Slavery and Four Years of War Part 22

Wm. Pitt Fessenden and Lot M. Morrill of Maine, Geo. S. Boutwell of Ma.s.sachusetts, David Dudley Field and Erastus Corning of New York, Frederick T. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, John Tyler, Wm. C. Rives, and John A. Seddon of Virginia, Wm. O. Butler, James B. Clay, James Guthrie, and Charles A. Wickcliffe of Kentucky, C. P. Wolcott, Salmon P. Chase, John C. Wright, Wm. S. Groesback, Franklin T.

Backus, Reuben Hitchc.o.c.k, Thomas Ewing (Sen.), and Valentine B.

Horton of Ohio, Caleb B. Smith and G.o.dlove S. Orth of Indiana, John M. Palmer and Burton C. Cook of Illinois, and James Harlan and James W. Grimes of Iowa were of the number. Many of them were then, or afterwards, celebrated as statesmen; and some of them subsequently held high rank as soldiers.

March 2, 1861, the "Peace Conference" propositions were offered twice to the Senate, and each time overwhelmingly defeated, as they had been, on the day preceding, by the House.(118)

There were many other propositions offered, considered, and defeated, to wit: Propositions from the Senate Committee of thirteen appointed December 18, 1860; propositions of Douglas, Seward, and others; also propositions from a meeting of Senators and members from the border, free, and slave States, all relating to slavery, and proposed with a view of stopping the already precipitated secession of States.(119)

Some of these propositions were exasperatingly humiliating, and only possibly justifiable by the times.

Though Lincoln's election as President was claimed to be a good cause for secession, and though much of the compromise talk was to appease his party opponents as well as the South, he was opposed to bargaining himself into the office to which the people had elected him. With respect to this matter (January 30, 1861) he said:

"I will suffer death before I will consent, or advise my friends to consent, to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of the government to which we have a const.i.tutional right."

We have now done with legislation, attempted legislation, and const.i.tutional amendments to protect and extend slavery in the Republic. Slavery appealed to war, and by the inexorable decree of war its fate must be decided.

The _Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln_ (January 1, 1863) and the _Thirteenth_ Amendment to the Const.i.tution (1865) freed all slaves in the Union; the _Fourteenth_ Amendment (1868) provided that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside"; and the _Fifteenth_ Amendment (1870) gave the right to vote to all citizens of the United States regardless of "_race, color, or previous condition of servitude_." These are all simply the decrees of war, written in the organic law of the United States at the end of the national four years' baptism of blood. Embodied in them are no concessions or compromises; the evil was torn out by the roots, and the Christian world, the progressive civilization of the age, and the consciences of enlightened mankind _now_ approve what was done.

The war, with its attendant horrors and evils, was necessary to terminate the deep-seated, time-honored, and unholy inst.i.tution of human slavery, so long embedded in our social, political, and commercial relations, and sustained by our prejudices, born of a selfish disposition, common to white people, to esteem themselves superior to others.

The history of emanc.i.p.ation and of these const.i.tutional amendments belongs, logically, to periods during and at the end of the war.

There are, however, two important acts relating to slavery which pa.s.sed Congress during the War of the Rebellion, not strictly the _result_ of that war, though incident to it, which must be mentioned.

(116) Kansas joined later, and Michigan, California, and Oregon were not represented; nor were the then seceded Southern States, or Arkansas, represented.

(117) Blaine (_Twenty Years of Congress_, vol. i., p. 269), says: "Puleston, a delegate from Pennsylvania, a subject of Queen Victoria, later (1884) of the British Parliament, was chosen Secretary of the Conference."--This is an error. He was not a delegate: only one of several a.s.sistant secretaries.

On the next page of Blaine's book he falls into another error in saying the Wilmot Proviso was embodied (1848) in the Oregon territorial act. It was never embodied in any act. The sixth section of the Ordinance of 1787 is embodied in that act word for word.

(118) _Hist. of Rebellion_ (McPherson), pp. 68-9.

