The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences Part 6

We have already noted some wonderful and instructive changes in the tide of events set in motion by the radical teachings of the New Abolitionists. The churches, as has been shown, to save the country, North and South, changed their att.i.tude on slavery itself. Dr. Channing, who had opposed the methods of the Abolitionists, became, as many others did with him, when mobs had a.s.sailed these people, their defender and eulogist, because they were martyrs for the sake of free speech; and now we are to see in John Quincy Adams another change, equally notable, a change that was to make Mr. Adams thenceforward the most momentous figure, at least during its earlier stages, in the tragic drama that is the subject of our story.

Elected to the House of Representatives after the expiration of his term as President, Mr. Adams was not in sympathy with the methods of the Abolitionists. Indeed, prior to December 31, 1831, he had shown as little interest in slavery as he did when on that day in presenting to the House fifteen pet.i.tions against slavery he "deprecated a discussion which would lead to ill-will, to heart-burning, to mutual hatred ...

without accomplis.h.i.+ng anything else."[35]

[35] Hart's "Slavery and Abolition," p. 256.

The pet.i.tions presented by Mr. Adams were referred to a committee.

The Southerners had not then become so exasperated as to insist on Congress refusing to receive Abolition pet.i.tions. But multiplying these pet.i.tions was a ready means of provoking the slave-holders, and soon pet.i.tions poured in from many quarters, couched, most of them, in language, not disrespectful to Congress but provoking to slave-holders.

Unfortunately, the lower house of Congress on May 26, 1836, which was while mobs in the North were still trying to put down the Abolitionists, pa.s.sed a resolution that all such pet.i.tions, etc., should thereafter be laid upon the table, _without further action_. Adams voted against it as "a direct violation of the Const.i.tution of the United States." The Const.i.tution forbids any law "abridging the freedom of speech ... or the right ... to pet.i.tion the government for a redress of grievances." The resolution to lay all anti-slavery pet.i.tions on the table without further action was pa.s.sed, "with the hope that it might put a stop to the agitation that seemed to endanger the existence of the Union." But it had the opposite effect. It soon became known as the "gag resolution," and was, for years, the centre of the most aggravating discussions that had, up to that time, ever occurred in Congress. Mr.

Adams in these debates became, without, it seems, ever having been in full sympathy with the agitators, thenceforward their champion in Congress, and so continued until the day of his death in 1848.

The Abolitionists were happy. They were succeeding in their programme--making the Southern slave-holder odious by exasperating him into offending Northern sentiment.

CHAPTER VI

A CRISIS AND A COMPROMISE

In 1840 there were 200 Abolition societies, with a members.h.i.+p of over 200,000. Agitation had created all over the North a spirit of hostility to slavery as it existed in the South, and especially to the admission of new slave States into the Union. In 1840 the struggle over the application of Texas for admission into the Union had already, for three years, been mooted. Objections to the admission of the new State were many, such as: American adventurers had wrongfully wrested control of the new State from Mexico; boundary lines were unsettled; war with Mexico would follow, etc.; but chiefly, Texas was a slave State, which was, in the South, a strong reason for annexation. There were, however, many sound and unanswerable arguments for the admission of the new State, just such as had influenced Jefferson in purchasing the Louisiana territory: Texas was contiguous, her territory and resources immense.

On the issue thus joined the first great gun had been fired by Dr.

Channing, who, though still more moderate than some, might now be cla.s.sed as an Abolitionist. August 1, 1837, he wrote a long open letter to Henry Clay against annexation, and in that letter he said:

To me it seems not only the right but the duty of the Free States, in case of the annexation of Texas, to say to the slave-holding States, "We regard this act as the dissolution of the Union; the essential conditions of the National Compact are violated."[36]

[36] "Channing's Works," vol. II, ed. 1847, p. 237.

This was very like the p.r.o.nunciamento already made by Garrison--"no union with slavery."

The underlying reasons that controlled Southern statesmen in this contest over Texas, and the motives that animated them in the fierce battles they fought later for new slave States, are thus stated by Mr.

George Ticknor Curtis, of New England.[37]

[37] "Life of Buchanan," vol. II, p. 280.

It should in justice be remembered that the effort _at that period to enlarge the area of slavery was an effort on the part of the South, dictated by a desire to remain in the Union, and not to accept the issue of an inherent incompatibility of a political union between slave-holding and non-slave-holding States_.

In 1840 the first effort for the annexation of Texas, by treaty, was defeated in the Senate.

