The President had also caused the collectors of the customs at Charleston, Georgetown, and Beaufort to be reminded of their powers under the laws of the United States, and had authorized them to make use of all the revenue cutters in the harbors, and of such other vessels as they could secure, and to call to their assistance the officers of the cutters, and to appoint a number of inspectors sufficient to execute successfully the laws of the United States for the collection of the duties. The collector at Charleston was specially authorized to remove the custom-house to Castle Pinckney, at his discretion; and the United States District Attorney at Charleston was ordered to aid the collector with counsel and advice.
After the passage of the Ordinance, the President ordered five more companies of artillery from Fort Monroe to Fort Moultrie, commanded the removal of the custom-house from Charleston to Castle Pinckney, and sent General Scott to Charleston Harbor to take command,on the spot, of all the forts and garrisons there, instructing him to avoid collision with the forces of the Commonwealth so long as possible, but, in case the exigency should arise requiring the exercise of military power, to act with firmness and decision, and to hold possession of the forts by all means and at every hazard.
The brave, loyal, and patriotic, yet wise and considerate, stand taken by the President was supported with great unanimity and enthusiasm throughout the North; and though the people of the Southern Commonwealths felt more sympathy with their South Carolina brethren, yet the dissent from the President's views and attitude in that section was rare and feeble. The nation was with the President, and the President had done his duty nobly and fearlessly.
The turn now came upon Congress. Would Congress sustain the President, and give him all the means necessary to conquer nullification and secession in fact, and destroy them in principle? Unfortunately, so far as finite reason can judge, the first movements made in Congress were in the opposite direction. That part of the President's message which dealt with the question of the tariff was referred by the House of Representatives to its committee on Ways and Means, and on December 27th, 1832, the chairman of that committee, Mr. Verplanck, of New York, reported a bill from the committee which proposed to reduce and equalize duties largely, and in the direction of the South Carolina principle. If this bill should pass, the nullifiers could well assume that their Ordinance had accomplished its purpose without being applied, and could with triumphant dignity desist from the application of it; and they could defer with almost equal dignity the application of the Ordinance,so long as there was any probability of the passage of this bill.
Seven days before the introduction of this bill, Governor Hayne had issued a counter-proclamation to the President's proclamation of December 10th, in which he went over again the ground of nullification and secession, warned the citizens of South Carolina against the President's "pernicious" doctrines, and accused the President of indulging in unwarrantable imputations upon South Carolina. He gave notice, on the same day, that he would accept the service of volunteers. The legislature supported the Governor in defiant resolutions, which it sent to Congress, and caused to be read in that body.
The President was much ruffled by the arrogant language of the Governor and legislature, and when the Verplanck bill appeared, it must have looked to him too much like surrendering the entire field, which he was not now in any mood to do. He felt that something more must be done to vindicate the authority and the dignity of the Government. On January 16th, 1833, he sent another message to Congress, demonstrating and denouncing again the pernicious character of the nullification doctrine, informing Congress that he had removed the custom-house from Charleston to Castle Pinckney, and asking Congress for the power to change the customs districts and ports of entry, to exact the payment of duties in cash, and to use the land and naval forces when necessary for the execution of the revenue laws.
The message was referred by the Houses of Congress to their respective committees on the Judiciary; but immediately upon the reading of the message, and before the Senate had passed the motion to refer, Mr. Calhoun said, in that body, that there was no foundation whatever for thestatement in the message that the movements made by South Carolina were intended as hostile to the Union, or were so. He called the attention of the Senate to the fact that before the Ordinance of Nullification was passed, before the convention had assembled, United States troops had been sent to Charleston Harbor; and he declared that, previous to this circumstance, South Carolina had looked to nothing beyond a civil process, and had intended to give effect to her opposition merely in the form of a suit at law, and that it was only when a military force had been displayed on her borders, and in her limits, and when a menace was thrown out against the lives of her citizens, that they found themselves driven to an attitude of resistance.
