The Planting System And National Politics
James Madison, the father of the federal Constitution, after he had
watched for many days the battle royal in the national convention of
1787, exclaimed that the contest was not between the large and the small
states, but between the commercial North and the planting South. From
the inauguration of Washington to the election of Lincoln the sectional
conflict, discerned by this penetrating thinker, exercised a profound
nfluence on the course of American politics. It was latent during the
"era of good feeling" when the Jeffersonian Republicans adopted
Federalist policies; it flamed up in the contest between the Democrats
and Whigs. Finally it raged in the angry political quarrel which
culminated in the Civil War.
SLAVERY--NORTH AND SOUTH
The Decline of Slavery in the North
At the time of the adoption of
the Constitution, slavery was lawful in all the Northern states except
Massachusetts. There were almost as many bondmen in New York as in
Georgia. New Jersey had more than Delaware or Tennessee, indeed nearly
as many as both combined. All told, however, there were only about forty
thousand in the North as against nearly seven hundred thousand in the
South. Moreover, most of the Northern slaves were domestic servants, not
laborers necessary to keep mills going or fields under cultivation.
There was, in the North, a steadily growing moral sentiment against the
system. Massachusetts abandoned it in 1780. In the same year,
Pennsylvania provided for gradual emancipation. New Hampshire, where
there had been only a handful, Connecticut with a few thousand
domestics, and New Jersey early followed these examples. New York, in
1799, declared that all children born of slaves after July 4 of that
year should be free, though held for a term as apprentices; and in 1827
it swept away the last vestiges of slavery. So with the passing of the
generation that had framed the Constitution, chattel servitude
disappeared in the commercial states, leaving behind only such
discriminations as disfranchisement or high property qualifications on
colored voters.
The Growth of Northern Sentiment against Slavery
In both sections of
the country there early existed, among those more or less
philosophically inclined, a strong opposition to slavery on moral as
well as economic grounds. In the constitutional convention of 1787,
Gouverneur Morris had vigorously condemned it and proposed that the
whole country should bear the cost of abolishing it. About the same time
a society for promoting the abolition of slavery, under the presidency
of Benjamin Franklin, laid before Congress a petition that serious
attention be given to the emancipation of "those unhappy men who alone
in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage." When
Congress, acting on the recommendations of President Jefferson, provided
for the abolition of the foreign slave trade on January 1, 1808, several
Northern members joined with Southern members in condemning the system
as well as the trade. Later, colonization societies were formed to
encourage the emancipation of slaves and their return to Africa. James
Madison was president and Henry Clay vice president of such an
organization.
The anti-slavery sentiment of which these were the signs was
nevertheless confined to narrow circles and bore no trace of bitterness.
"We consider slavery your calamity, not your crime," wrote a
distinguished Boston clergyman to his Southern brethren, "and we will
share with you the burden of putting an end to it. We will consent that
the public lands shall be appropriated to this object.... I deprecate
everything which sows discord and exasperating sectional animosities."
Uncompromising Abolition
In a little while the spirit of generosity
was gone. Just as Jacksonian Democracy rose to power there appeared a
new kind of anti-slavery doctrine--the dogmatism of the abolition
agitator. For mild speculation on the evils of the system was
substituted an imperious and belligerent demand for instant
emancipation. If a date must be fixed for its appearance, the year 1831
may be taken when William Lloyd Garrison founded in Boston his
anti-slavery paper, The Liberator. With singleness of purpose and
utter contempt for all opposing opinions and arguments, he pursued his
course of passionate denunciation. He apologized for having ever
"assented to the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition."
He chose for his motto: "Immediate and unconditional emancipation!" He
promised his readers that he would be "harsh as truth and uncompromising
as justice"; that he would not "think or speak or write with
moderation." Then he flung out his defiant call: "I am in earnest--I
will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single
inch--and I will be heard....
'Such is the vow I take, so help me God.'"
Though Garrison complained that "the apathy of the people is enough to
make every statue leap from its pedestal," he soon learned how alive the
masses were to the meaning of his propaganda. Abolition orators were
stoned in the street and hissed from the platform. Their meeting places
were often attacked and sometimes burned to the ground. Garrison himself
was assaulted in the streets of Boston, finding refuge from the angry
mob behind prison bars. Lovejoy, a publisher in Alton, Illinois, for his
willingness to give abolition a fair hearing, was brutally murdered; his
printing press was broken to pieces as a warning to all those who
disturbed the nation's peace of mind. The South, doubly frightened by a
slave revolt in 1831 which ended in the murder of a number of men,
women, and children, closed all discussion of slavery in that section.
"Now," exclaimed Calhoun, "it is a question which admits of neither
concession nor compromise."
As the opposition hardened, the anti-slavery agitation gathered in force
and intensity. Whittier blew his blast from the New England hills:
"No slave-hunt in our borders--no pirate on our strand;
No fetters in the Bay State--no slave upon our land."
Lowell, looking upon the espousal of a great cause as the noblest aim of
his art, ridiculed and excoriated bondage in the South. Those
abolitionists, not gifted as speakers or writers, signed petitions
against slavery and poured them in upon Congress. The flood of them was
so continuous that the House of Representatives, forgetting its
traditions, adopted in 1836 a "gag rule" which prevented the reading of
appeals and consigned them to the waste basket. Not until the Whigs were
in power nearly ten years later was John Quincy Adams able, after a
relentless campaign, to carry a motion rescinding the rule.
How deep was the impression made upon the country by this agitation for
immediate and unconditional emancipation cannot be measured. If the
popular vote for those candidates who opposed not slavery, but its
extension to the territories, be taken as a standard, it was slight
indeed. In 1844, the Free Soil candidate, Birney, polled 62,000 votes
out of over a million and a half; the Free Soil vote of the next
campaign went beyond a quarter of a million, but the increase was due to
the strength of the leader, Martin Van Buren; four years afterward it
receded to 156,000, affording all the outward signs for the belief that
the pleas of the abolitionist found no widespread response among the
people. Yet the agitation undoubtedly ran deeper than the ballot box.
Young statesmen of the North, in whose hands the destiny of frightful
years was to lie, found their indifference to slavery broken and their
consciences stirred by the unending appeal and the tireless reiteration.
Charles Sumner afterward boasted that he read the Liberator two years
before Wendell Phillips, the young Boston lawyer who cast aside his
profession to take up the dangerous cause.
Early Southern Opposition to Slavery
In the South, the sentiment
against slavery was strong; it led some to believe that it would also
come to an end there in due time. Washington disliked it and directed in
his will that his own slaves should be set free after the death of his
wife. Jefferson, looking into the future, condemned the system by which
he also lived, saying: "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure
when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of
the people that their liberties are the gift of God? Are they not to be
violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I
reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever." Nor
did Southern men confine their sentiments to expressions of academic
opinion. They accepted in 1787 the Ordinance which excluded slavery from
the Northwest territory forever and also the Missouri Compromise, which
shut it out of a vast section of the Louisiana territory.
The Revolution in the Slave System
Among the representatives of
South Carolina and Georgia, however, the anti-slavery views of
Washington and Jefferson were by no means approved; and the drift of
Southern economy was decidedly in favor of extending and perpetuating,
rather than abolishing, the system of chattel servitude. The invention
of the cotton gin and textile machinery created a market for cotton
which the planters, with all their skill and energy, could hardly
supply. Almost every available acre was brought under cotton culture as
the small farmers were driven steadily from the seaboard into the
uplands or to the Northwest.
The demand for slaves to till the swiftly expanding fields was enormous.
The number of bondmen rose from 700,000 in Washington's day to more than
three millions in 1850. At the same time slavery itself was transformed.
Instead of the homestead where the same family of masters kept the same
families of slaves from generation to generation, came the plantation
system of the Far South and Southwest where masters were ever moving and
ever extending their holdings of lands and slaves. This in turn reacted
on the older South where the raising of slaves for the market became a
regular and highly profitable business.
Slavery Defended as a Positive Good
As the abolition agitation
increased and the planting system expanded, apologies for slavery became
fainter and fainter in the South. Then apologies were superseded by
claims that slavery was a beneficial scheme of labor control. Calhoun,
in a famous speech in the Senate in 1837, sounded the new note by
declaring slavery "instead of an evil, a good--a positive good." His
reasoning was as follows: in every civilized society one portion of the
community must live on the labor of another; learning, science, and the
arts are built upon leisure; the African slave, kindly treated by his
master and mistress and looked after in his old age, is better off than
the free laborers of Europe; and under the slave system conflicts
between capital and labor are avoided. The advantages of slavery in this
respect, he concluded, "will become more and more manifest, if left
undisturbed by interference from without, as the country advances in
wealth and numbers."
Slave Owners Dominate Politics
The new doctrine of Calhoun was
eagerly seized by the planters as they came more and more to overshadow
the small farmers of the South and as they beheld the menace of
abolition growing upon the horizon. It formed, as they viewed matters, a
moral defense for their labor system--sound, logical, invincible. It
warranted them in drawing together for the protection of an institution
so necessary, so inevitable, so beneficent.
Though in 1850 the slave owners were only about three hundred and fifty
thousand in a national population of nearly twenty million whites, they
had an influence all out of proportion to their numbers. They were knit
together by the bonds of a common interest. They had leisure and wealth.
They could travel and attend conferences and conventions. Throughout the
South and largely in the North, they had the press, the schools, and the
pulpits on their side. They formed, as it were, a mighty union for the
protection and advancement of their common cause. Aided by those
mechanics and farmers of the North who stuck by Jacksonian Democracy
through thick and thin, the planters became a power in the federal
government. "We nominate Presidents," exultantly boasted a Richmond
newspaper; "the North elects them."
