INCOMPATIBILITY OF SLAVERY AND FREEDOM
That it was possible for slave States and free States to coexist under
our Federal Constitution was the belief of its framers and of most of
our people down to 1861. The first to announce the absolute
impossibility of such coexistence seems to have been William Lloyd
Garrison. In 1840, at Lynn, Massachusetts, the Essex County Anti-Slavery
Society adopted this resolution, offered by him:
"That freedom and slavery are natural and irreconcilable enemies; that
it is morally impossible for them to endure together in the same nation,
and that the existence of the one can only be secured by the destruction
of the other."[62]
[62] Garrison's "Garrison."
Garrison's remedy was disunion. Near that time his paper's motto was "No
Union with Slave-Holders."
The next to announce the idea of the incompatibility of slave States and
free States seems to have been one who did not dream of disunion. No
such thought was in the mind of Abraham Lincoln when, in a speech at
Springfield, Illinois, June 15, 1858, he said:
"_A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government
cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the
Union to be divided. It will become one thing or the other._ Either the
opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it
where the public mind will rest in the belief that _it is in the course
of ultimate extinction_; or its advocates will push it forward until it
shall become alike lawful in all the States--old as well as new--North
as well as South."
When the Southerners read that statement they concluded that, as Mr.
Lincoln knew very well that the South could not, if it would, force
slavery on the North, he was announcing the intention of his party to
place slavery "in course of ultimate extinction," constitution or no
constitution.
Senator Seward, at Rochester, New York, some weeks later, reannounced
the doctrine, declaring that the contest was "an irrepressible conflict
between opposing and enduring forces; and it means that the United
States _must and will_, sooner or later, become either an entirely
slave-holding nation or entirely a free labor nation."
The utterances of Lincoln and Seward were distinctly radical. The
question was, would this radical idea ultimately dominate the Republican
party?
Less than eighteen months after the announcement in 1858 of the doctrine
of the "irrepressible conflict," John Brown raided Virginia to incite
insurrections. With a few followers and 1,300 stands of arms for the
slaves who were to join him, he captured the United States arsenal at
Harper's Ferry. Only a few slaves came to him and, after a brief
struggle, with some bloodshed, Brown was captured, tried by a jury, and
hanged.
In the South the excitement was intense; the horror and indignation in
that section it is impossible to describe. Brown was already well known
to the public. He was not a lunatic. Not long before this, in Kansas,
"at the head of a small group of men, including two of his sons and a
son-in-law, he went at night down Pottowattamie Creek, stopping at three
houses. The men who lived in them were well known pro-slavery men; they
seem to have been rough characters; their most specific offence
(according to Sanborn, Brown's biographer and eulogist) was the driving
from his home, by violent threats, of an inoffensive old man. John Brown
and his party went down the creek, called at one after the other of
three houses, took five men away from their wives and children, and
deliberately shot one and hacked the others to death with swords."[63]
[63] "The Negro and the Nation," George Spring Merriam, p. 120.
Quite a number of people, some of them men of eminence in the North,
aided Brown in his enterprise. Among the men of repute were Gerrit
Smith, a former candidate for the presidency; and Theodore Parker, Dr.
Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, of Boston, who were all members of
a "secret committee to collect money and arms for the expedition." With
them was F. S. Sanborn, who has since the war vauntingly revealed the
scheme in his "Life of John Brown."[64]
[64] Sanborn's "Life of John Brown," p. 466.
Sanborn intimates that Henry Wilson, subsequently vice-president, was
more or less privy to the design.[65] At various places in the North
church bells were tolled on the day of John Brown's execution; meetings
were held and orators extolled him as a martyr. Emerson, the greatest
thinker in all that region, declared that if John Brown was hanged he
would glorify the gallows as Jesus glorified the cross; and now many
Southern men who loved the Union reluctantly concluded that separation
was inevitable. John Bell, of Tennessee, Union candidate for President
in 1860, is said to have cried like a child when he heard of Brown's
raid.
[65] _Ib._, p. 515.
The great body of the Northern people condemned John Brown's expedition
without stint. Edward Everett, voicing the opinion of all who were
really conservative, said of Brown's raid, in a speech at Faneuil Hall,
that its design was to "let loose the hell hounds of a servile
insurrection, and to bring on a struggle which, for magnitude,
atrocity, and horror, would have stood alone in the history of the
world."
