SUMMARY OF THE SLAVERY QUESTIONS FROM 1787 TO 1860—THE ANTI-SLAVERY AGITATION IN THE NORTH—GROWTH AND POLITICAL TRIUMPH OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY—FATAL DIVISIONS AMONG THE DEMOCRATS—MR. BUCHANAN DECLINES TO BE REGARDED AS A CANDIDATE FOR A SECOND ELECTION.

As the reader is now approaching the period when, for the first time in our political history, a President of the United States was elected by the votes of the free States alone, a retrospective view of those events which preceded and contributed to that result is necessary to a correct understanding of the great national schism of 1860-61.

The beginning of the year 1860 found the people of the United States in the enjoyment of as great a measure of prosperity as they had ever known. It was to close with a condition of feeling between the two sections of the Union entirely fatal to its peace and threatening to its perpetuity. In the future of our country there will come a time when our posterity will ask, why should there ever have been any “North” or any “South,” in the sense in which those divisions have been marked in so long a period of our national history. When the inquirer learns that from the time of the formation and establishment of the Constitution of the United States, the existence of slavery in certain States was nearly the sole cause of the sectional antagonism typified by those terms, he will have to trace, through various settlements, the successive adjustments of questions which related to this one dangerous and irritating subject.

This portion of our national history is divided into distinct stages, at each of which some thing intended to be definite and final was reached. It is also filled by the disastrous influence of causes which unsettled what had once been determined as a series of compacts between the sections; causes which continued to operate until the year that witnessed the beginning of a great catastrophe.

The Constitution of the United States, so far as it related in any way to the condition of slavery, was the result of agreements and adjustments between the Northern and the Southern States, which have been called “compromises.” It is not material to the present purpose to consider either the moral justification for these arrangements, or whether there was an equality or an inequality as between the two sections, in what they respectively gained or conceded. Both sections gained the Union of the whole country under a system of government better adapted to secure its welfare and happiness than it had known before; and what this system promised was abundantly fulfilled. The precise equivalent which the Southern States received, by the settlement made in the formation of the Constitution, was the recognition of slavery as a condition of portions of their population by a right exclusively dependent upon their own local law, and exclusively under their own control as a right of property; and to this right of property was annexed a stipulation that the master might follow his slave from the State whence he had escaped into any other State, and require him to be given up, even if the law of that other State did not recognize the condition of servitude. One other concession was made by the Northern States: that although the slaves of the Southern States were regarded as property, they should be so far considered as persons as to be reckoned in a certain ratio in fixing the basis of representation in the popular branch of Congress, and by consequence in fixing the electoral vote of the State in the choice of a President of the United States. The special equivalent which the Northern States received for these concessions was in the establishment of what is called “the commercial power,” or the power of Congress to regulate for the whole country the trade with foreign nations and between the States; a power which it was foreseen was to be one of vast importance, which was one of the chief objects for which the new Union was to be formed, and which proved in the event to be all, and more than all, that had been anticipated for it. Viewed in the light of mutual stipulations, these so-called “compromises” between the two sections were laid at the basis of the Constitution, forming a settlement fixed in the supreme law of the land, and therefore determinate and final.

Contemporaneously with the formation of the Constitution, and before its adoption, the Congress of the Confederation was engaged in framing an ordinance for the government of the Northwestern Territory, a region of country north and west of the Ohio, which Virginia and other States had ceded to the United States during the war of the revolution. From this region the ordinance excluded slavery by an agreement made in that Congress between the Northern and the Southern States. The Constitution did not take notice of this Northwestern Territory by its specific designation, but it was made to embrace a provision empowering the new Congress “to make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory and all other property of the United States,” and also a provision for the admission into the Union of new States, to be formed out of any territory belonging to the United States. For a long period after the adoption of the Constitution, these two provisions, taken together, were regarded as establishing a plenary power of legislation over the internal condition of any territory that might in any way become the property of the United States, while it remained subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress, and down to the time when its inhabitants were to be permitted to form themselves into a State that was to be admitted into the Union upon an equality with all the other States. Under this process, between the years 1792 and 1820, nine new States were admitted into the Union; five of them with slavery and four of them without it. Of these, three were formed out of parts of the Northwestern Territory, and they therefore derived their character as free States from the admitted force of the ordinance of 1787; while the others were not within the scope of that ordinance, but derived their character from the legislative authority of Congress under the Constitution.

