"Of one thing I am certain," wrote Mr. Jefferson, "that as the passage of slaves from one state to another would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier and proportionately facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation by dividing the burden upon a greater number of coadjutors."[[267]]

The force of these observations will still further appear when we recall that slavery might be abolished upon the adoption by a territory of its constitution preliminary to statehood, or the new state might at any time in the future so decree—a result most probable because of the small number of slaves and the ever increasing white population within its borders.

Mr. Seward in a speech before the United States Senate, in the winter of 1861, pointed out that in the decade during which the territories of Utah and New Mexico had been open to slavery, only twenty-four slaves had been carried into that vast dominion.[[268]]

"The whole controversy," says Mr. Blaine, "over the territories, as remarked by a witty representative from the South, related to an imaginary negro in an impossible place."[[269]]

CONGRESS ORGANIZES TERRITORIES

But despite these considerations, an acrimonious controversy had continued with growing bitterness for years. The Republican Party had at length been organized to maintain the tenet that Congress could and must exclude slaves from the territories; and, finally, its candidates for President and Vice-President had been elected to office. By the withdrawal from Congress of the Senators and Representatives from the Cotton States, the party found itself in January, 1861, controlling both branches of the National Legislature. Despite, however, the history and platform of the party, statutes were passed organizing the territories of Colorado, Dakota and Nevada, without any provision prohibiting slavery therein. Thus months before the date of Virginia's secession, the Republican Party gave this unequivocal assurance of its purpose to accord slaveholders the right to carry slaves into the territories.

The Hon. James G. Blaine, writing twenty-five years after the happening, thus characterizes the action of his party:

"When the Missouri Compromise was repealed, and the territories of the United States north of the line 35 degrees, 30 minutes were left without slavery inhibition or restriction, the agitation began which ended in the overthrow of the Democratic Party and the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States. It will, therefore, always remain as one of the singular contradictions in the political history of the country, that after seven years of almost exclusive agitation on this question, the Republicans, the first time they had the power as a distinctive political organization, to enforce the cardinal article of their political creed, quietly and unanimously abandoned it. And they abandoned it without a word of explanation."[[270]]

Mr. Blaine, in asserting that the Republican Party "unanimously abandoned" this cardinal article of its political creed, probably overstates the case. There were thousands of the party, and many of its foremost leaders, who had not surrendered their contention. At all events, the abandonment had not been made in such an authoritative and formal way as to commend itself to men yearning for peace and desiring an end of the controversy over the territories. This action, however, of the Republican Congress, in organizing the territories of Colorado, Dakota and Nevada without prohibitions as to slavery, constituted such a recognition of the constitutional rights of the slaveholders and a determination to abide by the decision of the Supreme Court, as to render baseless the charge that Virginia seceded in order to establish the right of her citizens to carry their slaves into the territories. As we shall hereafter see, Virginia was willing to re-enact the Missouri Compromise; make it a part of the constitution and thus forever exclude slavery from all the territory north of the historic line established by that settlement.

REPUBLICANS AND FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW