Let our dear old Bay State proudlyPut the trumpet to her mouth,Let her ring this messidge loudlyIn the ears of all the South:"I'll return ye good fer evilMuch ez we frail mortals can,But I won't go help the DevilMakin' man the cus o' man;Call me coward, call me traitor,Jest ez suits your mean idees,Here I stand a tyrant-hater,An' the friend o' God and Peace."
Meanwhile, the American army,—accepting as its sole part to obey orders, not questioning why,—though such officers as Grant and Lee had no liking for the task set them,—and reinforced by volunteer regiments from the Southwest,—was steadily fighting its way to the Mexican capital; Taylor's force advancing from Texas, while Scott moved from Vera Cruz. The Mexicans resisted bravely, but were beaten again and again, and upon the capture of the city of Mexico they gave up the contest.
Spite of theéclatof victories, the war had been so little popular in the North that the congressional election of 1846 displaced the administration majority in the House and gave the Whigs a preponderance. But, with the excitement of the complete victory over Mexico in the next year, came a fresh wave of the aggressive temper. It was freely advocated that Mexico should be annexed bodily. Against this madness Henry Clay spoke out with his old-time power. Clearly the country would tolerate no such extreme, and the annexationists contented themselves with mulcting Mexico, upon the payment of $6,000,000, of the vast territory known as California.
Then set in with full vigor the controversy over the new territory which Calhoun had foreseen. Calhoun had been left in a sort of isolation by his defection from the administration upon the war, but he did not break with President Polk; for the reason, says Von Holst, that he wanted to save his influence to oppose the tendency to a war withEngland. Oregon had been held in joint occupancy by the two nations for many years; now a line of demarcation was to be drawn, and there was a loud popular demand for maintaining at any cost the extreme northern line of latitude—it was "Fifty-four-forty or fight." But the sense of the country was against coming to extremities, and Calhoun—a statesman when slavery was not concerned—threw his influence with the moderate sentiment which secured the acceptance of the line of 49 degrees. But he looked with foreboding eyes on the deepening conflict of the sections and the advantage which gravitated toward the North;—from political causes, he declared, unwilling or unable to recognize that the industrial superiority lay inevitably with free labor. He met the danger with a bolder and more advanced claim. The South, he declared, had had enough of compromise over territory; it must now fall back on its ultimate right under the Constitution; and that right was that slaves, being lawful property, might be taken into any territory of the United States, and Congress had no right to forbid their introduction; neither had Congress a right to refuse admission of any State whose people desired to retain slavery. This was a claim for the nationalization of slavery; and it was not until after Calhoun's death that the South came to this position, staked its cause upon it, and when it was rejected by the popular vote broke with the Union.
But Calhoun's logic and passion had not yet brought his section up to his own position, and over the division of the newly acquired territory North and South disputed as before. While the war was still waging, President Polk asked for an appropriation to be expended as compensation for new territory; and David Wilmot, a Democratic member from Pennsylvania, moved that a proviso be added, stipulating that from any new territory acquired by purchaseslavery should be excluded. This was passed by the House, but rejected by the Senate. The Senate was long the stronghold of the South, the States having an equal representation, while in the House the greater increase of free State population gave them a fresh advantage at each new census and apportionment. The "Wilmot proviso" was for some years the watchword of the anti-extensionists. To the typical Northerner, it seemed monstrous that slavery should be introduced by law in territory where it had no previous existence. To the typical Southerner it seemed no less unjust that his peculiar institutions and usages should be excluded from the common domain, for which his section had paid its share of money and more than its share of blood.
While the question of the new territory had scarcely taken definite form, there came the Presidential election of 1848. In the Whig convention Clay's ambition received its final disappointment; Webster had hardly a chance; all the statesmen of the party were set aside in favor of General Zachary Taylor of Louisiana, an upright, soldierly man, a slaveholder, entirely unversed in civil affairs, and his claim resting solely on successful generalship in the war. The Democrats nominated Lewis Cass of Michigan, a mediocre politician, regarded by the South as a trustworthy servant. The third party displayed new strength, and exchanged the name of "Liberty" for "Free Soil." Under the stimulus of recent events recruits of power and promise came to its standard. In Massachusetts it gained such men as Samuel Hoar, Charles Sumner, Charles Francis Adams, and Henry Wilson from the Whigs; and from the Democrats, Robert Rantoul and N. P. Banks. Wilson and Charles Allen, delegates to the Whig convention, declared,—when that body in its resolutions absolutely ignored the question of slavery extension, and sank all principles in a hurrah for "Old Rough and Ready,"—that they would no longer supportthe party. They went home to work with their old friends, the "Conscience Whigs," for the success of the Free Soil party, whose convention was to meet at Buffalo. To that convention came strong allies from Ohio. There were Joshua Giddings, for years one of the few congressmen classed distinctly as anti-slavery, and Salmon P. Chase. New York State offered a reinforcement strong in numbers, but in some respects questionable. The anti-slavery Democrats in the State, nicknamed "Barnburners"—because "they would burn the barn to get rid of the rats"—were ready to break with their party, but their quarrel was partly a personal one. They were welcomed, however, and from their ranks was selected the Presidential candidate—of all men, ex-President Martin Van Buren, known of old as "the Northern man with Southern principles," but willing now to Northernize his principles with the Presidency in view. Such a nomination went far to take the heart out of the genuine anti-slavery men; and the strong name of Charles Francis Adams for vice-president could not make good the weakness of the head of the ticket. Should a real Free Soiler vote for Van Buren,—the probable effect being to improve Cass's chances over Taylor, just as the Birney vote four years earlier had beaten Clay and brought in Polk and all his consequences—or vote for Taylor, trusting to his personal character and the influences surrounding him for a practical advantage to the side of freedom? The latter alternative was the choice of many, including Horace Greeley and his associates, Thurlow Weed and William H. Seward. With such help, and mainly on his strength as a military hero, Taylor was elected. In the result there was considerable hope for the anti-slavery cause. For Seward, who had been chosen to the Senate from New York, was very influential with the new President, and Seward was one of the coming men, clearly destined to be a leaderamong those who were to succeed the great triumvirate of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. He was high-minded, cultivated, and united lofty ideals with practical wisdom. A thorough constitutionalist, he believed there were legitimate ways of advancing freedom under the Constitution; and in a speech at Cleveland he had declared: "Slavery can be limited to its present bounds; it can be ameliorated; it can be abolished; and you and I must do it." Ohio sent to the Senate another of the coming men, Salmon P. Chase, resembling Seward in his broad and philosophical views and his firm but constitutional opposition to slavery.
To win California as slave territory the Southern leaders had forced the war on Mexico. The territory was won, and no political force had developed strong enough to halt their progress. But now came a check from the realm which could not be cajoled or brow-beaten,—the world of natural and industrial forces. Gold was discovered in California. There was a rush of immigrants, and a swift opening and settlement of the country. The pioneers—hardy, enterprising and democratic—had no use nor room for slaves. They held a convention, with the encouragement of President Taylor; framed a Constitution in which slavery was excluded from the future State—this by unanimous vote, including the 15 delegates who had come from slave States; and the popular vote ratified the proposed Constitution by 10 to 1. Then they asked for admission to the Union.
