Negligence and dissension at the North had enabled the South to set aside Van Buren in favour of Polk at the Democratic convention. The party was pledged to annex Texas; and Northern members were appeased by a crafty promise that all which was worth having in British America, west of the Rocky Mountains, should be acquired also. The declaration in the platform of 1840, that the government ought not "to foster one branch of industry to the detriment of others," was repeated in 1844, as often afterwards, but it was so cunningly explained away in Pennsylvania that this State voted for the President who signed the low-tariff bill of 1846.
The election of 1844 strengthened the influence of the South. Texas was soon annexed by the same Congress which had refused to do so previously, and was admitted like Florida, as a slave State, in spite of remonstrances made by the legislatures of Massachusetts and Vermont, as well as by two-thirds of the Unitarian ministers.
In March, 1846, Polk's army invaded Mexico; her soldiers resisted; the Democrats in Congress voted that she had begun the war, which lasted for the next eighteen months; and the Whigs assented reluctantly. Most of the volunteers were Southerners, and there was much opposition at the North to warfare for the extension of slavery. The indignation was increased by the publication of Whittier's pathetic poem, The Angels of Buena Vista, as well as of that series of powerful satires, Lowell's Biglow Papers, The greatest achievement of literary genius thus far in America was the creation of Birdofre-dom Sawin; and no book except Mrs. Stowe's famous novel did so much for emancipation.
A foremost place among abolitionists was taken by Parker in 1845, when he began to preach in Boston. His first sermon against the war with Mexico was delivered the same month as the publication of the first of the Biglow Papers, June, 1846.
Early in 1847 he spoke with such severity, at an indignation meeting in Faneuil Hall, that his life was threatened by drunken volunteers. Other preachers that year in Massachusetts followed his example so generally as to win praise from the Garrisonians, as well as from the most patriotic abolitionists; and great effect was produced by his Letter to the People, which showed, early in 1848, that slavery was ruining the prosperity, as well as the morals, of the South. More about his work may be found in Chapter V. There we shall see how active the Transcendentalists were in carrying on the revolt begun by Channing. The most important victory for liberty recorded in this chapter was that of 1844 over the protectionists. The defeat of the Garrisonians was due largely to their mistakes; and there was urgent need of a new anti-slavery movement on broader ground.
CHAPTER IV. EMANCIPATION
THE revolutionary movements of 1848 did much to encourage love of liberty in America, where the anti-slavery agitation was now becoming prominent in politics. The indignation against the Mexican war increased as it was found that nothing would be done to keep the promise of 1844, that Great Britain should be excluded from the Pacific. The purpose of the South, to enlarge the area of slavery but not that of freedom, was so plain that the northern Democrats proposed the Wilmot Proviso, by which slavery would have been forbidden in all territory acquired from Mexico; and they actually carried it through the House of Representatives, with the help of the Whigs, in 1846. Similar action was taken by the legislatures of New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and seven other States. The Senate was so unwilling to have slavery prohibited anywhere as to oppose, merely on this account, a bill for giving a territorial government to Oregon.
I. Many of the New York delegates to the national Democratic convention in 1848 came pledged to "uncompromising hostility to the extension of slavery," and were so badly treated that they withdrew. Cass was nominated as a friend to the South; the Mexican war was declared "just and necessary"; and abolitionism was denounced, as it had been in 1840 and 1844. Van Buren was nominated soon after by the anti-slavery Democrats. A similar movement had already been made by Sumner, Wilson, and other men who were known as "conscience Whigs," and who had some support from Clay and Webster. Both these candidates for the presidency were set aside in favour of a slave-holder, who had been very successful in conquering Mexico, but never cast a vote. In fact, General Taylor had taken so little interest in politics, that he was supported in the North as a friend, and in the South as an enemy, to the Wilmot Proviso. No opinion on this or any other question could be extorted from the majority; Wilson declared in the convention that he should do all he could to defeat its nominee; the conscience Whigs made an alliance with the Van Buren Democrats; and the new movement was joined by the "Liberty men," whose vote of sixty thousand had decided the election of 1844. Thus was formed the Free Soil party, whose fundamental idea, like that afterwards held by the Republicans, was preservation of the Union by checking the extension of slavery.
Douglass and other Garrisonists were present at the Free Soil convention, where he was invited to speak. The new party pledged itself to "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labour, and Free Men." The national Government was to relieve itself of "all responsibility for slavery," and begin by prohibiting its extension. There should be "no more slave States," "no more slave territory," and "no more compromises with slavery." The convention also demanded that Oregon should be organised as a territory with free labour only; and this was granted at once by President Polk and both Houses of Congress. Most of the members of the convention were Transcendental enough to think that wisdom must be spontaneous; and their scorn of political machinery left it to be used for making Van Buren the candidate. Lowell, who was then at his height of productiveness, complained that,