(119) _Ibid_., p. 76.

XXVII DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA--SLAVERY ABOLISHED--1862

The District of Columbia, acquired by the United States in 1791 for the purpose of founding the city of Was.h.i.+ngton as the permanent Federal Capital, was, by the laws of Virginia and Maryland, slave territory. The District was originally ten miles square, and included the city of Alexandria. Later (1846) the part acquired from Virginia (about forty square miles) was retroceded to that State. Congress had complete jurisdiction over it, though the laws of Maryland and Virginia, for some purposes, were continued in force. It was, however, from the beginning claimed that Congress had the right to abolish slavery within its boundaries.

Congress is given the right "to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over such District."(120) But slavery was claimed to be excepted because of its peculiar character.

The inst.i.tution of slavery was therefore perpetuated in the District, and in the Capital of the Republic slave-marts existed where men and women were sold from the auction block, and families were torn asunder and carried to different parts of the country to be continued in bondage. In the shadow of the Capitol the voice of the auctioneer proclaiming in the accustomed way the merits of the slave commingled with that of the statesmen in the Halls of Congress proclaiming the boasted liberty of the great American Republic! Daniel Drayton (1848) was tried in the District for the larceny of seventy-four human beings, his crime consisting of affording means (in the schooner _Pearl_) for their escape to freedom.(121)

Under the laws of the District many others were punished for like offences.

As late as 1856, when the sculptor Crawford furnished a design for the _Statue of Liberty_ to crown the dome of the Capitol, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis ordered the "_liberty cap_" struck from the model, because in art it had an "established origin in its use as a badge of the freed slave."(122)

We have seen how much the consciences of just men were shocked, and how a.s.siduously such men labored to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and with what tenacity the slave party fought to maintain it there, and even by const.i.tutional amendments to fix it there forever.

But when slavery had brought the country to war, the emanc.i.p.ation of slaves in the District was early considered.

Henry Wilson of Ma.s.sachusetts, December 16, 1861, introduced a bill in the Senate, which, after a most memorable debate in both Houses of Congress, pa.s.sed, and on April 16, 1862, became a law, with the approval of President Lincoln. This act emanc.i.p.ated forthwith all the slaves of the District, and annulled the laws of Maryland over it relating to slavery and all statutes giving the cities of Was.h.i.+ngton and Georgetown authority to pa.s.s ordinances discriminating against persons of color.

(120) Con. U. S., Art. I., Sec. 8, par. 17.

(121) Drayton did not succeed in the attempt to afford these slaves means to escape. He was tried on two indictments for larceny, convicted, and on each sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary.

The Circuit Court reversed these convictions on the erroneous charge of the trial judge (Crawford), to the effect that a man might be guilty of larceny of property--slaves--without the intent to appropriate it to his own use. On re-trial Drayton was acquitted on the larceny indictments; but verdicts were taken against him on seventy-four indictments for transporting slaves--not a penitentiary offense--and he was sentenced to pay a fine of $10,000, and to remain in prison until paid. He was most ably defended by Horace Mann of Boston, and J. M. Carlisle of Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., either as volunteer counsel or employed by Drayton's friends, he being poor.

There were 115--41 for larceny, 64 for transportation--indictments against Drayton, which led Mr. Mann to remark of the threatened penalty: "_Methuselah himself must have been caught young in order to survive such a sentence_."--_Slavery, Letters, etc._ (Mann), p.

93.

President Fillmore, being defeated in 1852 for nomination for President, pardoned Drayton after four years' and four months'

imprisonment, which pardon, it was claimed, defeated Scott, the Whig nominee, at the polls.--_Memoir of Drayton_, p. 118.

(122) Correspondence in War Department between Davis and Quartermaster- General Meigs.

The present nondescript hood, giving the statue crowning the dome its appearance, in some views, of a wild Indian, was subst.i.tuted for the Liberty cap.

XXVIII SLAVERY PROHIBITED IN THE TERRITORIES--1862

Growing out of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the question was raised by Lovejoy of Illinois and others as to the duty of Congress to declare freedom _national_ and slavery _sectional;_ and also to prohibit slavery in all the Territories of the Union.

A bill was pa.s.sed, which (June 19, 1862) was approved by the President, and became the last general law of Congress on the subject of slavery in the Territories. It reads:

"That from and after the pa.s.sage of this act there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the Territories of the United States, now existing, or which may at any time hereafter be formed or acquired by the United States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."

By this act the principles of the Ordinance of 1787 (sixth section) were applied universally to all existing and to be acquired territory of the United States.

It was only, in effect, Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784, defeated by _one_ vote in the old Congress, the loss of which he deplored so much. His benign purpose to restrict slavery was delayed seventy- eight years--until blood flowed to sanction it.

XXIX BENTON'S SUMMARY

We close this already too long history of human slavery in the United States with Thomas H. Benton's summary of the "cardinal points" in the aggressive policy of the impetuous South in pus.h.i.+ng forward slavery as a cause for disunion. He wrote, four years anterior to the Rebellion of 1861, with a prophetic pen, nibbed by the experience of a Senator for thirty years, and as a slaveholder.

He had actively partic.i.p.ated in most of the events of which he speaks, and was personally familiar with all of them.(123)

"But I am not now writing the history of the present slavery agitation--a history which the young have not learnt, and the old have forgotten, and which every American ought to understand. I only indicate cardinal points to show its character; and of these a main one remains to be stated. Up to Mr. Pierce's administration the plan had been defensive--that is to say, to make the secession of the South a measure of self-defence against the abolition encroachments, aggressions, and crusades of the North. In the time of Mr. Pierce, the plan became offensive--that is to say, to commence the expansion of slavery, and the acquisition of territory to spread it over, so as to overpower the North with new slave States, and drive them out of the Union. In this change of tactics originated the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise, the attempt to purchase one half of Mexico, and the actual purchase of a large part; the design to take Cuba; the encouragement to Kinney and to Walker in Central America; the quarrels with Great Britain for outlandish coasts and islands; the designs upon the Tehuantepec, the Nicaragua, the Panama, and the Darien routes; and the scheme to get a foothold in the Island of San Domingo. The rising in the free States in consequence of the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise checked these schemes, and limited the success of the disunionists to the revival of the agitation which enables them to wield the South against the North in all the Federal elections and Federal legislation.

Accidents and events have given this part a strange pre-eminence-- under Jackson's administration proclaimed for treason; since, at the head of the government and of the Democratic party. The death of Harrison, and the accession of Tyler, was their first great lift; the election of Mr. Pierce was their culminating point. It not only gave them the government, but power to pa.s.s themselves for the Union party, and for democrats; and to stigmatize all who refused to go with them as disunionists and abolitionists. And to keep up this cla.s.sification is the object of the eleven pages of the message which calls for this Review--unhappily a.s.sisted in that object by the conduct of a few real abolitionists (not five per centum of the population of the free States); but made to stand, in the eyes of the South, for the whole."

(123) Hist., etc., Ex., _Dred Scott Case_, pp. 184-5.

x.x.x PROPHECY AS TO SLAVERY'S FATE: ALSO AS TO DISUNION

We are approaching the period for the fulfilment of prophecy in relation to the perpetuity of human slavery in the United States.

We summarize a few of the prophecies made by distinguished American statesmen and citizens. George Was.h.i.+ngton, Patrick Henry, and other Virginia statesmen and slaveholders at the close of the Revolution predicted that slaves would be emanc.i.p.ated, or they would acquire their freedom violently. These patriots advocated emanc.i.p.ation. The stumbling-block to abolition in Virginia at that time was, what to do with the blacks. The white population could not reconcile themselves to the idea of living on an equality with them, as they deemed they must if the blacks were free. As early as 1782 Jefferson expressed his serious forebodings:

"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government... .