This jubilant Southern claim was conceded by William H. Seward, a
Republican Senator from New York, in a speech describing the power of
slavery in the national government. "A party," he said, "is in one sense
a joint stock association, in which those who contribute most direct the
action and management of the concern.... The slaveholders, contributing
in an overwhelming proportion to the strength of the Democratic party,
necessarily dictate and prescribe its policy." He went on: "The
slaveholding class has become the governing power in each of the
slaveholding states and it practically chooses thirty of the sixty-two
members of the Senate, ninety of the two hundred and thirty-three
members of the House of Representatives, and one hundred and five of the
two hundred and ninety-five electors of President and Vice-President of
the United States." Then he considered the slave power in the Supreme
Court. "That tribunal," he exclaimed, "consists of a chief justice and
eight associate justices. Of these, five were called from slave states
and four from free states. The opinions and bias of each of them were
carefully considered by the President and Senate when he was appointed.
Not one of them was found wanting in soundness of politics, according to
the slaveholder's exposition of the Constitution." Such was the Northern
view of the planting interest that, from the arena of national politics,
challenged the whole country in 1860.
SLAVERY IN NATIONAL POLITICS
National Aspects of Slavery
It may be asked why it was that slavery,
founded originally on state law and subject to state government, was
drawn into the current of national affairs. The answer is simple. There
were, in the first place, constitutional reasons. The Congress of the
United States had to make all needful rules for the government of the
territories, the District of Columbia, the forts and other property
under national authority; so it was compelled to determine whether
slavery should exist in the places subject to its jurisdiction. Upon
Congress was also conferred the power of admitting new states; whenever
a territory asked for admission, the issue could be raised as to whether
slavery should be sanctioned or excluded. Under the Constitution,
provision was made for the return of runaway slaves; Congress had the
power to enforce this clause by appropriate legislation. Since the
control of the post office was vested in the federal government, it had
to face the problem raised by the transmission of abolition literature
through the mails. Finally citizens had the right of petition; it
inheres in all free government and it is expressly guaranteed by the
first amendment to the Constitution. It was therefore legal for
abolitionists to present to Congress their petitions, even if they asked
for something which it had no right to grant. It was thus impossible,
constitutionally, to draw a cordon around the slavery issue and confine
the discussion of it to state politics.
There were, in the second place, economic reasons why slavery was
inevitably drawn into the national sphere. It was the basis of the
planting system which had direct commercial relations with the North and
European countries; it was affected by federal laws respecting tariffs,
bounties, ship subsidies, banking, and kindred matters. The planters of
the South, almost without exception, looked upon the protective tariff
as a tribute laid upon them for the benefit of Northern industries. As
heavy borrowers of money in the North, they were generally in favor of
"easy money," if not paper currency, as an aid in the repayment of their
debts. This threw most of them into opposition to the Whig program for a
United States Bank. All financial aids to American shipping they stoutly
resisted, preferring to rely upon the cheaper service rendered by
English shippers. Internal improvements, those substantial ties that
were binding the West to the East and turning the traffic from New
Orleans to Philadelphia and New York, they viewed with alarm. Free
homesteads from the public lands, which tended to overbalance the South
by building free states, became to them a measure dangerous to their
interests. Thus national economic policies, which could not by any twist
or turn be confined to state control, drew the slave system and its
defenders into the political conflict that centered at Washington.
Slavery and the Territories--the Missouri Compromise (1820)
Though
men continually talked about "taking slavery out of politics," it could
not be done. By 1818 slavery had become so entrenched and the
anti-slavery sentiment so strong, that Missouri's quest for admission
brought both houses of Congress into a deadlock that was broken only by
compromise. The South, having half the Senators, could prevent the
admission of Missouri stripped of slavery; and the North, powerful in
the House of Representatives, could keep Missouri with slavery out of
the union indefinitely. An adjustment of pretensions was the last
resort. Maine, separated from the parent state of Massachusetts, was
brought into the union with freedom and Missouri with bondage. At the
same time it was agreed that the remainder of the vast Louisiana
territory north of the parallel of 36 deg. 30' should be, like the old
Northwest, forever free; while the southern portion was left to slavery.
In reality this was an immense gain for liberty. The area dedicated to
free farmers was many times greater than that left to the planters. The
principle was once more asserted that Congress had full power to prevent
slavery in the territories.
The Territorial Question Reopened by the Wilmot Proviso
To the
Southern leaders, the annexation of Texas and the conquest of Mexico
meant renewed security to the planting interest against the increasing
wealth and population of the North. Texas, it was said, could be divided
into four slave states. The new territories secured by the treaty of
peace with Mexico contained the promise of at least three more. Thus, as
each new free soil state knocked for admission into the union, the
South could demand as the price of its consent a new slave state. No
wonder Southern statesmen saw, in the annexation of Texas and the
conquest of Mexico, slavery and King Cotton triumphant--secure for all
time against adverse legislation. Northern leaders were equally
convinced that the Southern prophecy was true. Abolitionists and
moderate opponents of slavery alike were in despair. Texas, they
lamented, would fasten slavery upon the country forevermore. "No living
man," cried one, "will see the end of slavery in the United States!"
