ARMED DIVISION
For a little while there was a calm upon the surface of affairs.
Agitation fell quiet after the hard-won compromise, and the way seemed
clear again for the sober counsels of peace, the everyday business and
routine of politics and growth. But passion was none the less awake
because it had fallen silent for a space. Thoughtful men could not
forget what had been said in the debates which had accompanied the
compromise, or how near those debates had seemed to bring them to a
yawning gulf, where every danger gaped wide and obvious. “If you who
represent the stronger portion,” Mr. Calhoun had said, in words whose
passion seemed all the deeper because of their slow and sober cadence,
“if you who represent the stronger portion cannot agree to settle the
great questions at issue on the broad principles of justice and duty,
say so; and let the States we both represent agree to separate and
depart in peace.” And issue had been joined very sharply, for there had
been men of a new temper on the other side who had spoken as frankly:
free-soil Whigs and free-soil Democrats, men in their prime, but just
come into Congress, bold and ready to push their views at any risk. Mr.
Seward, the new Whig senator from New York, had proved himself in those
memorable debates a veritable philosophical radical, alike in opinion
and in purpose. He had utterly repudiated all compromise, had denied the
possibility of an equilibrium between the slave States and the free, and
had declared the common domain of the country to be devoted to justice
and liberty not only by the constitution but also by “a higher law than
the constitution.” He believed, he said, that slavery must give way “to
the salutary instructions of economy and to the ripening influences of
humanity”; that “all measures which fortified slavery or extended it
tended to the consummation of violence,—all that checked its extension
or abated its strength tended to its peaceful extirpation”; and that no
makeshift or avoidance could make the issue either slow or doubtful. Mr.
Calhoun had died with these things in his ears, face to face with the
very tragedy he had striven with all the intensity of his deep nature to
avert.
Men who gave little heed to debates and thought only of what they saw
and knew presently found themselves stirred with a fresh and vivid
passion of the mind as they witnessed or learned of the operations of
the Fugitive Slave Law. The constitution itself commanded in explicit
terms that fugitives from service, as well as fugitives from justice, who
should escape from one State into another, should be delivered up and
returned upon demand; and Congress, so long ago as 1793, had adopted a
measure intended to secure obedience to the constitution in that matter.
The behests of that statute, however, had been addressed, not to federal
officers, but to the officials of the several States; magistrates and
sheriffs in the northern States had shown greater and greater slackness
in performing their duty under the statute, had, indeed, come more and
more to neglect it altogether, as opinion against slavery gathered head;
and the Supreme Court of the United States had finally made utter dead
letter of the law by deciding, in the case of _Prigg vs. Pennsylvania_
(1842), that Congress could not in any case legally impose upon the
officials of a State the duty of executing a law of the United States.
The new law, therefore, which went with the compromise measures of 1850,
provided in very imperative and rigorous fashion for the direct action
of the federal authorities. The whole machinery of federal courts,
commissioners, marshals, and deputies was put at the service of slave
owners for the recovery of their runaway slaves; their simple affidavit
was made sufficient proof of their right of ownership and recovery and of
the identity of the negro claimed; federal marshals were made personally
responsible for the successful execution of the writs of seizure and
rendition; every private citizen summoned to assist was obliged to obey
under heavy penalties; no doubt or difficulty or delay was anywhere
permitted to be interposed if a master but made formal claim under oath.
The execution of the law, vigorously pushed by the southerners,—pushed
even against one-time slaves long settled at the North but safe until
now against apprehension; evaded, protested against, even resisted with
riot and force of arms in the North, bred irritation and excitement which
no art of the politician could check, no counsel of prudence divert. It
brought open contest of opinion wherever executed, and every question
which compromise and makeshift had sought to quiet and put by burned with
a new and fiercer flame. Opinion and action were not to be controlled now
as they had been in the early years of the republic, when men took their
cue from their leaders. The broad extension of the suffrage had put the
fortunes of all parties and policies in the hands of a thorough-going
democracy. The free, inquisitive judgments of common men determined now
what the method of affairs should be. New voters were added to the rolls,
it might be ten or fifteen thousand by the year, as the population grew
unchecked the seasons through. Public prints multiplied, and spread news
and opinion in ways incalculable by politicians, upon a scale which no
man could reckon. Close upon two thousand miles were added every year to
the railways of the country, and telegraph lines in the same measure.
There was no longer any checking or anticipating the sweep of impulse
and opinion among a people more and more knit together by intercourse,
interest, and acquaintance. New men, a new generation, again crowded
forward; parties could not dictate what they should think; parties were
indeed themselves to be transformed and mastered, rather, by the new
forces now free of the field.
For two sad years Mr. Webster and Mr. Clay sought to keep the nation in
hand, chiding every show of uneasiness or agitation under the compromise
they had labored to effect; speaking of the measures of 1850 as the
indispensable props of the constitution and of the Union itself; making
all sober counsels of peace ring eloquent in every perfect phrase of
conciliation and persuasion their genius could coin or their striking
utterance and presence enforce. But quiet would not come at their
bidding. Mr. Webster had lost his hold upon his own people. They had
deemed his advocacy of the compromises a base and cowardly retreat from
the high place of doctrine and of statesmanship he had held so gallantly
against Mr. Hayne, and now thought his defence of them but aggravation
of his apostasy. Mr. Clay seemed already of another generation dead and
gone. The new forces afield were not for his handling. Both men died with
the infinite uneasiness of that last failure heavy upon them, Mr. Clay in
June, Mr. Webster in October, 1852, fearing that they saw and knew what
was to follow. The stage was clearing for another scene.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF A CONTEMPORARY PAMPHLET]
It was, indeed, difficult until these older figures were withdrawn to
realize how radically the scene had changed, how singularly confused and
altered the field of politics had become. Mr. Clay, Mr. Calhoun, and Mr.
Webster, the notable men who had now made their sad exit, had come into
affairs forty years ago, upon the eve of the second war with England. In
their lifetime the very character of the government had changed. In the
days when they had entered Congress, themselves men of a new generation,
the country lived under a sort of parliamentary system. Congress looked
to the Executive for guidance. The President’s cabinet was made up of
the recognized leaders of the dominant party. The succession to the
presidency was determined by congressional caucus, and the Secretaryship
of State was looked upon as the post of succession to the headship of the
government. Parties were organized under men who got their authority from
training and from close association with ruling groups of influential
statesmen whose primacy in affairs no one dreamed of disputing.
Massachusetts had her ruling coterie of authoritative leaders no less
than Virginia. Her professional classes, her lawyers and ministers for
the most part, determined her action in politics,—university men, most
of them, who yielded precedence to training, to experience, to age, to
learning as of course, and put young men by to await their turn. Among
them, as among the Virginians, certain families enjoyed a prescriptive
pre-eminence. Any Englishman might have found the air and the method of
action in that school of affairs of the familiar kind of all tradition
amongst English speaking peoples.
The connection between Congress and the Executive was, it is true,
private, not open or upon the floor of the houses. The President’s
official advisers did not appear in debate or take their places upon the
floor as parliamentary leaders. The houses had by explicit vote declined
to hear them there. Neither did they resign, as the King’s ministers did,
when the measures they suggested were defeated in a legislative vote.
Their advice was given in private conference; they had no recognized
responsibility for party legislation; they suffered no personal defeats
and enjoyed no personal triumphs in Congress. But their influence
was direct and powerful; and the government, for all its theoretical
separation of parts, went forward as if of a single piece whenever the
houses were of the President’s party.
It had stood so until John Quincy Adams became President, with no party
at his back, the representative of a group, not of a national majority.
Already, in Mr. Monroe’s day, the “era of good feeling,” in which party
lines were fading out and the discipline of parties was relaxed, Congress
had got ready, with new standing committees, to act independently and on
its own initiative. When Mr. Adams came in it took leave to criticise and
resist rather than follow him; and after Mr. Adams came the democratic
upheaval which made a return to the older principles and methods of
action forever impossible. It was noteworthy that there had fallen, with
that change, a blight of final discredit upon the congressional caucuses
which had for so long assumed to nominate the Presidents. Scattered
state legislatures had made nominations of their own at the very dawn
of General Jackson’s day; conventions, called together by no party, by
no group of political leaders even, but representing, it appeared, only
some special class of citizens or some single locality, had volunteered
also their advocacy of this man or that for the presidency. The political
intimacy between Congress and the Executive having been lost, Congress
lost also its initiative in choosing the nominal leader of the nation.
That privilege passed to men such as those who had so shrewdly and so
successfully set the currents of opinion running for General Jackson:
private managers who knew how to use the machinery of newspaper comment,
of busy personal correspondence, and of local organization to make
opinion and control elections.
The process of change was a little obscured while General Jackson was
President. No man had ever dominated the politics of the country with
a more complete or unmistakable mastery. Congress did his bidding as
willingly and as promptly as it had done the bidding of Washington or
Jefferson. Few men stopped then to note the fact that he purposed nothing
constructive, that his work was negative, reactionary, directed towards
the “simplification” of the government and the tearing down of what the
Federalists had built up. Neither did it appear at once what it meant
that the President was making the patronage of office, not the action
of Congress, the real instrument of his power. He gave office to men
who kept the discipline of parties at the elections, to local political
managers, to the editors of serviceable newspapers, to those who watched
and sought to govern the movements of popular opinion.
When he was gone it began to appear what the whole change was which had
been brought to pass. It had become the habit of all parties alike to
make their nominations for office in organized party conventions, and to
look to the make-up of the conventions through the local managers who
expected to profit by their success. The convention which nominated a
President formulated also the programme of its party. Its declarations
of principle bound the President whom it nominated, not only; they
bound also the representatives of the party in Congress. And yet the
convention was not elected for any kind of responsible service. Its
members were not men picked out to frame legislation and test it by the
processes of debate, or for any of the slow deliberations which make
sound policy. They met to act without debate. They sat only for a day or
two; got no real acquaintance with each other’s principles or motives;
acted hastily and under excitement. What was of more consequence still,
they were chosen by the management and nomination of unknown men, the
self-constituted party overseers of the several localities from which
they came; men whom native shrewdness, or watchful, time-serving sagacity
had made masters of the arts of nomination and election: small office
holders, busy talkers, the editors of rural newspapers, the ruling
spirits of local political clubs.
Here was a wholesale decentralization of politics. Opinion began to
be made by a sort of incalculable _plébiscite_. Party leaders found
themselves, not giving suggestions, but taking them from the general
drift. Congress presently showed itself apt rather to register the
impressions which came to it, it hardly knew how, from the innumerable
minor politicians of its dominant party than to originate measures
and policies of its own. Party action yielded, too, to new forces
of disintegration: for this new machinery of initiative facilitated
division as well as organization. If old parties could be ruled by
conventions, new parties could be created by them. It presently became a
familiar thing to learn of the existence of a new party by learning of
the assembling of a new convention which had put forth a new platform,
and nominated a new candidate for the presidency. Every year set for
a presidential election was now apt to yield some such significant
symptom of shifting opinion, to show some new party formed or some
recent party grown strong and aggressive. At any time the agitation of
new questions or the alteration of old might produce a familiar fruitage
of conventions. Men of independent initiative might at almost any time
of excitement get their separate following, improvise their separate
organization, and confuse the field of action by the introduction of what
claimed and tried to be a new party.
When, in 1840, the Whigs put Mr. Van Buren from office it looked for
a brief space as if the older traditions of the government were to be
revived, as if Congress and the Executive were once more to draw together
under the leadership of men both in the President’s cabinet and on the
floor of the houses. But General Harrison’s death made that once more
impossible. Mr. Tyler pleased the Democrats as little as he pleased the
Whigs; and the two branches of the government drifted further apart than
ever. Once again, in 1848, the Whigs won; and some of their chief men
became the President’s advisers, Mr. Webster among them, as at the outset
of General Harrison’s term. But there was only a faint flicker of the
revival of tradition in that. It was too late to go back to the old ways
of administration.
[Illustration: MARTIN VAN BUREN]
In all ordinary seasons, while the old parties kept their discipline
and their prestige, mere flurries of independent action might cause
politicians little or no uneasiness; but in seasons when men’s minds
were likely to take a touch of passion from the questions of the hour
there was no telling what a new convention might portend. This new and
facile machinery of agitation was as suitable for acts of principle as
for schemes of manipulation. Mr. Clay and Mr. Webster looked from their
death-beds upon a strangely altered scene. Passions were astir which
might shake parties to pieces at any moment. The rule of parliamentary
leaders belonged to an age gone by. Compromises arranged in Congress were
conclusive of nothing should the thought of the nation once shake the
foundations upon which they rested.
Even yet, however, the signs of change were partially obscured. A
presidential election fell in that year, and parties seemed steadier
than before in their choice of candidates and issues. A convention of
Free Soilers met again (August 11, 1852), as four years before, and
again spoke their uncompromising programme very plainly: “No more slave
States, no more slave Territories, no nationalized slavery, no national
legislation for the extradition of slaves”; but their following proved
less numerous than it had been in 1848. The Whig ranks were not a little
thinned and disordered by the uneasiness and defections of a time of
dread and doubt; and when the party convention, in June, put forward
General Winfield Scott, a third popular soldier, as its candidate, and
declared itself entirely satisfied with the compromise of 1850, many a
man of conviction and initiative turned away from it, as from a party
which had lost courage and statesmanship. But the Democrats acted with
their old-time confidence and unanimity, and won, upon a declaration of
views which committed them not only to the maintenance of the compromise
but also to an unqualified adoption of “the principles laid down in the
Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 and the Report of
Mr. Madison to the Virginia legislature in 1799,”—principles which they
declared themselves resolved to carry out “in their obvious meaning and
import.” Such a programme would have satisfied even Mr. Calhoun. They
had not been able to nominate any one of their recognized leaders for
the presidency; for their convention had acted, as always, under a rule
which prescribed two-thirds as the majority necessary for a nomination,
and neither Mr. Cass nor Mr. Buchanan nor Mr. Douglas had been able to
command so large a support; but their choice had fallen upon Mr. Franklin
Pierce, of New Hampshire, whose handsome person and prepossessing
manners, whose record as a gallant commander of volunteers in the Mexican
war and an honorable, even if undistinguished, representative of his
State in Congress, they could look upon with some degree of complacency.
[Illustration: FRANKLIN PIERCE]
They supported him with every appearance of heartiness, and carried every
State for him except Vermont, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Kentucky,
securing two hundred and fifty-four electoral votes as against General
Scott’s forty-two. The popular vote for Mr. Pierce exceeded that for his
two opponents combined by less than sixty thousand out of a total vote
of more than three millions; but it was noteworthy how widespread and
general the success of the Democrats had been; how completely they had
closed the breaches made in their ranks four years before. Apparently
they controlled both the country and the government.
Not that the country was quiet or at ease. Opinion shifted feverishly,
incalculably, as if moved and driven by some unquiet spirit which it
sought by some means to lay or escape. The Democrats had won in the
elections because the Whigs had suffered hopeless division of opinion
and had already in fact fallen asunder upon the question of slavery.
The Democrats alone, with their chief strength at the South, kept their
organization and their power of united action. Men who could not act with
them now looked for a party, and yet feared to form one which should
bring the sections face to face and fight the slavery question out. And
yet they could not thrust that question into the background or forget
it. Territories were always making and to be made. That unresting host
forever moving upon the western plains and rivers must presently be told
what Congress meant itself to do, or let them do, with regard to the use
and ownership of slaves. Root-and-branch opponents of slavery were very
actively and aggressively making opinion against it without too tenderly
considering either the politicians who wanted to think of something else
or the merchants and manufacturers who dreaded to see peace and trade
disturbed. During the very summer of the presidential campaign (1852)
Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had published _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, a stirring
story of the life of a southern slave, and the book had done more, as it
were upon the instant, to bring opinion to a quick awakening than any
score of political pamphlets could have done. Its moving scenes, its
pathos, its humor touched with tears, its air as of the real tragedy and
pity and hope of life acted upon sensitive minds with a power they could
not resist; and bred everywhere a slow passion of philanthropic reform
which politicians had presently to look to. It was not a true picture
of slavery. It was a romance sprung out of the sympathetic imagination
of a refined and sensitive woman, whose pity kindled at every thought
of the black bondsmen at the South. It told, unquestionably, of what
slavery might produce, of what no doubt it did produce upon occasion,
of the terrible possibilities and in some part the terrible realities
of the master’s power and the slave’s subjection; but no one could read
in it the real life of the negro or take from it any just conception of
the system of slavery as administered by the vast majority of southern
masters. Those who read it, nevertheless, knew no other picture than
this, and were filled with pity and deep horror. Politicians had
presently good reason to know what this new engine of agitation meant.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN”]
Still, those who chose looked another way and refused to be drawn into
this matter. All who felt the older motives of politics strong within
them and dreaded upheaval declined to touch the critical business. Men
of uncompromising free soil convictions, on the other hand, whether
Whigs or Democrats hitherto, slowly drew off from the regular parties
and formed outspoken plans of opposition, frankly making slavery their
issue. But the majority of Democrats adhered steadily to their party,
and the majority of Whigs dreaded the threatened conflict and doubted
its outcome; sought any diversion rather than make this ugly issue the
acknowledged and only line between parties. Many persuaded themselves
that the most immediate peril of the country came from the sudden and
enormous influx of foreigners which recent years had witnessed. The
great flood poured in at the eastern ports and left its most unwholesome
deposits there; sent on the best things it carried to the western farms
and the open regions of the interior. It brought men whom revolution
had thrust out of the old world, men who wanted power and were apt at
intrigue, restless men, many of whom were outcasts, some of whom were
desperadoes. Now at last there came even men out of the alien Orient to
the lands by the Pacific. Here was cause enough for uneasiness. If men
looked for an issue, here was one: the preservation of the country’s
institutions in the face of such inroads, the maintenance of a safe
ascendency in affairs for those born and bred to the politics and manners
of America.
So long ago as 1844 matters had shaped themselves very sharply on this
issue in New York and Philadelphia, the cities most threatened by the
unwelcome invasion. Now feeling began to gather head upon a greater
scale. A secret “Order of United Americans” was formed, whose motto was,
“Americans must rule America”; and to this order many uneasy men were
drawn to whom its principles were a pleasant relief from the stress of
the slavery question; as well as all those who dreaded or hated the
foreigner or feared to see the Roman Catholic church of the Continent
brought into power in America along with its thousands of adherents
crowding in. Only those who were advanced to the highest ranks of the
Order’s hierarchy were inducted into its full mysteries; the rest
professed entire ignorance of its secrets, often of its very existence,
and were dubbed “Know Nothings” for their reticence.
[Illustration: COVER OF PAMPHLET ON THE BOSTON SLAVE RIOT]
In some quarters the rising philanthropic feeling of the time found
expression in a very pronounced renewal of the temperance movement.
The year 1851 witnessed the adoption in Maine of a stringent law which
absolutely forbade the manufacture or sale of intoxicating liquors within
the State; and many earnest people elsewhere hailed the novel statute
as a hopeful promise of social betterment, an example to be emulated.
But such things did not yet draw to them the deeper currents of the
country’s thought. To every man who looked thoughtfully upon the face of
affairs the slavery question obviously stalked obtrusive at the front of
all policy, despite compromises and evasions. It was the southerners,
besides, who seemed always to force the fighting. Whether the question
were the reception of a petition against the continuance of the slave
trade in the District of Columbia or the acquisition and government
of new territory or the admission of a state into the Union, they let
no opportunity go by to make known their claims and rights under the
constitutional arrangement. They saw with the keen insight of those who
lose that the game of growth and extending power went steadily against
them. They valued the Union as dearly as the men of the North, were bent
upon its preservation as earnestly and honorably as their compatriots
of any section; but they were convinced, with good reason, that its
preservation depended upon the maintenance of an equilibrium between the
sections, and they were determined, with Mr. Calhoun, to make their fight
now, while yet there was a chance to win. They waged it, accordingly,
like men suspiciously on guard in the face of a subtile enemy, and
upon occasion deeply irritated even their friends with their noisy and
ceaseless protests, driving their enemies to a like watchfulness and
aggression.
Upon the assembling of the first Congress of Mr. Pierce’s administration
fortune seemed for the nonce to smile upon them. They were accorded a
victory sudden, unlooked for, radical, costly, which instantly put a
new face upon affairs,—nothing less than the repeal of the Missouri
compromise and the opening of every Territory that remained to slavery.
No one but Mr. Douglas would have had the audacity to attempt so
revolutionary a measure; but Mr. Douglas had the hardihood of the
frontier and the initiative of a natural leader of men. Stephen A.
Douglas was one of the senators from Illinois. He had gone west out
of Vermont when a mere lad, had served a rough apprenticeship in the
new country, had made himself a lawyer and a judge of the supreme
court of the young State before he was thirty, had entered the House
of Representatives in 1843, at thirty, and the Senate in 1847, at
thirty-four, and was now in his prime, showing at their full vigor the
extraordinary qualities which had won him his quick advancement. His
short and massive figure, his square head, steady, deep-set eyes, and
mouth cut straight and firm, in lines unsensitive and full of will,
bespoke him the man he was: a man to make and have his way, fearless,
sincere, compact of force; commanding others, but not to be commanded
himself; coarse-fibred, daring, ready witted, loud, and yet prepossessing
withal, winning friends and receiving homage.
He watched as keenly as Mr. Benton did the progress of the West, and
had become, by natural selection, chairman of the Senate’s Committee on
Territories. Across the broad “Platte country,” he knew, which stretched
all the way from Iowa and Missouri to the foot of the great Rockies, lay
the chief highway into the far West. He feared, in common with other
western men, that it might be closed against travel by treaties made
at Washington with the Indian tribes whose hunting fields lay upon it,
and all the movement of life and settlement in the West embarrassed by
the erection of an Indian reservation athwart the great route; and ever
since he came into Congress, ten years ago, he had been pressing the
question of its settlement and organization as a Territory instead. In
the session of 1853-54 he had his will in the matter at last, and brought
on political revolution besides. As chairman of the Senate Committee
on Territories, he introduced, early in January, 1854, a bill which
provided for the organization of the Platte country as the Territory of
Nebraska; but, finding many features of the bill unacceptable to the
Senate, presently withdrew it and substituted another (January 23d)
which provided for the creation of two Territories, Kansas and Nebraska,
the one lying immediately to the west of the once disputed ground of
Missouri, the other lying to the north beyond Iowa, upon the great plains
through which the Platte found its way to the Missouri. The first measure
had provided that the people of the new Territory should make their
own choice in the matter of slavery; in the second measure the Missouri
compromise was explicitly “declared inoperative and void,” because
“inconsistent with the principles of non-intervention by Congress with
slavery in the States and Territories as recognized by the legislation of
1850.” The healing work of two generations of statesmen was destroyed at
a stroke. Mr. Douglas deemed such a course dictated by “a proper sense
of patriotic duty,” in order that the compromise measures of 1850 might
be given their full effect, the right of Congress to interfere with
the question of property in slaves clearly negatived, and the entire
sovereignty of the people in their self-constituted groups, first as
Territories and then as States, conspicuously set up, as the doctrine
which seemed to him most likely to solve every practical difficulty.
Mr. Pierce, the President, pronounced the bill a return to a “sound
principle, which the compromise of 1820 infringed upon.”
It was in fact matter of revolution. The southern members eagerly
accepted what they had not asked for; northern men who were of the
triumphant Democratic ranks blindly followed Mr. Douglas; and by the end
of May the bill was law, spite of protests, spite of every sign of the
profound and painful sensation it was to make, the country through. Mr.
Seward and Mr. Chase were no longer alone in the Senate; Hamilton Fish,
of New York, Solomon Foote, of Vermont, Benjamin Wade, of Ohio, Charles
Sumner, of Massachusetts stood with them to contest the ground against
slavery every foot, by every means of word or action. But they availed
nothing against the confident majorities which Mr. Douglas led, and the
thing was done.
[Illustration: WILLIAM H. SEWARD]
Strict party discipline was maintained in the houses, and Mr. Douglas
was unmistakably the leader of the Democratic majority. He might almost
be said to be for the moment the leader of the government. Congress had
learned very thoroughly how to do without the leadership or suggestions
of the Executive; had organized itself very efficiently for action on its
own initiative. The House very readily yielded itself to the control of
its Speaker, whom it was more and more coming to regard not only as its
presiding officer but also as its political leader. Its committees were
constituted by his appointment, and it more and more gave itself over to
the guidance of its committees. Mr. Polk, when he was Speaker, had set
the example of constituting each committee in such a way as to make it
an instrument for carrying the purposes of the leaders of the majority
into effect in legislation; and the machinery of party action was every
year growing more perfect. The Senate chose its committees by ballot, and
debated their recommendations with a thoroughness which the House, with
its more numerous membership, could not often emulate; but the committees
of the Senate, no less than the committees of the House, formulated every
action decided upon by the party leaders. The chairman of each committee,
indeed, enjoyed an initiative in respect of the matters referred to
his committee which often escaped the control of the leaders when he
chose to ignore them. It was in part because of this new, efficient,
and thorough-going way of action in Congress that Presidents and their
cabinets fell more and more into the background in the origination
of policy. Mr. Douglas had wished to be President: but was much more
powerful in his real place of leadership on the floor of the Senate. Mr.
Pierce accepted what he planned. He had his way with regard to Kansas and
Nebraska as he could have had it in no other capacity than as chairman of
the Committee on Territories.
No man could have wished to see his success produce a more dramatic
effect. It was instantaneous. Kansas became at once a veritable battle
ground. There was a fatal ambiguity in the law. Did it mean that
the people could make their choice with regard to slavery now, while
they were yet but citizens of a Territory, through their territorial
legislatures, or must they wait until they made their formal
constitutions as states and obtained admission into the Union? Whatever
its meaning, the matter was evidently to be decided by numbers, by
filling the inchoate state with a prevailing majority out of the South or
with a prevailing majority out of the North,—by the conquest of effectual
occupation. And so each section began to pour its settlers in. Nebraska
was out of the question. It lay too far to the northward; no one in the
South looked to see slavery make its way thither. But men must go to
Kansas, and go at once, ready for any heat of conflict.
[Illustration: THE UNITED STATES, MARCH 4TH, 1855.
BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]
It was singular how the strong discipline and self-confident spirit of
party held the Democrats together in face of the country’s manifest
sharp revulsion against what they had done. Too steady for panic, too
sure of the practical soundness and efficacy of the radical measures
they had entered upon to be seriously disconcerted, they held doggedly
on their way. But with the Whigs it was different. Their party had been
short-lived at best; they had looked chiefly to the North for support;
they had gone to pieces in the election of 1852 as completely and as
irretrievably as the Federalists had gone to pieces in the election
of 1800; their adherents were afield looking for a new allegiance, a
new way of action. Some were simply “Anti-Nebraska men,” opponents of
the extension of slavery; some knew not how to vote; some crowded, for
diversion, into the ranks of the Know Nothings. The elections of 1854 and
1855 brought strange surprises. The Know Nothings won a sudden series of
successes. In the autumn of 1854 they elected their candidates for the
governorship in Massachusetts and Delaware and put close upon a hundred
members into the federal House of Representatives. In the autumn of 1855
they carried New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut,
New York, Kentucky, and California, and fell but a little short of
majorities in six of the southern States. Their successes filled the
House of Representatives and the offices of government in the States with
new and unknown men. The House of Representatives which met in December,
1855, was so variously and whimsically compounded of Anti-Nebraska men,
Free Soilers, Democrats, southern pro-slavery Whigs, Know Nothings who
favored the extension of slavery and Know Nothings who opposed it, that
nothing was certain of it except that it contained a majority against the
administration.
[Illustration: GEORGE GORDON MEADE]
But another year (1856) brought the opposition together into a clearly
defined “Republican” party, into which all Anti-Nebraska men, whether
one-time Democrats or one-time Whigs, whether for a little while Free
Soilers or for a still shorter time Know Nothings, were drawn with united
purpose. Many things besides Mr. Douglas’s revolutionary Kansas-Nebraska
bill had given heat and cohesion to their gathering opposition. Before
that bill had been introduced the administration had purchased of Mexico
(December 30, 1853), through Mr. James Gadsden, of South Carolina, the
minister of the United States, forty-five thousand square miles of
additional territory, lying at the south of the Gila River, to round
out the acquisitions of 1848, the root of controversy and compromise.
The year the Kansas-Nebraska Act became law, Mr. Pierce had, moreover,
at the solicitation of southern men, directed the American ministers to
Great Britain, France, and Spain, Mr. James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania,
Mr. John Y. Mason, of Virginia, and Mr. Pierre Soulé, of Louisiana, to
confer and report to him upon the desirability of the acquisition of Cuba
by the United States. They met at Ostend, in Flanders, and reported that
in their opinion the acquisition of Cuba would be highly advantageous to
the United States; and that, rather than suffer it to be Africanized, as
Santo Domingo had been, the United States would be justified in wresting
it from Spain by force, if Spain would not sell. News came now and
again, too, of armed expeditions out of the southern ports against some
Central American state, and of repeated, though unsuccessful, attempts,
by force or strategy, to gain possession of more territory to the south
of Texas. There was no evidence that these lawless raids had any support
or countenance from the federal government or from any government, or
responsible person even, in the South itself; but the painful impression
they made chimed ominously with that made by the Gadsden purchase and the
“Ostend manifesto.” There seemed an organized effort afoot to extend upon
every hand the area of slavery.
[Illustration: PIERRE SOULÉ]
The new party of opposition, however, did not perfect its organization
or draw its strength effectively together soon enough to win the
presidential election of 1856. A remnant of the Whig party was still in
the field; the Know Nothings did not know that they had already lost
their following, and put candidates confidently into nomination; the
Republicans had still to compound a Free-Soil-Anti-Nebraska-Whig creed
and find a candidate to please their one-time Democratic supporters,—John
C. Frémont, the dashing young soldier and explorer who had found the
passes of the Rockies and taken part in the conquest of California.
The Democrats, keeping still a virtually unbroken organization in the
face of foes divided, elected their candidates, Mr. James Buchanan, of
Pennsylvania, and Mr. John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, by the safe
majority of fifty-two electoral votes. But the popular vote for their
candidates had fallen nearly four hundred thousand short of that cast for
their opponents; the Republicans had carried every northern State except
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and Illinois; and there was in the
success of the Democrats, it was to be suspected, nothing but a temporary
triumph.
[Illustration: JOHN CHARLES FRÉMONT]
Widespread financial distress clouded the winter that followed the
presidential election, and filled all the year 1857 with its deep
disquietude, now sharp and touched with panic, now a slow, dull lethargy
in which merchants and manufacturers and transportation companies and
bankers merely waited and did not hope. The sudden growth of enterprise
and commerce which had followed the rapid extension of railways and the
establishment of steam navigation upon the seas, to which the discovery
of gold in California had given added stimulation, and which every item
of the steady growth of industry and of the nation itself had assisted
to keep in heart these ten years, had inevitably bred mere speculation,
tempted men to unsound ventures, added excitement to confidence,
harebrained scheming to the sober making of plans, and credit had at
last been overstrained and wrecked by dishonesty, miscalculation, and
flat failure. It seemed to public men that the tariff, as it stood,
contributed to the distress of the time, because it steadily drew into
the Treasury of the United States a surplus which was just so much money
withheld from circulation. During the short session of Congress which
immediately preceded the inauguration of Mr. Buchanan, all parties
amicably united, therefore, in putting on the free list many of the raw
materials of manufacture hitherto taxed and in reducing the general level
of duties to twenty-four _per cent._
[Illustration: STEPHEN ARNOLD DOUGLAS]
No debate, no legislation, concerning the tariff had ever been so
temperate, so good natured, so full of amicable concert and quick
accommodation since the war of 1812. It was a notable sign how the
interest of parties had been withdrawn from old questions and fixed upon
new. The financial depression and slow recovery of credit which made
the year 1857 memorable among men of business constituted no part of
the strain of politics. It was of infinitely more consequence that two
days after the inauguration of Mr. Buchanan the Supreme Court of the
United States uttered, through Mr. Taney, its Chief Justice, an opinion
which went even beyond the Kansas-Nebraska Act in its radical rejection
of the Missouri compromise. The case was that of Dred Scott, a negro of
Missouri, whom his master had taken first into one of the free States
and then into the territory from which slavery had been excluded by the
legislation of 1820. The negro sought, after his return to Missouri and
the death of his master, to obtain his freedom, on the ground that his
temporary residence on free soil had operated to annul his master’s
rights over him; but the court decided against him. More than that,
though it left the proper field of the case itself, and therefore
uttered mere _obiter dicta_, in doing so, it went on to declare that the
legislation of 1820, which had forbidden slavery in part of the territory
of the United States, must be considered unconstitutional and without
legal effect. Slaves, as such, Mr. Taney argued, for the court, were not
citizens, in the contemplation of the constitution, but property merely;
neither Congress nor the territorial governments, which derived their
whole authority from Congress, could legally legislate with hostile
purpose against any kind of property belonging to citizens of the States;
slave owners might carry their slaves, as they might carry any other
property, where they chose within the federal domain; none but a State
could exclude their lawful bondsmen.
[Illustration: GEORGE HENRY THOMAS]
Here was not only a blow in the face for all Free Soilers, Anti-Nebraska
men, and Republicans, but a blow dealt straight at Mr. Douglas’s
doctrine of popular sovereignty as well. The court’s opinion suffered no
interference with slavery by any authority but that of a full-fledged
State, and the exclusion of slavery from Territories was out of the
question. Out of the question in law, it seemed, but yet not in fact.
How the fact was to be settled the country had but to look to Kansas to
see. There the rush of numbers and the clash of armed men had played
a quick drama out, stained by blood and ruffianly force. Men had come
first from Missouri near at hand, and out of the slave-holding States
which lay back of her, and then from the free States of the northwest
and far New England, some upon their own private errands of change or
profit or adventure, some in organized bands sent forward by public or
private subscription, by individuals or societies, engaged to see the
crusade out upon the one side or the other. Men of initiative in the
North had accepted the Kansas-Nebraska Act as a challenge to go and take
the land and hold it against slavery, by peaceful means or by force; had
bought supplies and arms, and had equipped sturdy men by the score for
the journey and the strife at its end. The lawless of the one faction
had vied with the lawless of the other in acts of violence and even of
treachery, and all the country had gazed these three years upon the dark
things done in “bleeding Kansas.”
[Illustration: JOSEPH ECCLESTON JOHNSTON]
Until this year of Mr. Buchanan’s presidency the pro-slavery settlers
had kept the upper hand and controlled for the most part the legislation
of the Territory; but by the autumn of that year their majority was
lost, their control wrested from them by the settlers out of the North,
crowding in at last in numbers greater than their own. Their final act
of power was to call a constitutional convention and submit to the vote
of the people a constitution which established slavery. The question
submitted to the people’s vote was not, however, the adoption or
rejection of the constitution, but merely its adoption “with slavery” or
“without slavery.” The clauses by which it directly sanctioned slavery
were by no means the only clauses which affected the critical matter. It
contained, besides, numerous provisions which were not to be affected by
the vote, which threw effective safeguards round about existing property
in slaves, quite independently of the establishment of a slave-holding
system; and great numbers of anti-slavery men, not being suffered to
vote against the instrument as a whole, would not vote at all. It was
consequently adopted “with slavery” and sent to Congress along with
the usual application for admission into the Union. The anti-slavery
legislature of the Territory, elected in the autumn of 1857, immediately
ordered the instrument submitted as a whole to the people’s vote, and it
was rejected by an overwhelming majority, the pro-slavery men in their
turn refraining from voting.
Mr. Buchanan, finding himself in fact the head of a party whose chief
strength lay in the South, and yielding more and more as events thickened
to the influence of the southern men in his cabinet, favored the
admission of the Territory under the constitution adopted “with slavery,”
as in technical form at any rate the legal expression of the wish of the
people of the Territory. But Mr. Douglas, no mere partisan, after all,
but a man steadfast in the principles upon which he had professed to
act, refused to be a party to the act. He knew, as the whole country did,
that this constitution, sent in the name of Kansas, was not in fact the
constitution preferred by a majority of its people. To adopt it would be,
not the recognition, but the repudiation of popular sovereignty. There
were Democratic majorities in both houses, but members enough followed
Mr. Douglas to defeat the resolution of admission, and it failed. A line
of cleavage had shown itself within the Democratic ranks, and the plot of
politics was sensibly thickening.
[Illustration: HARPER’S FERRY IN 1859]
Another year, and it was more evident than ever where the issue cut
and how the opinion of the country was turning. The elections of 1858
disclosed very serious losses for the Democrats. Five Republican
senators were added to the twenty already in active and aggressive
opposition; the Republican representation in the House was increased
from ninety-two to one hundred and nine; the President’s own State was
carried for the Opposition; and no observant man doubted what the causes
were. They were indeed fixed with dramatic force in the mind of the whole
country by the circumstances of Mr. Douglas’s own barely successful
struggle for re-election to the Senate. The Republicans of Illinois put
into the field against him a man new, like the party itself, but racy
of the soil and of the time. Abraham Lincoln was forty-nine years old,
Mr. Douglas’s senior by four full years; but, though he came late into
the view of the nation, he came with toughened fibre, athletic in mind
and body. He had struggled out of meanest poverty to a place among the
men who led by processes familiar enough upon that rough frontier, where
every man had his own way to make, his own training to get, for himself,
whether in books or in action; but the genius he had put into the task
had wrung out of the old processes a new and greater type of man. He had
had the instinct of the student in the midst of affairs and had made
himself a master of ideas, and of language as an instrument of mastery.
He had devised for himself straight thrusts of speech and a use of words
that acted always like the application of light,—spoke like a swordsman
who knows not only his fence, but also the temper of his blade and the
seats of life which the sword can touch.
[Illustration: JOHN BROWN]
Mr. Douglas knew his antagonist, and knew that he had arranged no light
matter when he had agreed to meet him in public debate, up and down the
State, upon the issues of the day. All the country knew that a novel
and very striking figure, the figure of an untutored master among men,
had emerged upon the general field of politics when it heard what the
debate had brought forth. “A house divided against itself,” Mr. Lincoln
said, in phrases which stuck in the mind, “cannot stand. I believe this
country cannot endure half slave and half free. I do not expect the
house to fall, but I expect it will cease to be divided. It will become
all one thing or all the other.” What, he asked Mr. Douglas, became of
the doctrine of popular sovereignty if the Dred Scott decision was
accepted as law? The territorial legislatures, replied Mr. Douglas, could
hold slavery back, if not by actual prohibition, at least by hostile
restriction and impediment. Then a territorial legislature can do what
Congress itself cannot? asked Mr. Lincoln,—and the country knew, the
Democrats whom he essayed to lead knew, how embarrassed Mr. Douglas had
been for an answer. He won his seat, but he lost his following at the
South.
[Illustration: THE DUNKER CHURCH, WHERE JOHN BROWN PREACHED THE NIGHT OF
THE RAID]
That same year, the elections notwithstanding, Mr. Buchanan urged upon
Congress, in his annual message (December 6th), fresh territorial
expansion at the South: the acquisition of Cuba, vigorous action on the
Isthmus against Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and a protectorate over the
nearer parts of the Mexican Republic, which appeared to be on the point
of going to pieces. No indifference, no hostility abated his zeal in
these matters. He could get nothing; the Republicans held the balance of
power in the House of Representatives since the election; policy stood
still there. But out of doors the rising passion of parties took its
natural course.
The autumn of 1859 brought a sinister thing to light which startled the
whole country, but the South most deeply, with its disclosure of what
passion, though it were but individual passion, might lead to. One John
Brown, come out of Kansas for the purpose, attempted of a sudden, on the
night of Sunday, October 17, 1859, a liberation of the slaves round about
Harper’s Ferry, in Virginia, madly hoping to set a general insurrection
aflame and bring emancipation on by force. The attempt failed miserably,
and Brown was sent to the scaffold; but that was not the whole of the
matter. The striking character and self-forgetful passion of the man
held the attention and moved the spirits of every one who looked upon
the event to heed it. He was a mad fanatic, but no common rascal and
adventurer. He had gone, four years before, out of Connecticut, with his
four sons, to throw himself into the struggle against slavery in Kansas,
and had got a price set upon his head there for lawless violence and
massacre; but there was in him the spirit as if of a blind and maddened
crusader; he fought and did deep evil, not for himself, but for a cause;
and men held their breath at thought of him as if at sudden sight of
some fateful omen. To the eyes of the southern men his image loomed
big, as the very embodiment of the party arrayed against them and the
institutions they lived under. Brown was found to have obtained money
and arms by subscription out of the North. They had been supplied him,
it turned out, for use in Kansas, not for use at Harper’s Ferry; but the
southerners made no discrimination in that matter. In either case, it was
aid given to a man who was expected to fight slavery at any cost, and
without reckoning of law or consequences. They would not now distinguish
between that and the objects of the Republican party itself.
They coupled this fatal raid with the systematic and successful attempts
of the northern States to nullify the Fugitive Slave Law. Runaway slaves
seized under that law had again and again been rescued by force, and the
rescuers had escaped punishment by the action of friendly juries and the
systematic application of the writ of _habeas corpus_. Every possible
obstacle had been put in the way of the operation of the law by state
statutes,—lawyers had been disbarred for acting for those who claimed the
runaways, the use of state prisons had been denied, and state officers
had been heavily fined for participating in the execution of the federal
enactment.
[Illustration: COLONEL LEE’S MARINES BREAKING INTO THE ENGINE-HOUSE AT
HARPER’S FERRY]
While the impressions made by the unhappy affair at Harper’s Ferry were
still vivid, while the heat it had engendered was still at its height,
the presidential campaign of 1860 came on, and the havoc sectional
feeling had made was laid painfully bare. The Democratic party was at
last hopelessly rent into factions, divided, as was inevitable, upon
the question of standing, with Mr. Douglas, for the principles of the
Kansas-Nebraska legislation, of the sovereignty of the people of a
Territory no less than of the people of a State, or, with the southern
men, for the extreme doctrine of the Dred Scott case. No agreement was
possible; the men of the one view and of the other had come at last to
the parting of the ways. The usual party convention was tried, but was
broken at once into factions, each of which tried to rally the party to
itself in a separate convention of its own. The one faction nominated Mr.
Douglas; the other Mr. Breckinridge, the Vice President. The Republicans,
meeting in Chicago, where the ardent enthusiasm of the Illinois men for
their newly risen champion was felt at its full, put aside Mr. Seward,
whom the country and the party itself had confidently expected to see
named, and nominated Mr. Lincoln for President. A third party, heir of
the Know Nothings, but strengthened also by many conservative men who
had despised Know Nothingism and meant now merely to hold the country
off, if they could, from all extremes, met and made its nominations also,
calling itself the “Constitutional Union” party, and avowing as its
simple creed “no political principle other than the constitution of the
country, the union of the States, and the enforcement of the laws.”
In the election which ensued almost every man who doubted whither to turn
with his vote acted, when the day came, with the Republicans, and Mr.
Lincoln was elected President. The electoral vote was to be, one hundred
and eighty for Mr. Lincoln, one hundred and twenty-three for his three
opponents combined. With the exception of four votes won at a hazard
in New Jersey, which had divided its votes between Mr. Lincoln and Mr.
Douglas, the Democrats had obtained not a single electoral vote in the
North or West. Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky had cast their votes
for Mr. Bell, the nominee of the “Constitutional Union” party; the rest
of the South had voted for Mr. Breckinridge. Mr. Douglas was to receive
the nine votes of Missouri and the three which New Jersey had withheld
from Mr. Lincoln. It was an ominous thing, nevertheless, that, despite
his undoubted majority in the electoral college, the election had gone
against Mr. Lincoln, reckoning by the vote of the people, by a majority
of close upon a million out of a total vote of but a little more than
four millions and a half. In almost every State that Mr. Lincoln had
carried the vote for Mr. Douglas had trodden close upon the heels of his
own. The total vote had been 4,682,069. Of this Mr. Lincoln had received
1,866,452, Mr. Douglas 1,376,957, Mr. Breckinridge and Mr. Bell together
1,438,660. In the North and West alone the vote cast against Mr. Lincoln
had been 1,575,000. In Oregon and California, whose electoral votes he
was to receive, the aggregate opposition vote had been nearly twice
that cast for him. It was a deeply perilous thing that such a victory,
won upon such issues, should have been won so narrowly, and through a
minority of the nation.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF LINCOLN’S LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE]
Before Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated seven southern States had withdrawn
from the Union, and revolution was upon the country. The southern
leaders of the extreme school of state rights and the doctrine of the
Dred Scott case had consciously, avowedly staked everything upon the
election, and accepted the result as conclusive of what self-respect and
political exigency demanded of them. They looked upon this coming into
power of the men of a minority which had set itself to check slavery and
to shut the slave-holding States in, in order that they might be thrust
from their place in the politics of the nation, as a thing fatal to
the very principles of the partnership formed in those first days when
the constitution had been framed, and accepted as a pledge of equality
between the States. The Republican party had, indeed, always and with
all proper emphasis disavowed any wish or intention to lay any hand
of molestation or change upon the domestic institutions of the South
itself. The anti-slavery men who were abolitionists were little more
numerous in 1860 than they had been in 1840, and those who spoke for the
Republicans vehemently disclaimed all alliance or sympathy with them.
But, though they did not mean to lay the axe to the root of the tree, the
partisans of Mr. Lincoln did mean to gird it about and let it die where
it stood, as one of the senators from Louisiana passionately told them.
They meant by law and force to keep slavery from getting any growth or
outlet whatever. They meant also to nullify, if they could not repeal,
the laws whose adoption the constitution commanded for the apprehension
and return of runaway slaves, and put the whole system of slavery, so far
as they might within the formal limits of the fundamental law, beyond
the recognition or countenance of federal statute. Their creed and their
actions alike were compounded of hostility towards the South; and the
challenge of their success was direct and unmistakable. Men of southern
mettle could not disregard or decline it.
[Illustration: MR. SEWARD’S SUGGESTION FOR THE CLOSE OF MR. LINCOLN’S
INAUGURAL ADDRESS]
[Illustration: CLOSING PARAGRAPH, IN MR. LINCOLN’S HANDWRITING, OF THE
INAUGURAL ADDRESS]
Pride and self-vindication seemed the more imperatively to command that
it should be accepted by the southerners because of what their opponents
had said, with sneer and taunt and bitter detraction, about the system
of slavery, which they maintained and stood for. No man who candidly
looked back to the indisputable records of the colonial time could justly
deem them responsible for its establishment. They had very earnestly and
again and again protested against the traffic in slaves which the crown
permitted, and the inevitable growth of servile labor which that hateful
traffic brought in its train, to the thrusting out of white men and of
the free labor which everywhere else gave dignity and efficiency to
English communities; but the authority of king and parliament alike had
forced and fostered it until it had seemed as if the entire slave trade
of the world centred at their ports. Free hired labor had been once for
all driven out, whether they would or no; the black people had multiplied
among them until emancipation became a thing not to be ventured upon;
work in the wet southern rice fields, upon the broad acres of tobacco,
amidst the sugar cane, and out in the hot furrows of grain came at
length, with long use and fixed custom, to seem a thing which only the
African could stand. The northern States, ere separation from England
set them free to be quit of slavery, if they chose, by emancipation, had
diligently sought to rid themselves of the few negroes who had unsuitably
found places of service in them by sending them also, as occasion
offered, to the southern slave markets. Finally, when fate and slow habit
and their own very multitude had fixed them, millions strong, upon the
South, a base and support upon which all society seemed to rest, their
labor, already indispensable, became of a sudden immensely profitable
in the blazing sun of the cotton fields by reason of the invention of
Whitney’s cotton gin.
[Illustration: JAMES BUCHANAN]
The system of slavery necessarily deprived the South of a body of small,
yeomen farmers; but small farms abounded, nevertheless. A great majority
of the southern farmers owned no slaves at all. If they could not afford
to hire negroes from some neighboring planter who had hands to spare,
they worked their fields themselves, like farmers everywhere. If they
could afford to hire a negro or two, they worked with them, side by side,
in the fields.
It was the accusation of moral guilt in the matter of slavery that stung
the southern men most intolerably. They knew with what motives and
principles they administered it, and felt to the quick the deep injustice
of imputing to them pleasure or passion or brutal pride of mastery in
maintaining their hold upon the slaves. Many a thoughtful man amongst
them saw with keen disquietude how like an incubus slavery lay upon the
South; how it demoralized masters who were weak, burdened masters who
were strong, and brought upon all alike enormous, hopeless economic
loss. Although the productive labor of the South was almost exclusively
agricultural, more rich land lay waste and unfilled there than in any
other region of the country held in use and occupation. The indolent
slaves did not work as free laborers would have worked, and could not
be made to. Intensive methods of farming were out of the question. Land
had first to be used, without artificial renewal, and then allowed long
to lie fallow and get its recuperation by the slow processes of nature.
The narrow margin of profit under such a system of labor and tillage
constantly threatened to disappear altogether. And yet the care of the
slaves, their maintenance like a huge family of shiftless children,
remained a duty and a burden which the master could not escape, good
season or bad, profit or no profit.
[Illustration: ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON]
Travelers could find whatever condition they looked for among the
slaves. Where it was necessary to assemble and keep them hundreds strong
upon remote plantations, lying in some malarial district upon the coast
or in the river bottoms, where they could live but their master could
not, they were often enough hard driven by brutal men, themselves mere
hired drudges, who cared for nothing but to get the exacted stint of work
out of them. But where the master was himself at hand there was almost
always moderation, a firm but not unkindly discipline, a real care shown
for their comfort and welfare. They were taught handicrafts, because each
plantation was of necessity, in respect of every simpler kind of work, a
complete industrial community. It was necessary that it should maintain
its own shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, bricklayers, blacksmiths, and
men of all work. There was seldom any town near at hand to supply even
its commoner wants. The punishments each master meted out he allotted
rather as magistrate than as master. The offences which he punished
would most of them have gone before a magistrate had the offenders been
freemen. “On principle, in habit, and even on grounds of self-interest,
the greater part of the slave owners were humane in the treatment
of their slaves,—kind, indulgent, not over exacting, and sincerely
interested in the physical welfare of their dependants,” said an eminent
northern man of letters, speaking of what he saw in 1844.
Domestic slaves were treated with affection and indulgence, cared for by
the mistress of the household. The life of a southern planter’s wife was
a life of executive labor, devoted chiefly to the care and training of
her slaves. Social privilege and the proud _esprit_ of their class bred
in southern masters a sense of the obligations of station; and the spirit
of the better men ruled the conduct of the less noble. The demoralizing
influences of the system were checked as much as it was in human nature
to check them. Southern gentlemen despised a slave trader as heartily as
any northern man did, necessary though his occupation seemed to be; sold
and bought slaves by private arrangement when they could; and sought in
every way to keep the worst features of the system at a minimum.
That very fact, their very consciousness that they exercised a good
conscience in these matters, made them the more keenly sensitive to the
bitter attacks made upon them at the North, the more determined now
to assert themselves, though it were by revolution, when they saw a
party whose chief tenet seemed to be the iniquity of the South, about
to take possession of the federal government. They had the inevitable
haughty pride of a privileged class. Probably not more than one white
man out of every five in the South was a slave holder; not more than
half had even the use or direction of slaves. Hundreds of the merchants,
lawyers, physicians, ministers who were the natural ruling spirits of
the towns owned none. But the men who were slave owners were the masters
of politics and of society. Their sensibilities were for all practical
purposes the sensibilities of the South; and for close upon forty years
now it had seemed as if at every turn of the country’s history those
sensibilities must be put upon the rack. The Missouri compromise of
1820 had treated the institution of slavery which they maintained as an
infection to be shut out by a line as if of quarantine. The alarming
insurrection of the slaves of southeastern Virginia under Nat Turner in
1831; the English Act of Emancipation and the formation of the American
Anti-Slavery Society in 1833; the slow and dangerous Seminole war,
which dragged from 1832 to 1839, and was as much a war to destroy the
easy refuge of runaway and marauding negroes in Florida as to bring the
Indians, their confederates, to submission; the critical Texas question;
the Mexican war and the debatable Wilmot proviso; the Kansas-Nebraska
Act, the “free-soil” campaign, the break-up of the Whigs and the rise and
triumph of the Republicans:—it had been a culminating series of events
whose wounds and perplexities were always for the South. Southerners
might have looked upon the election of Mr. Lincoln as only a casual party
defeat, to be outlived and reversed, had it not come like a dramatic
_dénouement_ at the end of the series. As it was, it seemed the last,
intolerable step in their humiliation.
The North had not realized as the South did what the election of 1860
meant. Southern men had been keenly conscious that the issues of
revolution hung upon it. That consciousness explained the votes of
Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, cast for Mr. Bell, the candidate of
the Constitutional Union party. In other parts of the South as well votes
by the tens of thousands had been cast for the candidates of that party,
by men who loved the Union, dreaded revolution, prayed for peace, and
sought this means of escape from the fatal antagonisms of the regular
parties. Northern voters, too, had been uneasy; but the air of opinion
about them had not been charged as the southern air was with the keen
forces of passion put to its final test. There was not among them the
universal feeling which stirred in the South, that politics had come at
last to a breaking strain.
[Illustration: THE “GEORGE WASHINGTON” LOCOMOTIVE, 1835]
South Carolina, alone among the States, still chose her presidential
electors through her legislature. Having chosen her eight electors
upon the appointed day in 1860, and instructed them to vote for Mr.
Breckinridge, her legislature remained in session to learn the result,
prepared to take action at once should what it feared come to pass. When
the news came that a majority in the electoral college had been secured
for Mr. Lincoln, it immediately called a state convention, provided for
the purchase of arms, and adjourned. On the 20th of December following
the convention which it had called, sitting in Charleston, adopted an
ordinance which solemnly repealed the act of the convention of the
23d of May, 1788, whereby the State had accepted the constitution of
the United States as part of its fundamental law, together with all
subsequent ratifications of federal constitutional amendments, and
formally declared the union hitherto “subsisting between South Carolina
and other States, under the name of the United States of America,”
dissolved and ended. By the first day of February following Mississippi,
Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had also seceded. On
the fourth day of February (1861) delegates appointed by the several
conventions of the seceding States met in convention at Montgomery,
Alabama, to frame a provisional constitution and choose a provisional
executive for a separate southern Confederacy. Mr. Jefferson Davis, until
a few weeks before a senator of the United States from Mississippi, was
chosen provisional President, Mr. Alexander Hamilton Stephens, until
two years before a member of the federal House of Representatives from
Georgia, provisional Vice President. In March a permanent constitution
was adopted, to take effect the next year. True to their theory of
government, the southern States had returned to the political methods
of 1788. Each State had, not by popular vote, but by sovereign
convention, withdrawn from the Union, as she had acceded to it. The same
conventions that had chosen the delegates sent to Montgomery ratified the
constitution which they framed, and authorized the inauguration of the
new Confederacy.
[Illustration: VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI, 1863]
It was corporate action, taken with the initiative and promptness of men
skilled alike in the theory and in the practice of constitutional action,
as Mr. Calhoun and all southern statesmen expounded it. They assumed
that, since each of their States had entered the Union of its own accord,
as into a free partnership, and might have declined to enter it, it was
clearly within its privilege to withdraw when just cause for withdrawal
seemed to exist. It was an assumption the theory of which would hardly
have been seriously questioned while the generation lived which made
the Union; though that generation would have been as ready as any that
followed it, no doubt, to make protest, it might be of arms, against
actual secession. Neither change of thought nor change of political
conditions in the nation at large had altered the thought of the South
with regard to the character of the government; for she had not herself
changed, and her own thought had kept steadfastly to the first conception
of the Union. But to the rest of the country such a theory had become
little less than incredible, often as southern statesmen had expounded
and pressed it. The constitution of a nation, though written, cannot
remain a mere legal document. The life of each succeeding generation must
inevitably be read into it, if only, because it must be men of successive
generations who read and interpret it. They can but comprehend it in
terms of their own lives. It must become the vehicle of their growing
thought, if it is to suffice them; must serve as the skeleton frame of
a living organism. For a majority of the nation no conception of the
Union was now possible but that which Mr. Webster had seemed to create
and bring once for all to their consciousness in that debate with Hayne
which had been a turning point in all men’s thinking. A Union full of new
States, themselves its own creation; a people recruited out of almost
every civilized nation of the world, bound together by railway and
telegraph, busy with enterprises which no State or section could imprison
within local boundaries, quick and various, as in the old days, but now
at last conscious of its unity and its organic integrity, could not turn
back to a particularistic creed which might make every jar of politics
threaten to break its joints asunder.
And so it happened that the action of the southern States took the North
by surprise. Often as they had heard the doctrine of secession preached,
the northern people looked upon it as a singular and novel thing when
they saw it thus put into practice. The spirit, precision, and concert,
the despatch and radical thoroughness with which the southern men acted,
as if upon a programme familiar and matter of course, filled the North
for a little with mere dull amazement. Their quick pace in revolution,
their confidence as of men who had no doubts or misgivings, confused
and for a brief space dismayed those to whom the North naturally looked
for counsel and guidance. The very month South Carolina seceded, before
any other State had taken action to join her, she sent commissioners to
Washington to arrange, as of course, for a division of the national
debt and for the formal transfer of all national property lying within
the State; and Mr. Buchanan knew not what to do. He promptly and
unequivocally denied the right of the States to secede; but he knew, he
said, no legal means of actually preventing their secession. The law
officers of the government could give him no light; from no quarter came
any clear counsel or unhalting judgment in the matter. Congress attempted
measures of compromise. A Peace Conference assembled, at the suggestion
of Virginia, to discuss plans of accommodation, and a committee of the
Senate concurred in its recommendations: the extension of the Missouri
compromise line to the Pacific, the positive establishment of slavery by
law south of that line, and compensation from the federal treasury for
all fugitive slaves rescued after arrest. But Congress seemed partially
dissolved, ere the winter was over, by the withdrawal of members from the
States which one by one seceded; nothing could be done while it seemed
insecure of its very membership; there was nowhere agreement or coolness
or courage enough to make any plan feasible.
[Illustration: A SNAG BOAT ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER]