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.