The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences Part 8

To undertake at this time to arrest the whole anti-slavery movement by holding up the Const.i.tution was indeed useless.

Seward, who had spoken for the "higher law," was riding on the tide of anti-slavery sentiment that was submerging "the Sage of Marshfield," who had stood for the Const.i.tution. Seward's reputation, in the years following, went steadily up, while Webster's was going down. Webster died, in dejection, in 1852.

Seward, at Rochester, in 1854, later on in the same crusade, made another famous declaration--there was an "irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom." The conflict was "irrepressible," as Seward well knew; and this was simply and solely because the anti-slavery crusade could not be suppressed. Clay and Webster, now both dead and gone, had tried it in vain. Every one knew that if, in 1850, or at any other time, the anti-slavery hosts had halted, and asked for, or consented to, peace, they could have had it at once.

Mr. Lodge, in the following paragraph, seems to have almost made up his mind to defend Webster. He says: "What most shocked the North were his utterances in regard to the fugitive slave law. There can be no doubt that, _under the Const.i.tution_, the South had a _perfect right_ to claim the extradition of fugitive slaves. The legal _argument to support that right was excellent_." This would seem to justify the speech in that regard. "But," Mr. Lodge adds, "the Northern people could not feel that it was _necessary_ for _Daniel Webster_ to make it." They wanted him to be sectional or to hold his tongue. Then Mr. Lodge goes on to say: "The fugitive slave law was in _absolute conflict with the awakened conscience and moral sentiment of the North_."

The conscience of _the North_ at that time, Mr. Lodge means, was a _higher law_ than the _Const.i.tution_; and Webster's "excellent argument," therefore, fell on deaf ears.

No American historian stands higher as an authority than Mr. Rhodes. He says on page 161, vol. I, of his "History of the United States,"

published in 1892: "_Until the closing years of our century a dispa.s.sionate judgment could not be made of Webster_; but we see now that in the war of secession his principles were mightier than those of Garrison. It was not 'No Union with slave-holders,' but _Liberty and Union_ that won."

This tribute to services Webster had rendered to the Union in his great speech in 1850, in which he advocated "Liberty and Union, now and forever," exactly as he was advocating it in 1830, is just. How pathetic that the historian was impelled also to record the fact, in the same sentence, that for nearly half a century partisan prejudice had rendered it impossible to form a dispa.s.sionate judgment of him who had pleaded in vain for the Union without war!

After an able a.n.a.lysis of his "7th of March speech," and a discussion of his record, in which he paralleled Webster and Edmund Burke, Mr. Rhodes declares: "His dislike of slavery was strong, but his love of the Union was stronger, and the more powerful motive outweighed the other, for he believed that _the crusade against slavery had arrived at a point where its further prosecution was hurtful to the Union_. As has been said of Burke, 'He changed his front but he never changed his ground.'"[49]

[49] _Ib._, p. 160.

Daniel Webster's name and its place in history may be likened to a giant oak, a monarch of the forest, that, while towering high above all others, was stripped of its branches; for a time it stood, a rugged trunk, robbed of its glory by a cyclone; but its roots were deep down in the rich earth; the storm is pa.s.sing away; the tree has put out buds again; now its branches are stretching out once more into the clear reaches of the upper air.

Mr. Rhodes seems to be the first historian of note to do justice to Daniel Webster and the great speech which, McMaster takes pains to inform us, historians have written down as his "7th of March speech," in spite of the fact that Mr. Webster himself ent.i.tled it "The Const.i.tution and the Union."

Other historians besides Mr. Rhodes have come to the rescue of Webster's speech for "the Const.i.tution and the Union." Mr. John Fiske says of it in a volume (posthumous) published in 1907: "So far as Mr. Webster's moral att.i.tude was concerned, although he was not prepared for the bitter hostility that his speech provoked in many quarters, he must nevertheless have known it was quite as likely to injure him at the North as to gain support for him in the South, and his resolute adoption of a policy that he regarded as national rather than sectional was really an instance of high moral courage."[50]

[50] "Daniel Webster and the Sentiment of Union," John Fiske, "Essays Historical and Literary," pp. 408-9.

