The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences Part 11

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 "Const.i.tutional 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 inst.i.tution 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 inst.i.tutions. He also said: "I a.s.sert 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 inst.i.tution," _viz._, slavery, saw the situation exactly as the South did. To prove that the Republican party was looking to the ultimate destruction of the inst.i.tution, Mr. Tilden cited the leaders.h.i.+p of Chase and his speeches in which he was propounding the higher law theory; a.s.serting that the conflict was "irrepressible"; suggesting the power of the North to amend the Const.i.tution, 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 Const.i.tution 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 Const.i.tution"

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 Const.i.tution 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 Const.i.tution. 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 Att.i.tude on Slavery and Secession," Mumford, pp.

211-12.

If these two governors had defied the Federal Const.i.tution, so had eleven State legislatures. From 1854 to 1860, inclusive, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, Ma.s.sachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, had all pa.s.sed 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 Const.i.tution."[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 a.s.sembly of Wisconsin expressly repudiated the authority of the United States Supreme Court. The Wisconsin a.s.sembly a.s.serted 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 Const.i.tution 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 Const.i.tution of the United States"; and modern historians recognize, as Tilden did, the leaders.h.i.+p 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 Const.i.tution 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 pa.s.sed their ordinances of secession, united as the Confederate States of America, and their officials took an oath to maintain inviolate the old Const.i.tution, 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.

CHAPTER IX

FOUR YEARS OF WAR

The bitter fruits of anti-slavery agitation were secession and four years of b.l.o.o.d.y war. The Federal Government waged war to coerce the seceding States to remain in the Union. With the North it was a war for the Union; the South was fighting for independence--denominated by Northern writers as "the Civil War." It was in reality a war between the eleven States which had seceded, as autonomous States, and were fighting for independence, as the Confederate States of America, against the other twenty-two States, which, as the United States of America, fought against secession and for the Union of all the States. It is true the States remaining in the Union had with them the army and the navy and the old government, but that government could not, and did not, exercise its functions within the borders of the seceded States until by force of arms in the war that was now waged it had conquered a control. It was a war between the States for such control; for independence on the one hand, and for the Union on the other. It was not, save in exceptional cases, a war between neighbor and neighbor; it was a war between States as ent.i.ties, and therefore not properly a civil war. The result of the war did not change the principles upon which it was fought, though it did decide finally the issues that were involved, the right of secession primarily, and slavery incidentally.

Jefferson Davis, afterward the much-loved President of the Confederacy, in his farewell speech in the United States Senate, March 21, 1861, thus stated the case of the South: "Then, senators, we recur to the compact which binds us together. We recur to the principles upon which this government was founded, and _when you deny them_, and when you deny to us the right to withdraw from a Union which thus perverted _threatens to be destructive of our rights, we but tread in the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence and take the hazard_. This is done not in hostility to others, not to injure any section of our country, _not even for our own pecuniary benefit, but from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited and which it is our duty to transmit unshorn to our children_."

Southerners were, as Mr. Davis understood it, treading in the path of their fathers when they proclaimed their independence and fought for the right of self-government.

Professor Fite, of Yale, justifies secession on the following ground:

"In the last a.n.a.lysis the one complete justification of secession was the necessity of saving the vast property of slavery from destruction; secession was a commercial necessity designed to make those billions secure from outside interference. Viewed in this light, secession was right, for any people, prompted by the commonest motives of self-defence and with no moral scruples against slavery, would have followed the same course. The present generation of Northerners, born and reared after the war, must shake off their inherited political pa.s.sions and prejudices and p.r.o.nounce the verdict of justification for the South. Believing slavery to be right, it was the duty of the South to defend it. It is time that the words 'traitors,' 'conspirators,' 'rebels,' and 'rebellion' be discarded."[82]

[82] "The Presidential Campaign of 1860," Emerson David Fite, 1911, introductory chapter.

These words of Professor Fite will waken a responsive echo in the hearts of Southerners, but Southerners place, and their fathers planted, themselves on higher ground than commercial considerations. The Confederates were defending their inherited right of local self-government and the Federal Const.i.tution that secured it. It was for these rights that, as Mr. Davis had said, they were willing to _follow the path their fathers trod_.

