In the meantime the people of the South, much excited, were resorting to repression, passing laws to prevent slaves from being taught to read, and laws, in some States, inhibiting assemblages of slaves above given numbers, unless some white person were present—all as safeguards against insurrection. Thus, in 1835, an indictment was found in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, against one Williams, who had never been in Alabama, for circulating there an alleged incendiary document, and Governor Gayle made requisition on Governor Marcy, of New York, for the extradition of Williams. Governor Marcy denied the request. The case was the same as that more recently decided by the Supreme Court of the United States, when it held that editors of New York and Indiana papers could not be brought to the District of Columbia for trial.
The South, all the while clamoring to have the agitators put down, had by still other means than these contributed to the ever-increasing excitement in the North. Southerners had mobbed Abolitionists, and whipped and driven out of the country persons found in possession of The Liberator or suspected of circulating other incendiary literature. And violence in the South against the Abolitionists had precisely the same effect on the Northern mind as the violence against them in the North had from 1835 to 1838, but there was this difference: the refugee from the distant South, whether he were an escaped slave or a fleeing Abolitionist, could color and exaggerate the wrongs he had suffered and so parade himself as a martyr. While this was true, it was also quite often true that the outrage committed in the South against the suspect was real enough—a mob had whipped and expelled him without any trial. And this is another of the lessons as to the evil effects of mob law that crop out all through the history of the anti-slavery crusade. No good can come from violating the law.
In 1848 another presidential election turned on the anti-slavery vote, this time again in New York State. Anti-slavery Democrats bolted the Democratic ticket, thus electing General Taylor, the Whig candidate.
In the canvass preceding this election originated, we are told, the catch-phrase applied to Cass, the Democratic candidate—"a Northern man with Southern principles." The phrase soon became quite common, South and North—"a Southern man with Northern principles," and vice versa.
The invention and use of it in 1848 shows the progress that had been made in arraying one section of the Union against the other. Later, a telling piece of doggerel in Southern canvasses, and it must also have been used North, was
Over the admission of California in 1849 there was another battle. California, 734 miles long, with about 50,000 people (less than the usual number), and with a constitution improvised under military government, applied for admission as a State. Southerners insisted on extending the line of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific, thereby making of the new territory two States. The South had been much embittered by the opposition to the admission of Texas. Texas was, nearly all of it, below the Missouri Compromise line, and the South thought it was equitably entitled to come in under that agreement. Its case, too, differed from that of Missouri, which already belonged to the United States when it applied for admission as a State. Texas, with all its vast wealth, was asking to come in without price.
Another continuing and increasing cause of distraction had been the use made by Abolitionists of the right of petition. As already shown, petitions to Congress against slavery had been received without question till 1836, when Northern conservatives and Southern members, hoping to abate this source of agitation, had combined to pass a resolution to lay them on the table, which meant that they were to be no further noticed. The Abolitionists were so delighted over the indefensible position into which they had driven the conservatives—the "gag law"—that they continued, up to the crisis of 1850, with unflagging zeal to hurry in monster petitions, one after another. The debates provoked by the presentation of these petitions, and the more and more heated discussions in Congress of slavery in the States, which was properly a local and not a national question, now attracted still wider public attention. The Abolitionists had almost succeeded in arraying the entire sections against each other, in making of the South and North two hostile nations. Professor John W. Burgess, dean of the Faculty of Political Science in Columbia University, says: "It would not be extravagant to say that the whole course of the internal history of the United States from 1836 to 1861 was more largely determined by the struggle in Congress, over the Abolition petitions and the use of the mails for the Abolition literature, than anything else."[39]
The South had its full share in the hot debates that took place over these matters in Congress. Its congressmen were quite as aggressive as those from the North, and they were accused of being imperious in manner, when demanding that a stop should be put to Abolition petitions, and Abolition literature going South in the mails.
There was another cause of complaint from the South, and this was grave. By the "two underground railroads" that had been established, slaves, estimated at 2,000 annually, abducted or voluntarily escaping, were secretly escorted into or through the free States to Canada. To show how all this was then regarded by those who sympathized with the Abolitionists, and how it is still looked upon by some modern historians, the following is given from Hart's "Abolition and Slavery":
"The underground railroad was manned chiefly by orderly citizens, members of churches, and philanthropical citizens. To law-abiding folk what could be more delightful than the sensation of aiding an oppressed slave, exasperating a cruel master, and at the same time incurring the penalties of defying an unrighteous law?"
Southerners at that time thought that conductors on that line were practising, and readers of the above paragraph will probably think that Dr. Hart in his attractive rhetoric is now extolling in his history, "higher law doctrines."