The Southern faction was wrathful. The extremists were for excluding the new State unless slavery was permitted. But it was clear that slavery could not be forced on a State against the wish of its entire people. Then compensation was sought in concessions to be made by the North. The remainder of the new domain, Utah and New Mexico, was not ripe for Statehood; but let slavery, it was urged, be established as a territorial condition. Then came up another grievance of the South. Its fugitive slaves, escaping over the border line, were systematically helped, either to make their way to Canada and the protection of the British flag, or to safe homes in the Northern States. Naturally the slaveswho dared the perils of escape were either the most energetic or the most wronged, and sympathy for them at the North was active and resourceful. Along their most frequented routes of flight were systematic provisions of shelter and help, known as "the underground railroad." The Federal Constitution required their return, but this task had been left to State laws and courts, and was performed slackly, if at all. The total number of fugitives was not large nor the pecuniary loss heavy, but the South was exasperated by what it considered a petty and contemptible depredation. So there was a demand that the Federal government should undertake and enforce the return of fugitive slaves.
Congress opened the session of 1849-50 amid great excitement and confusion. Once more Clay came forward to reconcile the disputants. Clay in these last days was at his best. He was no longer swayed by Presidential aspirations. When in 1849 the Kentucky Constitution was to be revised, he wrote a letter strongly favoring a gradual emancipation and colonization. This had no effect, but Clay's unshaken hold on his State was shown by his unanimous re-election to the Senate. There he at once entered upon his last great effort at national reconciliation. He introduced a bill providing for a series of concessions on both sides. California was to be admitted as a free State; and New Mexico and Utah were to be organized as territories, leaving the question of slavery for future settlement. Slavery was to continue in the District of Columbia, but the slave trade was to be forbidden there. Texas was to cede to New Mexico a disputed strip of territory, which presumably would ultimately become free; and was to be compensated by a large grant from the Federal territory. A law was to be passed for the return of fugitive slaves by Federal authority.
Over these measures the debate was long and hot. Claypleaded that by his scheme the advantages were fairly balanced between North and South. He urged that the rising spirit of disunion at the South should be disarmed by reasonable concessions. He appealed to the North for concessions and to the South for peace. When Jefferson Davis, Senator from Mississippi, declared that the plan conceded nothing to the South, and demanded that the Missouri compromise line be extended to the Pacific (bisecting California), with the express establishment of slavery south of that line, Clay declared that no earthly power should make him vote for the establishment of slavery anywhere where it had had no previous existence. To do so, he said, would be to incur from future inhabitants of New Mexico the reproach which Americans justly applied to their British ancestors for fastening the institution on them. But he would spare Southern sensibilities by withholding an explicit exclusion of slavery from New Mexico; Nature and the future would attend to that. Against any right of secession, against any possibility of peaceful secession, he declared with strongest emphasis: "War and dissolution of the Union are identical; they are convertible terms; and such a war!" Fighting for the extension of slavery, the sympathies of all mankind would be against the South.
The venerable old man, speaking with all the sincerity and warmth of his heart and with all the powers of his mind, was heard, says Schurz, by a great and brilliant audience. His first faltering words were followed by regained power; the old elevation of sentiment, the sonorous flow of words, the lofty energy of action, were enhanced by the pathetic sense that this was the final effort.
More pathetic, tragic even, was the last speech of Calhoun, read for him while he sat in his senatorial chair; the tall form bowed by age and weakness, the gaunt, impressive face furrowed by the long strife for a doomed cause, butthe old fire still alight in the dark eyes and in the resolute spirit. He recognized that the strife of the sections was radical, and that the proposed compromises and palliatives were weak and temporary. He declared that the South had been thwarted in its rights from the ordinance of 1787 until now; that the equilibrium would be destroyed past hope if California and New Mexico were to become free States; and that the only effective resource lay in some constitutional amendment to safeguard the rights of the South. What amendment could effect this, he did not say. But it transpired later that he had in mind the election of two Presidents, one from each section,—a fantastic and impossible scheme. In truth, Calhoun in this last utterance was less a statesman aiming to guide events than a prophet predicting an inevitable woe. He was too wise to share the elation with which hot-heads talked of an independent South, and it was with sad forebodings that he sank to his grave.
When on the 7th of March Webster rose to speak, the Senate and the country hung on his words. He too was drawing toward the end, but his powers were unabated. Hope was strong that in him would be found the champion of freedom. But the key of his speech was a view of the situation, not as a contest between freedom and slavery, but as an opposition of geographical sections, inflamed by extremists on both sides. The mischief, he declared, was due to Southern disunionists and Northern Abolitionists. The remedy was a calm, patriotic temper; the rebuke of fanaticism of both kinds, and the acceptance of reasonable accommodations and adjustments. He approved substantially the scheme proposed by Clay. The formal exclusion of slavery from New Mexico was an unnecessary affront to the South; natural conditions would prevent slavery there. A fugitive slave law was fairly required by the Constitution and the South had a right to claim it. He, like Clay, declaredpeaceable secession an impossibility, and his speech, impressive throughout by the power of a lucid and massive intellect, rose at its close to lofty eloquence in a plea for the maintenance of the Union and a warning of the catastrophe which secession would precipitate.
The defect of the speech was its complete failure to recognize the wrong and mischief of slavery. Webster had rarely shown himself a moral idealist, except as to the sentiment of patriotism. He was identified with the prosperous and "respectable" classes, and the sufferings of the poor and oppressed woke little sympathy in him. These limitations had always been apparent, and while Clay seemed to grow finer and gentler with advance of years, Webster's course was the other way. That imperial and commanding presence, with its imposing stature and Jove-like visage, was the tenement of a richly dowered nature. He had not only great powers of intellect, but warm affections, generous sentiments, and wholesome tastes for humanity and the outdoor world, but his moral fiber, never of the stanchest grain, had been sapped by prosperity. He was self-indulgent in his personal habits and heedless of homely obligations. His ambition was strong, and as the favor of the South had come to be the almost necessary condition of the Presidency, he could not escape the suspicion of courting that favor. He was in substantial agreement with Clay as to the compromise measures, but the Kentuckian rose higher than his section and his look was forward; while Webster was distinctly below the characteristic temper of New England, and his movement was retrograde. The anti-slavery men mourned his 7th of March speech as a great apostasy, and Whittier branded it in his poem of "Ichabod," which fell with Judgment-day weight. Yet it was not an apostasy, but the natural culmination of his course; and in spite of its error, he still was true to the characteristic sentiment of his best period, the love of the Union. His voice like Clay's gave inspiration—it may well have been a decisive inspiration—to the cause which triumphed at Gettysburg and Appomattox. Whittier himself, in a later poem, recognized the patriotic service of the man whom, in the heat of conflict, he had so scathingly denounced.
