CHAPTER III
The "Irrepressible Conflict"
There is no possibility of doubt that, but for the slavery controversy, that growth of an intense national feeling which has been mentioned would have rendered the war of 1861–65 impossible.
That intensely patriotic feeling of nationality was all pervasive, except in so far as the slavery controversy impaired it as it did, both North and South. If that one cause of disagreement had not existed, if there had been no negro slaves in the United States, the sentiment of union and nationality which had grown with the Nation's growth and strengthened with its strength, would unquestionably have overborne all the quibbles and all the logical refinements of the earlier time. The decisions of the Supreme Court, especially those of John Marshall, which in effect rewrote the Constitution and successfully claimed for the courts the right to annul any and all acts of Congress that were not in accordance with the Constitution, had created a new and effective barrier against possible aggression by the Federal power upon the autonomy of the states and had at the same time established the Federal authority securely. When Marshall decided in Marbury vs. Madison, that an act of Congress assuming to do by national authority anything reserved to the states in the constitutional grant of power to the General Government, is no law at all but an act null and void, which the courts will on no account enforce, there was an end of all danger of wanton Federal encroachment upon the reserved rights of the states. And, as we have seen, that fear died out of men's minds, except in so far as questions relating to slavery from time to time revived it. But for those questions it need never again have arisen to vex the Republic and set its people by the ears.
But slavery involved questions of prejudice, questions of passion, questions of morality, questions of labor, questions of principle, and questions of pride, of sentiment, of conscience, of religion, of conviction. It stirred the passions of men, excited their prejudices, and appealed to their interests as no other question of policy has done in our modern times. Incidentally it revived, as no other issue could have done, all the old jealousies between the Union and the several states which the progress of the Republic had so strongly tended to allay. It set the history of the formation of the Union against the history of the Union itself as implacably antagonistic historical arguments in behalf of conflicting contentions.
Let us see how all this came about.
When the colonies achieved their independence, slavery existed, in greater or less degree, in all of them. The negro was then nowhere regarded as a man, so far at least as the generalizations of the Declaration of Independence and other formal settings forth of human rights were concerned. There was a strong desire to be rid of slavery, a deep seated conviction of the impolity of that institution, but, except among the Quakers and a very few others, there seems to have been no thought anywhere that the holding of negroes in bondage was a violation of that fundamental doctrine of human rights upon which the Republic had been established.
Indeed the desire to be rid of slavery seems at that time, and for a long time afterwards, to have been stronger at the South, where the institution was general, than at the North where it existed only in a scant and inconsequent way. As early as 1760, the South Carolina colony had sought to limit the extension of the system by passing an act forbidding the further importation of slaves, but the British Government had vetoed the measure. Twelve years later Virginia sought to protect her people against the black danger of slavery by imposing a prohibitory tariff duty upon imported slaves. Again the home government in London forbade the act to have any force or effect.
When Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian, wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, one of the strongest counts in his splendid indictment of the British King was the charge that in these and other cases he had forbidden the people of the colonies to put any legal check upon the growth of this stupendous evil.
But when the Declaration was adopted by Congress and signed as the young Republic's explanation of its revolutionary action, rendered in obedience to "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind," the great Virginian's arraignment of the King for having thus fostered slavery in colonies that desired to be rid of it, did not appear in that supreme document of state. We have Jefferson's own testimony that it had been stricken out in deference to the will of those New England merchants and capitalists whose ships and money found astonishingly profitable employment in the slave trade between the coast of Africa and the southern part of our country.
Thus while the holding of slaves in the more northerly colonies had proved to be unprofitable and had to a great extent ceased at the time of the Revolution, the traffic in slaves from Africa to the southern parts of this country was so profitable an industry that even the Declaration of Independence must be emasculated of one of its most virile features in deference to the greed of gain.
And this dominance of interest over principle continued for long years afterward. When the great convention that framed the Constitution was in session, it was at first proposed to put an end to the slave trade from Africa in the year 1800. An amendment was offered, extending the license of that infamous traffic to the year 1808, and this eight years' extension was adopted by a vote which included in the affirmative every New England state represented in the convention, Virginia voting steadfastly against it.
Those votes for the extension of the slave trade were given undoubtedly in behalf of the mercantile interest of the maritime states of the northeast, and they reflected no moral conviction whatsoever. For there was at that time no moral conviction of the wrongfulness of slavery anywhere in the country. The thought that the negro was a man, endowed by his Creator with an unalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," had not yet been born in America.
And even after thirty odd years, and a dozen years after the constitutional prohibition of the African slave trade had gone into effect, that unlawful traffic in human beings was still so gainful an occupation to merchants and shipmasters, that Mr. Justice Joseph Story, himself a New Englander and a judge of the Supreme Court of the United States, was bitterly denounced by the New England press and public as a judge who deserved to be "hurled from the bench," because he had instructed grand juries that it was their sworn duty to indict the men who were still engaged in the nefarious business of transporting slaves, under conditions of unspeakable cruelty, from Africa to these shores. The offense of that great jurist lay in the fact that he regarded the demands of the constitution and the law as more binding upon his character and conscience than the demands of the New England slave traders whose very profitable business his insistence upon the rigid enforcement of the law threatened to embarrass and destroy.
As there are now no advocates of slavery in our free land; as all of us, North and South alike, are agreed that the institution was a curse the maledictions of which endure to the present day in vexatious "race problems;" it is possible and proper now to record all facts respecting it with impartiality and without controversial intent. It is of supreme importance to any clear understanding of this matter to bear in mind the fact that our modern conceptions of human rights did not exist in the earlier times; that the recognition of the negro as "a man and a brother" is the birth of comparatively recent thought; that the traffic in black human beings, captured in Africa and brought hither for sale as laborers, excited no impulse of antagonism, offended no moral sentiment, and seemed to nobody in the earlier times a violation of those fundamental doctrines of human right upon which this Republic is based. All that has been a glorious after-thought, and it is solely with an expository purpose and not at all as a tu quoque that these facts of history are here set forth.
Surely the time is fully ripe in which men of the North and men of the South may sit together in an impartial study of the causes of a quarrel that brought them into armed conflict more than a generation ago and may calmly consider without offense the sins of their forefathers on either side, making due allowance for the lack of modern light and leading as a guide to those forefathers. We must do this in this spirit, if we would be fair. Still more imperatively must we do it if history is ever to be written.
The period of controversy is past. The time of reckoning has come. The time has come when the advocate holding a brief for the one or the other party to the controversy should give place to the historian intent only upon the task of discovering and recording fact. The circumstance that there was grievous wrong on both sides does not rob either of the credit due for the right that it supported.
After the revolution the great statesmen of our land manifested a determined eagerness to free the country from slavery. John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were not more energetic in this cause than were Jefferson and other Southerners. When Virginia ceded to the Federal Government all her claims to the territory northwest of the Ohio river, it was Thomas Jefferson, the Virginian slaveholder, who insisted upon writing into the deed of cession a provision that slavery should never be permitted in any part of that fair land which now constitutes the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.
George Wythe, under whose tuition Henry Clay studied law, was by all odds the greatest jurist that Virginia ever produced, with the single exception of John Marshall. George Wythe was one of those whom Mr. Carl Schurz has in our own times characterized as "the Revolutionary abolitionists." They were the men of the South who regarded slavery as an imposed and hereditary curse to be got rid of by any means that did not threaten the social fabric with destruction and the country itself with chaos and black night. George Wythe absolutely impoverished himself—born to vast wealth as he was—in setting free the negroes whom he had inherited as slaves and in providing them with the means of establishing themselves in bread-winning ways. For, as he expressed it, "I have no right to set these people free to starve."
He gave them their liberty and with it a piece of land for each, on which with ordinary industry and thrift they could surely make a living for themselves and their families. Then he set to work, a man stripped of all his ancestral possessions and impoverished by his own act of justice, to earn a living as a Virginian lawyer. So far from having offended his fellow Virginians by his act of emancipation, he had won their esteem and their reverence. He became their chancellor and the most honored judge upon their bench.
Thousands of other Virginians of lesser note than George Wythe did substantially the same thing, though less conspicuously. Under the law after a time they could not set their slaves free without sending them beyond the borders of the state. Many of them found this condition a paralyzing one. They must pay off the hereditary debts of their estates and they must buy in the West little but sufficient farms for their inherited negro slaves to live upon if they would set those slaves free. These things many of them did at cost of personal impoverishment, while many others, like-minded, found conditions beyond their control. If the whole story of that Virginian effort to be rid of slavery by individual and grandly self-sacrificing effort could be told here or elsewhere, the angels of justice and mercy would rejoice to read the page on which the wonder tale was written. But the heroes who did these deeds of self-sacrifice for principle were mainly obscure men of whose names there remains no record. Only here and there a great name like that of George Wythe appears. Among these is the name of John Randolph of Roanoke,—most insistently cantankerous of Southerners—who left a will freeing all his slaves on grounds of human right. And though that will was defeated of its purpose by a legal technicality, it is immeasurably valuable as a fact in history which reflects the sentiment of that time among those who had inherited and who held slaves and even among those who, like Randolph, are commonly regarded as the special champions of slavery.
And this desire of Southern men to be rid of slavery did not cease until the very end. Very many Southerners whose consciences dominated their lives, deliberately and painstakingly educated their negroes for freedom in the hope and assurance that sooner or later, by one means or by another, freedom would come to them. There were planters not a few who used their authority as the masters of slaves to compel their negroes to cultivate little fields of their own and to put aside the proceeds thereof, as a fund with which to meet the surely coming freedom face to face, with no fear of starvation as a circumstance of embarrassment.
Henry Clay studied law under Virginia's great chancellor, George Wythe. From his distinguished Virginian teacher he learned the lesson that slavery—forced upon an unwilling people in the Southern part of this country by kingly and corporate greed, and still further forced upon those regions by the greed of merchants and shipmasters, even after the traffic that fed it had been prohibited by the Constitution and by the law—was an evil and a curse, a wrong to the black man and a demoralizing influence to the white. He saw clearly that it was the task of all good men to exterminate that evil root and branch, by such means as might be found available, without the destruction of society as a necessary incident or consequence. In the young state of Kentucky Henry Clay began his political career as an advocate of rational and gradual emancipation, and to his dying day—involved as he was in all the strenuous controversies to which the slavery issue gave rise in national politics—he never lost his interest in this behalf or abated his efforts to secure its accomplishment. A plea for the extermination of slavery was the first plea he ever presented to the people whom he asked to support him for public office. A plea for the extirpation of slavery was well-nigh the last that he ever urged upon the people of his state after all that was possible of honor had been conferred upon him by their approving will.
So enduring was this sentiment at the South that John Letcher, the Democratic war governor of Virginia, the man who set Lee to organize the state's forces for the Confederate war, the man who created the Army of Northern Virginia and made possible all its splendid achievements, was in fact elected governor because of his abolitionist sentiments.
Mr. Letcher was strongly imbued with that conviction which had dominated the best minds of Virginia from colonial days, that slavery was a curse to be got rid of and not at all an institution to be defended upon its merits. He had publicly urged the necessity of getting rid of it. He had explained to his fellow Virginians, in public utterances, its demoralizing influence upon the young white men of that commonwealth. Finally, so eager was he to rid his native state of the incubus that he deliberately proposed the one thing most offensive to the Virginian mind, namely, the division of the "Old Dominion" into two states in order that the western half of it at least might be free from slavery. When he stood as a candidate for governor in the last election before the war, all these facts were used against him to the utmost by the advocates of slavery and they undoubtedly deprived him of many thousands of votes east of the Alleghenies. The first returns indicated the election of his adversary, William L. Goggin, by an overwhelming majority. But when the figures came in from the western part of the state, where slavery scarcely at all survived, John Letcher was elected. Thus the anti-slavery sentiment gave to the foremost state of the Southern Confederacy its singularly earnest and efficient war governor.
But side by side with this anti-slavery sentiment in the South, there grew up a pro-slavery sentiment which was buttressed by every impulse of gain that it is possible for the human mind to conceive.
Near the end of the eighteenth century, Eli Whitney made slavery enormously profitable by his invention of the cotton-gin. Before that time slavery had been of more than doubtful profit to the people of the states that permitted it. It was not at all an economical labor system. It required the master to give to the laborer, in lieu of wages, such food, habitation, clothing, nursing in illness and care in infancy and old age, as no laboring population in the world has ever before or since received in return for its labor. It involved pension as well as payment. It imposed upon the employer obligations such as no employer in all the world, before or since, has been willing to assume.
But Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin made the payment of such wages possible and profitable. It made it possible for a plantation owner to grow rich while feeding, housing, clothing and caring for his negroes as no other employer has fed, housed, clothed and cared for his working people since the foundations of the world were laid.
