., p. 311.
(88) _Manassas to Appotmattox_ (Longstreet), pp. 113, 161.
(89) In 1862 the first homestead bill became a law, under which, by July 30, 1878, homesteads were granted to the number of 384,848; in area, 61,575,680 acres, or 96,212 square miles; greater in extent by 7000 square miles than England, Wales, and Scotland.
(90) In 1870 the Spanish Government enacted a law emancipating all slaves in Cuba over sixty years of age, and declaring all free who were born after the enactment. In 1886 but 25,000 slaves remained, and these were emancipated _en masse_ by a decree of the Spanish Cortes. The last vestige of slavery (the patronato system) was swept away by a royal decree dated October 7, 1886.
(91) But see _Service in Spanish War_, Appendix A.
XIX DRED SCOTT CASE--1857
On March 6, 1857, two days after Buchanan was inaugurated President of the United States, the famous Dred Scott case was decided.
Chief-Justice Taney of Maryland, Justices Wayne of Georgia, Catron of Tennessee, Daniel of Virginia, Campbell of Alabama, Grier of Pennsylvania, and Nelson of New York concurred in the decision, though some of them only in a qualified way.
Chief-Justice Taney read the opinion of the court.
Justices McLean of Ohio and Curtis of Massachusetts dissented on all points. All the justices read opinions at length.(93)
Chief-Justice Taney was a devout Roman Catholic, given much to letters, of great industry, and generally regarded as a great jurist. When the case was decided he was nearly eighty years of age, and he was then, in the distracted condition of the country, deeply imbued with the idea that the Supreme Court had the power to and could settle the slavery question.
All the other justices were eminent jurists and men of learning.
The decision reached marked an epoch in American history, and it gave slavery an apparent perpetual lease of life; this was, however, only apparent.
The case was twice argued by eminent lawyers; Blair and G. F. Curtis for Dred Scott, and by Geyer and Johnson for the defendant.
Dred Scott brought a suit in the United States Circuit Court in Missouri for trespass against one Sanford, charging him with assault on him, his wife, and two children--in fact, for his and their freedom.
The facts, as agreed, were as follows:
"In the year 1834, the plaintiff (Dred Scott) was a negro slave belonging to Dr. Emerson, who was a surgeon in the army of the United States. In that year, 1834, said Dr. Emerson took the plaintiff from the State of Missouri to the military post at Rock Island, in the State of Illinois, and held him there as a slave until the month of April or May, 1836. At the time last mentioned, said Dr. Emerson removed the plaintiff from said military post at Rock Island to the military post at Fort Snelling, situate on the west bank of the Mississippi River, in the Territory known as Upper Louisiana, acquired by the United States of France, and situate north of the latitude of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes north, and north of the State of Missouri. Said Dr. Emerson held the plaintiff in slavery at said Fort Snelling from said last-mentioned date until the year 1838.
"In the year 1835, Harriet, who is named in the second count of the plaintiff's declaration, was the negro slave of Major Taliaferro, who belonged to the army of the United States. In that year, 1835, said Major Taliaferro took said Harriet to said Fort Snelling, a military post, situated as hereinbefore stated, and kept her there as a slave until the year 1836, and then sold and delivered her as a slave at said Fort Snelling unto the said Dr. Emerson hereinbefore named. Said Dr. Emerson held said Harriet in slavery at said Fort Snelling until the year 1838.
"In the year 1836, the plaintiff and said Harriet, at said Fort Snelling, with the consent of said Dr. Emerson, who then claimed to be their master and owner, intermarried, and took each other for husband and wife. Eliza and Lizzie, named in the third count of the plaintiff's declaration, are the fruits of that marriage. Eliza is about fourteen years old, and was born on board the steamship _Gipsey_, north of the north line of the State of Missouri, and upon the river Mississippi. Lizzie is about seven years old, and was born in the State of Missouri, and at the military post called Jefferson Barracks.
"In the year 1838, said Dr. Emerson removed the plaintiff and said Harriet and their said daughter Eliza from said Fort Snelling to the State of Missouri, where they have ever since resided.
"Before the commencement of this suit, said Dr. Emerson sold and conveyed the plaintiff, said Harriet, Eliza, and Lizzie, to the defendant as slaves, and the defendant has ever since claimed to hold them and each of them as slaves.
"At the times mentioned in the plaintiff's declaration, the defendant, claiming to be the owner as aforesaid, laid his hands upon said plaintiff, Harriet, Eliza, and Lizzie, and imprisoned them, doing in this respect, however, no more than what he might lawfully do if they were of right his slaves at such times."
It is our purpose here only to set forth what was decided, or attempted to be decided, bearing upon slavery and its political status in the United States.
This purpose we can accomplish no better than by quoting parts of the Syllabi of the case.
We quote:
"A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a 'citizen' within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.
"When the Constitution was adopted, they were not regarded in any of the States as members of the community which constituted the State, and were not numbered among its 'people or citizens.' Consequently, the special rights and immunities guaranteed to citizens do not apply to them. And not being 'citizens' within the meaning of the Constitution, they are not entitled to sue in that character in a court of the United States, and the Circuit Court has no jurisdiction in such a suit.
"The only two clauses in the Constitution which point to this race treat them as persons whom it was _morally_ lawful to deal in as articles of property and to hold as slaves.
"The change in public opinion and feeling in relation to the African race which has taken place since the adoption of the Constitution cannot change its construction and meaning, and it must be construed and administered now according to its true meaning and intention when it was formed and adopted.
"The plaintiff, having admitted (by his demurrer to the plea in abatement) that his ancestors were imported from Africa and sold as slaves, he is not a citizen of the State of Missouri according to the Constitution of the United States, and was not entitled to sue in that character in the Circuit Court.
"The clause in the Constitution authorizing Congress to make all needful rules and regulations for the government of the territory and other property of the United States applies only to territory within the chartered limits of some of the States when they were colonies of Great Britain, and which was surrendered by the British Government to the old Confederation of States in the treaty of peace. It does not apply to territory acquired by the present Federal Government, by treaty or conquest, from a foreign nation.
"The United States, under the present Constitution, cannot acquire territory to be held as a colony, to be governed at its will and pleasure. But it may acquire and may govern it as a Territory until it has a population which, in the judgment of Congress, entitles it to be admitted as a State of the Union.
"During the time it remains a Territory Congress may legislate over it within the scope of its constitutional powers in relation to citizens of the United States--and may establish a territorial government--and the form of this local government must be regulated by the discretion of Congress--but with powers not exceeding those which Congress itself, by the Constitution, is authorized to exercise over citizens of the United States, in respect to their rights of persons or rights of property.
"The Territory thus acquired is acquired by the people of the United States for their common and equal benefit, through their agent and trustee, the Federal Government. Congress can exercise no power over the rights of persons or property of a citizen in the Territory which is prohibited by the Constitution. The government and its citizens, whenever the Territory is open to settlement, both enter it with their respective rights defined and limited by the Constitution.
"Congress has no right to prohibit the citizens of any particular State or States from taking up their home there, while it permits citizens of other States to do so. Nor has it a right to give privileges to one class of citizens which it refuses to another. The territory is acquired for their equal and common benefit--and if open to any it must be open to all upon equal and the same terms.
"Every citizen has a right to take with him into the Territory any article of property which the Constitution of the United States recognizes as property.
"The Constitution of the United States recognizes slaves as property, and pledges the Federal Government to protect it. And Congress cannot exercise any more authority on property of that description than it may constitutionally exercise over property of any other kind.
"The act of Congress, therefore, prohibiting a citizen of the United States from taking with him his slaves when he removes to the Territory in question to reside, is an exercise of authority over private property which is not warranted by the Constitution--and the removal of the plaintiff, by his owner, to that Territory, gave him no title to freedom.
"The plaintiff himself acquired no title to freedom by being taken by his owner to Rock Island, in Illinois, and brought back to Missouri. This court has heretofore decided that the status or condition of a person of African descent depended on the laws of the State in which he resided."
Thus the highest and most august judicial tribunal of this country pronounced doctrines abhorrent to the age, overthrowing the acts and practices of the fathers and framers of the Republic, and pronouncing the Ordinance of 1787, in so far as it restricted human slavery, and all like enactments as, from the beginning, _unconstitutional_.
This decision startled the bench and bar and the thinking people of the whole country, not alone on account of the doctrines laid down by the court, but because of the new departure of a high court in going beyond the confines of the case made on the record to announce them.
It is, to say the least, only usual for any court to decide the issues necessary to a determination of the real case under consideration, nothing more; but the court in this case first decided that the Circuit Court, from which error was prosecuted, had no jurisdiction to render any judgment, it having found "upon the showing of Scott himself that he was still a slave; not even to render a judgment against him and in favor of defendants for costs."
In the opinion it is said:
"It is the judgment of this court that it appears by the record before us that the plaintiff in error is not a citizen of Missouri, in the same sense in which that word is used in the Constitution; and that the Circuit Court of the United States, for that reason, had _no jurisdiction_ in the case, and could give no judgment in it. Its judgment for the defendant must, consequently, be reversed, and a mandate issued, directing the suit to be dismissed for want of jurisdiction."
Having thus decided, it followed that anything said or attempted to be decided on other questions was extra-judicial--mere _obiter dicta_, if even that.
Nor does the objection to the matters covered by the decision rest alone on its extra-judicial character, but on the fact that in settling a mere individual controversy it passed from private rights to public rights of the people in their national character, wholly pertaining to political questions, entirely beyond the province of the court, legally, judicially, or potentially. It had no legal right as a court to decide or comment upon what was not before it; it had no judicial power to make any decree to enforce public or political rights, nor yet to enforce, by any instrumentalities or judicial machinery,--fines, jails, etc.,--any such decrees.
Moreover, the decision invaded the express powers of the Constitution grated to it by the Constitution "respecting the Territory of other property belonging to the United States." This grant is preceded in the Constitution by the language, "The Congress shall have power to,"(93) etc.
The court entered the political field, though clothed only with judicial power, one of the three distinct powers of the government. For wise purposes executive, legislative, and judicial departments were provided by the Constitution, each to be potential within its sphere, acting always, of course, within their respective proper, limited, constitutionally conferred authority.