The preservation of the Union the North was fighting for, was a n.o.ble motive; it looked to the future greatness and glory of the republic; but devotion to the Union had been a growth, the product largely of a single generation; the devotion of the South to the right of local self-government was an older and deeper conviction; it had been bred in the bone for three generations; it dated from Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and Yorktown. Close as the non-slave-holders of the South were to the slave-holders, of the same British stock, and with the same traditions, blood kinsmen as they were, they might not have been willing to dare all and do all for the protection of property in which they were not interested; but they were ready to, and they did, wage a death struggle to maintain against a hostile sectional majority, their inherited right to govern themselves in their own way. Added to this was the ever-present conviction of Southerners all, that they were battling not only for the supremacy of their race but for the preservation of their homes. There was a little ditty quite prevalent in the Army of Northern Virginia, of which nothing is now remembered except the refrain, but that of itself speaks volumes. It ran:

"Do you belong to the rebel band Fighting for your home?"

Northerners had, most of them, convinced themselves that the South would never dare to secede. The danger of servile insurrections, if nothing else, would prevent it.[83] Many Southerners, on the other hand, could not see how, under the Const.i.tution, the North could venture on coercion.

[83] See Fite, "Campaign of 1860," pa.s.sim, and especially speech of Schurz, p. 244 _et seq._

But to the South the greatest surprise furnished by the events of that era has been Abraham Lincoln--as he appears now in the light of history.

What, in the minds of Southerners, fixed his status personally, during the canva.s.s of 1860, was the statement he had made in his speech at Chicago, preliminary to his great debate with Douglas in 1858, that the Union could not "continue to exist half slave and half free." And he was now the candidate of the "Black Republican" party, a party that was denouncing a decision of the Supreme Court; that, in nearly every State in the North, had nullified the fugitive slave law, and that stood for "negro equality," as the South termed it.

There were other statements by Mr. Lincoln in that debate with Douglas that the South has had especial reason to take note of since the period of Reconstruction. At Springfield, Illinois, September 18, 1858, he said: "There is a physical difference between the white and black races which, I believe, will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality, and, _inasmuch as they can not so live, while they do live together there must be the position of superior and inferior; and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having that position a.s.signed to the white man_."

The new Confederacy took the Const.i.tution of the United States, so modified as to make it read plainly as Jefferson had expounded it in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. Other changes were slight. The presidential term was extended to six years and the President was not to be re-eligible. The slave trade was prohibited and Congress was authorized to forbid the introduction of slaves from the old Union.

Abraham Lincoln became President, with a fixed resolve to preserve the Union but with no intent to abolish slavery. Had the war for the Union been as successful as he hoped it would be, slavery would not have been abolished by any act of his. It is clear that, when inaugurated, he had not changed his opinions expressed at Springfield, nor those others, which, at Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, he had stated thus: "When our Southern brethren tell us they are no more responsible for slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said the inst.i.tution exists and it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I will surely not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the inst.i.tution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia, their native land."

This, he said, it was impracticable to do, at least suddenly, and then proceeded: "To free them all and keep them among us as underlings--is it quite certain that this would better their condition?... What next? Free them and make them politically and socially our equals?" This question he answered in the negative, and continued: "It does seem to me that systems of gradual emanc.i.p.ation might be adopted, but for their tardiness I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South."

In these extracts from his speeches we find a central thread that runs through the history of his whole administration. We see it again when, pressed by extremists, Mr. Lincoln said in an open letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that."

Indeed, Congress had, in 1861, by joint resolution declared that the sole purpose of the war was the preservation of the Union. In no other way, and for no other purpose, could the North at that time have been induced to wage war against the South.

Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, and Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States, were both Kentuckians by birth, both Americans. In the purity of their lives, public and private, in patriotic devotion to the preservation of American inst.i.tutions as understood by each of them, they were alike; but they represented different phases of American thought, and each was the creature more or less of his environment. Both were men of commanding ability, but the destiny of each was shaped by agencies that now seem to have been directed by the hand of Fate. Mr. Lincoln, by nature a political genius, was carried to Illinois when a child, reared in the North-west among those to whom, with the Mississippi River as their only outlet to the markets of the world, disunion, with its loss of their highway to the sea, was unthinkable. Lincoln became a Whig, with the Union of the States the pa.s.sion of his life, and finally, by forces he had not himself put in motion, he was placed at the head of the Federal Government at a time when sectionalism had decided that the question of the permanence of the Union was to be tried out, once and forever.