It is undoubtedly true that, in 1850, a large majority of the Northern people strongly disapproved of the Abolitionists and their methods. Modern historians carefully point out the difference between the great body of Northern anti-slavery people and the Abolitionists. Nevertheless, here were majorities in eleven Northern States voting for, and sustaining, the legislators who passed and kept upon the statute books laws which were intended to enable Southern slaves to escape from their masters. The enactment and the support of these laws was an attack upon the constitutional rights of slave-holders; and Southern people looked upon all the voters who sustained these laws, and all the anti-slavery lecturers, speakers, pulpit orators, and writers of the North, as engaged with the Abolitionists in one common crusade against slavery. From the Southern stand-point a difference between them could only be made by a Hudibras:
As to how much of the formidable anti-slavery sentiment of that day had been created by the Abolitionists, we have this opinion of a distinguished English traveller and observer. Mr. L. W. A. Johnston was in Washington, in 1850, studying America. He says:
"Extreme men like Garrison seldom have justice done to them. It is true they may be impracticable, both as to their measures and their men, but that unmixed evil is the result of their exertions, all history of opinion in every country, I think, contradicts. Such ultra men are as necessary as the more moderate and reasonable advocates of any growing opinion; and, as an impartial person, who never happened to fall in with one of the party in the course of my tour, I must express my belief that the present wide diffusion of anti-slavery sentiment in the United States is, in no small degree, owing to their exertions."[40]
And Professor Smith, of Williams College, speaking of the anti-slavery feeling in the North in 1850, says:
"This sentiment of the free States regarding slavery was to a large degree the result of an agitation for its abolition which had been active for a score of years (1831-1850) without any positive results."[41]
But no matter what had produced it, the anti-slavery sentiment that pervaded the North in 1850 boded ill to slavery and to the Constitution, and the South was bitterly complaining. Congress met in December, 1849, and was to sit until October, 1850. Lovers of the Union, North and South, watched its proceedings with the deepest anxiety. The South was much excited. The continual torrent of abuse to which it was subjected, the refusal to allow slavery in States to be created from territory in the South-west that was below the parallel of the Missouri Compromise, and the complete nullification of the fugitive slave law, seemed to many to be no longer tolerable, and from sundry sources in that section came threats of secession.
In 1849-50 the South was demanding a division of California, an efficient fugitive slave law, and that the territories of New Mexico and Arizona should be organized with no restrictions as to slavery. Other minor demands were unimportant.
Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Stephen A. Douglas, Lewis Cass, and other conservative leaders came forward and, after long and heated debates in Congress, the Compromise of 1850 was agreed on. To satisfy the North, California, as a whole, came in as a free State, and the slave trade was abolished in the District of Columbia. To satisfy the South, a new and stringent fugitive slave law was agreed on, and the territories of New Mexico and Arizona were organized with no restrictions as to slavery.
In bringing about this compromise, Daniel Webster was, next to Clay, the most conspicuous figure. He was the favorite son of New England and the greatest statesman in all the North. On the 7th of March, 1850, Mr. Webster made one of the greatest speeches of his life on the Compromise measures. Rising above the sectional prejudices of the hour, he spoke for the Constitution and the Union. The manner in which he and his reputation were treated by popular historians in the North, for half a century afterward, on account of this speech, is the most pathetic and, at the same time, the most instructive story in the whole history of the anti-slavery crusade.
Mr. Webster was under the ban of Northern public opinion for all this half a century, not because of inconsistency between that speech and his former avowals, an averment often made and never proven, but because he was consistent. He stood squarely upon his record, and the venom of the assaults that were afterward made upon him was just in proportion to the love and veneration which had been his before he offended. His offence was that he would not move with the anti-slavery movement.[42] He did not stand with his section in a sectional dispute.
Henry Clay, old and feeble, had come back into the Senate to render his last service to his country. He was the author of the Compromise. Daniel Webster was everywhere known as the champion of the Union. Henry Clay was known as the "Old Man Eloquent," and he now spoke with all his old-time fire; but Webster's great speech probably had more influence on the result.
Before taking up Mr. Webster's speech his previous attitude toward slavery must be noted. The purpose of the friends of the Union was, of course, to effect a compromise that would, if possible, put an end to sectional strife. Compromise means concession, and a compromise of political differences, made by statesmen, may involve some concession of view previously held by those who advocate as well as by those who accept it. Webster thought his section of the Union should now make concessions.
Fanaticism, however, concedes nothing; it never compromises, although statesmanship does. One of the most notable utterances of Edmund Burke was:
"All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter."