Eli Whitney's invention made illimitable cotton a substitute for costly and narrowly limited linen and in a great degree for good. It made it possible for every man in all the world to put a shirt on his back, a pair of sheets on his bed, a case on his pillow, and to clothe his wife in calico and his children in cottonade where before all these luxuries were denied to him and his by inexorable laws of economics. But incidentally that invention made slavery enormously profitable, where before it had been doubtfully profitable. Eliza Lucas of South Carolina, afterwards Eliza Pinckney, had sought to find profitable employment for her slaves by cultivating indigo. Other enterprising experimenters had explored other avenues of earning, but not one of them had found a way of making profitable the ownership of slaves until Eli Whitney devised a machine by the use of which any ignorant negro could remove the seed from three thousand pounds of cotton in a single day, where before one negro man or woman could remove the seed from only one pound or at the most a few pounds. From that hour forward, negro slavery became profitable in the South, and from that hour forth it stood as a "vested interest" with its influence as such in politics.
Let us not misunderstand. The cultivation of cotton by free labor has exceeded in its productiveness by more than two to one, that cultivation under the slave system. As has already been set forth in these pages, the greatest cotton crop ever grown before the war with which we here have to deal amounted only to 4,669,770 bales, while under free labor the annual production rose to an average of more than 11,000,000 bales in the closing years of the century which saw the extinction of slavery.
Yet there is no doubt or possibility of doubt that Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin near the end of the eighteenth century made negro slavery profitable as it had never been before in this country. It enabled the planter to grow rich upon the proceeds of the labor of negro slaves whose industry had before produced scarcely more than enough to support themselves. It created a new era. It inaugurated a new epoch. It instigated a new sentiment in favor of slavery, where before the sentiment had been tending the other way.
In considering human affairs historically it is very necessary to bear in mind that men ordinarily have no opinions. If by "opinions" we mean well considered judgments, founded upon an orderly reasoning from accepted premises, then opinions are the very rarest of human possessions. If we are told that a particular person was born and bred in Spain, we know without further inquiry what his religious convictions are. If we learn that he is a Turk we perfectly know his so-called opinions upon the subject of matrimony. We take for granted the views of the Puritans' sons and daughters concerning religion. We know, without asking, what the "opinions" of any American are with respect to the Declaration of Independence. We know that, with the exception of a very few men, all the people of the South were firmly convinced that the cause of the South in the Confederate war was a just one; that the National Government had no conceivable right to coerce recalcitrant states; that secession was an absolute right of the states, and all the rest of it. On the other hand we know that the Northern boy who had declaimed Webster's reply to Hayne was fully imbued with the conviction that "Liberty and Union" were "now and forever, one and inseparable."
In other words, with here and there an exception, men's opinions are determined by geography, tradition, circumstance, self-interest and the like.
Thus when New England's chief interest was maritime and commercial, Daniel Webster was the most radical of free-traders. He held up to ridicule and contumely Henry Clay's protective "American system" and showed conclusively that nothing in the world could be more utterly un-American. But a few years later, when New England's interests were centered in manufactures, Daniel Webster's opinions became those of an extreme protectionist. In the same way he opposed a national bank so long as New England disliked that institution and favored it the moment New England desired its continuance. In like manner John C. Calhoun began by clamoring for the tariff protection of Southern industries and developed into the chief apostle of nullification as a means of escaping protective tariffs. Similarly Clay began by making so absolutely conclusive an argument against a national bank that Andrew Jackson afterwards quoted it as the best possible plea he could offer in support of his warfare upon that institution after Clay had become its chief apostle.
Men ordinarily have no opinions except so far as self-interest, geography, and circumstance determine them and in considering matters of history it is of the utmost importance to recognize that truth.
In the last analysis, therefore, Southern opinion was determined in behalf of slavery by the cotton-gin. And yet the greater number of Southern men were not slaveholders and so had no personal interest in the institution. Their opinions were merely a reflection of the sentiment that surrounded them. That sentiment was born of self-interest on the part of a small but dominant class and it drew to itself the sentiment of that much more numerous class—the white man who owned no negroes. Of the white men in the Confederate army, who made so unmatched a fight for Southern independence, not one in five had ever owned a slave or expected to own one.
And there was another influence at work all this while to create a sentiment at the South in favor of slavery as an institution right in itself, where before it had been almost uniformly regarded as an entail of evil. The circumstances of the national life forced this question into politics and made of it an incalculably exasperating issue.
The Nation having acquired the vast Louisiana territory, invitingly fruitful as it was, the question arose "What shall we do with it?" Men from all quarters of the country wanted to go in and "possess the land." Those of them who came from the South very naturally desired to take their negro servants with them into the new territories, and at first they did so without let or hindrance. Even the Indians of Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Alabama, when removed, practically by compulsion, to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi years later were freely permitted to take their negro slaves with them, nobody gainsaying their right. In like manner Southern men emigrating to Missouri took their slaves with them without so much as a question of their right to do so. And when Missouri, in 1819, became sufficiently populous to justify an application for statehood, a majority of the settlers in that region desired that African slavery should be permitted there.
In the meantime, the Northern states, now completely emancipated from slavery within their own borders, had more and more learned to detest the system. There had grown up in the North an intense moral sentiment in antagonism to the further extension of slavery. There had grown up also an intense economic opposition to the system. It was felt that the very existence of slavery in any region tended to degrade free labor and to make of the laborer an inferior person not entitled to respect, a person not quite a slave but still not quite a freeman.
It was, nevertheless, not deemed reputable to advocate the abolition of slavery. The term "Abolitionist" was then, and for a generation afterwards continued to be, the most opprobrious epithet that one man could apply to another.
Nevertheless when Missouri sought admission to the Union as a slave state, the opposition was intense, determined, angry.
Then came Henry Clay with a compromise. Earnestly desiring the extinction of the slave system, it was that statesman's fate to do more than any other man of his era in behalf of the perpetuation and extension of the institution which he regarded as a curse and an incubus. There was one other thing for which he cared far more than he did for the extinction of slavery. In common with Webster and most others of the statesmen of that time he was more deeply concerned for the preservation and perpetuation of the Union than for any other matter that appealed to his mind. His attitude was identical with that of Mr. Lincoln while the war was on, when he declared his sole purpose to be the restoration of the Union and proclaimed his conviction that the question of slavery and all other questions were in his mind subordinate to that.
Clay saw grave danger to the Union in this Missouri controversy. In order to avert that danger, and regardless of everything else, he brought forward his compromise and succeeded in securing its enactment into law.
Under that compromise Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state; but it was stipulated that no other slave state should be carved out of territory north of 36° 80´ north latitude, that being the southern boundary line of Missouri.
