THE MEXICAN WAR
We have seen that about 1832-3 a new distinctness and prominence was
given to the slavery question by various events,--the substantial
victory of the South Carolina nullifiers, and the leadership thenceforth
of the South by Calhoun; Nat Turner's rising, and the rejection by
Virginia of the emancipation policy; the compensated liberation of the
West India slaves by the British Government; and the birth of aggressive
Abolitionism under the lead of Garrison. We have now to glance at the
main course of history for the next twenty years. Party politics had for
a time no direct relation to slavery. The new organizations of Whigs and
Democrats disputed on questions of a national bank, internal
improvements, and the tariff. The Presidency was easily won in 1836 by
Jackson's lieutenant, Van Buren; but the commercial crash of 1837
produced a revulsion of feeling which enabled the Whigs to elect
Benjamin Harrison in 1840. His early death gave the Presidency to John
Tyler of Virginia, who soon alienated his party, and who was thoroughly
Southern in his sympathies and policy.
The newly aroused anti-slavery enthusiasm in the North found expression
in petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.
It was not intrinsically a great matter, but it was the one point where
the national authority seemed clearly to have a chance to act--questions
of new territory being for the time in abeyance. Petitions poured in on
Congress with thousands of signatures--then with tens, then hundreds of
thousands. There was a hot struggle as to whether the petitions should
be received at all by the Senate and House. John Quincy Adams, willing
after his Presidency to serve in the humbler capacity of congressman,
was the champion of the right of petition. Calhoun had entered the
Senate in 1832 and remained there with a brief intermission until his
death in 1850. He stood independent of the two great parties, with his
own State always solidly behind him, and with growing influence over the
whole South. He was the leader in opposing the admission of the
petitions. He maintained that any discussion in Congress of such a topic
was injurious and incendiary; he voiced the new sentiment of the South
that all agitation of slavery was an invasion of its rights. "Hands
off!" was the cry. The question was settled in 1836, after long debates,
by another compromise, proposed by James Buchanan of Pennsylvania; the
petitions were given a formal reception, but instantly rejected without
debate.
Another burning question was the circulation of anti-slavery documents
through the Southern mails. In 1835 a mob in Charleston broke open the
post-office, and made a bonfire of all such matter they could find. The
social leaders and the clergy of the city applauded. The
postmaster-general under Jackson, Amos Kendall, wrote to the local
postmaster who had connived at the act: "I cannot sanction and will not
condemn the step you have taken." Jackson asked Congress to pass a law
excluding anti-slavery literature from the mails. Even this was not
enough for Calhoun; he claimed that every State had a right to pass such
legislation for itself, with paramount authority over any act of
Congress. But the South would not support him in this claim; and indeed
he was habitually in advance of his section, which followed him
generally at an interval of a few years. Congress refused to pass any
law on the subject. But the end was reached without law; Southern
postmasters systematically refused to transmit anti-slavery
documents--even of so moderate character as the New York _Tribune_--and
this was their practice until the Civil War. "A gross infraction of law
and right!" said the North. "But," said the South, "would you allow
papers to circulate in your postoffices tending directly to breed revolt
and civil war? If the mails cannot be used in the service of gambling
and lotteries, with far more reason may we shut out incitements to
insurrection like Nat Turner's."
On a similar plea all freedom of speech in Southern communities on the
question of slavery was practically denied. Anti-slavery men were driven
from their homes. In Kentucky, one man stood out defiantly and
successfully. Cassius M. Clay opposed slavery, advocated its compensated
abolition, and was as ready to defend himself with pistols as with
arguments. He stood his ground to the end, and in 1853 he settled Rev.
John G. Fee at Berea, who established a group of anti-slavery churches
and schools, which was broken up after John Brown's raid, but after the
war was revived as Berea College. But as a rule free speech in the South
was at an end before 1840. No man dared use language like that of
Patrick Henry and Madison; and Jefferson's _Notes on Virginia_, if newly
published, would have been excluded from the mails and its author
exiled.
South Carolina passed a law under which negro seamen on ships entering
her ports were put in jail while their vessel remained, and if the jail
fees were not paid, they were sold into slavery. When Massachusetts
seamen suffered under this law, the State government in 1844 dispatched
an eminent citizen, Samuel Hoar, to try to secure a modification of the
enactment. Arriving in Charleston, accompanied by his daughter, Mr. Hoar
was promptly visited in his hotel by a committee of prominent men and
obliged to leave the city and State at once.
The North had its share of violence. In Connecticut a school for negro
children, kept by two white women, was forcibly broken up. In Illinois
in 1837 an anti-slavery newspaper office was destroyed by a mob, and its
proprietor, Elijah P. Lovejoy, was murdered.
In the Presidential election of 1840 slavery was almost forgotten. The
Whigs were bent on overthrowing the Democratic administration, to which
they attributed the hard times following 1837; and they raised a popular
hurrah for the candidate of the "plain people," William Henry Harrison
of Indiana, who had won a victory over the Indians at Tippecanoe. In a
canvass where "log-cabins" and "hard cider" gave the watchwords and
emblems, national politics played little part. But now first those
resolute anti-slavery men who were determined to bring their cause
before the people as a political issue, and fight it out in that arena,
with solid ranks be their forces ever so small,--came together and
nominated for the Presidency James G. Birney. They could give him but a
handful of votes, but it was the raising of a flag which twenty years
was to carry to victory. Birney, never an extremist, had grown to a full
recognition of all that was at stake. He wrote in 1835: "The contest is
becoming--has become--not one alone of freedom for the blacks, but of
freedom for the whites.... There will be no cessation of the strife
until slavery shall be exterminated or liberty destroyed."