Great statesmen, on great occasions, speak not only to their countrymen and for the time being, but they speak to all mankind and for all time. So spoke Burke in that famous sentence when advocating, in the British Parliament in 1776, "conciliation with America"; and so did Daniel Webster speak, in the Senate of the United States, on the 7th of March, 1850, for "the Constitution and the Union." If George III and Lord North had heeded Burke, and if the British government and people, from that day forth, had followed the wise counsels given in that speech by their greatest statesman, all the English-speaking peoples of the world, now numbering over 170,000,000, might have been to-day under one government, that government commanding the peace of the world. And if all the people of the United States in 1850 and from that time on, had heeded the words of Daniel Webster, we should have been spared the bloodiest war in the book of time; every State of the Union would have been left free to solve its own domestic problems, and it is not too much to say that these problems would have been solved in full accord with the advancing civilization of the age.
The sole charge of inconsistency against Webster that has in it a shadow of truth relates to the proposition he made in his speech as to the "Wilmot proviso." That celebrated proviso was named for David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, its author. It provided against slavery in all the territory acquired from Mexico. The South had opposed the Wilmot proviso because the territory in question, much of it, was south of the Missouri Compromise line extended. Mr. Webster had often voted for the Wilmot proviso, as all knew. In his speech for the Compromise, by which the South was urged to and did give up its contentions as to the admission of California, and its contentions as to the slave trade in the District of Columbia, Webster argued that the North might forego the proviso as to New Mexico and Arizona for the reason that the proviso was, as to these territories, immaterial. Those territories, he argued, would never come in as slave States, because the God of nature had so determined. Climate and soil would forbid. Time vindicated this argument. In 1861 Charles Francis Adams said, in Congress, that New Mexico, open to slave-holders and their slaves for more than ten years, then had only twelve slaves domiciled on the surface of over 200,000 square miles of her extent.[43]
Daniel Webster's services to the cause of the Union, the preservation of which had been the passion of his life, had been absolutely unparalleled. It is perhaps true that without him Abraham Lincoln and the armies of the Union in 1861-65 would have been impossible. The sole and, as he then stated and as time proved, immaterial concession this champion of the Union now (1850) made for the sake of preserving the Union was his proposition as to New Mexico and Arizona.
Henry Clay spoke before Webster. These words were the key-note of Clay's great speech: "In my opinion the body politic cannot be preserved unless this agitation, this distraction, this exasperation, which is going on between the two sections of the country, shall cease."
The country waited with anxiety to hear from Webster. Hundreds of suggestions and appeals went to him. Both sides were hopeful.[44] Anti-slavery people knew his aversion to slavery. He had never countenanced anti-slavery agitation, but he had voted for the Wilmot proviso. They knew, too, that he had long been ambitious to be President, and, carried away by their enthusiasm, they hoped that Webster would swim along with the tide that was sweeping over the majority section of the Union. In view of Mr. Webster's past record, however, it would be difficult to believe that Abolitionists were really disappointed in him had we not many such proofs as the following stanza from Whittier's ode, published after the speech:
The conservatives also were hopeful. They knew that, though Webster had always been, as an individual, opposed to slavery, he had at all times stood by the Constitution, as well as the Union. At no time had he ever qualified or retracted these words in his speech at Niblo's Garden in 1839: "Slavery, as it exists in the States, is beyond the reach of Congress. It is a concern of the States themselves. They have never submitted it to Congress, and Congress has no rightful power over it. I shall concur therefore in no act, no measure, no menace, no indication of purpose which shall interfere or threaten to interfere with the exclusive authority of the several States over the subject of slavery, as it exists within their respective limits. All this appears to me to be matter of plain imperative duty."
Nullifying the fugitive slave law was a plain "interference" with the rights of the slave States.
Mr. Webster's intent, when he spoke on the Compromise measures, is best explained by his own words, on June 17, while these measures were still pending: "Sir, my object is peace. My object is reconciliation. My purpose is not to make up a case for the North or a case for the South. My object is not to continue useless and irritating controversies. I am against agitators, North and South, and all narrow local contests. I am an American, and I know no locality but America."
In his speech made on the 7th of March he dwelt at length on existing conditions, on the attitude of the North toward the fugitive slave law, and argued fully the questions involved in the "personal liberty" laws passed by Northern States. Referring to the complaints of the South about these, he said: "In that respect the South, in my judgment, is right and the North is wrong. Every member of every Northern legislature is bound by oath, like every other officer in the country, to support the Constitution of the United States; and the article of the Constitution which says to these States that they shall deliver up fugitives from service is as binding in honor and conscience as any other article. No man fulfils his duty in any legislature who sets himself to find excuses, evasions, escapes, from this constitutional obligation."
And further on he said: "Then, sir, there are the Abolition societies, of which I am unwilling to speak, but in regard to which I have very clear notions and opinions. I do not think them useful. I think their operations for the last twenty years have produced nothing good or valuable.... I cannot but see what mischief their interference with the South has produced."
In these statements is the substance of Webster's offending.
Webster's speech was followed, on the 11th of March, by the speech of Senator Seward, of New York, in the same debate. Quoting the fugitive slave provision of the Federal Constitution, Mr. Seward said: "This is from the Constitution of the United States in 1787, and the parties were the Republican States of the Union. The law of nations disavows such compacts; the law of nature, written on the hearts and consciences of freemen, repudiates them."[45] The people of the North, instead of following Webster, chose to follow Seward, the apostle of a law higher than the Constitution; and when, ten years later, it appeared to them that the whole North had given in its adhesion to the "higher law" doctrine, the people of eleven Southern States seceded, and put over themselves in very substance the Constitution that Seward had flouted and Webster had pleaded for in vain.
Anti-slavery enthusiasts in the North generally, and Abolitionists especially, in their comments on Webster's speech scouted the idea that the preservation of the Union depended upon the faithful execution of the fugitive slave law or the cessation of anti-slavery agitation. "What," said Theodore Parker, "cast off the North! They set up for themselves! Tush! Tush! Fear boys with bugs!... I think Mr. Webster knew there was no danger of a dissolution of the Union."[46]
The immediate effect of the speech was wonderful; congratulations poured in upon Mr. Webster from conservative classes in every quarter, and he must have felt gratified to know that he had contributed greatly to the enactment of measures that, for a time, had some effect in allaying sectional strife. But the revilings of the Abolitionists prevailed, and it turned out that Daniel Webster, great as he was, had undertaken a task that was too much even for him. His enemies struck out boldly at once: and years afterward, when the anti-slavery movement that Webster's appeals could not arrest had culminated in secession, and when the Union had been saved by arms, the triumphant hosts of the anti-slavery crusade all but succeeded in writing Daniel Webster down permanently in the history of his country as an apostate from principle for the sake of an office he did not get. Here is their verdict, which Mr. Lodge, a biographer of Webster, passes on into history:
"The popular verdict has been given against the 7th of March speech, and that verdict has passed into history. Nothing can be said or done which will alter the fact that the people of this country, who maintained and saved the Union, have passed judgment on Mr. Webster, and condemned what he said on the 7th of March as wrong in principle and mistaken in policy."
Here are specimens of the assaults that were made on Webster after his speech. They are selected from among many given by one of his biographers.[47]
"'Webster,' said Horace Mann, 'is a fallen star! Lucifer descended from Heaven.'... 'Webster,' said Sumner, 'has placed himself in the dark list of apostates.' When Whittier named him Ichabod, and mourned for him in verse as one dead, he did but express the feeling of half New England:
After much more to the same effect, Professor McMaster proceeds: "The attack by the press, the expressions of horror that rose from New England, Webster felt keenly, but the absolute isolation in which he was left by his New England colleagues cut him to the quick."[48]
On Mr. Webster's speech, its purpose and effect, we have this opinion from Mr. Lodge:
"The speech, if exactly defined, is in reality a powerful effort, not for a compromise, or for the fugitive slave law, or for any other one thing, but to arrest the whole anti-slavery movement, and in that way put an end to the danger which threatened the Union and restore harmony to the jarring sections."
And then he adds:
"It was a mad project. Mr. Webster might as well have attempted to stay the incoming tide at Marshfield with a rampart of sand, as to check the anti-slavery movement with a speech."
To undertake at this time to arrest the whole anti-slavery movement by holding up the Constitution was indeed useless.
Seward, who had spoken for the "higher law," was riding on the tide of anti-slavery sentiment that was submerging "the Sage of Marshfield," who had stood for the Constitution. Seward's reputation, in the years following, went steadily up, while Webster's was going down. Webster died, in dejection, in 1852.
Seward, at Rochester, in 1854, later on in the same crusade, made another famous declaration—there was an "irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom." The conflict was "irrepressible," as Seward well knew; and this was simply and solely because the anti-slavery crusade could not be suppressed. Clay and Webster, now both dead and gone, had tried it in vain. Every one knew that if, in 1850, or at any other time, the anti-slavery hosts had halted, and asked for, or consented to, peace, they could have had it at once.
Mr. Lodge, in the following paragraph, seems to have almost made up his mind to defend Webster. He says: "What most shocked the North were his utterances in regard to the fugitive slave law. There can be no doubt that, under the Constitution, the South had a perfect right to claim the extradition of fugitive slaves. The legal argument to support that right was excellent." This would seem to justify the speech in that regard. "But," Mr. Lodge adds, "the Northern people could not feel that it was necessary for Daniel Webster to make it." They wanted him to be sectional or to hold his tongue. Then Mr. Lodge goes on to say: "The fugitive slave law was in absolute conflict with the awakened conscience and moral sentiment of the North."
The conscience of the North at that time, Mr. Lodge means, was a higher law than the Constitution; and Webster's "excellent argument," therefore, fell on deaf ears.
