Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 / From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860

by James Gillespie Blaine

ADDENDUM.

Hon. Galusha A. Grow, who filled the important post of Chairman of the Committee on Territories in the Thirty-sixth Congress, criticises the statements made on pages 269-272 of Volume I. The anomaly was there pointed out that the men who had been most active in condemning Mr. Webster for consenting to the organization of the Territories of New Mexico and Utah in 1850 without a prohibition of slavery, consented in 1861 to the organization of the Territories of Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada without a prohibition. Mr. Grow as a zealous anti-slavery man writes in defense of the course adopted in 1861. The wisdom of the course was not criticised. Its consistency only was challenged. After giving a history of the various steps in organizing the three Territories in 1861, and of the great need, by reason of the pressure of thousands of emigrants, of providing a government therefor, and the impracticability of passing a Territorial bill with an anti-slavery proviso, Mr. Grow, in a letter to the author, says,—

"The Republican party, about to be entrusted for the first time with the administration of the Government, must show, in addition to sound principles, that it possessed sufficient practical statesmanship to solve wisely any question relative to the development of the material resources of the country, or it would prove itself incompetent to the trust imposed by the people.

"There was this difference in the condition of the public affairs, then, from what it was when Mr. Webster made his celebrated speech of March 7th. The great battle between Freedom and Slavery for supremacy in the Territories had been fought and won in Kansas, and the people had elected a Chief Magistrate on Freedom's side, so that the influences of National Administration would no longer be wielded for the extension of human bondage. Besides, Kansas, a free State, and New Mexico, a Territory already organized, would lie between these new Territories and slave institutions, so that by no possibility could they in the ordinary course of events become slave States.

"On the 7th of March, 1850, when Mr. Webster from the Senate chamber appealed to the North to 'conquer its prejudices' and rely on the laws of God and Nature to prevent the extension of the institution of human bondage, the two great forces of Liberty and Slavery were in deadly and irrepressible conflict,—with all the powers of the Government on the side of Slavery. That struggle reached its last peaceable stage in the triumph of Freedom in Kansas and the election of Lincoln to the Presidency."

Mr. Grow mistakes the relative positions of the slavery question in 1850 and 1861. When Mr. Webster was willing to waive the anti-slavery clause in the bill organizing the Territories of New Mexico and Utah, all the Territories to the North were already protected from slavery by the general prohibition of the Missouri Compromise in 1820, and by the specific prohibition in the Oregon bill of 1848. To Mr. Webster's view, in 1850 Kansas was as secure against the introduction of slavery as it was to Mr. Grow's view in 1861 after Mr. Lincoln was chosen President and the Free State men had won their victory on the soil of the Territory. Mr. Webster saw before him therefore a long procession of States in the North-West whose free institutions were assured by the absolute inhibition of Slavery. He was in the midst of a heated and hated controversy over two Territories adapted only to mining and grazing and never likely to attract slave labor. Neither he nor any other person at that time imagined the possibility of repealing the Missouri Compromise; and therefore when all the territory north of 36° 30' was secured by a prohibition as absolute as Congress could make it, Mr. Webster did not consider it necessary to wage a bitter contest and possibly endanger the Union of the States merely to secure a prohibition of slavery in two Territories where he believed the institution could not go. Precisely in the same way Mr. Grow did not believe that slavery would go into Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada, and he was therefore willing to waive the anti-slavery clause rather than add to the danger of disunion by insisting on it.

The same motives that inspired Mr. Webster in 1850, inspired Mr. Seward, Mr. Wade, and Mr. Grow in 1861. It is seldom that history so exactly repeats itself; but the mention of the coincidence was not designed as a criticism, much less a condemnation of the course of the statesmen who wisely and bravely met their responsibilities in 1861. It was simply a protest against the injustice that had been visited upon Mr. Webster for a like patriotic course in 1850.

If the Southern agitators had resorted to secession and brought on civil war in 1850 the efforts of Mr. Webster to avert the calamity would have received unstinted praise from all classes in the North. If no secession had been attempted and no civil war had followed in 1861, and the South remaining in the Union had resumed the old course for the rights of Slavery in the Territories, Mr. Seward, Mr. Grow and their associates would have received unlimited censure as "dough faces" who had yielded to Southern threats and consented to organize three Territories without an anti-slavery proviso. In each instance the subsequent course of events determined the popularity of unpopularity of similar acts performed with similar motives,—acts altogether honorable, motives altogether patriotic in both cases.