Mr. William C. Wilkinson has recently written an able "Vindication of Daniel Webster," and, after a conclusive argument on that branch of his subject, he says: "Webster's consistency stands like a rock on the sh.o.r.e after the fretful waves are tired with beating upon it in vain."[51]

[51] "Daniel Webster: A Vindication," p. 47.

Mr. E. P. Wheeler, concluding a masterly sketch of Daniel Webster, setting forth his services as statesman and expounder of the Const.i.tution, and not deigning to notice the partisan charges against him, concludes with these words:

"Great men elevate and enn.o.ble their countrymen. In the glory of Webster we find the glory of our whole country."

The story of Daniel Webster and his great speech in 1850 has been told at some length because it is instructive. The historians who had set themselves to the task of upholding the idea that it was the aggressiveness of the South, during the controversy over slavery, and not that of the North, that brought on secession and war, could not make good their contention while Daniel Webster and his speech for "the Const.i.tution and the Union" stood in their way. They, therefore, wrote the great statesman "down and out," as they conceived. But Webster and that speech still stand as beacon lights in the history of that crusade.

The attack came from the North. The South, standing for its const.i.tutional rights in the Union, was the conservative party.

Southern leaders, it is true, were, during the controversy over slavery, often aggressive, but they were on the defensive-aggressive, just as Lee was when he made his campaign into Pennsylvania for the purpose of stopping the invasion of his own land; and the South lost in her political campaign just for the same reason that Lee lost in his Gettysburg campaign: numbers and resources were against her. "The stars in their courses fought against Sisera."

Mr. Webster in his great speech for "the Const.i.tution and the Union," as became a great statesman pleading for conciliation, measured the terms in which he condemned "personal liberty" laws and Abolitionism. But afterward, irritated by the attacks made upon him, he naturally spoke out more emphatically. McMaster quotes several expressions from his speeches and letters replying to these a.s.saults, and says: "His hatred of Abolitionists and Free-soilers grew stronger and stronger. To him these men were a 'band of sectionalists, narrow of mind, wanting in patriotism, without a spark of national feeling, and quite ready to see the Union go to pieces if their own selfish ends were gained.'" Such, if this is a fair summing up of his views, was Webster's final opinion of those who were carrying on the great anti-slavery crusade.[52]

[52] McMaster's "Webster," p. 340.

CHAPTER VII

EFFORTS FOR PEACE

The desire for peace in 1850 was wide-spread. Union loving people, North and South, hoped that the Compromise would result in a cessation of the strife that had so long divided the section; and the election of Franklin Pierce, in 1852, as President, on a platform strongly approving that Compromise, was promising. But anti-slavery leaders, instead of being convinced by such arguments as those of Webster, were deeply offended by the contention that legislators, in pa.s.sing personal liberty laws, had violated their oaths to support the Const.i.tution. They were angered also by the presumptuous attempt to "arrest the whole anti-slavery movement."

The new fugitive slave law was stringent; it did not give jury trial; it required bystanders to a.s.sist the officers in "slave-catching," etc. For these and other reasons the law was a.s.sailed as unconst.i.tutional. All these contentions were overruled by the Supreme Court when a case eventually came before it. The court decided that the act was, in all its provisions, fully authorized by the Const.i.tution.[53] But in their present mood, no law that was efficient would have been satisfactory to the mult.i.tudes of people, by no means all "Abolitionists," who had already made up their minds against the "wicked" provision of the Const.i.tution that required the delivery of fugitive slaves. This deep-seated feeling of opposition to the return to their masters of escaping slaves was soon to be wrought up to a high pitch by a novel that went into nearly every household throughout the North--"Uncle Tom's Cabin." On its appearance the poet Whittier, who had so ferociously attacked Webster in the verses quoted in the last chapter, "offered up thanks for the fugitive slave law, for it gave us 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"

[53] Ableman _v._ Boothe, 21 How., 506.

Rufus Choate, a celebrated lawyer and Whig leader, is reported to have said of "Uncle Tom's Cabin": "That book will make two millions of Abolitionists." Drawing, as it did, a very dark picture of slavery, it aroused sympathy for the escaping slave and pictured in glowing colors the dear, sweet men and women who dared, for his sake, the perils of the road in the darkness of night and all the dangers of the law. Mrs. Stowe was _making heroes of law-breakers, preaching the higher law_.

Mrs. Stowe declared she had not written the book for political effect; she certainly did not antic.i.p.ate the marvellous results that followed it. That book made vast mult.i.tudes of its readers ready for the new sectional and anti-slavery party that was to be organized two years after its appearance. It was the most famous and successful novel ever written. It was translated into every language that has a literature, and has been more read by American people than any other book except the Bible. As a picture of what was conceivable under the laws relating to slavery there was a basis for it. Though there were laws limiting the master's power, cruelty was nevertheless possible.

Here, then, Mrs. Stowe's imagination had full scope. Her book, however, has in it none of the strident harshness, none of the purblind ferocity of Garrison, in whose eyes every slave-holder was a fiend. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" a.s.sailed a system; it did not a.s.sault personally, as the arch-agitator did, every man and woman to whom slaves had come, whether by choice or chance. Light and shadow and the play of human nature made Mrs. Stowe's picture as attractive in many of its pages as it was repulsive and unfair in others. Mrs. Shelby was a type of many a n.o.ble mistress, a Christian woman, and when financial misfortunes compelled the sale of the Shelby slaves and the separation of families, we have not only what might have been, but what sometimes was, one of the evils of slavery, which, by reason of the prevailing agitation, the humanity of the age could not remedy. But Mrs. Stowe's slave-master, Legree, was impossible. The theory was inconceivable that it was cheaper to work to death in seven years a slave costing a thousand dollars, than to work him for forty years. Millions of our people, however, have accepted "Uncle Tom" as a fact, and have wept over him; they have accepted also as a fact the monster Legree.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" lives to-day as a cla.s.sic on book shelves and as a popular play. The present generation get most of their opinions about slavery as it was in the South from its pages, and not one in ten thousand of those who read it ever thinks of the inconsistency between the picture of slavery drawn there and that other picture, which all the world now knows of--the Confederate soldier away in the army, his wife and children at home faithfully protected by slaves--not a case of violence, not even a single established case, during four years, although there were four millions of negroes in the South, of that crime against white women that, after the reconstruction had demoralized the freedmen, became so common in that section.

The unwavering fidelity during the four years of war of so many slaves to the families of their absent masters, and the fact that those who, during that war, left their homes to seek their freedom invariably went without doing any vengeful act, is a phenomenon that speaks for itself.

It tells of kindly relations between master and slave. It is not to be denied that where the law gave so much power to the master there were individual instances of cruelty, nor is it supposable that there were not many slaves who were revengeful; but at the same time there was, quite naturally, among slaves who were all in like case, a more clannish and all-pervading public opinion than could have been found elsewhere.

It was that all-pervading and rigid standard of kindly feeling among the slaves to their masters that made the rule universal--fidelity toward the master's family, at least to the extent of inflicting no injury.

What a surprise to many this conduct of the slave was may be gathered from a telling Republican speech made by Carl Schurz during the campaign of 1860.[54] A devotee of liberty, recently a revolutionist in his native land, and, like other foreigners, disregarding all const.i.tutional obstacles, Mr. Schurz had naturally espoused the cause of anti-slavery in this country. He had absorbed the views of his political a.s.sociates and now contended that secession was an empty threat and that secession was impossible. "The mere antic.i.p.ation of a negro insurrection," he said, "will paralyze the whole South." And, after ridiculing the alarm created by the John Brown invasion, the orator said that in case of a war between the South and the North, "they will not have men enough to quiet their friends at home; what will they have to oppose to the enemy?

Every township will want its home regiment; every plantation its garrison; and what will be left for its field army?"

[54] Fite, "Presidential Campaign of 1860," p. 243.

Slavery in the South eventually proved to be, instead of a weakness, an element of strength to the Confederates, and Mr. Lincoln finally felt himself compelled to issue his proclamation of emanc.i.p.ation as a military necessity--the avowed purpose being to deprive the Confederates of the slaves who were by their labor supporting their armies in the field.

The faithfulness during the war of the slave to his master has been a lesson to the Northerner, and it has been a lesson, too, to the Southerner. It argues that the danger of b.l.o.o.d.y insurrections was perhaps not as great as had been apprehended where incendiary publications were sent among them. That danger, however, did exist, and if the fear of it was exaggerated, it was nevertheless real, and was traceable to the Abolitionists.

The rights of the South in the territories had now been discussed for years and Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois, had reached the conclusion that under the Const.i.tution Southerner and Northerner had exactly the same right to carry their property, whatever it might be, into the territories, which had been purchased with the common blood and treasure of both sections, a view afterward sustained by the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred Scott case.

Douglas, "entirely of his own motion,"[55] introduced, and Congress pa.s.sed, such a bill--the Kansas-Nebraska act. The new act replaced the Missouri Compromise. This the Southerners considered had been a dead letter for years. Every "personal liberty" law pa.s.sed by a Northern State was a violation of it.

[55] "Parties and Slavery," Theodore Clarke Smith, professor of history in Williams College, p. 96.

Ambition was now playing its part in the sectional controversy. Douglas was a Democrat looking to the presidency and had here made a bid for Southern support. On the other hand was Seward, an "old line Whig,"

aspiring to the same office. The South had been the dominant element in national politics and the North was getting tired of it. Seward's idea was to organize all the anti-slavery voters and to appeal at the same time to the pride and jealousy of the North as a section.

The immediate effect of the Kansas-Nebraska act was to aggravate sectionalism. It opened up the territory of Kansas, allowing it to come into the Union with or without slavery, as it might choose. Slave State and free State adventurers rushed into the new territory and struggled, and even fought, for supremacy. The Southerners lost. Their resources could not match the means of organized anti-slavery societies, and the result was an increase, North and South, of sectional animosity.

The overwhelming defeat of the old Whig party in 1852 presaged its dissolution. Until that election, both the Whig and Democratic parties had been national, each endeavoring to hold and acquire strength, North and South, and each combating, as best it could, the spirit of sectionalism that had been steadily growing in the North, and South as well, ever since the rise of Abolitionism. Both these old parties had watched with anxiety the increase of anti-slavery sentiment in the North. Both parties feared it. Alliance with the anti-slavery North would deprive a party of support South and denationalize it. For years prior to 1852 the drift of Northern voters who were opposed to slavery had been as to the two national parties toward the Whigs, and the tendency of conservative Northerners had been toward the Democratic party. Thus the great body of the Whig voters in the North had become imbued with anti-slavery sentiments, and now, with no hope of victory as a national party and left in a hopeless minority, the majority of that old party in that section were ready to join a sectional party when it should be formed two years later. William H. Seward was still a Whig when he made in the United States Senate his anti-slavery "higher law"

speech of 1850.

The Kansas-Nebraska act was a political blunder. The South, on any dispa.s.sionate consideration, could not have expected to make Kansas a slave State. The act was a blunder, too, because it gave the opponents of the Democratic party a plausible pretext for the contention, which they put forth then and which has been persisted in till this day, that the new Republican party, immediately thereafter organized, was called into existence by, and only by, the Kansas-Nebraska act.

As far back as 1850 it was clear that a new party, based on the anti-slavery sentiment that had been created by twenty years of agitation, was inevitable. Mr. Rhodes, speaking of conditions then, says: "It was, moreover, obvious to an astute politician like Seward, and probably to others, that a dissolution of parties was imminent; that to oppose the extension of slavery, _the different anti-slavery elements must be organized as a whole_; it might be called Whig or some other name, but it would be based on the principle of the Wilmot proviso"[56]--the meaning of which was, no more slave States.

[56] "Rhodes," vol. I, p. 192.

Between 1850 and the pa.s.sage of the Kansas-Nebraska act in 1854, new impulse had been given anti-slavery sentiment by fierce a.s.saults on the new fugitive slave law and, as has been seen, by "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

The Kansas-Nebraska act did serve as a cry for the rallying of all anti-slavery voters. That was all. It was a drum-call, in answer to which soldiers already enlisted fell into ranks, under a new banner. Any other drum-call--the application of another slave State for admission into the Union--would have served quite as well. Thus the Republican party came into existence in 1854. Mr. Rhodes sums up the reason for the existence of the new party and what it subsequently accomplished in the following pregnant sentence, "The moral agitation had accomplished its work, the cause (of anti-slavery) ... was to be consigned to a political party that brought to a successful conclusion the movement begun by the moral sentiment of the community,"[57]--which successful conclusion was, of course, _the freeing of the slaves by a successful war_.