On the 21st of the month (January), Mr. Wilkins, the chairman of the Judiciary committee of the Senate, reported from his committee the bill for the collection of the revenue. This bill provided for extending the jurisdiction of the Circuit Courts of the United States over all cases in law or equity arising under the revenue laws of the United States; for making all property taken or detained by any officer or person under authority of any law of the United States irrepleviable by any order or process of the tribunals of a Commonwealth; for effecting the removal of suits commenced in a Commonwealth court against any officer or person for any act done under the laws of the United States, or on account of any right, authority, or title claimed under those laws, to the Circuit Courts of the United States, by means of proof laid before the Circuit Court that the defendant had petitioned the Commonwealth court for the removal of the cause. The bill provided, further, for substituting for a copy of the record of the proceedings in theCommonwealth court, in case of the failure of that court to furnish a copy, an affidavit, or other evidence, as the circumstances of the case might require; for giving to the United States judges the power to grant writs of habeas corpus in all cases where persons were in confinement for acts done in pursuance of a law of the United States, or of an order, process, or decree of any United States court or judge; for empowering the United States marshals, under direction of the United States judges, to provide places of confinement for persons arrested or committed under the laws of the United States, where any Commonwealth should refuse the use of its jails for the confinement of such persons; for allowing the President to change the custom-house from one place in a collection district to another, and to require the duties to be paid in cash; and for empowering the President to use the land and naval forces for suppressing any resistance to the execution of the revenue laws too powerful to be overcome by the civil officers of the general Government.
It was a good, stiff measure, but it was constitutional at every point, and it was demanded by the exigencies of the situation. It was a complete answer to the Replevin Act of South Carolina, and it would inevitably throw the responsibility for committing the first act of violence upon the Commonwealth in any resistance to the collection of the duties. It pricked the bubble completely of South Carolina's proposed legal resistance to the execution of the laws of the United States.
Of course the bill was denounced at once by the South Carolinians as a "Force Bill." Calhoun attacked it as a measure for coercing a sovereign "State," and offered a series of "States' rights" propositions, which he declared to be indisputable, and which must, therefore, prevent the passage of the bill. The discussion uponthese resolutions, and upon the bill which they were meant to destroy, dragged on from day to day in the Senate, while that upon the Verplanck bill in the House proceeded even more slowly.
The chiefs of the nullifiers, professing to feel that the Government was yielding, reassembled in convention in the last days of January, and postponed the execution of their Ordinance until the end of the existing Congressional session.
On February 8th, Mr. Bell, the chairman of the Judiciary committee of the House of Representatives, reported to that body that his committee did not recommend vesting the President with any further powers for the execution of the revenue laws than those already possessed by him, and that they could not approve of the employment of military force for the purpose.
Such was the situation when, on February 12th, Mr. Clay astonished the Senate with the noted proposition for compromise. This was his bill for the gradual reduction of the duties to a revenue basis. The revenue basis was fixed in the bill at twenty per centumad valoremon all articles then paying a higher duty, and the excess was to be remitted in biennial instalments, and entirely abolished from and after June 30th, 1842. The free list was slightly extended, and cash payments, from and after June 30th, 1842, were provided.
Mr. Clay said, in introducing this bill, that he had two purposes in view: one to save what could be saved of the protective tariff, and the other to allow South Carolina to withdraw with dignity from the position which she had rashly assumed. He claimed that his feeling toward the action of South Carolina had changed since her Representatives and Senators in Congress had disavowed rebellion and hadasserted that they were only trying to invent legal methods for protecting themselves against the oppression of the tariff Acts. He demonstrated very clearly the error of supposing that they could do any such thing, and then urged his brother Senators to join him in the proposed measure of conciliation.
Mr. Calhoun immediately indicated that the bill would have his support, and would solve the difficulties between South Carolina and the general Government. He professed to see in it the concession of about all that South Carolina had asked.