For a dozen years there had been only skirmishing. Now came on a battle
royal, or rather a campaign, from 1844 to 1850,--the annexation of
Texas, the war with Mexico, and the last great compromise. Texas, a
province of Mexico after Mexico became free from Spain, received a
steady immigration from the American Southwestern States. These
immigrants became restive under Mexican control, declared their
independence in 1835, and practically secured it after sharp fighting.
Slavery, abolished under Mexico, was re-established by the republic of
Texas. From the character of its population, it seemed to gravitate
toward the United States. The keen eyes of the Southern leaders were
early fixed upon it. Annex Texas, and a great field of expansion for
slavery was open. Its votes in the Senate and House would be added to
the Southern column, and from its immense domain future States might be
carved. As early as 1829 Lundy's and Garrison's _Genius_ had protested
against this scheme. The time was now ripe for carrying it out. Calhoun
was again the leader. He claimed to be "the author of annexation," and
with good reason. He exchanged the Senate for Tyler's cabinet as
Secretary of War in 1844, the change being engineered by Henry A. Wise,
one of the rising men in Virginia,--for the express purpose of bringing
in Texas. A treaty of annexation was negotiated with Texas, and sent to
the Senate. There were difficulties; the Texans had cooled in their zeal
for annexation; and the American Senate was not over-favorable. To give
the necessary impetus, Calhoun,--so says Van Holst, in his excellent and
not unfriendly biography,--fell below his habitual sincerity, and
misrepresented a dispatch of the English Foreign Secretary, Lord
Aberdeen, as showing a disposition on England's part to get hold of
Texas for herself. It was a Presidential year; the Democratic convention
nominated James K. Polk of Tennessee, and passed a resolution favoring
annexation. But Calhoun had now shown his motive so plainly that the
country took alarm, and the Senate rejected the treaty. The Whigs
nominated Clay. He was believed to be opposed to the annexation scheme,
but his hunger for the great prize betrayed him into an equivocal
expression, which lost him the confidence of the strong anti-slavery
men. Again they nominated Birney,--taking now the name of the Liberty
party--and gave him so many votes that the result was to lose New York
and Michigan for Clay, and Polk was elected. The administration now
claimed--though in truth the combined Whig and Liberty vote put it in a
minority--that it had received a plebiscite of popular support on its
annexation policy. Thus emboldened, its friends,--knowing that they
could not yet count on the two-thirds vote necessary for a senatorial
confirmation,--dropped the treaty altogether, and brought into Congress
a joint resolution affirming the annexation of Texas to the Union. This
won the necessary majority in both houses, and as the last act of
Tyler's administration Texas was declared a State.
Calhoun now returned to the Senate,--his temporary substitute promptly
vacating at his word. Thus far he had triumphed. But his associates in
their elation were eager for another conquest. Texas is ours, now let us
have California and the Pacific! But to that end, Mexico, reluctant to
yield Texas, and wholly unwilling to cede more territory, must be
attacked and despoiled. At that proposal Calhoun drew back. It does not
appear that he had any scruples about Mexico. But, keener-sighted than
his followers, he knew that any further acquisitions to the West would
be stoutly and hopefully claimed by the North. His warning was in vain;
he had lighted a fire and now could not check it. The next step was to
force Mexico into a war. She claimed the river Nueces as her boundary
with Texas, while Texas claimed the Rio Grande. Instructions were
quietly given to General Taylor, in January, 1846, to throw his small
force into the disputed territory, so near the Rio Grande as to invite a
Mexican attack. The Mexican force did attack him, and President Polk
instantly declared that "war existed by the act of Mexico"--thus
allowing Congress no chance to pass on it. As is the way of nations,
fighting once begun, every consideration of justice was ignored and the
only word was "our country, right or wrong." Congressmen of both parties
voted whatever supplies were needed for the war; and the Whigs, trying
to throw the blame on the President, put no obstacles in the way of his
conquest of Mexico. Only one man in Congress spoke out for justice as
higher than party or country. Thomas Corwin of Ohio, in a powerful
speech, denounced the whole iniquitous business, and declared that were
he a Mexican facing the American invaders of his home, "I would welcome
them with hospitable hands to bloody graves!"
The war called out another voice that went home to the heart of the
people,--the voice of James Russell Lowell in the "Biglow Papers." In
the homely Yankee vernacular he spoke for the highest conscience of New
England. The righteous wrath was winged with stinging wit and lightened
with broad humor. He spoke for that sentiment of the new and nobler
America which abhorred slavery and detested war, and saw in a war for
the extension of slavery a crime against God and man. The politician's
sophistries, the respectable conventionalities current in church and
state, found no mercy at his hands:
Ez fer war, I call it murder,--
There you hev it plain and flat:
I don't want to go no furder
Than my Testyment fer that:
God hez sed so plump an' fairly,
It's ez long ez it is broad,
An' you've got to git up airly
Ef you want to take in God.
'Tain't your eppyletts an' feathers
Make the thing a grain more right;
'Tain't a follerin' your bell-wethers
Will excuse ye in his sight;
Ef you take a sword and draw it,
An' go stick a feller thru,
Guv'ment ain't to answer for it,
God'll send the bill to you.
Massachusetts, God forgive her,
She's a kneelin' with the rest,
She, that ought to hav' clung forever
In her grand old eagle-nest.
* * * * *
Let our dear old Bay State proudly
Put the trumpet to her mouth,
Let her ring this messidge loudly
In the ears of all the South:
"I'll return ye good fer evil
Much ez we frail mortals can,
But I won't go help the Devil
Makin' man the cus o' man;
Call me coward, call me traitor,
Jest ez suits your mean idees,
Here I stand a tyrant-hater,
An' the friend o' God and Peace."