In practical effect this compromise excluded slavery from all future states to be created out of the vast region embraced in the Louisiana Purchase, except the territory of Arkansas. Louisiana was already a state. Missouri was permitted by the compromise itself to become a state. The Indian Territory was forever set apart for a special purpose and, it was then held, could never become a state. There was no other acre of the Louisiana Purchase lying south of the line fixed by the compromise as the extreme northern limit to which the institution might extend. Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado and the rest were still Mexican possessions which the great Republic had not then the remotest thought of acquiring. On the other hand there were all the vast, fruitful regions now known as Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas and the states lying to the west of them into which by this agreement slavery might never go, from which it was supposedly as effectually excluded as it had been from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin by that clause which Thomas Jefferson—in his eagerness to make an end of the system—had written into the deed of cession by which the Northwest Territory became a national possession.
Clay fondly believed that this Missouri Compromise of his devising had finally laid to rest the entire controversy with regard to slavery. Thirty odd years later he was still laboring to induce his own state, Kentucky, to adopt a system of gradual emancipation, but in the meanwhile history had written itself in another way and in direct antagonism to his views.
There had grown up at the North an intolerance of slavery which freely expressed itself in denunciation of those who supported or countenanced the institution. There had grown up at the South a sentiment in advocacy of slavery such as did not exist in that region in the earlier years of the Republic. Men whose fathers and grandfathers had diligently sought means by which to free their native land of a curse, had little by little come to regard that curse as a blessing. Men whose forefathers had regarded slavery as an inherited misfortune, came to regard the institution as right in itself and to defend it as the best, most generous, and most humane labor system in the world. In support of this contention they could point to the factory system of old England, and New England and argue with some truth that nowhere in the world was labor so generously rewarded as at the South.
Moreover, the antagonism to the system which had developed at the North had its very natural reflex effect. The offensive terms in which slave owners were habitually spoken of in Northern prints were well calculated to impel Southern men to the angry and intemperate defense of their system. Still more effective in breeding a "thick and thin" pro-slavery sentiment at the South were the aggressive measures taken at the North for the annoyance of those who held slaves.
The laws for the rendition of fugitive slaves—not at that time so strict as they were afterwards made—were habitually set at naught. There existed a fairly well organized system called "the underground railroad" by which slaves were induced to run away and by means of which their flight was facilitated. All this was dictated by a profound conviction on the part of those who engaged in it that slavery was an institution so utterly wrong that any means by which its hold could be impaired were right in morals, no matter what the law might say.
All this was done in defiance of law, in violation of the statutes and in flagrant disregard of that compact of reciprocity upon which the Union was founded. We are not concerned in the twentieth century to discuss the question of the right or wrong of men's conduct in the first half of the nineteenth. But if we would understand the irritations that bred the war between the North and the South, we must recognize not only all the facts but equally all the refinements by which they were judged in their time.
For a time at least the Missouri Compromise took the sting out of the slavery issue as a cause of controversy between the North and the South. By that compromise the South had given up all claim further to extend its institutions into any part of the vast and immeasurably rich territory included in the Louisiana Purchase, with the single exception of Arkansas. All the region that now constitutes Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, the two Dakotas—and all the vast territories west of those states,—were foreordained by that agreement to be erected into free states. South of the dead line established by the agreement there remained the territory of Arkansas and nothing else. Arkansas was admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1836 and in the next year the balance of power in the Senate and the electoral college was restored by the admission of Michigan as a free state. There remained within the limits of our national domain no other acre of territory except in Florida, into which under the terms of the Missouri Compromise the southern emigrant could take his slave property with him, while to the northern emigrant there was opened a possession rivaling the greatest empires of earth in area and in prospective productiveness.
But for twenty-five years the compromise served in a great degree to allay the asperities of the slavery controversy. The anti-slavery sentiment at the North was for the time satisfied with the assurance that with the exceptions of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas, all the great domain embraced in the Louisiana Purchase was by that compromise forever devoted to the system of free labor; that perhaps a dozen prospective free states of inestimable wealth and incalculable population were destined in the near future to be added to the Union, while with the exceptions of Florida and Arkansas, no further slave states could be created. The South in its turn was satisfied with the recognition which the compromise gave to slave property as entitled to equal protection in national law at least with other property.
CHAPTER IV
The Annexation of Texas
If matters had remained as they were, there is little room for doubt that the settlement reached in the Missouri Compromise would have endured for another generation at the least. It is true that, once raised, the issue between free labor and slavery was, as Mr. Seward afterwards said, "an irrepressible conflict." It is morally certain that sooner or later, in one way or in another, it was bound to lead to a decisive struggle either of war or of diplomacy between the North and the South. But we are dealing now with facts and not with probabilities; with events and not with conjectures; and the facts and events strongly suggest that if no new condition had intervened to disturb the settlement made by the Missouri Compromise, that adjustment of the vexed and vexing slavery question would have endured for at least a generation longer than in fact it did.
The new circumstance that intervened was the annexation of Texas. Texas was a vast territory, undefined as to its limits at that time, but covering an area eight or ten times greater than that of the largest state then in the Union. It included the present state of Texas, New Mexico, and a large area besides. It had been a part of Mexico, peopled chiefly by emigrants from the United States under whose inspiration it had revolted and achieved its independence as a republic.
Its desire for annexation to the Union was quite natural and inevitable and but for slavery that desire would have been reciprocated throughout the United States. It was easily foreseen, however, that the annexation of this vast territory, lying as it did south of the line that set the limit to slavery, would open to that institution an opportunity of expansion scarcely less than that opened to free labor by the Missouri Compromise.
The policy of annexation was bitterly opposed on this ground and additionally because of the practical certainty that annexation would involve a war with Mexico.
Years before that time, Henry Clay had severely criticized the administration for having failed to insist upon our right to Texas as a part of the Louisiana Purchase, but now, in his anxiety to keep the slavery question out of politics because of the danger it involved to the Union, he was strongly opposed to the annexation policy.
When, in 1844, it was deemed certain that Clay and Van Buren would be the rival candidates for president, those statesmen, being personal friends, met at Clay's residence at Ashland, and together planned to keep the Texan question out of the coming campaign. Their agreement was that each should publish a letter—at about the same time—opposing the annexation of Texas and the ratification of the treaty, which was then pending, to accomplish that purpose.
The letters were published, but their effect was precisely the reverse of that which was intended. The Whigs nominated Clay by acclamation, but the Democrats of the South took offense at Van Buren's letter and nominated in his stead James K. Polk, an uncompromising advocate of annexation. Thus the painstaking effort that had been made by Clay and Van Buren to eliminate this annexation question from the presidential campaign had for its actual effect the making of that question the paramount issue of the contest.