It so happened, however, that the events which, it was thought, would
secure slavery let loose a storm against it. A sign appeared first on
August 6, 1846, only a few months after war was declared on Mexico. On
that day, David Wilmot, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, introduced into
the House of Representatives a resolution to the effect that, as an
express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory
from the republic of Mexico, slavery should be forever excluded from
every part of it. "The Wilmot Proviso," as the resolution was popularly
called, though defeated on that occasion, was a challenge to the South.
The South answered the challenge. Speaking in the House of
Representatives, Robert Toombs of Georgia boldly declared: "In the
presence of the living God, if by your legislation you seek to drive us
from the territories of California and New Mexico ... I am for
disunion." South Carolina announced that the day for talk had passed and
the time had come to join her sister states "in resisting the
application of the Wilmot Proviso at any and all hazards." A conference,
assembled at Jackson, Mississippi, in the autumn of 1849, called a
general convention of Southern states to meet at Nashville the following
summer. The avowed purpose was to arrest "the course of aggression" and,
if that was not possible, to provide "in the last resort for their
separate welfare by the formation of a compact and union that will
afford protection to their liberties and rights." States that had
spurned South Carolina's plea for nullification in 1832 responded to
this new appeal with alacrity--an augury of the secession to come.
The Great Debate of 1850
The temper of the country was white hot
when Congress convened in December, 1849. It was a memorable session,
memorable for the great men who took part in the debates and memorable
for the grand Compromise of 1850 which it produced. In the Senate sat
for the last time three heroic figures: Webster from the North, Calhoun
from the South, and Clay from a border state. For nearly forty years
these three had been leaders of men. All had grown old and gray in
service. Calhoun was already broken in health and in a few months was to
be borne from the political arena forever. Clay and Webster had but two
more years in their allotted span.
Experience, learning, statecraft--all these things they now marshaled in
a mighty effort to solve the slavery problem. On January 29, 1850, Clay
offered to the Senate a compromise granting concessions to both sides;
and a few days later, in a powerful oration, he made a passionate appeal
for a union of hearts through mutual sacrifices. Calhoun relentlessly
demanded the full measure of justice for the South: equal rights in the
territories bought by common blood; the return of runaway slaves as
required by the Constitution; the suppression of the abolitionists; and
the restoration of the balance of power between the North and the South.
Webster, in his notable "Seventh of March speech," condemned the Wilmot
Proviso, advocated a strict enforcement of the fugitive slave law,
denounced the abolitionists, and made a final plea for the Constitution,
union, and liberty. This was the address which called forth from
Whittier the poem, "Ichabod," deploring the fall of the mighty one whom
he thought lost to all sense of faith and honor.
The Terms of the Compromise of 1850
When the debates were closed,
the results were totaled in a series of compromise measures, all of
which were signed in September, 1850, by the new President, Millard
Fillmore, who had taken office two months before on the death of Zachary
Taylor. By these acts the boundaries of Texas were adjusted and the
territory of New Mexico created, subject to the provision that all or
any part of it might be admitted to the union "with or without slavery
as their constitution may provide at the time of their admission." The
Territory of Utah was similarly organized with the same conditions as to
slavery, thus repudiating the Wilmot Proviso without guaranteeing
slavery to the planters. California was admitted as a free state under a
constitution in which the people of the territory had themselves
prohibited slavery.
The slave trade was abolished in the District of Columbia, but slavery
itself existed as before at the capital of the nation. This concession
to anti-slavery sentiment was more than offset by a fugitive slave law,
drastic in spirit and in letter. It placed the enforcement of its terms
in the hands of federal officers appointed from Washington and so
removed it from the control of authorities locally elected. It provided
that masters or their agents, on filing claims in due form, might
summarily remove their escaped slaves without affording their "alleged
fugitives" the right of trial by jury, the right to witness, the right
to offer any testimony in evidence. Finally, to "put teeth" into the
act, heavy penalties were prescribed for all who obstructed or assisted
in obstructing the enforcement of the law. Such was the Great Compromise
of 1850.
The Pro-slavery Triumph in the Election of 1852
The results of the
election of 1852 seemed to show conclusively that the nation was weary
of slavery agitation and wanted peace. Both parties, Whigs and
Democrats, endorsed the fugitive slave law and approved the Great
Compromise. The Democrats, with Franklin Pierce as their leader, swept
the country against the war hero, General Winfield Scott, on whom the
Whigs had staked their hopes. Even Webster, broken with grief at his
failure to receive the nomination, advised his friends to vote for
Pierce and turned away from politics to meditate upon approaching death.