If the Southerners had been as ready to accept the doctrine of an inherent incompatibility between slave and free States as were Dr.

Channing and those other Abolitionists who were now declaring for "no union with slave-holders," they would at once have seceded and joined Texas; but the South still loved the Union, and strove, down to 1860, persistently, and often pa.s.sionately, for power that would enable it to remain safely in its folds.

Texas was finally admitted in 1845, after annexation had been pa.s.sed on by the people in the presidential election of 1844. In that election Clay was defeated by the Abolitionists. Because Clay was not unreservedly against annexation the Abolitionists drew from the Whigs in New York State enough votes, casting them for Birney, to defeat Clay and elect Polk; and now Abolitionism was a factor in national politics.

The two great national parties were the Democrats and the Whigs, the voters somewhat equally divided between them. For years both parties had regarded the Abolitionists precisely as did the non-partisan meeting at Faneuil Hall, in August, 1835--as a band of agitators, organized for the purpose of interfering with slavery where it was none of their business; and both parties had meted out to this new and, as they deemed it, pestilent sect, unstinted condemnation. But at last the voters of this despised cult had turned a presidential election and were making inroads in both parties. Half a dozen Northern States, in which in 1835 "no protest had been made against the fugitive slave law of 1793," had already pa.s.sed "personal liberty laws" intended to obstruct and nullify that law. And now it was "slave-catchers" and not Abolitionists who were being mobbed in the North.

Boston had reversed its att.i.tude toward the Abolitionists. On May 31, 1849, the New England Anti-Slavery Society was holding its annual convention in that very Faneuil Hall where, in 1835, Abolitionism had been so roundly condemned; and now Wendell Phillips, pointing to one of two fugitive slaves, who then sat triumphantly on the platform, said, "amid great applause, ... 'We say that they may make their little laws in Was.h.i.+ngton, but that _Faneuil Hall repeals them_, in the name of the humanity of Ma.s.sachusetts.'"[38]

[38] Garrison's "Garrison," vol. III, p. 247.

Poets headed by Whittier and Longfellow, authors like Emerson and Lowell, and orators like Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips, had joined the agitators, and all united in a.s.saulting the fugitive slave law. The following, from James Russell Lowell's "Biglow Papers," No. 1, June, 1840, is a specimen of the literature that was stirring up hostility against slavery and the "slave-catcher" in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of many thousands, who were joining in an anti-slavery crusade while disdaining companions.h.i.+p with the Abolitionists:

"Ain't it cute to see a Yankee Take such everlastin' pains All to get the Devil's Thankee Helpin' on 'em weld their chains?"

W'y it's jest es clear es figgers, Clear es one and one makes two, Chaps that makes black slaves of n.i.g.g.e.rs Want to make w'ite slaves o' you.

In the meantime the people of the South, much excited, were resorting to repression, pa.s.sing laws to prevent slaves from being taught to read, and laws, in some States, inhibiting a.s.semblages of slaves above given numbers, unless some white person were present--all as safeguards against insurrection. Thus, in 1835, an indictment was found in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, against one Williams, who had never been in Alabama, for circulating there an alleged incendiary doc.u.ment, and Governor Gayle made requisition on Governor Marcy, of New York, for the extradition of Williams. Governor Marcy denied the request. The case was the same as that more recently decided by the Supreme Court of the United States, when it held that editors of New York and Indiana papers could not be brought to the District of Columbia for trial.

The South, all the while clamoring to have the agitators put down, had by still other means than these contributed to the ever-increasing excitement in the North. Southerners had mobbed Abolitionists, and whipped and driven out of the country persons found in possession of _The Liberator_ or suspected of circulating other incendiary literature.

And violence in the South against the Abolitionists had precisely the same effect on the Northern mind as the violence against them in the North had from 1835 to 1838, but there was this difference: the refugee from the distant South, whether he were an escaped slave or a fleeing Abolitionist, could color and exaggerate the wrongs he had suffered and so parade himself as a martyr. While this was true, it was also quite often true that the outrage committed in the South against the suspect was real enough--a mob had whipped and expelled him without any trial.

_And this is another of the lessons as to the evil effects of mob law that crop out all through the history of the anti-slavery crusade. No good can come from violating the law._

In 1848 another presidential election turned on the anti-slavery vote, this time again in New York State. Anti-slavery Democrats bolted the Democratic ticket, thus electing General Taylor, the Whig candidate.

