THE SLAVERY QUESTION
The Compromise of 1850, though welcomed on all sides as a final
settlement, failed as completely as the Missouri Compromise had
succeeded. It has already been said that the fault was not in any lack
of skill in the actual framing of the plan. As a piece of political
workmanship it was even superior to Clay's earlier masterpiece, as the
rally to it at the moment of all but the extreme factions, North and
South, sufficiently proves. That it did not stand the wear of a few
years as well as the earlier settlement had stood the wear of twenty was
due to a change in conditions, and to understand that change it is
necessary to take up again the history of the Slavery Question where the
founders of the Republic left it.
It can hardly be said that these great men were wrong in tolerating
Slavery. Without such toleration at the time the Union could not have
been achieved and the American Republic could not have come into being.
But it can certainly be said that they were wrong in the calculation by
means of which they largely justified such toleration not so much to
their critics as to their own consciences. They certainly expected, when
they permitted Slavery for a season, that Slavery would gradually weaken
and disappear. But as a fact it strengthened itself, drove its roots
deeper, gained a measure of moral prestige, and became every year harder
to destroy.
Whence came their miscalculation? In part no doubt it was connected with
that curious and recurrent illusion which postulates in human affairs--a
thing called "Progress." This illusion, though both logically and
practically the enemy of reform--for if things of themselves tend to
grow better, why sweat and agonize to improve them?--is none the less
characteristic, generally speaking, of reforming epochs, and it was not
without its hold over the minds of the American Fathers. But there were
also certain definite causes, some of which they could hardly have
foreseen, some of which they might, which account for the fact that
Slavery occupied a distinctly stronger position halfway through the
nineteenth century than it had seemed to do at the end of the
eighteenth.
The main cause was an observable fact of psychology, of which a thousand
examples could be quoted, and which of itself disposes of the whole
"Progressive" thesis--the ease with which the human conscience gets used
to an evil. Time, so far from being a remedy--as the "Progressives" do
vainly talk--is always, while no remedy is attempted, a factor in favour
of the disease. We have seen this exemplified in the course of the
present war. The mere delay in the punishment of certain gross outrages
against the moral traditions of Europe has made those outrages seem just
a little less horrible than they seemed at first, so that men can even
bear to contemplate a peace by which their authors should escape
punishment--a thing which would have been impossible while the anger of
decent men retained its virginity. So it was with Slavery. Accepted at
first as an unquestionable blot on American Democracy, but one which
could not at the moment be removed, it came gradually to seem something
normal. A single illustration will show the extent of this decline in
moral sensitiveness. In the first days of the Republic Jefferson, a
Southerner and a slave-owner, could declare, even while compromising
with Slavery, that he trembled for his country when he remembered that
God was just, could use of the peril of a slave insurrection this fine
phrase: "The Almighty has no attribute that could be our ally in such a
contest." Some sixty years later, Stephen Douglas, as sincere a democrat
as Jefferson, and withal a Northerner with no personal interest in
Slavery, could ask contemptuously whether if Americans were fit to rule
themselves they were not fit to rule "a few niggers."
The next factor to be noticed was that to which Jefferson referred in
the passage quoted above--the constant dread of a Negro rising. Such a
rising actually took place in Virginia in the first quarter of the
nineteenth century. It was a small affair, but the ghastly massacre of
whites which accompanied it was suggestive of the horrors that might be
in store for the South in the event of a more general movement among the
slaves. The debates which this crisis produced in the Virginian
legislature are of remarkable interest. They show how strong the feeling
against Slavery as an institution still was in the greatest of Slave
States. Speaker after speaker described it as a curse, as a permanent
peril, as a "upas tree" which must be uprooted before the State could
know peace and security. Nevertheless they did not uproot it. And from
the moment of their refusal to uproot it or even to make a beginning of
uprooting it they found themselves committed to the opposite policy
which could only lead to its perpetuation. From the panic of that moment
date the generality of the Slave Codes which so many of the Southern
States adopted--codes deliberately framed to prevent any improvement in
the condition of the slave population and to make impossible even their
peaceful and voluntary emancipation.
There was yet another factor, the economic one, which to most modern
writers, starting from the basis of historical materialism, has
necessarily seemed the chief of all. It was really, I think, subsidiary,
but it was present, and it certainly helped to intensify the evil. It
consisted in the increased profitableness of Slavery, due, on the one
hand, to the invention in America of Whitney's machine for extracting
cotton, and, on the other, to the industrial revolution in England, and
the consequent creation in Lancashire of a huge and expanding market for
the products of American slave labour. This had a double effect. It not
only strengthened Slavery, but also worsened its character. In place of
the generally mild and paternal rule of the old gentlemen-planters came
in many parts of the South a brutally commercial _régime_, which
exploited and used up the Negro for mere profit. It was said that in
this further degradation of Slavery the agents were often men from the
commercial North; nor can this be pronounced a mere sectional slander
in view of the testimony of two such remarkable witnesses as Abraham
Lincoln and Mrs. Beecher Stowe.
All these things tended to establish the institution of Slavery in the
Southern States. Another factor which, whatever its other effects,
certainly consolidated Southern opinion in its defence, was to be found
in the activities of the Northern Abolitionists.
In the early days of the Republic Abolition Societies had existed
mainly, if not exclusively, in the South. This was only natural, for,
Slavery having disappeared from the Northern States, there was no
obvious motive for agitating or discussing its merits, while south of
the Mason-Dixon line the question was still a practical one. The
Southern Abolitionists do not appear to have been particularly unpopular
with their fellow-citizens. They are perhaps regarded as something of
cranks, but as well-meaning cranks whose object was almost everywhere
admitted to be theoretically desirable. At any rate, there is not the
suspicion of any attempt to suppress them; indeed, the very year before
the first number of the _Liberator_ was published in Boston, a great
Conference of Anti-Slavery Societies, comprising delegates from every
part of the South, met at Baltimore, the capital city of the Slave State
of Maryland.