The verdict of the voters would seem to indicate that for the time
everybody, save a handful of disgruntled agitators, looked upon Clay's
settlement as the last word. "The people, especially the business men of
the country," says Elson, "were utterly weary of the agitation and they
gave their suffrages to the party that promised them rest." The Free
Soil party, condemning slavery as "a sin against God and a crime against
man," and advocating freedom for the territories, failed to carry a
single state. In fact it polled fewer votes than it had four years
earlier--156,000 as against nearly 3,000,000, the combined vote of the
Whigs and Democrats. It is not surprising, therefore, that President
Pierce, surrounded in his cabinet by strong Southern sympathizers, could
promise to put an end to slavery agitation and to crush the abolition
movement in the bud.
Anti-slavery Agitation Continued
The promise was more difficult to
fulfill than to utter. In fact, the vigorous execution of one measure
included in the Compromise--the fugitive slave law--only made matters
worse. Designed as security for the planters, it proved a powerful
instrument in their undoing. Slavery five hundred miles away on a
Louisiana plantation was so remote from the North that only the
strongest imagination could maintain a constant rage against it. "Slave
catching," "man hunting" by federal officers on the streets of
Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago, or Milwaukee and in the hamlets
and villages of the wide-stretching farm lands of the North was another
matter. It brought the most odious aspects of slavery home to thousands
of men and women who would otherwise have been indifferent to the
system. Law-abiding business men, mechanics, farmers, and women, when
they saw peaceful negroes, who had resided in their neighborhoods
perhaps for years, torn away by federal officers and carried back to
bondage, were transformed into enemies of the law. They helped slaves to
escape; they snatched them away from officers who had captured them;
they broke open jails and carried fugitives off to Canada.
Assistance to runaway slaves, always more or less common in the North,
was by this time organized into a system. Regular routes, known as
"underground railways," were laid out across the free states into
Canada, and trusted friends of freedom maintained "underground stations"
where fugitives were concealed in the daytime between their long night
journeys. Funds were raised and secret agents sent into the South to
help negroes to flee. One negro woman, Harriet Tubman, "the Moses of her
people," with headquarters at Philadelphia, is accredited with nineteen
invasions into slave territory and the emancipation of three hundred
negroes. Those who worked at this business were in constant peril. One
underground operator, Calvin Fairbank, spent nearly twenty years in
prison for aiding fugitives from justice. Yet perils and prisons did not
stay those determined men and women who, in obedience to their
consciences, set themselves to this lawless work.
From thrilling stories of adventure along the underground railways came
some of the scenes and themes of the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe,
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," published two years after the Compromise of 1850.
Her stirring tale set forth the worst features of slavery in vivid word
pictures that caught and held the attention of millions of readers.
Though the book was unfair to the South and was denounced as a hideous
distortion of the truth, it was quickly dramatized and played in every
city and town throughout the North. Topsy, Little Eva, Uncle Tom, the
fleeing slave, Eliza Harris, and the cruel slave driver, Simon Legree,
with his baying blood hounds, became living specters in many a home that
sought to bar the door to the "unpleasant and irritating business of
slavery agitation."
THE DRIFT OF EVENTS TOWARD THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT
Repeal of the Missouri Compromise
To practical men, after all, the
"rub-a-dub" agitation of a few abolitionists, an occasional riot over
fugitive slaves, and the vogue of a popular novel seemed of slight or
transient importance. They could point with satisfaction to the election
returns of 1852; but their very security was founded upon shifting
sands. The magnificent triumph of the pro-slavery Democrats in 1852
brought a turn in affairs that destroyed the foundations under their
feet. Emboldened by their own strength and the weakness of their
opponents, they now dared to repeal the Missouri Compromise. The leader
in this fateful enterprise was Stephen A. Douglas, Senator from
Illinois, and the occasion for the deed was the demand for the
organization of territorial government in the regions west of Iowa and
Missouri.
Douglas, like Clay and Webster before him, was consumed by a strong
passion for the presidency, and, to reach his goal, it was necessary to
win the support of the South. This he undoubtedly sought to do when he
introduced on January 4, 1854, a bill organizing the Nebraska territory
on the principle of the Compromise of 1850; namely, that the people in
the territory might themselves decide whether they would have slavery or
not. Unwittingly the avalanche was started.
After a stormy debate, in which important amendments were forced on
Douglas, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill became a law on May 30, 1854. The
measure created two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, and provided that
they, or territories organized out of them, could come into the union as
states "with or without slavery as their constitutions may prescribe at
the time of their admission." Not content with this, the law went on to
declare the Missouri Compromise null and void as being inconsistent with
the principle of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the states
and territories. Thus by a single blow the very heart of the continent,
dedicated to freedom by solemn agreement, was thrown open to slavery. A
desperate struggle between slave owners and the advocates of freedom was
the outcome in Kansas.