The opposition to the bill came from three quarters—from the protectionists, who clung to the existing law, from the strong nationalists, who were against any show of compromise with nullification, and from the strict parliamentarians, who held that any bill touching the tariff must originate in the House of Representatives.
The protectionists were answered, and many of them won over, by the argument that the Verplanck bill would pass if they did not accept Mr. Clay's bill. The strong nationalists were told that if Congress should pass the Wilkins bill before the Clay bill a sufficient vindication of their position would be attained. They were inclined to accept that view, but the South Carolinians set themselves against this order of procedure with all their strength. Mr. Calhoun came forward again with his "States' sovereignty" exposition of the Constitution, and denounced the Wilkins bill in the most vehement language as "utterly unconstitutional, as an attempt to enforce robbery by murder, an attempt to decree the massacre of the citizens of South Carolina," and declared that the citizens of South Carolina would, should it become law, resist its execution "at every hazard, even that of death itself."
On the following day Mr. Webster answered Mr. Calhoun's argument, and demonstrated so clearly the nationality of the Constitution, the supremacy of the laws of the United States, and the rebellious character of nullification, that the Senate was convinced of the necessity of passing the Wilkins bill before voting upon Mr. Clay's bill. On the 20th of the month (February), the Senate passed the Wilkins bill by a vote of thirty-two to one. The objections of the strong nationalists to Mr. Clay's bill were now substantially satisfied; but the high protectionists still held out in considerable number for some modification of the bill in their favor, and on the day after the passage of the Wilkins bill by the Senate, Mr. Clay moved to amend his own bill by the proposition to base the duties on home valuation instead of on the foreign invoice. The protectionists were satisfied by this, but Mr. Calhoun immediately declared that South Carolina would not accept the bill with this change. The protectionists, in sufficient number to defeat the bill, declared that they would not accept it without the change. Mr. Calhoun had at last come to see the peril which lay in South Carolina's course, and to understand the feeling of the nation toward her. He wisely concluded to abandon his opposition to the amendment, and to vote for the bill.
The opposition of the strict parliamentarians, on the ground that the Senate could not originate a revenue bill, was overcome by the action of the House of Representatives in substituting the Clay bill for the Verplanck bill, and passing it on the 26th, and sending it to the Senate for concurrence. The Senate now passed the House bill on March 1st, and the House immediately passed the Wilkins bill, against the protestof the South Carolinians that it could now have no purpose since every member of Congress from South Carolina had voted for the new Tariff Act.
The President signed both bills at the same time, March 2nd, and South Carolina rescinded the Nullification Ordinance.
It is not easy to see what principles or what party finally triumphed in this contest, or to comprehend all the motives of the chief actors in it. It has been said, or hinted, that Mr. Calhoun, chagrined and disappointed at not gaining the presidency in 1832, was induced to take the course which he followed in reference to nullification by the hope of breaking up the Union and winning, thus, the presidency of a Southern confederacy; that President Jackson was largely influenced, in the decided attitude which he assumed, by the desire to take revenge on Mr. Calhoun and South Carolina for Mr. Calhoun's attempt to court-martial him more than a dozen years before, and for South Carolina's slight upon him in the election of 1832; and that Mr. Clay was moved far more by his jealousy of President Jackson, and his fear of trusting him with extraordinary powers, than by any dread of the destruction of the Union.
There is probably some truth in certain, if not in all, of these speculations, but such things are not the matters of chief value in the search for the line of development of the constitutional history of this country. They do indeed help us to appreciate the motives for the particular form of adjustment put upon that development at any stage of its course; but our chief concern must be with the advance or retrogression in principle of that development, our question must be whether the Union and the Constitution were strengthened or weakened bythe events of 1832 and 1833, whether the political nationality of the country was cemented or suffered disintegration, and whether strength was gathered, or the seeds of weakness were sown, in the results attained.
From the point of view of the present, a point so much more national than any reached before 1860, the settlement of 1833 is usually regarded as a great misfortune, as a fateful error, which led the country finally into civil war. It is now usually said that the national cause lost everything in principle, and that nullification was virtually acknowledged by the Act of Congress in repealing the nullified laws, at the same moment that it enacted the measure for upholding the supremacy of the laws of the United States.
From a purely historical view of the development of the constitutional law of the country, this proposition does not seem to be true, at least not without great modification. From such a point of view it seems more correct to say, that the doctrine formulated by Mr. Calhoun and his colleagues in South Carolina was only the exact logical statement of the principles advanced by Mr. Jefferson in 1798, principles through the advocacy of which Mr. Jefferson and the Republicans turned the Federalists out of power and captured the Government; that under the pressure of foreign war and through its results, the Republican practice in administering the Government had been driven into lines almost, if not quite, contradictory to the Republican doctrine; that in the gradual relapse, after 1815, into the humdrum of peace and business, the conditions were being revived for the reassertion of the principles of 1800; and that, under such conditions and in such a period, the doctrines advanced by President Jackson, doctrines of a far more completely national system of sovereignty, government, and liberty than were ever expressedby any preceding President, certainly mark a great advance in the development of the national theory of the Constitution.
The South Carolinians said that John Quincy Adams invented these doctrines, and that Jackson first essayed their application. Even Clay declared that they were an advance upon his own views. And some of Jackson's friends undertook, it was said with authority from Jackson himself, to explain them away, so startled were they by their strong nationalism.
But the spoken word cannot be recalled. It had gone forth, and the nation had approved it. The politicians might split hairs in its interpretation, but the people had heard from the highest authority which they recognized that the United States was a sovereign nation, and that the attempt of any combination of persons, whether calling themselves a "State" or not, to resist by violence the execution of the laws of the United States, or to withdraw themselves from their operation, was rebellion, which the President was empowered and required by the Constitution to suppress with the whole physical power of the nation.
And besides the Proclamation there was the "Force Bill," which rested upon the same theory of the political system of the country as the Proclamation. The Congress as well as the President was now inculcating the national doctrine. Calhoun and his friends knew what an influence this would exert. He said that he and they would never rest content until this measure was expunged from among the Acts of Congress.
It is true that the passage of the new Tariff Act appeared to take the virtue out of the Proclamation and the "Force Bill;" but it is not at all probable that the nullifiers would have retreated from their ground so promptly, to say the least, except for the determinedwords of the President and the Congress, and the popular approval with which they were received; and it is almost certain that, when it came to the great crisis, twenty-eight years later, the people would not have understood and supported the great principle that the general Government has the right of self-preservation, in the exercise of all its powers, throughout the whole territory of the Union, against everything and everybody but the sovereign nation itself, except for the great education in national principles which they received from the Proclamation, and through the enactment of the law which gave the sanction of Congress to the enforcement of its principles.
ABOLITION
ABOLITION
The Philosophy of Abolition—William Lloyd Garrison—The Civil Status under the Constitution of 1787—Points at which Slavery Could be Legally Attacked—Garrison's Methods—The Southampton Massacre—The Attempt to Suppress the Abolition Movement at the North—Growth of the Abolition Movement—The Methods of the Moderate Abolitionists—The Abolition Petitions—The Earlier Method of Dealing with the Petitions—Beginning of the Conflict over the Abolition Petitions—The New Method for Dealing with Petitions in the House of Representatives—True View of the Right of Petition—Mr. Polk's Fatal Error in Regard to the Right of Petition—The Pinckney Resolutions—The New Rule of the House of Representatives in Regard to the Abolition Petitions—The Increase of Petitions, and the Denunciation of the Pinckney Rule—The Final Denial of the Right of Petition on the Subject of Slavery by the House of Representatives—The Abolition Petitions in the Senate—Mr. Rives and Mr. Calhoun in Regard to the Morality of Slavery—Mr. Calhoun's Resolutions in Regard to the Political Relations of Slavery—The Anti-Slavery Petition from the Vermont Legislature—The Abolition Documents and the United States Mails—The Postmaster-General's Ruling in Regard to the Abolition Documents in the Mails—Jackson on the Use of the Mails by the Abolitionists—Mr. Calhoun's Report and Bill on the Subject—Clay's Criticism of Calhoun's Proposition—The Act of Congress Protecting the Abolition Documents in the Mails—General Results of the Struggle over the Right of Petition and the Freedom of the Mails.