Northern Abolitionism was, however, quite a different thing. It owed its
inception to William Lloyd Garrison, one of those enthusiasts who
profoundly affect history solely by the tenacity with which they hold to
and continually enforce a burning personal conviction. But for that
tenacity and the unquestionable influence which his conviction exerted
upon men, he would be a rather ridiculous figure, for he was almost
every sort of crank--certainly a non-resister, and, I think, a
vegetarian and teetotaller as well. But his burning conviction was the
immorality of Slavery; and by this he meant something quite other than
was meant by Jefferson or later by Lincoln. When these great men spoke
of Slavery as a wrong, they regarded it as a social and political wrong,
an evil and unjust system which the community as a community ought as
soon as possible to abolish and replace by a better. But by Garrison
slave-holding was accounted a personal sin like murder or adultery. The
owner of slaves, unless he at once emancipated them at whatever cost to
his own fortunes, was by that fact a wicked man, and if he professed a
desire for ultimate extinction of the institution, that only made him a
hypocrite as well. This, of course, was absurd; fully as absurd as the
suggestion sometimes made in regard to wealthy Socialists, that if they
were consistent they would give up all their property to the community.
A man living under an economic system reposing on Slavery can no more
help availing himself of its fruits than in a capitalist society he can
help availing himself of capitalist organization. Obviously, unless he
is a multi-millionaire, he cannot buy up all the slaves in the State and
set them free, while, if he buys some and treats them with justice and
humanity, he is clearly making things better for them than if he left
them in the hands of masters possibly less scrupulous. But, absurd as
the thesis was, Garrison pushed it to its wildest logical conclusions.
No Christian Church ought, he maintained, to admit a slave-owner to
communion. No honest man ought to count a slave-owner among his friends.
No political connection with slave-owners was tolerable. The Union,
since it involved such a connection, was "a Covenant with Death and an
Agreement with Hell." Garrison publicly burnt the Constitution of the
United States in the streets of Boston.
Abolitionist propaganda of this kind was naturally possible only in the
North. Apart from all questions of self-interest, no Southerner, no
reasonable person who knew anything about the South, though the
knowledge might be as superficial and the indignation against Slavery as
intense as was Mrs. Beecher Stowe's, could possibly believe the
proposition that all Southern slave-owners were cruel and unjust men.
But that was not all. Garrison's movement killed Southern Abolitionism.
It may, perhaps, be owned that the Southern movement was not bearing
much visible fruit. There was just a grain of truth, it may be, in
Garrison's bitter and exaggerated taunt that the Southerners were ready
enough to be Abolitionists if they were allowed "to assign the guilt of
Slavery to a past generation, and the duty of emancipation to a future
generation." Nevertheless, that movement was on the right lines. It was
on Southern ground that the battle for the peaceful extinction of
Slavery ought to have been fought. The intervention of the North would
probably in any case have been resented; accompanied by a solemn
accusation of specific personal immorality it was maddeningly
provocative, for it could not but recall to the South the history of the
issue as it stood between the sections. For the North had been the
original slave-traders. The African Slave Trade had been their
particular industry. Boston itself, when the new ethical denunciation
came, had risen to prosperity on the profits of that abominable traffic.
Further, even in the act of clearing its own borders of Slavery, the
North had dumped its negroes on the South. "What," asked the
Southerners, "could exceed the effrontery of men who reproach us with
grave personal sin in owning property which they themselves have sold us
and the price of which is at this moment in their pockets?"
On a South thus angered and smarting under what is felt to be undeserved
reproach, yet withal somewhat uneasy in its conscience, for its public
opinion in the main still thought Slavery wrong, fell the powerful voice
of a great Southerner proclaiming it "a positive good." Calhoun's
defence of the institution on its merits probably did much to encourage
the South to adopt a more defiant tone in place of the old apologies for
delay in dealing with a difficult problem--apologies which sounded
over-tame and almost humiliating in face of the bold invectives now
hurled at the slave-owners by Northern writers and speakers. I cannot,
indeed, find that Calhoun's specific arguments, forcible as they
were--and they are certainly the most cogent that can be used in defence
of such a thesis--were particularly popular, or, in fact, were ever used
by any but himself. Perhaps there was a well-founded feeling that they
proved too much. For Calhoun's case was as strong for white servitude as
for black: it was a defence, not especially of Negro Slavery, but of
what Mr. Belloc has called "the Servile State." More general, in the
later Southern defences, was the appeal to religious sanctions, which in
a nation Protestant and mainly Puritan in its traditions naturally
became an appeal to Bible texts. St. Paul was claimed as a supporter of
the fugitive slave law on the strength of his dealings of Onesimus. But
the favourite text was that which condemns Ham (assumed to be the
ancestor of the Negro race) to be "a servant of servants." The
Abolitionist text-slingers were not a whit more intelligent; indeed, I
think it must be admitted that on the whole the pro-Slavery men had the
best of this absurd form of controversy. Apart from isolated texts they
had on their side the really unquestionable fact that both Old and New
Testaments describe a civilization based on Slavery, and that in neither
is there anything like a clear pronouncement that such a basis is
immoral or displeasing to God. It is true that in the Gospels are to be
found general principles or, at any rate, indications of general
principles, which afterwards, in the hands of the Church, proved largely
subversive of the servile organization of society; but that is a matter
of historical, not of Biblical testimony, and would, if followed out,
have led both Northern and Southern controversialists further than
either of them wanted to go.
It would, however, be hasty, I think, to affirm that even to the very
end of these processes a majority of Southerners thought with Calhoun
that Slavery was "a positive good." The furthest, perhaps, that most of
them went was the proposition that it represented the only relationship
in which white and black races could safely live together in the same
community--a proposition which was countenanced by Jefferson and, to a
considerable extent at least, by Lincoln. To the last the full
Jeffersonian view of the inherent moral and social evil of Slavery was
held by many Southerners who were none the less wholeheartedly on the
side of their own section in the sectional dispute. The chief soldier of
the South in the war in which that dispute culminated both held that
view and acted consistently upon it.