No American historian stands higher as an authority than Mr. Rhodes. He says on page 161, vol. I, of his "History of the United States," published in 1892: "Until the closing years of our century a dispassionate judgment could not be made of Webster; but we see now that in the war of secession his principles were mightier than those of Garrison. It was not 'No Union with slave-holders,' but Liberty and Union that won."
This tribute to services Webster had rendered to the Union in his great speech in 1850, in which he advocated "Liberty and Union, now and forever," exactly as he was advocating it in 1830, is just. How pathetic that the historian was impelled also to record the fact, in the same sentence, that for nearly half a century partisan prejudice had rendered it impossible to form a dispassionate judgment of him who had pleaded in vain for the Union without war!
After an able analysis of his "7th of March speech," and a discussion of his record, in which he paralleled Webster and Edmund Burke, Mr. Rhodes declares: "His dislike of slavery was strong, but his love of the Union was stronger, and the more powerful motive outweighed the other, for he believed that the crusade against slavery had arrived at a point where its further prosecution was hurtful to the Union. As has been said of Burke, 'He changed his front but he never changed his ground.'"[49]
Daniel Webster's name and its place in history may be likened to a giant oak, a monarch of the forest, that, while towering high above all others, was stripped of its branches; for a time it stood, a rugged trunk, robbed of its glory by a cyclone; but its roots were deep down in the rich earth; the storm is passing away; the tree has put out buds again; now its branches are stretching out once more into the clear reaches of the upper air.
Mr. Rhodes seems to be the first historian of note to do justice to Daniel Webster and the great speech which, McMaster takes pains to inform us, historians have written down as his "7th of March speech," in spite of the fact that Mr. Webster himself entitled it "The Constitution and the Union."
Other historians besides Mr. Rhodes have come to the rescue of Webster's speech for "the Constitution and the Union." Mr. John Fiske says of it in a volume (posthumous) published in 1907: "So far as Mr. Webster's moral attitude was concerned, although he was not prepared for the bitter hostility that his speech provoked in many quarters, he must nevertheless have known it was quite as likely to injure him at the North as to gain support for him in the South, and his resolute adoption of a policy that he regarded as national rather than sectional was really an instance of high moral courage."[50]
Mr. William C. Wilkinson has recently written an able "Vindication of Daniel Webster," and, after a conclusive argument on that branch of his subject, he says: "Webster's consistency stands like a rock on the shore after the fretful waves are tired with beating upon it in vain."[51]
Mr. E. P. Wheeler, concluding a masterly sketch of Daniel Webster, setting forth his services as statesman and expounder of the Constitution, and not deigning to notice the partisan charges against him, concludes with these words:
"Great men elevate and ennoble their countrymen. In the glory of Webster we find the glory of our whole country."
The story of Daniel Webster and his great speech in 1850 has been told at some length because it is instructive. The historians who had set themselves to the task of upholding the idea that it was the aggressiveness of the South, during the controversy over slavery, and not that of the North, that brought on secession and war, could not make good their contention while Daniel Webster and his speech for "the Constitution and the Union" stood in their way. They, therefore, wrote the great statesman "down and out," as they conceived. But Webster and that speech still stand as beacon lights in the history of that crusade. The attack came from the North. The South, standing for its constitutional rights in the Union, was the conservative party. Southern leaders, it is true, were, during the controversy over slavery, often aggressive, but they were on the defensive-aggressive, just as Lee was when he made his campaign into Pennsylvania for the purpose of stopping the invasion of his own land; and the South lost in her political campaign just for the same reason that Lee lost in his Gettysburg campaign: numbers and resources were against her. "The stars in their courses fought against Sisera."
Mr. Webster in his great speech for "the Constitution and the Union," as became a great statesman pleading for conciliation, measured the terms in which he condemned "personal liberty" laws and Abolitionism. But afterward, irritated by the attacks made upon him, he naturally spoke out more emphatically. McMaster quotes several expressions from his speeches and letters replying to these assaults, and says: "His hatred of Abolitionists and Free-soilers grew stronger and stronger. To him these men were a 'band of sectionalists, narrow of mind, wanting in patriotism, without a spark of national feeling, and quite ready to see the Union go to pieces if their own selfish ends were gained.'" Such, if this is a fair summing up of his views, was Webster's final opinion of those who were carrying on the great anti-slavery crusade.[52]
The desire for peace in 1850 was wide-spread. Union loving people, North and South, hoped that the Compromise would result in a cessation of the strife that had so long divided the section; and the election of Franklin Pierce, in 1852, as President, on a platform strongly approving that Compromise, was promising. But anti-slavery leaders, instead of being convinced by such arguments as those of Webster, were deeply offended by the contention that legislators, in passing personal liberty laws, had violated their oaths to support the Constitution. They were angered also by the presumptuous attempt to "arrest the whole anti-slavery movement."
