The Life of Lyman Trumbull Part 3

LYMAN TRUMBULL.

[11] _American Notes_, chap. XIII. The reason why horses were more precious than human life was that when the frontier farmer lost his work-team, he faced starvation. Both murder and horse-stealing were then capital offenses, the latter by the court of Judge Lynch.

[12] Mr. Morris St. P. Thomas, a close friend of Trumbull in his latter years, a member of his law office, and administrator of his estate, made the following statement in an interview given at 107 Dearborn Street, Chicago, June 13, 1910: "Judge Trumbull once told me that he had never in his life given a promissory note. 'But you do not mean,' said I, 'that in every purchase of real estate you ever made you paid cash down!' 'I do mean just that,' the Judge replied. 'I never in my life gave a promissory note.'"

CHAPTER II

SLAVERY IN ILLINOIS

When the territory comprising the state of Illinois pa.s.sed under control of the United States, negro slavery existed in the French villages situated on the so-called American Bottom, a strip of fertile land extending along the east bank of the Mississippi River from Cahokia on the north to Kaskaskia on the south, embracing the present counties of St. Clair, Monroe, and Randolph. The first European settlements had been made here about 1718, by colonists coming up the great river from Louisiana, under the auspices of John Law's Company of the Indies.

The earlier occupation of the country by French explorers and Jesuit priests from Canada had been in the nature of fur-trading and religious propagandism, rather than permanent colonies, although marriages had been solemnized in due form between French men and Indian women, and a considerable number of half-breed children had been born. Five hundred negro slaves from Santo Domingo were sent up the river in 1718, to work any gold and silver mines that might be found in the Illinois country.

In fact, slavery of red men existed there to some extent, before the Africans arrived, the slaves being captives taken in war.

In 1784-85, Thomas Jefferson induced Rev. James Lemen, of Harper's Ferry, Virginia, to migrate to Illinois in order to organize opposition to slavery in the Northwest Territory and supplied him with money for that purpose. Mr. Lemen came to Illinois in 1786 and settled in what is now Monroe County. He was the founder of the first eight Baptist churches in Illinois, all of which were pledged to oppose the doctrine and practice of slavery. Governor William H. Harrison having forwarded pet.i.tions to Congress to allow slavery in the Northwest Territory, Jefferson wrote to Lemen to go, or send an agent, to Indiana, to get pet.i.tions signed in opposition to Harrison. Lemen did so. A letter of Lemen, dated Harper's Ferry, December 11, 1782, says that Jefferson then had the purpose to dedicate the Northwest Territory to freedom.[13]

In 1787, Congress pa.s.sed an ordinance for the government of the territory northwest of the river Ohio which had been ceded to the United States by Virginia. The sixth article of this ordinance prohibited slavery in said territory. Inasmuch as the rights of persons and property had been guaranteed by treaties when this region had pa.s.sed from France to Great Britain and later to the United States, this article was generally construed as meaning that no more slaves should be introduced, and that all children born after the pa.s.sage of the ordinance should be free, but that slaves held there prior to 1787 should continue in bondage.

Immigration was mainly from the Southern States. Some of the immigrants brought slaves with them, and the territorial legislature pa.s.sed an act in 1812 authorizing the relation of master and slave under other names.

It declared that it should be lawful for owners of negroes above fifteen years of age to take them before the clerk of the court of common pleas, and if a negro should agree to serve for a specified term of years, the clerk should record him or her as an "indentured servant." If the negro was under the age of fifteen, the owner might hold him without an agreement till the age of thirty-five if male, or thirty-two if female.

Children born of negroes owing service by indenture should serve till the age of thirty if male, and till twenty-eight if female. This was a plain violation of the Ordinance of 1787 and was a glaring fraud in other respects. The negroes generally did not understand what they were agreeing to, and in cases where they did not agree the probable alternative was a sale to somebody in an adjoining slave state, so that they really had no choice. The state const.i.tution, adopted in 1818, prohibited slavery, but recognized the indenture system by providing that male children born of indentured servants should be free at the age of twenty-one and females at the age of eighteen. The upshot of the matter was that there was just enough of the virus of slavery left to keep the caldron bubbling there for two generations after 1787, although the Congress of the Confederation supposed that they had then made an end of it.