It was not until the year 1820 that this recognized practice of admitting a State into the Union as a free or as a slave State, according to the character of its early settlement, and the legislation which governed the Territorial condition, incurred any serious danger of interruption. But in that year, Missouri, which was a part of the territory ceded in 1803 by France to the United States under the name of Louisiana, was in a condition to seek admission into the Union. Slavery had existed there from the first settlement of the country, and when it became necessary to authorize the free inhabitants to form a State constitution, preparatory to admission into the Union, it was certain that, if left to themselves, they would not abolish a domestic relation that had long existed among them, and in which no inconsiderable part of their wealth was involved. It was proposed to require them to abolish it, as a condition precedent to the admission of the State into the Union. On this so-called “Missouri Restriction,” a violent sectional struggle ensued in Congress, which ended in what has since been known as the “Missouri Compromise.” This was embodied in the organic act, passed on the 6th of March, 1820, which authorized the people of the then Territory of Missouri to form a State constitution and government. The compromise consisted, on the one hand, in the omission of the proposed restriction as a condition of admission into the Union, and, on the other hand, in a guarantee of perpetual freedom throughout all the remainder of the Louisiana territory lying north of the parallel of 36° 30´. This was accompanied, however, by a proviso, which saved the right to reclaim any person escaping into that region, from whom labor or service was lawfully claimed in any State or Territory of the United States. The parallel of 36° 30´ was adopted as the line north of which slavery or involuntary servitude might not be permitted to exist as an institution or condition recognized by the local law, because it was assumed as a practical fact that north of that line the slavery of the African race could not, from the nature of the climate, be profitably introduced, whilst it was equally assumed that in those portions of the Louisiana purchase south of that line, the habits of the contiguous States, and the character of the climate would induce a settlement by persons accustomed to hold and depend upon that species of labor in the cultivation of the soil, and in the wants of domestic life. The principle of the Missouri Compromise, therefore, as a final settlement made between the two sections of the Union in respect to the whole of the Louisiana purchase, was that north of the parallel of 36° 30´, slavery could never be introduced, but that south of that line, slavery might be established according to the will of the free inhabitants. Regarded in the light of a division of this vast territory, this compromise secured to the North quite as much as, if not more than, it secured to the South. Regarded in the light of a settlement of a dangerous and exciting controversy, on which the whole Union could repose, the Missouri Compromise disposed of the future character of all the territory then belonging to the United States, not including the Northwestern Territory, the character of which was fixed by the ordinance of 1787. For a quarter of a century afterward, the two sections of North and South rested in peace upon the settlement of 1820, so far as discussion of the subject of slavery in the halls of Congress could be induced by the application of new States to be admitted into the Union. But in 1845, when Texas, a foreign, an independent, and a slave State, was annexed to the Union, the subject of an increase in the number of slave States came again into discussion, in which angry sectional feeling was carried to a dangerous point. Texas was finally admitted into the Union as a slaveholding State, with a right to divide herself into four new States, with or without slavery; but one of the express conditions of the annexation was a recognition of the Missouri Compromise line, so that north of that line no new State could be framed out of any portion of Texas unless slavery should be excluded from it. The wisdom and policy of the Missouri Compromise were thus again recognized, and it remained undisturbed for a period of thirty-four years from the time of its enactment, as a covenant of peace between the North and the South.

The war between the United States and Mexico, which was terminated by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, resulted in the acquisition by the United States of a vast region of country which was not embraced by the Missouri Compromise. At the time of this acquisition, Mr. Buchanan earnestly advocated the extension of the line of 36° 30´ through the whole of this new territory to the Pacific Ocean, as the best mode of adjustment.

It is not necessary in this historical sketch to dwell on the advantages or disadvantages of this plan. All that needs to be said about it here is, that it commended itself to Mr. Buchanan as a plan more acceptable to the people of both sections of the Union than any other that could be devised. It was defeated by the proposal of the so-called “Wilmot Proviso,” which aimed to exclude slavery from all possible introduction into any part of this newly acquired territory, without regard to the principle of division which was the characteristic of the Missouri Compromise, and without recognizing any claim of the slaveholding States to an equal enjoyment of the common territory of the Union, in the manner in which they asserted that claim. The Southern claim was that of a right to emigrate into any Territory of the United States, with slaves, as part of the property of the emigrant, just as a Northern man could emigrate into such a Territory with whatever personal property he chose to take with him. When, therefore, the admission of California as a State, and the organization of Territorial governments for the other provinces of Mexico that had been ceded to the United States came before Congress, they came accompanied by a great sectional excitement, that was partly due to the anti-slavery agitation that had been going on in the North, and partly to the struggle for an increase of the political power of the free States on the one side, and of the slave States on the other, according as the future character of these new acquisitions might be determined.

Having now reached the year 1850, the reader stands at a period at which the character of freedom had been long impressed upon the whole of the Northwestern Territories; at which the character of the whole region of the Louisiana purchase had been for thirty years determined by the principle of the Missouri Compromise; and at which, what remained to be done was to adjust, by a final settlement, the future character of the territory acquired from Mexico, and to act upon any other questions concerning slavery that demanded and admitted legislation by Congress. There were two such questions that did not relate to the newly acquired territory. One of these concerned the toleration of the domestic slave trade in the District of Columbia, the abolition of which was loudly demanded by the North. The other related to a Southern demand of a more efficient law for the extradition of fugitives from service.