The new fugitive slave law was stringent; it did not give jury trial; it required bystanders to assist the officers in "slave-catching," etc. For these and other reasons the law was assailed as unconstitutional. All these contentions were overruled by the Supreme Court when a case eventually came before it. The court decided that the act was, in all its provisions, fully authorized by the Constitution.[53] But in their present mood, no law that was efficient would have been satisfactory to the multitudes of people, by no means all "Abolitionists," who had already made up their minds against the "wicked" provision of the Constitution that required the delivery of fugitive slaves. This deep-seated feeling of opposition to the return to their masters of escaping slaves was soon to be wrought up to a high pitch by a novel that went into nearly every household throughout the North—"Uncle Tom's Cabin." On its appearance the poet Whittier, who had so ferociously attacked Webster in the verses quoted in the last chapter, "offered up thanks for the fugitive slave law, for it gave us 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"
Rufus Choate, a celebrated lawyer and Whig leader, is reported to have said of "Uncle Tom's Cabin": "That book will make two millions of Abolitionists." Drawing, as it did, a very dark picture of slavery, it aroused sympathy for the escaping slave and pictured in glowing colors the dear, sweet men and women who dared, for his sake, the perils of the road in the darkness of night and all the dangers of the law. Mrs. Stowe was making heroes of law-breakers, preaching the higher law.
Mrs. Stowe declared she had not written the book for political effect; she certainly did not anticipate the marvellous results that followed it. That book made vast multitudes of its readers ready for the new sectional and anti-slavery party that was to be organized two years after its appearance. It was the most famous and successful novel ever written. It was translated into every language that has a literature, and has been more read by American people than any other book except the Bible. As a picture of what was conceivable under the laws relating to slavery there was a basis for it. Though there were laws limiting the master's power, cruelty was nevertheless possible.
Here, then, Mrs. Stowe's imagination had full scope. Her book, however, has in it none of the strident harshness, none of the purblind ferocity of Garrison, in whose eyes every slave-holder was a fiend. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" assailed a system; it did not assault personally, as the arch-agitator did, every man and woman to whom slaves had come, whether by choice or chance. Light and shadow and the play of human nature made Mrs. Stowe's picture as attractive in many of its pages as it was repulsive and unfair in others. Mrs. Shelby was a type of many a noble mistress, a Christian woman, and when financial misfortunes compelled the sale of the Shelby slaves and the separation of families, we have not only what might have been, but what sometimes was, one of the evils of slavery, which, by reason of the prevailing agitation, the humanity of the age could not remedy. But Mrs. Stowe's slave-master, Legree, was impossible. The theory was inconceivable that it was cheaper to work to death in seven years a slave costing a thousand dollars, than to work him for forty years. Millions of our people, however, have accepted "Uncle Tom" as a fact, and have wept over him; they have accepted also as a fact the monster Legree.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" lives to-day as a classic on book shelves and as a popular play. The present generation get most of their opinions about slavery as it was in the South from its pages, and not one in ten thousand of those who read it ever thinks of the inconsistency between the picture of slavery drawn there and that other picture, which all the world now knows of—the Confederate soldier away in the army, his wife and children at home faithfully protected by slaves—not a case of violence, not even a single established case, during four years, although there were four millions of negroes in the South, of that crime against white women that, after the reconstruction had demoralized the freedmen, became so common in that section.
The unwavering fidelity during the four years of war of so many slaves to the families of their absent masters, and the fact that those who, during that war, left their homes to seek their freedom invariably went without doing any vengeful act, is a phenomenon that speaks for itself. It tells of kindly relations between master and slave. It is not to be denied that where the law gave so much power to the master there were individual instances of cruelty, nor is it supposable that there were not many slaves who were revengeful; but at the same time there was, quite naturally, among slaves who were all in like case, a more clannish and all-pervading public opinion than could have been found elsewhere. It was that all-pervading and rigid standard of kindly feeling among the slaves to their masters that made the rule universal—fidelity toward the master's family, at least to the extent of inflicting no injury.
What a surprise to many this conduct of the slave was may be gathered from a telling Republican speech made by Carl Schurz during the campaign of 1860.[54] A devotee of liberty, recently a revolutionist in his native land, and, like other foreigners, disregarding all constitutional obstacles, Mr. Schurz had naturally espoused the cause of anti-slavery in this country. He had absorbed the views of his political associates and now contended that secession was an empty threat and that secession was impossible. "The mere anticipation of a negro insurrection," he said, "will paralyze the whole South." And, after ridiculing the alarm created by the John Brown invasion, the orator said that in case of a war between the South and the North, "they will not have men enough to quiet their friends at home; what will they have to oppose to the enemy? Every township will want its home regiment; every plantation its garrison; and what will be left for its field army?"
