EFFORTS FOR PEACE
The desire for peace in 1850 was wide-spread. Union loving people, North and South, hoped that the Compromise would result in a cessation of the strife that had so long divided the section; and the election of Franklin Pierce, in 1852, as President, on a platform strongly approving that Compromise, was promising. But anti-slavery leaders, instead of being convinced by such arguments as those of Webster, were deeply offended by the contention that legislators, in passing personal liberty laws, had violated their oaths to support the Constitution. They were angered also by the presumptuous attempt to "arrest the whole anti-slavery movement."
The new fugitive slave law was stringent; it did not give jury trial; it required bystanders to assist the officers in "slave-catching," etc. For these and other reasons the law was assailed as unconstitutional. All these contentions were overruled by the Supreme Court when a case eventually came before it. The court decided that the act was, in all its provisions, fully authorized by the Constitution.[53] But in their present mood, no law that was efficient would have been satisfactory to the multitudes of people, by no means all "Abolitionists," who had already made up their minds against the "wicked" provision of the Constitution that required the delivery of fugitive slaves. This deep-seated feeling of opposition to the return to their masters of escaping slaves was soon to be wrought up to a high pitch by a novel that went into nearly every household throughout the North—"Uncle Tom's Cabin." On its appearance the poet Whittier, who had so ferociously attacked Webster in the verses quoted in the last chapter, "offered up thanks for the fugitive slave law, for it gave us 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"
Rufus Choate, a celebrated lawyer and Whig leader, is reported to have said of "Uncle Tom's Cabin": "That book will make two millions of Abolitionists." Drawing, as it did, a very dark picture of slavery, it aroused sympathy for the escaping slave and pictured in glowing colors the dear, sweet men and women who dared, for his sake, the perils of the road in the darkness of night and all the dangers of the law. Mrs. Stowe was making heroes of law-breakers, preaching the higher law.
Mrs. Stowe declared she had not written the book for political effect; she certainly did not anticipate the marvellous results that followed it. That book made vast multitudes of its readers ready for the new sectional and anti-slavery party that was to be organized two years after its appearance. It was the most famous and successful novel ever written. It was translated into every language that has a literature, and has been more read by American people than any other book except the Bible. As a picture of what was conceivable under the laws relating to slavery there was a basis for it. Though there were laws limiting the master's power, cruelty was nevertheless possible.
Here, then, Mrs. Stowe's imagination had full scope. Her book, however, has in it none of the strident harshness, none of the purblind ferocity of Garrison, in whose eyes every slave-holder was a fiend. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" assailed a system; it did not assault personally, as the arch-agitator did, every man and woman to whom slaves had come, whether by choice or chance. Light and shadow and the play of human nature made Mrs. Stowe's picture as attractive in many of its pages as it was repulsive and unfair in others. Mrs. Shelby was a type of many a noble mistress, a Christian woman, and when financial misfortunes compelled the sale of the Shelby slaves and the separation of families, we have not only what might have been, but what sometimes was, one of the evils of slavery, which, by reason of the prevailing agitation, the humanity of the age could not remedy. But Mrs. Stowe's slave-master, Legree, was impossible. The theory was inconceivable that it was cheaper to work to death in seven years a slave costing a thousand dollars, than to work him for forty years. Millions of our people, however, have accepted "Uncle Tom" as a fact, and have wept over him; they have accepted also as a fact the monster Legree.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" lives to-day as a classic on book shelves and as a popular play. The present generation get most of their opinions about slavery as it was in the South from its pages, and not one in ten thousand of those who read it ever thinks of the inconsistency between the picture of slavery drawn there and that other picture, which all the world now knows of—the Confederate soldier away in the army, his wife and children at home faithfully protected by slaves—not a case of violence, not even a single established case, during four years, although there were four millions of negroes in the South, of that crime against white women that, after the reconstruction had demoralized the freedmen, became so common in that section.
The unwavering fidelity during the four years of war of so many slaves to the families of their absent masters, and the fact that those who, during that war, left their homes to seek their freedom invariably went without doing any vengeful act, is a phenomenon that speaks for itself. It tells of kindly relations between master and slave. It is not to be denied that where the law gave so much power to the master there were individual instances of cruelty, nor is it supposable that there were not many slaves who were revengeful; but at the same time there was, quite naturally, among slaves who were all in like case, a more clannish and all-pervading public opinion than could have been found elsewhere. It was that all-pervading and rigid standard of kindly feeling among the slaves to their masters that made the rule universal—fidelity toward the master's family, at least to the extent of inflicting no injury.
What a surprise to many this conduct of the slave was may be gathered from a telling Republican speech made by Carl Schurz during the campaign of 1860.[54] A devotee of liberty, recently a revolutionist in his native land, and, like other foreigners, disregarding all constitutional obstacles, Mr. Schurz had naturally espoused the cause of anti-slavery in this country. He had absorbed the views of his political associates and now contended that secession was an empty threat and that secession was impossible. "The mere anticipation of a negro insurrection," he said, "will paralyze the whole South." And, after ridiculing the alarm created by the John Brown invasion, the orator said that in case of a war between the South and the North, "they will not have men enough to quiet their friends at home; what will they have to oppose to the enemy? Every township will want its home regiment; every plantation its garrison; and what will be left for its field army?"