The Thirty-first Congress, assembled in December, 1849, was the one which enacted the series of measures known as the “Compromise of 1850,” and which settled all the slavery questions that remained for adjustment. In respect to the territory that had been acquired from Mexico, there was danger for a time that all harmony of action would be frustrated by the so-called “Wilmot Proviso,” which aimed to impose as a fundamental condition of any legislation respecting any part of that territory, a perpetual exclusion of slavery. Mr. Buchanan was out of public office at this time, but his influence was exerted in his own State, with success, to prevent the passage by her legislature of instructing resolutions in favor of that proviso. This led the way for its rejection by Congress. On the 4th of February, 1850, resolutions favoring the proviso were laid upon the table of the House of Representatives in Congress, by the vote of 105 to 75. This important vote was followed in the Senate by five measures, designed by Mr. Clay and supported by Mr. Webster and Mr. Calhoun, which, after a long discussion, became laws in September, 1850, with the general concurrence of both the Whig and the Democratic parties. The first of these Acts consisted of a new and more efficient law for the extradition of fugitives from service, to take the place of the old law of February 12th, 1793, which bore the signature of Washington. By reason of a decision of the Supreme Court, made in 1842, which had determined that Congress could not constitutionally require State magistrates to perform a duty which the Court declared to be one pertaining exclusively to the Federal power, the law of 1793 had become almost inoperative. Although the decision of the Court left the States at liberty to allow their magistrates to act in such cases, many of the Northern States had passed laws to prohibit them from rendering any official aid to the claimant of a fugitive from service. It had become necessary, therefore, for Congress to provide officers of Federal appointment to execute an express mandate of the Federal Constitution. This was the purpose of the new law of 1850.

The second of these “compromise measures” was an Act for the immediate admission of California into the Union, as a free State, embracing its whole territory, both south and north of the line of the Missouri Compromise. The third and fourth measures were Acts for the establishment of Territorial governments in New Mexico and Utah, which secured to them respectively the right of admission as States into the Union, “with or without slavery as their respective constitutions might require.” The Act relating to New Mexico declared that “no citizen of the United States shall be deprived of his life, liberty or property in said Territory, except by the judgment of his peers and the laws of the land;” thus making, from abundant caution, a provision of the Federal Constitution obligatory upon the Territorial legislature. Thus these two Acts, along with the Missouri Compromise, comprehended all the territory belonging to the United States, whether derived from Mexico or from France; there was no territory remaining for the Wilmot Proviso to act upon, and consequently the agitation of that proviso was excluded from the halls of Congress. Moreover, the Act for establishing the Territory of New Mexico withdrew from the jurisdiction of a slave State all that portion of Texas which lay north of the parallel of 36° 30´, by including it within the boundary of New Mexico. The fifth of the compromise measures of 1850 was a law abolishing the domestic slave trade within the District of Columbia.

It is not singular that a final settlement, which disposed of all the slavery questions on which Congress could in any way act, should have been acceptable to the people of the whole Union, excepting the extremists of the two sections. The abolitionists of the North denounced it, because it admitted of the possible and theoretical establishment of slavery in New Mexico, notwithstanding the patent fact that neither the soil nor the climate of that region could ever make it a profitable form of labor, and because it recognized and provided for the execution of that provision of the Constitution which required the extradition of fugitives from service. The extreme men of the South disliked the settlement, because it admitted the great and rich State of California as a free State. But when the Presidential election of 1852 approached, the general approval of this settlement was made manifest. The national convention of the Whig party nominated as its candidate for the Presidency General Scott, who was supposed to be somewhat closely affiliated, both personally and politically, with public men who opposed and continued to denounce the compromise. But in their “platform” the Whigs pledged themselves to maintain it as a binding settlement, and to discountenance all attempts in or out of Congress to disturb it. The Democratic national convention not only made equally emphatic declarations of their purpose to maintain this settlement inviolate, but by nominating a candidate who could not be suspected of any lukewarmness on this, the great political question of the time, they secured a majority of the electoral votes of both free and slave States that was almost unprecedented. General Pierce received 254 electoral votes out of 296, or 105 votes more than were necessary to a choice. All the free States, excepting Massachusetts and Vermont, and all the slave States, excepting Kentucky and Tennessee, gave him their electoral votes. Never did a party come into power with greater strength, and never was there a more distinct political issue than that which placed General Pierce at the head of the Government. The people at large distrusted the soundness of the Whig candidate and his friends upon the compromise of 1850, and being determined to maintain that settlement as final, and to have no more agitation of slavery questions in Congress, they entrusted the destinies of the country to the Democratic party.