Slavery in the South eventually proved to be, instead of a weakness, an element of strength to the Confederates, and Mr. Lincoln finally felt himself compelled to issue his proclamation of emancipation as a military necessity—the avowed purpose being to deprive the Confederates of the slaves who were by their labor supporting their armies in the field.
The faithfulness during the war of the slave to his master has been a lesson to the Northerner, and it has been a lesson, too, to the Southerner. It argues that the danger of bloody insurrections was perhaps not as great as had been apprehended where incendiary publications were sent among them. That danger, however, did exist, and if the fear of it was exaggerated, it was nevertheless real, and was traceable to the Abolitionists.
The rights of the South in the territories had now been discussed for years and Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois, had reached the conclusion that under the Constitution Southerner and Northerner had exactly the same right to carry their property, whatever it might be, into the territories, which had been purchased with the common blood and treasure of both sections, a view afterward sustained by the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred Scott case. Douglas, "entirely of his own motion,"[55] introduced, and Congress passed, such a bill—the Kansas-Nebraska act. The new act replaced the Missouri Compromise. This the Southerners considered had been a dead letter for years. Every "personal liberty" law passed by a Northern State was a violation of it.
Ambition was now playing its part in the sectional controversy. Douglas was a Democrat looking to the presidency and had here made a bid for Southern support. On the other hand was Seward, an "old line Whig," aspiring to the same office. The South had been the dominant element in national politics and the North was getting tired of it. Seward's idea was to organize all the anti-slavery voters and to appeal at the same time to the pride and jealousy of the North as a section.
The immediate effect of the Kansas-Nebraska act was to aggravate sectionalism. It opened up the territory of Kansas, allowing it to come into the Union with or without slavery, as it might choose. Slave State and free State adventurers rushed into the new territory and struggled, and even fought, for supremacy. The Southerners lost. Their resources could not match the means of organized anti-slavery societies, and the result was an increase, North and South, of sectional animosity.
The overwhelming defeat of the old Whig party in 1852 presaged its dissolution. Until that election, both the Whig and Democratic parties had been national, each endeavoring to hold and acquire strength, North and South, and each combating, as best it could, the spirit of sectionalism that had been steadily growing in the North, and South as well, ever since the rise of Abolitionism. Both these old parties had watched with anxiety the increase of anti-slavery sentiment in the North. Both parties feared it. Alliance with the anti-slavery North would deprive a party of support South and denationalize it. For years prior to 1852 the drift of Northern voters who were opposed to slavery had been as to the two national parties toward the Whigs, and the tendency of conservative Northerners had been toward the Democratic party. Thus the great body of the Whig voters in the North had become imbued with anti-slavery sentiments, and now, with no hope of victory as a national party and left in a hopeless minority, the majority of that old party in that section were ready to join a sectional party when it should be formed two years later. William H. Seward was still a Whig when he made in the United States Senate his anti-slavery "higher law" speech of 1850.
The Kansas-Nebraska act was a political blunder. The South, on any dispassionate consideration, could not have expected to make Kansas a slave State. The act was a blunder, too, because it gave the opponents of the Democratic party a plausible pretext for the contention, which they put forth then and which has been persisted in till this day, that the new Republican party, immediately thereafter organized, was called into existence by, and only by, the Kansas-Nebraska act.
As far back as 1850 it was clear that a new party, based on the anti-slavery sentiment that had been created by twenty years of agitation, was inevitable. Mr. Rhodes, speaking of conditions then, says: "It was, moreover, obvious to an astute politician like Seward, and probably to others, that a dissolution of parties was imminent; that to oppose the extension of slavery, the different anti-slavery elements must be organized as a whole; it might be called Whig or some other name, but it would be based on the principle of the Wilmot proviso"[56]—the meaning of which was, no more slave States.
Between 1850 and the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska act in 1854, new impulse had been given anti-slavery sentiment by fierce assaults on the new fugitive slave law and, as has been seen, by "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The Kansas-Nebraska act did serve as a cry for the rallying of all anti-slavery voters. That was all. It was a drum-call, in answer to which soldiers already enlisted fell into ranks, under a new banner. Any other drum-call—the application of another slave State for admission into the Union—would have served quite as well. Thus the Republican party came into existence in 1854. Mr. Rhodes sums up the reason for the existence of the new party and what it subsequently accomplished in the following pregnant sentence, "The moral agitation had accomplished its work, the cause (of anti-slavery) ... was to be consigned to a political party that brought to a successful conclusion the movement begun by the moral sentiment of the community,"[57]—which successful conclusion was, of course, the freeing of the slaves by a successful war.