But they who had been preaching the "irrepressible conflict," they whom
public opinion might hold responsible, did not feel precisely as Mr.
Everett did. They were concerned about political consequences, as
appears from a letter written somewhat later during the State canvass in
New York by Horace Greeley to Schuyler Colfax. Horace Greeley afterward
proved himself in many ways a broad-minded, magnanimous man, but now he
wrote: "Do not be downhearted about the old John Brown business. Its
present effect is bad and throws a heavy load on us in this State ...
_but the ultimate effect is to be good.... It will drive the slave power
to new outrages.... It presses on the irrepressible conflict_."[66]
[66] "History of United States," Rhodes, vol. I.
The fact that such a man as Horace Greeley was taking comfort because
that outrage would "drive the slave power to new outrages"[67] throws a
strong side-light on the tactics of the anti-slavery leaders. They were
following Garrison. Garrison, the father of the Abolitionists, had
begun his campaign against slave-holders by "exhausting upon them the
vocabulary of abuse," and he had shown "a genius for infuriating his
antagonists."[68] The new party--his successor and beneficiary, was now
felicitating itself that ultimate good would come, even from the John
Brown raid. It would further their policy of "_driving the slave power
to new outrages_."
[67] Channing.
[68] Hart.
People at the North, conservatives and all, held their breath for a time
after Harper's Ferry. Then the crusade went on, in the press, on the
rostrum, and from the pulpit, with as much virulence as ever. No
assertion was too extravagant for belief, provided only its tendency was
to disparage the Southern white man or win sympathy for the negro. From
the noted "Brownlow and Pryne's Debate," Philadelphia (_Lippincott_), we
take the following as a specimen of the abuse a portion of the Northern
press was then heaping on the Southern people. Brownlow quotes from the
_New York Independent_ of November, 1856:
"The mass of the population of the Atlantic Coast of the slave region
of the South are descended from the transported convicts and outcasts of
Great Britain.... Oh, glorious chivalry and hereditary aristocracy of
the South! Peerless first families of Virginia and Carolina!... Progeny
of the highwaymen, and horse-thieves and sheep-stealers, and
pick-pockets of Old England!"
The South was not to be outdone, and here was a retort from _De Bow's
Review_, July, 1858:
"The basis, framework, and controlling influence of Northern sentiment
is Puritanism--the old Roundhead, rebel refuse of England, which ... has
ever been an unruly sect of Pharisees ... the worst bigots on earth and
the meanest of tyrants when they have the power to exercise it."[69]
[69] Theodore Clarke Smith, "Parties and Slavery," p. 303.
And the non-slave-holder of the South did not escape from the pitiless
pelting of the storm. He was sustaining the slave-holder, and this was
not only an offence but a puzzle.
It became quite common in the North for anti-slavery writers to classify
the non-slave-holding agricultural classes of the South as "poor
whites," thus distinguishing them from the slave-holders; and the idea
is current even now in that section that as a class the lordly
slave-holder despised his poor white fellow-citizen. The average
non-slave-holding Southern agriculturist, whether farming for himself or
for others, was a type of man that no one who knew him, least of all the
Southern slave-holder, his neighbor and political ally, could despise.
Educated and uneducated, these people were independent voters and honest
jurors, the very backbone of Southern State governments that always will
be notable in history for efficiency, purity, and economy.
This class of voters, however, came in for much abuse in the literature
of the crusade. They were all lumped together as "poor whites,"
sometimes as "poor white trash," and the belief was inculcated that
their imperious slave-holding neighbors applied that term to them. "Poor
white trash," on its face, is "nigger talk," caught up, doubtless, from
Southern negro barbers and bootblacks, and used by writers who, from
information thus derived, pictured Southern society.
This is a sample of the numerous errors that crept into the literature
of one section of our Union about social conditions in the other during
that memorable sectional controversy. It is on a par with the idea that
prevailed, in some quarters in the South, that the Yankee cared for
nothing but money, and would not fight even for that.
Southerners were practically all of the old British stock. Homogeneity,
common memories of the wars of the Revolution, of 1812, and with Mexico,
and Fourth of July celebrations, all tended to bind together strongly
the Southern slave-holder and non-slave-holder.