When a state has fairly accomplished the primal end of establishing its governmental system, itspublic policy will be found to be pursuing, in ultimate generalization, two great all-comprehending purposes, namely, national development and universal human progress. Rarely, if ever, will any state be found to have succeeded in so balancing these two principal objects of its public policy as to make the resultant of its two main lines of progress follow an unchanging angle. At one period, the principle of national development will prevail, even to the point of national exclusiveness; at another, an enthusiastic humanism will almost threaten the existence of national distinctions. But in all the convulsions of political history, described as advance and reaction, the scientific student of history is able to discover that the zigzags of progress are ever bearing in the general direction which the combined impulses toward nationalism and humanism compel.
After the humanitarian outburst of the revolutionary period in the latter part of the eighteenth century had expended its force, the states of the world veered in their policies toward the line of national development. The United States, which had been excessively humanitarian during that period, both in its doctrine of rights and in its policy, became, in the succeeding period, the first three decades of the nineteenth century, more and more national in disposition and in practice, until industrial exclusiveness and race domination appeared, at the close of the period, to be the sole principles of the policy of the country.
Had the two elements of this policy been equally, or almost equally, sustained throughout the whole country, there is little question that the human purpose, the world-purpose, as Hegel calls it, of state existence, would have been ignored to a higher degree, and for alonger period, than it was. But curiously and fortunately, the race domination in the South produced economic conditions which demanded trade and commerce with the world, and which finally forced upon the North the conviction that the cause of those conditions—race domination, slavery—must be removed, in order to secure the industrial interests of the North against the competition of the world's markets. The destruction of that domination must proceed, however, upon a humanitarian principle, namely, the right of man to personal liberty. Thus it clearly appears that the two elements of the national exclusiveness of the United States in 1830 were, in the peculiar relation which finally obtained between them, preparing the nation for a new advance in the direction of world intercourse and human rights.
In the summer of 1830 the wave of revolution rolled again over Europe. The rights of man, the brotherhood of man, and the sovereignty of the people, were the principles which pressed again to the front. While no actual connection can be established between the Revolution of 1830 in Europe and the rise of Abolition in the United States, yet they belong to the same period of time, and harmonize in principle. The impulses which move the human race, or those parts of the human race which stand upon the same plane of civilization, are not broken by mountain heights or broad seas. Their manifestations appear spontaneously and coetaneously in widely separated places.
Before 1830, indeed, as we have so often seen, slavery in the United States had been regarded as a grievous evil by most of the great spirits of the age and country, and schemes for gradual emancipation had been invented, and, in some slight degree, had been put intooperation. It was, however, the humanitarian outburst of 1830, and the succeeding years, which represented slavery as a sin and a crime against the universal principle of human liberty and the rights of man, a sin which called for immediate expiation by instantaneous, unqualified, and uncompensated abolition.
There is nothing strange about the philosophy of Abolition. It is simply the idealistic view of the beginning and the progress of human history. It assumes liberty as the original state of man, condemns every species of modification of liberty suffered by any human being, or any class of human beings, as resulting from the unrighteous act of some other human being, or class or race of human beings, and demands the immediate discontinuance of the tyranny as the only approximately adequate satisfaction which can be made to those who have suffered that tyranny. It is the orthodox, paradisaical view of the origin, unity, and primal perfection of the human race. It is the literal interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. It is thorough-going, radical humanitarianism. Its political principle, in the language of its chief exponent, was: "The world our country, and all mankind our countrymen."