Slavery in the South eventually proved to be, instead of a weakness, an element of strength to the Confederates, and Mr. Lincoln finally felt himself compelled to issue his proclamation of emancipation as a military necessity—the avowed purpose being to deprive the Confederates of the slaves who were by their labor supporting their armies in the field.
The faithfulness during the war of the slave to his master has been a lesson to the Northerner, and it has been a lesson, too, to the Southerner. It argues that the danger of bloody insurrections was perhaps not as great as had been apprehended where incendiary publications were sent among them. That danger, however, did exist, and if the fear of it was exaggerated, it was nevertheless real, and was traceable to the Abolitionists.
The rights of the South in the territories had now been discussed for years and Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois, had reached the conclusion that under the Constitution Southerner and Northerner had exactly the same right to carry their property, whatever it might be, into the territories, which had been purchased with the common blood and treasure of both sections, a view afterward sustained by the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred Scott case. Douglas, "entirely of his own motion,"[55] introduced, and Congress passed, such a bill—the Kansas-Nebraska act. The new act replaced the Missouri Compromise. This the Southerners considered had been a dead letter for years. Every "personal liberty" law passed by a Northern State was a violation of it.
Ambition was now playing its part in the sectional controversy. Douglas was a Democrat looking to the presidency and had here made a bid for Southern support. On the other hand was Seward, an "old line Whig," aspiring to the same office. The South had been the dominant element in national politics and the North was getting tired of it. Seward's idea was to organize all the anti-slavery voters and to appeal at the same time to the pride and jealousy of the North as a section.
The immediate effect of the Kansas-Nebraska act was to aggravate sectionalism. It opened up the territory of Kansas, allowing it to come into the Union with or without slavery, as it might choose. Slave State and free State adventurers rushed into the new territory and struggled, and even fought, for supremacy. The Southerners lost. Their resources could not match the means of organized anti-slavery societies, and the result was an increase, North and South, of sectional animosity.
The overwhelming defeat of the old Whig party in 1852 presaged its dissolution. Until that election, both the Whig and Democratic parties had been national, each endeavoring to hold and acquire strength, North and South, and each combating, as best it could, the spirit of sectionalism that had been steadily growing in the North, and South as well, ever since the rise of Abolitionism. Both these old parties had watched with anxiety the increase of anti-slavery sentiment in the North. Both parties feared it. Alliance with the anti-slavery North would deprive a party of support South and denationalize it. For years prior to 1852 the drift of Northern voters who were opposed to slavery had been as to the two national parties toward the Whigs, and the tendency of conservative Northerners had been toward the Democratic party. Thus the great body of the Whig voters in the North had become imbued with anti-slavery sentiments, and now, with no hope of victory as a national party and left in a hopeless minority, the majority of that old party in that section were ready to join a sectional party when it should be formed two years later. William H. Seward was still a Whig when he made in the United States Senate his anti-slavery "higher law" speech of 1850.
The Kansas-Nebraska act was a political blunder. The South, on any dispassionate consideration, could not have expected to make Kansas a slave State. The act was a blunder, too, because it gave the opponents of the Democratic party a plausible pretext for the contention, which they put forth then and which has been persisted in till this day, that the new Republican party, immediately thereafter organized, was called into existence by, and only by, the Kansas-Nebraska act.
As far back as 1850 it was clear that a new party, based on the anti-slavery sentiment that had been created by twenty years of agitation, was inevitable. Mr. Rhodes, speaking of conditions then, says: "It was, moreover, obvious to an astute politician like Seward, and probably to others, that a dissolution of parties was imminent; that to oppose the extension of slavery, the different anti-slavery elements must be organized as a whole; it might be called Whig or some other name, but it would be based on the principle of the Wilmot proviso"[56]—the meaning of which was, no more slave States.
Between 1850 and the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska act in 1854, new impulse had been given anti-slavery sentiment by fierce assaults on the new fugitive slave law and, as has been seen, by "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The Kansas-Nebraska act did serve as a cry for the rallying of all anti-slavery voters. That was all. It was a drum-call, in answer to which soldiers already enlisted fell into ranks, under a new banner. Any other drum-call—the application of another slave State for admission into the Union—would have served quite as well. Thus the Republican party came into existence in 1854. Mr. Rhodes sums up the reason for the existence of the new party and what it subsequently accomplished in the following pregnant sentence, "The moral agitation had accomplished its work, the cause (of anti-slavery) ... was to be consigned to a political party that brought to a successful conclusion the movement begun by the moral sentiment of the community,"[57]—which successful conclusion was, of course, the freeing of the slaves by a successful war.
For a time the new Republican party had a powerful competitor in another new organization. This was the American or Know-Nothing party. This other aspirant for power made an honest effort to revitalize the old Whig party under a new name and, by gathering in all the conservatives North and South, to put an end to sectionalism. Its signal failure conveys an instructive lesson. After many and wide-spread rumors of its coming, the birth of the American party was formally announced in 1854. It had been organized in secret and was bound together with oaths and passwords; its members delighted to mystify inquirers by refusing to answer questions, and soon they got the name of "Know-Nothings." The party had grown out of the "Order of the Star Spangled Banner," organized in 1850 to oppose the spread of Catholicism and indiscriminate immigration—the two dangers that were said to threaten American institutions.
The American party made its appeal: For the Union and against sectionalism; for Protestantism, the faith of the Fathers, against Catholicism that was being imported by foreigners; its shibboleth was "America for the Americans."
The Americans or Know-Nothings everywhere put out in 1854 full tickets and showed at once surprising strength. In the fall elections of that year they polled over one-fourth of all the votes in New York, two-fifths in Pennsylvania, and over two-thirds in Massachusetts, where they made a clean sweep of the State and Federal offices.[58]
They struck directly at sectionalism by exacting of their adherents the following oath:
"You do further swear that you will not vote for any one ... whom you know or believe to be in favor of a dissolution of the Union ... or who is endeavoring to produce that result."
The effect of this oath at the South was almost magical. The Whig party there was speedily absorbed by the Americans, and Southern Democrats by thousands joined the new party that promised to save the Union.[59] But the attitude of the Northern and Southern members of the American party soon became fundamentally different. Southerners saw their Northern allies in Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts passing "personal liberty" laws.[60]
The Know-Nothings were strong enough in the elections of 1855 to directly check the progress of the new Republican party; but the American party, though it succeeded in electing a Speaker of the national House of Representatives in February, 1856, soon afterward went down to defeat. Even though led by such patriots as John Bell, of Tennessee, and Edward Everett, of Massachusetts, it could not stand against the storm of passion that had been aroused by the crusade against slavery.
There was a fierce and protracted struggle between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery men in Kansas for possession of the territorial government. Rival constitutions were submitted to Congress, and the debates over these were extremely bitter. In their excitement the Democrats again delighted their adversaries by committing what now seems to have been another blunder. They advocated the admission of Kansas under the "Lecompton Constitution." A review of the conflicting evidence appears to show that the Southerners were fairly outnumbered in Kansas and that the Lecompton Constitution did not express the will of the people.[61]
While "the war in Kansas" was going on, Charles Sumner, an Abolitionist from Massachusetts, delivered in the Senate a speech of which he wrote his friends beforehand: "I shall pronounce the most thorough Philippic ever delivered in a legislative body." He was a classical scholar. His purpose was to stir up in the North a greater fury against the South than Demosthenes had aroused in Athens against its enemies, the Macedonians. His speech occupied two days, May 28 and 29, 1855. At its conclusion, Senator Cass, of Michigan, arose at once and pronounced it "the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of this high body." The speech attacked, without any sufficient excuse, the personal character of an absent senator, Butler of South Carolina, a gentleman of high character and older than Sumner. Among other unfounded charges, it accused him of falsehood. Preston Brooks, a representative from South Carolina, attacked Sumner in the Senate chamber during a recess of that body and beat him unmercifully with a cane. The provocation was bitter, indeed, but Brooks's assault was unjustifiable. Nevertheless, the exasperated South applauded it, while the North glorified Sumner as a martyr for free speech.
In less than two years the new Republican party had absorbed all the Abolition voters, and in the election of 1856 was in the field with its candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency—Fremont and Dayton—upon a platform declaring it the duty of Congress to abolish in the territories "those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery."
Excitement during that election was intense. Rufus Choate, the great Massachusetts lawyer, theretofore a Whig, voiced the sentiment of conservatives when he said it was the "duty of every one to prevent the madness of the times from working its maddest act—the permanent formation and the actual present triumph of a party which knows one-half of America only to hate it," etc.
Senator Toombs, of Georgia, said: "The object of Fremont's friends is the conquest of the South. I am content that they shall own us when they conquer us."
The Democrats elected Buchanan; Democrats 174 electoral votes; Republicans 74, all Northern; and the Know-Nothings, combined with a remnant of Whigs, 8.
The work of sectionalism was nearly completed.
The extremes to which some of the Southern people now resorted show the madness of the times. They encouraged filibustering expeditions to capture Cuba and Nicaragua. These wild ventures were absolutely indefensible. They had no official sanction and were only spontaneous movements, but they met with favor from the Southern public, the outgrowth of a feeling that, if these countries should be captured and annexed as slave States, the South could the better, by their aid, defend its rights in the Union. The Wanderer and one or two other vessels, contrary to the laws of the United States, imported slaves from Africa, and when the participants were, some of them, indicted, Southern juries absolutely refused to convict.
"Judgment had fled to brutish beasts,
And men had lost their reason."
When later the Southern States had seceded and formed a government of their own their constitution absolutely prohibited the slave traffic.