There were, of course, many classes of non-slave-holders--the thrifty
farmer, the unthrifty, and the laborer who worked for hire, but more
frequently for "shares of the crop." Then there were others--the
inhabitants of the "sand-hills" and the mountain regions. These people
were, as a rule, very shiftless; too lazy to work, they were still too
proud to beg, as the very poor usually do in other countries. The
mountaineers were hardier than the sand-hillers, and it was from the
mountains of Tennessee, Alabama, etc., that the Union armies gathered
many recruits. This was not, as is often stated, because mountaineers
love liberty better than others, but because these mountaineers never
came into contact with either master or slave. The crusade against
slavery, therefore, did not threaten to affect their personal status.
There were very few public schools in the South, but in the cities and
towns there were academies and high-schools, and the country was dotted
with "old field schools," most of them not good, but sufficient to train
those who became efficient leaders in social, religious, and political
circles.
The wonderful progress made by the Southern white man during the last
thirty-five years is by no means all due to the abolition of slavery.
Labor, it is true, is held in higher esteem. This is a great gain, but
still more is due to improved transportation, to better prices for
timber and cotton, to commercial fertilizers, and an awakening interest
in education. The South is also developing its mineral resources and is
now rapidly forging to the front. The white man is making more cotton
than the negro.
But the very strongest bond that bound together the Southern
slave-holder and non-slave-holder was the pride of caste. Every white
man was a freeman; he belonged to the superior, the dominant race.
Edmund Burke, England's philosopher-statesman, in his speech on
"Conciliation with America" at the beginning of our Revolution,
complimented in high terms the spirit of liberty among the dissenting
protestants of New England. Then, alluding to the hopes indulged in by
some gentlemen, that the Southern colonies would be loyal to Great
Britain because the Church of England had there a large establishment,
he said: "It is certainly true. There is, however, a circumstance
attending these colonies which in my opinion fully counter-balances this
difference, and makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty
than in those to the Northward. It is, that in Virginia and Carolina
they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case, in any
part of the world, _those who are free are by far the most proud and
jealous of their freedom_. Freedom with them is not only an enjoyment,
but a kind of _rank and privilege_."
The privilege of belonging to the superior race and of being free was a
bond that tied all Southern whites together, and it was infinitely
strengthened by a crusade that seemed, from a Southern stand-point, to
have for its purpose the levelling of all distinctions between the white
man and the slave hard by.
Socially, there were classes in the South as there are everywhere. The
controlling class consisted of professional men, lawyers, physicians,
teachers, and high-class merchants (though the merchant prince was
unknown), and slave-holders. Slave-holders were, of course, divided into
classes, chiefly two: those who had acquired culture and breeding from
slave-holding ancestors, and those who had little culture or breeding,
principally the newly rich. It was the former class that gave tone to
Southern society. The performance of duty always ennobles, and this is
especially true of duty done by superiors to inferiors. The master and
mistress of a slave establishment were responsible for the moral and
material welfare of their dependents. When they appreciated and
fulfilled their responsibilities, as the best families usually did,
there was found what was called the Southern aristocracy. The habit of
command, assured position, and high ideals, coming down, as these often
did, with family traditions, gave these favored people ease and grace,
and they were social favorites, both in the North and Europe. At home
they dispensed a hospitality that made the South famous. They were
exemplars, giving tone to society, and it was notable that breeding and
culture, and not wealth, gave tone to Southern society. There was
perhaps in Virginia and South Carolina an aristocracy that was somewhat
more exclusive than elsewhere.
Slavery was at its worst when masters were not equal to their
responsibilities, for want of either culture or Christian feeling, or
both, as also when, as was now and then the case, a brutal overseer was
in charge of a plantation far away from the eye of the owner.
The influence of the slave-holder and his lavish hospitality did not
make for thrift among his less fortunate brethren; it made perhaps for
prodigality, but it also made for a high sense of honor among
slave-holders and non-slave-holders as well. Both slave-holders and
non-slave-holders were extremely punctilious. Money did not count where
honor was concerned, and Southerners do well to be proud of the record
in this respect that has been made by their statesmen.