Congress, and especially the Senate, was at this time full of brilliant men. Among the leaders of the extreme South were Mason of Virginia, Butler of South Carolina, Davis of Mississippi, and Soule of Louisiana. From this element came plentiful threats of disunion. But these threats were met with stern answers. When President Taylor heard of them the stout old soldier answered that such language was treasonable, and if necessary he would himself take command of the army that should put down rebellion. Disunion, he said, is treason; and to one questioning him, he answered with a soldier's oath that if anyone really attempted to carry it out, they should be dealt with by law as they deserved, and executed. Clay's language was no less explicit. When Senator Rhett in Charleston proposed to raise the flag of secession, and his colleague, Barnwell in the Senate, half indorsed his words, Clay said, with a lightning flash that thrilled the audience, that if Senator Rhett followed up that declaration by overt acts "he will be a traitor, and I hope he will meet the fate of a traitor!" Clay went on to say that if Kentucky should ever unfurl the banner of resistance unjustly against the Union, "never, never will I engage with her in such a cause!"
There was in Congress a new element, of the smallest in numbers, but with the promise and potency of a great future. Four days after Webster, Seward spoke in the Senate. He advocated the admission of California as a free State, with no additions or compromises. No equilibrium between freedom and slavery was possible; if established to-day it would be destroyed to-morrow. The moral sentiment of the age would never permit the enforcement of a law requiring Northern freemen to return slaves to bondage. The entire public domain was by the Constitution devoted to union, justice, defense, welfare, and liberty; and it was devoted to the same noble ends by "a higher law than the Constitution." The extension of slavery ought to be barred by all legal means. Threats of disunion had no terrors for him. The question was "whether the Union shall stand, and slavery, under the steady, peaceful action of moral, social, and political causes, be removed by gradual voluntary effort and with compensation; or whether the Union shall be dissolved and civil war ensue, bringing on violent but complete and immediate emancipation."
Salmon P. Chase of Ohio spoke to similar effect. If, he said, the claims of freedom are sacrificed here by forms of legislation, "the people will unsettle your settlement." "It may be that you will succeed in burying the ordinance of freedom. But the people will write upon its tomb, 'I shall rise again.'"
The disunionists found that they had little popular support behind them. A convention at Nashville, held to promote the interests of the South, refused to countenance any extreme measures. General Taylor steadily favored the admission of California as a free State, with no qualifications or accompaniments. Then, while the result in Congress hung doubtful, in the summer of 1850, President Taylor died. His successor, Vice-President Millard Fillmore of New York, was a man of fair ability and cautious or timid disposition; an opponent of Seward in the politics of their State. He favored the compromise, and called Webster to his cabinet. The administration's influence seemed to turn the scale, and Clay's series of measures were adoptedone by one. There was dissatisfaction at the South and indignation at the North. The territorial settlement was substantially in the North's favor. But the exasperating fact, and pregnant with consequences, was the Fugitive Slave law. Its provisions were intolerable to the popular conscience. All citizens were liable to be called to aid in the pursuit and arrest of a fugitive. He was to be tried before a United States commissioner, whose decision was final. A man accused of a crime punishable by a small fine or a brief imprisonment was entitled to a verdict from an impartial jury of twelve; but a man whose freedom for life was at stake was at the mercy of a single official.
Most of the Northern States sooner or later passed "Personal Liberty laws," which, without directly assuming to nullify the Federal statute, aimed to defeat its enforcement. They contained such provisions as the exemption of State officials and State buildings from service in the rendition of fugitives, and the right of alleged fugitives to be taken byhabeas corpusbefore a State tribunal. So against the charge of inhumanity in the Fugitive Slave law, the South brought the counter-charge of evasion bordering on defiance of a Federal statute. Few renditions were attempted. Sometimes they were met by forcible resistance. An alleged fugitive, Jerry, was rescued by the populace in Syracuse. A negro, Shadrach, arrested as a fugitive in Boston in 1851, was set free and carried off by a mob. There was a spasm of excitement in Congress, but it was brief and resultless. Later, in 1854, when the anti-slavery tide was swiftly rising, came the rendition of Anthony Burns, who was taken through the streets of Boston under a strong guard of Federal troops and State militia, while the popular wrath and grief at the sight swelled the wave which the repeal of the Missouri compromise had started on its inevitable way.
After the half-year's debate over the compromise of 1850 came a time of political quiet. "The tumult and the shouting died." It seemed more than a temporary lull. In a great tide of material prosperity, the country easily forgot the slaves; if out of sight, they were, to most, out of mind. Webster's speech had a deep significance. He was identified in Massachusetts with the classes representing commercial prosperity, social prominence, and academic culture. In these classes, throughout the North, there was a general apathy as to slavery. The temper of the time was materialistic. There was indeed enough anti-slavery sentiment, stirred by the 7th of March speech and the Fugitive Slave law, to change the balance of power in Massachusetts politics. The Democrats and the Free Soilers made a coalition, and it triumphed over the Whigs. The Democrats took the State offices, with George S. Boutwell as Governor; and Charles Sumner—a scholar, an idealist, an impressive orator, and a pronounced anti-slavery man, though never an Abolitionist,—was sent to the Senate to reinforce Seward and Chase.
The Presidential election of 1852 came on. In the Whig convention Fillmore had some support, especially from the South; Webster had most of the Massachusetts votes and scarce any others; and choice was made of General Winfield Scott, in the hope of repeating the victory of 1848 with another hero of the Mexican war. It was to Webster a blow past retrieval; in bitterness of spirit he turned hisface to the wall, in his old home at Marshfield, and died. The Democratic convention hesitated between several Northern politicians of trustworthy subserviency to the South,—Cass, Douglas, and Buchanan—and its choice fell upon Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, an amiable man, of fair ability, but easy to manage; he, too, the winner of a trifle of military glory in the Mexican conquest. Both conventions professed entire content with the settlements of the compromise. The Free Soilers nominated John P. Hale of New Hampshire, and made their familiar declaration of principles. But they had lost their Democratic allies of four years earlier, and threw only 150,000 votes—less by 100,000 than at the previous election. The Whig party proved to be on the verge of dissolution. It had lost its hold on the "conscience vote" of the North, and was less trusted than its rival by the South. Pierce was chosen by a great majority; he carried every State except Vermont, Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
Party politics were dull; commercial and material interests seemed wholly in the ascendant, and the anti-slavery cause was at a low ebb. But many things had happened in two decades, below the surface current of public events, and, just on the threshold of a new era, we may glance back over these twenty years. All the European world had been full of movement. France had passed through three revolutions. Germany, Austria, and Italy had undergone a political upheaval and subsidence; and the liberal reverses of 1848 were the precursors of national unity and constitutional freedom in the near future.