Thus the slavery question became again dominant in national politics with a greater disturbing force than ever. For the agitation in politics of a question concerning which men's consciences or self-interests are strongly enlisted—and this question involved both—must always and everywhere intensify feeling, arouse passion and consolidate partisan activity.
The result in this case was to intensify the sentiment of hostility to slavery at the North and to break down the sentiment in behalf of emancipation which had previously been strong though decreasing at the South. The agitation of those years continued to the end, and in its course it slowly but surely changed the conditions of the problem. At the North it made anti-slavery endeavor respectable, where before it had been looked upon with frowning as an activity which threatened that Union which was the chief object of American adoration. At the South, by putting men on the defensive and filling them with a feeling that they were menaced in their homes, it slowly but surely broke down the old conviction that slavery was an evil to be cured and ultimate emancipation a national good to be sought by every safe means that human ingenuity could devise.
At the North it gave birth to a party willing to sacrifice the Union itself, in behalf of the cause of anti-slavery. At the South it gave birth to a new party ready to defend and perpetuate slavery at all hazards and at the cost of a dissolution of the Union if that should become necessary.
In addition to this, as the years went on this new agitation of the slavery question revived with added intensity the old jealousy which the states had felt toward the national power. Of that we shall speak later. Let us first outline the course of events.
Texas was annexed. The Mexican war followed, ending in the additional annexation of an imperial domain including all that we now know as California, Utah, Colorado, Nevada and the neighboring states and territories. The question at once arose, What shall we do with these new lands? A large part of them lay south of the slavery dead line. Should that part be open to slavery? Texas, itself a slave state, was authorized by the terms of the contract of annexation to form itself into four states with eight senators and at least twelve electoral votes which a rapid immigration might increase to twenty or forty within a brief while. Arizona and New Mexico, claimed by Texas as a part of its domain, seemed practically certain to become independent states. California,—even now extending from the latitude of Boston to the latitude of Savannah and reaching inland half as far as from the Atlantic to the Mississippi—had at least one-half its area and the better half, lying south of the Missouri Compromise line. Moreover the terms of the compromise did not forbid the extension of slavery even into the whole of the California country, a region that might easily be carved into ten or a dozen states, for the restrictions of the compromise applied only to territory acquired by the Louisiana Purchase.
Here surely was cause enough for controversy. And a new reason had arisen for intense obstinacy in controversy. Let us consider this a little carefully. The anti-slavery agitation at the North was growing more and more aggressively hostile. In common with the pro-slavery sentiment at the South it had begun to appeal to the old and dying sentiment of states' rights for the justification of its attitude, thus reviving a controversy between the national sovereignty and the independence of the states, which had been largely allayed by the progress of time.
Northern states refused to make themselves parties to slavery even at command of the Federal Government. They refused to lend their courts and jails and sheriffs to the work of returning to slavery negroes who had run away from bondage at the South. They enacted laws in assertion of their State sovereignty which in effect nullified the laws of the Nation and effectually obstructed their execution. We are writing now of the period from 1845 to 1860, and not of a particular year.
Here was that revival of the old states' rights controversy with the Federal authority, of which mention has been made before.
It was met on the other side by an equally determined assertion of states' rights. There was nowhere any question that every state in the Union—except as forbidden by the cession of the Northwest Territory or by the Missouri Compromise—had full authority to sanction or forbid the institution of slavery within its own borders at its own free will. But there was a party at the North which contended that slavery was a wrong so enormous that it ought to be exterminated by the high hand of Federal force; that the disruption of the Union as an incident to such extermination of the system would be a small price to pay for an end so beneficent. The abolitionists denounced the Constitution itself as "a covenant with hell," because it permitted the several states to decide for themselves whether or not they would permit African slavery within their borders, and because it authorized laws compelling the rendition of fugitive slaves.
On the other hand there was growing up at the South a party that preferred the disruption of the Union to a longer continuance of existing conditions, a party weary of struggling for what it held to be the rights of the states under the Constitution and disposed instead to resort to the ultimate right of withdrawal from the Union which the South claimed then, as New England had claimed it during the war of 1812, as a reserved privilege of the states.
The slavery question had not only entered again into national politics, but had become well-nigh the only question of politics, state and national.
Congress was flooded with daily petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and for the prohibition of the sale of slaves from one state to another. Southern and some Northern members opposed the reception of these petitions and endeavored to secure rules to lay them on the table without debate and without reference to any committee. This policy was stoutly opposed on the ground that it was in derogation of that "right to petition" which in all free lands is held to be inherent in the citizen. Debate ran high on this and like questions, and became intensely acrimonious.
When the peace settlement with Mexico was pending, a bill to authorize the rectification of boundaries by the purchase of a large territory from Mexico was presented in Congress. Mr. Wilmot of Pennsylvania, in 1846, moved as an amendment a proviso—known in history as "The Wilmot Proviso"—stipulating that slavery should never be permitted in any of the territory to be thus acquired.
This additionally intensified the controversy, and while the Wilmot Proviso, though adopted by the House of Representatives, was rejected by the Senate and never became law, its suggestion and the House's adoption of it were accepted by the South as an additional evidence of the uncompromising hostility of the anti-slavery party, and of a determination at the North to use the Federal power for the limitation, the restriction and the ultimate extermination of slavery.
In the meantime a sentiment against abolitionism had grown up at the North which was implacably intolerant of opinion. Owen Lovejoy was put to death by an Illinois mob for his offense in publishing an aggressively abolitionist newspaper. Other men suffered persecution upon similar account. Newspaper offices were wrecked and their proprietors sorely dealt with by mobs in states which by their organic law forbade slavery and the people of which had no interest in the institution. They regarded all abolitionist movements as agitations seriously threatening the Union and recklessly risking the public peace. They were ready to resort to mob violence by way of repressing activities which they regarded as destructive of public order and seriously menacing to the Union, which had come to be an object of adoration to the great majority of Americans.
Thus the controversy involved violence and lawlessness at the North even more than at the South.
Again the anti-slavery propagandists at the North were men of shrewd intelligence as well as men of profound convictions as to the absolute righteousness of their cause. They believed without doubt or question that anything which might help to destroy slavery was right. To that end they were ready to violate law, to commit acts which the law—improperly as they thought—denounced as criminal, and even to destroy the American Republic if by that means they could extirpate the system of human bondage. They were devotees of a cause that admitted of no compromise or qualification. They were crusaders at war who regarded all means as righteous that might lead to what they believed to be a righteous end. This is not the place in which to question the correctness of their belief or to criticize their conduct. Our concern is merely to record the facts and trace the consequences of them.