But as not infrequently happens, the Democrats were in a majority so large that it became unwieldy; and before the administration of General Pierce had closed, a step was taken that was to lead to the most serious consequences. This step was the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The settlement, or “compromise” of 1850, made by the consentaneous action of the North and the South, rested, as on a corner stone, upon the inviolable character of the settlement of 1820, known as the Missouri Compromise. To preserve that earlier compromise intact, was to preserve the later one; for if the settlement made in 1820 in regard to all the territory derived from France should be renounced, the door would be open for the renunciation of the settlement made in 1850 respecting New Mexico and Utah. Sweep away the compact which dedicated the whole Louisiana territory north of 36° 30´ to perpetual freedom, and which gave to the South whatever parts of it below that line might be adapted to slave labor, and all Territories everywhere would be subject to a new contention over the dogma that slavery did or that it did not go into every Territory by virtue of a right derived from the Constitution of the United States. There was no security for the peace and harmony of the country, but to act upon the principle that the settlement of 1850 rested for its foundation upon the inviolable character and perpetual duration of the settlement of 1820.

But in all free countries governed by political parties, and especially at times when the party in power is in an extraordinary majority, there are always men who feel that they are wiser than others, and who are apt to couple their own aims as statesmen, looking to the highest honors of their country, with new plans for the management of public affairs. Such a man was the late Stephen A. Douglas, a Senator in Congress from the State of Illinois from 1847 until his death, in 1861; a distinguished leader of the Democratic party, who had been several times a candidate for the nomination by his party to the Presidency. This very able man, who had a considerable body of friends attached to him from his energetic and somewhat imperious qualities, had been a strenuous supporter of the Compromise of 1850, and had rendered very efficient service in the adoption of that settlement. He seems to have been somewhat suddenly led, in 1854, to the adoption of the idea that it would be wise to repeal the Missouri Compromise, and that in its place might be substituted a doctrine that the people of a Territory have the same right and ought to have the same sovereign power, while in the Territorial condition, to shape their domestic institutions in their own way, as the people of a State. He does not appear to have had the foresight to see that the practical application of this doctrine would lead, in the circumstances of the country, to a sectional struggle for the possession and political dominion of a Territory, between slaveholders and non-slaveholders, without the superintending and controlling authority of Congress to prevent such a conflict by determining the character of the Territory one way or the other. As he could not remove the Missouri settlement without attacking the constitutional power of Congress to legislate as it might see fit on the condition of a Territory, he boldly determined to make that attack, and to put in the place of the authority of Congress the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” as a substitute for Congressional legislation on the relations of master and slave. When this ill-advised legislation, which tended in the most direct manner to concentrate into political organization the Northern dislike of slavery, received the sanction of the President, General Pierce, on the 30th of May, 1854, Mr. Buchanan was out of the country. He never approved of it, and had he been at home, it is quite certain that it would have encountered his strenuous opposition.

Turning now aside from the history of these successive settlements, and the modes in which they were unsettled, in order to appreciate the condition of feeling between the two sections of the Union at the time when the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency was effected exclusively by the electoral votes of the free States, the reader should learn something of the history of the anti-slavery agitation in the North; something of the effort to extend the political power of the slave States as a barrier against anticipated encroachments upon Southern rights; and something of the causes which led to the assertion of the supposed right of State secession from the Union, as a remedy against dangers apprehended to be in store for the people of the South.

By the universal admission of all persons, whatever were their sentiments or feelings concerning slavery, the Constitution of the United States conferred no power upon Congress to act on it in any State of the Union. This was as much acknowledged by the early abolitionists as by all other men. They regarded the Constitution as a “pro-slavery” instrument. They admitted that the supreme law of the land recognized and to a certain extent upheld the principle that slaves were property; and they therefore sought for a justification of their attacks upon the Constitution in what they denominated the “higher law,” which meant that when the individual citizen believes that the moral law is in conflict with the law of the land, the latter cannot rightfully bind his conscience or restrain his conduct. Proclaiming it to be sinful to live in a political confederacy which tolerated slavery anywhere within its limits, they began by denouncing the Constitution as a “league with death and a covenant with hell;” and it was not long before this doctrine of the higher law was preached from pulpits and disseminated by numerous publications in the New England States. The dates of the organized anti-slavery societies are important to be observed, because of the spontaneous movement in Virginia towards the removal of slavery which shortly preceded them. The New England Anti-slavery Society was organized in Boston, on the 30th of January, 1832; the New York Society in October, 1833; and the National Society at Philadelphia in December, 1833. Affiliated local societies of the same kind sprang up at once in many towns and villages of the North. At the time when these organizations were first gathered, and for a long period thereafter, there was no pending question upon the subject of the extension of slavery into Territories of the United States. The country had been reposing since 1820 upon the Missouri settlement; it was not until 1845 that any addition of slave territory was threatened; and at the moment when the first anti-slavery society was organized in Boston, Virginia was on the verge of emancipating her slaves. Accordingly, the nature, purposes and methods of the Northern anti-slavery agitation between the year 1832 and the annexation of Texas in 1845, and thence to the year 1860, form a most important subject of political study.

