Slavery and Four Years of War Part 9

The report concluded:

"Should such be your decision, by refusing to pa.s.s this bill, I shall say to the people of the South, look to yourselves.

"But I must tell the Senate, be your decision what it may, the South will never abandon the principles of this bill... . We have a remedy in our own hands."

Clay, Webster, Benton, and others ably and effectually combated both the report and the bill, and the latter failed (25 to 19) in the Senate.

Besides denying the doctrine of the report, they showed the evil was not in mailing, but in taking from the mails and circulating by their own citizens the supposed objectionable publications.

Benton, himself a slaveholder, then and in subsequent years a.s.sailed and p.r.o.nounced the doctrine of this report as the "_birth of disunion_." He has also shown that Calhoun delighted over the agitation of slavery more than he deprecated it; that he profoundly hoped that on the slavery question the South would be united and a Slave-Confederacy formed.(50)

In support of this Mr. Benton quotes from a letter of Mr. Calhoun to a gentleman in Alabama (1847) in which he says:

"I am much gratified with the tone and views of your letter, and concur entirely in the opinion you express, that instead of shunning, we ought to court the issue with the North on the slavery question.

I would even go one step further and add that it is our duty _to force the issue_ on the North. We are now stronger relatively than we shall be hereafter, politically and morally. Unless we bring on the issue, delay to us will be dangerous indeed... . Something of the kind was indispensable to the South. On the contrary, if we should not meet it as we ought, I fear, greatly fear, our _doom_ will be fixed."(51)

Comment is unnecessary, but the letter, almost exultantly, mentions as fortunate that the Wilmot Proviso was offered, as it gave an opportunity to unite the South.

It proceeds:

"With this impression, I would regard any compromise or adjustment of the proviso, _or even its defeat_, without meeting the danger in its whole length and breadth, as very unfortunate for us.

"This brings up the question, how can it be so met, without resorting to the dissolution of the Union.

"There is and can be but one remedy short of disunion, and that is to retaliate on our part by refusing to fulfill the stipulations in their (other States) favor, or such as we may select, as the most efficient."

The letter, still proceeding to discuss modes of dissolution or retaliation against Northern States, declares a convention of Southern States indispensable, and their co-operation absolutely essential to success, and says:

"Let that be called, and let it adopt measures to bring about the co-operation, and I would underwrite for the rest. The non- slaveholding States would be compelled to observe the stipulations of the Const.i.tution _in our favor_, or abandon their trade with us, _or to take measures to coerce us_, which would throw on them the responsibility of dissolving the Union. Their unbounded avarice would in the end control them."(52)

It is certain that President Jackson's heroic proclamation of December, 1832, aborted the project of nullification under the South Carolina Ordinance, and certain it is, also, that the disappointed leaders of it turned from a protective tariff as a ground for it, to what they regarded as a better excuse, to wit: A slavery agitation, generated out of false alarms in the slave States.

After the tariff compromise of 1833, in which Calhoun sullenly acquiesced, he returned home and immediately announced that the South would never unite against the North on the tariff question, --"That the sugar interest of Louisiana would keep her out,--and consequently the basis of Southern union must be shifted to the slave question," which was then accordingly done.(53)

Jackson, discussing nullification, is reported to have said:

"It was the _tariff_ this time; next time it will be the _negro_."

This new and dangerous departure was not overlooked. The report and bill of 1835 relating to the use of the mails was only a chapter in execution of the new plan.

The observing friends of the Union did not overlook or misunderstand the movement. They at once took alarm. Mr. Clay, in May, 1833, wrote a letter to Mr. Madison expressing his apprehensions of the new danger, which brought from him a prompt response.

Mr. Madison in his letter said:

"It is painful to see the unceasing efforts to alarm the South by imputations against the North of unconst.i.tutional designs on the subject of the slaves. You are right. I have no doubt that no such intermeddling disposition exists in the body of our Northern brethren. Their good faith is sufficiently guaranteed by the interest they have as merchants, ship-owners, and as manufacturers, in preserving a union with the slave-holding states. On the other hand, what madness in the South to look for greater safety in _disunion_."(54)

What Clay and Madison saw in 1833 as the real starting-point for ultimate secession proved true to history. From that time dates the machinations which led, through the steps that successively followed, to actual dissolution of the Union in 1860-61; then to coercion--War; then to the eradication of slavery. It was Southern madness that hastened the destruction of American slavery. "Whom the G.o.ds would destroy, they first make mad."

The excuse for even this much significance given to "nullification"

is, that in less than thirty years, under a new name--"state-rights"

--it worked secession--disunion, and lit up the whole country with the flames and frenzy of internal war that did not die down for four years more; and then only when slavery was consumed.

The great abolition movement commenced in earnest, January 1, 1831.

Wm. Lloyd Garrison published, at Boston, the _Liberator_, with the motto--"_Our countrymen are all mankind_." Benjamin Lundy, and perhaps others, had preceded Garrison, but not until after the Webster-Hayne debate did the abolition movement spread. Thenceforth it took deeper root in the human conscience, and it had advocates of determined spirit throughout the North, led on fearlessly, not alone by Garrison, but by Rev. Dr. Channing, Rev. James Freeman Clarke, and, later, by Rev. Samuel May (Syracuse, N. Y.), Gerritt Smith, the poet Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, Horace Mann, Charles Sumner, Joshua R. Giddings, Owen Lovejoy, and others, who spoke from pulpit, rostrum, and some in the halls of legislation; others in the courts and through the press. The enforcement of the fugitive-slave law was often violent, and always added new fuel to the fierce and constantly growing opposition to slavery.

The Anti-Slavery party was not one wholly built on abstract sentiment of philanthropists, but it involved physical resistance: Violence to violence.

The American Anti-Slavery Society was founded at a National Anti- Slavery Convention held in Philadelphia, in December, 1831.

Hard upon the establishment of the _Liberator_ came the Nat Turner insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia (August, 1831). This gave to the South a fresh ground to complain of the North. Turner's insurrection was held to be the legitimate fruit of abolition agitation. Turner was an African of natural capacity, who quoted the Bible fluently, prayed vehemently, and preached to his fellow slaves.

He told them, as did Joan of Arc, of "_Voices_" and "_Visions_,"

and of his communion with the Holy Spirit. An eclipse of the sun was the signal to strike their enemies and for freedom. The ma.s.sacre lasted forty-eight hours, and sixty-one whites, women and children not spared, were victims. On the other hand, negroes were shot, tortured, hanged, and burned at the stake on whom the slightest suspicion of complicity fell.

The Nat Turner negro slave insurrection is the only one known to slavery in the United States. Others may possibly have been contemplated. The John Brown raid was not a negro insurrection.

Even in the midst of the war (1861-65), believed by most slaves to be a war for their freedom, insurrections were unknown.(55)

The African race, the most wronged through the centuries, has been the most docile and the least revengeful of the races of the world.

(45) Confederate Con., Art. 1, Sec. 8, par. 1.

(46) The South in the days of slavery had, practically, no manufactories.

(47) Benton, _Thirty Years' View_, vol. i., p. 343.

(48) Rhodes, _Hist. U. S._, vol. i., pp. 49-50.

(49) January 26, 1830.

(50) For this report and history see Benton's _Thirty Years' View_, vol. i, pp. 580, etc.

(51) _Thirty Years' View_, vol. ii., chap. clx.x.xix.; Historical, etc. Examination, _Dred Scott Case_ (Benton), p. 139.

(52) Historical, etc., Examination, _Dred Scott Case_ (Benton), p. 141-4.

(53) _Ibid_., p. 181.

(54) Historical, etc., Ex., _Dred Scott Case_, pp. 181-2.

(55) There were some small insurrections and some threatened ones in the colonies as early as 1660, the guilty negroes or Indians being then punished by crucifixion, burning, and by starvation; other insurrections took place in the Carolinas and Georgia in 1734, and the Cato insurrection occurred at Stono, S. C., in 1740.

There was a wide spread "Negro Plot" in New York in 1712. These attempts alarmed the colonies and caused some of them to take steps to abolish slavery.--_Sup. of African Slave-Trade U. S._, pp. 6, 10, 22, 206.

XIV TEXAS--ADMISSION INTO THE UNION (1845)

Texas was a province of Mexico when the latter seceded from Spain through a "Proclamation of Independence" by Iturbide (February 24, 1821) with a view to establishing a const.i.tutional monarchy. At the end of about two years of Iturbide's reign, this form of government was overthrown, and he was compelled (March 19, 1823) to resign his crown. Through the efforts, princ.i.p.ally of General Santa Anna, a Republic was established under a Const.i.tution, modelled, in large part, on that of the United States, which went into full effect October 4, 1824. Spain did not formally recognize the independence of Mexico until 1836. The Mexican Republic was opposed to slavery, and after some of her provinces had decreed freedom to slaves its President (Guerro), September 15, 1829, decreed its total abolition, but as Texas, on account of slave- holding settlers from the United States, demurred to the decree, another one followed, April 5, 1837, by the Mexican Congress, also abolishing slavery, without exception, in Texas. Despite these decrees the American settlers carried slaves into Texas, which became part of the State of Coahuila, whose Const.i.tution also forbade the importation of slaves.

Thus was slavery extension to the southwest cut off by a power not likely ever to be in sympathy with it. It is worthy of note that neither the independent Spanish blood (notwithstanding Spain's deep guilt in the conduct of the slave trade), nor that blood as intermixed with the Indian, nor the Mexican Indians themselves, ever willingly maintained human slavery in America. Mexico's established religion under the Const.i.tution, being Roman Catholic, did not permit its perpetuation. The Pope of Rome, in the nineteenth century and earlier, had denounced it as inhuman and contrary to the divine justice.