Coupled with this three-fold aspect of the problem, Virginia was confronted by four factors, more or less potential in their relation to the subject—the Federal Government, the Republican Party, certain of the Northern States, and the Abolitionists.
With respect to the Federal Government, neither Virginia nor her slaveholders could lodge any complaint.
The compromise measures of 1850 had accorded slaveholders the right to carry their slaves into the territories of Utah and New Mexico (which embraced the present states of Nevada, Utah, a portion of Colorado, and the present territories of Arizona and New Mexico); while the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, enacted in 1854, repealed the restrictions imposed by the Missouri Compromise.
Independent of these measures the Supreme Court of the United States had, in 1857, in the Dred Scott case, decided that slaveholders possessed the right under the constitution, to carry their slaves into the territories, and that Congress could not deprive them of it. In like manner, the Federal Government had enacted a fugitive slave law with most efficient provisions for its enforcement by Federal officials, and, finally, the continued existence of slavery in Virginia found a sure defense from illegal assaults in the Federal Constitution and the power and obligation of the National Government to maintain its provisions.
ATTITUDE OF REPUBLICAN PARTY
With respect to the attitude of the Republican Party, the situation was not so simple. The Republican Party was organized in 1854 to maintain the tenet that Congress had the right, as it was its duty, to exclude slave owners with their slaves from the territories. The Supreme Court of the United States three years later decided that Congress possessed no such power, yet in its platform of 1860 the Republican Party reasserted its position and hence advanced the more portentous claim that Congress had a right to legislate upon the subject in disregard of the mandates of the highest court of the Republic. It must also be borne in mind that the Republican Party was sectional in its origin, membership and spirit. Even its National conventions were composed of representatives gathered practically from only one of the two great divisions of the Union. Its nominees for President and Vice-President in 1856 and 1860 were both taken from the same section. Electoral tickets bearing the names of its candidates were presented for the suffrages of the people only in the Northern and Border States; and, finally, by electoral votes coming exclusively from the North, its candidates were elected, though the majority in favor of their opponents aggregated nearly a million of the popular suffrage. These conditions may well have aroused the conviction that the rights and interests of Virginia and the South would receive scant recognition at the hands of the incoming administration, yet the fact remains that before the date of Virginia's secession, the Republican Party had, by legislative enactments and official pledges, given proof of its purpose to protect slaveholders in every right previously established by the laws of Congress and the decisions of the Federal Courts.
SLAVEHOLDERS' RIGHTS IN TERRITORIES
It is difficult at this distance from the event to appreciate how the question of the right of slaveholders to introduce slaves into the territories could have been the subject of such profound and peace-destroying controversy. That few slaves would ever be carried into the territories was a conclusion easily deducible from the character of slave labor, and the climatic and soil conditions of most of the Western prairies—especially after Southern California, which would have furnished them a congenial home, had been admitted into the Union as part of a free state.
EFFECTS OF DISPERSING SLAVES
In like manner while we may appreciate the position of slaveholders who insisted upon their constitutional right to carry slaves into the territories, though they might never expect to exercise the privilege, yet it is difficult to realize the reasonableness of objection when coming from friends of emancipation not themselves citizens of the locality which was thus to be burdened. The problem of emancipation was largely a question of the relative numbers of whites and blacks in any given state. With few blacks and many whites, there was no problem worthy of the name. With many blacks and few whites, the problem assumed its maximum of difficulty and danger. Every slave, therefore, who went from the congested slave centres of the South to the Western prairies not only ameliorated his own condition and enhanced his hopes of emancipation, but, in like manner, augmented the chances of improvement and ultimate freedom to those he left behind. Mr. Jefferson had, as far back as 1820, crystallized the thought in terms so clear and reasonable that it seems difficult to controvert.