History of the United States Volume Iii Part 15

Thus was first voiced by a public authority Judge Douglas's new and taking heresy of "squatter sovereignty," that Congress, though possessing by Article IV., Section iii., Clause 2 of the Const.i.tution, general authority over the Territories, is not permitted to touch slavery there, but must leave it for each territorial populace "to vote up or vote down." At the South this doctrine of Douglas's was dubbed "nonintervention," and its real aim to secure Kansas a pro-slavery character avowed. It was consequently popular there as useful toward the repeal, although repudiated the instant its working bade fair to render Kansas free.

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

Stephen A. Douglas.

[1855]

This was soon the prospect. Organizations had been formed to aid anti-slavery emigrants from the northern States to Kansas. The first was the Kansas Aid Society, another a Ma.s.sachusetts corporation ent.i.tled the New England Emigrant Aid Society. There were others still. Kansas began to fill up with settlers of strong northern sympathies. They were in real minority at the congressional election of November, 1854, and in apparent minority at the territorial election the next March. The vote against them on the last occasion, however, was largely deposited by Missourians who came across the border on election day, voted, and returned. This was demonstrated by the fact that there were but 2,905 legal voters in the Territory at the time, while 5,427 votes were cast for the pro-slavery candidates alone. These early successes gave the pro-slavery party and government in Kansas great vantage in the subsequent congressional contest. The first Legislature convened at p.a.w.nee, July 2, 1855, enacted the slave laws of Missouri, and ordered that for two years all state officers should be appointed by legislative authority, and no man vote in the Territory who would not swear to support the fugitive slave law.

The free-state settlers, now a majority, ignored this Legislature and its acts, and at once set to work to secure Kansas admission to the Union as a State without slavery. The Topeka convention, October 23, 1855, formed the Topeka const.i.tution, which was adopted December 14th, only forty-six votes being polled against it. This showed that pro-slavery men abstained from voting. January 15, 1856, an election was held under this const.i.tution for state officers, a state legislature, and a representative in Congress. The House agreed, July 3d, by one majority, to admit Kansas with the Topeka const.i.tution, but the Senate refused. The Topeka Legislature a.s.sembled July 4th, but was dispersed by United States troops.

[1856-1857]

This was done under command from Washington. President Pierce, backed by the Senate with its steady pro-slavery majority, was resolved at all hazards to recognize the pro-slavery authorities of Kansas and no other, and, as it seemed, to force it to become a slave State; but fortunately the House had an anti-slavery majority which prevented this. The friends of freedom in Kansas had also on their side the history that was all this time making in Kansas itself. During the summer of 1856 that Territory was a theatre of constant war. Men were murdered, towns sacked. Both sides were guilty of violence, but the free-state party confessedly much the less so, having far the better cause. Nearly all admitted that this party was in the majority. Even the governors, all Democrats, appointed by Pierce, acknowledged this, some of them, to all appearance, being removed as a punishment for the admission. Governor Geary, in office from September, 1856, to March, 1857, and Governor Walker, in office from May, 1857, were just and able men, and their decisions, in most things favorable to the free-state cause, had much weight with the country.

Walker's influence in the Territory led the free-state men to take part in the territorial election of October, 1857, where they were entirely triumphant. But the old, pro-slavery Legislature had called a const.i.tutional convention, which met at Lecompton, September, 1857, and pa.s.sed the Lecompton const.i.tution. This const.i.tution sanctioned slavery and provided against its own submission to popular vote. It ordained that only its provision in favor of slavery should be so submitted. This pro-slavery clause was adopted, but only because the free-state men would not vote. The Topeka Legislature submitted the whole const.i.tution to popular vote, when it was overwhelmingly rejected. The President and Senate, however, urged statehood under the Lecompton const.i.tution, although popular votes in Kansas twice more, April, 1858, and March, 1859, had adopted const.i.tutions prohibiting slavery, the latter being that of Wyandotte. But the House still stood firm. Kansas was not admitted to the Union till January 29, 1861, when her chief foes in the United States Senate had seceded from the Union. She came in with the Wyandotte const.i.tution and hence as a free State.