England had gone steadily on in the path of conservative progress; had widened its suffrage by the Reform Act of 1832; had relieved distress and disarmed discontent by the free trade policy of Sir Robert Peel; her factory legislation had met a crying need of the new industrial epoch, andshe had pacified and energized Canada by giving her self-government. Meanwhile American progress had been along lines of its own. The country had grown at a tremendous rate, and mainly at the North and West. Immigration had poured in from Europe, and the stream of native stock from the seaboard States to the West had hardly slackened. It was the epoch of the railroad and the telegraph. Manufactures had increased and multiplied; acres fell under cultivation by the million. In this industrial growth the North had far outstripped the South. Calhoun had urged the construction of railroads to link the eastern and western parts of the South, but the political motive could not supply the want of industrial force. The figures of the census of 1850 were more eloquent than any orator as to the relative effects of free and slave labor. Intellectually the period had been prolific. Emerson had risen, the bright morning star of American literature. Bryant, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, were telling their stories or singing their songs. Theology was fruitful of debate and change. The Unitarian movement had defined itself. Presbyterians and Congregationalists were discussing the tenets of old school and new. For "women's rights" a strong and promising advance had been made, in the face of unpopularity and derision. Religious revivals, foreign missions, social reforms, were making active way. From all this intellectual and social movement, unless we except the emotional revivals of religion, the South stood apart. Literature it had virtually none; its theology was only conservative and defensive; at most so-called reforms it looked askance.
In two respects the South had an advantage. Its social system was aristocratic; above the slaves came the non-slave-holding whites, including a great mass of the ignorant and degraded; but at the summit the slave-holding class had a social life in many ways attractive and delightful.The slave-holders, all told, numbered some 350,000. The controlling element consisted of the large planters, with the affiliated members of the liberal professions. Plantation life at its best had a great deal of beauty and charm. A degree of improvidence and "shiftlessness," by Northern standards, was not inconsistent with free hospitality, a generous outdoor life, an old-time culture with an atmosphere of leisure and courtesy, superior in its way to what the busy and bustling North could show. The charming and chivalrous "Colonel Carter of Cartersville" had many a prototype in real life. A higher type was sometimes bred in Southern society; it was not without some reason that Virginians claimed that the mold which produced Washington was not broken when it could yield a Robert Lee. There was a somber side; plantation life was often a rank soil for passions of tyranny and license. But its better fruitage added an element to the composite American type which could not and cannot be spared.
The other advantage the South possessed was the devotion of its strongest men to political life. The loss of commerce and literature was the gain of politics. The typical Southern leader was apt to be both a planter and a lawyer, with a strong and active interest in public affairs. Political oratory was a favorite resource in the sparsely-settled districts. The personal force which in the North was scattered among twenty fields was here centered mainly in one. This feature of Southern society worked together with the fact that the section had in slavery a common interest and bond. That interest of the entire section, led by its ablest men, came naturally to be the dominant factor in American public life. When it could not rule through its own men, it found agents in subservient Northern politicians. And so it came about that in the early '50s the South, while outstripped altogether in population, wealth, industrial andintellectual achievement, was yet in substantial control of the governmental power. In the North, by the very magnitude of the commercial and industrial development the moral sentiment in public affairs seemed submerged or at least eclipsed.
It was during such a period of apathy that there was held an anti-slavery meeting at which two negroes were present, Sojourner Truth, an old woman whose shrewdness matched her fervor, and Frederick Douglass. Douglass was the son of a white father and a slave mother; he taught himself to read and write, made his escape into freedom, gained an education, and became an effective speaker for the anti-slavery cause. On this occasion he spoke with power and passion of the gloomy prospects of their people; government, wealth, social advantage, all were on the side of their oppressors; good people seemed indifferent to their wrongs; was there indeed any help or hope? Then rose Sojourner Truth, and looking at him said only, "Frederick! Is God dead?"
And now, in the year 1852, there befell an event perhaps as momentous in American history as any between the establishment of the Constitution and the Civil War. A frail little woman, the wife of an obscure theological professor in a Maine village, wrote a story, and that story captured the heart of the world. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say thatUncle Tom's Cabinconverted the North to the cause of the slave. The typical Union volunteer of 1861 carried the book in his memory. It brought home to the heart of the North, and of the world, that the slave was a man,—one with mankind by that deepest tie, of human love and aspiration and anguish,—but denied the rights of a man.
The book was a birth of genius and love. It is absolutely sweet-spirited. Its intense and irresistible plea is not against a class or a section, but against a system. It portrays among the Southern slave-holders characters noble and attractive,—Mrs Shelby, the faithful mistress, and the fascinating St. Clare. The worst villain in the story is a renegade Northerner. Its typical Yankee, Miss Ophelia, provokes kindly laughter. The book mixes humor with its tragedy; the sorrows of Uncle Tom and the dark story of Cassy are relieved by the pranks of Black Sam and the antics of Topsy. With all its woes, the story somehow does not leave a depressing effect; it abounds in courage and action; the fugitives win their way to freedom; the final impulseis to hopeful effort against the wrong. Its basal motive was the same as that of the Abolitionists, but its spirit and method were so different from Garrison's that it won response and sympathy where he had roused antagonism. Against pharisaical religion it uses effective satire,—which was intensified in its successor,Dred,—but the Christianity of faith and life is its animating spirit. No book is richer in the gospel of love to man and trust in God. Its rank is high in the new literature which has stimulated and led the great modern movement for the uplifting of the poor and oppressed. Its place is with Victor Hugo'sLes Miserablesand Tolstoi'sWar and Peace.
The motive ofUncle Tom's Cabinwas an appeal to the heart of the American people. There was no reference to political action, far less any suggestion of servile insurrection, and there was no discussion of methods of emancipation. The book set forth an organized, monstrous wrong, which it was in the power of the American nation, and above all, of the Southern people, to remove. The effect at the North was immeasurably to widen and deepen the conviction of the wrong of slavery, and the desire to remove it. But the way to practical action did not open; and strangely enough there was at first no visible effect on politics. The political logic of the situation led straight, as a first step, to the support of the Free Soil party. But thoughUncle Tom's Cabinappeared (as a book) in April, 1852, and its popularity was instant, the Presidential election seven months later showed a Free Soil vote less by 100,000 than four years before. The political effect of the book was to appear only when public events two years later gave a sudden spur to the hesitating North.
The South turned a deaf ear to the appeal. It shut the book out from its borders as far as it could, and one who inquired for it in a Southern bookstore would probably beofferedAunt Phillis's Cabinor some other mild literary anti-toxin. The South protested that the book's picture of slavery was untrue and unjust. It was monstrous, so they said, that their labor system should be shown as having its natural result in the whipping to death of a saintly negro for his virtuous conduct. Another reply was: "If the book is true, it is really a eulogy of slavery, for it depicts slavery as producing in Uncle Tom a perfect character."
To the objections to the fidelity of her portraiture Mrs. Stowe replied withA Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin,—a formidable array of proved facts, as to the laws of the slave States, and specific incidents which paralleled or exceeded all she had told. As now judged, the novel has some serious imperfections as a picture of slavery. Probably the most important of these was expressed by Judge Tourgee, para-phrasing the proverb about the Russian and the Tartar: "Scratch one of Mrs. Stowe's negroes, and you will find a white man." She failed adequately to differentiate the two races, and described the negro too much from such specimens as Uncle Tom and George and Eliza Harris. She had never lived in the South, and her knowledge was obtained from observation in the border town of Cincinnati, from acquaintance with fugitives, and from the reports of Northern travelers—all interpreted with the insight of genius and the impulse of philanthropy. Her avowed purpose was not to make a literal or merely artistic picture, but to show the actual wrongs and legalized possibilities of wrong which called for redress. It did not lessen the justice of her plea, that the mass of negroes were more degraded than she knew, or that their average treatment was kinder than her portrayal showed.
But a true historical judgment of slavery must rest on a comparison of documents. The story told from the master'sstandpoint should be heard. Among the faithful and graphic narrations of this sort may be named Mrs. Burton Harrison'sFlower de Hundred,—a volume of personal reminiscences of Virginia before the war. It is a charming story, without motive other than the pleasure of recalling happy memories, and it describes a society of various and vivid charm. The mention of the slaves is occasional and incidental; but the description of the plantation hands, and especially the household servants, trusted and beloved, gives a sunny and doubtless a real side of slavery. Another book is fuller and more impressive in its treatment. It might be said that every American ought to readUncle Tom's Cabinas a part of his education, and to follow it with two other books of real life. One of these isA Southern Planter,—a biography of Thomas Dabney, of Virginia and later of Mississippi, written by his daughter. It is a story amply worth reading for its human interest, and for its presentation of a man of noble and beautiful character. One is enriched by the acquaintance, even through a book, of a man like Thomas Dabney. And it is most desirable for the Northerner to vivify his impression of the South by the knowledge of men like him. We are misled by general and geographical terms: "an Englishman" is a vague and perhaps unattractive term to an American until he knows, in books or in flesh and blood, a few Britons of the right stamp. And so South and North need mutual interpretation not alone through their historic heroes, but through the best of their everyday people. And of those best, surely Thomas Dabney was one,—a strong, tender, noble man, fulfilling each relation in family and society with loyal conscience and sympathetic heart.
From the book we can give but a few instances of plantation life as such a man made it. When he was to move from Virginia to Mississippi he called together all his slaves,—some hundreds—and told them he wanted to take none of them against their will, and especially he would not break up any families. If any of them had wives or husbands on other plantations, he would sell or buy, just as they wished, so that every family should stay or go together. Every one of them elected to go with their old master. Settled in Mississippi, his cotton plantation became the admiration and envy of the neighbors, for the size of the crops as well as the condition of the workers. Their comfort was amply secured. The general rule was three hours' rest at midday and a Saturday half-holiday. At the height of the season hours were longer, but there was a system of prizes, for four or five months in the year, from $1 a week to a picayune; with an extra prize of a $5 gold piece for anyone picking 600 pounds a day; and these prizes roused such interest and excitement that some of the ambitious ones had to be compelled to leave the field at night, wishing to sleep at the end of their row. The inefficient were gently tolerated; severe punishment was held to be alike cruel and useless; an incompetent servant was carried as a burden from which there was no escape. Such endurance was the way of all good masters and mistresses at the South,—"and I have known very few who were not good," adds the writer. The plantation trained and kept its own mechanics; two each of carpenters, blacksmiths, millers, with five seamstresses in the house. In the house, under the mistress's eye, were cut and made the clothes of all the negroes, two woolen and two cotton suits a year, with a gay calico Sunday dress for each woman. The women were taught sewing in the house. When their babies were born a nurse was provided, and all the mother's work done for her for a month, and for a year she was allowed ample leisure for the care of the baby. The sons of the family taught reading to those who wished to learn. Some of the house servantswere very fine characters; the sketch of "Mammy Maria" one would gladly reproduce. When secession came on, Thomas Dabney altogether disapproved, and foresaw the ruin of the South. He proposed to his wife that they close up their affairs, and go to live in England. Her reply was: "What will you do with Abby? and with Maria and Harriet, and their husbands and children, and the rest of our people?" That was unanswerable. So he stayed, and with his family shared the fighting,—for, the war begun, Dabney gave his hearty support to the Southern cause, and his sons went to the field,—shared the hardships of a devastated country, the social chaos that followed, and the slow reconstruction,—a more intrepid and lovable figure in adversity than before.
His daughter writes: "In the family of Thomas Dabney the first feeling when the war ended was of joy that one dreadful responsibility at least was removed. Gradual emancipation had been a hope and a dream not to be realized." "A hope and a dream,"—it does not appear that it had ever been seriously considered as a purpose or a duty. "Not an intelligent white man or woman in the South," says the writer, "would now wish slavery restored." But why,—it is impossible not to return to the question,—why had the South done nothing to rid itself of the evil? Why had it centered its political energies in maintaining and extending it? Why had it revolted from the Union and invited war and ruin, for a system which when once removed it recognized as a burden and a curse? No right minded man can ponder that question without taking a step further, and asking whether the evils in our present industrial system shall be allowed to go on till they bring down the temple on our heads, or be met with deliberate and resolute cure. And the good and conscientious man who does his best under the existing system—as ThomasDabney did under slavery—is yet derelict unless he gives his thought and effort to such radical amendment as the system may need.
There is yet another book in illustration of slavery which ought to be read by every American. It is Fanny Kemble Butler'sA Residence on a Georgia Plantation. She was a woman of unusual genius, character, and sensibility; the inheritor of a great dramatic talent, and a brilliant actress until she married Mr. Butler of Georgia, and left the stage to live with him on the plantation owned by himself and his brother. After no long period she left her husband, not taking the world into her confidence as to her domestic affairs, but returning to the stage as a dramatic reader, and passing into honored private life. After the outbreak of the Civil War she published, with some reserves and some additions, the journal she had kept during her life on the plantation. As to her personal relations, except as touching the slaves, the book is entirely reticent, but it is plain that slavery as she saw it made life under those conditions literally intolerable. Below all special cruelties, she writes, she felt the ever-present, vivid wrong of living on the unpaid labor of servants. The special wrongs were constant. Thus she describes the parting of a family of slaves, and the husband's awful distress. She tells of the head-driver, Frank, an every way superior man, left at some seasons in sole charge of the plantation; but his wife was taken from him and made the mistress of the overseer. There was Engineer Ned, intelligent and capable, and himself not badly treated, but with a wife broken down by being driven to field work too soon after the birth of a child. Half the women on the plantation were diseased from the same cause. One woman brought to her mistress a pitiful tale of such suffering. A little later the mistress learned that the woman, on the ground that this visit had caused herday's labor to come short, had received a flogging. She appealed to her husband, but he refused to interfere. "To Mr. ——'s assertion of the justice of poor Theresa's punishment, I retorted the manifest injustice of unpaid and enforced labor; the brutal inhumanity of allowing a man to strip and lash a woman, the mother of ten children; to exact from her toil which was to maintain in luxury two idle young men, the owners of the plantation. I said I thought female labor of the sort exacted from these slaves, and corporal chastizement such as they endure, must be abhorrent to any manly or humane man. Mr. —— said he thought it was disagreeable, and left me to my reflections with that concession." Presently he refused to listen to any more such petitions from her. She writes: "A wild wish rose in my heart that the river and the sea would swallow up and melt in their salt waves the whole of this accursed property of ours."
The principal physical hardships, she writes, fell to the women. The children and the old people are idle and neglected; the middle-aged men do not seem over-worked, and lead a mere animal existence, in itself not peculiarly cruel or distressing, but with a constant element of fear and uncertainty, "and the trifling evils of unrequited labor, ignorance the most profound (to which they are condemned by law), and the unutterable injustice which precludes them from all the merits and all the benefits of voluntary exertion, and the progress that results from it."
Her eye notes closely the faces about her. When she gathers the slaves to read prayers to them, she observes "their sable faces, so many of them so uncouth in their outlines and proportions, and yet all of them so pathetic, and some so sublime in their expression of patient suffering and religious fervor." She says: "Just in proportion as I have found the slaves on this plantation intelligent andadvanced, I have observed this pathetic expression of countenance in them, a mixture of sadness and fear." The plantation, she writes, was well reputed, and its management was considered above the average.
Her analysis of the master class in the South is keen and striking. "The shop is not their element, and the eager spirit of speculation and the sordid spirit of gain do not infect their whole existence, even to their very demeanor and appearance, as they too manifestly do those of a large proportion of the inhabitants of the Northern States. The Southerners are infinitely better bred men, according to English notions, than the men of the Northern States. The habit of command gives them a certain self-possession, the enjoyment of leisure a certain ease. Their temperament is impulsive and enthusiastic, and their manners have the grace and spirit which seldom belong to the development of a Northern people; but upon more familiar acquaintance the vices of the social system to which they belong will be found to have infected them with their own peculiar taint; and haughty, over-bearing irritability, effeminate indolence, reckless extravagance, and a union of profligacy and cruelty which is the immediate result of their irresponsible power over their dependents, are some of the less pleasing traits."
She gives another and darker picture of the planter class. It goes without saying that it is only a part of the class to which it fairly applies: "A nation, for as such they should be spoken of, of men whose organization and temperament is that of the southern European, living under the influence of a climate at once enervating and exciting, scattered over trackless wildernesses of arid sand and pestilential swamp, intrenched within their own boundaries, surrounded by creatures absolutely subject to their despotic will; delivered over by hard necessity to the lowest excitements of drinking, gambling, and debauchery for sole recreation; independent of all opinion; ignorant of all progress; isolated from all society—it is impossible to conceive a more savage existence within the border of any modern civilization." The picture of the poor whites is graphic and somber, but space must limit these quotations.
She gives credit for the habits of courage and command, which are bred in the upper class, as when she tells of a heroic rescue from a shipwreck: "The devil must have his due, and men brought up in habits of peremptory command over their fellowmen, and under the constant apprehension of danger and awful necessity of immediate readiness to meet it, acquire qualities precious to themselves and others in hours of supreme peril."
She touches repeatedly on the social restrictions on free speech; thus, speaking of two gentlemen, one a clergyman: "They seem good and kind and amiable men, and I have no doubt are conscientious in their capacity of slave holders; but to one who has lived outside this dreadful atmosphere, the whole tone of their discourse has a morally muffled sound which one must hear to be able to conceive." She observes that whenever she discusses slavery with people she meets, they waive the abstract right or wrong of the system. Now and then she gets a bit of entire frankness, as when a very distinguished South Carolinian says to her, "I'll tell you why abolition is impossible; because every healthy negro can fetch $1000 in Charleston market at this moment."
She generalizes as to the effects of emancipation in a way which later events completely justified. Unlike the West Indies, she says, the South is not tropical, and will not yield food without labor, and necessity would compel the liberated blacks to work. That they would not work, and the ground would lie idle, was, as we know, the bogy which washeld up to scare away from emancipation—just as in our own day the danger of race mixture is made a bogy to scare away from social justice. But the event proved that Fanny Kemble was right in her predictions, in which indeed she was at one with other candid observers at the time. As to gradual emancipation, she believed it unwise—the system, she writes, is too absolutely bad for slow measures. Had she owned her husband's plantation, she would at once have freed the slaves, and hired them, if only as a means of financial salvation.
She pronouncesUncle Tom's Cabinto be no exaggeration. Her own story of facts gives a darker impression than Mrs. Stowe's novel. It may be asked, why, at this distance, revive the tragic tale? The answer is, that the truth of history is precious, and our present problems cannot be understood if we shut our eyes to their antecedents. Just now there is a fashion, among many Southern writers on the negro question, of beginning their story with the wrongs and sufferings of the reconstruction period. Now, it was indeed deplorable, and a thing not to be forgotten, that ignorant negroes sat in the Senate chambers of South Carolina and Mississippi, that taxes were excessive, and the public business mismanaged. But, in the broad view, it is well to remember that a few years earlier very much worse things than these were happening, and that a system which made cattle of men and women might be expected to avenge itself.
Another work may be merely mentioned as illuminating the facts of slavery. It is Frederic Law Olmsted's three volumes of travels in the slave States. He studied them with the eyes of a farmer and a practical man; a well-equipped, fair, and keen observer. His testimony, already touched on in these chapters, is very strong as to the economic mischief of the system, its frequent cruelties, itsdemoralization of both master and slave, and the absolute need of its ultimate extinction. From his pages we can borrow but one or two passages. The contrasts of slavery are epitomized in two plantations he found side by side in Mississippi. On one the slaves had good food and clothes, were not driven hard, were given three stops in the day for meals, and had the time from Friday night till Monday morning for themselves. In this time the men cultivated gardens and the women washed and sewed. They were smartly dressed, and seemed very contented; many could read and write; on Sundays there was a church service and a Sabbath school taught by their mistress, both of which they could attend or not as they pleased. On the other plantation, owned by a religious woman, the working hours were from 3.30A. M.to 9P. M.The slaves had only Sunday free from labor, and on that day there were three services which they had to attend under penalty of a whipping. They were never allowed off the plantation, and were whipped if they talked with slaves from other plantations. Said a neighbor, "They can all repeat the catechism, but they are the dullest, laziest, and most sorrowful negroes I ever saw."
As to the possibilities of gradual emancipation, which he favored, Olmsted wrote that in Cuba every slave has the right of buying his own freedom, at a price which does not depend on the selfish exaction of his master, but is either a fixed price or is determined in each case by disinterested appraisers. "The consequence is that emancipations are continually going on, and the free people of color are becoming enlightened, cultivated, and wealthy. In no part of the United States do they occupy the high position which they enjoy in Cuba." So much for the despised Spanish-American.
