Parties, like men, have their ups and downs. Like machines they get out
of whack and line. First it was the Federalists, then the Whigs, and
then the Democrats. Then came the Republicans. And then, after a long
interruption, the Democrats again. English political experience repeats
itself in America.
A taking label is as valuable to a party as it is to a nostrum. It
becomes in time an asset. We are told that a fool is born every minute,
and, the average man being something of a fool, the label easily
catches him. Hence the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
The old Whig Party went to pieces on the rocks of sectionalism. The
institution of African slavery arrived upon the scene at length as the
paramount political issue. The North, which brought the Africans here
in its ships, finding slave labor unprofitable, sold its slaves to the
South at a good price, and turned pious. The South took the bait and
went crazy.
Finally, we had a pretty kettle of fish. Just as the Prohibitionists
are going to convert mortals into angels overnight by act of
assembly—or still better, by Constitutional amendment—were the
short-haired women and the long-haired men of Boston going to make a
white man out of the black man by Abolition. The Southern Whigs could
not see it and would not stand for it. So they fell in behind the
Democrats. The Northern Whigs, having nowhere else to go, joined the
Republicans.
The wise men of both sections saw danger ahead. The North was warned
that the South would fight, the South, that if it did it went against
incredible odds. Neither would take the warning. Party spirit ran wild.
Extremism had its fling. Thus a long, bloody and costly War of
Sections—a fraternal war if ever there was one—brought on by
alternating intolerance, the politicians of both sides gambling upon
the credulity and ignorance of the people.
Hindsight is readier, certainly surer, than foresight. It comes easier
and shows clearer. Anybody can now see that the slavery problem might
have had a less ruinous solution; that the moral issue might have been
compromised from time to time and in the end disposed of. Slave labor
even at the South had shown itself illusory, costly and clumsy. The
institution untenable, modern thought against it, from the first it was
doomed.
But the extremists would not have it. Each played to the lead of the
other. Whilst Wendell Phillips was preaching the equality of races,
death to the slaveholders and the brotherhood of man at the North,
William Lowndes Yancey was exclaiming that cotton was king at the
South, and, to establish these false propositions, millions of good
Americans proceeded to cut one another’s throats.
There were agitators and agitators in those days as there are in these.
The agitator, like the poor, we have always with us. It used to be said
even at the North that Wendell Phillips was just a clever comedian.
William Lowndes Yancey was scarcely that. He was a serious, sincere,
untraveled provincial, possessing unusual gifts of oratory. He had the
misfortune to kill a friend in a duel when a young man, and the tragedy
shadowed his life. He clung to his plantation and rarely went away from
home. When sent to Europe by the South as its Ambassador in 1861, he
discovered the futility of his scheme of a Southern confederacy, and,
seeing the cornerstone of the philosophy on which he had constructed
his pretty fabric, overthrown, he came home despairing, to die of a
broken heart.
The moral alike for governments and men is: Keep the middle of the
road.