It was during the debate upon Kansas affairs in 1856 that Preston S.

Brooks, a member of the House from South Carolina, made his cowardly attack upon Charles Sumner. Sumner had delivered a powerful speech upon the crime against Kansas, worded and delivered, naturally but unfortunately, with some asperity. In this speech he animadverted severely upon South Carolina and upon Senator Butler from that State.

This gave offence to Brooks, a relative of Butler, and coming into the Senate Chamber while Sumner was busy writing at his desk, he fell upon him with a heavy cane, inflicting injuries from which Sumner never recovered, and which for four years unfitted him for his senatorial duties. Sumner's colleague, Henry Wilson, in an address to the Senate, characterized the a.s.sault as it deserved. He was challenged by Brooks, but refused to fight on the ground that duelling was part of the barbarism which Brooks had shown in caning Sumner. Anson Burlingame, representative from Ma.s.sachusetts, who had publicly denounced the caning, was challenged by Brooks and accepted the challenge, but, as he named Canada for the place of meeting, Brooks declined to fight him for the ostensible reason that the state of feeling in the North would endanger his life upon the journey. A vote to expel Brooks had a majority in the House, though not the necessary two-thirds. He resigned, but was at once re-elected by his South Carolina const.i.tuency.

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

Charles Sumner.

While the fierce Kansas controversy had been raging, the South had grown cold toward the Douglas doctrine of popular sovereignty, and had gradually adopted another view based upon Calhoun's teachings. This was to the effect that Congress, not under Article IV., section iii., clause 2, but merely as the agent of national sovereignty, rightfully legislates for the Territories in all things, yet, in order to carry out the const.i.tutional equality of the States in the Territories, is obliged to treat slaves found there precisely like any other property. If one citizen wishes to hold slaves, all the rest opposing, the general Government must support him. It is obvious how antagonistic this thought was to that of Douglas, since, according to the latter, a majority of the inhabitants in a Territory could elect to exclude slavery as well as to establish it.

The new southern or Calhoun theory a.s.sumed startling significance for the Nation when, in 1857, it was proclaimed in the Dred Scott decision of the United States Supreme Court as part of the innermost life of our Const.i.tution. Dred Scott was a slave of an army officer, who had taken him from Missouri first into Illinois, a free State, then into Wisconsin, covered by the Missouri Compromise, then back into Missouri.

Here the slave learned that by decisions of the Missouri courts his life outside of Missouri const.i.tuted him free, and in 1848, having been whipped by his master, he prosecuted him for a.s.sault. The decision was in his favor, but was reversed when appeal was taken to the Missouri Supreme Court. Dred Scott was now sold to one Sandford, of New York. Him also he prosecuted for a.s.sault, but as he and Sandford belonged to different States this suit went to the United States Circuit Court.

Sandford pleaded that this lacked jurisdiction, as the plaintiff was not a citizen of Missouri but a slave.

It was this last issue which made the case immortal. The Circuit Court having decided in the defendant's favor, the plaintiff took an appeal to the Supreme Court. Here the verdict was against the citizenship of the negro, and therefore against the jurisdiction of the court below. The upper court did not stop with this simple dictum, hard and dubious as it was, but proceeded to lay down as law an astounding course of pro-slavery reasoning. In this it confined the ordinance of 1787 to the old northwestern territory, declared the Missouri Compromise and all other legislation against slavery in Territories unconst.i.tutional, and the slave character portable not only into all the Territories but into all the States as well, slavery having everywhere all presupposition in its favor and freedom being on the defensive. The denial of Scott's citizenship was based solely upon his African descent, the inevitable implication being that no man of African blood could be an American citizen.