The mails offered an easy and convenient means by which these propagandists could address themselves to other minds than their own, or those in known sympathy with them. Accordingly they freely used the mails as a means of impressing their anti-slavery convictions upon black men or white at the South.
To them the literature which they sought thus to circulate in the South was nothing more than an appeal to reason and the sense of right. But to the Southerner, whose family was at the mercy of a multitude of slaves, it seemed a very different thing and one immeasurably more menacing. To him it seemed an incitement to servile insurrection in a region where such an insurrection could not fail to result in unspeakable horrors and calamities.
It is a fact imperfectly understood outside of the South that the average negro there was not at all such as the planter usually carried about with him in the capacity of body servant to himself or maid to his wife or daughter; not at all the "intelligent contraband" so dear to the newsgatherers of the war time; not at all a Booker T. Washington or a Frederick Douglass, or a Blanche K. Bruce or a Montgomery, but a hopelessly ignorant, passion-impregnated, half-savage, held to good behavior only by fear of the white man's superior power. On the coast of South Carolina and in other regions the negro was in many cases even a whole savage—recently imported, clad in breech clout and ebonized nakedness and unable to speak or understand any language except the Congo gibberish to which he had been born.
Of course literature made no direct appeal to creatures of such sort. But there were many educated or at least literate negroes at the South—some of them slaves and some of them "free men of color" as the law phrase at that time ran. If incited thereto, these intelligent blacks might very easily have organized the physical force of the multitude of more ignorant negroes for an insurrection which would have involved the wholesale slaughter of white women and children and a servile war more horrible in its incidents and consequences than any that the world has known since time itself began.
It was altogether natural that the anti-slavery agitators who had made up their minds to destroy slavery at all hazards and at all costs and who held all other considerations to be but as dust in the balance in comparison with that one supreme desire of their souls, should seek by means of the mails to propagate their ideas in the South and among the slaves themselves. But it was equally natural that the white men of the South, whose wives and children as well as themselves and their property were menaced by such a possibility, should seek to avert it by any means within their grasp. Their impulse was dictated by the primal human instinct of self-preservation—an instinct that listens to no argument and stops at no act which may be necessary to avert the impending danger.
These people saw their hearthstones menaced by this use of the mails. They saw in the mails a certain socialistic use of the people's power for a common purpose. They paid taxes for the maintenance of those mails, and they could not see why a mail system which represented and was supported by all the people of all the states should be used for the destruction and desecration of the homes of a part of those people—for the instigation of a servile revolt which could not fail to result in horrors so unspeakable that we may not even suggest them, except vaguely, in this place.
Since that time it has become a commonplace of law to forbid the use of the mails to those who would use them for any purpose inimical to the public welfare; but at that time this thought had gained no place in postal administration, and the desire of the Southerners to purge the mails of incendiary literature which threatened to create a servile insurrection with all its necessarily horrible accompaniments, was put aside as an effort to "tamper with the mail." Contrary to all modern conceptions as to the mails it was held that they were sacred alike to good and to evil purposes and that any matter deposited in them must be delivered to the person to whom it was addressed in utter disregard of any question of public polity and in absolute indifference to the use which the person addressed might be disposed to make of the printed or written matter sent to him.
In our time, where the post office refuses even to rent a box to any man who cannot demonstrate to the postmaster his need of it for legitimate business purposes, and when the delivery of men's mail is deliberately and quite unquestioningly stopped by the postal authorities upon the mere suspicion that their business may be in some way detrimental to the public welfare, we find it difficult to understand why the Southern objection to the distribution of dangerously incendiary matter through the mails—matter which threatened those American citizens with massacre for themselves and something immeasurably worse than massacre for their womankind—should not have received respectful attention.
In the light of our modern postal practice it is difficult to understand the anger and resentment with which the demand of the Southerners was received for the exclusion from the mails of matter the circulation of which threatened themselves, their homes and their families with calamities too horrible to be contemplated with complacency.
But it must be remembered that on the other hand the extirpation of slavery was confidently believed to be an end so righteous as to justify any means that might be employed for its accomplishment; that the holding of men in bondage, whether willingly or unwillingly, whether by virtue of an inheritance that carried other and controlling obligations with it, or by the speculative purchase of men's labor, was a crime deserving of any calamity that might fall upon those who participated in it in the process of its extinction.
In other words there was intolerance on both sides; misunderstanding on both; an utter failure on each side to grasp the considerations that controlled the acts of men on the other side; a fanatical dogmatism on the one side and upon the other that was open to no argument, no consideration of fact or circumstance, no reasoning of any kind.
Thus came about the "irrepressible conflict." These were the influences that created it and forced it to an issue of politics. How it resulted in the most stupendous war of modern times must be related in other chapters.
CHAPTER V
The Compromise of 1850
The Mexican war and the subsequent negotiations added a vast territory to the national domain. Much of it lay south of the Missouri Compromise line, and into that part of it at least the advocates of slavery confidently expected to extend their labor system.
The introduction of the Wilmot Proviso and its passage by the House did not indeed result in the exclusion of slavery from those territories, for the reason that the proviso, failing in the Senate, did not become law.
But it alarmed the South. By the Southerners of the more radical pro-slavery school it was accepted as a notice to quit; a notification that so far as Northern anti-slavery sentiment could control the matter, there was to be no further addition of a single acre to the slave territory of the Union; that so far as that sentiment could influence national politics, the power of the Federal Government was thenceforth and forever to be exercised to prevent the extension of slavery into any new territory acquired or to be acquired by the Union north or south of the Missouri Compromise line, and in the end to abolish the system altogether.
Let us clearly understand this situation. The Wilmot Proviso and all the attempted legislation, by which it was sought to confine slavery within the boundaries prescribed for it by existing conditions, seemed to the opponents of slavery merely a legitimate effort to emphasize the fact that free labor was national, while slavery was a permitted evil within prescribed limits permitted solely because within those limits the national power was not authorized to exert itself for the extermination of the system. On the other hand, all these things seemed to the Southern mind to be an utterly unjust discrimination against a part of the people. The territories involved in the controversy had become national possessions, they contended, largely through the activities of Southern men and Southern statesmanship. It was felt to be a grievous wrong that Southern men should be forbidden to emigrate to those territories on equal terms with other citizens of the Union or that thus emigrating they should be forbidden to take with them their slave property, which represented in part their industrial system but in far greater part their domestic life.