In the canva.s.s preceding this election originated, we are told, the catch-phrase applied to Ca.s.s, the Democratic candidate--"a Northern man with Southern principles." The phrase soon became quite common, South and North--"a Southern man with Northern principles," and _vice versa_.

The invention and use of it in 1848 shows the progress that had been made in arraying one section of the Union against the other. Later, a telling piece of doggerel in Southern canva.s.ses, and it must also have been used North, was

He wired in and wired out, Leaving the people all in doubt, Whether the snake that made the track Was going North, or coming back.

Over the admission of California in 1849 there was another battle.

California, 734 miles long, with about 50,000 people (less than the usual number), and with a const.i.tution improvised under military government, applied for admission as a State. Southerners insisted on extending the line of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific, thereby making of the new territory two States. The South had been much embittered by the opposition to the admission of Texas. Texas was, nearly all of it, below the Missouri Compromise line, and the South thought it was equitably ent.i.tled to come in under that agreement. Its case, too, differed from that of Missouri, which already belonged to the United States when it applied for admission as a State. Texas, with all its vast wealth, was asking to come in without price.

Another continuing and increasing cause of distraction had been the use made by Abolitionists of the right of pet.i.tion. As already shown, pet.i.tions to Congress against slavery had been received without question till 1836, when Northern conservatives and Southern members, hoping to abate this source of agitation, had combined to pa.s.s a resolution to lay them on the table, which meant that they were to be no further noticed.

The Abolitionists were so delighted over the indefensible position into which they had driven the conservatives--the "gag law"--that they continued, up to the crisis of 1850, with unflagging zeal to hurry in monster pet.i.tions, one after another. The debates provoked by the presentation of these pet.i.tions, and the more and more heated discussions in Congress of _slavery in the States_, which was properly _a local and not a national question_, now attracted still wider public attention. The Abolitionists had almost succeeded in arraying the entire sections against each other, in making of the South and North two hostile nations. Professor John W. Burgess, dean of the Faculty of Political Science in Columbia University, says: "It would not be extravagant to say that the whole course of the internal history of the United States from 1836 to 1861 was more largely determined by the struggle in Congress, over the _Abolition pet.i.tions_ and the use of the mails for the Abolition literature, than anything else."[39]

[39] "The Middle Period," John W. Burgess, p. 274.

The South had its full share in the hot debates that took place over these matters in Congress. Its congressmen were quite as aggressive as those from the North, and they were accused of being imperious in manner, when demanding that a stop should be put to Abolition pet.i.tions, and Abolition literature going South in the mails.

There was another cause of complaint from the South, and this was grave.

By the "two underground railroads" that had been established, slaves, estimated at 2,000 annually, abducted or voluntarily escaping, were secretly escorted into or through the free States to Canada. To show how all this was then regarded by those who sympathized with the Abolitionists, and how it is still looked upon by some modern historians, the following is given from Hart's "Abolition and Slavery":

"The underground railroad was manned chiefly by orderly citizens, members of churches, and philanthropical citizens. _To law-abiding folk_ what could be more delightful than the sensation of aiding an oppressed slave, _exasperating_ a cruel master, and at the same time incurring the penalties of _defying an unrighteous law_?"

Southerners at that time thought that conductors on that line were practising, and readers of the above paragraph will probably think that Dr. Hart in his attractive rhetoric is now extolling in his history, "higher law doctrines."

It is undoubtedly true that, in 1850, a large majority of the Northern people strongly disapproved of the Abolitionists and their methods.

Modern historians carefully point out the difference between the great body of Northern anti-slavery people and the Abolitionists.

Nevertheless, here were majorities in eleven Northern States voting for, and sustaining, the legislators who pa.s.sed and kept upon the statute books laws which were intended to enable Southern slaves to escape from their masters. The enactment and the support of these laws was an attack upon the const.i.tutional rights of slave-holders; and Southern people looked upon all the voters who sustained these laws, and all the anti-slavery lecturers, speakers, pulpit orators, and writers of the North, as engaged with the Abolitionists in one common crusade against slavery. From the Southern stand-point a difference between them could only be made by a Hudibras:

He was in logic a great critic Profoundly skilled in a.n.a.lytic, He could distinguish and divide A hair 'twixt South and South West side.

As to how much of the formidable anti-slavery sentiment of that day had been created by the Abolitionists, we have this opinion of a distinguished English traveller and observer. Mr. L. W. A. Johnston was in Was.h.i.+ngton, in 1850, studying America. He says: