A LULL AND A RETROSPECT
After the half-year's debate over the compromise of 1850 came a time of
political quiet. "The tumult and the shouting died." It seemed more than
a temporary lull. In a great tide of material prosperity, the country
easily forgot the slaves; if out of sight, they were, to most, out of
mind. Webster's speech had a deep significance. He was identified in
Massachusetts with the classes representing commercial prosperity,
social prominence, and academic culture. In these classes, throughout
the North, there was a general apathy as to slavery. The temper of the
time was materialistic. There was indeed enough anti-slavery sentiment,
stirred by the 7th of March speech and the Fugitive Slave law, to change
the balance of power in Massachusetts politics. The Democrats and the
Free Soilers made a coalition, and it triumphed over the Whigs. The
Democrats took the State offices, with George S. Boutwell as Governor;
and Charles Sumner--a scholar, an idealist, an impressive orator, and a
pronounced anti-slavery man, though never an Abolitionist,--was sent to
the Senate to reinforce Seward and Chase.
The Presidential election of 1852 came on. In the Whig convention
Fillmore had some support, especially from the South; Webster had most
of the Massachusetts votes and scarce any others; and choice was made of
General Winfield Scott, in the hope of repeating the victory of 1848
with another hero of the Mexican war. It was to Webster a blow past
retrieval; in bitterness of spirit he turned his face to the wall, in
his old home at Marshfield, and died. The Democratic convention
hesitated between several Northern politicians of trustworthy
subserviency to the South,--Cass, Douglas, and Buchanan--and its choice
fell upon Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, an amiable man, of fair
ability, but easy to manage; he, too, the winner of a trifle of military
glory in the Mexican conquest. Both conventions professed entire content
with the settlements of the compromise. The Free Soilers nominated John
P. Hale of New Hampshire, and made their familiar declaration of
principles. But they had lost their Democratic allies of four years
earlier, and threw only 150,000 votes--less by 100,000 than at the
previous election. The Whig party proved to be on the verge of
dissolution. It had lost its hold on the "conscience vote" of the North,
and was less trusted than its rival by the South. Pierce was chosen by a
great majority; he carried every State except Vermont, Massachusetts,
Kentucky, and Tennessee.
Party politics were dull; commercial and material interests seemed
wholly in the ascendant, and the anti-slavery cause was at a low ebb.
But many things had happened in two decades, below the surface current
of public events, and, just on the threshold of a new era, we may glance
back over these twenty years. All the European world had been full of
movement. France had passed through three revolutions. Germany, Austria,
and Italy had undergone a political upheaval and subsidence; and the
liberal reverses of 1848 were the precursors of national unity and
constitutional freedom in the near future.
England had gone steadily on in the path of conservative progress; had
widened its suffrage by the Reform Act of 1832; had relieved distress
and disarmed discontent by the free trade policy of Sir Robert Peel; her
factory legislation had met a crying need of the new industrial epoch,
and she had pacified and energized Canada by giving her
self-government. Meanwhile American progress had been along lines of its
own. The country had grown at a tremendous rate, and mainly at the North
and West. Immigration had poured in from Europe, and the stream of
native stock from the seaboard States to the West had hardly slackened.
It was the epoch of the railroad and the telegraph. Manufactures had
increased and multiplied; acres fell under cultivation by the million.
In this industrial growth the North had far outstripped the South.
Calhoun had urged the construction of railroads to link the eastern and
western parts of the South, but the political motive could not supply
the want of industrial force. The figures of the census of 1850 were
more eloquent than any orator as to the relative effects of free and
slave labor. Intellectually the period had been prolific. Emerson had
risen, the bright morning star of American literature. Bryant,
Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, were telling their stories or
singing their songs. Theology was fruitful of debate and change. The
Unitarian movement had defined itself. Presbyterians and
Congregationalists were discussing the tenets of old school and new. For
"women's rights" a strong and promising advance had been made, in the
face of unpopularity and derision. Religious revivals, foreign missions,
social reforms, were making active way. From all this intellectual and
social movement, unless we except the emotional revivals of religion,
the South stood apart. Literature it had virtually none; its theology
was only conservative and defensive; at most so-called reforms it looked
askance.
In two respects the South had an advantage. Its social system was
aristocratic; above the slaves came the non-slave-holding whites,
including a great mass of the ignorant and degraded; but at the summit
the slave-holding class had a social life in many ways attractive and
delightful. The slave-holders, all told, numbered some 350,000. The
controlling element consisted of the large planters, with the affiliated
members of the liberal professions. Plantation life at its best had a
great deal of beauty and charm. A degree of improvidence and
"shiftlessness," by Northern standards, was not inconsistent with free
hospitality, a generous outdoor life, an old-time culture with an
atmosphere of leisure and courtesy, superior in its way to what the busy
and bustling North could show. The charming and chivalrous "Colonel
Carter of Cartersville" had many a prototype in real life. A higher type
was sometimes bred in Southern society; it was not without some reason
that Virginians claimed that the mold which produced Washington was not
broken when it could yield a Robert Lee. There was a somber side;
plantation life was often a rank soil for passions of tyranny and
license. But its better fruitage added an element to the composite
American type which could not and cannot be spared.
The other advantage the South possessed was the devotion of its
strongest men to political life. The loss of commerce and literature was
the gain of politics. The typical Southern leader was apt to be both a
planter and a lawyer, with a strong and active interest in public
affairs. Political oratory was a favorite resource in the
sparsely-settled districts. The personal force which in the North was
scattered among twenty fields was here centered mainly in one. This
feature of Southern society worked together with the fact that the
section had in slavery a common interest and bond. That interest of the
entire section, led by its ablest men, came naturally to be the dominant
factor in American public life. When it could not rule through its own
men, it found agents in subservient Northern politicians. And so it came
about that in the early '50s the South, while outstripped altogether in
population, wealth, industrial and intellectual achievement, was yet in
substantial control of the governmental power. In the North, by the very
magnitude of the commercial and industrial development the moral
sentiment in public affairs seemed submerged or at least eclipsed.
It was during such a period of apathy that there was held an
anti-slavery meeting at which two negroes were present, Sojourner Truth,
an old woman whose shrewdness matched her fervor, and Frederick
Douglass. Douglass was the son of a white father and a slave mother; he
taught himself to read and write, made his escape into freedom, gained
an education, and became an effective speaker for the anti-slavery
cause. On this occasion he spoke with power and passion of the gloomy
prospects of their people; government, wealth, social advantage, all
were on the side of their oppressors; good people seemed indifferent to
their wrongs; was there indeed any help or hope? Then rose Sojourner
Truth, and looking at him said only, "Frederick! Is God dead?"