"The judicial power shall extend to all _cases_ in law and equity arising under this Constitution."(94)
This highest judicial tribunal, it is seen, passed from a case wherein no jurisdiction, as it held, rested in the courts to enter any form of judgment--not even for costs, to decide matters not pertaining in any sense to the particular case, nor even to _judicial_ public rights of the people or the government, but wholly to the political, legislative powers of Congress, not in any degree involved in the jurisdictional question arising and decided. If it be said that courts of review or error sometimes decide all the questions made on the record, though some of them may not be necessary to a complete disposition of the case before it, it must be answered that this is most rare, if at all, where the case is disposed of, as was the Dred Scott case, against the trial court's jurisdiction. But, manifestly, the many political questions discussed at great length in the opinions and formulated as _syllabi_ (quoted above) for the case, did not and could not arise of record, and they were not covered by assignments of error, and hence, whether the sole question decided or to be decided was one of jurisdiction or not, these questions can only be regarded as discussions--personal opinions of the justices--not rising to the dignity of mere volunteer opinions on matters of _law_; of no binding force even as _legal precedents_, because outside of the case and record--not even properly _obiter dicta_.
But slavery then dominated and permeated everything and everybody. Why should the justices of the Supreme Court be free from its influence? The Ordinance of 1787 was re-enacted by the First Congress under the Constitution, and its slavery restriction clause was enforced, without question, by Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson and their administrations. The Missouri Compromise line had stood unassailed for above a third of a century. In 1848 Polk and his Cabinet approved the Oregon Bill prohibiting slavery; also Pierce and his Administration approved (1853) the extension of the same prohibition over Washington Territory.
Earlier, in 1845, the Texas Annexation Act, as we have seen, re- enacted the 36° 30´ line of restriction for slavery, and in 1848 the pro-slavery party in Congress voted to extend this line to California. Congress again and again exercised the power of legislating for the Territories; eleven times, between 1823 and 1838, it amended the laws of the Legislature of Florida, thus asserting the absolute right to legislate for the Territories. The Supreme Court of the United States for nearly seventy years had assumed and acted on the principle of the right of Congress to legislate for them.
Now all became changed, as though a new oracle of construction had appeared, higher and wiser than all who had gone before--an oracle who knew more of the Constitution than its makers. This new oracle did not divine the fates. The announcement of the principle that the Constitution treats negroes "as persons whom it is _morally_ lawful to deal in as articles of property and to hold as slaves," shocked the consciences of just men throughout the earth.
Referring to the times when the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were adopted, and speaking of the African race, the Chief-Justice, in his opinion, said:
"They had, for more than a century before, been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations: and so far inferior, _that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect:_ and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."
These and kindred expressions astonished all civilization and all Christian people.
The North was stunned by the decision, some fearing that slavery was soon to become national. The South exulted boastfully of their cause,(95) loudly proclaiming the paramount, binding force of the supreme judicial tribunal in the Republic. Free labor and free laborers were decried. They were, in speech and press, called "_mud sills of society:_" only negro slavery ennobled the white race.
The over-zealous South was even persuaded that the small farmers, trafficking merchants, and mechanics did not possess bravery enough to fight for _liberty_.
Justice Catron, especially, claimed that Napoleon I., by the insertion of the third article of the treaty of cession of the Louisiana Province, had forever fastened slavery on it. But of this we have already spoken.(96)
It was slavery's last triumph. Dred Scott, his wife, and two little girls were remanded to slavery, to be freed by the irresistible might of divine justice, worked out through the expiating blood of the long-offending white race, commingled on many fields with the blood of their own race.
(92) 19th Howard (_U. S._), pp. 393-633.
(93) Con., Art. IV., Sec. 3, Par. 2.
(94) Con., Art. III., Sec. 2.
(95) Robert Toombs of Georgia in extravagant exuberance is reported to have said: "I expect to call the roll of my slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill."
(96) _Ante_, p. 43-5.
XX JOHN BROWN RAID--1859
John Brown, of Kansas fame, eccentric, misguided, and intense in his hatred of slavery, and of martyr stuff, encouraged by some of the most influential anti-slavery men of the North, who were goaded on by slavery's perennial aggressions, with a "_pike-pole_" at Harper's Ferry (October 16, 1859) pricked the fetid pit of slavery, causing a tremor to run through the whole body of it. He had with him an _army of eighteen_, five of whom were free negroes.(97) They had rifles and pistols for themselves, and a few pikes for the slaves they hoped to free.
Brown had assembled his band at the Kennedy farm in Maryland, a few miles distant from Harper's Ferry, Virginia.
He professed to believe he might succeed if he could take the latter place, as it "would serve as a notice to the slaves that their friends had come, and as a trumpet to rally them to his standard." This he stated to Frederick Douglass, whom he urged in vain to join his expedition.(98) His object was to free slaves, not to take life.
This daring body seized the United States armory, arsenal, and the rifle-works, all government property. By midnight Brown was in full possession of Harper's Ferry. Before morning he caused the arrest of two prominent slave owners, one of whom was Colonel Lewis Washington, the great grandson of a brother of George Washington, capturing of him the sword of Frederick the Great, and a brace of pistols of Lafayette, presents from them, respectively, to General Washington. It was Brown's special ambition to free the Washington slaves. Fighting began at daybreak of the 17th. The Mayor of Harper's Ferry and another fell mortally wounded.
Brown and his party by noon were driven into an engine-house near the armory, where they had barred the doors and windows, and made port-holes for their rifles. There they were besieged and fired on by their assailants.
Colonel Washington and others of their captives were held by Brown in the engine-house. Shots were returned by Brown and his men. Some idea of Brown's character and bravery can be formed from Colonel Washington's description of his conduct in the engine-house fort:
"Brown was the coolest and firmest man I ever saw in defying danger and death. With one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand and held his rifle with the other, and commanded his men with the utmost composure, encouraging them to be firm and sell their lives as dearly as they could."
He wreaked no vengeance on his prisoners. Though his sons and friends were dead and dying around him, and himself, near the end of the fight, cleaved down with a sword, and bayonets were thrust in his body, he sheltered his prisoners so that not one of them was harmed. And non-combatants were not fired on by his band.
When Brown's party in the _fort_ were reduced to himself and six men, two or more of these being wounded, Colonel Robert E. Lee, _then of the United States Army_, arrived with a company of marines. After Lee's demand to surrender was refused by Brown, an entrance was forced, and, bleeding, some dying, he and those left were taken. Of the nineteen, ten were killed, five taken prisoners, and four had succeeded in escaping, two of the four being afterwards captured in Pennsylvania. They had killed five and wounded nine of the inhabitants and of their besiegers.
Not only was all the vicinity wildly excited, but the whole South was in an uproar. Slavery had been physically assaulted in its home. The North partook of the excitement, generally condemning the rash proceeding, though many deeply sympathized with the purpose of Brown's movement, and his heroic conduct and life caused many to admire him. He was a devout believer in the literal reading of the Holy Bible, and of the special judgments of God, as he interpreted them in the Old Testament. His attack on slavery he regarded as more rational than and as likely to triumph as Joshua's attack on a walled city with trumpets and shouts, and as Gideon's band of three hundred, armed only with trumpets, lamps, and pitchers in its encounter with a great army. As Jericho's walls had fallen, and Gideon's band had put to flight Midianites and Amalekites in countless multitudes like grasshoppers, so, Brown expected, at least fondly hoped and devoutly prayed, to see the myriads of human slaves go free in America. He did not, however, expect a general rising of the slaves.
He did not seek to San Domingoize the South, and against this he provided penalties in his prepared provisional constitution.(99)
Brown had been encouraged and materially aided by Gerritt Smith, Dr. Howe of Boston, Stearns, Sanborn, Frederick Douglass, Higginson, Emerson, Parker, Phillips, and others of less renown; some, if not all, of whom had neither understood nor approved of his plan of attack.
The slaves did not rise, not did they in any considerable number even know at the time the real purpose of their would-be liberator.
During the excitement of the first news Greeley prophetically wrote:
"We deeply regret this outbreak; but remembering if their fault was grievous, grieviously have they answered for it, we will not by one reproachful word disturb the bloody shrouds wherein John Brown and his compatriots are sleeping. They dared and died for what they felt to be right, though in a manner which seems to us to be fatally wrong. Let their epitaphs remain unwritten until the _not distant day_ when no slave shall clank his chains in the shades of Monticello or by the graves of Mount Vernon."(100)
Brown's raid did not seriously, as was then expected, affect the November elections of that year, and they were favorable to the young, aggressive Republican party, formed to stay the extension of slavery.
It is not the purpose here to write a detailed history of particular events, only to name such as had a substantial effect on slavery; yet John Brown's _fate_ should be recorded. He was captured October 18th; indicted on October 20th; arraigned and put on his trial at Charlestown, in Jefferson County, Virginia, though his open wounds were still bleeding; and on October 31, 1859, a jury brought in a verdict finding him "Guilty of treason, and conspiring and advising with slaves and others to rebel; and murder in the first degree." Save in the matter of precipitation, his trial was fair, under all the circumstances, and no other result could have been expected. November 2 he was sentenced to be hung on December 2, 1859.
When arraigned for sentence, among other things he said:
"If it is deemed necessary I should forfeit my life in furtherance of the end of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust exactments, I say, let it be done."
A little later he wrote:
"I can leave to God the time and manner of my death, for I believe now that the sealing of my testimony before God and man with my blood will do far more to further the cause to which I have earnestly devoted myself than anything I have done in my life . . . I am quite cheerful concerning my approaching end, since I am convinced I am worth infinitely more on the gallows than I could be anywhere else."
On his way from the prison to the scaffold he handed to a guard a paper on which were written his last words.
"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."
Emerson, Parker, and the Abolition press of the North eulogized Brown and his followers.
His raid was made another pretence for uniting the South.
The American Anti-Slavery Society in its calendar of events designated _1859_ as "The John Brown Year."
John Brown was immortalized in a song written and sung first in 1861, and thereafter by the Union army wherever it marched. On the spot where he was hanged a Massachusetts regiment (1862) sung:
"John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave, But his soul goes marching on," etc.
The significance of John Brown's attack, small as it was in the point of numbers engaged in it, lies in the fact that it is the only one of its character openly made on slavery in the history of the United States, and in the further fact that it was at the threshold of _Secession--War_, ending in _universal emancipation_.
(97) _Hist. of the U. S._ (Rhodes), vol. ii., p. 393.
(98) _Ibid_., p. 392.
(99) Mason's _Report_, p. 57.
(100) _Hist. of U. S._ (Rhodes), vol. ii., p. 403; New York _Tribune_, Oct. 19th.
XXI PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS, 1856-1860
The political campaign of 1856 has thus far been passed by, as it more appropriately belongs to a history of the political movements leading up to secession.