This decision rendered jubilant all friends of slavery, as also the ultra Abolitionists, but correspondingly disheartened the sober friends of human liberty. How, it was asked, is the cause of freedom to be advanced when the supreme law of the land, as interpreted by the highest tribunal existing for that purpose, virtually establishes slavery in New England itself, provided any slave-master wishes to come there with his troop? But anti-slavery men did not despair. Patriots had of course to obey the court till its opinion should be reversed, yet its opinion was at once repudiated as bad law. Men like Sumner, Wilson, Chase, Giddings, Seward, and Lincoln, appealing to both the history and the letter of the Const.i.tution, and to the course of legislation and of judicial decisions on slavery even in the slave States, had been elaborating and demonstrating the counter theory, under which our fundamental law appeared as anything but a "covenant with h.e.l.l."

The pith of this counter theory was that slaves were property not by moral, natural, or common law, but only by state law, that hence freedom, not slavery, was the heart and universal presupposition of our government, and that slavery, not freedom, was bound to show reasons for its existence anywhere. This being so, while Calhoun and Taney were right as against Douglas in ascribing to Congress all power over the Territories, it was as impossible to find slaves in any United States Territory as to find a king there. Slaves taken into Territories therefore became free. Slaves taken into any free State became free.

Slaves carried from a slave State on to the high seas became free. Even the fugitive slave clause of the Const.i.tution must be applied in the way least favorable to slavery.

On the other hand Douglas was right in his view that citizens and not States were the partners in the Territories. As to the a.s.sertion of incompatibility between citizenship and African blood, it would not stand historical examination a moment. If it was true that the framers of the Const.i.tution did not consciously include colored persons in the "ourselves and our posterity" for whom they purposed the "Blessings of Liberty," neither did they consciously exclude, as is clear from the fact that nearly everyone of them expected blacks some time to be free.

CHAPTER VI.

SLAVERY AND THE OLD PARTIES

[1841]

The Democratic Party was predominantly southern, the Whig northern. Both sought to be of national breadth, but the democratic with much the better success. Democracy would not give up its northern vote nor the Whigs their southern; but a better party fealty, due to a longer and prouder party history, rendered the Democrats far the more independent and bold in the treatment of their out-lying wing. The consequence was that while its rank and file at the North never loved slavery, they tolerated it and became its apologists in a way to make the party as a whole not only in appearance but in effect the pliant organ of the slavocracy. This status became more p.r.o.nounced with the progress of the controversy and of the South's self-a.s.sertion. It was real under Jackson, rigid under Van Buren, manifest and almost avowed under Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan.

Whig temper toward slavery was throughout the North much better, but whig party action was little better. Fear of losing southern supporters permanently forbade all frank enlistment by the Whig Party for freedom.

The mighty leaders, Adams, Webster, even Clay, were well inclined, and the party, as such, was at the South persistently accused of alliance with the Abolitionists. This was untrue. Abolitionists, Liberal Party men, and Free-soilers oftener voted with Democrats than with Whigs. Clay complained once that Abolitionists denounced him as a slave-holder, slave-holders as an Abolitionist, while both voted for Van Buren.

Compromise was the bane of this party as of the other; and each of the resplendent chieftains named at one time or another seemed so reverent to Belial that the record is painful reading.

When in 1841 the ship Creole sailed from Richmond with one hundred and thirty-five slaves on board bound for the southern market, and one Madison Washington, a recovered runaway on board, headed a dash upon captain and crew, got possession of the vessel and took her into New Providence, Clay was as loud as Calhoun or any southern senator in demanding of the English Government the return of these slaves to bondage or, at least, that of "the mutineers," as they were called.

Webster, Secretary of State at the time, instructed Edward Everett, our English minister, to insist upon this, his arguments being sound and his tone emphatic enough to please Mr. Calhoun. This was the time when Giddings, of Ohio, brought into the House his resolutions to the effect that slavery was a state inst.i.tution only, and that hence any slave carried on to the open ocean or to any other locality where only national law prevailed, was free. He was censured in the House by a large majority and resigned, but his Ohio const.i.tuency immediately re-elected him.

[1836-1844]

Up to this time Giddings and Adams were the only p.r.o.nounced anti-slavery men in that body. Adams had acquiesced in the Missouri Compromise, but all his subsequent career, especially his course in the House of Representatives after 1830, is not only creditable to him so far as the slavery question is concerned, but registers him as one of the most influential opponents of slavery in our history. Refusing to be cla.s.sed with the Abolitionists, he was, in effect, the most efficient Abolitionist of them all.

