Slavery the Trouble-Maker—Break-Up of the Whig Party and Rise of the
Republican—The Key—Sickle’s Tragedy—Brooks and Sumner—Life at
Washington in the Fifties
I
Whether the War of Sections—as it should be called, because, except in
Eastern Tennessee and in three of the Border States, Maryland, Kentucky
and Missouri, it was nowise a civil war—could have been averted must
ever remain a question of useless speculation. In recognizing the
institution of African slavery, with no provision for its ultimate
removal, the Federal Union set out embodying the seeds of certain
trouble. The wiser heads of the Constitutional Convention perceived
this plainly enough; its dissonance to the logic of their movement; on
the sentimental side its repugnancy; on the practical side its doubtful
economy; and but for the tobacco growers and the cotton planters it had
gone by the board. The North soon found slave labor unprofitable and
rid itself of slavery. Thus, restricted to the South, it came to
represent in the Southern mind a “right” which the South was bound to
defend.
Mr. Slidell told me in Paris that Louis Napoleon had once said to him
in answer to his urgency for the recognition of the Southern
Confederacy: “I have talked the matter over with Lord Palmerston and we
are both of the opinion that as long as African slavery exists at the
South, France and England cannot recognize the Confederacy. They do not
demand its instant abolition. But if you put it in course of abatement
and final abolishment through a term of years—I do not care how many—we
can intervene to some purpose. As matters stand we dare not go before a
European congress with such a proposition.”
Mr. Slidell passed it up to Richmond. Mr. Davis passed it on to the
generals in the field. The response he received on every hand was the
statement that it would disorganize and disband the Confederate Armies.
Yet we are told, and it is doubtless true, that scarcely one
Confederate soldier in ten actually owned a slave.
Thus do imaginings become theories, and theories resolve themselves
into claims; and interests, however mistaken, rise to the dignity of
prerogatives.