Between the two great parties--Republican and Democratic--the most important issue was the slavery question.
The Republican party, born of the slavery agitation, in its platform (1856) denied
"The authority of Congress, of a territorial legislature, of any individual or association of individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any Territory of the United States.
"Declared that the Constitution confers on Congress sovereign power over the Territories of the United States for their government, and that in the exercise of this power it is both the right and the duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism--Polygamy and Slavery."
On the other hand, the Democratic party in 1856, fresh from the contest in Congress over the Nebraska Bill and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, denied the right of Congress to exclude slavery from the Territories, and declared it
"The right of the people of all the Territories, including Kansas and Nebraska . . . to form a Constitution, with or without domestic slavery, and be admitted into the Union."
There were other but minor issues discussed in 1856. John C. Fremont was nominated by the Republicans and James Buchanan by the Democrats. Douglas failed of the Presidential prize through violent antagonism from the South, especially from Jefferson Davis, Wm. L. Yancey, Robert Toombs, and other leading pro-slavery statesmen. They distrusted him, though he had led them to victory in 1854 in repealing the 36° 30´ restriction of slavery, and in throwing open, as we have seen, the Nebraska territorial empire to the influx of slaves. He was patriotic, and hence could not be depended on to take the next step towards forcing slavery into the Territories and to favor a dissolution of the Union.
Buchanan, a pliant tool, was elected by a plurality vote over Fremont and Fillmore, the candidate of the American party. Fremont carried, with good majorities, all the free States save Indiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and California.
The popular discussion of the slavery question in the campaign was thorough, memorable, exciting, educating, and, though resulting in defeat to the anti-slavery party, it marked the trend of public sentiment, and clearly foreshadowed that it would soon triumph.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 still further elucidated to the masses of the people the issues impending, and indicated that the end of slavery extension was near.
The Dred Scott decision, announced March, 1857, had completely overthrown, so far as it could be done by judicial-political _obiter dicta_, Douglas's Popular Sovereignty theory, leaving him with only the northern end (and that not united) of his party endeavoring to uphold it.
Next came the Presidential campaign of 1860, the last in which a slave party participated.
The Democratic party met in delegate convention in April, 1860, in Charleston, South Carolina, and after seven days of struggle, during which disunion threats were made by Yancey and others, the delegates from the Cotton States--South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas--seceded, for the alleged reason that a majority of the convention adopted the 1856 Democratic platform which upheld the Douglas - Popular Sovereignty doctrine as applied to the Territories.
The seceding delegates had voted for a platform declaring the right of all citizens to settle in the Territories with all their property (including slaves) "without its being destroyed or impaired by Congressional or territorial legislation," and further,
"That it is the duty of the Federal Government in all its departments to protect, when necessary, the rights of persons and property in the Territories, and wherever else its constitutional authority extends."
This was not only the new doctrine of the Supreme Court, but to it was superadded the further claim that the Constitution _required_ Congress and all the departments of the government to protect the slaveholder with his slaves, when once in a Territory, against territorial legislation or other unfriendly acts. By this most startling doctrine the Constitution was to become an instrument to _establish and protect slavery_ in all the territorial possessions of the Republic.
Douglas failed of nomination at Charleston for want of a two thirds vote of the entire convention as originally organized. The convention adjourned to meet, June 11th, at Baltimore, and the seceding branch of it also adjourned to meet at the same time at Richmond, but later it decided to meet with and again become a part of the convention at Baltimore. At this time the South had control of the Senate, and May 25, 1860, before the convention reassembled, and after a most acrimonious debate into which Douglas was drawn and in which Jefferson Davis bitterly assailed him, the resolutions of the latter were passed, affirming the "_property_" theory, with the new doctrine of constitutional protection of it in the Territories added.
The convention reassembled, and at the end of five days' wrangle and recrimination, during which the members called each other "disorganizers," "bolters," "traitors," "disunionists," "abolitionists," accompanied by violent threats, it disrupted again, its chairman, Caleb Cushing, of Massachusetts, led the bolters and was followed by the delegates generally from the Southern States. They organized at once a separate convention.
Douglas was nominated by the originally organized convention, and John C. Breckinridge by the bolters, each on the sharply defined platform relating to slavery, mentioned above.
Still another political body assembled in Baltimore in 1860, to wit: "The Constitutional Union Convention." It met May 9th. Its platform was intended to be comprehensive and so simple and patriotic that everybody might endorse it. It declared against recognizing any principle other than
"_The Constitution of the Country, the Union of the States, and the Enforcement of the Laws._"
John Bell of Tennessee was nominated on this broad platform for President, with Edward Everett of Massachusetts for Vice-President, both eminently respectable statesmen, but the times were not auspicious for mere generalized principles or mere respectability.
The great Wigwam - Republican Convention met at Chicago, May 16, 1860, with delegates from all the free States, the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska, and from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri.
Its platform was long, and affirmed the principles of the Declaration of Independence, pronounced against interfering with slavery in the States, denounced the John Brown raid as "among the gravest of crimes," and, in the main, was temperate and conservative.
On the question of slavery in the Territories it was radical:
"That the new dogma that the Constitution, of its own force, carries slavery in to any or all of the Territories of the United States, is a dangerous political heresy, at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself," etc.
"That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom, . . . and we deny the authority of Congress, or a Territorial Legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any Territory in the United States."
Lincoln of Illinois, Seward of New York, Chase of Ohio, and Cameron of Pennsylvania were the principal candidates for nomination, but the contest turned out to be between Lincoln and Seward, each of whom was regarded eminently qualified for the Presidency and an especial representative of his party on the slavery issue.
Lincoln was nominated on the third ballot, and Hannibal Hamlin, a sturdy New England statesman, was nominated for Vice-President.
Slavery, with its tri-cornered issues, was the sole absorbing question discussed in the campaign. In the South, the Breckinridge wing assailed the Douglas party, which combated _it_ there in turn. In the North, the Republican party attacked furiously both the Douglas and Breckinridge wings of the Democratic party; they, in turn, fighting back and fighting each other.
The Bell and Everett party, though it claimed to be the only party of the Constitution, fell into ridicule, as it really advocated no well-defined principles on any subject whatsoever. Bell and Everett, however, carried Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. Lincoln carried all the Northern States, save three of the electoral votes in New Jersey.
Of the 303 electoral votes, Lincoln had 180, Douglas 12 (Missouri 9 and New Jersey 3), Breckinridge 72, and Bell 39, thus giving Lincoln 57 over all. He was the first and only President elected on a direct slavery issue.
The slavery question, thus sharply presented, was decided at the polls by the people, and their verdict was for freedom in the Territories. No more slave States; no more dilution of slavery by spreading it (as was once advocated by Clay and others) for its amelioration.
It must live or die in States wherein it was established. Neither successful secession, state-rights, nor accomplished disunion could extend it. Like all wrong, it could not stand still; to flourish, it must be aggressive and progressive. To limit it was to strangle it. This its votaries well understood.
In the history of the world there never were more brilliant, more devoted, more earnest, more infatuated, and yet more inconsistent propagandists of the institution of human slavery than in our Republic during the period of the agitation of nullification--state- rights--secession--disunion lines. They were of the Calhoun school. They declaimed in halls of legislation and on the stump and rostrum for "Liberty," and hugged closely _human slavery_, often professing to believe it of _divine right_.
XXII DISSOLUTION OF THE UNION
Secession was at hand! At first it was justified under the banner of state-rights, on the theory that the Union was a voluntary compact of States which could be broken at the will of one or all. That a Republic was only an experiment, to exist until overthrown by any member of it. That the blood of the Revolution was shed, not for the establishment of an independent nation, but for a confederacy of separate states. In the guise of nullification it appeared, as we have seen, 1832; excessive tariff duties were the pretext. In 1835 it assumed to be the champion of slavery, because on the slavery question only could the South be united. It is due to history to say, of the decade preceding 1860, patriotism was not universal even in the free States. Slavery had her votaries there. Interests of trade affected many. Prejudice against the blacks and ties of kinship affected others. Parties and affiliations and love of political power controlled the policy of influential men in all sections of the country.
The South was aggressive, and smarted under its defeats in attempts to extend its beloved institution. The prayer of Calhoun for a united South was fast being realized, and a fatal destiny goaded on its leaders. Slavery, indeed, no longer stood on a firm foundation. Public sentiment had sapped it. It could not live and tolerate free speech, and a free press, or universal education even of the white race where it existed. All strangers sojourning in the South were under espionage; they, though innocent of any designs on slavery, were often brutally treated and driven away. It was only the distinguished visitors who were entertained with the much boasted-of Southern hospitality. The German or other industrious foreign emigrant rarely, if ever, ventured into the South.
Its towns and cities languished. Slavery was bucolic and patriarchal. It could not, in its most prosperous state, flourish on small plantations; nor could the many own slaves or be interested in their labor. Not exceeding two tenths of the white race South owned, at any time, or were interested in slave labor or slaves. The eight tenths had no political or social standing. They were, in a large sense, in another form, white slaves.
The Border States held their negroes by a precarious tenure. The most intelligent were constantly escaping. The inter-traffic in slaves bred in the more northern slave States was likely to become less profitable. And patrols by night, to insure order, had become generally necessary.
The publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ had a great effect on public sentiment North, and some influence even in the South. _The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It_, written by Hilton R. Helper, a poor white man of North Carolina (1857), an arraignment of slavery from the standpoint of the white majority South, was denounced as incendiary in Congress. Sherman of Ohio, having in some way endorsed its publication, when a candidate for Speaker, was denounced by Millson of Virginia, who declared that "one who consciously, deliberately, and of purpose lent his name and influence to the propagation of such writings is not only not fit to be Speaker, but is not fit to live."
Sherman's endorsement of the Helper book caused his defeat for Speaker, and a riot occurred in the House during this contest: Not quite bloodshed. Of the scene, Morris of Illinois said:
"A few more such scenes . . . and we shall hear the crack of the revolver and see the gleam of the brandished blade."
The contents of the book, though temperate in tone, were said by Pryor of Virginia to deal only "in rebellion, treason, and insurrection."
Scenes, most extraordinary, were not unfrequently enacted in the House of Representatives, all having the effect to inflame the public mind. Some of these were brought on by violent speeches of Northern statesmen, made in response to the defiant attitude or utterances of Southern men, boastful of their bravery.
