History of the United States Volume Iii Part 12

[Ill.u.s.tration: Locomotive, tender and two cars.]

Boston & Worcester Railroad, 1835.

From 1832 the railway system grew marvellously. The year 1833 saw completed the South Carolina Railroad between Charleston and the Savannah River, one hundred and thirty-six miles. This was the first railway line in this country to carry the mails, and the longest continuous one then in the world. Two years later Boston was connected by railway with Providence, with Lowell, and with Worcester, Baltimore with Washington, and the New York & Erie commenced. In 1839 Worcester was joined to Springfield in the same manner, and in 1841 a pa.s.senger could travel by rail from Boston to Rochester, changing cars, however, at least ten times.

PERIOD III.

THE YEARS OF SLAVERY CONTROVERSY 1840-1860

CHAPTER I.

SLAVERY AFTER THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE

[1820]

Slavery would most likely never have imperilled the life of this nation had it not been for the colossal industrial revolution sketched above.

Cotton had been grown here since, 1621, and some exportation of it is said to have occurred in 1747. Till nearly 1800 very little had gone from the United States to England, for by the old process a slave could clean but five or six pounds a day. In 1784, an American ship which brought eight bags to Liverpool was seized, on the ground that so much could not have been the produce of the United States. Jay's treaty, as first drawn, consented that no cotton should be exported from America.

It changed the very history of the country when, in 1793, Eli Whitney invented the saw-gin, by which a slave could clean 1,000 pounds of cotton per day. Slavery at once ceased to be a pa.s.sive, innocuous inst.i.tution, promising soon to die out, and became a means of gain, to be upheld and extended in all possible ways. The cotton export, but 189,316 pounds in 1791, and a third less in 1792, rose to 487,600 pounds in 1793, to 1,610,760 pounds in 1794, to 6,276,300 pounds in 1795, and to 38,118,041 pounds in 1804. Within five years after Whitney's invention, cotton displaced indigo as the great southern staple, and the slave States had become the cotton-field of the world. In 1869 the export was nearly 1,400,000,000 pounds, worth about $161,500,000.

[Footnote: Johnson, in Lalor's Cyclopaedia, Art. "Slavery."]

So profitable was slavery to vast numbers of individuals because of this its new status, that men would not notice how, after all, it militated against the nation's supreme interests. It polluted social relations in obvious ways, setting at naught among slaves family ties and the behests of virtue, influences that reacted terribly upon the whites. The entire government of slaves had a brutalizing tendency, more p.r.o.nounced as time pa.s.sed. "Plantation manners" were cultivated, which, displaying themselves in Congress and elsewhere, in all discussions and measures relating to the execrable inst.i.tution, made the North believe that the South was drifting toward barbarism. This was an exaggeration, yet everyone knew that schools in the South were rare and poor, and thought and speech little free as compared with the same in the North. Political power, like the slaves, was in the hands of a few great barons, totally merciless toward even southerners who differed from them. It is of course not meant that virtue, kindliness, intelligence, and fair-mindedness were ever wanting in that section, but they flourished in spite of the slave-system.

Economically slavery was an equal evil, taking as was the superficial evidence to the contrary. No cruelty could make the slave work like a free man, while his power to consume was enormous. Infants, aged, and weak had to be supported by the owner. Even the best slaves were improvident. Everywhere slave labor tended to banish free. Upon slave soil scarcely an immigrant could be led to set foot. Poor whites grew steadily poorer, their lot often more wretched than that of slaves.

Invention, care, forethought were as good as unknown among them. Slave labor proved incompetent even for agriculture, impoverishing the richest soil in comparatively few years, whence the perpetual impulse of the slave-owners to acquire new territory. The dishonesty of blacks and the danger of slave insurrections made property insecure, at the same time that the system diminished in every community the number of its natural defenders. The result was that the South, the superior of the North in natural resources, was, by 1800, rapidly becoming the inferior in every single element of prosperity.

[1831]

One of these insurrections was the event of 1831 in Virginia, originating near the southern border. Four slaves in alliance with three whites commenced it by killing several families and pressing all the slaves they could find into their service, until the force was nearly two hundred. They spread desolation everywhere. Fifty-five white persons were murdered before the insurrection was in hand. Virginia and North Carolina called out troops, and at last all the insurgents were captured or killed. The leader was a black named Nat Turner, who believed himself called of G.o.d to give his people freedom. He had heard voices in the air and seen signs on the sky, which, with many other portents, he interpreted as proofs of his divine commission. When all was over Turner escaped to the woods, dug a hole under some fence-rails and lived there for six weeks, coming out only at midnight for food. Driven thence by discovery, he still managed to hide here and there about the plantations in spite of a whole country of armed men in search of him, until at last he was accidentally confronted in the bush by a white man with levelled rifle. He was hanged, November 11th, and sixteen others later. His wife was tortured for evidence, but in vain. Twelve negroes were transported.

Very many were, without trial, punished in inhuman ways, the heads of some impaled along the highway as a warning. Partly in consequence of this horrible affair, originated a stout movement for the abolition of slavery in Virginia. This was favored by many of the ablest men in the Old Dominion, but they were overruled.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Turner, holding a short sword and another man pointing a rifle at him.]

The Discovery of Nat Turner.

Danger from the blacks necessitated the most rigid laws concerning them.

Time had been when it was thought not dangerous to teach slaves to read.

In 1742 Commissary Garden, of the English Society for Propagating the Gospel, founded a negro school in Charleston, where slaves were taught by slave teachers, these last being the society's property. Honest Elias Neale, the society's catechist in New York, engaged in the same work there, and afterward catechists were so employed in Philadelphia. That organization did much to stir up the planters to teach their slaves the rudiments of Christianity. [Footnote: Eggleston in Century, May, 1888.]

Now, all this was changed. The strictest laws were made to keep every slave in the most abject ignorance, to prevent their congregating, and to make it impossible for abolitionists or abolitionist literature or influence to get at them.

[1816]

Inconvenient and perilous as slavery was, southern devotion to it for many reasons strengthened rather than weakened. The ma.s.ses did not perceive the ruin the system was working, which, moreover, consisted with great profits to vast numbers of influential men and to many localities. Border States little by little gave up the hope of becoming free, the old anti-slavery convictions of their best men faltering, and the practical problem of emanc.i.p.ation, really difficult, being too easily decided insoluble. More significant, owing to a variety of circ.u.mstances, the abolition spirit itself greatly subsided early in the present century. Completion of the emanc.i.p.ation process in the North was a.s.sured by the action of New York in 1817, proclaiming a total end to slavery there from July 4, 1827. The view that each State was absolute sovereign over slavery within its own borders, responsibility for it and its abuses there ending with the State's own citizens, was now universally accepted. Success in securing the act of 1807, making the slave trade illegal from January 1, 1808, and affixing to it heavy penalties, lulled mult.i.tudes to sleep. This act, however, had effect only gradually, and its beneficence was greatly lessened in that it left confiscated negroes to the operation of the local law.

Such quietude was furthered through the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1816, by easy philanthropists and statesmen, North as well as South, who swore by the Const.i.tution as admitting no fundamental amendment, admired its three great compromises, loved all brethren of the Union except agitators, and deprecated slavery and the black race about equally; its mission negro deportation, but its actual efforts confined to the dumping of free blacks, reprobates, and castaways in some remote corner of the universe, for the convenience of slave-holders themselves. [Footnote: 3 Schouler's United States, 198.]

[1839]

Meantime much was occurring to harden northern hostility to slavery into resolute hatred, a fire which might smoulder long but could not die out.

The fugitive slave law for the rendition of runaways found in free States operated cruelly at best, and was continually abused to kidnap free blacks. The owner or his attorney or agent could seize a slave anywhere on the soil of freedom, bring him before the magistrate of the county, city, or town corporate in which the arrest was made, and prove his ownership by testimony or by affidavit; and the certificate of such magistrate that this had been done was a sufficient warrant for the return of the poor wretch into bondage. Obstruction, rescue, or aid toward escape was fined in the sum of five hundred dollars. This is the pith of the fugitive slave act of 1793. It might have been far more mischievous but for the interpretation put upon it in the celebrated case of Prigg versus Pennsylvania.

Mr. Prigg was the agent of a Maryland slave-owner. He had in 1839 pursued a slave woman into Pennsylvania, and when refused her surrender by the local magistrate carried her away by force. He was indicted in Pennsylvania for kidnapping, an amicable lawsuit made up, and an appeal taken to the United States Supreme Court. Here, in an opinion prepared by Justice Story, the Pennsylvania statute under which the magistrate had acted, providing a mode for the return of fugitives by state authorities, was declared unconst.i.tutional on the ground that only Congress could legislate on the subject; but it was added that while a free State had no right in any way to block the capture of a runaway, as for example by ordering a jury trial to determine whether a seized person had really been a slave, so as to protect free persons of dark complexion, yet States might forbid their officers to aid in the recovery of slaves. As the act of 1793 did not name any United States officials for this service it became nearly inoperative. Spite of this terrible construction of the Const.i.tution, which Chief Justice Taney thought should have included an a.s.sertion of a State's duty by legislation to aid rendition, many northern States pa.s.sed personal liberty laws, besetting the capture of slaves with all possible difficulties thought compatible with the Const.i.tution. The South denounced all such laws whatever as unconst.i.tutional, and perhaps some of them were.

[1835]

Const.i.tutional or not, they were needed. There were regular expeditions to carry off free colored persons from the coasts of New York and New Jersey, many of them successful. The foreign slave-trade, with its ineffable atrocities, proved defiant of law and preternaturally tenacious of life. A lucrative but barbarous domestic trade had sprung up between the Atlantic States, Virginia and North Carolina especially, and those on the Gulf, for the supply of the southern market. Families were torn apart, gangs of the poor creatures driven thousands of miles in shackles or carried coastwise in the over-filled holds of vessels, to live or die--little matter which--under unknown skies and strange, heartless masters.

The slave codes of the southern States grew severer every year, as did legislation against free colored people. Laws were pa.s.sed rendering emanc.i.p.ation more difficult and less a blessing when obtained. The Mississippi and Alabama const.i.tutions, 1817 and 1819 respectively, and all those in the South arising later, were shaped so as to place general emanc.i.p.ation beyond the power even of Legislatures. Congress was even thus early--so it seemed at the North--all too subservient to the slave-holders, partly through the operation of the three-fifths rule, partly from fear that opposition would bring disunion, partly in that ambitious legislators were eager for southern votes. As to the Senate, the South had taken care, Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee having evened the score, all before 1800, to allow no new northern State to be admitted unless matched by a southern. In addition to all this, the North had a vast trade with the South, and northern capitalists held to an enormous amount mortgages on southern property of all sorts, so that large and influential cla.s.ses North had a pecuniary interest in maintaining at the South both good nature and business prosperity.

CHAPTER II.

"IMMEDIATE ABOLITION"

[1832]

While slavery was thus strengthening itself upon its own soil and in some respects also at the North, its champions ever more alert and forward, its old foes asleep, these very facts were provoking thought about the inst.i.tution and hostility to it, destined in time to work its overthrow. Interested people saw that slavery, so aggressive and defiant, must be fought to be put down, and that if the Const.i.tution was its bulwark, as all believed, provided a t.i.the of what the South as well as the North had said of its evils was true, the whole country, and not the South only, was guilty in tolerating the curse. In 1821 Lundy began publishing his Genius of Universal Emanc.i.p.ation, seconded, from 1829, by the more radical Garrison. In 1831 Garrison founded the Liberator, whose motto, "immediate and unconditional emanc.i.p.ation," was intended as a rebuke to the tame policy of the colonizationists. "I am in earnest,"

said the plucky man, when his utterances threatened to cost him his life, "I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard." These were startling tones. Had G.o.d turned a new prophet loose in the earth?

The abolition spirit was a part of the general moral and religious quickening we have mentioned as beginning about 1825, and revealing itself in revivals, missions, a religious press, and belief in the end of the world as approaching. The ethical teaching of the great German philosopher, Emanuel Kant, denouncing all use of man as an instrument, began to take effect in America through the writings of Coleridge.

Hatred of slavery was gradually intensified and spread. In 1832 rose the New England Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 the American Society was organized, with a platform declaring "slavery a crime."

[1833]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]

John G. Whittier in 1833.

This declaration marked one of the most important turning-points in all the history of the United States. It drew the line. It brought to view the presence in our land of two sets of earnest thinkers, with diametrically opposite views touching slavery, who could not permanently live together under one const.i.tution. May, Phillips, Weld, Whittier, the Tappans, and many other men of intellect, of oratorical power, and of wealth, drew to Garrison's side. State abolition societies were organized all over the North, the Underground Railroad was hard worked in helping fugitives to Canada, and fiery prophets harangued wherever they could get a hearing, demanding "immediate abolition" in the name of G.o.d.

The Abolitionists proposed none but moral arms in fighting slavery--papers, pamphlets, public addresses, personal appeals. They deprecated rebellion by slaves, and urged congressional action against slavery only in the District of Columbia, in the territories, and at sea, where the absolute jurisdiction of the general Government was admitted by nearly all. Nevertheless, southern hostility to them was indescribably ferocious and uncompromising. They were charged with instigating all the slave insurrections and insubordination that occurred, and with having made necessary the new, more diabolical discipline over blacks, both bond and free. Southern papers and Legislatures incessantly commanded that Abolitionists be delivered up to southern justice, their societies and their publications suppressed by law, and abolitionist agitation made penal. There were northerners quite ready to grant these demands. Rage against abolitionism, much of it, if possible, even more unreasoning, prevailed at the North. Garrison says that he found here "contempt more bitter, detraction more relentless, prejudice more stubborn, and apathy more frozen than among slave-owners themselves." The Church, politics, business--all interests save righteousness--seemed to bow to the false G.o.d. Of all utterances against abolitionism, those of clergymen and religious journals were the bitterest. To call slavery sin was the unpardonable sin.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]

Wm. Lloyd Garrison.

[1834-1836]

In 1834, on July 4th, a mob broke up a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York. A few days after, Lewis Tappan's house was sacked in the same manner, as well as several churches, school-houses, and dwellings of colored families. At Newark, N. J., a colored man who had been introduced into a pulpit by the minister of the congregation, was forcibly wrenched therefrom and carried off to jail.

The pulpit was then torn down and the church gutted. In Norwich, Conn., the mob pulled an abolitionist lecturer from his platform and drummed him out of town to the Rogues' March. In 1836 occurred the murder of Rev. E. P. Lovejoy, at Alton, Ill. He was the publisher of The Observer, an abolitionist sheet, which had already been three times suspended by the destruction of his printing apparatus. It was at a meeting held in Faneuil Hall over this occurrence that Wendell Phillips first made his appearance as an anti-slavery orator. Also in 1836 the office at Cincinnati in which James G. Birney published The Philanthropist, was sacked, the types scattered, and the press broken and sunk in the river.

Birney was a southerner by birth, and had been a slave-holder, but had freed his slaves. Between 1834 and 1840 there was hardly a place of any size in the North where an Abolitionist could speak with certain safety.