If Douglas fancied that the North would receive the overthrow of the
Missouri Compromise in the same temper that it greeted Clay's
settlement, he was rapidly disillusioned. A blast of rage, terrific in
its fury, swept from Maine to Iowa. Staid old Boston hanged him in
effigy with an inscription--"Stephen A. Douglas, author of the infamous
Nebraska bill: the Benedict Arnold of 1854." City after city burned him
in effigy until, as he himself said, he could travel from the Atlantic
coast to Chicago in the light of the fires. Thousands of Whigs and
Free-soil Democrats deserted their parties which had sanctioned or at
least tolerated the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, declaring that the startling
measure showed an evident resolve on the part of the planters to rule
the whole country. A gage of defiance was thrown down to the
abolitionists. An issue was set even for the moderate and timid who had
been unmoved by the agitation over slavery in the Far South. That issue
was whether slavery was to be confined within its existing boundaries or
be allowed to spread without interference, thereby placing the free
states in the minority and surrendering the federal government wholly to
the slave power.
The Rise of the Republican Party
Events of terrible significance,
swiftly following, drove the country like a ship before a gale straight
into civil war. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill rent the old parties asunder
and called into being the Republican party. While that bill was pending
in Congress, many Northern Whigs and Democrats had come to the
conclusion that a new party dedicated to freedom in the territories must
follow the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Several places claim to be
the original home of the Republican party; but historians generally
yield it to Wisconsin. At Ripon in that state, a mass meeting of Whigs
and Democrats assembled in February, 1854, and resolved to form a new
party if the Kansas-Nebraska Bill should pass. At a second meeting a
fusion committee representing Whigs, Free Soilers, and Democrats was
formed and the name Republican--the name of Jefferson's old party--was
selected. All over the country similar meetings were held and political
committees were organized.
When the presidential campaign of 1856 began the Republicans entered the
contest. After a preliminary conference in Pittsburgh in February, they
held a convention in Philadelphia at which was drawn up a platform
opposing the extension of slavery to the territories. John C. Fremont,
the distinguished explorer, was named for the presidency. The results
of the election were astounding as compared with the Free-soil failure
of the preceding election. Prominent men like Longfellow, Washington
Irving, William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and George William
Curtis went over to the new party and 1,341,264 votes were rolled up for
"free labor, free speech, free men, free Kansas, and Fremont."
Nevertheless the victory of the Democrats was decisive. Their candidate,
James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, was elected by a majority of 174 to 114
electoral votes.
The Dred Scott Decision (1857)
In his inaugural, Buchanan vaguely
hinted that in a forthcoming decision the Supreme Court would settle one
of the vital questions of the day. This was a reference to the Dred
Scott case then pending. Scott was a slave who had been taken by his
master into the upper Louisiana territory, where freedom had been
established by the Missouri Compromise, and then carried back into his
old state of Missouri. He brought suit for his liberty on the ground
that his residence in the free territory made him free. This raised the
question whether the law of Congress prohibiting slavery north of 36 deg.
30' was authorized by the federal Constitution or not. The Court might
have avoided answering it by saying that even though Scott was free in
the territory, he became a slave again in Missouri by virtue of the law
of that state. The Court, however, faced the issue squarely. It held
that Scott had not been free anywhere and that, besides, the Missouri
Compromise violated the Constitution and was null and void.
The decision was a triumph for the South. It meant that Congress after
all had no power to abolish slavery in the territories. Under the decree
of the highest court in the land, that could be done only by an
amendment to the Constitution which required a two-thirds vote in
Congress and the approval of three-fourths of the states. Such an
amendment was obviously impossible--the Southern states were too
numerous; but the Republicans were not daunted. "We know," said Lincoln,
"the Court that made it has often overruled its own decisions and we
shall do what we can to have it overrule this." Legislatures of Northern
states passed resolutions condemning the decision and the Republican
platform of 1860 characterized the dogma that the Constitution carried
slavery into the territories as "a dangerous political heresy at
variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself ... with
legislative and judicial precedent ... revolutionary in tendency and
subversive of the peace and harmony of the country."
The Panic of 1857
In the midst of the acrimonious dispute over the
Dred Scott decision, came one of the worst business panics which ever
afflicted the country. In the spring and summer of 1857, fourteen
railroad corporations, including the Erie, Michigan Central, and the
Illinois Central, failed to meet their obligations; banks and insurance
companies, some of them the largest and strongest institutions in the
North, closed their doors; stocks and bonds came down in a crash on the
markets; manufacturing was paralyzed; tens of thousands of working
people were thrown out of employment; "hunger meetings" of idle men were
held in the cities and banners bearing the inscription, "We want
bread," were flung out. In New York, working men threatened to invade
the Council Chamber to demand "work or bread," and the frightened mayor
called for the police and soldiers. For this distressing state of
affairs many remedies were offered; none with more zeal and persistence
than the proposal for a higher tariff to take the place of the law of
March, 1857, a Democratic measure making drastic reductions in the rates
of duty. In the manufacturing districts of the North, the panic was
ascribed to the "Democratic assault on business." So an old issue was
again vigorously advanced, preparatory to the next presidential
campaign.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
The following year the interest of the
whole country was drawn to a series of debates held in Illinois by
Lincoln and Douglas, both candidates for the United States Senate. In
the course of his campaign Lincoln had uttered his trenchant saying that
"a house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government
cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." At the same time he
had accused Douglas, Buchanan, and the Supreme Court of acting in
concert to make slavery national. This daring statement arrested the
attention of Douglas, who was making his campaign on the doctrine of
"squatter sovereignty;" that is, the right of the people of each
territory "to vote slavery up or down." After a few long-distance shots
at each other, the candidates agreed to meet face to face and discuss
the issues of the day. Never had such crowds been seen at political
meetings in Illinois. Farmers deserted their plows, smiths their forges,
and housewives their baking to hear "Honest Abe" and "the Little Giant."
The results of the series of debates were momentous. Lincoln clearly
defined his position. The South, he admitted, was entitled under the
Constitution to a fair, fugitive slave law. He hoped that there might be
no new slave states; but he did not see how Congress could exclude the
people of a territory from admission as a state if they saw fit to adopt
a constitution legalizing the ownership of slaves. He favored the
gradual abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the total
exclusion of it from the territories of the United States by act of
Congress.
Moreover, he drove Douglas into a hole by asking how he squared
"squatter sovereignty" with the Dred Scott decision; how, in other
words, the people of a territory could abolish slavery when the Court
had declared that Congress, the superior power, could not do it under
the Constitution? To this baffling question Douglas lamely replied that
the inhabitants of a territory, by "unfriendly legislation," might make
property in slaves insecure and thus destroy the institution. This
answer to Lincoln's query alienated many Southern Democrats who believed
that the Dred Scott decision settled the question of slavery in the
territories for all time. Douglas won the election to the Senate; but
Lincoln, lifted into national fame by the debates, beat him in the
campaign for President two years later.
John Brown's Raid
To the abolitionists the line of argument pursued
by Lincoln, including his proposal to leave slavery untouched in the
states where it existed, was wholly unsatisfactory. One of them, a grim
and resolute man, inflamed by a hatred for slavery in itself, turned
from agitation to violence. "These men are all talk; what is needed is
action--action!" So spoke John Brown of New York. During the sanguinary
struggle in Kansas he hurried to the frontier, gun and dagger in hand,
to help drive slave owners from the free soil of the West. There he
committed deeds of such daring and cruelty that he was outlawed and a
price put upon his head. Still he kept on the path of "action." Aided by
funds from Northern friends, he gathered a small band of his followers
around him, saying to them: "If God be for us, who can be against us?"
He went into Virginia in the autumn of 1859, hoping, as he explained,
"to effect a mighty conquest even though it be like the last victory of
Samson." He seized the government armory at Harper's Ferry, declared
free the slaves whom he found, and called upon them to take up arms in
defense of their liberty. His was a hope as forlorn as it was desperate.
Armed forces came down upon him and, after a hard battle, captured him.
Tried for treason, Brown was condemned to death. The governor of
Virginia turned a deaf ear to pleas for clemency based on the ground
that the prisoner was simply a lunatic. "This is a beautiful country,"
said the stern old Brown glancing upward to the eternal hills on his way
to the gallows, as calmly as if he were returning home from a long
journey. "So perish all such enemies of Virginia. All such enemies of
the Union. All such foes of the human race," solemnly announced the
executioner as he fulfilled the judgment of the law.
The raid and its grim ending deeply moved the country. Abolitionists
looked upon Brown as a martyr and tolled funeral bells on the day of his
execution. Longfellow wrote in his diary: "This will be a great day in
our history; the date of a new revolution as much needed as the old
one." Jefferson Davis saw in the affair "the invasion of a state by a
murderous gang of abolitionists bent on inciting slaves to murder
helpless women and children"--a crime for which the leader had met a
felon's death. Lincoln spoke of the raid as absurd, the deed of an
enthusiast who had brooded over the oppression of a people until he
fancied himself commissioned by heaven to liberate them--an attempt
which ended in "little else than his own execution." To Republican
leaders as a whole, the event was very embarrassing. They were taunted
by the Democrats with responsibility for the deed. Douglas declared his
"firm and deliberate conviction that the Harper's Ferry crime was the
natural, logical, inevitable result of the doctrines and teachings of
the Republican party." So persistent were such attacks that the
Republicans felt called upon in 1860 to denounce Brown's raid "as among
the gravest of crimes."
The Democrats Divided
When the Democratic convention met at
Charleston in the spring of 1860, a few months after Brown's execution,
it soon became clear that there was danger ahead. Between the extreme
slavery advocates of the Far South and the so-called pro-slavery
Democrats of the Douglas type, there was a chasm which no appeals to
party loyalty could bridge. As the spokesman of the West, Douglas knew
that, while the North was not abolitionist, it was passionately set
against an extension of slavery into the territories by act of Congress;
that squatter sovereignty was the mildest kind of compromise acceptable
to the farmers whose votes would determine the fate of the election.
Southern leaders would not accept his opinion. Yancey, speaking for
Alabama, refused to palter with any plan not built on the proposition
that slavery was in itself right. He taunted the Northern Democrats with
taking the view that slavery was wrong, but that they could not do
anything about it. That, he said, was the fatal error--the cause of all
discord, the source of "Black Republicanism," as well as squatter
sovereignty. The gauntlet was thus thrown down at the feet of the
Northern delegates: "You must not apologize for slavery; you must
declare it right; you must advocate its extension." The challenge, so
bluntly put, was as bluntly answered. "Gentlemen of the South,"
responded a delegate from Ohio, "you mistake us. You mistake us. We will
not do it."
For ten days the Charleston convention wrangled over the platform and
balloted for the nomination of a candidate. Douglas, though in the lead,
could not get the two-thirds vote required for victory. For more than
fifty times the roll of the convention was called without a decision.
Then in sheer desperation the convention adjourned to meet later at
Baltimore. When the delegates again assembled, their passions ran as
high as ever. The division into two irreconcilable factions was
unchanged. Uncompromising delegates from the South withdrew to Richmond,
nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky for President, and put forth
a platform asserting the rights of slave owners in the territories and
the duty of the federal government to protect them. The delegates who
remained at Baltimore nominated Douglas and endorsed his doctrine of
squatter sovereignty.
The Constitutional Union Party
While the Democratic party was being
disrupted, a fragment of the former Whig party, known as the
Constitutional Unionists, held a convention at Baltimore and selected
national candidates: John Bell from Tennessee and Edward Everett from
Massachusetts. A melancholy interest attached to this assembly. It was
mainly composed of old men whose political views were those of Clay and
Webster, cherished leaders now dead and gone. In their platform they
sought to exorcise the evil spirit of partisanship by inviting their
fellow citizens to "support the Constitution of the country, the union
of the states, and the enforcement of the laws." The party that
campaigned on this grand sentiment only drew laughter from the Democrats
and derision from the Republicans and polled less than one-fourth the
votes.
The Republican Convention
With the Whigs definitely forced into a
separate group, the Republican convention at Chicago was fated to be
sectional in character, although five slave states did send delegates.
As the Democrats were split, the party that had led a forlorn hope four
years before was on the high road to success at last. New and powerful
recruits were found. The advocates of a high protective tariff and the
friends of free homesteads for farmers and workingmen mingled with
enthusiastic foes of slavery. While still firm in their opposition to
slavery in the territories, the Republicans went on record in favor of a
homestead law granting free lands to settlers and approved customs
duties designed "to encourage the development of the industrial
interests of the whole country." The platform was greeted with cheers
which, according to the stenographic report of the convention, became
loud and prolonged as the protective tariff and homestead planks were
read.
Having skillfully drawn a platform to unite the North in opposition to
slavery and the planting system, the Republicans were also adroit in
their selection of a candidate. The tariff plank might carry
Pennsylvania, a Democratic state; but Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were
equally essential to success at the polls. The southern counties of
these states were filled with settlers from Virginia, North Carolina,
and Kentucky who, even if they had no love for slavery, were no friends
of abolition. Moreover, remembering the old fight on the United States
Bank in Andrew Jackson's day, they were suspicious of men from the East.
Accordingly, they did not favor the candidacy of Seward, the leading
Republican statesman and "favorite son" of New York.
After much trading and discussing, the convention came to the conclusion
that Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was the most "available" candidate. He
was of Southern origin, born in Kentucky in 1809, a fact that told
heavily in the campaign in the Ohio Valley. He was a man of the soil,
the son of poor frontier parents, a pioneer who in his youth had labored
in the fields and forests, celebrated far and wide as "honest Abe, the
rail-splitter." It was well-known that he disliked slavery, but was no
abolitionist. He had come dangerously near to Seward's radicalism in his
"house-divided-against-itself" speech but he had never committed himself
to the reckless doctrine that there was a "higher law" than the
Constitution. Slavery in the South he tolerated as a bitter fact;
slavery in the territories he opposed with all his strength. Of his
sincerity there could be no doubt. He was a speaker and writer of
singular power, commanding, by the use of simple and homely language,
the hearts and minds of those who heard him speak or read his printed
words. He had gone far enough in his opposition to slavery; but not too
far. He was the man of the hour! Amid lusty cheers from ten thousand
throats, Lincoln was nominated for the presidency by the Republicans. In
the ensuing election, he carried all the free states except New Jersey.