One such scene was precipitated in 1860 by Owen Lovejoy of Illinois, who, in a speech to the House, denounced
"Slaveholding as worse than robbing, than piracy, than polygamy. The enslavement of human beings because they are inferior . . . is the doctrine of the Democrats, and the doctrine of devils as well! and there is no place in the universe outside the five-points of hell and the Democratic party where the practice and prevalence of such doctrines would not be a disgrace."
Lovejoy had more than an ordinary excuse for using such violent language.
As long before as November 7, 1837, his brother, Elijah P. Lovejoy, had been murdered at Alton, Illinois, while defending his printing- press from a mob, chiefly from Missouri, his offence being that he published an Abolition paper (_The Observer_). His press had thrice before in a year been destroyed.
Pryor of Virginia, Barksdale of Mississippi, and others resented Lovejoy's expletives, calling him "an infamous, perjured villain," "a perjured negro-thief," and demanding of the Speaker to "order that blackhearted scoundrel and negro-stealing thief to take his seat."
Personal conflicts were imminent between opposing members. Potter of Iowa, Kellogg of Illinois, and others promptly and fiercely came to Lovejoy's defence. The latter finished his speech amid excitement and threats. Pryor afterwards demanded of Potter "the satisfaction usual among gentlemen," who promptly proposed to give it to him, naming bowie-knives as the weapons for the duel. This mode of gaining "_satisfaction_" was not accepted, because it was "vulgar, barbarous, and inhuman." Potter thenceforth became a hero, and less was heard of Northern cowardice.
This, and like incidents, kindled the fast-spreading flame,--real battle-fires were then almost in sight.
It must not be assumed the Republican party, before the war, favored the abolition of slavery. Its principal leaders denied they were abolitionists; on the contrary, they insisted that their party would not interfere with slavery where it existed by State law.
The sentiment of the people in that party, however, was, on this question, in advance even of its progressive leaders. The enforcement of the Fugitive-Slave Law caused many and most important accessions to the Abolitionists. Wendell Phillips became an Abolitionist on seeing Garrison dragged by a mob through the streets of Boston; Josiah Quincy by the martyrdom of Lovejoy; other men of much note, and multitudes of the moving, controlling masses, were decided to oppose human slavery by kindred scenes all over the North. They took solemn, often secret vows, on witnessing men and women carried off in chains to slavery, to wage eternal war on the institution; this, in imitation of the vow of Hannibal of old to his father, Hamilcar, to wage eternal war on Rome.
At last, through causes for the existence of which the South was chiefly to blame, the sentiment North was culminating so strongly against slavery that soon, had secession and war not come, slavery would have everywhere been assailed. It is impossible to stay the march of a great moral movement, when backed by enlightened masses, as to stem the rushing waters of a great stream in flood time. Hence, the experiment of dissolution of the Union to save slavery was due, if ever, to be tried in _1861!_
Secession was made easier by reason of a long cherished habit of the Southern people to speak of themselves boastfully as citizens of their respective States, thus, "I am a Virginian"; "I am a Kentuckian," seemingly oblivious to the fact that they were citizens of the United States. This habit destroyed in some degree national patriotism, and promoted a State pride, baleful in its consequences. In many of the slave State voting was done _viva voce;_ that is, by the voter announcing at the polls to the judges the name of the person for whom he voted for each office. This, it was contended, promoted frankness, manliness, independence, and honesty in elections. On the other hand, it was claimed, with much truth, that it was a most refined and certain method of coercing the dependent poorer classes into voting as the dominant class might desire, and hence almost totally destructive of independence in voting.
An anecdote is told of John Randolph of Roanoke, who, when at the Court of St. James (England) was conspicuous for his boasting that he was a _Virginian_. He was introduced by an English official for an after-dinner speech with a request that he should tell the distinguishing difference between a _Virginian_ and a citizen of the American Republic. He curtly responded:
"The difference is in the system of voting on election days; in Virginia a voter must stand up, look the candidates in the eye, and bravely and honestly name his preference, like a man; while generally a voter in other States of the Union is permitted to sneak to the polls like a thief, and slip a folded paper into a hole in a box, then in a cowardly way steal home; the one promotes manliness, the other cowardice."
XXIII SECESSION OF STATES--1860-1
From what has been said, it will be seen the hour had arrived for practical secession--disunion--or a total abandonment by the South of its defiant position on slavery. The latter was not to be expected of the proud race of Southern statesmen and slaveholders. They had pushed their cause too far to recede, and the North, though conceding generally that there was no constitutional power to interfere with slavery where it existed, was equally determined not to permit its extension. In secession lay the only hope of either forcing the North to recede from its position, or, if successful, to create a new government wherein slavery should be universal and fundamental. Never before had it been proposed to establish a nation solely to perpetuate human slavery.
The election of Lincoln was already announced as a sufficient cause for secession. The South had failed to make California slave; to make four more slave States out of Texas; to secure pledges that out of the New Mexico Territory other slave States should be formed; and to make Kansas a slave State. It had also failed to acquire Cuba, already slave, for division into more slave States. There was, moreover, a certainly that many more free States would be admitted from the territorial domain of the great West. The political equilibrium in Congress on the line of slavery had therefore become impossible for all the future. These were the grievances over which the South brooded.
But was it not in the divine plan that slavery in the Republic should come to a violent end? Nowhere among the kingdoms and empires of the earth had it become, or had it ever been so deeply implanted, as a part of a political system. In the proud, boastful, free Republic of America, in the afternoon of the nineteenth century, where the Christian religion was taught, where liberty of conscience was guaranteed by organic law, where civilization was assumed to exist in its most enlightened and progressive stage, there, _alone_, the slave owner marshalled boastfully his human slaves, selling them on the auction block or otherwise at will, to be carried to distant parts, separating wife and husband, parents and children, and in a thousand ways shocking all the purer instincts of humanity.
Nor did its evil effects begin or cease with the black slave.
Jefferson, speaking of slavery in the United States when it existed in a more modified form, described its immoral effect on the master and his family thus:
"The whole commerce between master and slave is perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it. . . . The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of small slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities."(101)
The virtue of the white race was necessarily involved in the institution. The blood of the dominant race became intermingled with the black, and often white blood predominated in the slave. The offspring of slaveholders became slaves, and were dealt in the same as the pure African. Concubinage existed generally where slaves were numerous.
The rule was that any person born of a slave mother was doomed to perpetual slavery.
As early as 1856, perhaps earlier, conferences were proposed among leaders in some of the Southern States looking to secession. They were repeated again in 1858, and before the election of Lincoln in 1860.(102) And Southern secret societies were formed in 1860 to promote the same end.
The existence of a disunion cabal in Buchanan's Cabinet, working to bring about disunion, was hardly a secret.
Howell Cobb of Georgia, Secretary of the Treasury, John B. Floyd of Virginia, Secretary of War, Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, Secretary of the Interior, and possibly others, were of the Cabinet cabal.
Buchanan, though himself desiring to preserve the Union, had not the bold temperament, and he had too long been a political tool of the slave power to effectually resist its violent aggressions; nor did he have the discernment to discover that his official household was the centre of a disunion movement. His Secretary of War distributed officers of the army believed to be friendly to the South where they could become available to it; he sent from the North small arms and cannon, ammunition and stores where they could be seized at the right time.(103) Members of the Cabinet kept the secession leaders advised of all acts of the administration, and generally aided them. The auspicious time, if ever, seemed to have come for a successful dissolution of the Union. The army and navy were full of able Southern men, ready, as the sequel proves, to go with their States, abandon the country that had nurtured and educated them, and the flag that had been their glory.
Governor Wm. H. Gist, of South Carolina, October 5, 1860, by confidential letters to the governors of the cotton States, fairly inaugurated disunion, based on the anticipated election of Abraham Lincoln a month thence.(104)
One week later, without waiting for a consultation of governors of slave States, he, by proclamation, convened the Legislature of South Carolina to "_take action for the safety and protection of the State_."
This body met November 5th, the day preceding the Presidential election.
The alleged grounds of justification for this early meeting were:
"The strong possibility of the election to the Presidency of a sectional candidate by a party committed to the support of measures which, if carried out, will inevitably destroy _our equality in the Union_," etc.
This was the avowed reason, finally, for secession, though the true reason was the absolute restriction of slavery and the overthrow of the slave power in the Republic. The election of a Republican President was, of course, a disappointment to Southern statesmen, long used to absolute sway in Congress and in the administration of the government. The charge that Lincoln was a sectional President was true only to the extent that freedom was sectional. Slavery only was then, by secessionists, regarded as national.
The first important step of the South Carolina Legislature was to appropriate $100,000 to be expended by the Governor in purchasing small-arms and a battery of rifled cannon. Without opposition a convention was called to take "into consideration the dangers incident to the position of the State in the Federal Union." Her two United States Senators and other of her Federal officers forthwith resigned. A grand mass meeting was held, November 17th, at Charleston, generally participated in by the ladies, merchants, etc. The Stars and Stripes were not displayed, but a white palmetto flag, after solemn prayer, was unfurled in its stead. Disunion was here inaugurated. November 13th the Legislature of South Carolina stayed the collection of all debts due to citizens of non- slaveholding States. It was not sufficient to repudiate the Union, but honest debts must also be repudiated.
The convention thus called first met at Columbia, December 17th, thence adjourned to Charleston, where (appropriately) on December 20, 1860, an Ordinance of Secession was passed reading thus:
"_An Ordinance,
"To dissolve the Union between the State of South Carolina and other States united with her under the compact entitled 'The Constitution of the United States of America_.'
"We, the people of the State of South Carolina, in convention assembled, do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained: That the Ordinance adopted by us in convention on the 23d day of May, in the year of our Lord 1788, whereby the Constitution of the United States was ratified, and also, all acts and parts of acts of the General Assembly of this State, ratifying amendments of the said Constitution, are hereby repealed, and the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'The United States of America,' is hereby dissolved."
This action was taken in Buchanan's administration while secessionists and promoters of disunion were yet in his Cabinet, and Jefferson Davis and others were still plotting in Congress.
Great stress was laid upon the right to rescind the original Ordinance of 1788 ratifying the Constitution of the United States, and the Union of the States was denominated only a "_compact_." The passage of the Ordinance of Secession was followed by "bonfires and illuminations, ringing of bells, insults to the Stars and Stripes," participated in by South Carolina aristocracy, especially cheered on by the first ladies of the State and city, little dreaming that slavery's opening death-knell was being proclaimed.(105)
It was fitting that South Carolina should lead the van of secession. She had, in a Colonial state, furnished more Tories in the Revolution of 1776 than any of the other colonies; she had initiated secession through nullification in 1832; and her greatest statesman, Calhoun, was the first to propose disunion as a remedy for slavery restrictions.
Events succeeded rapidly.
An Alabama convention met, and, on January 8, 1861, received commissioners from South Carolina, and on the 11th passed, in secret session, an Ordinance of Secession, refusing to submit it to a vote of her people.
Mississippi, on January 9, 1861, passed, through a convention, a like Ordinance.
Georgia, January 19th, by a convention passed her Ordinance of Secession.
Louisiana's convention passed an Ordinance of Secession January 25, 1861.
Texas passed, in convention, on February 1, 1861, a like Ordinance, which was ratified by a vote of her people February 24th.(106)
Thus seven States resolved to secede before Abraham Lincoln became President.
And each of these States had prepared for armed opposition; most, if not all, of their Senators and Representatives in Congress had withdrawn; in most of the States named United States forts, arms, military stores, and other public property had been seized; and many officers of the army and navy had deserted, weakly excusing their action by declaring they must go with their States.
Events were happening in Washington. Cass resigned as Secretary of State because Buchanan adhered to the doctrine that there was no power to coerce a seceding State. Under this baleful doctrine, secession had secured, apparently, a free and bloodless right of way in its mad rush to dissolve the Union and to establish a slave empire. It was at first thought by Southern leaders wise to postpone the formation of a "Confederacy" until Lincoln was inaugurated. But about January 1st there came a Cabinet rupture. Floyd was driven from it, and Joseph Holt of Kentucky, a most able and patriotic Union man, succeeded him. Later, Edwin M. Stanton and Jeremiah Black came into the Cabinet, Buchanan yielding to more patriotic influences and adopting more decided Union measures, though not based wholly on a coercive policy.
But, on January 5, 1861, a "Central Cabal," consisting of "Southern Statesmen," who still lingered at Washington, where they could best promote and direct the secession of the States and keep the administration in check, if not control it, met in one of the rooms of the _Capitol_ to devise an ultimate programme for the future. It agreed on these propositions:
First. Immediate secession of States.
Second. A convention to meet at Montgomery, Alabama, not later than February 15th, to organize a Confederacy.
To prevent hostile legislation under the changed and more loyal impulses of the President and his reconstructed Cabinet, the cotton States Senators should remain awhile in their places, to "keep the hands of Buchanan tied."(107)
This cabal appointed Senators Jefferson Davis, Slidell, and Mallory "to carry out the objects of the meeting."
Thus, beneath the "Dome of the Capitol," treason was plotted by Senators and Representatives who still held their seats and official places, and still received their pay from the United States Treasury, for the sole purpose of enabling them the better to accomplish the end sought. Think of the prospective President of the "Confederate States of America," their future Minister to the Court of France, and their future Secretary of the Navy, plotting secretly in the Capitol at Washington to destroy the Union! But these were treasonable times.
Through resolution of the Mississippi Legislature, the Montgomery Convention was hastened, and it met February 4, instead of February 15, 1861, as suggested by the Washington caucus of Southern Congressmen. The delegates from the six seceded States east of the Mississippi assembled, and a little later (March 2d) delegates from Texas joined them. On the fourth day of its session the national _slave-child_ was born, and christened "_Confederate States of America_." The next day Jefferson Davis was elected President, and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, Vice-President. Stephens took the oath of office on the day following his election. Davis arrived from Washington, and was, on the 18th, inaugurated the first (and last) President of this Confederacy.
The next step was a permanent Constitution. With characteristic celerity, this was prepared and adopted March 11, 1861, one week after Lincoln became President of the United States, though the Confederacy had been formed almost a month before his official term commenced.
This instrument was modelled on the Constitution of the United States.
It forbade the importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country, other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States. Then following, for the first time probably in the history of nations, the proposed new Republic dedicated itself to eternal slavery, thus:
"No bill of attainder, _ex post facto_ law, or _law denying or impairing_ the right of property in negro slaves, shall be passed."(108)
Singularly enough, the astute friends of the institution of slavery, knowing and avowing that it could not survive competition with the free, well-paid labor necessary to manufacturing industries, and knowing also that slavery was only adapted to rural pursuits, not to skilled mechanical labor, and desiring to plant human slavery permanently in the new nation, removed from all possibility of competition with anything that might, by dignifying labor, build up wealth as witnessed in the great Northern cities and thus endanger slavery, sought to protect it by a clause incorporated in their organic act, prohibiting any form of _tariff_ to protect home industries.
"Nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry."(109)
Cotton was ever to be "King" in the Confederacy.
Mississippi's "Declaration of the Immediate Causes" justifying secession with perfect honesty announced:
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest in the world. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition or a dissolution of the Union."
The best, most candid, conservative, and comprehensive statement in explanation and vindication of the Confederate Constitution, the purposes and objects of the nation and people to be governed by and under it, is found in a speech of Vice-President Stephens at Savannah, Georgia, delivered ten days (March 21, 1861) after its adoption.
Here is a single extract:
"The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution--African slavery as it exists among us--the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. _This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this as the rock upon which the old Union would split_. He was right. What was conjecture with him is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him, and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time. The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly used against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a government built upon it: when the 'storms came and the wind blew, it fell.'
"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, _its corner stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man_. That slavery-- subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all the other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics."
This is a fair and truthful exposition of the fundamental principles of the Confederacy, fallacious as they were.
North Carolina, after her people had voted down a convention to consider the question of secession at an extra session of her Legislature, called a convention which, on May 21, 1861, when the war had begun, passed an Ordinance of Secession without submission to a vote of her people.
Virginia through her Legislature called a convention which, April 17, 1861, passed an Ordinance of Secession in secret session, subject to ratification by a vote of her people. This was after Sumter had been fired on.
The vote was taken June 25th, and the Ordinance was ratified.
Arkansas defeated in convention an Ordinance for secession March 18, but passed one May 6, 1861, without a vote of her people.
Tennessee, by a vote of her people, February 8, 1861 (67,360 to 54,156) voted against a convention, but her Legislature (May 7, 1861) in secret session adopted a "Declaration of Independence and Ordinance dissolving her Federal relations," subject to a vote of her people on June 8th. The vote being for separation, her Governor, June 24, 1861, declared the State out of the Union.(110)
This was the last State of the eleven to secede. All these four ratified the Confederate Constitution and joined the already-formed Confederacy.
The seceded States early passed laws authorizing the organization of their militia, and making appropriations for defence against coercion, and providing for the seizure of United States forts, arsenals, and other property within their respective limits, and later, that they should be turned over to the Confederate States.
Some of the States by law provided severe penalties against any of their citizens holding office under the Government of the United States. Virginia, in July, 1861, in convention, passed an ordinance declaring that any citizen of Virginia holding office under the old Government should be forever banished from that State, and if he undertook to represent the State in the Congress of the United States, he should, in addition, be guilty of treason and his property confiscated.
The other Border States failed to break up their relation to the Union, though in all of them (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri) various irregular expedients were resorted to, to declare them a part of the Confederacy. From their people, however, much material and moral support was given to the Confederate cause.
(101) Jefferson's _Works_, viii., p. 403.--Notes on Virginia.
(102) _Lincoln_ (Nicolay and Hay), vol. ii., pp. 299-314.
(103) _Annual Cyclopaedia_ (Appleton), 1861, p. 123.
(104) For this letter, see _Lincoln_ (N. and H.), vol. ii., p. 306.
(105) The prophecy: "The rebellion, which began where Charleston is, shall end where Charleston _was_," was fulfilled.
For a vivid, though sad description of Charleston at the end of the war, by an eye-witness, see _Civil war in Am._ (Draper), vol. i, p. 564. Andrew's Hall, where the first Ordinance passed, and the Institute in which it was signed, were then charred rubbish.
The _Demon_ war had been abroad in Charleston--who respects not life or death.
(106) Sam Houston was the rightful Governor of Texas in 1861, but on the adoption of an Ordinance of Secession (February 24, 1861) he declined to take an oath of allegiance to the new government and was deposed by a convention March 16, 1861. Just previous to the vote of the State on ratifying the ordinance, at Galveston, before an immense, seething, secession audience, with few personal friends to support him, in face of threatened violence, he denounced the impolicy of Secession, and painted a prophetic picture of the consequences that would result to his State from it. He said:
"Let me tell you what is coming on the heels of secession. The time will come when your fathers and husbands, your sons and brothers, will be herded together like sheep and cattle, at the point of the bayonet, and your mothers and wives, your sisters and daughters, will ask: Where are they? You may, after the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds and thousands of precious lives, succeed, if God is not against you, in winning Southern independence. But I doubt it. It is a bare possibility at best. I tell you that while I believe, with you, in the doctrine of state rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people, as you are, for the live in cooler climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, where great interests are involved, they move with the steady momentum of a giant avalanche, and what I fear is that they will overwhelm the South with ignoble defeat."
During this speech a horse in a team near by grew restive, and kicked out of harness, but was soon beaten to submission by his driver. Houston seized on the incident for an illustration, saying: "That horse tried a little practical secession--See how speedily he was whipped back into the Union." This quick-witted remark brought him applause from unsympathetic hearers.
Houston refused to recognize any Secession authority, and a few days subsequent to his deposition retired to his home near Huntsville, without friends, full of years, weak in body, suffering from wounds received in his country's service, but strong in soul, and wholly undismayed, though mourning his State's folly. In front of his house on the prairie he mounted a four-pound cannon, saying: "Texas may go to the devil and ruin if she pleases, but she shall not drag me along with her." History does not record another such incident. To the credit of the Secessionists, they respected the age and valor of the old hero, and did not molest, but permitted him to hold his personal "fortress" until his death, which occurred July 26, 1863 (three weeks after Vicksburg fell), in his seventy-first year.
He died satisfied the Confederacy and secession would soon be overthrown and the Union preserved.
(107) _Lincoln_ (N. and H.), vol. iii, pp. 180-1.
(108) Con., Art. I., Sec. 9, pars. 1, 4.
(109) Confederate Con., Art. I., Sec. 8, par. 1.
(110) McPherson's _Hist. of the Rebellion_, pp. 4-8.
XXIV ACTION OF RELIGIOUS DENOMINATIONS, ETC.--1860-1
Significant above all other of the great events resulting from the secession of the Southern States was the dissolution of the great religious denominations in the United States.(111)
First, the Old School Presbyterian Church Synod of South Carolina, early as December 3, 1860, declared for a slave Confederacy. This was followed by other such synods in the South, all deciding for separation from the Church North. The Baptists in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina were equally prompt in taking similar action.