The very proposal thus to exclude them from an equal participation in the opportunities and the privileges opened to other citizens of the Republic by the acquisition of these new territories seemed to them a threat, a notification that henceforth they were to be treated not as citizens of the Union entitled to the same protection and the same privileges that were extended to other citizens, but as inferior and offending persons, persons graciously permitted to exist, but persons to be excluded, because of their offenses, from an equal participation in the conquests and land purchases of the Nation and from the enjoyment of a share of the benefits resulting from the addition of a great and immeasurably rich territory to the national domain.
It is true that the proposal of their exclusion had failed to become law. But it had failed by a margin so narrow that its success might easily be anticipated as an event of the near future. It is true that neither the Wilmot Proviso nor any other legislation suggested at that time sought to forbid Southerners to migrate into the new territories. But it was proposed that they should be forbidden by law to take with them into those territories the slaves upon whose services they relied not only for agricultural work, but even more for that domestic service to which they had been accustomed all their lives to look for comfort. To tell them that they might remove their households into the new territories, but at the same time to say to them that they must leave behind all that had before contributed to their prosperity and to the comfort of their domestic arrangements, seemed to them something worse than a mockery.
Out of the agitation of these questions arose very important events.
The old sentiment at the South in favor of a gradual emancipation of the slaves, though it survived in some degree to the end, gave place, in large measure, to a new sentiment in behalf of slavery as a thing right in itself, a sentiment born of the instinct of self-preservation.
The manifest disposition to exclude slavery from the newly acquired Southern possessions prompted the men of the South to question the Missouri Compromise itself. The spirit of that compromise had been that slave property might be taken into territories south of 36° 30´ north latitude, with the assurance that such territories might become slave states, in return for the stipulation of the South that all territory lying north of that line should be forever exempted from slavery. When the new territory was acquired from Mexico, a large part of it lying south of that line, it was naturally expected that in those regions the people of the slave states were to find an outlet for emigration as freely as those of the Northern states found a like outlet north of that line. When a determined effort was made, with every prospect of success, to deny even this to them, they began seriously to question a compromise by which they had surrendered so much and seemed now destined to gain so little. They had secured Arkansas and Missouri as outlets for their superfluous, discontented, unfortunate or specially enterprising population; they had surrendered all claim to an equal opportunity in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas and all the rest of the rich regions embraced in the Louisiana Purchase. Obviously, it seemed to them, they had made a bad bargain, and now that they were threatened with a denial of their share in the benefits of it, so far as the territory acquired from Mexico was concerned, they were disposed to repent them of it or at the very least to question the extent to which its terms were binding on themselves.
The compromise, they reflected, was merely a matter of statutory law. It had no constitutional obligation back of it. It had been enacted by one congress. It could be repealed by another. In answer to the threat to disregard its spirit in dealing with the new territories, the Southerners made the counter-threat to repeal the compromise itself. It was all very natural, very human, but to the Republic it was very dangerous.
The lands that lay north of the dead line were still territories and still for the most part unoccupied. Nothing more binding than an easily repealable statute forbade Southerners to migrate into those territories with their negroes and in due time, by out-voting Northern immigrants, to make slave states of them. The essence of the compromise they held to be, that in return for the prohibition of slavery north of 36° 30´ north latitude, slavery should be freely permitted in all regions lying south of that line if the people settling there should so decide. If the contract was to be repudiated on the one hand, why, they asked, should it not be equally repudiated on the other? If the Missouri Compromise was to carry with it none of the benefits it conferred on the South why should it be held binding upon the South for the benefit of the North?
This seems to have been the thought and attitude of the South at that time, and it soon found expression in legislation and in attempted legislation.
The discovery of gold in California quickly resulted in such a peopling of that region as made its admission to the Union as a state a necessity. The settlers there were mainly from the North and they naturally had no desire to make a slave state out of the territory. Without waiting for an enabling act they adopted a constitution in 1849 and knocked at the doors of the Union for admission as a free state.
Instantly the South took alarm. Quite half of California lay south of 36° 30´ north latitude. Apart from its gold, the region promised harvests of grain and fruit of incalculably greater value even than all the output of all its mines. There was nothing in the Missouri Compromise or in any other legislation to forbid the whole of California to become a slave state. There was only the decision of the people in that part of the country that they wanted the state to be free and that decision was not by any means unanimous. On the contrary it was believed to be at least possible that if the territory were divided into two substantially equal parts the southern half of it would elect to become a slave state.
This added enormously to the acrimony of the slavery controversy. There had from the beginning been accepted in the country a half formulated theory of the necessity of maintaining a "balance of power" between the opposing systems of slavery and free labor so far at least as the Senate, representing the states as such without regard to population, was concerned. From the beginning slave and free states had been admitted to the Union in effect in couples. Thus Vermont, admitted in 1791, was balanced by Kentucky, admitted in 1792. Tennessee came in in 1796 with no free state comrade till 1803, when Ohio was admitted. Louisiana, admitted in 1812, was offset by Indiana which became a state in 1816. Mississippi was admitted in 1817 and Illinois in the following year. Alabama, admitted in 1819, was balanced by Maine in 1820. Missouri came in in 1821 by a compromise that more than offset the omission to create a corresponding and compensatory free state. But when Arkansas was admitted in 1836, Michigan was thrown into the other scale in 1837. Florida and Texas, annexed in 1845, were balanced by Iowa in 1846 and Wisconsin in 1848. But for California as a free state there was no peopled region that could be carved into a compensatory slave state and for that reason, as well as because of the rise of the anti-slavery agitation to fever heat, the controversy about 1850 took on an angrier tone than ever, and one more seriously threatening to the Union.
The people of the country at that time might justly have been divided into three classes, viz:
1. Those extreme opponents of slavery who were ready and eager to sacrifice the Union itself and the Constitution to the accomplishment of their emancipating purpose;
2. Those extreme pro-slavery men who were equally ready to wreck the Union in order to perpetuate and extend the system of slave labor;
3. Those intense lovers of the Union, North and South, who were ready to put aside and sacrifice their convictions for or against slavery in order to save the Nation from disruption with all its horrible consequences of civil war.
This last class was at that time a dominant majority and for long afterwards it exercised a controlling and restraining influence over all the rest. It included men at the South who earnestly desired the extinction of slavery, and other men at the South who were sincerely convinced that the slave system was absolutely necessary to the cultivation of Southern fields and that its perpetuation was justified by the incurable inferiority of the black race, and the hopeless incapacity of the negro for freedom and self-government. At the North the class of those who cared more for the perpetuity of the Union than for either the extinction or the perpetuation of slavery included men of every shade of belief as regarded slavery itself, except the extreme opponents of the system. It included such men as Abraham Lincoln who, even after the war was on, persisted in holding to his heart as his supreme desire the perpetuity of the Union in order, as he splendidly phrased it in his Gettysburg speech, that "Government of the people by the people and for the people might not perish from the earth."
It was a magnificent conflict of human forces. Incidentally it brought into play passion, prejudice, malice, groveling self-interest and brutal disregard of others' rights and feelings. But in large part it was dominated, on the one side and upon the other, by a love of liberty, an instinct of justice and an exalted patriotism that did honor to those who were so inspired.
All these sentiments and aspirations were variously directed, giving rise sometimes to contradictory courses of action. But he who would understand and interpret the events of that time must fully conceive the fact that the inspiring impulses of the great majority were essentially and fundamentally the same on both sides, however variously they may have been interpreted into conduct. Only thus shall we understand how it was that men on opposite sides of a geographical line, men equally loving liberty and equally holding in reverence the traditions of the American Union, fell a-fighting in 1861 and for four years waged the bloodiest and most devastating war of which modern history anywhere makes record.
The controversy with respect to California and the territories was only a part of the disturbing influences of the middle of the nineteenth century.
The Constitution of the United States, in Section 3 of Article IV, distinctly imposed upon the states and upon the people thereof the duty of returning to their masters all fugitive slaves who might escape from one state to another. That provision of the Constitution was resented, even to the point of violence by the antagonists of slavery; it was insisted upon by the advocates of slavery—in the North as well as in the South—to the border-land of crime. It was defeated of its purpose, not only by the acts of individuals banded together with express intent to nullify it in practice, but still more by laws enacted in many states at the North to facilitate its nullifications. The law officers of many states either refused to exercise their authority for the enforcement of this law or going further, employed their authority to prevent its enforcement.
Let us frankly recognize the fact that these men were in effect disunionists, and the further fact that they were such upon conscientious conviction. All this was done in full faith that it was right and in response to the requirements of conscience. But it was done in flagrant violation of the constitutional compact. We may sympathize with the impulses of the sheriff or other officer who refused to aid in the return of an escaping negro to slavery, and still more easily we may sympathize with those unofficial persons who fed and housed and expedited escaping slaves, in their refusal to aid a system of human bondage of which they were conscientiously intolerant, but on the other hand we may not justly blink the fact that all this was in disobedience of the fundamental law of the land, in violation of that compact on which alone the Union rested, and in derogation of property rights which the compact of union pledged all the states to enforce and all the people to respect.
The whole trouble lay in the fact that there was an "irrepressible conflict" between the ideas that were dominant North and South and that laws and constitutions, and compacts, and agreements were powerless to enforce themselves or to get themselves enforced in opposition to intense conviction and strongly felt sentiment.
The feeling on both sides ran high and was intensely intolerant. It was heedless of reason or argument. It scoffed at compacts and agreements. It made of legal obligations a mockery and of constitutional requirements a laughing stock.
It entered also into every relation of life and mischievously disturbed every such relation. It divided families. It disrupted churches, producing divisions in them, some of which—most of which indeed—have not been healed even in our present time when the war and slavery and all things pertaining to them are matters of history.
Along the line of the Ohio river, where one brother had gone across the narrow stream to Indiana in search of fortune while another had remained behind in Kentucky, the specter of this implacable controversy wrought an estrangement that was at once cruel and unnatural. Skiffs lined the opposing shores. Intercourse was easy and the waterway between was of trifling width; but the skiffs were not used, and the intervening waterway was left uncrossed, because between those who dwelt upon the one side of the stream and those who lived upon the other there arose the black shadow of the irrepressible conflict. They were friends and near relatives. Their homes confronted each other with only a placid stream between. Their shores were far less than a mile apart, and their old loves for each other were uncooled, so far as they realized. But they gradually ceased to visit each other. Those courtships and marriages which had been the frequent occasions of rejoicing among them became of the very rarest occurrence and finally ceased to occur at all. And all this in spite of the fact that in northern Kentucky slavery was scarcely more than a name while the people on the other side of the river had, for the major part, been emigrants from Kentucky, accustomed in their childhood to such mild mannered slavery as still survived beyond the stream.
Here was the line of cleavage. Here was the barrier between men's minds and hearts and lives. On the one side slavery was permitted and, in self-preservation chiefly, was defended. On the other side there were softening memories of slavery as an institution that had surrounded the childhood of those concerned with the loving care and the affectionate coddling of negro mammies and negro uncles. But the issue between slavery and antagonism to it had become so sharply accentuated that even family affection and memories of childhood and the influences of near neighborhood and the ties of close kinship could not break down the barrier.
Still further, there had begun to grow up at the North a political party whose sole bond of union was antipathy to slavery. It was not at all respectable, for even yet it was not deemed respectable in many parts of the North to be an Abolitionist, and this was distinctly an Abolitionist party. Its sole reason for being was its purpose to abolish slavery in the United States. It was still a feeble party, so far as the number of votes it could command was concerned, but it was prepared to ally itself with any others whose purposes might tend even in the smallest degree in the direction in which it wished the Republic to go. It was ready to join in any effort that might help toward the extirpation of slavery, but its avowed purpose was not to assail slavery where that institution legally existed, but to prevent its extension to any new lands.
In that purpose many thousands sympathized who would scornfully have resented the imputation that they were Abolitionists.
This new "Free-soil" party had no less a personage than Ex-president Martin Van Buren as its candidate for the presidency in 1848 and while its following and its poll of votes were small its menace seemed to men of the South very great, a seeming that was destined to be confirmed ere long. In 1840 the Anti-slavery candidate, Birney, had received only 7,059 votes in the whole country, scarcely enough to be recorded in the election returns. In 1844 the same candidate received 62,300 votes—a great increase, but still not enough to be reckoned seriously. In 1848 Martin Van Buren, as the candidate of this Free-soil party, received 291,263 votes, thus greatly more than quadrupling the highest directly Anti-slavery vote previously polled. In 1856 the Free-soil party under the name of the Republican party, was in effect the only serious antagonist of the Democracy, the only party that seriously disputed with it the control of the National Government. In that election the new party polled 1,341,264 votes, against 1,838,169 for the Democratic candidate. It carried no less than 114 electoral votes out of a total of 296, its successful antagonist carrying 174.