Over against it stands the pessimistic view of man and of civilization, which divides the human race into the few intelligent and good, and the great mass of the ignorant and vicious, and considers the permanent subjection of the latter to the former as the divinely constituted, and therefore the permanent, order of the world.
And between the two lies the true historical view, which regards liberty, equality, and brotherhood as the products of civilization, as the final, not the primal, status of the human race, and determines the character of every stage of development from barbarism tocivilization, not by its distance from the perfect condition, but by the fact of its advance upon, or its retrogression from, the stage immediately antecedent.
The latter is, unquestionably, the true philosophy of history, but the former has its uses as well as its abuses. It contains those forces of mystical enthusiasm, self-sacrifice, and reckless disregard of consequences so necessary, at times, to drag the world out of the ruts of materialism and the love of peace. Such was its mission in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century in American history.
If we must give a name, a date, and a place to the first open appearance of a movement which was a product of the age, that name is Garrison; the date, the beginning of the year 1831; and the place, Boston. The character of William Lloyd Garrison, whether noble or vulgar; his purposes, whether generous or selfish; and the motives which impelled him, whether narrow and personal or grandly humane, are not subjects for treatment in a work upon constitutional history. Constitutional history has to do only with the doctrines of political ethics and public jurisprudence which he formulated, and with the means proposed by him, and those who thought and acted with him, for their realization; and the historian does neither him nor them any injustice in saying that, while those doctrines are to be justified from the point of view of an extreme idealism, the means for their realization, at first only indicated, but later boldly and rudely expressed, were revolutionary, almost anarchic.
There is now certainly little question that the determination of the civil status of all persons is, from an ethical point of view, a matter of national concern, and that that status must be fixed, in general principle, by a national act. There is just as little question thatthe denial of personal liberty to any human being of adult years does not comport with the civilization of the nineteenth century. In espousing these principles the Abolitionists were only prophets ahead of their time, and must be accorded the honor which belongs to such. On the other hand, it is entirely unquestionable that the Constitution of the United States recognized to the Commonwealths, respectively, the exclusive control of the civil status of persons belonging within their several jurisdictions, and it is entirely improbable that the Constitution of 1787 could ever have been established without the guarantees, expressed and implied in it, of such power to the Commonwealths. There is no question at all that the slavery or freedom of the negro race within the several Commonwealths was, under the Constitution of 1787, not only left, as it had been before, a matter for each Commonwealth to determine for itself, but that the exclusive power of determination in regard to it was guaranteed by the Constitution to the several Commonwealths. The Commonwealths in which slaveholding generally and extensively prevailed regarded the guarantee as the principal consideration for their assent to the "compact." The attempt to violate, or weaken, or even to cast doubt upon, these guarantees appeared to them to be an attack upon the fundamental covenants of the Union. The Constitution might, indeed, be so amended as to withdraw these powers and guarantees from the Commonwealths, by the regular procedure provided in the Constitution itself; and the general Government was vested by the Constitution with the general powers of exclusive government in the Territories, the District of Columbia, and the places owned by the United States within Commonwealths and used by the general Government forgovernmental purposes. But so long as the Constitution remained what it was, there was no constitutional power in the general Government to attack slavery in the Commonwealths; and the slaveholders could certainly claim that, in the exercise of its powers in the Territories, the District, and other places where those powers were exclusive, the general Government should act fairly toward all the members of the Union.
Nevertheless, here were legal points of attack for the Abolitionists. They might memorialize Congress for the abolition of slavery in the Territories and in the District, and for the initiation of an amendment which would abolish slavery in the Commonwealths or would give Congress the power to do so, and they might appeal to the legislatures of the Commonwealths to demand of Congress the calling of a constitutional convention of the United States to initiate such an amendment. But Garrison would have nothing to do with the Constitution, or with existing legal methods. He denounced the Constitution, "as a covenant with death and an agreement with hell," and declared that he wanted "no union with slaveholders." His violent language, his repudiation of vested rights and constitutional agreements, and his fanatical disregard of other men's opinions and feelings, led the people both of the North and the South to believe that his methods were incendiary and his morals loose; that he and his co-workers were planning and plotting slave insurrection, and thereby the wholesale massacre of slaveholders; and that he and they were endeavoring to attain, through violence and anarchy, a leadership which they could not otherwise reach.
In August of 1831, a slave insurrection broke out in Southampton County, Va., under the leadership of anegro named Nat Turner, and more than sixty white persons, most of them women and children, were massacred in cold blood. The Southerners said, no doubt believed, that the insurrection was incited by the Abolitionists in the North. Governor Floyd, of Virginia, declared, in his message to the legislature upon the subject, that there was ample proof of it in the documents accompanying the message. The great mass of the people at the North believed the same thing. The Abolitionist historians assert, on the contrary, that there was no connection between the work of the Abolitionists and this event. We shall probably never know whether there was or not. This much we can say, that the radical character of the Abolition doctrines and the violence of the language in which they were expressed—not so much before as after this event, indeed—produced the universal feeling, both in the North and in the South, that these doctrines and this event were in perfect harmony, and that the latter might very naturally be the outcome of the former. The moral sentiment of the North was not prepared for the destruction of slavery by any such means. It considered these methods as containing ten times more evil and barbarism than slavery itself. It is just to say that what appeared to be the methods of the Abolitionists were revolting to the moral feelings of all the decent people of the North, and to ninety-nine one-hundredths of all the people of the North, while the Southerners saw in them nothing but the destruction of all law and order, the plunder of their property, the burning of their firesides, and the massacre of their families. The pronounced and determined manner in which the people of the North went about the work of suppressing the agitation occasioned by the Abolitionists is ample evidence to any sane mind that the indignation of arighteous conscience was fully aroused, and not the fury of a guilty conscience.
The details of the breaking up of the Abolition meetings and of the destruction of the Abolition printing-presses by the citizens of the Northern Commonwealths, as well as those of the Southampton massacre, may be passed over, in a work like this, with a single remark that only one person, the Rev. Mr. Lovejoy, was murdered in these collisions; that this happened under circumstances of some aggravation; and that, if the excitement at the South over the massacre of sixty-one innocent persons was out of proportion with the event, then not too much should be made out of the killing of a single person, who was not entirely guiltless on his part of giving provocation.
The things of importance to the student of constitutional history in connection with these events are the increase of the Abolitionists in number, their organization into societies, the dissatisfaction of the Southerners with the unofficial, merely popular, way of dealing with the agitation at the North, and their demands upon the governments of the Northern Commonwealths to deal with the Abolitionists through the processes of their criminal law.
So long as men only talk and write, it is the impulse of our Anglo-Saxon character to place no further restraint upon them than the law of slander and libel of private character imposes, no matter what may be, or may be thought to be, the ultimate consequences of acting according to what they may say or write. To deny this privilege to anybody appears like a deprivation of the liberty of speech and of the press, appears like persecution. There is no country in the world in which the making of martyrs is an easier procedure than inthe United States. Persecution is the soil in which new movements grow best, no matter what may be the character of the movement.
In a single year from the date of the first number of Garrison's newspaper,The Liberator,that is, in January of 1832, the New England Anti-slavery Society was formed, and in December of 1833 the American Anti-slavery Society was organized, which soon established branches in many quarters. The exaggerated demands of the Southerners, that the Northern Commonwealths should forbid Abolition agitation by law, thus identifying the interests of slavery with the denial of the freedom of speaking and writing in the Northern Commonwealths, helped greatly to swell the ranks of the Abolitionists, and to mollify public opinion in the North against them.