On the North the effect of the new propaganda was different, but there
also it tended to increase the antagonism of the sections. The actual
Abolitionists of the school of Garrison were neither numerous nor
popular. Even in Boston, where they were strongest, they were often
mobbed and their meetings broken up. In Illinois, a Northern State, one
of them, Lovejoy, was murdered by the crowd. Such exhibitions of
popular anger were not, of course, due to any love of Slavery. The
Abolitionists were disliked in the North, not as enemies of Slavery but
as enemies of the Union and the Constitution, which they avowedly were.
But while the extreme doctrine of Garrison and his friends met with
little acceptance, the renewed agitation of the question did bring into
prominence the unquestionable fact that the great mass of sober Northern
opinion thought Slavery a wrong, and in any controversy between master
and slave was inclined to sympathize with the slave. This feeling was
probably somewhat strengthened by the publication in 1852 and the
subsequent huge international sale of Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
The practical effect of this book on history is generally exaggerated,
partially in consequence of the false view which would make of the Civil
War a crusade against Slavery. But a certain effect it undoubtedly had.
To such natural sympathy in the main, and not, as the South believed, to
sectional jealousy and deliberate bad faith, must be attributed those
"Personal Liberty Laws" by which in many Northern States the provision
of the Constitution guaranteeing the return of fugitive slaves was
virtually nullified. For some of the provisions of those laws an
arguable constitutional case might be made, particularly for the
provision which assured a jury trial to the escaped slave. The Negro, it
was urged, was either a citizen or a piece of property. If he were a
citizen, the Constitution expressly safeguarded him against imprisonment
without such a trial. If, on the other hand, he were property, then he
was property of the value of more than $50, and in cases where property
of that value was concerned, a jury was also legally required. If two
masters laid claim to the same Negro the dispute between them would have
to be settled by a jury. Why should it not be so where a master claimed
to own a Negro and the Negro claimed to own himself? Nevertheless, the
effect, and to a great extent the intention, of these laws was to defeat
the claim of _bonâ fide_ owners to fugitive slaves, and as such they
violated at least the spirit of the constitutional compact. They
therefore afforded a justification for Clay's proposal to transfer the
power of recovering fugitive slaves to the Federal authorities. But they
also afforded an even stronger justification for Lincoln's doubt as to
whether the American Commonwealth could exist permanently half slave and
half free.
Finally, among the causes which made a sectional struggle the more
inevitable must be counted one to which allusion has already been made
in connection with the Presidential Election of 1848--the increasingly
patent unreality of the existing party system. I have already said that
a party system can endure only if it becomes unreal, and it may be well
here to make clear how this is so.
Fundamental debates in a Commonwealth must be _settled_, or the
Commonwealth dies. How, for instance, could England have endured if,
throughout the eighteenth century, the Stuarts had alternately been
restored and deposed every seven years? Or, again, suppose a dispute so
fundamental as that between Collectivism and the philosophy of private
property. How could a nation continue to exist if a Collectivist
Government spent five years in attempting the concentration of all the
means of production in the hands of the State and an Anti-Collectivist
Government spent the next five years in dispersing them again, and so on
for a generation? American history, being the history of a democracy,
illustrates this truth with peculiar force. The controversy between
Jefferson and Hamilton was about realities. The Jeffersonians won, and
the Federalist Party disappeared. The controversy between Jackson and
the Whigs was originally also real. Jackson won, and the Whigs would
have shared the fate of the Federalists if they stood by their original
principles and refused to accept the consequences of the Jacksonian
Revolution. As a fact, however, they did accept these consequences and
so the party system endured, but at the expense of its reality. There
was no longer any fundamental difference of principle dividing Whigs
from Democrats: they were divided arbitrarily on passing questions of
policy, picked up at random and changing from year to year. Meanwhile a
new reality was dividing the nation from top to bottom, but was dividing
it in a dangerously sectional fashion, and for that reason patriotism as
well as the requirements of professional politics induced men to veil it
as much as might be. Yet its presence made the professional play-acting
more and more unmeaning and intolerable.
It was this state of things which made possible the curious interlude of
the "Know-Nothing" movement, which cannot be ignored, though it is a
kind of digression from the main line of historical development. The
United States had originally been formed by the union of certain
seceding British colonies, but already, as a sort of neutral ground in
the New World, their territory had become increasingly the meeting-place
of streams of emigration from various European countries. As was
natural, a certain amount of mutual jealousy and antagonism was making
itself apparent as between the old colonial population and the newer
elements. The years following 1847 showed an intensification of the
problem due to a particular cause. That year saw the Black Famine in
Ireland and its aggravation by the insane pedantry and folly of the
British Government. Innumerable Irish families, driven from the land of
their birth, found a refuge within the borders of the Republic. They
brought with them their native genius for politics, which for the first
time found free outlet in a democracy. They were accustomed to act
together and they were soon a formidable force. This force was regarded
by many as a menace, and the sense of menace was greatly increased by
the fact that these immigrants professed a religious faith which the
Puritan tradition of the States in which they generally settled held in
peculiar abhorrence.
The "Know-Nothings" were a secret society and owed that name to the fact
that members, when questioned, professed to know nothing of the ultimate
objects of the organization to which they belonged. They proclaimed a
general hostility to indiscriminate immigration, for which a fair enough
case might be made, but they concentrated their hostility specially on
the Irish Catholic element. I have never happened upon any explanation
of the secrecy with which they deliberately surrounded their aims. It
seems to me, however, that a possible explanation lies on the surface.
If all they had wanted had been to restrict or regulate immigration, it
was an object which could be avowed as openly as the advocacy of a
tariff or of the restriction of Slavery in a territory. But if, as their
practical operations and the general impression concerning their
intentions seem to indicate, the real object of those who directed the
movement was the exclusion from public trust of persons professing the
Catholic religion, then, of course, it was an object which could not be
avowed without bringing them into open conflict with the Constitution,
which expressly forbade such differentiation on religious grounds.