Among the more cultured classes in the period here treated of, the duel
prevailed, a practice now very properly condemned. But it made for a
high sense of honor. Demagogues were not common when a false statement
on "the stump" was apt to result in a mortal combat.
Among the less cultured classes insult was answered with a blow of the
fist. Fisticuffs, too, were quite common to ascertain who was the "best
man" in a community or county. The rules were not according to the
Marquis of Queensbury, but they always secured "fair play."[70]
[70] For the humorous side of life in the South in the old day, see
"Simon Suggs," J. J. Hooper; "Georgia Scenes," Judge Longstreet; and
"Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi," by Baldwin.
This combative spirit of Southerners was undoubtedly a result of the
spirit of caste that came from slavery. Sometimes it was unduly
exhibited in Congress during the controversy over slavery and State's
rights, and excited Southerners occasionally subjected themselves to the
charge of arrogance.
One of the great evils of slavery was that, as a rule, neither the
slave-holder nor the non-slave-holder properly appreciated the dignity
of labor. A witty student at a Southern university said that his chief
objection to college life was that he could not have a negro to learn
his lessons for him. The slave-holder quite generally disdained manual
labor, and the non-slave-holder was also inclined to deprecate the
necessity that compelled him to work.
The sudden abolition of slavery was the ruin of thousands of innocent
families--a loss for which there was no recompense. But for the South at
large, and especially to this generation, it is a blessing that all
classes have come to see, that to labor and to be useful is not only a
duty, but a privilege.
Political conditions, North and South, differed widely. The North was
the majority section. Its majority could protect its rights; recourse to
the limitations of the Federal Constitution was seldom necessary. The
South, a minority section, with a devotion that never failed, held high
the "Constitution of the fathers, the palladium" of its rights. To one
section the Constitution was the bond of a Federal Union that was the
security for interstate commerce and national prosperity; to the other
it was a guaranty of peace abroad and local self-government at home. In
the one section the brightest minds were for the most part engaged in
business or in literary pursuits; in the other, politics absorbed much
of its talent. In the North the staple of political discussion was
usually some business or moral question, while in the South the
political arena was a great school in which the masses were not only
educated in the history of the formation of the Constitution, but taught
an affectionate regard for that instrument as a revered "gift from the
fathers" and the only safeguard of American liberty. Joint political
discussions, which were common between the ablest men of opposing
parties, were always numerously attended, and the Federal Constitution
was an unfailing topic. The result was, an amount of political
information in the average Confederate soldier that the average Union
soldier in his business training had never acquired, and a devotion of
the Southerner to the Constitution of his country which even the ablest
historians of to-day have failed to comprehend.
It is often stated, as if it were an important fact in the consideration
of the great anti-slavery crusade, that not many of the Abolitionists
were as radical as Garrison, and that of the anti-slavery voters very
few favored social equality between whites and blacks. Southerners did
not stop to make distinctions like these. They saw the Abolitionists
advocating mixed schools and favoring laws authorizing mixed marriages;
saw them practising social equality; saw the general trend in that
direction; and so from its very beginning the Republican party, which
had absorbed the Abolitionists, was dubbed, North and South, the "Black
Republican" party.
The whites of the South believed that the triumph of the "Black
Republican" party, as they called it, would be ultimately the triumph of
its most radical elements. Judge Reagan, of Texas, United States
congressman in 1860-61, Confederate Postmaster-General, later United
States senator, and always until 1860 an avowed friend of the Union, in
his farewell speech to the Congress of the United States in January,
1861, gave expression to this idea when he said:
"And now you tender to us the inhuman alternative of unconditional
submission to _Republican rule on abolition principles, and ultimately
to free negro equality, and a government of mongrels_, or a war of races
on the one hand, and on the other, secession and a bloody and desolating
civil war."[71]
[71] "Memoirs of John H. Reagan," p. 261.
Judge Reagan was expressing in Congress the opinion that animated the
Confederate soldier in the war that was to follow secession, an opinion
the ex-Confederate did not see much reason to change when the era of
Reconstruction had been reached, and the ballot had been given to every
negro, while the leading whites were disfranchised.
