INCOMPATIBILITY OF SLAVERY AND FREEDOM
That it was possible for slave States and free States to coexist under our Federal Constitution was the belief of its framers and of most of our people down to 1861. The first to announce the absolute impossibility of such coexistence seems to have been William Lloyd Garrison. In 1840, at Lynn, Massachusetts, the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society adopted this resolution, offered by him:
"That freedom and slavery are natural and irreconcilable enemies; that it is morally impossible for them to endure together in the same nation, and that the existence of the one can only be secured by the destruction of the other."[62]
Garrison's remedy was disunion. Near that time his paper's motto was "No Union with Slave-Holders."
The next to announce the idea of the incompatibility of slave States and free States seems to have been one who did not dream of disunion. No such thought was in the mind of Abraham Lincoln when, in a speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 15, 1858, he said:
"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be divided. It will become one thing or the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind will rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the States—old as well as new—North as well as South."
When the Southerners read that statement they concluded that, as Mr. Lincoln knew very well that the South could not, if it would, force slavery on the North, he was announcing the intention of his party to place slavery "in course of ultimate extinction," constitution or no constitution.
Senator Seward, at Rochester, New York, some weeks later, reannounced the doctrine, declaring that the contest was "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces; and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either an entirely slave-holding nation or entirely a free labor nation."
The utterances of Lincoln and Seward were distinctly radical. The question was, would this radical idea ultimately dominate the Republican party?
Less than eighteen months after the announcement in 1858 of the doctrine of the "irrepressible conflict," John Brown raided Virginia to incite insurrections. With a few followers and 1,300 stands of arms for the slaves who were to join him, he captured the United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry. Only a few slaves came to him and, after a brief struggle, with some bloodshed, Brown was captured, tried by a jury, and hanged.
In the South the excitement was intense; the horror and indignation in that section it is impossible to describe. Brown was already well known to the public. He was not a lunatic. Not long before this, in Kansas, "at the head of a small group of men, including two of his sons and a son-in-law, he went at night down Pottowattamie Creek, stopping at three houses. The men who lived in them were well known pro-slavery men; they seem to have been rough characters; their most specific offence (according to Sanborn, Brown's biographer and eulogist) was the driving from his home, by violent threats, of an inoffensive old man. John Brown and his party went down the creek, called at one after the other of three houses, took five men away from their wives and children, and deliberately shot one and hacked the others to death with swords."[63]
Quite a number of people, some of them men of eminence in the North, aided Brown in his enterprise. Among the men of repute were Gerrit Smith, a former candidate for the presidency; and Theodore Parker, Dr. Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, of Boston, who were all members of a "secret committee to collect money and arms for the expedition." With them was F. S. Sanborn, who has since the war vauntingly revealed the scheme in his "Life of John Brown."[64]
Sanborn intimates that Henry Wilson, subsequently vice-president, was more or less privy to the design.[65] At various places in the North church bells were tolled on the day of John Brown's execution; meetings were held and orators extolled him as a martyr. Emerson, the greatest thinker in all that region, declared that if John Brown was hanged he would glorify the gallows as Jesus glorified the cross; and now many Southern men who loved the Union reluctantly concluded that separation was inevitable. John Bell, of Tennessee, Union candidate for President in 1860, is said to have cried like a child when he heard of Brown's raid.
The great body of the Northern people condemned John Brown's expedition without stint. Edward Everett, voicing the opinion of all who were really conservative, said of Brown's raid, in a speech at Faneuil Hall, that its design was to "let loose the hell hounds of a servile insurrection, and to bring on a struggle which, for magnitude, atrocity, and horror, would have stood alone in the history of the world."
But they who had been preaching the "irrepressible conflict," they whom public opinion might hold responsible, did not feel precisely as Mr. Everett did. They were concerned about political consequences, as appears from a letter written somewhat later during the State canvass in New York by Horace Greeley to Schuyler Colfax. Horace Greeley afterward proved himself in many ways a broad-minded, magnanimous man, but now he wrote: "Do not be downhearted about the old John Brown business. Its present effect is bad and throws a heavy load on us in this State ... but the ultimate effect is to be good.... It will drive the slave power to new outrages.... It presses on the irrepressible conflict."[66]
The fact that such a man as Horace Greeley was taking comfort because that outrage would "drive the slave power to new outrages"[67] throws a strong side-light on the tactics of the anti-slavery leaders. They were following Garrison. Garrison, the father of the Abolitionists, had begun his campaign against slave-holders by "exhausting upon them the vocabulary of abuse," and he had shown "a genius for infuriating his antagonists."[68] The new party—his successor and beneficiary, was now felicitating itself that ultimate good would come, even from the John Brown raid. It would further their policy of "driving the slave power to new outrages."
People at the North, conservatives and all, held their breath for a time after Harper's Ferry. Then the crusade went on, in the press, on the rostrum, and from the pulpit, with as much virulence as ever. No assertion was too extravagant for belief, provided only its tendency was to disparage the Southern white man or win sympathy for the negro. From the noted "Brownlow and Pryne's Debate," Philadelphia (Lippincott), we take the following as a specimen of the abuse a portion of the Northern press was then heaping on the Southern people. Brownlow quotes from the New York Independent of November, 1856:
"The mass of the population of the Atlantic Coast of the slave region of the South are descended from the transported convicts and outcasts of Great Britain.... Oh, glorious chivalry and hereditary aristocracy of the South! Peerless first families of Virginia and Carolina!... Progeny of the highwaymen, and horse-thieves and sheep-stealers, and pick-pockets of Old England!"
The South was not to be outdone, and here was a retort from De Bow's Review, July, 1858:
"The basis, framework, and controlling influence of Northern sentiment is Puritanism—the old Roundhead, rebel refuse of England, which ... has ever been an unruly sect of Pharisees ... the worst bigots on earth and the meanest of tyrants when they have the power to exercise it."[69]
And the non-slave-holder of the South did not escape from the pitiless pelting of the storm. He was sustaining the slave-holder, and this was not only an offence but a puzzle.
It became quite common in the North for anti-slavery writers to classify the non-slave-holding agricultural classes of the South as "poor whites," thus distinguishing them from the slave-holders; and the idea is current even now in that section that as a class the lordly slave-holder despised his poor white fellow-citizen. The average non-slave-holding Southern agriculturist, whether farming for himself or for others, was a type of man that no one who knew him, least of all the Southern slave-holder, his neighbor and political ally, could despise. Educated and uneducated, these people were independent voters and honest jurors, the very backbone of Southern State governments that always will be notable in history for efficiency, purity, and economy.
This class of voters, however, came in for much abuse in the literature of the crusade. They were all lumped together as "poor whites," sometimes as "poor white trash," and the belief was inculcated that their imperious slave-holding neighbors applied that term to them. "Poor white trash," on its face, is "nigger talk," caught up, doubtless, from Southern negro barbers and bootblacks, and used by writers who, from information thus derived, pictured Southern society.
This is a sample of the numerous errors that crept into the literature of one section of our Union about social conditions in the other during that memorable sectional controversy. It is on a par with the idea that prevailed, in some quarters in the South, that the Yankee cared for nothing but money, and would not fight even for that.
Southerners were practically all of the old British stock. Homogeneity, common memories of the wars of the Revolution, of 1812, and with Mexico, and Fourth of July celebrations, all tended to bind together strongly the Southern slave-holder and non-slave-holder.
There were, of course, many classes of non-slave-holders—the thrifty farmer, the unthrifty, and the laborer who worked for hire, but more frequently for "shares of the crop." Then there were others—the inhabitants of the "sand-hills" and the mountain regions. These people were, as a rule, very shiftless; too lazy to work, they were still too proud to beg, as the very poor usually do in other countries. The mountaineers were hardier than the sand-hillers, and it was from the mountains of Tennessee, Alabama, etc., that the Union armies gathered many recruits. This was not, as is often stated, because mountaineers love liberty better than others, but because these mountaineers never came into contact with either master or slave. The crusade against slavery, therefore, did not threaten to affect their personal status.
There were very few public schools in the South, but in the cities and towns there were academies and high-schools, and the country was dotted with "old field schools," most of them not good, but sufficient to train those who became efficient leaders in social, religious, and political circles.
The wonderful progress made by the Southern white man during the last thirty-five years is by no means all due to the abolition of slavery. Labor, it is true, is held in higher esteem. This is a great gain, but still more is due to improved transportation, to better prices for timber and cotton, to commercial fertilizers, and an awakening interest in education. The South is also developing its mineral resources and is now rapidly forging to the front. The white man is making more cotton than the negro.
But the very strongest bond that bound together the Southern slave-holder and non-slave-holder was the pride of caste. Every white man was a freeman; he belonged to the superior, the dominant race.
