Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White — Volume 1

by Andrew Dickson White

I also remember once entering the old Delavan House at Albany, with a college friend of mine, afterward Bishop of Maine, and seeing, at the other end of a long hall, Gerrit Smith in quiet conversation. In a moment we heard his voice, and my friend was greatly impressed by it, declaring he had never imagined such an utterance possible. It was indeed amazing; it was like the deep, clear, rich tone from the pedal bass of a cathedral organ. During his career in Congress, it was noted that he was the only speaker within remembrance who without effort made himself heard in every part of the old chamber of the House of Representatives, which was acoustically one of the worst halls ever devised. And it was not a case of voice and nothing else; his strength of argument, his gift of fit expression, and his wealth of illustration were no less extraordinary.

On this occasion at Canandaigua he rose to speak, and every word went to the hearts of his audience. ``Why,'' he began, ``do they conduct these harassing proceedings against these men? If any one is guilty, I am guilty. With Samuel J. May I proposed the Jerry Rescue. We are responsible for it; why do they not prosecute us?'' And these words were followed by a train of cogent reasoning and stirring appeal.

The Jerry Rescue trials only made matters worse. Their injustice disgusted the North, and their futility angered the South. They revealed one fact which especially vexed the Southern wing of the Democratic party, and this was, that their Northern allies could not be depended upon to execute the new compromise. In this Syracuse rescue one of the most determined leaders was a rough burly butcher, who had been all his life one of the loudest of pro-slavery Democrats, and who, until he saw Jerry dragged in manacles through the streets, had been most violent in his support of the fugitive slave law. The trials also stimulated the anti-slavery leaders and orators to new vigor. Garrison, Phillips, Gerrit Smith, Sumner, and Seward aroused the anti-slavery forces as never before, and the ``Biglow Papers'' of James Russell Lowell, which made Northern pro-slavery men ridiculous, were read with more zest than ever.

But the abolition forces had the defects of their qualities, and their main difficulty really arose from the stimulus given to a thin fanaticism. There followed, in the train of the nobler thinkers and orators, the ``Fool Reformers,''—sundry long-haired men and short-haired women, who thought it their duty to stir good Christian people with blasphemy, to deluge the founders of the Republic with blackguardism, and to invent ever more and more ingenious ways for driving every sober-minded man and woman out of the anti-slavery fold. More than once in those days I hung my head in disgust as I listened to these people, and wondered, for the moment, whether, after all, even the supremacy of slaveholders might not be more tolerable than the new heavens and the new earth, in which should dwell such bedraggled, screaming, denunciatory creatures.

At the next national election the Whigs nominated General Scott, a man of extraordinary merit and of grandiose appearance; but of both these qualities he was himself unfortunately too well aware; as a result the Democrats gave him the name of ``Old Fuss and Feathers,'' and a few unfortunate speeches, in one of which he expressed his joy at hearing that ``sweet Irish brogue,'' brought the laugh of the campaign upon him.

On the other hand the Democrats nominated Franklin Pierce; a man greatly inferior to General Scott in military matters, but who had served well in the State politics of New Hampshire and in Congress, was widely beloved, of especially attractive manners, and of high personal character.

He also had been in the Mexican War, but though he had risen to be brigadier-general, his military record amounted to very little. There was in him, no doubt, some alloy of personal with public motives, but it would be unjust to say that selfishness was the only source of his political ideas. He was greatly impressed by the necessity of yielding to the South in order to save the Union, and had shown this by his utterances and votes in Congress: the South, therefore, accepted him against General Scott, who was supposed to have moderate anti- slavery views.

General Pierce was elected; the policy of his administration became more and more deeply pro-slavery; and now appeared upon the scene Stephen Arnold Douglas— senator from Illinois, a man of remarkable ability,—a brilliant thinker and most effective speaker, with an extraordinary power of swaying men. I heard him at vari- ous times; and even after he had committed what seemed to me the unpardonable sin, it was hard to resist his eloquence. He it was who, doubtless from a mixture of motives, personal and public, had proposed the abolition of the Missouri Compromise, which since the year 1820 had been the bulwark of the new territories against the encroachments of slavery. The whole anti-slavery sentiment of the North was thereby intensified, and as the establishment of north polarity at one end of the magnet excites south polarity at the other, so Southern feeling in favor of slavery was thereby increased. Up to a recent period Southern leaders had, as a rule, deprecated slavery, and hoped for its abolition; now they as generally advocated it as good in itself;—the main foundation of civil liberty; the normal condition of the working classes of every nation; and some of them urged the revival of the African slave-trade. The struggle became more and more bitter. I was during that time at Yale, and the general sentiment of that university in those days favored almost any concession to save the Union. The venerable Silliman, and a great majority of the older professors spoke at public meetings in favor of the pro-slavery compromise measures which they fondly hoped would settle the difficulty between North and South and re<e:>stablish the Union on firm foundations. The new compromise was indeed a bitter dose for them, since it contained the fugitive slave law in its most drastic form; and every one of them, with the exception of a few theological doctrinaires who found slavery in the Bible, abhorred the whole slave system. The Yale faculty, as a rule, took ground against anti-slavery effort, and, among other ways of propagating what they considered right opinions, there was freely distributed among the students a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Boardman of Philadelphia, which went to extremes in advocating compromise with slavery and the slave power.

The great body of the students, also, from North and South, took the same side. It is a suggestive fact that whereas European students are generally inclined to radicalism, American students have been, since the war of the Revolution, eminently conservative.

To this pro-slavery tendency at Yale, in hope of saving the Union, there were two remarkable exceptions, one being the beloved and respected president of the university, Dr. Theodore Dwight Woolsey, and the other his classmate and friend, the Rev. Dr. Leonard Bacon, pastor of the great Center Church of New Haven, and frequently spoken of as the ``Congregational Pope of New England.'' They were indeed a remarkable pair; Woolsey, quiet and scholarly, at times irascible, but always kind and just; Bacon a rugged, leonine sort of man who, when he shook his mane in the pulpit and addressed the New England conscience, was heard throughout the nation. These two, especially, braved public sentiment, as well as the opinion of their colleagues, and were supposed, at the time, to endanger the interests of Yale by standing against the fugitive slave law and other concessions to slavery and its extension. As a result Yale fell into disrepute in the South, which had, up to that time, sent large bodies of students to it, and I remember that a classmate of mine, a tall, harum-scarum, big-hearted, sandy-haired Georgian known as ``Jim'' Hamilton, left Yale in disgust, returned to his native heath, and was there welcomed with great jubilation. A poem was sent me, written by some ardent admirer of his, beginning with the words: