History of the United States, Volume 3

by Elisha Benjamin Andrews

Old Boston & Worcester Railway Ticket (about 1837).
But all these improvements were soon to be overshadowed by the work of
the railway and locomotive. The first road of rails in America was in
the Lehigh coal district of Pennsylvania. Its date is uncertain, but not
later than 1825. In 1826, October 7th, the second began operation, at
Quincy, Mass., transporting granite from the quarries to tide-water,
about three miles. This experiment attracted great attention, showing
how much heavier loads could be transported over rails than upon common
roads, and with how much greater ease and less expense ordinary weights
could be carried. The same had been demonstrated in England before.
Locomotives were not yet used in either country, but only horse-power.
The conviction spread rapidly that not only highway transportation but
even that by canals would soon be, for all large burdens, either quite
superseded or of secondary importance. In 1827 the Maryland Legislature
chartered a railroad from Baltimore to Wheeling. The projectors, though
regarding it a bold act, promised an average rate between the two cities
of at least four miles per hour. Subscriptions were offered for more
than twice the amount of the stock. The Massachusetts Legislature the
same year appointed commissioners to look out a railway route between
Boston and Hudson River. Also in this year a railway was completed at
Mauch Chunk, Pa., for transporting coal to the landing on the Lehigh.
The descent was by gravity, mules being used to haul back the cars.
In most country parts, the new railway projects encountered great
hostility. Engineers were not infrequently clubbed from the fields as
they sought to survey. Learned articles appeared in the papers arguing
against the need of railways and exhibiting the perils attending them.
When steam came to be used, these scruples were re-enforced by the
alleged danger that the new system of travel would do away with the
market for oats and for horses, and that stage-drivers would seek wages
in vain.
The first trip by a locomotive was in 1828, over the Carbondale and
Honesdale route in Pennsylvania. The engine was of English make, and run
by Mr. Horatio Allen, who had had it built. This was a year before the
first steam railroad was opened in England. July 4, 1828, construction
upon the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was begun. It, like the other early
roads, was built of stone cross-ties, with wooden rails topped with
heavy straps of iron. Such ties were soon replaced by wooden ones, as
less likely to be split by frost, but the wooden rail with its iron
strap might be seen on branch lines, for instance, between Monocacy
Bridge and Frederick City, Md., so late as the Civil War.

The "South Carolina," 1831, and plan of its running gear.
The first railroad for passengers in this country went into operation
between Charleston and Hamburg, S. C., in 1830. The locomotive had been
gotten up in New York, the first of American make. It had four wheels
and an upright boiler. This year the railroad between Albany and
Schenectady was begun, and fourteen miles of the Baltimore & Ohio opened
for use. In 1831 Philadelphia was joined to Pittsburgh by a line of
communication consisting of a railway to Columbia, a canal thence to
Hollidaysburg, another railway thence over the Alleghanies to Johnstown,
and then on by canal. The railway over the mountains consisted of
inclined planes mounted by the use of stationary engines. It is
interesting to notice the view which universally prevailed at first,
that the locomotive could not climb grades, and that where this was
necessary stationary engines would have to be used. Not till 1836 was it
demonstrated that locomotives could climb. Up to the same date, also,
locomotives had burned wood, but this was now found inferior to coal,
and began to be given up except where it was much the cheaper fuel.

Boston & Worcester Railroad, 1835.
From 1832 the railway system grew marvellously. The year 1833 saw
completed the South Carolina Railroad between Charleston and the
Savannah River, one hundred and thirty-six miles. This was the first
railway line in this country to carry the mails, and the longest
continuous one then in the world. Two years later Boston was connected
by railway with Providence, with Lowell, and with Worcester, Baltimore
with Washington, and the New York & Erie commenced. In 1839 Worcester
was joined to Springfield in the same manner, and in 1841 a passenger
could travel by rail from Boston to Rochester, changing cars, however,
at least ten times.
PERIOD III.
THE YEARS OF SLAVERY CONTROVERSY 1840-1860
CHAPTER I.
SLAVERY AFTER THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE
[1820]
Slavery would most likely never have imperilled the life of this nation
had it not been for the colossal industrial revolution sketched above.
Cotton had been grown here since, 1621, and some exportation of it is
said to have occurred in 1747. Till nearly 1800 very little had gone
from the United States to England, for by the old process a slave could
clean but five or six pounds a day. In 1784, an American ship which
brought eight bags to Liverpool was seized, on the ground that so much
could not have been the produce of the United States. Jay's treaty, as
first drawn, consented that no cotton should be exported from America.
It changed the very history of the country when, in 1793, Eli Whitney
invented the saw-gin, by which a slave could clean 1,000 pounds of
cotton per day. Slavery at once ceased to be a passive, innocuous
institution, promising soon to die out, and became a means of gain, to
be upheld and extended in all possible ways. The cotton export, but
189,316 pounds in 1791, and a third less in 1792, rose to 487,600 pounds
in 1793, to 1,610,760 pounds in 1794, to 6,276,300 pounds in 1795, and
to 38,118,041 pounds in 1804. Within five years after Whitney's
invention, cotton displaced indigo as the great southern staple, and the
slave States had become the cotton-field of the world. In 1869 the
export was nearly 1,400,000,000 pounds, worth about $161,500,000.
[Footnote: Johnson, in Lalor's Cyclopaedia, Art. "Slavery.">[
So profitable was slavery to vast numbers of individuals because of this
its new status, that men would not notice how, after all, it militated
against the nation's supreme interests. It polluted social relations in
obvious ways, setting at naught among slaves family ties and the behests
of virtue, influences that reacted terribly upon the whites. The entire
government of slaves had a brutalizing tendency, more pronounced as time
passed. "Plantation manners" were cultivated, which, displaying
themselves in Congress and elsewhere, in all discussions and measures
relating to the execrable institution, made the North believe that the
South was drifting toward barbarism. This was an exaggeration, yet
everyone knew that schools in the South were rare and poor, and thought
and speech little free as compared with the same in the North. Political
power, like the slaves, was in the hands of a few great barons, totally
merciless toward even southerners who differed from them. It is of course
not meant that virtue, kindliness, intelligence, and fair-mindedness
were ever wanting in that section, but they flourished in spite of the
slave-system.
Economically slavery was an equal evil, taking as was the superficial
evidence to the contrary. No cruelty could make the slave work like a
free man, while his power to consume was enormous. Infants, aged, and
weak had to be supported by the owner. Even the best slaves were
improvident. Everywhere slave labor tended to banish free. Upon slave
soil scarcely an immigrant could be led to set foot. Poor whites grew
steadily poorer, their lot often more wretched than that of slaves.
Invention, care, forethought were as good as unknown among them. Slave
labor proved incompetent even for agriculture, impoverishing the richest
soil in comparatively few years, whence the perpetual impulse of the
slave-owners to acquire new territory. The dishonesty of blacks and the
danger of slave insurrections made property insecure, at the same time
that the system diminished in every community the number of its natural
defenders. The result was that the South, the superior of the North in
natural resources, was, by 1800, rapidly becoming the inferior in every
single element of prosperity.
[1831]
One of these insurrections was the event of 1831 in Virginia,
originating near the southern border. Four slaves in alliance with three
whites commenced it by killing several families and pressing all the
slaves they could find into their service, until the force was nearly
two hundred. They spread desolation everywhere. Fifty-five white persons
were murdered before the insurrection was in hand. Virginia and North
Carolina called out troops, and at last all the insurgents were captured
or killed. The leader was a black named Nat Turner, who believed himself
called of God to give his people freedom. He had heard voices in the air
and seen signs on the sky, which, with many other portents, he
interpreted as proofs of his divine commission. When all was over Turner
escaped to the woods, dug a hole under some fence-rails and lived there
for six weeks, coming out only at midnight for food. Driven thence by
discovery, he still managed to hide here and there about the plantations
in spite of a whole country of armed men in search of him, until at last
he was accidentally confronted in the bush by a white man with levelled
rifle. He was hanged, November 11th, and sixteen others later. His wife
was tortured for evidence, but in vain. Twelve negroes were transported.
Very many were, without trial, punished in inhuman ways, the heads of
some impaled along the highway as a warning. Partly in consequence of
this horrible affair, originated a stout movement for the abolition of
slavery in Virginia. This was favored by many of the ablest men in the
Old Dominion, but they were overruled.

The Discovery of Nat Turner.
Danger from the blacks necessitated the most rigid laws concerning them.
Time had been when it was thought not dangerous to teach slaves to read.
In 1742 Commissary Garden, of the English Society for Propagating the
Gospel, founded a negro school in Charleston, where slaves were taught
by slave teachers, these last being the society's property. Honest Elias
Neale, the society's catechist in New York, engaged in the same work
there, and afterward catechists were so employed in Philadelphia. That
organization did much to stir up the planters to teach their slaves the
rudiments of Christianity. [Footnote: Eggleston in Century, May, 1888.]
Now, all this was changed. The strictest laws were made to keep every
slave in the most abject ignorance, to prevent their congregating, and
to make it impossible for abolitionists or abolitionist literature or
influence to get at them.
[1816]
Inconvenient and perilous as slavery was, southern devotion to it for
many reasons strengthened rather than weakened. The masses did not
perceive the ruin the system was working, which, moreover, consisted
with great profits to vast numbers of influential men and to many
localities. Border States little by little gave up the hope of becoming
free, the old anti-slavery convictions of their best men faltering, and
the practical problem of emancipation, really difficult, being too
easily decided insoluble. More significant, owing to a variety of
circumstances, the abolition spirit itself greatly subsided early in the
present century. Completion of the emancipation process in the North was
assured by the action of New York in 1817, proclaiming a total end to
slavery there from July 4, 1827. The view that each State was absolute
sovereign over slavery within its own borders, responsibility for it and
its abuses there ending with the State's own citizens, was now
universally accepted. Success in securing the act of 1807, making the
slave trade illegal from January 1, 1808, and affixing to it heavy
penalties, lulled multitudes to sleep. This act, however, had effect
only gradually, and its beneficence was greatly lessened in that it left
confiscated negroes to the operation of the local law.
Such quietude was furthered through the formation of the American
Colonization Society in 1816, by easy philanthropists and statesmen,
North as well as South, who swore by the Constitution as admitting no
fundamental amendment, admired its three great compromises, loved all
brethren of the Union except agitators, and deprecated slavery and the
black race about equally; its mission negro deportation, but its actual
efforts confined to the dumping of free blacks, reprobates, and
castaways in some remote corner of the universe, for the convenience of
slave-holders themselves. [Footnote: 3 Schouler's United States, 198.]
[1839]
Meantime much was occurring to harden northern hostility to slavery into
resolute hatred, a fire which might smoulder long but could not die out.
The fugitive slave law for the rendition of runaways found in free
States operated cruelly at best, and was continually abused to kidnap
free blacks. The owner or his attorney or agent could seize a slave
anywhere on the soil of freedom, bring him before the magistrate of the
county, city, or town corporate in which the arrest was made, and prove
his ownership by testimony or by affidavit; and the certificate of such
magistrate that this had been done was a sufficient warrant for the
return of the poor wretch into bondage. Obstruction, rescue, or aid
toward escape was fined in the sum of five hundred dollars. This is the
pith of the fugitive slave act of 1793. It might have been far more
mischievous but for the interpretation put upon it in the celebrated
case of Prigg versus Pennsylvania.
Mr. Prigg was the agent of a Maryland slave-owner. He had in 1839
pursued a slave woman into Pennsylvania, and when refused her surrender
by the local magistrate carried her away by force. He was indicted in
Pennsylvania for kidnapping, an amicable lawsuit made up, and an appeal
taken to the United States Supreme Court. Here, in an opinion prepared
by Justice Story, the Pennsylvania statute under which the magistrate
had acted, providing a mode for the return of fugitives by state
authorities, was declared unconstitutional on the ground that only
Congress could legislate on the subject; but it was added that while a
free State had no right in any way to block the capture of a runaway, as
for example by ordering a jury trial to determine whether a seized
person had really been a slave, so as to protect free persons of dark
complexion, yet States might forbid their officers to aid in the
recovery of slaves. As the act of 1793 did not name any United States
officials for this service it became nearly inoperative. Spite of this
terrible construction of the Constitution, which Chief Justice Taney
thought should have included an assertion of a State's duty by
legislation to aid rendition, many northern States passed personal
liberty laws, besetting the capture of slaves with all possible
difficulties thought compatible with the Constitution. The South
denounced all such laws whatever as unconstitutional, and perhaps some
of them were.
[1835]
Constitutional or not, they were needed. There were regular expeditions
to carry off free colored persons from the coasts of New York and New
Jersey, many of them successful. The foreign slave-trade, with its
ineffable atrocities, proved defiant of law and preternaturally
tenacious of life. A lucrative but barbarous domestic trade had sprung
up between the Atlantic States, Virginia and North Carolina especially,
and those on the Gulf, for the supply of the southern market. Families
were torn apart, gangs of the poor creatures driven thousands of miles
in shackles or carried coastwise in the over-filled holds of vessels, to
live or die--little matter which--under unknown skies and strange,
heartless masters.
The slave codes of the southern States grew severer every year, as did
legislation against free colored people. Laws were passed rendering
emancipation more difficult and less a blessing when obtained. The
Mississippi and Alabama constitutions, 1817 and 1819 respectively, and
all those in the South arising later, were shaped so as to place general
emancipation beyond the power even of Legislatures. Congress was even
thus early--so it seemed at the North--all too subservient to the
slave-holders, partly through the operation of the three-fifths rule,
partly from fear that opposition would bring disunion, partly in that
ambitious legislators were eager for southern votes. As to the Senate,
the South had taken care, Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee having evened
the score, all before 1800, to allow no new northern State to be
admitted unless matched by a southern. In addition to all this, the
North had a vast trade with the South, and northern capitalists held to
an enormous amount mortgages on southern property of all sorts, so that
large and influential classes North had a pecuniary interest in
maintaining at the South both good nature and business prosperity.
CHAPTER II.
"IMMEDIATE ABOLITION"
[1832]
While slavery was thus strengthening itself upon its own soil and in
some respects also at the North, its champions ever more alert and
forward, its old foes asleep, these very facts were provoking thought
about the institution and hostility to it, destined in time to work its
overthrow. Interested people saw that slavery, so aggressive and
defiant, must be fought to be put down, and that if the Constitution was
its bulwark, as all believed, provided a tithe of what the South as well
as the North had said of its evils was true, the whole country, and not
the South only, was guilty in tolerating the curse. In 1821 Lundy began
publishing his Genius of Universal Emancipation, seconded, from 1829, by
the more radical Garrison. In 1831 Garrison founded the Liberator,
whose motto, "immediate and unconditional emancipation," was intended as
a rebuke to the tame policy of the colonizationists. "I am in earnest,"
said the plucky man, when his utterances threatened to cost him his
life, "I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will
not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard." These were startling
tones. Had God turned a new prophet loose in the earth?
The abolition spirit was a part of the general moral and religious
quickening we have mentioned as beginning about 1825, and revealing
itself in revivals, missions, a religious press, and belief in the end
of the world as approaching. The ethical teaching of the great German
philosopher, Emanuel Kant, denouncing all use of man as an instrument,
began to take effect in America through the writings of Coleridge.
Hatred of slavery was gradually intensified and spread. In 1832 rose the
New England Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 the American Society was
organized, with a platform declaring "slavery a crime."
[1833]

John G. Whittier in 1833.
This declaration marked one of the most important turning-points in all
the history of the United States. It drew the line. It brought to view
the presence in our land of two sets of earnest thinkers, with
diametrically opposite views touching slavery, who could not permanently
live together under one constitution. May, Phillips, Weld, Whittier, the
Tappans, and many other men of intellect, of oratorical power, and of
wealth, drew to Garrison's side. State abolition societies were
organized all over the North, the Underground Railroad was hard worked
in helping fugitives to Canada, and fiery prophets harangued wherever
they could get a hearing, demanding "immediate abolition" in the name of
God.
The Abolitionists proposed none but moral arms in fighting
slavery--papers, pamphlets, public addresses, personal appeals. They
deprecated rebellion by slaves, and urged congressional action against
slavery only in the District of Columbia, in the territories, and at
sea, where the absolute jurisdiction of the general Government was
admitted by nearly all. Nevertheless, southern hostility to them was
indescribably ferocious and uncompromising. They were charged with
instigating all the slave insurrections and insubordination that
occurred, and with having made necessary the new, more diabolical
discipline over blacks, both bond and free. Southern papers and
Legislatures incessantly commanded that Abolitionists be delivered up to
southern justice, their societies and their publications suppressed by
law, and abolitionist agitation made penal. There were northerners quite
ready to grant these demands. Rage against abolitionism, much of it, if
possible, even more unreasoning, prevailed at the North. Garrison says
that he found here "contempt more bitter, detraction more relentless,
prejudice more stubborn, and apathy more frozen than among slave-owners
themselves." The Church, politics, business--all interests save
righteousness--seemed to bow to the false god. Of all utterances against
abolitionism, those of clergymen and religious journals were the
bitterest. To call slavery sin was the unpardonable sin.