THE POLITICAL SITUATION
In several of his addresses before his election to the Presidency, Mr.
Lincoln gave utterance to the following language: "A house divided
against itself cannot stand. I believe this Government cannot
permanently remain half slave and half free. I do not expect the house
to fall, but I do expect it to cease to be divided. It will become all
one thing or all the other thing."
The same opinion had been enunciated several years before by John
Quincy Adams on the floor of Congress, when, with his accustomed
pungency, he declared, "The Union will fall before slavery or slavery
will fall before the Union."
But before either Adams or Lincoln spoke on the subject--away back in
1838--the same idea they expressed had a more elaborate and forcible
presentation in the following words:
"The conflict is becoming--has become--not alone of freedom for
the blacks, but of freedom for the whites. It has now become
absolutely necessary that slavery shall cease in order that
freedom may be preserved in any portion of our land. The
antagonistic principles of liberty and slavery have been roused
into action, and one or the other must be victorious. There will
be no cessation of the strife until slavery shall be exterminated
or liberty destroyed."
The author of the words last above quoted was James Gillespie Birney,
who was the first Abolitionist, or "Liberty party," candidate for the
Presidency, and of whose career a brief sketch is elsewhere given.
That the slaveholders reached the same conclusion that Birney and
Adams and Lincoln announced, viz., that the country was to be all one
thing or all the other thing, is as manifest as any fact in our
history. It is equally certain that they had firmly resolved to
capture the entire commonwealth for their "institution," and had laid
their plans to that end. They were unwilling to live in a divided
house, particularly with an occupant who was stronger in population
and wealth than they were.
They saw the danger in such association. Northern sentiment toward
slavery was complacent enough, even servilely so, but it might change.
The South thought it had too much at stake to take the chances when
the opportunity for absolute safety and permanent rule was within its
reach. It resolved to make the whole country, not only pro-slavery,
but slaveholding. If, through any mischance, it failed in its
calculation, the next step would be to tear down the house and from
its ruins reconstruct so much of it as might be needed for its own
occupancy. That it would be able in time to possess itself of the
whole country, however, for and in behalf of its industrial policy, it
did not for an instant doubt. It was not empty braggadocio on the part
of the celebrated Robert Toombs, of Georgia, when he uttered his
famous boast.[1] He voiced the practically unanimous opinion of his
section.
[1] See page 13.
Nor was there anything seemingly very presumptuous in that
anticipation. So far, the South had been invariably victorious. In
what appeared to be a decisive battle in the test case of admitting
Missouri into the Union as a slave State, it had won. So pronounced
was its triumph that whatever Anti-Slavery sentiment survived the
conflict appeared to be stunned and helpless. All fight was knocked
out of it. Its spirit was broken. While the South was not only compact
and fully alive, but exultingly aggressive, the North was divided,
fully one half of its population being about as pro-slavery as the
slaveholders themselves, and the rest, with rare exceptions, being
hopelessly apathetic. The Northern leaders of both of the old
political parties--Whig and Democratic--were what the Abolitionists
called "dough-faces," being Northern men with Southern principles. The
Church was "a dumb dog," and the press simply drifted with the tide.
It was not at all strange that the slaveholders expected to go on from
conquest to conquest.
There were two policies they could adopt. One was to attack the
enemy's citadel; or rather, the several citadels it possessed in its
individual States, and force them to open their doors to the master
and his human chattels. The other was to flank and cover, approaching
the main point of attack by way of the Territories. These, once in
possession of the slaveholders, could be converted into enough slave
States to give them the control of the general government, from which
coigne of advantage they could proceed in their own time and way to
possess themselves of such other free States as they might want.
In the matter of the Territories they had a great advantage. The North
was up against a stone wall at the Canadian border. In that direction
it could not advance a step, while the South had practically an
unlimited field on its side from which to carve possessions as they
might be wanted, very much as you would cut a pie.
In pursuance of its territorial policy--being the line of action it
first resolved upon--the first movement of the South was to annex
Texas--a victory. The next was to make war on Mexico, and (a joke of
the day) conquer a "piece" from it large enough to make half a dozen
States, all expected to be slaveholding--another victory.
By a curious irony the filching of land for slavery's uses from a
neighbor, and on which the foot of a slave had never pressed, was
exultingly spoken of at the time by its supporters as "an extension of
the area of freedom." The act was justified on the ground that we
needed "land for the landless," which led Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio to
assert on the floor of the United States Senate, with as much truth as
wit, that it was not land for the landless that was wanted, but
"niggers for the niggerless."
Then came the battle over Kansas. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska
Bill in Congress, although involving a breach of good faith on the
part of the South, was hailed as another victory for that section. It
was a costly victory. It was followed by defeat not only disastrous
but fatal. The result in Kansas was really the turning-point in the
great struggle. It broke the line of Southern victories. It
neutralized the effect of the whole territorial movement up to that
point. It completely spoiled the slaveholders' well-laid plans. We
will always give Grant and his men all praise for victories leading up
to Appomatox, but, in some respects, the most important victory of the
great conflict was won on the plains of Kansas by John Brown of
Ossawattomie and his Abolition associates.
The most sagacious Southern leaders saw in that result conclusive
proof that the scale was turned. They realized that they were beaten
within the lines of the Union, and they began to arrange for going out
of it. They helped to elect a Republican President by dividing the
Democratic party in 1860 between two candidates--Douglas and
Breckenridge--in order that they might have a plausible pretext for
secession.
But the slaveholders had not abandoned the other policy to which
reference has been made--that of carrying their institution, by main
force, as it were, into some, if not all, of the free States. To that
end they had, in sporting parlance, a card up their sleeves which they
proceeded to play. That card was the decision of the United States
Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, upon which they relied to give
them the legal power to take and hold their slaves in all parts of the
land. Up to the date of that decision, the current of judicial rulings
had been that slavery, being a municipal institution, was local,
while freedom was national. Hence, when a master took his slave into a
free State, at that instant he became a free man. The Dred Scott
decision was intended to reverse the rule. Practically it held that
slave ownership, wherever the Constitution prevailed, was both a legal
and a natural right. It, as Benton forcibly expressed it, "made
slavery the organic law of the land and freedom the exception"; or, as
it was jocularly expressed at the time, it left freedom nowhere.
Although at the time of its promulgation, it was claimed by some of
the more conservative pro-slavery leaders that the Dred Scott dictum
applied only to the Territories, giving the masters the legal
authority to enter them with their slaves, that position was clearly
deceptive. The principle involved, as laid down by the Court, was
altogether too broad for that construction. In effect it put the
proprietorship of human beings upon the same footing with other
property rights, and claimed for it the same constitutional
protection. The bolder men of the South, like Toombs of Georgia, did
not hesitate to give that interpretation to the Court's pronouncement,
and to insist on it with brutal frankness. If they were wrong, the
Court was putty in their hands and they could easily have had a
supplemental ruling that would have gone to any extent.
If the Dred Scott decision had been promulgated by our highest court,
and the slaveholders had insisted upon the license it was intended to
give them for taking their slave property into free territory, at the
time that Garrison was being dragged by a mob through Boston's
streets; when Birney's printing-press in Cincinnati was being tumbled
into the Ohio River; when Pennsylvania Hall, the Quaker Abolitionists'
forty-thousand-dollar construction, was ablaze in Philadelphia; when
Lovejoy, the Abolition martyr, was bleeding out his life in one of the
streets of Alton, Illinois--when, in fact, the whole land was swayed
by a frenzied hatred of the men and women who dared to question
slavery's right to supremacy, the writer believes the movement would
have been successful. Public opinion was so inclined in States like
Indiana and Illinois, and even in Ohio, that they might have been
easily toppled over to the South. Indeed, at that time it is a problem
how Massachusetts would have voted on a proposition to "slaveryize"
her soil. The surprising thing, as we look back to that period, is
that slavery did not get a foothold in some of the free States, if not
in all of them.
But by the time the South was ready to play its trump card, it was too
late. The game was lost. Public opinion had become revolutionized
throughout the North. The leaven of Abolitionism had got in its work.
The men and women, few in number and weak in purse and worldly
position as they were, who had enlisted years before in the cause of
emancipation, and had fought for it in the face of almost every
conceivable discouragement, had at last won a great preliminary
victory. Slavery, through their exertions, had become impossible, both
in the Territories and in the free States of the North, the United
States Supreme Court and all the forces of the slave power to the
contrary notwithstanding. Then came to the South a not unanticipated,
and to many of her leaders a not unwelcome political Waterloo, in the
election of Lincoln. This gave the argument for secession that was
wanted. The South had then to yield--which she had no idea of
doing--or to go into rebellion. She went out of the Union very much as
she would have gone to a frolic. She had no thought that serious
fighting was to follow. She did not believe, as one of the Southern
leaders expressed it, that the Northern people would go to war for the
sake of the "niggers."