For a time the new Republican party had a powerful competitor in another new organization. This was the American or Know-Nothing party. This other aspirant for power made an honest effort to revitalize the old Whig party under a new name and, by gathering in all the conservatives North and South, to put an end to sectionalism. Its signal failure conveys an instructive lesson. After many and wide-spread rumors of its coming, the birth of the American party was formally announced in 1854. It had been organized in secret and was bound together with oaths and passwords; its members delighted to mystify inquirers by refusing to answer questions, and soon they got the name of "Know-Nothings." The party had grown out of the "Order of the Star Spangled Banner," organized in 1850 to oppose the spread of Catholicism and indiscriminate immigration—the two dangers that were said to threaten American institutions.
The American party made its appeal: For the Union and against sectionalism; for Protestantism, the faith of the Fathers, against Catholicism that was being imported by foreigners; its shibboleth was "America for the Americans."
The Americans or Know-Nothings everywhere put out in 1854 full tickets and showed at once surprising strength. In the fall elections of that year they polled over one-fourth of all the votes in New York, two-fifths in Pennsylvania, and over two-thirds in Massachusetts, where they made a clean sweep of the State and Federal offices.[58]
They struck directly at sectionalism by exacting of their adherents the following oath:
"You do further swear that you will not vote for any one ... whom you know or believe to be in favor of a dissolution of the Union ... or who is endeavoring to produce that result."
The effect of this oath at the South was almost magical. The Whig party there was speedily absorbed by the Americans, and Southern Democrats by thousands joined the new party that promised to save the Union.[59] But the attitude of the Northern and Southern members of the American party soon became fundamentally different. Southerners saw their Northern allies in Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts passing "personal liberty" laws.[60]
The Know-Nothings were strong enough in the elections of 1855 to directly check the progress of the new Republican party; but the American party, though it succeeded in electing a Speaker of the national House of Representatives in February, 1856, soon afterward went down to defeat. Even though led by such patriots as John Bell, of Tennessee, and Edward Everett, of Massachusetts, it could not stand against the storm of passion that had been aroused by the crusade against slavery.
There was a fierce and protracted struggle between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery men in Kansas for possession of the territorial government. Rival constitutions were submitted to Congress, and the debates over these were extremely bitter. In their excitement the Democrats again delighted their adversaries by committing what now seems to have been another blunder. They advocated the admission of Kansas under the "Lecompton Constitution." A review of the conflicting evidence appears to show that the Southerners were fairly outnumbered in Kansas and that the Lecompton Constitution did not express the will of the people.[61]
While "the war in Kansas" was going on, Charles Sumner, an Abolitionist from Massachusetts, delivered in the Senate a speech of which he wrote his friends beforehand: "I shall pronounce the most thorough Philippic ever delivered in a legislative body." He was a classical scholar. His purpose was to stir up in the North a greater fury against the South than Demosthenes had aroused in Athens against its enemies, the Macedonians. His speech occupied two days, May 28 and 29, 1855. At its conclusion, Senator Cass, of Michigan, arose at once and pronounced it "the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of this high body." The speech attacked, without any sufficient excuse, the personal character of an absent senator, Butler of South Carolina, a gentleman of high character and older than Sumner. Among other unfounded charges, it accused him of falsehood. Preston Brooks, a representative from South Carolina, attacked Sumner in the Senate chamber during a recess of that body and beat him unmercifully with a cane. The provocation was bitter, indeed, but Brooks's assault was unjustifiable. Nevertheless, the exasperated South applauded it, while the North glorified Sumner as a martyr for free speech.
In less than two years the new Republican party had absorbed all the Abolition voters, and in the election of 1856 was in the field with its candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency—Fremont and Dayton—upon a platform declaring it the duty of Congress to abolish in the territories "those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery."
Excitement during that election was intense. Rufus Choate, the great Massachusetts lawyer, theretofore a Whig, voiced the sentiment of conservatives when he said it was the "duty of every one to prevent the madness of the times from working its maddest act—the permanent formation and the actual present triumph of a party which knows one-half of America only to hate it," etc.
Senator Toombs, of Georgia, said: "The object of Fremont's friends is the conquest of the South. I am content that they shall own us when they conquer us."
The Democrats elected Buchanan; Democrats 174 electoral votes; Republicans 74, all Northern; and the Know-Nothings, combined with a remnant of Whigs, 8.
The work of sectionalism was nearly completed.
The extremes to which some of the Southern people now resorted show the madness of the times. They encouraged filibustering expeditions to capture Cuba and Nicaragua. These wild ventures were absolutely indefensible. They had no official sanction and were only spontaneous movements, but they met with favor from the Southern public, the outgrowth of a feeling that, if these countries should be captured and annexed as slave States, the South could the better, by their aid, defend its rights in the Union. The Wanderer and one or two other vessels, contrary to the laws of the United States, imported slaves from Africa, and when the participants were, some of them, indicted, Southern juries absolutely refused to convict.