In like manner while we may appreciate the position of slaveholders
who insisted upon their constitutional right to carry slaves into the
territories, though they might never expect to exercise the privilege,
yet it is difficult to realize the reasonableness of objection when
coming from friends of emancipation not themselves citizens of the
locality which was thus to be burdened. The problem of emancipation
was largely a question of the relative numbers of whites and blacks in
any given state. With few blacks and many whites, there was no problem
worthy of the name. With many blacks and few whites, the problem
assumed its maximum of difficulty and danger. Every slave, therefore,
who went from the congested slave centres of the South to the Western
prairies not only ameliorated his own condition and enhanced his hopes
of emancipation, but, in like manner, augmented the chances of
improvement and ultimate freedom to those he left behind. Mr.
Jefferson had, as far back as 1820, crystallized the thought in terms
so clear and reasonable that it seems difficult to controvert.
"Of one thing I am certain," wrote Mr. Jefferson, "that as the
passage of slaves from one state to another would not make a slave
of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their
diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually
happier and proportionately facilitate the accomplishment of their
emancipation by dividing the burden upon a greater number of
coadjutors."[267]
The force of these observations will still further appear when we
recall that slavery might be abolished upon the adoption by a
territory of its constitution preliminary to statehood, or the new
state might at any time in the future so decree—a result most
probable because of the small number of slaves and the ever increasing
white population within its borders.
Mr. Seward in a speech before the United States Senate, in the winter
of 1861, pointed out that in the decade during which the territories
of Utah and New Mexico had been open to slavery, only twenty-four
slaves had been carried into that vast dominion.[268]
"The whole controversy," says Mr. Blaine, "over the territories, as
remarked by a witty representative from the South, related to an
imaginary negro in an impossible place."[269]