In 1857 Hinton Rowan Helper, of North Carolina, wrote a notable book to
show that slavery was a curse to the South, and especially to the
non-slave-holders. It was an appeal to the latter to become
Abolitionists. His arguments availed nothing; back of his book was the
Republican party, now planting itself, as Garrison had planted himself,
on an extract from the first sentence of the Declaration of
Independence, "all men are created equal." The Republican contention
was, in platforms and speeches, that the Declaration of Independence
covered negroes as well as whites,[72] and Southern whites, nearly all
of Revolutionary stock, resented the idea. They rebelled at the
suggestion that the signers, every one of whom, save possibly those from
Massachusetts, represented slave-holding constituents, intended to say
that the negroes then in the colonies were the equals of the whites. If
so, why were these negroes kept in slavery, and why were they not
immediately given the right to vote, to sit on juries, to be educated,
and to intermarry with the whites?
[72] Mr. Lincoln took that position in his great speech at Chicago, in
1858, when beginning his campaign for the senatorship.
All this, the Southerners said, as, indeed, did many Northerners also,
was to be the logical outcome of the Republican doctrine, that negroes
and whites were equals. It is passing strange that modern historians so
often have failed to note that this thought was in the minds of all the
opponents of the Republican party from the day of its birth--North and
South it was called the "Black Republican" party. Douglas, in his debate
with Lincoln, gave it that name and stood by it. In his speech at
Jonesboro, Illinois, September 15, 1858, he charges the Republicans with
advocating "negro citizenship and negro equality, putting the white man
and the negro on the same basis under the law."[73]
[73] Lincoln, "Complete Works," vol. IV, p. 9.
John C. Calhoun, in a memorial to the Southern people in 1849, signed by
many other congressmen, had said that Northern fanaticism would not stop
at emancipation. "Another step would be taken to raise them [the
negroes] to a political and social equality with their former owners, by
giving them the right of voting and holding public office under the
Federal Government.... But when raised to an equality they would become
the fast political associates of the North, acting and voting with them
on all questions, and by this perfect union between them holding the
South in complete subjection. _The blacks and the profligate whites that
might unite with them_ would become the principal recipients of Federal
patronage, and would, in consequence, be raised above the whites of the
South in the social and political scale. We would, in a word, change
conditions with them, _a degradation greater than has as yet fallen to
the lot of a free and enlightened people_."[74]
[74] "Calhoun's Works," vol. VI, p. 311.
In the light of Reconstruction, this was prophecy.
These words, once heard by a Southern white man, of course sank into his
heart. They could never have been forgotten. The argument of Helper fell
on deaf ears. If Helper had come with the promise (and an assurance of
its fulfilment) that the negroes, when emancipated, would be sent to
Liberia, or elsewhere _out of the country_, the South would have become
Republicanized at once. Even if the slave-holder had been unwilling, the
Southern non-slave-holder, with his three, and often five, to one
majority, would have seen to it.
And it is not too much to say that if the negro had been, as the
Abolitionists and ultimately many Republicans contended he was, the
equal of the white man, Liberia would have been a success. What a
glorious consummation of the dreams of statesmen and philanthropists
that would have been! Abolitionists, unable to frustrate their scheme,
and the American negro, profiting by the civilization here received from
contact with the white man, building by his own energy happy homes for
himself and his kinsmen, and enjoying the blessings of a great
government of his own, in his own great continent!
Africa with its vast resources is a prize that all Europe is now
contending for. It is believed to be adapted even to white men. Most
assuredly, for the negro Liberia offered far better opportunities than
did the rocky coast of New England to the white men who settled it.
Liberia had been carefully selected as a desirable part of Africa. It
was an unequalled group of statesmen and philanthropists that had
planted the colony; they provided for it and set it on its feet. But it
failed; failed just for the same reason that prevented the aboriginal
African from catching on to the civilization that began to develop
thousands of years ago, close by his side on the borders of the
Mediterranean; failed for the same reason that Hayti, now free for a
century, has failed. The failure of the plan of the American
Colonization Society to repatriate the American negro in Africa was due
_primarily to the incapacity of the negro_.
A very complete and convincing story will be found in an article
entitled "Liberia, an Example of Negro Self-Government,"[75] by Miss
Agnes P. Mahony, for five years a missionary in that country. The author
of the article was a sympathizing friend. She says: "In 1847 the colony
was considered healthy enough to stand alone.... So our flag was lowered
on the African continent, and the protectors of the colony retired,
leaving the people to govern the country in their own way." Then she
recites that in order to test their capacity for self-government their
constitution (1847) provided that no white man should hold property in
the country; and to this Miss Mahony traces the failure that followed.
When she wrote, the Liberian negroes, for fifty-nine years under the
protectorship of the United States, had been troubled by no foreign
enemy; yet their failure was complete--not a foot of railroad, no cable
communication with foreign countries, no telegraphic communication with
the interior, etc. Still the devoted missionary thinks that Liberia
might prosper, if it could but have "_the encouraging example of and
contact with the right kind of white men_."
[75] _Independent_, 1906.
* * * * *
The presidential campaign of 1860 was very exciting. There were four
tickets in the field, Douglas and Johnson, Democrats; Breckenridge and
Lane, Democrats; Lincoln and Hamlin, Republicans, and Bell and Everett
representing the "Constitutional Union" party. As the election
approached it became apparent that the Republicans were leading, and
far-seeing men, like Samuel J. Tilden, of New York, became much alarmed
for fear that the election of Lincoln would bring about secession in the
South. Mr. Tilden, in view of the danger that to him was apparent,
wrote, shortly before the election, to William Kent, of New York City,
an open letter in which he earnestly urged a combination in New York
State of the supporters of other candidates, in order to defeat Abraham
Lincoln. The letter was so alarming that some of Tilden's friends
thought he had lost his balance; but now that letter is regarded as a
remarkable proof of his sagacity. In the first volume of Mr. Tilden's
"Life and Letters," by Bigelow, appears an "Appreciation" by James C.
Carter and an analysis of this letter. Of this the following is a brief
abstract: Mr. Tilden first argued that two strictly sectional parties,
arrayed upon the question of destroying an institution which one of
them, not unnaturally, regarded as essential to self-existence, would
bring war.
Then Mr. Tilden further said that if the Republican party should be
successful in establishing its dominion over the South, the national
government in the Southern States would cease to be self-government and
become a government of one people over a distinct people, a thing
impossible with our race, except as a consequence of a successful war,
and even then incompatible with our democratic institutions. He also
said: "I assert that a controversy between powerful communities,
organized into governments, of a nature like that which now divides the
North and South, can be settled only by convention or by war."
And again: "A condition of parties in which the Federative Government
shall be carried on by a party, having no affiliations in the Southern
States, is impossible to continue. Such a government would be out of all
relations to those States. It would have neither the nerves of
sensation, which convey intelligence to the intellect of the body
politic, nor the ligaments and muscles, which hold its parts together
and move them in harmony. It would be in substance the government of one
people by another people. That system will not do for our race."
Mr. Tilden, when he spoke of "two sectional parties arrayed upon the
question of destroying an institution," _viz._, slavery, saw the
situation exactly as the South did. To prove that the Republican party
was looking to the ultimate destruction of the institution, Mr. Tilden
cited the leadership of Chase and his speeches in which he was
propounding the higher law theory; asserting that the conflict was
"irrepressible"; suggesting the power of the North to amend the
Constitution, etc.
The South noted this, and it regarded, not the platform, but the record
of the Republican party and of the statesmen the party was following.
Long before 1860, that great American scholar, George Ticknor, saw the
dilemma in which the North was involving itself by its concern over
slavery in the South, and he thus stated it, in a letter to his friend,
William Ellery Channing, April 30, 1842:[76]
[76] Life and Letters and Journals of George Ticknor.
"On the subject of our relations with the South and its slavery, we
must--as I have always thought--do one of two things; either keep
honestly the bargain of the Constitution as it shall be interpreted by
the authorities--of which the Supreme Court of the United States is the
chief and safest--or declare honestly that we can no longer in our
conscience consent to keep it, and break it."
The North had failed to "keep honestly the bargain of the Constitution"
by faithfully delivering fugitive slaves and leaving the question of
slavery to be dealt with by the States in which it existed, and was now,
in 1860, upon the other horn of the dilemma--repudiating and denouncing
a decision of the Supreme Court, which, as Mr. Ticknor had said, was the
"chief and safest authority." But during that campaign of 1860 very
many, perhaps a majority of the Republican voters, failed to realize
what their party was standing for. Indeed, down to this day the members
of that organization, taught as they have been, indignantly deny that a
vote for Lincoln and Hamlin in 1860 looked to an interference with
slavery in the States.
But now Professor Emerson David Fite, of Yale University, sees in 1911
what was the underlying hope, and consequently the ultimate aim, of the
Republican party in 1860, exactly as the South saw it then. In a
powerful summing up of more evidence than there is room to recite here,
he says: "The testimony of the Democracy and of the leaders of the
Republican party accords well with the evidence of daily events in
_revealing Republican aggression_. _The party hoped to destroy slavery,
and this was something new in a large political organization._"[77]
[77] "The Presidential Campaign of 1860," p. 195, Fite, 1911.
That this party, when it should ultimately come into full power, would,
to carry out the purpose which Professor Fite now sees, ignore the
Federal Constitution was, in 1860, evident to Southerners from the
following facts:
In 1841 the governor of Virginia demanded of the governor of New York
the extradition of two men indicted in Virginia for enticing away slaves
from their masters. Governor Seward, of New York, refused the demand, on
the ground that no such offence existed in New York. This case did not
go to the courts, but in 1860 the governor of Kentucky made a similar
demand in a like case on the governor of Ohio, who placed his refusal on
the same grounds as had Governor Seward in the former case. The Supreme
Court of the United States in this case decided that the governor of
Ohio, in refusing to deliver up the fugitive, was violating the
Constitution. The court further said:
"If the governor of Ohio refuses to _discharge this duty there is no
power delegated to the general government_, either through the judicial
department or any other department, to use any coercive means to compel
him."[78]
[78] "Virginia's Attitude on Slavery and Secession," Mumford, pp.
211-12.
If these two governors had defied the Federal Constitution, so had
eleven State legislatures. From 1854 to 1860, inclusive, Vermont, Rhode
Island, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas,
Ohio, and Pennsylvania, had all passed new "personal liberty laws" to
abrogate the new fugitive slave law of 1850.
Of these laws Professor Alexander Johnston said:
"There is absolutely no excuse for the personal liberty laws. If the
rendition of fugitive slaves was a federal obligation, the personal
liberty laws were flat disobedience to the law; if the obligation was
upon the States, they were a gross breach of good faith, for they were
intended and operated to prevent rendition; and, in either case, they
were in violation of the Constitution."[79]
[79] Alexander Johnston, "Lalor's Encyclopaedia," vol. III, p. 163.
And now came the State of Wisconsin. Its Supreme Court intervened and
took from the hands of the federal authorities an alleged fugitive
slave. The Supreme Court of the United States reversed the case and
ordered the slave back into the custody of the United States
marshal;[80] and thereupon the General Assembly of Wisconsin expressly
repudiated the authority of the United States Supreme Court. The
Wisconsin assembly asserted its right to nullify the Federal law, basing
its action on the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798--a recrudescence of a
doctrine long since abandoned even in the South.
[80] Ableman _v._ Booth, 21 How.
In reality all this defiance of the Constitution of the United States by
State executives, State legislatures, and a State court, was on the
ground that whatever was dictated by conscience to these officials was a
"higher law than the Constitution of the United States"; and modern
historians recognize, as Tilden did, the leadership of the statesman who
in 1850 announced that startling doctrine. It is Alexander Johnston who
says, "Seward's speeches in the Senate made him the leader of the
Republican party from its first organization."[81]
[81] Alexander Johnston, "Lalor's Encyclopaedia," vol. III, p. 707.
To the minds of Southerners it seemed clear that _if the Southern States
desired to preserve for themselves the Constitution of the fathers, they
must secede and set it up over a government of their own_. This eleven
of these States did. Many of them were reluctant to take the step; all
their people had loved the old Union, but they passed their ordinances
of secession, united as the Confederate States of America, and their
officials took an oath to maintain inviolate the old Constitution,
which, with unimportant changes in it, they had adopted.
The new government sent delegates to ask that the separation should be
peaceful. The application was denied and the war followed. Attempts to
secede were made in Kentucky and Missouri. In neither of these States
did the seceders get full control. They were represented, however, in
the Confederate Congress by senators and representatives elected by the
troops from those States that were serving in the Confederate army.