Likewise the Protestant Episcopal Church, in a General Convention, held in Columbia, South Carolina, after having endorsed the Confederacy, adopted a "Constitution of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America"; all its Southern bishops being present and approving, save Bishop Leonidas Polk of Louisiana, who was absent, a Major-General in the Confederate army.(112)
The Methodist Episcopal Church South endorsed disunion and slavery; it had, however, in 1845, separated from the Methodist Church North.
The Roman Catholic Church, through Bishop Lynch, early in 1861, espoused the Confederate cause, and he, later, corresponded with the Pope of Rome in its interests, receiving a conciliatory answer in the Pope's name by Cardinal Antonelli.
The Young Men's Christian Association of New Orleans, May 22, 1861, issued an _Address to the Young Men's Christian Associations of North America_, declaring secession justifiable, and protesting, "in the name of Christ and his divine teachings," against waging war against the Southern States and their institutions.
Later, in 1863, the "Confederate clergy" issued a most memorable "_Address to Christians throughout the World_," likewise protesting against further prosecution of the war; declaring that the Union was forever dissolved, and specially pointing out "the most indefensible act growing out of the inexcusable war" to be
"The recent proclamation of the President of the United States seeking the _emancipation of the slaves_ of the South."
And saying further:
"It is in our judgment a suitable occasion for solemn protest on the part of the people of God throughout the world."
Thus encouraged and upheld, the new Confederacy, with slavery for its "corner-stone," defiantly embarked.
The counter-action of the Church North was equally emphatic for _freedom_, and the Union of the States under one flag and one God.(113)
It is appropriate in connection with the attitude of the religious people of the country toward slavery and the Confederacy, and the war to preserve the one and to establish the other, to quote from President Lincoln's valedictory Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865), in which he refers to the attitude of opposing parties, the cause of the conflict, and to each party invoking God's aid.
"Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. _Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God_, and each invoked His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us 'judge not that we be not judged.' The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.
"The Almighty has His own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offences. For it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of woe may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'
"With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."
(111) _Hist. of Rebellion_ (McPherson), 508-520.
(112) He was, as Lieutenant-General, June 14, 1864, killed by a shell, at Marietta, Ga., while reconnoitering the Union lines.
(113) _Hist. of Rebellion_ (McPherson), pp. 460-508.
XXV PROPOSED CONCESSIONS TO SLAVERY--BUCHANAN'S ADMINISTRATION AND CONGRESS--1860-1
The manner of receiving and treating the secession of the States by the administration of Buchanan and the Thirty-Sixth Congress can only here have a brief notice. There was a pretty general disposition to make further concessions and compromises to appease the disunion sentiment of the South. His administration was weak and vacillating. Two serious attempts at conciliation were made. President Buchanan, in his last Annual Message (December 4, 1860), while declaring that the election of any one to the office of President was not a just cause for dissolving the Union, and while denying that "Secession" could be justified under the Constitution, yet announced his conclusion that the latter had not "delegated to Congress the power to coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw, or has actually withdrawn, from the Confederacy"; that coercion was "not among the specific and enumerated powers granted to Congress." He did not think it was constitutional to preserve the Constitution or the Union of the States. This view was held by most leaders of his party at the time and throughout the ensuing war; not so, however, by the rank and file.
Buchanan did not believe that self-preservation inhered in the Constitution or the Union.
The President in this Message suggested an explanatory amendment to the Constitution: (1) To recognize the right of property in slaves in the States where it existed; (2) to protect this right in the Territories until they were admitted as States with or without slavery; (3) a like recognition of the right of the master to have his escaped slave delivered up to him; and (4) declaring all unfriendly State laws impairing this right unconstitutional.
This was the signal for the presentation of a numerous brood of propositions to amend the Constitution in the interest of slavery, and by way of concessions to the South.
A committee of thirty-three, one from each State, of which Thomas Corwin of Ohio was chairman, was (December 4, 1860) appointed to consider the part of the President's Message referred to.
Mr. Noel of Missouri proposed to instruct this committee to report on the expediency of abolishing the office of President, and in lieu thereof establishing an Executive Council of three, elected by districts composed of contiguous States--each member armed with a veto power; and he also proposed to restore the equilibrium of the States by dividing slave States into two or more.
Mr. Hindman of Arkansas proposed to amend the Constitution so as to expressly recognize slavery in the States; to protect it in the Territories; to allow slaves to be transported through free States; to prohibit representation in Congress to any State passing laws impairing the Fugitive-Slave Act; giving slave States a negative upon all acts relating to slavery, and making such amendment unalterable.
Mr. Florence of Pennsylvania and Mr. Kellogg of Illinois each proposed to amend the Constitution "granting the right to hold slaves in all territory south of 36° 30´, and prohibiting slavery in territory north of this line," etc.
Mr. Vallandigham of Ohio proposed a long amendment to the Constitution, the central idea of which was a division of the Union into four sections, with a complicated and necessarily impracticable plan of voting in Congress, and of voting for the election of President and Vice-President.
These are only samples of the many propositions to amend the Constitution, but they will suffice for all. None of them had the approval of both Houses of Congress.
There were many patriotic propositions offered looking to the preservation of the Union as it was. They too failed.
The great committee reported (January 14, 1861) five propositions. The first a series of resolutions declaratory of the duty of Congress and the government to the States, and in relation to slavery; the second an amendment to the Constitution relating to slavery; the third a bill for the admission of New Mexico, including therein Arizona, as a State; the fourth a bill amending and making more efficient the Fugitive-Slave Law, among other things giving the United States Commissioner _ten dollars_ whether he remanded or discharged the alleged fugitive; and the fifth a bill for the rendition of fugitives from justice. These several propositions (save the fifth, which was rejected) passed the House, the proposed constitutional amendment of the committee being amended on motion of Mr. Corwin before its passage.
None of the propositions were considered in the Senate save the second, and even this one did not receive the support of the secessionists still lingering in Congress.
The proposition to amend the Constitution passed both Houses by the requisite two thirds vote. It read:
"Art. XIII. No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of any State."
_Two_ States _only_--Maryland and _Ohio_ (114)--ratified this proposed amendment. It was needless, and, if adopted, would have taken no power from Congress, which any respectable party had ever claimed it possessed, but the amendment was tendered to answer the false cry that slavery in the slave States was in danger from Congressional action.
(What a contrast between this proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the Thirteenth Amendment adopted four years later! The former proposed to establish slavery forever; the latter abolished it _forever_.)
The resolutions of John J. Crittenden in the Senate proposed various amendments to the Constitution, among others to legalize slavery south of 36° 30´; to admit States from territory north of that line, with or without slavery; to prohibit the abolition of slavery in the States and also in the District of Columbia so long as it existed in Virginia or Maryland, such abolition even then to be only with the consent of the inhabitants of the District and with compensation to the slave owners; to require the United States to pay for fugitive slaves who were prevented from arrest or return to slavery by violence and intimidation, and to make all the provisions of the Constitution, including the proposed amendments, unchangeable forever. The Crittenden resolutions, at the end of much debate, and after various votes on amendments proposed thereto, failed (19 to 20) in the Senate, and therefore were never considered in the House.(115)
It was claimed at the time that had the Congressmen from the Southern States remained and voted for the Corwin and Crittenden propositions the Constitution might have been amended, giving slavery all these guarantees.
(114) Joint resolution of ratification, _Ohio Laws_, 1861, p. 190.
(115) _Hist. of Rebellion_ (McPherson), pp. 57-67.
XXVI PEACE CONFERENCE--1861
By appointments of governors or legislatures, commissioners from each of twenty States, chosen at the request of the Legislature of Virginia, met in Washington, February 4, 1861, in a "_Peace Conference_."(116) Ex-President John Tyler of Virginia was made President, and Crafts J. Wright of Ohio Secretary.(117)
It adjourned February 27th, having agreed to recommend to the several States amendments to the Constitution, in substance: That north of 36° 30´ slavery in the Territories shall be, and south of that line it shall not be, prohibited; that neither Congress nor a Territorial Legislature shall pass any law to prevent slaves from being taken from the States to the Territories; that no Territory shall be acquired by the United States, except by discovery and for naval stations, without the consent of a majority of the Senators from the slave and also from the free States; that Congress shall have no power to abolish slavery in any State, nor in the District of Columbia without the consent of Maryland; nor to prohibit Congressmen from taking their slaves to and from said District; nor the power to prohibit the free transportation of slaves from one slave State or Territory to another; that bringing slaves into the District of Columbia for sale, or to be placed in depot for transfer and sale at other places, is prohibited; that the clauses in the Constitution and its amendments relating to slavery shall never be abolished or amended without the consent of all the States; and that Congress shall provide by law for paying owners for escaped slaves where officers, whose duty it was to arrest them, were prevented from arresting them or returning them to their owners after being arrested.
"The Peace Conference" was composed of 133 members, among whom were some of the most eminent men of the country, though generally, however, only conservatives from each section were selected as members. Its remarkable recommendations were made with considerable unanimity, voting in the conference being by States, the Continental method.
Wm. Pitt Fessenden and Lot M. Morrill of Maine, Geo. S. Boutwell of Massachusetts, David Dudley Field and Erastus Corning of New York, Frederick T. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, John Tyler, Wm. C. Rives, and John A. Seddon of Virginia, Wm. O. Butler, James B. Clay, James Guthrie, and Charles A. Wickcliffe of Kentucky, C. P. Wolcott, Salmon P. Chase, John C. Wright, Wm. S. Groesback, Franklin T. Backus, Reuben Hitchcock, Thomas Ewing (Sen.), and Valentine B. Horton of Ohio, Caleb B. Smith and Godlove S. Orth of Indiana, John M. Palmer and Burton C. Cook of Illinois, and James Harlan and James W. Grimes of Iowa were of the number. Many of them were then, or afterwards, celebrated as statesmen; and some of them subsequently held high rank as soldiers.
March 2, 1861, the "Peace Conference" propositions were offered twice to the Senate, and each time overwhelmingly defeated, as they had been, on the day preceding, by the House.(118)
There were many other propositions offered, considered, and defeated, to wit: Propositions from the Senate Committee of thirteen appointed December 18, 1860; propositions of Douglas, Seward, and others; also propositions from a meeting of Senators and members from the border, free, and slave States, all relating to slavery, and proposed with a view of stopping the already precipitated secession of States.(119)
Some of these propositions were exasperatingly humiliating, and only possibly justifiable by the times.
Though Lincoln's election as President was claimed to be a good cause for secession, and though much of the compromise talk was to appease his party opponents as well as the South, he was opposed to bargaining himself into the office to which the people had elected him. With respect to this matter (January 30, 1861) he said:
"I will suffer death before I will consent, or advise my friends to consent, to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of the government to which we have a constitutional right."
We have now done with legislation, attempted legislation, and constitutional amendments to protect and extend slavery in the Republic. Slavery appealed to war, and by the inexorable decree of war its fate must be decided.
The _Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln_ (January 1, 1863) and the _Thirteenth_ Amendment to the Constitution (1865) freed all slaves in the Union; the _Fourteenth_ Amendment (1868) provided that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside"; and the _Fifteenth_ Amendment (1870) gave the right to vote to all citizens of the United States regardless of "_race, color, or previous condition of servitude_." These are all simply the decrees of war, written in the organic law of the United States at the end of the national four years' baptism of blood. Embodied in them are no concessions or compromises; the evil was torn out by the roots, and the Christian world, the progressive civilization of the age, and the consciences of enlightened mankind _now_ approve what was done.
The war, with its attendant horrors and evils, was necessary to terminate the deep-seated, time-honored, and unholy institution of human slavery, so long embedded in our social, political, and commercial relations, and sustained by our prejudices, born of a selfish disposition, common to white people, to esteem themselves superior to others.
The history of emancipation and of these constitutional amendments belongs, logically, to periods during and at the end of the war.
There are, however, two important acts relating to slavery which passed Congress during the War of the Rebellion, not strictly the _result_ of that war, though incident to it, which must be mentioned.
(116) Kansas joined later, and Michigan, California, and Oregon were not represented; nor were the then seceded Southern States, or Arkansas, represented.
(117) Blaine (_Twenty Years of Congress_, vol. i., p. 269), says: "Puleston, a delegate from Pennsylvania, a subject of Queen Victoria, later (1884) of the British Parliament, was chosen Secretary of the Conference."--This is an error. He was not a delegate: only one of several assistant secretaries.
On the next page of Blaine's book he falls into another error in saying the Wilmot Proviso was embodied (1848) in the Oregon territorial act. It was never embodied in any act. The sixth section of the Ordinance of 1787 is embodied in that act word for word.
(118) _Hist. of Rebellion_ (McPherson), pp. 68-9.
(119) _Ibid_., p. 76.
XXVII DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA--SLAVERY ABOLISHED--1862
The District of Columbia, acquired by the United States in 1791 for the purpose of founding the city of Washington as the permanent Federal Capital, was, by the laws of Virginia and Maryland, slave territory. The District was originally ten miles square, and included the city of Alexandria. Later (1846) the part acquired from Virginia (about forty square miles) was retroceded to that State. Congress had complete jurisdiction over it, though the laws of Maryland and Virginia, for some purposes, were continued in force. It was, however, from the beginning claimed that Congress had the right to abolish slavery within its boundaries.
Congress is given the right "to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over such District."(120) But slavery was claimed to be excepted because of its peculiar character.
The institution of slavery was therefore perpetuated in the District, and in the Capital of the Republic slave-marts existed where men and women were sold from the auction block, and families were torn asunder and carried to different parts of the country to be continued in bondage. In the shadow of the Capitol the voice of the auctioneer proclaiming in the accustomed way the merits of the slave commingled with that of the statesmen in the Halls of Congress proclaiming the boasted liberty of the great American Republic! Daniel Drayton (1848) was tried in the District for the larceny of seventy-four human beings, his crime consisting of affording means (in the schooner _Pearl_) for their escape to freedom.(121)
Under the laws of the District many others were punished for like offences.
As late as 1856, when the sculptor Crawford furnished a design for the _Statue of Liberty_ to crown the dome of the Capitol, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis ordered the "_liberty cap_" struck from the model, because in art it had an "established origin in its use as a badge of the freed slave."(122)
We have seen how much the consciences of just men were shocked, and how assiduously such men labored to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and with what tenacity the slave party fought to maintain it there, and even by constitutional amendments to fix it there forever.
But when slavery had brought the country to war, the emancipation of slaves in the District was early considered.
Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, December 16, 1861, introduced a bill in the Senate, which, after a most memorable debate in both Houses of Congress, passed, and on April 16, 1862, became a law, with the approval of President Lincoln. This act emancipated forthwith all the slaves of the District, and annulled the laws of Maryland over it relating to slavery and all statutes giving the cities of Washington and Georgetown authority to pass ordinances discriminating against persons of color.
(120) Con. U. S., Art. I., Sec. 8, par. 17.
(121) Drayton did not succeed in the attempt to afford these slaves means to escape. He was tried on two indictments for larceny, convicted, and on each sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary. The Circuit Court reversed these convictions on the erroneous charge of the trial judge (Crawford), to the effect that a man might be guilty of larceny of property--slaves--without the intent to appropriate it to his own use. On re-trial Drayton was acquitted on the larceny indictments; but verdicts were taken against him on seventy-four indictments for transporting slaves--not a penitentiary offense--and he was sentenced to pay a fine of $10,000, and to remain in prison until paid. He was most ably defended by Horace Mann of Boston, and J. M. Carlisle of Washington, D. C., either as volunteer counsel or employed by Drayton's friends, he being poor. There were 115--41 for larceny, 64 for transportation--indictments against Drayton, which led Mr. Mann to remark of the threatened penalty: "_Methuselah himself must have been caught young in order to survive such a sentence_."--_Slavery, Letters, etc._ (Mann), p. 93.
President Fillmore, being defeated in 1852 for nomination for President, pardoned Drayton after four years' and four months' imprisonment, which pardon, it was claimed, defeated Scott, the Whig nominee, at the polls.--_Memoir of Drayton_, p. 118.
(122) Correspondence in War Department between Davis and Quartermaster- General Meigs.
The present nondescript hood, giving the statue crowning the dome its appearance, in some views, of a wild Indian, was substituted for the Liberty cap.
XXVIII SLAVERY PROHIBITED IN THE TERRITORIES--1862
Growing out of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the question was raised by Lovejoy of Illinois and others as to the duty of Congress to declare freedom _national_ and slavery _sectional;_ and also to prohibit slavery in all the Territories of the Union.
A bill was passed, which (June 19, 1862) was approved by the President, and became the last general law of Congress on the subject of slavery in the Territories. It reads:
"That from and after the passage of this act there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the Territories of the United States, now existing, or which may at any time hereafter be formed or acquired by the United States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."
By this act the principles of the Ordinance of 1787 (sixth section) were applied universally to all existing and to be acquired territory of the United States.
It was only, in effect, Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784, defeated by _one_ vote in the old Congress, the loss of which he deplored so much. His benign purpose to restrict slavery was delayed seventy- eight years--until blood flowed to sanction it.
XXIX BENTON'S SUMMARY
We close this already too long history of human slavery in the United States with Thomas H. Benton's summary of the "cardinal points" in the aggressive policy of the impetuous South in pushing forward slavery as a cause for disunion. He wrote, four years anterior to the Rebellion of 1861, with a prophetic pen, nibbed by the experience of a Senator for thirty years, and as a slaveholder. He had actively participated in most of the events of which he speaks, and was personally familiar with all of them.(123)
"But I am not now writing the history of the present slavery agitation--a history which the young have not learnt, and the old have forgotten, and which every American ought to understand. I only indicate cardinal points to show its character; and of these a main one remains to be stated. Up to Mr. Pierce's administration the plan had been defensive--that is to say, to make the secession of the South a measure of self-defence against the abolition encroachments, aggressions, and crusades of the North. In the time of Mr. Pierce, the plan became offensive--that is to say, to commence the expansion of slavery, and the acquisition of territory to spread it over, so as to overpower the North with new slave States, and drive them out of the Union. In this change of tactics originated the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise, the attempt to purchase one half of Mexico, and the actual purchase of a large part; the design to take Cuba; the encouragement to Kinney and to Walker in Central America; the quarrels with Great Britain for outlandish coasts and islands; the designs upon the Tehuantepec, the Nicaragua, the Panama, and the Darien routes; and the scheme to get a foothold in the Island of San Domingo. The rising in the free States in consequence of the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise checked these schemes, and limited the success of the disunionists to the revival of the agitation which enables them to wield the South against the North in all the Federal elections and Federal legislation. Accidents and events have given this part a strange pre-eminence-- under Jackson's administration proclaimed for treason; since, at the head of the government and of the Democratic party. The death of Harrison, and the accession of Tyler, was their first great lift; the election of Mr. Pierce was their culminating point. It not only gave them the government, but power to pass themselves for the Union party, and for democrats; and to stigmatize all who refused to go with them as disunionists and abolitionists. And to keep up this classification is the object of the eleven pages of the message which calls for this Review--unhappily assisted in that object by the conduct of a few real abolitionists (not five per centum of the population of the free States); but made to stand, in the eyes of the South, for the whole."
(123) Hist., etc., Ex., _Dred Scott Case_, pp. 184-5.
XXX PROPHECY AS TO SLAVERY'S FATE: ALSO AS TO DISUNION
We are approaching the period for the fulfilment of prophecy in relation to the perpetuity of human slavery in the United States.
We summarize a few of the prophecies made by distinguished American statesmen and citizens. George Washington, Patrick Henry, and other Virginia statesmen and slaveholders at the close of the Revolution predicted that slaves would be emancipated, or they would acquire their freedom violently. These patriots advocated emancipation. The stumbling-block to abolition in Virginia at that time was, what to do with the blacks. The white population could not reconcile themselves to the idea of living on an equality with them, as they deemed they must if the blacks were free. As early as 1782 Jefferson expressed his serious forebodings:
"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. . . .
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. The way, I hope, is preparing, under the auspices of Heaven, for a total emancipation."
The anti-slavery societies when they first met in annual convention (1804) proclaimed that
"Freedom and slavery cannot long exist together."
John Quincy Adams, in 1843, prophesied:
"I am satisfied slavery will not go down until it goes down in blood."(124)
Abraham Lincoln, at the beginning of his celebrated debate with Douglas (1858) expressed his belief that this nation could not exist "half slave and half free." He had, however, made the same declaration in a letter to a Kentucky friend to whom he wrote:
"Experience has demonstrated, I think, that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us. . . .
"On the question of liberty as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that 'all men are created equal' a _self-evident truth;_ but now, when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the maxim '_a self-evident lie_.' The Fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great dy for burning fire-crackers. That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery has itself become extinct with the occasion and the men of the Revolution. . . . So far as peaceful, voluntary emancipation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave in America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of the free mind, is now as fixed and hopeless of change for the better as that of lost souls of the finally impenitent. The autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free Republicans, sooner than will our masters voluntarily give up their slaves.
"Our political problem now is, 'Can we as a nation continue together _permanently_--forever--half slave, and half free'? The problem is too mighty for me. May God in his mercy superintend the solution."
(Under God, within ten years after this was written, Lincoln was the instrument for the solution of the _mighty problem!_)
This was a fitting prelude to his speech on slavery at Springfield, Illinois (June, 1858), wherein he said:
"In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. '_A house divided against itself cannot stand_.'
"I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the house to fall--but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."(125)
Seward of New York compressed the issue between freedom and slavery into a single sentence in his Rochester speech (October 25, 1858):
"It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either an entirely slave holding nation or entirely a free labor nation."(126)
But statesmen were not the only persons who predicted the downfall of slavery in the Republic; not the only persons who contributed to that end, nor yet the only persons who foretold its overthrow in blood.
The institution had grown to arrogant and intolerant as to brook no opposition, and its friends did not even seek to clothe its enormities.
A leading Southern journal, in 1854, honestly expressed the affection in which slavery was held:
"We cherish slavery as the apple of our eye, and we are resolved to maintain it, peaceably, if we can, forcibly, if we must."(127)
The clergy and religious people of the North came to believe slavery must, in the mill of justice, be ground to a violent death, in obedience to the will of God.
Theodore Parker, the celebrated Unitarian divine, a personal friend of John Brown, on hearing, in Rome, of his failure, trial, and sentence to the scaffold, in a letter to Francis Jackson of Boston, November 24, 1859, gave vent to what was then regarded as fanatical prophecy, but now long since fulfilled:
"The American people will have to march to rather severe music, I think, and it is better for them to face it in season. A few years ago it did not seem difficult, first to check slavery, and then to end it without bloodshed. I think this cannot be done now, nor ever in the future. All the great charters of _Humanity_ have been writ in blood. I once hoped that American _Democracy_ would be engrossed in less costly ink; but it is plain, now, that our pilgrimage must lead through a Red Sea, wherein many a _Pharoah_ will go under and perish. . . .
"Slavery will not _die a dry death_. It may have as many lives as a cat; at last, it will dies like a mad dog in a village, with only the enemies of human kind to lament its fate, and they too cowardly to appear as mourners."(128)
Parker was fast descending, from broken health, into the grave, but in the wildest of his dreams he did not peer into futurity far enough to see that within a single decade the "_sin of the nation_" would be washed out, root and branch, in blood; and that in Virginia --the State that hung John Brown--at the home of its greatest Governor, Henry A. Wise, there would be seen "a Yankee school-marm" teaching free negroes--sons of Africa--to read and write--to read the Holy Bible, and she the humble daughter of "Old John Brown."(129)
One sample of prophecy of what _disunion_ would be, we give from a speech of Henry Winter Davis of Maryland:
"It would be an act of suicide, and sane men do not commit suicide. The act itself is insanity. It will be done, if ever, in a fury and madness which cannot stop to reason. _Dissolution_ means death, the suicide of Liberty, without a hope of resurrection--death without the glories of immortality; with no sister to mourn her fall, none to wrap her decently in her winding-sheet and bear her tenderly to a sepulchre--_dead Liberty_, left to all the horrors of corruption, a loathsome thing, with a stake through the body, which men shun, cast out naked on the highway of nations, where the tyrants of the earth who feared her living will mock her dead, passing by on the other side, wagging their heads and thrusting their tongues in their cheeks at her, saying, 'Behold _her_ now, how _she_ that was fair among the nations is fallen! is fallen!'-- and only the few wise men who loved her out of every nation will shed tears over her desolation as they pass, and cast handfuls of earth on her body to quiet her manes, while we, her children, stumble about our ruined habitations to find dishonorable graves wherein to hide our shame. Dissolution? How shall it be? Who shall make it? Do men dream of Lot and Abraham parting, one to the east and the other to the west, peacefully, because their servants strive? That States will divide from States and boundary lines will be marked by compass and chain? Sir, that will be a portentous commission that shall settle that partition, for cannon will be planted at the corners and grinning skeletons be finger- posts to point the way. It will be no line gently marked on the bosom of the Republic--some meandering vein whence generations of her children have drawn their nourishment--but a sharp and jagged chasm, rending the hearts of commonwealths, lacerated and smeared with fraternal blood. On the night when the stars of her constellation shall fall from heaven the blackness of darkness forever will settle on the liberties of mankind in this Western World. _This is dissolution!_ If such, Sir, is _dissolution_ seen in a glass darkly, how terrible will it be face to face? They who reason about it are half crazy now. They who talk of it do not mean it, and dare not mean it. They who speak in earnest of a dissolution of this Union seem to me like children or madmen. He who would do such a deed as that would be the maniac without a tongue to tell his deed, or reason to arrest his steps--an instrument of mad impulse impelled by one idea to strike his victim. Sir, _there have been maniacs who have been cured by horror at the blood they have shed_."(130)
This eloquent, patriotic, word-picture of _dissolution_, intended to deter those who so impetuously and glibly talked of it, was not, as the sequel proved, overdrawn. When delivered it was not generally believed that a dissolution of the Union could or would be attempted. In the Presidential campaigns of 1856 and 1860, as well as in Congress, there was much eloquence displayed in line with the above; few of the orators, however, believed that dissolution, with all the wild terrors of war, was near at hand. But there were some men in public life who early comprehended the destiny awaiting the politically storm-racked Republic, and as it approached, boldly gave the opinion that "_a little blood-letting would be good for the body politic_."(131)
The story of the war which secession inaugurated remains to be in part narrated in succeeding chapters, portraying the impetuous rush to battle; the unparalleled heroism of the mighty hosts on either side; the slaughter of men; the hell of suffering; the bitter tears; the incalculable sorrow; the billions expended; the destruction of property; the alternating defeats and triumphs; the final victory of the Union arms; the overthrow of state-rights, nullification, secession--disunion; the emancipation of four million human slaves, and the annihilation in the United States of the institution of slavery, including all its baleful doctrines, whether advanced by partisan, pro-slavery statesmen, or advocated by learned politicians, or upheld by church or clergy in the name of the prophets of Holy Writ or of Christ and his Apostles, or expounded by a tribunal clothed in the ermine, majesty, dignity, and power of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
Abraham Lincoln, whose beautiful character is illumined in the intense light of a third of a century of heightened civilization, will be immortalized through all time as God's chiefest instrument in accomplishing the end.
In closing this chapter we desire again to remind the reader that in 1861 the Congress of the United States, by a two thirds majority in each branch, voted to so amend the Constitution as to make forever unalterable its provisions for the recognition and perpetuation of human bondage; that if the amendment thus submitted had been ratified by three fourths of the States, this nation would have been the first and only one in the history of the world wherein the right to enslave human beings was fundamental and decreed to be eternal.
This amendment, guaranteeing perpetual slavery, was the tender made by Union men in 1861 to avert disunion and war. It was the humiliating and unholy pledge offered to a slave-loving people to induce them to remain true to the Constitution and the Union. In the providence of God the amendment was not ratified, nor was a willingness to accept it shown by the defiant South. On the contrary, it was spurned by it with singular unanimity and deserved contempt. A nation to be wholly slave was alone acceptable to the disunionists; and to establish such a nation the hosts were arrayed on the one side; to preserve and perpetuate the Union and to overthrow the would-be slave nation, they were also, thank God, arrayed on the other.
This was the portentous issue made up--triable by the tribunal of last resort from which there is no earthly appeal.
Promptly, even enthusiastically, did the South respond to the summons to battle, and with a heroism worthy of a better cause did it devote life and property to the maintenance of the Confederacy. But from mountain, hillside, vale, plain, and prairie, from field, factory, counting-house, city, village, and hamlet, from all professions and occupation alike came the sons of freedom, with the cry of "Union and Liberty," under one flag, to meet the opposing hosts, heroically ready to make the necessary sacrifice that the unity of the American Republic should be preserved.
The effort to establish a slave nation in the afternoon of the nineteenth century resulted in a civil war unparalleled in magnitude, and the bloodiest in the history of the human race. In the eleven seceding States the authority of the Constitution was thrown off; the National Government was defied; former official oaths of army, navy, and civil officers were disregarded, and other oaths were taken to support another government; the public property of the United States was seized in the seceding States as of right, Cabinet officers of the President assisting in the plunder; Senators and Representatives in Congress, while yet holding seats, making laws, and drawing pay, plotted treason, and, later, defiantly joined the Confederacy; sequestration acts were passed by the Confederate Congress, and citizens of the United States were made aliens in the Confederacy, and their property there was confiscated, and debts due loyal men North were collected for the benefit of the Confederate Treasury; piratical vessels, with the aid and connivance of boastful _civilized_ monarchies of Europe, destroyed our commerce and drove our flag from the high seas; above a half million of men fell in battle, and another half million died of wounds and disease incident to war; above sixty thousand Union soldiers died in Southern prisons; the direct cost of the Rebellion, paid from the United States Treasury, approximated seven billions of dollars, and the indirect cost to the loyal people, in property destroyed, etc., was at least equal to seven billions more. Fairly estimated, slaves not considered, the people of the seceding States expended and lost in the prosecution and devastations of the war more than double the expenditures and losses of the North; imagination cannot compass or language portray the suffering and sorrow, agony and despair, which pervaded the whole land. All this to settle the momentous question, whether or not human slavery should be fundamental as a domestic, social, and political institution.
Thus far slavery has been our theme, and the war for the suppression of the Rebellion only incidentally referred to, but in succeeding chapters slavery will only be incidentally referred to, and the war will have such attention as the scope of the narrative permits.
(124) _Life of Seward_, vol. i., p. 672.
(125) A. Lincoln, _Complete Works_, vol. i., pp. 215, 240, 251.
(126) Seward's _Works_, vol. iv, p. 289.
(127) _Hist. U. S._ (Rhodes), vol. i, p. 469.
(128) _Life of Parker_ (Weiss), vol. ii., p. 172-4 (406).
(129) _Civil War in America_ (Draper), vol. i, 565-6.
(130) Speech of Henry Winter Davis, House of Representatives, Aug. 7, 1856.
(131) Zachariah Chandler, 1860.