The founders of the Northern anti-slavery societies, while taking their stand in opposition to the Constitution, had yet, in all that they asked Congress to do, to address themselves to a public body every member of which had taken an oath to support that instrument. In their own communities, those who carried on the agitation could appeal to the emotional natures of men, women and children upon the wrongs and the sin of slavery, and fill them with hatred of the slaveholder, without discriminating between questions on which the citizens of a non-slaveholding State could and those on which they could not legitimately act. A great moral force of abhorrence of slavery could thus be, and in fact was, in process of time accumulated. This force expended itself in two ways; first, in supplying to the managers of the agitation the means of sending into the Southern States, pamphlets, newspapers and pictorial representations setting forth the wrongs and cruelties of slavery. For this purpose, the mails of the United States had, by the year 1835, been so much used for the circulation in the South of matter which was there regarded as incendiary and calculated to promote servile insurrections, that President Jackson deemed it to be his duty to propose legislation to arrest such abuses of the post office. Congress did not adopt his recommendation, and the abuse remained unchecked.^[58] Another mode in which the anti-slavery agitation expended itself was in petitions to Congress. During the session of 1835-6, and for several of the following years, Congress was flooded with what were called “abolition petitions.” On some of them Congress could legitimately act: such as those which prayed for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and in the forts, arsenals, and dock-yards of the United States situated in slaveholding States. On others, which petitioned for a dissolution of the Union on account of the existence of slavery in some of the States, or for action on the subject of slavery in general, Congress of course could do nothing. A question arose whether such petitions could be received at all, which led to a very memorable and a very excited discussion of the right of petition. Not only was a large part of the time of Congress taken up with these topics, but the opposing representatives of the two sections were guilty of excesses in crimination and recrimination, which foreshadowed the formation of two geographical parties, one Northern and the other Southern, having nothing but slavery as the cause of their division.

One of the questions to which those who are to come after us will seek for an answer, will be, what was the justification for this anti-slavery agitation, begun in 1832 and continued for a period of about ten years, during which there was no special effort on the part of the South to extend the area of slavery? What, again, was the unquestionable effect of this agitation in producing a revulsion of feeling on the whole subject of slavery among the slaveholders themselves? Was the time propitious for the accomplishment of any good? Were the mode, the method, and the spirit of the agitation such as men would resort to, who had a just and comprehensive sense of the limitations upon human responsibility?

The time was most unfortunate. The Southern conscience did not then need to be quickened or enlightened on the inherent wrong of African slavery; nor did it need to be told that the system was one that inflicted many evils upon society. Plans of emancipation, which the Southerners themselves were far better fitted to form than any one who was a stranger to their social condition, had already begun to be considered by enlightened men in more than one of the older Southern States. All that could be done by others who were beyond their limits, to aid them in any aspect of the subject, was limited by just such restraints as apply to any evil existing in a community to which it is confined, and on which strangers can offer nothing but the most considerate and temperate discussion of remedies originating among those who have the burthen to bear. The grand error of our early abolitionists was that they would not observe the limitations of human duty. They were either citizens or residents of non-slaveholding States. Foreigners, in respect to this matter, to the States in which slavery existed, they carried on their discussions, publications and organizations in communities whose public opinion could have but an extremely narrow and subordinate right to act on the subject at all. They either disregarded the fact that the Constitution of the United States could never have been established if it had not recognized the exclusive right of each Southern State to govern the relation of master and slave—nay, that the foreign slave trade without that Constitution could not have been ended when it was, if at all—or else they denounced the Constitution as an emanation from the bottomless pit. Grant that the relation of servitude was a moral wrong, that the idea that man can hold property in man was repugnant to the law of nature or the law of God; grant that the political system of the Union, as our fathers made it, ought to have been reformed by their descendants;—were there no moral restraints resting upon those who enjoyed the advantages and blessings of a Union which had been purchased by certain concessions to the slaveholder? Did not the Constitution itself provide for regular and peaceful changes which the progress of society and the growing philanthropy of the age might find to be necessary to the fuller practical development of the great truths of liberty? Was there no way to deal with slavery but to attack the slaveholder as a sinner, stained with the deepest of crimes against God and his fellow-men? Was there nothing to be done to aid him in ridding himself of the burthen of his sin, by discussing with him the economical problems of his situation? Was it necessary for strangers to demand instant and unqualified manumission, regardless of what was to follow? Was it necessary to assail the Constitution as an unholy covenant with sin, and, rejecting its restraints, to disregard the wisdom that takes human nature as it is, that is careful not to provoke reaction, that looks before and after, and shapes its measures with a rational forecast of their adaptation to the end?

Whilst it is not to be denied that our “Abolitionists” were men of a certain kind of courage developed into rashness, of unbounded zeal, of singular energy, of persistent consistency with their own principles of action, and of that fanatical force which is derived from the incessant contemplationcontemplation of one idea to the exclusion of all others, it must nevertheless be said that they were not statesmen. There was no one among them of whom it can be said that he acted with a statesmanlike comprehension of the difficulties of this great subject, or with a statesman’s regard for the limitations on individual conduct. Their situation was very different from that of the public or private men in England, who gallantly led the early crusade against the slave trade, or of those who afterwards brought about emancipation in the British colonies. Whatever Parliament thought fit to do in regard to slavery under the British flag or in the British dominions, it had ample power to do, and what Parliament might be made to do, was for the nation to determine. An English statesman or philanthropist had, in either character, no constitutional restraints to consider. He had to deal with both moral and economical questions, and he could deal freely with either. He could use argument, persuasion, invective, or denunciation, and he could not be told by the Jamaica slaveholder, you have entered into a solemn public compact with me which secures to me the exclusive cognizance of this domestic relation, and by that compact you purchased the very existence of the general government under which we both live. But a citizen of the United States, or a foreigner, taking his stand in a free State, stirring up popular hatred of the slaveholder, sending into the Southern States publications which were there regarded as incendiary, persuading legislative bodies in the North to act against one of the express conditions of the Federal Union, and renouncing all Christian fellowship with Southern churches, surely violated the spirit and in some respects the letter of the Constitution. He provoked a sudden revulsion of feeling in the South, and brought about a state of opinion which aimed to maintain slavery by texts of scripture, by the examples of other nations, by the teachings of Christ and his apostles, by the assumed relations of races, by the supposed laws of public economy, and the alleged requirements of a southern clime. He promoted, by an effect as inevitable as the nature of man, a purpose to defend slavery through an increase of its political power, to which a multiplication of slave States would make a large addition. He thus sowed the wind, and, left to another generation to reap the whirlwind.

These assertions must not be left unsupported by proof, and the proof is at hand. In all periods of our history, prior to the civil war, Virginia exercised great influence over the whole slaveholding region. I have said that she was on the verge of emancipation when the first anti-slavery society was organized in the North; and although half a century has since elapsed, there are those living who, like myself, can recollect that she was so. But to others the fact must be attested by proof. It may be asserted as positively as anything in history that, in the year 1832, there was nowhere in the world a more enlightened sense of the wrong and the evil of slavery, than there was among the public men and the people of Virginia. The movement against it was spontaneous. It reached the general assembly by petitions which evinced that the policy and justice of emancipation had taken a strong hold on the convictions of portions of the people of the State, whom no external influence had then reached, and who, therefore, had free scope. Any Virginian could place himself at the head of this movement without incurring hostility or jealousy, and it was a grandson of Jefferson, Mr. Jefferson Randolph, by whom the leading part in it was assumed.

Mr. Randolph represented in the assembly the county of Albemarle, which was one of the largest slaveholding counties of the State. He brought forward a bill to accomplish a gradual emancipation. It was debated with the freedom of men who, undisturbed by external pressure, were dealing with a matter of purely domestic concern. No member of the house defended slavery, for the day had not come when Southern men were to learn that it was a blessing, because those who knew nothing of its burthens told them that it was a curse. There could be nothing said anywhere, there had been nothing said out of Virginia, stronger and truer, in depicting the evils of slavery, than was said in that discussion by Virginia gentlemen, debating in their own legislature a matter that concerned themselves and their people. But finding that the house was not prepared for immediate action on so momentous a subject, Mr. Randolph did not press his bill to a vote. A resolution, however, was adopted, by a vote of 65 to 58, which shows what was the condition of the public sentiment of Virginia at that moment. It declared, as the sense of the house, “that they were profoundly sensible of the great evils arising from the condition of the colored population of the commonwealth, and were induced by policy, as well as humanity, to attempt the immediate removal of the free negroes; but that further action for the removal of the slaves should await a more definite development of public opinion.”