This arrangement did not satisfy either the incoming slave-owners or those already domiciled there. Persistent attempts were made while the country was still under territorial government, to procure from Congress a repeal of the sixth article of the Ordinance, but they were defeated chiefly by the opposition of John Randolph, of Roanoke, Virginia. After the state was admitted to the Union, the pro-slavery faction renewed their efforts. They insisted that Illinois had all the rights of the other states, and could lawfully introduce slavery by changing the const.i.tution. They proposed, therefore, to call a new convention for this purpose. To do so would require a two-thirds vote of both branches of the legislature, and a majority vote of the people at the next regular election. A bill for this purpose was pa.s.sed in the Senate by the requisite majority, but it lacked one vote in the House. To obtain this vote a member who had been elected and confirmed in his seat after a contest, and had occupied it for ten weeks, was unseated, and the contestant previously rejected was put in his place and gave the necessary vote. Reynolds, who was himself a convention man, says that "this outrage was a death-blow to the convention." He continues:

The convention question gave rise to two years of the most furious and boisterous excitement that ever was visited on Illinois. Men, women, and children entered the arena of party warfare and strife, and families and neighborhoods were so divided and furious and bitter against one another that it seemed a regular civil war might be the result. Many personal combats were indulged in on the question, and the whole country seemed to be, at times, ready and willing to resort to physical force to decide the contest. All the means known to man to convey ideas to one another were resorted to and practiced with energy. The press teemed with publications on the subject. The stump orators were invoked, and the pulpit thundered with anathemas against the introduction of slavery. The religious community coupled freedom and Christianity together, which was one of the most powerful levers used in the contest.

At this time all the frontier communities were anxious to gain additions to their population. Immigration was eagerly sought. The arrivals were mostly from the Southern States, the main channels of communication being the converging rivers Ohio, Mississippi, c.u.mberland, and Tennessee. Many of these brought slaves, and since there was no security for such property in Illinois, they went onward to Missouri. One of the strongest arguments used by the convention party was, that if slavery were permitted, this tide of immigration would pour a stream of wealth into Illinois.

Most of the political leaders and office-holders were convention men, but there were some notable exceptions, among whom were Edward Coles, governor of the state, and Daniel P. Cook, Representative in Congress, the former a native of Virginia, and the latter of Kentucky. Governor Coles was one of the Virginia abolitionists of early days, who had emanc.i.p.ated his own slaves and given them lands on which to earn their living. The governor gave the entire salary of his term of office ($4000) for the expenses of the anti-convention contest, and his unceasing personal efforts as a speaker and organizer. Mr. Cook was a brilliant lawyer and orator, and the sole Representative of Illinois in Congress, where he was chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, and where he cast the vote of Illinois for J. Q. Adams for President in 1824. Cook County, which contains the city of Chicago, takes its name from him. He was indefatigable on the side of freedom in this campaign.

Another powerful reinforcement was found in the person of Rev. John M.

Peck, a Baptist preacher who went through the state like John the Baptist crying in the wilderness. He made impa.s.sioned speeches, formed anti-slavery societies, distributed tracts, raised money, held prayer-meetings, addressed Sunday Schools, and organized the religious sentiment of the state for freedom. He was ably seconded by Hooper Warren, editor of the Edwardsville _Spectator_. The election took place August 2, 1824, and the vote was 4972 for the convention, and 6640 against it. In the counties of St. Clair and Randolph, which embraced the bulk of the French population, the vote was almost equally divided--765 for; 790 against.

In 1850, both Henry Clay and Daniel Webster contended that Nature had interposed a law stronger than any law of Congress against the introduction of slavery into the territory north of Texas which we had lately acquired from Mexico. From the foregoing facts, however, it is clear that no law of Nature prevented Illinois from becoming a slaveholding state, but only the fiercest kind of political fighting and internal resistance. John Reynolds (and there was no better judge) said in 1854: "I never had any doubt that slavery would now exist in Illinois if it had not been prevented by the famous Ordinance" of 1787. The law of human greed would have overcome every other law, including that of Congress, but for the magnificent work of Edward Coles, Daniel P. Cook, John Mason Peck, Hooper Warren, and their coadjutors in 1824.

The snake was scotched, not killed, by this election. There were no more attempts to legalize slavery by political agency, but persevering efforts were made to perpetuate it by judicial decisions resting upon old French law and the Territorial Indenture Act of 1812. Frequent law suits were brought by negroes, who claimed the right of freedom on the ground that their period of indenture had expired, or that they had never signed an indenture, or that they had been born free, or that their masters had brought them into Illinois after the state const.i.tution, which prohibited slavery, had been adopted. In this litigation Trumbull was frequently engaged on the side of the colored people.

