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.



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