Meanwhile the thrilling work of the Underground Railroad was answered by a practical reopening of the slave-trade. From 1820 to 1840, as the result of the repressive measure of 1819, the traffic had declined; between 1850 and 1860, however, it was greatly revived, and Southern conventions resolved that all laws, state or Federal, prohibiting the slave-trade, should be repealed. The traffic became more and more open and defiant until, as Stephen A. Douglas computed, as many as 15,000 slaves were brought into the country in 1859. It was not until the Lincoln government in 1862 hanged the first trader who ever suffered the extreme penalty of the law, and made with Great Britain a treaty embodying the principle of international right of search, that the trade was effectually checked. By the end of the war it was entirely suppressed, though as late as 1866 a squadron of ships patrolled the slave coast.
The Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the Missouri Compromise and providing for "squatter sovereignty" in the territories in question, outraged the North and led immediately to the forming of the Republican party. It was not long before public sentiment began to make itself felt, and the first demonstration took place in Boston. Anthony Burns was a slave who escaped from Virginia and made his way to Boston, where he was at work in the winter of 1853-4. He was discovered by a United States marshal who presented a writ for his arrest just at the time of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in May, 1854. Public feeling became greatly aroused. Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker delivered strong addresses at a meeting in Faneuil Hall while an unsuccessful attempt to rescue Burns from the Court House was made under the leadership of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who with others of the attacking party was wounded. It was finally decided in court that Burns must be returned to his master. The law was obeyed; but Boston had been made very angry, and generally her feeling had counted for something in the history of the country. The people draped their houses in mourning, hissed the procession that took Burns to his ship and at the wharf a riot was averted only by a minister's call to prayer. This incident did more to crystallize Northern sentiment against slavery than any other except the exploit of John Brown, and this was the last time that a fugitive slave was taken out of Boston. Burns himself was afterwards bought by popular subscription, and ultimately became a Baptist minister in Canada.
In 1834 Dr. Emerson, an army officer stationed in Missouri, removed to Illinois, taking with him his slave, Dred Scott. Two years later, again accompanied by Scott, he went to Minnesota. In Illinois slavery was prohibited by state law and Minnesota was a free territory. In 1838 Emerson returned with Scott to Missouri. After a while the slave raised the important question: Had not his residence outside of a slave state made him a free man? Beaten by his master in 1848, with the aid of anti-slavery lawyers Scott brought a suit against him for assault and battery, the circuit court of St. Louis rendering a decision in his favor. Emerson appealed and in 1852 the Supreme Court of the state reversed the decision of the lower court. Not long after this Emerson sold Scott to a citizen of New York named Sandford. Scott now brought suit against Sandford, on the ground that they were citizens of different states. The case finally reached the Supreme Court of the United States, which in 1857 handed down the decision that Scott was not a citizen of Missouri and had no standing in the Federal courts, that a slave was only a piece of property, and that a master might take his property with impunity to any place within the jurisdiction of the United States. The ownership of Scott and his family soon passed to a Massachusetts family by whom they were liberated; but the important decision that the case had called forth aroused the most intense excitement throughout the country, and somehow out of it all people remembered more than anything else the amazing declaration of Chief Justice Taney that "the Negroes were so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The extra-legal character and the general fallacy of his position were exposed by Justice Curtis in a masterly dissenting opinion.
No one incident of the period showed more clearly the tension under which the country was laboring than the assault on Charles Sumner by Preston S. Brooks, a congressional representative from South Carolina. As a result of this regrettable occurrence splendid canes with such inscriptions as "Hit him again" and "Use knock-down arguments" were sent to Brooks from different parts of the South and he was triumphantly reëlected by his constituency, while on the other hand resolutions denouncing him were passed all over the North, in Canada, and even in Europe. More than ever the South was thrown on the defensive, and in impassioned speeches Robert Toombs now glorified his state and his section. Speaking at Emory College in 1853 he had already made an extended apology for slavery;[174] speaking in the Georgia legislature on the eve of secession he contended that the South had been driven to bay by the Abolitionists and must now "expand or perish." A writer in the Southern Literary Messenger,[175] in an article "The Black Race in North America," made the astonishing statement that "the slavery of the black race on this continent is the price America has paid for her liberty, civil and religious, and, humanly speaking, these blessings would have been unattainable without their aid." Benjamin M. Palmer, a distinguished minister of New Orleans, in a widely quoted sermon in 1860 spoke of the peculiar trust that had been given to the South—to be the guardians of the slaves, the conservers of the world's industry, and the defenders of the cause of religion.[176] "The blooms upon Southern fields gathered by black hands have fed the spindles and looms of Manchester and Birmingham not less than of Lawrence and Lowell. Strike now a blow at this system of labor and the world itself totters at the stroke. Shall we permit that blow to fall? Do we not owe it to civilized man to stand in the breach and stay the uplifted arm?... This trust we will discharge in the face of the worst possible peril. Though war be the aggregation of all evils, yet, should the madness of the hour appeal to the arbitration of the sword, we will not shrink even from the baptism of fire.... The position of the South is at this moment sublime. If she has grace given her to know her hour, she will save herself, the country, and the world."
All of this was very earnest and very eloquent, but also very mistaken, and the general fallacy of the South's position was shown by no less a man than he who afterwards became vice-president of the Confederacy. Speaking in the Georgia legislature in opposition to the motion for secession, Stephens said that the South had no reason to feel aggrieved, for all along she had received more than her share of the nation's privileges, and had almost always won in the main that which was demanded. She had had sixty years of presidents to the North's twenty-four; two-thirds of the clerkships and other appointments although the white population in the section was only one-third that of the country; fourteen attorneys general to the North's five; and eighteen Supreme Court judges to the North's eleven, although four-fifths of the business of the court originated in the free states. "This," said Stephens in an astonishing declaration, "we have required so as to guard against any interpretation of the Constitution unfavorable to us."
Still another voice from the South, in a slightly different key, attacked the tendencies in the section. The Impending Crisis (1857), by Hinton Rowan Helper, of North Carolina, was surpassed in sensational interest by no other book of the period except Uncle Tom's Cabin. The author did not place himself upon the broadest principles of humanity and statesmanship; he had no concern for the Negro, and the great planters of the South were to him simply the "whelps" and "curs" of slavery. He spoke merely as the voice of the non-slaveholding white men in the South. He set forth such unpleasant truths as that the personal and real property, including slaves, of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, taken all together, was less than the real and personal estate in the single state of New York; that representation in Southern legislatures was unfair; that in Congress a Southern planter was twice as powerful as a Northern man; that slavery was to blame for the migration from the South to the West; and that in short the system was in every way harmful to the man of limited means. All of this was decidedly unpleasant to the ears of the property owners of the South; Helper's book was proscribed, and the author himself found it more advisable to live in New York than in his native state. The Impending Crisis was eagerly read, however, and it succeeded as a book because it attempted to attack with some degree of honesty a great economic problem.
The time for speeches and books, however, was over, and the time for action had come. For years the slave had chanted, "I've been listenin' all the night long"; and his prayer had reached the throne. On October 16, 1859, John Brown made his raid on Harper's Ferry and took his place with the immortals. In the long and bitter contest on American slavery the Abolitionists had won.
Footnote 151: [(return)]
See "Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races. By Josiah C. Nott, M.D., Mobile, 1844."
Footnote 152: [(return)]
See Laurence Hutton: "The Negro on the Stage," in Harper's Magazine, 79:137 (June, 1889), referring to article by Edmon S. Conner in New York Times, June 5, 1881.
Footnote 153: [(return)]
See Hart: Slavery and Abolition, 11 and 117, citing Cutler: Lynch Law, 98-100 and 126-128.