In 1842, a colored woman named Sarah Borders, with three children, who was held under the indenture law by one Andrew Borders in Randolph County, escaped and made her way north as far as Peoria County. She and her children were there arrested and confined in a jail as fugitive slaves. They were brought before a justice of the peace, who decided that they were illegally detained and were ent.i.tled to their freedom. An appeal was taken by Borders to the county court, which reversed the action of the justice. The case eventually went to the supreme court, where Lyman Trumbull and Gustave Koerner appeared for the negro woman in December, 1843, and argued that slavery was unlawful in Illinois and had been so ever since the enactment of the Ordinance of 1787. The court decided against them.[14]

Trumbull was not discouraged by the decision in this case. Shortly afterward he appeared before the supreme court again in the case of Jarrot _vs._ Jarrot, in which he won a victory which practically put an end to slavery in the state. Joseph Jarrot, a negro, sued his mistress, Julia Jarrot, for wages, alleging that he had been held in servitude contrary to law. The plaintiff's grandmother had been the slave of a Frenchman in the Illinois country before it pa.s.sed under the jurisdiction of the United States. His mother and himself had pa.s.sed by descent to Julia Jarrot, n.o.body objecting. Fifty-seven years had elapsed since the pa.s.sage of the Ordinance of 1787 and twenty-six since the adoption of the state const.i.tution, both of which had prohibited slavery in Illinois. The previous decisions in the court of last resort had generally sustained the claims of the owners of slaves held under the French regime and their descendants, and also those held under the so-called indenture system. Now, however, the court swept away the whole basis of slavery in the state, of whatever kind or description, declaring, as Trumbull had previously contended, that the Congress of the Confederation had full power to pa.s.s the Ordinance of 1787, that no person born since that date could be held as a slave in Illinois, and that any slave brought into the state by his master, or with the master's consent, since that date became at once free. It followed that such persons could sue and recover wages for labor performed under compulsion, as Joseph Jarrot did.

This decision, which abolished slavery in Illinois _de facto_, was received with great satisfaction by the substantial and sober-minded citizens. Although the number of aggressive anti-slavery men in the state was small and of out-and-out abolitionists still smaller, there was a widespread belief that the lingering snaky presence of the inst.i.tution was a menace to the public peace and a blot upon the fair fame of the state, and that it ought to be expunged once for all. The growth of public opinion was undoubtedly potent in the minds of the judges, but the untiring activity of the leading advocates in the cases of Borders, Jarrot, etc., should not be overlooked. On this subject Mr.

Dwight Harris, in the book already cited, says:

The period of greatest struggle and of greatest triumph for the anti-slavery advocates was that from 1840 to 1845. The contest during these five years was serious and stubbornly carried on.

It involved talent, ingenuity, determination, and perseverance on both sides. The abolitionists are to be accredited with stirring up considerable interest over the state in some of the cases. Southern sympathizers and the holders of indentured servants in the southern portion of the state were naturally considerably concerned in the decisions of the supreme court.

Still there seems to have been no widespread interest or universal agitation in the state over this contest in the courts. It was carried on chiefly through the benevolence of a comparatively small number of citizens who were actuated by a firm belief in the evils of slavery; while the brunt of the fray fell to a few able and devoted lawyers.

Among these were G. T. M. Davis, of Alton, Nathaniel Niles, of Belleville, Gustave Koerner, of Belleville, and Lyman Trumbull.

James H. Collins, a noted abolition lawyer of Chicago, should also be highly praised for his work in the Lovejoy and Willard cases, but to the other men the real victory is to be ascribed.

They were the most powerful friends of the negro, and lived where their a.s.sistance could be readily secured. They told the negroes repeatedly that they were free, urged them to leave their masters, and fought their cases in the lower courts time and time again, often without fees or remuneration. Chief among them was Lyman Trumbull, whose name should be written large in anti-slavery annals.

He was a lawyer of rare intellectual endowments, and of great ability. He had few equals before the bar in his day. In politics he was an old-time Democrat, with no leanings toward abolitionism, but possessing an honest desire to see justice done the negro in Illinois. It was a thankless task, in those days of prejudice and bitter partisan feelings, to a.s.sume the role of defender of the indentured slaves. It was not often unattended with great risk to one's person, as well as to one's reputation and business. But Trumbull did not hesitate to undertake the task, thankless, discouraging, unremunerative as it was, and to his zeal, courage, and perseverance, as well as to his ability, is to be ascribed the ultimate success of the appeal to the supreme court.

This disinterested and able effort, made in all sincerity of purpose, and void of all appearance of self-elevation, rendered him justly popular throughout the State, as well as in the region of his home. The people of his district showed their approval of his work and their confidence in his integrity by electing him judge of the supreme court in 1848, and Congressman from the Eighth District of Illinois by a handsome majority in 1854, when it was well known that he was opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] These facts are detailed in a paper contributed to the Illinois State Historical Society in 1908 by Joseph B. Lemen, of O'Fallon, Illinois.

[14] _Negro Servitude in Illinois_, by N. Dwight Harris, p. 108.

CHAPTER III

FIRST ELECTION AS SENATOR

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was the cause of Trumbull's return to an active partic.i.p.ation in politics. The prime mover in that disastrous adventure was Stephen A. Douglas, who had been Trumbull's predecessor in the office of secretary of state and also one of his predecessors on the supreme bench. He was now a Senator of the United States, and a man of world-wide celebrity. Born at Brandon, Vermont, in 1813, he had lost his father before he was a year old. His mother removed with him to Canandaigua, New York, where he attended an academy and read law to some extent in the office of a local pract.i.tioner. At the age of twenty, he set out for the West to seek his fortune, and he found the beginnings of it at Winchester, Illinois, where he taught school for a living and continued to study law, as Trumbull was doing at the same time at Greenville, Georgia. He was admitted to the bar in 1834. In 1835, he was elected state's attorney. Two years later he was elected a member of the legislature by the Democrats of Morgan County, and resigned the office he then held in order to take the new one. In 1837, he was appointed by President Van Buren register of the land office at Springfield. In the same year he was nominated for Congress in the Springfield district before he had reached the legal age, but was defeated by the Whig candidate, John T. Stuart, by 35 votes in a total poll of 36,742.[15] In 1840, he was appointed secretary of state, and in 1841, elected a judge of the supreme court under the circ.u.mstances already mentioned. In 1843, he was elected to the lower house of Congress and was reelected twice, but before taking his seat the third time he was chosen by the legislature, in 1846, Senator of the United States for the term beginning March 4, 1847, and was reelected in 1852.

In Congress he had taken an active part in the annexation of Texas, in the war with Mexico, in the Oregon Boundary dispute, and in the Land Grant for the Illinois Central Railway. In the Senate he held the position of Chairman of the Committee on Territories.

In the Democratic party he had forged to the front by virtue of boldness in leadership, untiring industry, boundless ambition, and self-confidence, and horse-power. He had a large head surmounted by an abundant mane, which gave him the appearance of a lion prepared to roar or to crush his prey, and not seldom the resemblance was confirmed when he opened his mouth on the hustings or in the Senate Chamber. As stump orator, senatorial debater, and party manager he never had a superior in this country. Added to these gifts, he had a very attractive personality and a wonderful gift for divining and antic.i.p.ating the drift of public opinion. The one thing lacking to make him a man "not for an age but for all time," was a moral substratum. He was essentially an opportunist.

Although his private life was unstained, he had no conception of morals in politics, and this defect was his undoing as a statesman.

On the 4th of January, 1854, Douglas reported from the Senate Committee on Territories a bill to organize the territory of Nebraska. It provided that said territory, or any portion of it, when admitted as a state or states, should be received into the Union with or without slavery, as their const.i.tution might prescribe at the time of their admission. The Missouri Compromise Act of 1820, which applied to this territory, was not repealed by this provision, and it must have been plain to everybody that if slavery were excluded from the _territory_ it would not be there when the people should come together to form a _state_.

Douglas did not at first propose to repeal the Missouri Compromise. He intended to leave the question of slavery untouched. He did not want to reopen the agitation, which had been mostly quieted by the Compromise of 1850; but it soon became evident that if he were willing to leave the question in doubt, others were not. Dixon, of Kentucky, successor of Henry Clay in the Senate and a Whig in politics, offered an amendment to the bill proposing to repeal the Missouri Compromise outright. Douglas was rather startled when this motion was made. He went to Dixon's seat and begged him to withdraw his amendment, urging that it would reopen the controversies settled by the Compromise of 1850 and delay, if not prevent, the pa.s.sage of any bill to organize the new territory. Dixon was stubborn. He contended that the Southern people had a right to go into the new territory equally with those of the North, and to take with them anything that was recognized and protected as property in the Southern States. Dixon's motion received immediate and warm support in the South.

Two or three days later, Douglas decided to embody Dixon's amendment in his bill and take the consequences. His amended bill divided the territory in two parts, Kansas and Nebraska. The apparent object of this change was to give the Missourians a chance to make the southernmost one a slave state; but this intention has been controverted by Douglas's friends in recent years, who have brought forward a ma.s.s of evidence to show that he had other sufficient reasons for thus dividing the territory and hence that it must not be a.s.sumed that he intended that one of them should be a slave state. The evidence consists of a record of efforts put forth by citizens of western Iowa in 1853-54 to secure a future state on the opposite side of the Missouri River h.o.m.ogeneous with themselves, and to promote the building of a Pacific railway from some point near Council Bluffs along the line of the Platte River. These efforts were heartily seconded by Senators Dodge and Jones and Representative Henn, of Iowa. They labored with Douglas and secured his cooperation. So Douglas himself said when he announced the change in the bill dividing the territory into two parts.

Most people at the present day, including myself, would be glad to concur with this view, but we must interpret Douglas's acts not merely by what he said in 1854, but also by what he said and did afterwards. In 1856 he made an unjustifiable a.s.sault upon the New England Emigrant Aid Company, for sending settlers to Kansas, as they had a perfect right to do under the terms of the bill; and he apologized for, if he did not actually defend, the Missourian invaders who marched over the border in military array, took possession of the ballot boxes, elected a pro-slavery legislature, and then marched back boasting of their victory. Troubles multiplied in Douglas's pathway rapidly after he introduced his Nebraska Bill, and it is very likely that an equal division of the territory between the North and South seemed to him the safest way out of his difficulties. That was the customary way of settling disputes of this kind. We need not a.s.sume, however, that he intended to do more than give the Missourians a chance to make Kansas a slave state if they could, for Douglas was not a pro-slavery man at heart.

Senator Thompson, of Kentucky, once alluded to the division of the territory embraced in the original Nebraska Bill into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, showing that his understanding was that one should be a free state and the other a slave state, if the South could make it such. He said:

When the bill was first introduced in 1854 it provided for the organization of but one territory. Whence it came or how it came scarcely anybody knows, but the senator from Illinois (Mr.

Douglas) has always had the credit of its paternity. I believe he acted patriotically for what he thought best and right. In a short time, however, we found a provision for a division--for two territories--Nebraska, the larger one, to be a free state, and as to Kansas, the smaller one, repealing the Missouri Compromise, we of the South taking our chance for it. That was certainly a beneficial arrangement to the North and the bill was pa.s.sed in that way.[16]

What were Douglas's reasons for repealing the Missouri Compromise? It was generally a.s.sumed that he did it in order to gain the support of the South in the next national convention of the Democratic party. In the absence of any other sufficient motive, this will probably be the verdict of posterity, although he always repelled that charge with heat and indignation. A more important question is whether there would have been any attempt to repeal it if Douglas had not led the way. This may be safely answered in the negative. The Southern Senators did not show any haste to follow Douglas at first. They generally spoke of the measure as a free-will offering of the North, both Douglas and Pierce being Northern men, and both being indispensable to secure its pa.s.sage.

Francis P. Blair, of Missouri, a competent witness, expressed the opinion that a majority of the Southern senators were opposed to the measure at first and were coerced into it by the fear that they would not be sustained at home if they refused an advantage offered to them by the North.[17]

The Nebraska Bill pa.s.sed the Senate by a majority of 22, and the House by a majority of 13. The Democratic party of the North was cleft in twain, as was shown by the division of their votes in the House: 44 to 43. The bill would have been defeated had not the administration plied the party lash unmercifully, using the official patronage to coerce unwilling members. In this way did President Pierce redeem his pledge to prevent any revival of the slavery agitation during his term of office.

When the bill actually pa.s.sed there was an explosion in every Northern State. The old parties were rent asunder and a new one began to crystallize around the nucleus which had supported Birney, Van Buren, and Hale in the elections of 1844, 1848, and 1852. Both Abraham Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull were stirred to new activities. Both took the stump in opposition to the Nebraska Bill.