From a still different standpoint—that of the non-slaveholding Southern white—the system was reviewed and scathingly judged in Helper'sThe Impending Crisis. But that, likeUncle Tom's Cabin, was not merely a book, but an event, and as such is to be mentioned in its place among events. The general survey of the slave system in itself need not here be carried further. As to its essential character and basal principle, no truer word was ever spoken than that which Mrs. Stowe puts in the mouth of the slaveholder St. Clare:
"The short of the matter is, cousin, on this abstract question of slavery there can, as I think, be but one opinion. Planters, who have money to make by it,—clergymen, who have planters to please,—politicians, who want to rule by it,—may warp and bend language and ethics to a degree that shall astonish the world at their ingenuity; they can press Nature and the Bible, and nobody knows what else, into the service; but, after all, neither they nor the world believe in it one particle the more. It comes from the devil, that's the short of it,—and to my mind, it's a pretty respectable specimen of what he can do in his own line. You seem to wonder; but if you will get me fairly at it, I'll make a clean breast of it. This cursed business, accursed of God and man, what is it? Strip it of all its ornament, run it down to the root and nucleus of the whole, and what is it? Why, because my brother Quashy is ignorant and weak, and I am intelligent and strong,—because I know how, and can do it,—therefore I may steal all he has, keep it, and give him only such and so much as suits my fancy. Whatever is too hard, too dirty, too disagreeable, for me, I may set Quashy to doing. Because I don't like work, Quashy shall work. Because the sun burns me, Quashy shall stay in the sun. Quashy shall earn the money, and I will spend it. Quashy shall lie down in every puddle, that I may walk over dry-shod. Quashy shalldo my will, and not his, all the days of his mortal life, and have such chance of getting to heaven, at last, as I find convenient. This I take to be about what slavery is."
St. Clare goes on to say that "for pity's sake, for shame's sake, because we are men born of women and not savage beasts, many of us do not and dare not—we would scorn to—use the full power which our savage laws put into our hands." In truth, a compilation of the slave laws was one of the most convincing arguments against the whole system.
This book is characterized by Charles G. Ames,—whose long life of noble service to humanity included earnest work among the anti-slavery pioneers: "To my mind, the heaviest blow, though probably not the most telling one, ever struck against our slave system as a system was the compilation and publication of Stroud'sSlave Laws—a codification from the statute-books of the Southern States of their own barbarous methods of legislation, made necessary for the protection of the peculiar institution. All the recent sentimental defenses of it, as gentle, humane, and patriarchal, seem utterly to ignore the rugged facts, which Lawyer Stroud's book made as plain as the stratification of the rocks to the eye of the geologist."
In its actual administration, the system was in a measure softened and humanized. It was more humane in the border than in the cotton and sugar States, and it was generally better when a plantation was managed by its owner than when left to an overseer,—as the plantation of Fanny Kemble's husband had been left. But in one respect its disastrous effect was everywhere felt. By associating manual labor with the stigma of servitude, it bred, in free men, a strong disrelish for work,—a most demoralizing and ruinous influence. Inefficiency and degradation were the marks of the non-slaveholding whites. The master class missed the wholesome regimen of toil. Nature is never morebeneficent than when she lays on man the imperative command "Thou shalt work." Of all ways of evading it the worst is to shift the burden to another man. In being driven to do other men's work as well as his own the negro found some compensation, but his enslaver paid a constant and heavy penalty.
The foremost politician of the Northwest, in the early '50s, was Stephen A. Douglas, United States senator from Illinois. He was a native of Vermont, and had early gone West and pushed his fortunes with energy, audacity, and shrewdness. He was an effective, popular speaker; and his short and stout frame and large head had won for him the nickname of "The Little Giant." He was a leader in the Democratic party, and a prominent Presidential candidate, but never identified with any great political principle or broad policy. He was chairman of the Senate committee on Territories, and early in the session of 1853-4 he introduced a bill for the organization of a vast section hitherto known as "the Platte country," a part of the Louisiana purchase, lying next to the western tier of States, and stretching from Indian Territory to Canada; all of which was now to constitute the Territory of Nebraska, or, as it was soon divided, the two Territories of Nebraska and Kansas. This region had as yet been scarcely touched by permanent settlers, but it was the next step in the great onward march toward the Pacific. It lay north of the line of 36 degrees 30 minutes, above which it had been declared by the compromise act of 1820 slavery should never be extended. Douglas incorporated in his "Kansas-Nebraska" bill, a clause declaring that the prohibition of slavery north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, by the act of 1820, had been "superseded by the principles of the legislation of 1850," and was "inoperative and void." Later he added theexplanatory clause: "It being the true intent and meaning of this act, not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States." On its face, this was a proposal to withdraw the congressional prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern territory, and remand the question to the territorial population. But the latent purpose to distinctly favor slavery was proved when Senator Chase moved an additional clause: "Under which (the Constitution) the people of the Territory, through their appropriate representatives, may, if they see fit, prohibit the existence of slavery therein"; and Douglas and his followers, in defiance of consistency, instantly threw this out. The meaning of the whole business was unmistakable; under the pretext of "popular sovereignty,"—Douglas's favorite watchword—the bars were thrown down and slavery was invited to enter.
The proposal took the country completely by surprise. The South was not asking for any such advantage as was offered, but was prompt to accept it. This of course Douglas had expected, and in this lay his personal gain as a Presidential candidate. But he had utterly misjudged the temper of the North. The general acquiescence in the compromise of 1850 might seem to indicate a weariness or indifference as to the slavery question. But just as in 1820 and in 1850, again there sprung up a wide and deep hostility to any extension of slavery, and now the old restraints on that hostility were gone, and its sources were newly filled. For now Clay and Webster were dead, and the case itself offered no room for compromise; no offset was possible. And the anti-slavery feeling had strengthened immensely throughout the North. Under the stimulus ofUncle Tom's Cabin, theinhumanity of the system had made the deepest impression on the popular imagination and conscience. To this system it was now proposed to throw open all the fair and fertile Northwest, in effect from the Mississippi to the Pacific. The North awoke like a giant from sleep. The old party organizations went down in the shock; a new party came instantly to birth; and the last triumph of slavery in Congress gave the signal for a six-years' campaign, ending in the triumph of the Republicans and the appeal of the South to revolution.
The debate in Congress was hot through the winter and spring of 1854. In the Senate, Seward and Sumner and Chase had been reinforced by such allies as Benjamin Wade of Ohio, Hamilton Fish of New York, Solomon Foot of Vermont, and William P. Fessenden of Maine. The supporters of the bill, with such leaders as Douglas and Cass from the North and Mason and Benjamin from the South, proved finally to number three-fourths of the Senate. In the House, party lines were completely broken, and the division was almost equal,—the bill passed by 113 to 110. Its supporters included all the Southern and just half of the Northern Democrats, and two-thirds of the few Southern Whigs. Its opponents were all the Northern and a third of the Southern Whigs, with half of the Northern Democrats and the four Free-Soilers in the House.
The bill finally passed on the 25th of May, 1854, and there instantly began a hot battle for the congressional election. On the very next morning,—so Henry Wilson relates,—a meeting of about twenty members of the House was held; among their leaders were Israel Washburn, Jr., of Maine, and Edward Dickinson and Thomas D. Eliot of Massachusetts; and it was agreed that the best hope lay not in the Whig organization, but in a new party, for which the name "Republican" was chosen; and of which thisoccasion might now be considered the birth and christening. It came to its earliest maturity in Michigan, where the Whigs and Free Soilers united in the new party and carried the autumn election. But in most Northern States there was political confusion, heightened by the sudden appearance of the "American" party. This was the political development of the "Know-nothing" secret society, which came into existence the year before, on the basis of the exclusion of recent immigrants from political power. Its special animus was hostility to the Irish Catholics, and in various parts of the country it had for a year or two a mushroom growth. In Massachusetts, where the Whigs clung obstinately to their tradition and their social prestige, and the Republican party was at first only a continuance of the Free Soil, the Know-nothings won in 1854 a sweeping victory, carrying the State by almost two to one and electing all the members of Congress. That shrewd politician, Henry Wilson, contributed to the result; was elected to the United States Senate; and led the anti-slavery element which controlled the American party in Massachusetts and a year or two later divided its national organization. In other States, the term "anti-Nebraska" was the basis of a temporary union, such as in Ohio had a majority of 70,000. In New York the influence of Greeley, Seward, and Weed prolonged the Whig organization as an anti-Nebraska party. The roster of the new Congress was a jumble of Democrats, Whigs, Republicans, Americans, and anti-Nebraskans. But the general result was clear; Douglas's bill had turned an overwhelming administration majority into a minority of the popular vote; and the political revolution had carried the House in the first engagement. The result crystallized a year later, when an obstinate battle of many weeks for the House speakership ended in the election of Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts.
The immediate practical effect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was to throw the political destiny of those Territories into the hands of the future settlers. There were men at the North who were prompt to see and seize the opportunity. In February, 1854, three months before the bill became law, the New England Emigrant Aid Society was incorporated in Massachusetts. Its originator was Eli Thayer of Worcester, and among its active promoters was Edward Everett Hale. In the following July it sent to Kansas a colony of twenty-four, speedily followed by another of seventy, which founded the town of Lawrence. Other colonies followed from various Northern States, and other settlements were made. The natural westward movement of an active population seeking new homes and personal betterment was augmented and stimulated by a propaganda of freedom. Whittier gave the colonists a marching song:
We cross the prairies as of oldOur fathers crossed the sea,To make the West as they the EastThe home of liberty.
A counter movement was started from the South. Missouri was its natural base. But Missouri furnished the material and leadership for another kind of crusade. The rough and lawless element of a border community was brought out in its worst character by the appeal to champion the cause of slavery. Men high in political life were ready to utilize such forces. The first settlers of Lawrence, before they had time to raise their houses, were visited by a ruffianly mob from Missouri, who tried by threats and show of force to drive them from the Territory, but failed. When in November the first election was held for Territorial delegate to Congress, there was a systematic invasion by bands of Missourians, who captured the polling-places and electedtheir candidate by 3000 votes; though it was afterward proved that there were only half that number of voters resident in Kansas.
In 1855 the first Territorial Legislature was elected by a similar invasion of armed men, which chose the entire body. A foremost leader in these operations was United States Senator Atchison of Missouri. President Pierce's administration recognized the usurping faction. It sent a succession of governors—Reeder, Shannon, Geary, Walker (the last was sent by President Buchanan)—who, with the exception of the incompetent and worthless Shannon, were by the inexorable facts of the situation won to the side of the Free-State men, and accordingly lost favor and their office. Meantime the usurping Legislature had enacted an extraordinary code of laws. By these statutes, decoying a slave from his master was punishable by death or hard labor for ten years; the circulation of writings inciting to revolt was made a capital offense; and the assertion by speech, writing, or the circulation of any book or paper, that slavery was not lawful in the Territory, was punishable by two years' hard labor.
It was not in the blood of free men to submit to such usurpation and tyranny. In the autumn of 1855 the Free State party held a convention, adopted a State constitution, and petitioned for admission to the Union. They elected State officers with Charles S. Robinson as Governor. This organization had really no legal standing; in form it was revolutionary. But the Free State party were not only resolute, but adroit. They had no mind to actively rebel against the United States Government, or come into collision with its forces. Governor Robinson, their foremost leader, was a man of New England birth, who had served a profitable apprenticeship in the settlement of California, and learned a lesson amid the complications of Federalauthority and pioneer exigencies. Counseled by him and men of like mind, the Free State party, while maintaining the form of a State government, and disavowing the Territorial Legislature as fraudulent, always deferred to any express mandate of Federal authority. The Federal troops in the Territory were commanded by Colonel Sumner, afterward a distinguished commander in the Union army, and Governor Robinson (The Kansas Conflict), credits him with a loyal and generally successful purpose to preserve order and peace. In the mixed population there was much bad blood, many threats, and occasional violence, but no general conflict. The "border ruffians" were often insulting, and some murders were committed, but the Free State men kept steadily on the defensive, though there was among them a faction which favored more aggressive measures.
At last, a Free-State man was wantonly murdered; then an eye-witness of the murder was got away on an apparently trumped-up charge; this was followed by a bloodless rescue and the witness was carried off to Lawrence. Then a sheriff with his posse went to Lawrence to arrest one of the rescuers. In the night the sheriff was fired at and wounded. He retreated; and immediately afterward a formidable demonstration was made against the town of Lawrence. The situation was peculiar. Many of the Free-State men were armed; contributions had been openly taken in the North for this purpose, and "Sharpe's rifles" was one of the familiar words of the day. But this policy was fixed—to disown and disobey the authority of the Territorial Legislature, but never to oppose or resist a United States official. In this way, says Robinson, the entire odium of all oppressive proceedings was fixed on the Federal administration; "the more outrages the people could get the government to perpetrate upon them the more victories they would gain, and this simply because the field of battle embraced the entire country, and the chief victories at this stage were to be moral, political, and national."
The Territorial authorities were bent on breaking down, if possible, the passive resistance of the Free-State men. Indictments were found, by a Federal grand jury, against a number of members of the Free-State government for "constructive treason," and they were put under arrest. Indictments were also found against two printing offices in Lawrence, and the principal hotel in the town. A large force of Missourians, led by a United States marshal, advanced on the town. The inhabitants protested, but agreed to respect the United States authority. The hotel and the two printing offices were accordingly destroyed. A considerable amount of lawless pillaging was done, and Governor Robinson's house was burned. Then the force was withdrawn.
The Free-State leaders, as Robinson states, were in no wise cast down by the course of events. Their actual losses had not been great; the temporary confinement of a few of their men did not seriously disturb them; and they considered that by their self-restraint and non-resistance they had put their enemies thoroughly in the wrong, and gained a most valuable vantage-ground for the ensuing Presidential and congressional elections—an estimate which the result fully justified.
But in their party were some spirits to whom these peaceful tactics were distasteful. Chief in this number was John Brown—little known to the world at large till a later time. He and his family of sons had made their homes in Kansas, impelled partly by the hostility to slavery which in him was a master passion. He was a man personally upright and kindly, of only moderate interest and capacity for the ordinary practical affairs of life, given to brooding on public events and ideal causes, and viewing them with a fanatic'snarrowness and a fanatic's absorption. He was a belated Puritan, and his natural place would have been with Cromwell's Ironsides. His ideas were largely influenced by his reading of the Bible, especially of the Old Testament. Of the modern State and the duties of the modern citizen he had no rational idea. Following the Old Testament analogy, he conceived of the slaveholders as the enemies of God—like the Canaanites; and he came to imagine for himself a mission like one of the Hebrew leaders. His favorite hero seems to have been Gideon, and to assail and overcome the Midianites, a handful against a host, became his dream.