Edmund Burke, England's philosopher-statesman, in his speech on "Conciliation with America" at the beginning of our Revolution, complimented in high terms the spirit of liberty among the dissenting protestants of New England. Then, alluding to the hopes indulged in by some gentlemen, that the Southern colonies would be loyal to Great Britain because the Church of England had there a large establishment, he said: "It is certainly true. There is, however, a circumstance attending these colonies which in my opinion fully counter-balances this difference, and makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than in those to the Northward. It is, that in Virginia and Carolina they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case, in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom with them is not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege."
The privilege of belonging to the superior race and of being free was a bond that tied all Southern whites together, and it was infinitely strengthened by a crusade that seemed, from a Southern stand-point, to have for its purpose the levelling of all distinctions between the white man and the slave hard by.
Socially, there were classes in the South as there are everywhere. The controlling class consisted of professional men, lawyers, physicians, teachers, and high-class merchants (though the merchant prince was unknown), and slave-holders. Slave-holders were, of course, divided into classes, chiefly two: those who had acquired culture and breeding from slave-holding ancestors, and those who had little culture or breeding, principally the newly rich. It was the former class that gave tone to Southern society. The performance of duty always ennobles, and this is especially true of duty done by superiors to inferiors. The master and mistress of a slave establishment were responsible for the moral and material welfare of their dependents. When they appreciated and fulfilled their responsibilities, as the best families usually did, there was found what was called the Southern aristocracy. The habit of command, assured position, and high ideals, coming down, as these often did, with family traditions, gave these favored people ease and grace, and they were social favorites, both in the North and Europe. At home they dispensed a hospitality that made the South famous. They were exemplars, giving tone to society, and it was notable that breeding and culture, and not wealth, gave tone to Southern society. There was perhaps in Virginia and South Carolina an aristocracy that was somewhat more exclusive than elsewhere.
Slavery was at its worst when masters were not equal to their responsibilities, for want of either culture or Christian feeling, or both, as also when, as was now and then the case, a brutal overseer was in charge of a plantation far away from the eye of the owner.
The influence of the slave-holder and his lavish hospitality did not make for thrift among his less fortunate brethren; it made perhaps for prodigality, but it also made for a high sense of honor among slave-holders and non-slave-holders as well. Both slave-holders and non-slave-holders were extremely punctilious. Money did not count where honor was concerned, and Southerners do well to be proud of the record in this respect that has been made by their statesmen.
Among the more cultured classes in the period here treated of, the duel prevailed, a practice now very properly condemned. But it made for a high sense of honor. Demagogues were not common when a false statement on "the stump" was apt to result in a mortal combat.
Among the less cultured classes insult was answered with a blow of the fist. Fisticuffs, too, were quite common to ascertain who was the "best man" in a community or county. The rules were not according to the Marquis of Queensbury, but they always secured "fair play."[70]
This combative spirit of Southerners was undoubtedly a result of the spirit of caste that came from slavery. Sometimes it was unduly exhibited in Congress during the controversy over slavery and State's rights, and excited Southerners occasionally subjected themselves to the charge of arrogance.
One of the great evils of slavery was that, as a rule, neither the slave-holder nor the non-slave-holder properly appreciated the dignity of labor. A witty student at a Southern university said that his chief objection to college life was that he could not have a negro to learn his lessons for him. The slave-holder quite generally disdained manual labor, and the non-slave-holder was also inclined to deprecate the necessity that compelled him to work.
The sudden abolition of slavery was the ruin of thousands of innocent families—a loss for which there was no recompense. But for the South at large, and especially to this generation, it is a blessing that all classes have come to see, that to labor and to be useful is not only a duty, but a privilege.
Political conditions, North and South, differed widely. The North was the majority section. Its majority could protect its rights; recourse to the limitations of the Federal Constitution was seldom necessary. The South, a minority section, with a devotion that never failed, held high the "Constitution of the fathers, the palladium" of its rights. To one section the Constitution was the bond of a Federal Union that was the security for interstate commerce and national prosperity; to the other it was a guaranty of peace abroad and local self-government at home. In the one section the brightest minds were for the most part engaged in business or in literary pursuits; in the other, politics absorbed much of its talent. In the North the staple of political discussion was usually some business or moral question, while in the South the political arena was a great school in which the masses were not only educated in the history of the formation of the Constitution, but taught an affectionate regard for that instrument as a revered "gift from the fathers" and the only safeguard of American liberty. Joint political discussions, which were common between the ablest men of opposing parties, were always numerously attended, and the Federal Constitution was an unfailing topic. The result was, an amount of political information in the average Confederate soldier that the average Union soldier in his business training had never acquired, and a devotion of the Southerner to the Constitution of his country which even the ablest historians of to-day have failed to comprehend.
It is often stated, as if it were an important fact in the consideration of the great anti-slavery crusade, that not many of the Abolitionists were as radical as Garrison, and that of the anti-slavery voters very few favored social equality between whites and blacks. Southerners did not stop to make distinctions like these. They saw the Abolitionists advocating mixed schools and favoring laws authorizing mixed marriages; saw them practising social equality; saw the general trend in that direction; and so from its very beginning the Republican party, which had absorbed the Abolitionists, was dubbed, North and South, the "Black Republican" party.
The whites of the South believed that the triumph of the "Black Republican" party, as they called it, would be ultimately the triumph of its most radical elements. Judge Reagan, of Texas, United States congressman in 1860-61, Confederate Postmaster-General, later United States senator, and always until 1860 an avowed friend of the Union, in his farewell speech to the Congress of the United States in January, 1861, gave expression to this idea when he said:
"And now you tender to us the inhuman alternative of unconditional submission to Republican rule on abolition principles, and ultimately to free negro equality, and a government of mongrels, or a war of races on the one hand, and on the other, secession and a bloody and desolating civil war."[71]
Judge Reagan was expressing in Congress the opinion that animated the Confederate soldier in the war that was to follow secession, an opinion the ex-Confederate did not see much reason to change when the era of Reconstruction had been reached, and the ballot had been given to every negro, while the leading whites were disfranchised.
In 1857 Hinton Rowan Helper, of North Carolina, wrote a notable book to show that slavery was a curse to the South, and especially to the non-slave-holders. It was an appeal to the latter to become Abolitionists. His arguments availed nothing; back of his book was the Republican party, now planting itself, as Garrison had planted himself, on an extract from the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, "all men are created equal." The Republican contention was, in platforms and speeches, that the Declaration of Independence covered negroes as well as whites,[72] and Southern whites, nearly all of Revolutionary stock, resented the idea. They rebelled at the suggestion that the signers, every one of whom, save possibly those from Massachusetts, represented slave-holding constituents, intended to say that the negroes then in the colonies were the equals of the whites. If so, why were these negroes kept in slavery, and why were they not immediately given the right to vote, to sit on juries, to be educated, and to intermarry with the whites?
All this, the Southerners said, as, indeed, did many Northerners also, was to be the logical outcome of the Republican doctrine, that negroes and whites were equals. It is passing strange that modern historians so often have failed to note that this thought was in the minds of all the opponents of the Republican party from the day of its birth—North and South it was called the "Black Republican" party. Douglas, in his debate with Lincoln, gave it that name and stood by it. In his speech at Jonesboro, Illinois, September 15, 1858, he charges the Republicans with advocating "negro citizenship and negro equality, putting the white man and the negro on the same basis under the law."[73]
John C. Calhoun, in a memorial to the Southern people in 1849, signed by many other congressmen, had said that Northern fanaticism would not stop at emancipation. "Another step would be taken to raise them [the negroes] to a political and social equality with their former owners, by giving them the right of voting and holding public office under the Federal Government.... But when raised to an equality they would become the fast political associates of the North, acting and voting with them on all questions, and by this perfect union between them holding the South in complete subjection. The blacks and the profligate whites that might unite with them would become the principal recipients of Federal patronage, and would, in consequence, be raised above the whites of the South in the social and political scale. We would, in a word, change conditions with them, a degradation greater than has as yet fallen to the lot of a free and enlightened people."[74]
In the light of Reconstruction, this was prophecy.
These words, once heard by a Southern white man, of course sank into his heart. They could never have been forgotten. The argument of Helper fell on deaf ears. If Helper had come with the promise (and an assurance of its fulfilment) that the negroes, when emancipated, would be sent to Liberia, or elsewhere out of the country, the South would have become Republicanized at once. Even if the slave-holder had been unwilling, the Southern non-slave-holder, with his three, and often five, to one majority, would have seen to it.
And it is not too much to say that if the negro had been, as the Abolitionists and ultimately many Republicans contended he was, the equal of the white man, Liberia would have been a success. What a glorious consummation of the dreams of statesmen and philanthropists that would have been! Abolitionists, unable to frustrate their scheme, and the American negro, profiting by the civilization here received from contact with the white man, building by his own energy happy homes for himself and his kinsmen, and enjoying the blessings of a great government of his own, in his own great continent!
Africa with its vast resources is a prize that all Europe is now contending for. It is believed to be adapted even to white men. Most assuredly, for the negro Liberia offered far better opportunities than did the rocky coast of New England to the white men who settled it. Liberia had been carefully selected as a desirable part of Africa. It was an unequalled group of statesmen and philanthropists that had planted the colony; they provided for it and set it on its feet. But it failed; failed just for the same reason that prevented the aboriginal African from catching on to the civilization that began to develop thousands of years ago, close by his side on the borders of the Mediterranean; failed for the same reason that Hayti, now free for a century, has failed. The failure of the plan of the American Colonization Society to repatriate the American negro in Africa was due primarily to the incapacity of the negro.
A very complete and convincing story will be found in an article entitled "Liberia, an Example of Negro Self-Government,"[75] by Miss Agnes P. Mahony, for five years a missionary in that country. The author of the article was a sympathizing friend. She says: "In 1847 the colony was considered healthy enough to stand alone.... So our flag was lowered on the African continent, and the protectors of the colony retired, leaving the people to govern the country in their own way." Then she recites that in order to test their capacity for self-government their constitution (1847) provided that no white man should hold property in the country; and to this Miss Mahony traces the failure that followed. When she wrote, the Liberian negroes, for fifty-nine years under the protectorship of the United States, had been troubled by no foreign enemy; yet their failure was complete—not a foot of railroad, no cable communication with foreign countries, no telegraphic communication with the interior, etc. Still the devoted missionary thinks that Liberia might prosper, if it could but have "the encouraging example of and contact with the right kind of white men."
The presidential campaign of 1860 was very exciting. There were four tickets in the field, Douglas and Johnson, Democrats; Breckenridge and Lane, Democrats; Lincoln and Hamlin, Republicans, and Bell and Everett representing the "Constitutional Union" party. As the election approached it became apparent that the Republicans were leading, and far-seeing men, like Samuel J. Tilden, of New York, became much alarmed for fear that the election of Lincoln would bring about secession in the South. Mr. Tilden, in view of the danger that to him was apparent, wrote, shortly before the election, to William Kent, of New York City, an open letter in which he earnestly urged a combination in New York State of the supporters of other candidates, in order to defeat Abraham Lincoln. The letter was so alarming that some of Tilden's friends thought he had lost his balance; but now that letter is regarded as a remarkable proof of his sagacity. In the first volume of Mr. Tilden's "Life and Letters," by Bigelow, appears an "Appreciation" by James C. Carter and an analysis of this letter. Of this the following is a brief abstract: Mr. Tilden first argued that two strictly sectional parties, arrayed upon the question of destroying an institution which one of them, not unnaturally, regarded as essential to self-existence, would bring war.
Then Mr. Tilden further said that if the Republican party should be successful in establishing its dominion over the South, the national government in the Southern States would cease to be self-government and become a government of one people over a distinct people, a thing impossible with our race, except as a consequence of a successful war, and even then incompatible with our democratic institutions. He also said: "I assert that a controversy between powerful communities, organized into governments, of a nature like that which now divides the North and South, can be settled only by convention or by war."
And again: "A condition of parties in which the Federative Government shall be carried on by a party, having no affiliations in the Southern States, is impossible to continue. Such a government would be out of all relations to those States. It would have neither the nerves of sensation, which convey intelligence to the intellect of the body politic, nor the ligaments and muscles, which hold its parts together and move them in harmony. It would be in substance the government of one people by another people. That system will not do for our race."
Mr. Tilden, when he spoke of "two sectional parties arrayed upon the question of destroying an institution," viz., slavery, saw the situation exactly as the South did. To prove that the Republican party was looking to the ultimate destruction of the institution, Mr. Tilden cited the leadership of Chase and his speeches in which he was propounding the higher law theory; asserting that the conflict was "irrepressible"; suggesting the power of the North to amend the Constitution, etc.
The South noted this, and it regarded, not the platform, but the record of the Republican party and of the statesmen the party was following.
Long before 1860, that great American scholar, George Ticknor, saw the dilemma in which the North was involving itself by its concern over slavery in the South, and he thus stated it, in a letter to his friend, William Ellery Channing, April 30, 1842:[76]
"On the subject of our relations with the South and its slavery, we must—as I have always thought—do one of two things; either keep honestly the bargain of the Constitution as it shall be interpreted by the authorities—of which the Supreme Court of the United States is the chief and safest—or declare honestly that we can no longer in our conscience consent to keep it, and break it."
The North had failed to "keep honestly the bargain of the Constitution" by faithfully delivering fugitive slaves and leaving the question of slavery to be dealt with by the States in which it existed, and was now, in 1860, upon the other horn of the dilemma—repudiating and denouncing a decision of the Supreme Court, which, as Mr. Ticknor had said, was the "chief and safest authority." But during that campaign of 1860 very many, perhaps a majority of the Republican voters, failed to realize what their party was standing for. Indeed, down to this day the members of that organization, taught as they have been, indignantly deny that a vote for Lincoln and Hamlin in 1860 looked to an interference with slavery in the States.
But now Professor Emerson David Fite, of Yale University, sees in 1911 what was the underlying hope, and consequently the ultimate aim, of the Republican party in 1860, exactly as the South saw it then. In a powerful summing up of more evidence than there is room to recite here, he says: "The testimony of the Democracy and of the leaders of the Republican party accords well with the evidence of daily events in revealing Republican aggression. The party hoped to destroy slavery, and this was something new in a large political organization."[77]
That this party, when it should ultimately come into full power, would, to carry out the purpose which Professor Fite now sees, ignore the Federal Constitution was, in 1860, evident to Southerners from the following facts:
In 1841 the governor of Virginia demanded of the governor of New York the extradition of two men indicted in Virginia for enticing away slaves from their masters. Governor Seward, of New York, refused the demand, on the ground that no such offence existed in New York. This case did not go to the courts, but in 1860 the governor of Kentucky made a similar demand in a like case on the governor of Ohio, who placed his refusal on the same grounds as had Governor Seward in the former case. The Supreme Court of the United States in this case decided that the governor of Ohio, in refusing to deliver up the fugitive, was violating the Constitution. The court further said:
"If the governor of Ohio refuses to discharge this duty there is no power delegated to the general government, either through the judicial department or any other department, to use any coercive means to compel him."[78]
If these two governors had defied the Federal Constitution, so had eleven State legislatures. From 1854 to 1860, inclusive, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, had all passed new "personal liberty laws" to abrogate the new fugitive slave law of 1850.
Of these laws Professor Alexander Johnston said:
"There is absolutely no excuse for the personal liberty laws. If the rendition of fugitive slaves was a federal obligation, the personal liberty laws were flat disobedience to the law; if the obligation was upon the States, they were a gross breach of good faith, for they were intended and operated to prevent rendition; and, in either case, they were in violation of the Constitution."[79]
And now came the State of Wisconsin. Its Supreme Court intervened and took from the hands of the federal authorities an alleged fugitive slave. The Supreme Court of the United States reversed the case and ordered the slave back into the custody of the United States marshal;[80] and thereupon the General Assembly of Wisconsin expressly repudiated the authority of the United States Supreme Court. The Wisconsin assembly asserted its right to nullify the Federal law, basing its action on the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798—a recrudescence of a doctrine long since abandoned even in the South.
In reality all this defiance of the Constitution of the United States by State executives, State legislatures, and a State court, was on the ground that whatever was dictated by conscience to these officials was a "higher law than the Constitution of the United States"; and modern historians recognize, as Tilden did, the leadership of the statesman who in 1850 announced that startling doctrine. It is Alexander Johnston who says, "Seward's speeches in the Senate made him the leader of the Republican party from its first organization."[81]
To the minds of Southerners it seemed clear that if the Southern States desired to preserve for themselves the Constitution of the fathers, they must secede and set it up over a government of their own. This eleven of these States did. Many of them were reluctant to take the step; all their people had loved the old Union, but they passed their ordinances of secession, united as the Confederate States of America, and their officials took an oath to maintain inviolate the old Constitution, which, with unimportant changes in it, they had adopted.
The new government sent delegates to ask that the separation should be peaceful. The application was denied and the war followed. Attempts to secede were made in Kentucky and Missouri. In neither of these States did the seceders get full control. They were represented, however, in the Confederate Congress by senators and representatives elected by the troops from those States that were serving in the Confederate army.