Born in New Hampshire, 1782; died, 1852. Was educated at Phillips Exeter
Academy, and at Dartmouth College, graduating in 1801; admitted to the
bar at Boscawen, New Hampshire, in 1805; member of Congress, 1813–1817;
moved to Boston and in 1818 rose to the front rank of lawyers by his labors
in the “Dartmouth College Case”; congressman, 1823–1827; became widely
known as orator by his orations at Plymouth, 1820, and Bunker Hill, 1825,
and his eulogy on Adams and Jefferson, 1826; entered the Senate in 1827, and
at once took high rank as a leader; favored the protective tariff of 1828; won
the highest distinction as “Expounder of the Constitution” in debate with
Hayne in 1830; Secretary of State, 1841; negotiated the Ashburton Treaty,
1842; resigned in 1843; reëntered the Senate, 1845; gave feeble support to
Taylor in 1848; alienated many old friends by his 7th of March speech in 1850,
in which he supported Clay’s Compromises and took a conservative position on
the question of slavery; Secretary of State, 1850–1852.
Born in North Carolina, 1782; died, 1858. Early migrated to Tennessee;
was colonel in the War of 1812; went to Missouri and became a journalist in
1813; was United States senator from Missouri, 1821–1851; was during this
whole period deemed second in influence only to the great trio Calhoun, Clay,
and Webster; was a stanch advocate of favorable land laws, of post-roads,
of the development of the West, and of conservatism in finance; strenuously
supported Jackson and opposed Calhoun; published valuable Thirty Years
View, and Abridgment of Debates of Congress.
Born in South Carolina, 1791; died, 1839. Served in War of 1812; member
of the South Carolina Legislature, 1814–1818; attorney-general of South Carolina,
1818–1822; elected to United States Senate, 1823; opposed the protective
system, denying its constitutionality; was chairman of the nullifying convention
of 1832; governor of South Carolina, 1832–1834, when the state prepared
to enforce its ideas of nullification,—a movement which was prevented by
Clay’s compromise tariff.
CHAPTER XXI. jackson’s second administration, 1833–1837.
THE ABOLITIONISTS.
359. Anti-slavery Agitation.—The tariff was not destined to remain the chief grievance of the Southerners. They were soon far more concerned with the growing agitation against slavery which was being waged by determined men and women in the North. At the head of these abolitionists, as they were styled, stood William Lloyd Garrison, who in 1831 established his anti-slavery paper, The Liberator, in Boston. Up to this time many leading Southerners, including Washington and Jefferson, had deplored the existence of slavery without seeing how to get rid of it. Now, feeling outraged by the attacks made upon their section, and fearing other slave insurrections like one incited by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831, they began to defend their institution as a property right secured to them by law, and a profitable one in view of the increased demand for cotton. Efforts for emancipation, such as those made by representatives of the mountain districts of Virginia, in a convention held in that state in 1829–1830, were abandoned. A pro-slavery literature was produced, which treated slavery not as an evil to be abated, but as a benefit to be spread. Stricter penal laws were enacted with regard to the blacks, and the abolitionists were denounced and threatened. The latter received at first similar treatment in the North, where they were frequently mobbed. They continued to make proselytes, however, and by 1836 had put the nation in a turmoil, as a result of their petitions to Congress for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.
