THE ABOLITIONISTS
The overthrow of the Democratic party in 1848 was due, not to the
ruthless exploitation of Mexico nor to dissatisfaction with the new
economic policy, but to the abiding distrust of the aristocratic South
and its slavery system by the small business men and farmers of the
North. The greater the success of Polk, the greater the danger to the
older virtues of the Republic, a simple life and faith in the ideals of
freedom and equality. As we have seen, the South had given up these
ideals, and the tobacco, cotton, and sugar planters governed there with
increasing success and acceptability.
There had been persistent economic and religious opposition to the
growth of the plantation system. In the closing years of the eighteenth
century most people in the South disliked slavery, and in Kentucky
majorities of the voters sustained the first abolition movement of
radical tendencies in the country; but the excitement over the Alien and
Sedition Laws eclipsed at the critical moment the public interest in the
anti-slavery struggle. Other outcroppings of the same hostility to
slavery, as already noted, were made evident in the meetings of
Presbyterian and Methodist church conferences between 1815 and 1825 in
Maryland, western Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. But all these
efforts failed and the Southern abolitionists, as we have seen, having
"fought the good fight," emigrated to the Northwest about 1830, when
Virginia failed to rid herself of the growing "incubus." Just as Birney
and Rankin "took up arms" in Ohio there arose a fiercer champion of
their cause in the East, where distance from the scene, lack of intimate
knowledge of "the system," and a strong popular dislike of the South
gave unwonted strength to the new evangelism. William Lloyd Garrison,
son of a Massachusetts sea captain, was in a humor to reform a world
which "sat in darkness." He declared negro slavery the one great evil of
his generation, and the Federal Constitution, which protected it, "an
agreement with Hell." After some ill-luck and untoward experience in
Baltimore, he set up in Boston, in 1831, his famous _Liberator_, in
which he said he would be heard, and henceforth his paper appeared every
week until the close of the Civil War. Every scrap of news, true or
untrue, which reflected the cruelty of the slavery system, the lust of
some brutal master, or the growing power of the Southern States in
national politics he repeated and exploited. It was "yellow journalism"
in a peculiar sense. But a single weekly paper published in Boston,
where the commercial and industrial interests had created an aristocracy
almost as exclusive as that of the South, could hardly be expected to
accomplish a great deal. The other papers of the city would not publish
his "stories," nor pay any attention to his earnest appeals.
He made another move upon the intrenched position of the enemy. Between
1831 and 1835 he organized abolition societies, whose members took vows
to "fight on and fight ever" till success should be attained. These
societies were naturally numerous in all those sections of New England,
the Middle States, and the Northwest where hostility and even hatred to
the masterful South prevailed. Pure idealists, small farmers, village
merchants, the unsuccessful, and debtors who dreamed of an America of
which the Declaration of Independence speaks became abolitionists.
Orators were employed, speaking campaigns were arranged, and the slogan
was always immediate and uncompensated abolition of negro slavery. The
more democratic churches were invaded and their preachers were enlisted;
or, when these resisted, placarded as unfriendly to mankind. Before 1840
not less than fifteen thousand Methodists refused association with other
Methodists who would not declare war on slavery. Nearly all of these
lived in western Massachusetts and upper New York. These revolutionists
carried their cause to the Methodist General Conference in New York in
1844, and the great Church was broken into two branches: a Northern and
a Southern. The Baptists of New England refused the same year to support
a missionary who was also a slaveholder, and immediately the Alabama
Baptists refused to fellowship their Northern brethren. The Southern
Baptist Convention, head of the denomination for all the Southern
States, was organized the next year at Augusta. The fact, already noted,
that both these sundered denominations almost doubled their membership
in the next few years shows the strong sectionalism of the issue.
Nor did the public men of the North escape the ordeal of ardent
abolitionism. William H. Seward, a conservative by nature, became an
anti-slavery Whig of national influence in 1843; Joshua R. Giddings, of
the Western Reserve, and Elijah P. Lovejoy, of Illinois, accepted the
agitator's commissions and sought to unite the new idealism with the old
Americanism. But John Quincy Adams, who had never been a democrat and
who did not sympathize with Garrison, became the arch-leader of the
abolitionists in Congress from 1836 to his death in 1848. Smarting under
the ill-treatment of Southern politicians, it was easy for the able
ex-President to become the political exponent of the new anti-Southern
agitation. In no other country of that time could a movement like
American abolitionism have gained such a hearing. In England the
Government, that is the people, never dreamed of destroying without
compensation the millions of property in the West Indian slaves. But
American abolitionists declared that there could be no property in man,
just as the socialists say there can be no property in land. To destroy
outright the property which underlay the Southern political power and
the Southern aristocracy was the aim of Garrison, and he found able men,
owners of large estates in the North, who were willing to do what he
urged.
Petitions asking the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia
were presented to Congress by John Quincy Adams in increasing numbers
from 1831 to 1836. Southern men denied that the national legislature had
the power to destroy property protected by the Constitution; Northern
men, especially representatives of the farmer districts, insisted that
the right of petition was fundamental to the Constitution itself. There
was a deadlock in Congress, for the South controlled the Senate, while
the North controlled the House. In this state of things, Southern
legislatures formally denounced the abolition movement as endangering
the Union, and asked Congress to protect them from the floods of
abolition literature which the United States mails carried into
communities where negro slaves were in the majority and where
insurrections were likely to occur.
In Charleston the people refused to allow the postmaster to deliver the
objectionable mail matter. The subject was carried to President Jackson
in 1835, and he decided that the uneasy masters of South Carolina were
justified in their protest. Calhoun, like Adams in New England, became
the champion of his section, and devoted the remainder of his life to a
vain defense of slavery against the "foul slanders" of anti-slavery
agitators.
In May, 1836, after a fierce struggle in the House, it was decided to
lay upon the table without debate all petitions which dealt with
slavery. The right of petition was thus formally denied, since a hearing
is the one thing prayed for in such documents. John Quincy Adams
declared that the rights of his constituents, as guaranteed in the
Constitution, were thus abrogated. On the other hand, Calhoun declared
in the Senate, with equal truth, that the constitutional rights of his
constituents would be jeopardized if the petitions were received and
debated. Great excitement prevailed throughout the country, for the
contending sections were too strong for any easy-going compromise to be
possible. Keen observers then visiting Washington wrote home that the
great Republic would go to pieces if either side won.
In the summer of 1837, Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered at Alton,
Illinois, where he was trying to publish, against the wishes of the
people, an anti-slavery weekly like Garrison's. And in Boston the
following December a young aristocrat, a Harvard graduate and a
promising lawyer, arose before a large audience, before whom the
Attorney-General of the State had just been defending the Alton people
against attack, and declared that the "earth should have yawned and
swallowed up" the author of such treasonable words. It was Wendell
Phillips, and from that day till the close of the bitter sectional
struggle, he was the greatest champion of immediate abolition, the
fervent orator who was ready to destroy the Union in order to destroy
slavery. Four years after Phillips began his public career, Frederick
Douglass, escaping from a slave plantation in Maryland, came into
contact with Garrison, who at once commissioned him an orator of
abolition, and the brilliant mulatto soon developed powers that gave
rise to jealous heartburnings among the leading agitators. Lewis Tappan,
Gerrit Smith, the Misses Grimké, born in South Carolina, and a host of
other enthusiastic democrats and idealists professed the new faith.
Contemptuous of Church and State, of union and nationality, these
apostles of the new cause laid the foundations of the great sectional
party which was later to bear the name Republican, thus appealing to
the memories of Jefferson and his followers of 1800.
It was this hostility of the sections, always dangerous, but exceedingly
so in 1836, when Texas was asking admission as a slave State, that
caused so many of the best men of the time to talk freely of the
disruption of the Union. If Texas were annexed, the East would secede;
if it were not annexed, the South would secede. Van Buren, the head of
the Democratic party, and Clay, the master of the Whigs, exerted all
their influence in 1844 to avoid the expected conflict. But President
Tyler, without close party affiliations and standing in need of an
issue, was ready to take the risk. Radical expansionists, supported by
substantial economic interests in the South, urged the immediate
annexation of Texas, while Adams and twenty-one of his colleagues from
the restless sections of the North declared that the addition of the new
region to the Union would be equivalent to a dissolution of the ties
which held the warring sections together;[5] and they published, in May,
1843, a formal address to their constituents calling upon them to
secede. The members of Congress who signed this address represented the
districts, almost without exception, in which abolition had won a
footing.
[Footnote 5: See chap. _VII_, pp. 126-127.]
The important question was: Should the East remain passive while the
annexation of "another Louisiana" was being consummated and thus allow
herself to be submerged.
Charles Sumner, an ambitious young man, an intellectual kinsman of
Wendell Phillips, one of those "transcendentalists" of Massachusetts of
whom the country was to hear a great deal in the future, answered this
question in his famous "grandeur-of-nations" oration of July 4, 1845.
The élite of Boston had gathered for the occasion in Tremont Temple, and
they had invited the officers of a warship then lying in the harbor, the
local military men, and others who took pride in the martial deeds of
their ancestors, to join in the accustomed celebration of the Fourth.
Dressed in gay, super-fashionable attire, the young Sumner poured forth
in matchless language a denunciation of war, of military and naval
armaments, of President Polk and the party in power, which drove one
half of his audience frantic with resentment and anger. "There is no war
which is honorable, no peace which is dishonorable," he declared at the
outset, and for two hours he massed his arguments and statistics to
prove the thesis. The conservatives of Boston declared that it would be
the last of the young man. But Garrison and Phillips had raised up
another recruit. The oration which had insulted half of those who heard
it was published in edition after edition and distributed in the country
districts of the North. Sumner was ever after in great demand as a
speaker and anti-Southern agitator. He would not, however, dissolve the
Union to escape slavery; he sought rather to mobilize the forces which
the abolitionists were stirring to activity.
[Illustration: Location of Abolition Societies in 1847]
The war with Mexico came, victories were won, and the national
enthusiasm was running high when President Polk asked Congress in
August, 1846, to vote him two million dollars in order that he might
have the means of inducing Mexico to make satisfactory cessions of
territory. The Western Democrats were smarting under the sting of the
veto of their internal improvements bill, and the "people at home" were
much disappointed at the loss of half of Oregon, "given away," some
said, by a President who was only interested in "Southern policies."[6]
Jacob Brinkerhoff, who had had a quarrel with Polk about the patronage,
drew a proviso to be added to the appropriation bill, which declared
that slavery should be forever forbidden throughout the proposed
accessions of territory. Judge Wilmot, a quiet member from Pennsylvania,
was induced to offer the amendment. He awoke next day a famous man.
[Footnote 6: See chap. _VIII_, 152.]
Northern Whigs who had been compelled by popular sentiment to support
the Administration in all its war measures seized the opportunity to
vote for the proviso; of course the Northwestern Democrats, who were
dissatisfied because of other matters, took this chance to pay the
President for his neglect of them. The abolitionists who were in
politics became more active, and many orthodox, that is non-voting,
followers of Garrison changed their views and thenceforward fought in
the ranks of party organization. It was a critical time for the dominant
South. Only the conservative Senate saved the President from a second
unpopular veto. A strong popular sentiment supported the proviso
movement, and when Congress reassembled in December the determination
of the opposition to prevent the extension of slavery into the new
territory was stronger than ever. The House attached the proviso to the
appropriation bill, which came up again, and the Senate a second time
defeated the anti-slavery forces.
The South was by this time greatly excited, and Virginia, South
Carolina, and Alabama declared that the passage of the proposed
amendment would be resisted to the point of making open war. In the East
and Northwest, where the abolitionists were numerous, the leaders were
equally resolute in their purpose that slavery should not profit by the
war with Mexico. Horace Greeley, William H. Seward, and Salmon P. Chase,
a vigorous anti-slavery leader of Ohio, who now came into national
prominence, were the most powerful spokesmen of the various elements of
the opposition, and they were actively laying the foundations of an
abolition and sectional party which should ere long outvote the South.
The candidacy of Zachary Taylor, strongly supported by Thurlow Weed,
checked and even defeated the sectional purposes of the radicals. Taylor
was the master of a great plantation in Louisiana, and John J.
Crittenden, of Kentucky, Ballard Preston, of Virginia, and Alexander
Stephens, of Georgia, all good pro-slavery men, rallied at once to the
popular military chieftain. Clay was promptly snubbed and Webster's
claims were unceremoniously brushed aside. The Whig Convention of 1848
met in Philadelphia in May. It was under the control of Weed and his
Southern allies. Taylor was nominated, and Webster, Clay, and the other
disgruntled leaders finally gave him their support. Nothing was said of
the great issue, the spread of slavery over the new accessions; and the
party, as in 1840, went before the country without a platform. Nor was
the candidate allowed to make speeches or write public letters, which
was doubtless wise, for Taylor knew little of public questions. It was
said that he had never voted, and he claimed to belong to no party. The
Whigs took him on his reputation as a soldier and on the recommendation
of the great New York "boss." His candidacy probably saved the party
from breaking into two hostile wings.
When the Democratic Convention assembled in Baltimore in May, 1848, Cass
met with little opposition. His stout imperialism had won him the
leadership of the expansionist West and South. The radical pro-slavery
men of the lower South, who feared his former friendliness to the Wilmot
Proviso leaders, had been satisfied, with a few exceptions, by the
Nicholson letter of December, 1847, in which Cass laid down the doctrine
that the settlers in any new region should be allowed to determine for
themselves whether they would have slaves or not. It was the same idea
which Douglas made famous in his Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, and which
the country then dubbed "squatter-sovereignty." Cass was nominated and
the Nicholson letter was made the platform; all the leaders of the party
gave him hearty support, save those who had been humiliated at Baltimore
four years before by the defeat of Van Buren. Van Buren himself
doubtless remembered that Cass had lent assistance to the astute
Southern politicians who had compassed his fall.
It was difficult to say which of the great parties was the weaker, the
Whigs with both Webster and Clay sulking, or the Democrats with the
shrewd Van Buren awaiting his opportunity to punish his enemies. The
opportunity came in the nomination of Van Buren by the Liberty Party
Convention, which met later in the summer at Syracuse. The Van Buren
wing of the New York Democracy approved the Syracuse Convention, and the
Free-Soil party began its first and only campaign with the ex-President
as its candidate. Van Buren received nearly 300,000 votes in November
and prevented Cass from becoming President. He had avenged himself. The
South found her alliance with the Northwest broken, but a Southern
slave-owner was to be the next President.
As so often happens in American history, the election settled nothing,
for the victorious Whigs, as in 1840, had no program, and their
candidate had no political record. When the Administration began its
work, it was found expedient to underwrite practically all that the Polk
Administration had accomplished. There was no idea of reopening the bank
or financial questions; and the tariff was already so successful that it
would have been plain folly to change it. In the foreign policy of the
country the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with England dealt with the proposed
isthmian canal. By this agreement the two contracting parties promised
not to acquire further interests in Central America, and thus in a way
nullified the concessions of Colombia of 1846, under which Polk had
hoped for the building of a canal across Panama.
The one absorbing question after the inauguration of Taylor was that
which both the great parties had side-stepped during the campaign,
namely, what should be done with slavery in the Territories. The
Southern Whigs sought day and night to gain the ear of the President,
and the Southern Democrats were not less persistent. Both aimed at the
same thing, the extension of their favorite institution. And now that
the fight for slavery in Oregon was recognized as lost, this Southern
wooing of the new President became the more intense. It was a desperate
situation for the South. The Northwest was rapidly expanding toward the
Pacific and building up free States which might at any time repudiate
their allegiance to the South. Now the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo
opened a great hinterland for the South, extending by the easiest passes
over the mountains to California. But the abolitionists declared that
the South should not expand in that direction save at the expense of
slavery. The President's attitude might determine the matter.
The discovery of gold in amazingly rich deposits in California hastened
the conflict of the rival sections. During the second half of 1848 and
all through 1849 thousands of Southerners, Easterners, and Westerners
rushed pell-mell into the new Eldorado, bent on making hasty fortunes
and oblivious of the anxious thoughts of statesmen. The motley
gold-diggers needed government. They asked Polk to provide it. He
failed to grant it. Congress could not do so because of the deadlock
over slavery. Benton wrote a public letter to the Californians advising
them to form a government for themselves, and his son-in-law, John C.
Frémont, went to the new community to help the cause and perhaps to come
back to Washington as one of their Senators. In 1849, the Californians
formed a State Government, and the new legislature sent their
constitution and two Senators, one of whom was Frémont, on to Washington
early the next year. Admission as a full-fledged State was asked. They
had failed to mention slavery in their constitution.
President Taylor had at last decided to admit to his counsels the
anti-slavery leaders of the Whig party, and he filled his Cabinet with
men who would support him as against Clay and Webster. William H. Seward
became the confidential adviser to the President and a sort of
Administration leader of the Senate. Southern Whigs like Stephens, who
had done much to secure for Taylor the Presidency, were without
influence, and they feared that all the anti-slavery elements of the
North were combining to control the Government.
While California was shaping her own course and the President was making
his decision as between the factions of his party, South Carolina and
Mississippi took the lead in a movement to prevent that or any other
State or Territory from being brought into the Union if slavery were not
duly recognized. Whigs and Democrats joined in great mass meetings,
which showed conclusively that the lower South was in earnest. All
classes of the people united in what seemed to be almost the unanimous
wish of the South, that the new Southwest should be preserved for the
expansion of slavery. These meetings spread over all the lower Southern
States, and as a result, a convention was called to meet in Nashville in
June, 1850. The object of this general convention was to present to
Congress a Southern ultimatum, and in the event that this should not be
heeded, to urge the secession of the slaveholding States.
In the West the crisis did not seem so acute. But Clay, now seventy-four
years old, and cured of his ambition to be President, was sent back to
the Senate in the hope of averting the calamity of a disruption of the
Union. Thomas H. Benton, though recently defeated in a campaign for
reëlection, was still in the Senate. Cass was again a member of the
Senate, and he, too, felt that the Union was about to be dissolved.
Douglas and the other younger representatives of the Northwest, who had
suffered somewhat from the legislation of 1846, ceased to nurse their
grievances against the party, and deplored the "treason" of the
abolitionists who were making all the trouble. There was undoubtedly a
crisis which Southern leaders like Davis, Stephens, Yancey, and Robert
Toombs, another able Georgian who now came into national prominence,
took pains to lay to the charge of the radical anti-slavery people of
the East; that is, to Seward and his followers, who were allowing
Garrison and Phillips and the radical abolitionists to drive them into
open opposition to the South.
When Clay came back to Washington, Taylor and his Cabinet had taken
their stand, which was to recommend the admission of California as a
free State. The Mormons in Deseret and a few Americans and Mexicans in
New Mexico had taken steps toward organizing Territories in the region
between Texas and eastern California, and they were to be made
Territories with or without slavery, as they chose. If all this were
done, the South would secede and the Administration would be in a
dilemma. Taylor was a stubborn man; he had made up his mind, and he sent
to Congress a fatherly message in which his devotion to the Union above
everything else was very evident. If the Southerners, who were then
offering Texas military assistance to make good her claim to a large
part of New Mexico, chose to resist the lawful authority of the
Administration and war came, the fault would be theirs, not his.
But Henry Clay and Daniel Webster still enjoyed much more of the
confidence of the people of the country, North and South, than the
President. Nor was Webster less popular because he had been ignored by
the Administration. He was in his place in the Senate. Calhoun was also
there. It was an exceedingly able Congress, that to which Taylor and
Seward must look for support. With scant courtesy to the President, Clay
took the lead in the Senate late in January and offered his plan of
compromising the sectional quarrel. He would make a free State of
California, allow Utah, as Deseret came to be called, and New Mexico to
form Territorial Governments without mention of slavery, pay Texas ten
million dollars for her claims against New Mexico, abolish the slave
trade in the District of Columbia, and enact a Fugitive Slave Law which
would satisfy the border Southern States.
Excitement was too intense for the two parties in the Senate and House
to accept immediately this comprehensive plan. The President opposed it;
the extreme men of the South opposed it. But Clay had not lost his power
to charm, and he was still a good manager, according to the polite
phraseology of the day. He quietly secured the support of Thomas
Ritchie, editor of the Democratic organ at Washington, _The Union_; he
broke the hold of Calhoun on Mississippi by winning to his side Senator
Henry S. Foote, a fiery Democrat and foremost advocate of Southern
resistance; and within the next three months most of the Southern Whigs
who were preparing to take part in the Nashville convention indicated
their change of heart. Clay's method, almost exactly parallel to that by
which Jackson had defeated Calhoun in 1833, was to steal away the hearts
of Whigs and Westerners, to whom the Union was still sacred, and leave
the radical South isolated. And in support of his compromise the old
statesman made most moving appeals during February and March. It was the
greatest moment of his life, he thought, and in this his colleagues were
fully agreed.
But Calhoun and the ardent representatives of the lower South, supported
by nearly all of the spokesmen of Virginia and North Carolina, were the
obstacles in the way of a settlement. They demanded a slave State in
California and free access, under the protection of the Union, to all
the new Mexican territory. The extension of the Missouri Compromise line
to the Pacific would have satisfied them. Or failing in this, Calhoun
asked for an amendment to the Federal Constitution which should create a
dual presidency in which each section was always to have a veto over the
legislation of Congress. Permanent deadlock was thus proposed as the
remedy for the ills of sectional conflict. Resolute as the old
nationalist was, he could not bring himself in these closing days of his
life to pronounce to his party the word "secession." It was pathetic to
see the disappointed and broken leader of the South as he literally wore
his life away trying to defeat Clay, his lifelong antagonist, or to
conciliate Webster, for whom he had always entertained a hearty respect.
Upon Webster and his conservative Eastern support depended the outcome.
He had never been a democrat, and as he had grown older, he had come to
sympathize more than formerly with the great property interests of the
South, which were not unlike the industrial interests of the East, for
which he had broken many a lance. He, too, had been a rival of Clay
since 1832, and three times a disappointed candidate for the Whig
nomination for the Presidency. But both he and Clay had been brushed
aside in 1848 by Thurlow Weed and the young William H. Seward with
rather scant ceremony. And the abolitionists of New England were as
noisome to him as were the radical secessionists to Henry Clay. Charles
Sumner and his friends were already waging incessant war upon him. He
took his stand on March 7, and he made the day famous. He spoke for the
Union, and the effect of the speech was probably the postponement of the
Civil War. Although he was again the follower of Clay, he was henceforth
"the Godlike Webster" to Northern conservatives, and the large business
interests of his section applauded him more heartily than they had ever
done before. But the price which he paid for this epoch-making speech
was fearful. The Massachusetts abolitionists groaned at the mention of
his name, and the poet Whittier pilloried him in the famous lines:--
"So fallen! So lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore!
The glory from his gray hairs gone
Forever more!
Revile him not--the Tempter hath
A snare for all;
And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,
Befit his fall."
Clay had won. The President, resisting to the last and following the
counsels of Seward, saw the majority of Congress yield slowly to
influences which favored compromise. Calhoun died early in April, and
though his followers maintained their position resolutely, their Whig
allies were deserting them, and the Nashville convention proved a fiasco
when it assembled in June. President Taylor died on the 9th of July, and
the last obstacle to the success of Clay and Webster was removed.
Millard Fillmore, the Vice-President, a close friend of Clay, became
President; the Cabinet was reorganized, Webster becoming Secretary of
State. One by one during the month of August all the features of the
"Omnibus Bill" became law. The great majority of the Southerners
indicated their ready acceptance of the compromise as a "finality"; and
radicals like Jefferson Davis, Robert Barnwell Rhett, and William L.
Yancey retired from public life, either voluntarily or by compulsion of
the people. The big cities of the East and the Northwest celebrated the
passage of the crisis with the firing of cannon, and everywhere the
thanks of the people were expressed to the "great Congress" which had
saved them from civil war.
[Illustration: California Election of 1852]
[Illustration: The Presidential Election of 1852]
If the logic of events ever pointed to one individual as the proper
leader of the people or the fit man for the Presidency, it pointed to
Daniel Webster in 1852. The Whigs had not all voted for the compromise,
but their leaders had been its authors. The party was entitled to claim
the glory for a great performance; and if they claimed it and nominated
their candidate upon a platform of "henceforth there shall be peace
between the sections," they would undoubtedly win and control the
Federal Government for at least two or three presidential terms.
But with a most remarkable aptitude for blundering, the Whigs in their
convention of 1852 hesitated in their pronouncement upon the compromise,
and refused to nominate Webster. The radical element procured the
nomination of General Winfield Scott, a Southern man of anti-slavery
proclivities, and Scott blundered through the campaign, losing votes
every time he made a public statement. Heart-broken, the "Godlike
Webster" died before the day of election. Nor was Clay spared to witness
the crushing defeat which awaited his beloved party in November. The
Whig newspapers of that autumn appeared in mourning too frequently for
the public mind not to be affected.
Conservative interests turned to the Democratic party, whose leaders
promptly declared in their convention that the compromise was a
finality. They nominated a popular but colorless young New Englander,
Franklin Pierce, a colonel under Scott in the war with Mexico, and
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the campaign biography. Pierce said little
during the months of electioneering. His rôle and that of his party was
now one of conciliation. If elected he would enforce the laws and
maintain the Union. Every State but four, Massachusetts, Vermont,
Kentucky, and Tennessee, gave him their electoral votes. The support of
the Free-Soil Democrats, 156,000 votes and all in the abolitionist
sections, showed that the country was tired of agitation. The prolonged
quarrel of the sections seemed definitely closed, and the future
promised peace and prosperity.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
A. B. Hart's _Slavery and Abolition_ (1906), in _American Nation_
series; F. J. and W. P. Garrison's _William Lloyd Garrison: the Story of
his Life Told by his Children_ (1885-89), and both McMaster and Schouler
in their histories, already mentioned, give all the essential facts
about the abolitionists and the Wilmot Proviso struggle. James Ford
Rhodes's _History of the United States_ (from 1850 to 1877) is a work of
the greatest importance, and it gives, in vol. _I_, the best account of
the compromise measures of 1850. The following biographies are valuable
for the period: T. W. Barnes, _Memoir of Thurlow Weed_ (1884); William
Birney, _James G. Birney and his Times_ (1890); G. L. Austin, _Life and
Times of Wendell Phillips_ (1887); Henry Cleveland, _Alexander Stephens
in Public and Private_ (1866); W. H. Haynes, _Charles Sumner_ (1909),
in _American Crises_ series; A. C. McLaughlin, _Lewis Cass_ (1891), in
_American Statesmen_ series. Special for the lower South: Miss Cleo
Hearon, _Mississippi and the Compromise of 1850_ (1914); W. G. Brown,
_The Lower South in American History_ (1902); J. W. DuBose, _The Life of
William L. Yancey_; and A. C. Cole, _The Whig Party in the South_
(1913), named in a previous note. J. D. Richardson's _Messages and
Papers of the Presidents_ (1900), vol. v; H. V. Ames's _State Documents
on Federal Relations_ (1907); and the _Congressional Globe_ for the 29th
and 30th Congresses give the most important speeches and documents
bearing on the crisis of 1850.