Previous to 1835, though pet.i.tions against slavery reached Congress in great numbers and nettled many members, they had been received and referred in the usual manner. But in February, 1836, the House created a special committee to consider these pet.i.tions. It reported a resolution, which pa.s.sed under the previous question, that thereafter all papers of the kind should be tabled without printing or reference. Adams declared to the House: "I hold the resolution to be a direct violation of the Const.i.tution of the United States, the rules of this House, and the rights of my const.i.tuents." In this rencounter Adams advanced the view on which the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation by and by proceeded, that slavery, even in States, was not beyond reach of the national arm, but would be at the mercy of Congress the instant slave-masters should rebel. This, the first of the gag laws, was, however, enacted. The second, or Patton gag, was pa.s.sed on December 21, 1837, and the third, or Atherton gag, a year later. The principle of these, practically cutting off all pet.i.tions to Congress respecting slavery, was taken up in the twenty-first rule of the House in 1840.

Mr. Adams was from the first the resolute and uncompromising foe of the gag policy. Wagon-loads of pet.i.tions came to him to offer, among them one for his own expulsion from the House and one to dissolve the Union, and he presented all.

February 6, 1837, he inquired of Mr. Speaker whether or not it would be appropriate to offer a pet.i.tion in his hand from slaves, whereupon the pro-slavery members flew at him like vampires. After much uproar, in which Adams gave as good as was sent him, he sarcastically reminded his already infuriated a.s.sailants that the pet.i.tion was in favor of slavery, not against, and that he had emphatically not offered it, but only made an innocent inquiry of the Speaker about doing so, the proper answer to which was so far from obvious that the Speaker himself had signified his intention to take the sense of the House upon it. Regularly, year after year, Adams moved the abolition of the gag rule, was beaten as regularly, long as a matter of course, sometimes after heated debate in which he was always victor. But little by little the majority vote against him lessened. In 1842 the gag pa.s.sed by but four votes, in 1843 it had a majority of three only, in 1844 his motion to strike it out was carried by a vote of one hundred and eight to eighty. Adams wrote that day in his diary: "Blessed, forever blessed be the name of G.o.d."

[1850]

But a plenitude of Whigs, not all southern, voted for each of these gags. The worst one of all was moved by a Whig. The XXVIIth Congress, strongly whig, voted to retain the gag, which it was left for the XXVIIIth, strongly democratic, finally to repeal. At the South, slavery more and more overbore party feeling. Said Dixon, a Kentucky Whig, in 1854, "Upon the question of slavery I know no Whiggery, no Democracy--I am a pro-slavery man." It should be added, however, that as the conflict progressed, pro-slavery Whigs became few save in the South, and that these nearly all soon turned Democrats.

Most humiliating was the va.s.salage to the slave power displayed by northern congressmen of both parties, though forming a majority in the House during all the great days of the slavery battle. The gag history is one example. Resolutions against unquestionably unconst.i.tutional laws imprisoning northern seamen at southern ports simply because they were colored, were tabled in the House by a large majority. Slavery in the District of Columbia, where Congress had the right of "exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever," so that the entire nation was responsible, defied every effort to abolish it till 1862, after the Civil War began. Nor was the trade there in aught alleviated till 1850, when some modification of it was possible as an element of the compromise described in the preceding chapter. An enlargement of Missouri, adding to the northwest corner of that State, as slave territory, a vast tract which the Missouri Compromise had forever devoted to freedom, being in truth a preliminary repeal of that pact, was carried without opposition.

The brutal and murderous lawlessness practised against Abolitionists was praised by northern congressmen often as slavery came up in debate. Even Senator Silas Wright, of New York, subsequently famous as a foe of slavery, in remarks upon the reference of anti-slavery pet.i.tions, boasted of the atrocities at Utica in 1835 and of others similar, as proof that "resistance to these dangerous and wicked agitators in the North had reached a point beyond law and above law." A bill, in 1836, for closing the mails to abolitionist literature, another defiance of the Const.i.tution, Amendment I., secured engrossment in the Senate by the casting vote of Vice-President Van Buren; Wright, Tallmadge, and Buchanan also favoring; but failed to pa.s.s, nineteen to twenty-five, because Benton, Clay, and Crittenden had the patriotism to vote nay.

Discussion hereon laid bare the vital contradiction in our governmental system. Calhoun showed that the Const.i.tution permits each State for itself to define, in order to inhibit, incendiary literature.

Characteristically, he would have forced mail agents to obey state laws upon this matter. Yet for Congress to have so directed would plainly have been abridging freedom of the press.

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

Thomas H. Benton.

Had the Whig Party, while in power from 1849 to 1853, been brave enough boldly to a.s.sume a rational anti-slavery att.i.tude, though it might have been defeated, as it was in 1852, it would have had a future. The chance pa.s.sed unimproved. The temporizing att.i.tude of the party's then leaders and the known pro-slavery feeling of most of its southern members--twelve Whigs voting in the House for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise--proved deadly to the organization, its faithful old battalions going over in the South to the Democrats, in the North to the Republicans.

Many Whigs took the latter course by a circuitous route. Ever since the alien and sedition laws, cry had been raised at intervals against the too easy attainment of citizenship by the unnumbered immigrants thronging to our sh.o.r.es, and agitation raised, more or less successful, to thrust forward "Nativism" or Americanism, with opposition to the Roman Catholic Church, as an issue in our politics. To such movements Whigs, as legatees of Federalism, were always more friendly than Democrats, which was partly a cause and partly a consequence of the affinity that naturalized citizens all along showed for the Democratic Party.

Americanism had its greatest run after 1850, when the Whigs saw their organization going to pieces, and, mistakenly in part, attributed democratic success to the immigrant vote. A secret fraternity arose, called the "Know-nothings," from "I don't know," the ever-repeated reply of its members to inquiry about its nature and doings. "America for Americans" was their cry, and they proposed to "put none but Americans on guard." At first pursuing their aims through silent manipulation of the old parties, by 1854 the Know-nothings swung out as a third party.

From this date they l.u.s.tily competed with the Republicans for the hosts of whig and democratic stragglers jostled from their old ranks by the omnibus bill legislation, the Kansas-Nebraska act, and the "Crime against Kansas" committed by Pierce and his slavocratic Senate. In 1855 this party a.s.sumed national proportions, and worried seasoned politicians not a little; but having crystallized around no living issue, like that which nerved Republicanism, it fell like a rocket-stick, its sparks going over to make redder still republican fires. Henry Wilson became a Republican from the status of a Know-nothing; so did Banks, Colfax, and a score of others subsequently eminent among their new a.s.sociates. Some had of old been Democrats, though most had been Whigs.

Notwithstanding many appearances to the contrary, the Democracy had begun to lose its hold upon the North from the moment of Polk's nomination in 1844. In that act it showed preference, on the score of availability, for a small man as presidential candidate. Harrison's election and Van Buren's defeat in 1840 doubtless had something to do with this. The same disposition was revealed in 1852, when Pierce was made candidate. What harmed the party still more was swerving from strict construction in declaring for the annexation of Texas, which in this case did not imply enlargement of view in reading the Const.i.tution, but simply subserviency to the slave power. In this way Van Buren was alienated and the vote of New York lost in 1848, insuring defeat that year.

[1856-1860]

This particular breach was pretty well healed, but the evil survived.

Then came the compromise repeal, wherein the Democracy stood by the South in casting to the winds, the moment it promised to be of service to the North, a solemn bargain which had yielded the South Florida, Arkansas, and Missouri as slave States. Northern Democrats, especially in the rural parts, unwilling longer to serve slavery, drew off from the party in increasing numbers. Northern States one by one pa.s.sed to the opposition. The whole of New England had gone over in 1856, also New York, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa--Buchanan having six votes outside those of Pennsylvania, where he won, as many believed, by unfair means. In 1860, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, and Oregon crossed to the same side.