Between the jealousy of new immigrants felt by the descendants of the
original colonists and the religious antagonism of Puritan New England
to the Catholic population growing up within its borders; intensified by
the absence of any genuine issue of debate between the official
candidates, the Know-Nothings secured at the Congressional Election of
1854 a quite startling measure of success. But such success had no
promise of permanence. The movement lived long enough to deal a
death-blow to the Whig Party, already practically annihilated by the
Presidential Election of 1852, wherein the Democrats, benefiting by the
division and confusion of their enemies, easily returned their
candidate, Franklin Pierce.
It is now necessary to return to the Compromise of 1850, hailed at the
time as a final settlement of the sectional quarrel and accepted as such
in the platforms of both the regular political parties. That Compromise
was made by one generation. It was to be administered by another. Henry
Clay, as has already been noted, lived long enough to enjoy his triumph,
not long enough to outlive it. Before a year was out the grave had
closed over Webster. Calhoun had already passed away, bequeathing to
posterity his last hopeless protest against the triumph of all that he
most feared. Congress was full of new faces. In the Senate among the
rising men was Seward of New York, a Northern Whig, whose speech in
opposition to the Fugitive Slave clause in Clay's Compromise had given
him the leadership of the growing Anti-Slavery opinion of the North. He
was soon to be joined by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, null in
judgment, a pedant without clearness of thought or vision, but gifted
with a copious command of all the rhetoric of sectional hate. The place
of Calhoun in the leadership of the South had been more and more assumed
by a soldier who had been forced to change his profession by reason of
a crippling wound received at Monterey. Thenceforward he had achieved an
increasing repute in politics, an excellent orator, with the sensitive
face rather of a poet than of a man of affairs, vivid, sincere and
careful of honour, though often uncertain in temper and judgment:
Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. But for the moment none of these so
dominated politics as did the Westerner whom Illinois had recently sent
to the Senate--Stephen Douglas, surnamed "the Little Giant."
The physical impression which men seem to have received most forcibly
concerning Douglas, and which was perhaps responsible for his nickname,
was the contrast between his diminutive stature and the enormous power
of his voice--trained no doubt in addressing the monster meetings of the
West, where tens of thousands crowded everywhere to hear him speak.
Along with this went the sense of an overwhelming vitality about the
man; he seemed tingling with excess of life. His strong, square,
handsome face bore a striking resemblance to that of Napoleon Bonaparte,
and there was really something Napoleonic in his boldness, his
instinctive sense of leadership, and his power of dominating weaker men.
Withal he was a Westerner--perhaps the most typical and complete
Westerner in American history, for half of Clay was of Washington, and
Jackson and Lincoln were too great to be purely sectional. He had a
Westerner's democratic feeling and a Westerner's enthusiasm for the
national idea. But, especially, he had a peculiarly Western vision which
is the key to a strangely misunderstood but at bottom very consistent
political career.
This man, more than any other, fills American history during the decade
that intervened between the death of Clay and the election of Lincoln.
That decade is also full of the ever-increasing prominence of the
Slavery Question. It is natural, therefore, to read Douglas's career in
terms of that question, and historians, doing so, have been bewildered
by its apparent inconsistency. Unable to trace any connecting principle
in his changes of front, they have put them down to interested motives,
and then equally unable to show that he himself had anything to gain
from them, have been forced to attribute them to mere caprice. The fact
is that Douglas cannot be understood along those lines at all. To
understand him one must remember that he was indifferent on the Slavery
Question, "did not care," as he said, "whether Slavery was voted up or
voted down," but cared immensely for something else. That something else
was the Westward expansion of the American nation till it should bridge
the gulf between the two oceans. The thought of all those millions of
acres of virgin land, the property of the American Commonwealth, crying
out for the sower and the reaper, rode his imagination as the wrongs of
the Negro slave rode the imagination of Garrison. There is a reality
about the comparison which few will recognize, for this demagogue, whom
men devoted to the Slavery issue thought cynical, had about him also
something of the fanatic. He could forget all else in his one
enthusiasm. It is the key to his career from the day when he entered
Congress clamouring for Oregon or war with England to the day when he
died appealing for soldiers to save the Union in the name of its common
inheritance. And it is surely not surprising that, for the fulfilment of
his vision, he was willing to conciliate the slave-owners, when one
remembers that in earlier days he had been willing to conciliate the
Mormons.
Douglas stands out in history, as we now see it, as the man who by the
Kansas and Nebraska Bill upset the tottering Compromise of 1850. Why did
he so upset it? Not certainly because he wished to reopen the Slavery
Question; nothing is less likely, for it was a question in which he
avowedly felt no interest and the raising of which was bound to unsettle
his plans. Not from personal ambition; for those who accuse him of
having acted as he did for private advantage have to admit that in fact
he lost by it. Why then did he so act? I think we shall get to the root
of the matter if we assume that his motive in introducing his celebrated
Bill was just the avowed motive of that Bill and no other. It was to set
up territorial governments in Kansas and Nebraska. Douglas's mind was
full of schemes for facilitating the march of American civilization
westward, for piercing the prairies with roads and railways, for opening
up communications with Oregon and the Pacific Slope. Kansas and
Nebraska were then the outposts of such expansion. Naturally he was
eager to develop them, to encourage squatters to settle within their
borders, and for that purpose to give them an assured position and a
form of stable government. If he could have effected this without
touching the Slavery Question I think that he would gladly have done so.
And, as a matter of fact, the Nebraska Bill as originally drafted by him
was innocent of the clause which afterwards caused so much controversy.
That clause was forced on him by circumstances.
The greater part of the territory which Douglas proposed to develop lay
within the limits of the Louisiana Purchase and north of latitude 36°
30'. It was therefore free soil by virtue of the Missouri Compromise.
But the Southerners now disputed the validity of that Congressional
enactment, and affirmed their right under the Constitution as they
interpreted it to take and hold their "property" in any territories
belonging to the United States. Douglas had some reason to fear Southern
opposition to his plans on other grounds, for the South would naturally
have preferred that the main road to the Pacific Slope should run from
Tennessee through Arizona and New Mexico to California. If Kansas and
Nebraska were declared closed against slave property their opposition
would be given a rallying cry and would certainly harden. Douglas
therefore proposed a solution which would at any rate get rid of the
Slavery debate so far as Congress was concerned, and which had also a
democratic ring about it acceptable to his Western instincts and, as he
hoped, to his Western following. The new doctrine, called by him that of
"Popular Sovereignty" and by his critics that of "Squatter Sovereignty,"
amounted to this: that the existing settlers in the territories
concerned should, in the act of forming their territorial governments,
decide whether they would admit or exclude Slavery.
It was a plausible doctrine; but one can only vindicate Douglas's
motives, as I have endeavoured to do, at the expense of his judgment,
for his policy had all the consequences which he most desired to avoid.
It produced two effects which between them brought the sectional quarrel
to the point of heat at which Civil War became possible and perhaps
inevitable. It threw the new territories down as stakes to be scrambled
for by the rival sections, and it created by reaction a new party,
necessarily sectional, having for its object the maintenance and
reinforcement of the Missouri Compromise. It will be well to take the
two points separately.
Up to the passing of Kansas and Nebraska Law, these territories had been
populated exactly as such frontier communities had theretofore been
populated, by immigrants from all the States and from Europe who mingled
freely, felt no ill-will to each other, and were early consolidated by
the fact of proximity into a homogeneous community. But from the moment
of its passage the whole situation was altered. It became a political
object to both sections to get a majority in Kansas. Societies were
formed in Boston and other Northern cities to finance emigrants who
proposed to settle there. The South was equally active, and, to set off
against the disadvantage of a less fluid population, had the advantage
of the immediate proximity of the Slave State of Missouri. Such a
contest, even if peaceably conducted, was not calculated to promote
either the reconciliation of the sections or the solidarity and
stability of the new community. But in a frontier community without a
settled government, and with a population necessarily armed for
self-defence, it was not likely to be peaceably conducted. Nor was it.
For years Kansas was the scene of what can only be described as
spasmodic civil war. The Free Soil settlement of Lawrence was, after
some bloodshed, seized and burnt by "border ruffians," as they were
called, from Missouri. The North cried out loudly against "Southern
outrages," but it is fair to say that the outrages were not all on one
side. In fact, the most amazing crime in the record of Kansas was
committed by a Northerner, the notorious John Brown. This man presents
rather a pathological than a historical problem. He had considerable
military talents, and a curious power of persuading men. But he was
certainly mad. A New England Puritan by extraction, he was inflamed on
the subject of Slavery by a fanaticism somewhat similar to that of
Garrison. But while Garrison blended his Abolitionism with the Quaker
dogma of Non-Resistance, Brown blended his with the ethics of a
seventeenth-century Covenanter who thought himself divinely commanded to
hew the Amalakites in pieces before the Lord. In obedience to his
peculiar code of morals he not only murdered Southern immigrants without
provocation, but savagely mutilated their bodies. If his act did not
prove him insane his apology would. In defence of his conduct he
explained that "disguised as a surveyor" he had interviewed his victims
and discovered that every one of them had "committed murder in his
heart."
The other effect of the Kansas-Nebraska policy was the rise of a new
party formed for the single purpose of opposing it. Anti-Slavery parties
had already come into being from time to time in the North, and had at
different times exerted a certain influence on elections, but they made
little headway because they were composed mainly of extremists, and
their aim appeared to moderate men inconsistent with the Constitution.
The attack on the time-honoured Missouri Compromise rallied such men to
the opposition, for it appeared to them clearly that theirs was now the
legal, constitutional, and even conservative side, and that the Slave
Power was now making itself responsible for a revolutionary change to
its own advantage.
Nor was the change on the whole unjust. The programme to which the South
committed itself after the direction of its policy fell from the hands
of Calhoun was one which the North could not fail to resent. It involved
the tearing up of all the compromises so elaborately devised and so
nicely balanced, and it aimed at making Slavery legal certainly in all
the new territories and possibly even in the Free States. It was,
indeed, argued that this did not involve any aggravating of the evil of
Slavery, if it were an evil. The argument will be found very ingeniously
stated in the book which Jefferson Davis subsequently wrote--professedly
a history of the Southern Confederacy, really rather an _Apologia pro
Vita Sua_. Davis argues that since the African Slave Trade was
prohibited, there could be no increase in the number of slaves save by
the ordinary process of propagation. The opening of Kansas to Slavery
would not therefore mean that there would be more slaves. It would
merely mean that men already and in any case slaves would be living in
Kansas instead of in Tennessee; and, it is further suggested, that the
taking of a Negro slave from Tennessee, where Slavery was rooted and
normal, to Kansas, where it was new and exceptional, would be a positive
advantage to him as giving him a much better chance of emancipation. The
argument reads plausibly enough, but it is, like so much of Davis's
book, out of touch with realities. Plainly it would make all the
difference in the world whether the practice of, say, the Catholic
religion were permitted only in Lancashire or were lawful throughout
England, and that even though there were no conversions, and the same
Catholics who had previously lived in Lancashire lived wherever they
chose. The former provision would imply that the British Government
disapproved of the Catholic religion, and would tolerate it only where
it was obliged to do so. The latter would indicate an attitude of
indifference towards it. Those who disapproved of Slavery naturally
wished it to remain a sectional thing and objected to its being made
national. But the primary feeling was that it was the South that had
broken the truce. The Northerners had much justification in saying that
their opponents, if not the aggressors in the Civil War, were at least
the aggressors in the controversy of which the Civil War was the
ultimate outcome.
Under the impulse of such feelings a party was formed which,
adopting--without, it must be owned, any particular appropriateness--the
old Jeffersonian name of "Republican," took the field at the
Presidential Election of 1856. Its real leader was Seward of New York,
but it was thought that electioneering exigencies would be better served
by the selection of Captain Frémont of California, who, as a wandering
discoverer and soldier of fortune, could be made a picturesque figure in
the public eye. Later, when Frémont was entrusted with high military
command he was discovered to be neither capable nor honest, but in 1856
he made as effective a figure as any candidate could have done, and the
results were on the whole encouraging to the new party. Buchanan, the
Democratic candidate, was elected, but the Republicans showed greater
strength in the Northern States than had been anticipated. The Whig
Party was at this election finally annihilated.
The Republicans might have done even better had the decision of the
Supreme Court on an issue which made clear the full scope of the new
Southern claim been known just before instead of just after the
election. This decision was the judgment of Roger Taney, whom we have
seen at an earlier date as Jackson's Attorney-General and Secretary to
the Treasury, in the famous Dred Scott case. Dred Scott was a Negro
slave owned by a doctor of Missouri. His master had taken him for a time
into the free territory of Minnesota, afterwards bringing him back to
his original State. Dred Scott was presumably not in a position to
resent either operation, nor is it likely that he desired to do so.
Later, however, he was induced to bring an action in the Federal Courts
against his master on the ground that by being taken into free territory
he had _ipso facto_ ceased to be a slave. Whether he was put up to this
by the Anti-Slavery party, or whether--for his voluntary manumission
after the case was settled seems to suggest that possibility--the whole
case was planned by the Southerners to get a decision of the territorial
question in their favour, might be an interesting subject for inquiry. I
can express no opinion upon it. The main fact is that Taney, supported
by a bare majority of the judges, not only decided for the master, but
laid down two important principles. One was that no Negro could be an
American citizen or sue in the American courts; the other and more
important that the Constitution guaranteed the right of the slave-holder
to his slaves in all United States territories, and that Congress had no
power to annul this right. The Missouri Compromise was therefore
declared invalid.
Much of the Northern outcry against Taney seems to me unjust. He was
professedly a judge pronouncing on the law, and in giving his ruling he
used language which seems to imply that his ethical judgment, if he had
been called upon to give it, would have been quite different. But,
though he was a great lawyer as well as a sincere patriot, and though
his opinion is therefore entitled to respect, especially from a
foreigner ignorant of American law, it is impossible to feel that his
decision was not open to criticism on purely legal grounds. It rested
upon the assertion that property in slaves was "explicitly recognized"
by the Constitution. If this were so it would seem to follow that since
under the Constitution a man's property could not be taken from him
"without due process of law" he could not without such process lose his
slaves. But was it so? It is difficult, for a layman at any rate, to
find in the Constitution any such "explicit recognition." The slave is
there called a "person" and defined as a "person bound to service or
labour" while his master is spoken of as one "to whom such service or
labour may be due." This language seems to suggest the relation of
creditor and debtor rather than that of owner and owned. At any rate,
the Republicans refused to accept the judgment except so far as it
determined the individual case of Dred Scott, taking up in regard to
Taney's decision the position which, in accordance with Taney's own
counsel, Jackson had taken up in regard to the decision which affirmed
the constitutionality of a bank.
Douglas impetuously accepted the decision and, forgetting the precedent
of his own hero Jackson, denounced all who challenged it as wicked
impugners of lawful authority. Yet, in fact, the decision was as fatal
to his own policy as to that of the Republicans. It really made "Popular
Sovereignty" a farce, for what was the good of leaving the question of
Slavery to be settled by the territories when the Supreme Court declared
that they could only lawfully settle it one way? This obvious point was
not lost upon the acute intelligence of one man, a citizen of Douglas's
own State and one of the "moderates" who had joined the Republican Party
on the Nebraska issue.
Abraham Lincoln was by birth a Southerner and a native of Kentucky, a
fact which he never forgot and of which he was exceedingly proud. After
the wandering boyhood of a pioneer and a period of manual labour as a
"rail-splitter" he had settled in Illinois, where he had picked up his
own education and become a successful lawyer. He had sat in the House of
Representatives as a Whig from 1846 to 1848, the period of the Mexican
War, during which he had acted with the main body of his party, neither
defending the whole of the policy which led to the war nor opposing it
to the extent of refusing supplies for its prosecution. He had voted,
as he said, for the Wilmot Proviso "as good as fifty times," and had
made a moderate proposition in relation to Slavery in the district of
Columbia, for which Garrison's _Liberator_ had pilloried him as "the
Slave-Hound of Illinois." He had not offered himself for re-election in
1848. Though an opponent of Slavery on principle, he had accepted the
Compromise of 1850, including its Fugitive Slave Clauses, as a
satisfactory all-round settlement, and was, by his own account, losing
interest in politics when the action of Douglas and its consequences
called into activity a genius which few, if any, had suspected.
A man like Lincoln cannot be adequately described in the short space
available in such a book as this. His externals are well appreciated,
his tall figure, his powerful ugliness, his awkward strength, his racy
humour, his fits of temperamental melancholy; well appreciated also his
firmness, wisdom and patriotism. But if we wish to grasp the peculiar
quality which makes him almost unique among great men of action, we
shall perhaps find the key in the fact that his favourite private
recreation was working out for himself the propositions of Euclid. He
had a mind not only peculiarly just but singularly logical, one might
really say singularly mathematical. His reasoning is always so good as
to make his speeches in contrast to the finest rhetorical oratory a
constant delight to those who have something of the same type of mind.
In this he had a certain affinity with Jefferson. But while in
Jefferson's case the tendency has been to class him, in spite of his
great practical achievements, as a mere theorizer, in Lincoln it has
been rather to acclaim him as a strong, rough, practical man, and to
ignore the lucidity of thought which was the most marked quality of his
mind.
He was eminently practical; and he was not less but more practical for
realizing the supreme practical importance of first principles.
According to his first principles Slavery was wrong. It was wrong
because it was inconsistent with the doctrines enunciated in the
Declaration of Independence in which he firmly believed. Really good
thinking like Lincoln's is necessarily outside time, and therefore he
was not at all affected by the mere use and wont which had tended to
reconcile so many to Slavery. Yet he was far from being a fanatical
Abolitionist. Because Slavery was wrong it did not follow that it should
be immediately uprooted. But it did follow that whatever treatment it
received should be based on the assumption of its wrongness. An
excellent illustration of his attitude of mind will be found in the
exact point at which he drew the line. For the merely sentimental
opponent of Slavery, the Fugitive Slave Law made a much more moving
appeal to the imagination than the extension of Slavery in the
territories. Yet Lincoln accepted the Fugitive Slave Law. He supported
it because, as he put it, it was "so nominated in the bond." It was part
of the terms which the Fathers of the Republic, disapproving of Slavery,
had yet made with Slavery. He also, disapproving of Slavery, could
honour those terms. But it was otherwise in regard to the territorial
controversy. Douglas openly treated Slavery not as an evil difficult to
cure, but as a thing merely indifferent. Southern statesmen were
beginning to echo Calhoun's definition of it as "a positive good." On
the top of this came Taney's decision making the right to own slaves a
fundamental part of the birthright of an American citizen. This was much
more important than the most drastic Fugitive Slave Law, for it
indicated a change in first principles.
This is the true meaning of his famous use of the text "a house divided
against itself cannot stand," and his deduction that the Union could not
"permanently exist half slave and half free." That it had so existed for
eighty years he admitted, but it had so existed, he considered, because
the Government had acted on the first principle that Slavery was an evil
to be tolerated but curbed, and the public mind had "rested in the
belief that it was in process of ultimate extinction." It was now, as it
seemed, proposed to abandon that principle and assume it to be good or
at least indifferent. If _that_ principle were accepted there was
nothing to prevent the institution being introduced not only into the
free territories but into the Free States. And indeed the reasoning of
Taney's judgment, though not the judgment itself, really seemed to point
to such a conclusion.
Lincoln soon became the leader of the Illinois Republicans, and made
ready to match himself against Douglas when the "Little Giant" should
next seek re-election. Meanwhile a new development of the Kansas affair
had split the Democratic Party and ranged Senator Douglas and President
Buchanan on opposite sides in an open quarrel. The majority of the
population now settled in Kansas was of Northern origin, for the
conditions of life in the North were much more favourable to emigration
into new lands than those of the slave-owning States. Had a free ballot
been taken of the genuine settlers there would certainly have been a
large majority against Slavery. But in the scarcely disguised civil war
into which the competition for Kansas had developed, the Slave-State
party had the support of bands of "border ruffians" from the
neighbouring State, who could appear as citizens of Kansas one day and
return to their homes in Missouri the next. With such aid that party
succeeded in silencing the voices of the Free State men while they held
a bogus Convention at Lecompton, consisting largely of men who were not
really inhabitants of Kansas at all, adopted a Slave Constitution, and
under it applied for admission to the Union. Buchanan, who, though a
Northerner, was strongly biassed in favour of the Slavery party, readily
accepted this as a _bonâ fide_ application, and recommended Congress to
accede to it. Douglas was much better informed as to how things were
actually going in Kansas, and he felt that if the Lecompton Constitution
were acknowledged his favourite doctrine of Popular Sovereignty would be
justly covered with odium and contempt. He therefore set himself against
the President, and his personal followers combined with the Republicans
to defeat the Lecompton proposition.
The struggle in Illinois thus became for Douglas a struggle for
political life or death. At war with the President and with a large
section of his party, if he could not keep a grip on his own State his
political career was over. Nor did he underrate his Republican opponent;
indeed, he seems to have had a keener perception of the great qualities
which were hidden under Lincoln's rough and awkward exterior than anyone
else at that time exhibited. When he heard of his candidature he looked
grave. "He is the strongest man of his party," he said, "and thoroughly
honest. It will take us all our time to beat him."
It did. Douglas was victorious, but only narrowly and after a
hard-fought contest. The most striking feature of that contest was the
series of Lincoln-Douglas debates in which, by an interesting innovation
in electioneering, the two candidates for the Senatorship contended face
to face in the principal political centres of the State. In reading
these debates one is impressed not only with the ability of both
combatants, but with their remarkable candour, good temper and even
magnanimity. It is very seldom, if ever, that either displays malice or
fails in dignity and courtesy to his opponent. When one remembers the
white heat of political and sectional rivalry at that time--when one
recalls some of Sumner's speeches in the Senate, not to mention the
public beating which they brought on him--it must be confessed that the
fairness with which the two great Illinois champions fought each other
was highly to the honour of both.
Where the controversy turned on practical or legal matters the
combatants were not ill-matched, and both scored many telling points.
When the general philosophy of government came into the question
Lincoln's great superiority in seriousness and clarity of thought was at
once apparent. A good example of this will be found in their dispute as
to the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence. Douglas denied
that the expression "all men" could be meant to include Negroes. It only
referred to "British subjects in this continent being equal to British
subjects born and residing in Great Britain." Lincoln instantly knocked
out his adversary by reading the amended version of the Declaration: "We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all British subjects who were
on this Continent eighty-one years ago were created equal to all British
subjects born and then residing in Great Britain." This was more than a
clever debating point. It was a really crushing exposure of intellectual
error. The mere use of the words "truths" and "self-evident" and their
patently ridiculous effect in the Douglas version proves conclusively
which interpreter was nearest to the mind of Thomas Jefferson. And the
sense of his superiority is increased when, seizing his opportunity, he
proceeds to offer a commentary on the Declaration in its bearing on the
Negro Question so incomparably lucid and rational that Jefferson himself
might have penned it.
In the following year an incident occurred which is of some historical
importance, not because, as is sometimes vaguely suggested, it did
anything whatever towards the emancipation of the slaves, but because it
certainly increased, not unnaturally, the anger and alarm of the South.
Old John Brown had suspended for a time his programme of murder and
mutilation in Kansas and returned to New England, where he approached a
number of wealthy men of known Abolitionist sympathies whom he persuaded
to provide him with money for the purpose of raising a slave
insurrection. That he should have been able to induce men of sanity and
repute to support him in so frantic and criminal an enterprise says much
for the personal magnetism which by all accounts was characteristic of
this extraordinary man. Having obtained his supplies, he collected a
band of nineteen men, including his own sons, with which he proposed to
make an attack on the Government arsenal at Harper's Ferry in Virginia,
which, when captured, he intended to convert into a place of refuge and
armament for fugitive slaves and a nucleus for the general Negro rising
which he expected his presence to produce. The plan was as mad as its
author, yet it is characteristic of a peculiar quality of his madness
that he conducted the actual operations not only with amazing audacity
but with remarkable skill, and the first part of his programme was
successfully carried out. The arsenal was surprised, and its sleeping
and insufficient garrison overpowered. Here, however, his success ended.
No fugitives joined him, and there was not the faintest sign of a slave
rising. In fact, as Lincoln afterwards said, the Negroes, ignorant as
they were, seem to have had the sense to see that the thing would come
to nothing. As soon as Virginia woke up to what had happened troops were
sent to recapture the arsenal. Brown and his men fought bravely, but the
issue could not be in doubt. Several of Brown's followers and all his
sons were killed. He himself was wounded, captured, brought to trial
and very properly hanged--unless we take the view that he should rather
have been confined in an asylum. He died with the heroism of a fanatic.
Emerson and Longfellow talked some amazing nonsense about him which is
frequently quoted. Lincoln talked some excellent sense which is hardly
ever quoted. And the Republican party was careful to insert in its
platform a vigorous denunciation of his Harper's Ferry exploit.
Both sides now began to prepare for the Presidential Election of 1860.
The selection of a Republican candidate was debated at a large and
stormy Convention held in Chicago. Seward was the most prominent
Republican politician, but he had enemies, and for many reasons it was
thought that his adoption would mean the loss of available votes. Chase
was the favourite of the Radical wing of the party, but it was feared
that the selection of a man who was thought to lean to Abolitionism
would alienate the moderates. To secure the West was an important
element in the electoral problem, and this, together with the zealous
backing of his own State, within whose borders the Convention met, and
the fact that he was recognized as a "moderate," probably determined the
choice of Lincoln. It does not appear that any of those who chose him
knew that they were choosing a great man. Some acute observers had
doubtless noted the ability he displayed in his debates with Douglas,
but in the main he seems to have been recommended to the Chicago
Convention, as afterwards to the country, mainly on the strength of his
humble origin, his skill as a rail-splitter, and his alleged ability to
bend a poker between his fingers.
While the Republicans were thus choosing their champion, much fiercer
quarrels were rending the opposite party, whose Convention met at
Charleston. The great majority of the Northern delegates were for
choosing Douglas as candidate, and fighting on a programme of "popular
sovereignty." But the Southerners would not hear of either candidate or
programme. His attitude on the Lecompton business was no longer the only
count against Douglas. The excellent controversial strategy of Lincoln
had forced from him during the Illinois debates an interpretation of
"popular sovereignty" equally offensive to the South. Lincoln had asked
him how a territory whose inhabitants desired to exclude Slavery could,
if the Dred Scott decision were to be accepted, lawfully exclude it.
Douglas had answered that it could for practical purposes exclude it by
withholding legislation in its support and adopting "unfriendly
legislation" towards it. Lincoln at once pointed out that Douglas was
virtually advising a territorial government to nullify a judgment of the
Supreme Court. The cry was caught up in the South and was fatal to
Douglas's hopes of support from that section.
The Charleston Convention, split into two hostile sections, broke up
without a decision. The Douglas men, who were the majority, met at
Baltimore, acclaimed him as Democratic candidate and adopted his
programme. The dissentients held another Convention at Charleston and
adopted Breckinridge with a programme based upon the widest
interpretation of the Dred Scott judgment. To add to the multiplicity of
voices the rump of the old Whig Party, calling themselves the party of
"the Union, the Constitution and the Laws," nominated Everett and Bell.
The split in the Democratic Party helped the Republicans in another than
the obvious fashion of giving them the chance of slipping in over the
heads of divided opponents. It helped their moral position in the North.
It deprived the Democrats of their most effective appeal to Union-loving
men--the assertion that their party was national while the Republicans
were sectional. For Douglas was now practically as sectional as Lincoln.
As little as Lincoln could he command any considerable support south of
the Potomac. Moreover, the repudiation of Douglas seemed to many
Northerners to prove that the South was arrogant and unreasonable beyond
possibility of parley or compromise. The wildest of her protagonists
could not pretend that Douglas was a "Black Abolitionist," or that he
meditated any assault upon the domestic institutions of the Southern
States. If the Southerners could not work with him, with what
Northerner, not utterly and unconditionally subservient to them, could
they work? It seemed to many that the choice lay between a vigorous
protest now and the acceptance of the numerically superior North of a
permanently inferior position in the Confederation.
In his last electoral campaign the "Little Giant" put up a plucky fight
against his enemies North and South. But he had met his Waterloo. In the
whole Union he carried but one State and half of another. The South was
almost solid for Breckinridge. The North and West, from New England to
California, was as solid for Lincoln. A few border States gave their
votes for Everett. But, owing to the now overwhelming numerical
superiority of the Free States, the Republicans had in the Electoral
College a decided majority over all other parties.
Thus was Abraham Lincoln elected President of the United States. But
many who voted for him had hardly recorded their votes before they
became a little afraid of the thing they had done. Through the whole
continent ran the ominous whisper: "What will the South do?"
And men held their breath, waiting for what was to follow.