Mr. Randolph was again elected by his constituents, upon this special question. But in the mean time came suddenly the intelligence of what was doing at the North. It came in an alarming aspect for the peace and security of the whole South; since it could not be possible that strangers should combine together to assail the slaveholder as a sinner and to demand his instant admission of his guilt, without arousing fears of the most dangerous consequences for the safety of Southern homes, as well as intense indignation against such an unwarrantable interference. From that time forth, emancipation, whether immediate or gradual, could not be considered in Virginia or anywhere else in the South. Public attention became instantly fixed upon the means of resisting this external and unjustifiable intermeddling with a matter that did not concern those who intermeddled. A sudden revulsion of public sentiment in Virginia was followed by a similar revulsion wherever Southern men had begun to consider for themselves what could be done for the amelioration of the condition of the colored race and for ultimate emancipation. As the Northern agitation went on, increasing in bitterness and gathering new forces, Southern statesmen cast about for new devices to strengthen the political power of their section in the Federal Government. These devices are to be traced to the anti-slavery agitation in the North as their exciting cause, as distinctly as anything whatever in the history of sectional feeling can be traced back from an effect to a cause which has produced it.

But this was not the whole of the evil produced by the anti-slavery agitation. It prevented all consideration by the higher class of Northern statesmen of any method of action by which the people of the free States could aid their Southern brethren in removing slavery; and it presented to Northern politicians of the inferior order a local field for cultivating popularity, as the excitement went on increasing in violence and swept into its vortex the voters whose local support was found to be useful. That there was a line of action on which any Northern statesman could have entered, consistently with all the obligations flowing from the letter and the spirit of the Federal Constitution, is perfectly plain.

While it was impracticable for the people of the North to act directly upon slavery in any State through the Federal Government, it was not impracticable for that Government to follow, with cautious steps, in auxiliary measures to aid what it could not initiate. There were States which were becoming ripe for changes in the condition of their colored population. Of course such changes could be proposed, considered and acted upon only in each of those States, as a measure that concerned its own domestic condition. But there were many ways in which the Federal Government, without transcending its constitutional powers, could incidentally assist any State in what the State had of itself determined to do. The line which separated what the Federal power could legitimately and properly do from what was prohibited to it by every political and moral consideration, was not difficult to be discovered. For example, if the State of Virginia had in 1832-33 adopted any system for colonizing her negroes, what was there to prevent the Federal Government from granting a portion of the public lands for such a purpose? If the subject of prospective emancipation had been approached in this manner, without the disturbance produced by the anti-slavery societies of the North, who can doubt that experiments of the utmost consequence could have been tried, and tried successfully, in a country possessing an almost boundless public domain? But the sudden irruption of those societies into the field, their disregard of all prudential and all constitutional restraints, their fierce denunciations of the slaveholder, their demand for instant and unqualified manumission, at once converted a question which should have remained a matter for joint and friendly coöperation of the two sections, into a struggle for political supremacy of one section over the other in the councils of the Federal Government. All measures and tendencies in the South, which might have opened the way for subsidiary aid on the part of the Federal power, were at once arrested; and it became a study with Southern statesmen how they were to raise new barriers for the defence of slavery, by increasing the political power of their section within the Union. The old barriers had become, in their eyes, but a feeble defence against those who proclaimed that the Union itself was an accursed thing, and that if immediate emancipation of the slaves was not adopted, the Union ought to be broken up.

While it is true that the doctrines of the abolitionists were at first regarded by the great body of the Northern people as the ravings of fanatics, insomuch that they were sometimes subjected to popular violence, they were nevertheless making progress. Year after year the agitation was carried on in the same spirit, and year after year the excitement on the whole subject of slavery continued to grow until it reached a fresh impulse in the proposed annexation of Texas. It should in justice be remembered that the effort at that period to enlarge the area of slavery was an effort on the part of the South, dictated by a desire to remain in the Union, and not to accept the issue of an inherent incompatibility of a political union between slaveholding and non-slaveholding States. It was not at this period that the Southern States embraced, or were much disposed to embrace, the doctrine of “secession.” The views of the nature of the Union, maintained by their most distinguished and powerful statesman, Mr. Calhoun, in 1830-33, led logically to the deduction that every State has, by the terms of the Federal compact, a right to quit the Union when, in its own judgment, it deems that step necessary. But no considerable body of persons in the South, out of his own State, accepted his premises or followed them to their conclusion, until long after he was in his grave; nor did he himself propose secession as a remedy against what he and the whole South regarded as the unwarrantable aggressions of the Northern abolitionists. He aimed to strengthen the political power of his section within the Union, and his whole course in regard to the acquisition of Texas shows his conviction that if that country were not brought under our dominion, there would be an exposed frontier, from which England and the American abolitionists would operate against slavery in the Southern section of the United States. The previous history of the Union shows very plainly that prior to the commencement of the Northern anti-slavery agitation, the political equilibrium between the two sections had not been seriously disturbed.

At the period which I am now considering, the public men of the North who acted an important part in national affairs, and who belonged, as Mr. Buchanan unquestionably did belong, to the higher class of statesmen, had to act with a wise circumspection on this subject of slavery. There was nothing that such a man could do, if he regarded his public duty with an American statesman’s sense of public obligation, but to stand aloof from and to discountenance what was wrong in the doings of the anti-slavery agitators. In this course of conduct he had often to discriminate between conflicting claims of constitutional rights that unquestionably belonged to every citizen of the United States, and acts which no citizen had a right to do, or which it was in the highest and plainest sense inexpedient to allow him to do. In these conflicts, right and wrong became at times so mixed and intricate, that it required a resolute and clear intellect to separate them, and a lofty courage in meeting obloquy and misrepresentation. It was an easy matter, in the exciting period of those slavery questions, to impute to a Northern man of either of the great political parties of the time, a base truckling to the South for his own ambitious purposes. After ages must disregard the ephemeral vituperation of politics, and must judge the statesmen of the past by the situation in which they stood, by the soundness of their opinions, by their fidelity to every unquestionable right, by the correctness of their policy, and by the purity of their characters and their aims. There has been a passionate disposition in our day to judge the public men of the North, who had to act in great and peculiar crises of the sectional conflict, and who did not give themselves up to a purely sectional spirit, by a standard that was inapplicable to their situation, because it was unjust, illogical and inconsistent with the highest ideas of public duty in the administration of such a Government as ours.

The anti-slavery agitation, begun in the North at the time and carried on in the mode I have described, is to be deplored, because of the certainty that sudden emancipation, which was alone considered or cared for by the abolitionists, must be fraught with great evils.

In whatever way sudden, universal and unqualified emancipation was to be enforced, if it was to happen the negro could not be prepared for freedom. He must take his freedom without one single aid from the white man to fit him to receive it. Wise and thoughtful statesmen saw this—the abolitionist did not see it. Men who had passed their lives in the business of legislation and government, knew full well, not only that the fundamental political bond of the Union forbade interference by the people of the free States with the domestic institutions of the slave States, but that emancipation without any training for freedom could not be a blessing. Men who had passed their lives in an emotional agitation for instant freedom did not see or did not care for the inevitable fact, that freedom for which no preparation had been made could not be a boon. When the emancipation came, it came as an act of force applied in a civil war and in the settlements which the war was claimed to have entailed as necessities. No preparatory legislation, no helpful training in morality and virtue, no education, no discipline of the human being for his new condition, had prepared the negro to be a freeman. While, therefore, it may be and probably is true, that the whites of our Southern States have reason to rejoice, and do rejoice, in the change which they deprecated and against which they struggled, it is not true that the colored race have the same reason for thankfulness. The Christianity and the philanthropy of this age have before them a task that is far more serious, more weighty and more difficult, than it would have been if the emancipation had been a regulated process, even if its final consummation had been postponed for generations. To this day, after twenty years of freedom, the church, the press, society and benevolence have to encounter such questions as these:—Whether the negro is by nature vicious, intractable, thriftless—the women incurably unchaste, the men incurably dishonest; whether the vices and the failings that are so deplorable, and apparently so remediless, are to be attributed to centuries of slavery, or are taints inherent in the blood. Who can doubt that all such questions could have been satisfactorily answered, if the Christianity of the South had been left to its own time and mode of answering them, and without any external force but the force of kindly respectful coöperation and forbearing Christian fellowship.

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

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise during the administration of President Pierce (May, 1854), followed, as it was three years afterwards, by a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, that Congress could not constitutionally prohibit slavery in a Territory of the States, gave a vast impetus to the tendencies which were already bringing about a consolidation of most of the elements of the anti-slavery feeling of the North into a single political party. When Mr. Buchanan became the nominee of the Democratic party for the Presidency, although the repeal of the Missouri Compromise had already taken place, the decision of the Supreme Court in the celebrated case of “Dred Scott” had not occurred,^[59] and consequently the Republican party, for this and other reasons, had not acquired sufficient force to enable it to elect its candidate, General Fremont. But during the administration of Mr. Buchanan, the scenes which occurred in Kansas and which were direct consequences of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, with the added excitement which followed the announcement by a majority of the judges of the Supreme Court of doctrines which the people of the North would not accept, there was a field for sectional political action, such as the Union had never before known. So that when the Republican party, in the spring of 1860, assembled its delegates in convention at Chicago, for the nomination of its candidates for the Presidency and the Vice Presidency, adopted a “platform” on which no Southern man of any prominence could place himself, and selected Northern candidates for both offices, it was plain that the time had come when there was to be a trial of political strength between the two sections of the Union.

The “Chicago platform,” on which Mr. Lincoln was nominated and elected as the candidate of the Republican party, while repudiating with great precision the idea that Congress could in any way act upon slavery in the States, contained the following resolution on the subject of slavery in the Territories of the United States: