The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 1 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

by George Cary Eggleston

Nevertheless when Missouri sought admission to the Union as a slave state, the opposition was intense, determined, angry.

Then came Henry Clay with a compromise. Earnestly desiring the extinction of the slave system, it was that statesman's fate to do more than any other man of his era in behalf of the perpetuation and extension of the institution which he regarded as a curse and an incubus. There was one other thing for which he cared far more than he did for the extinction of slavery. In common with Webster and most others of the statesmen of that time he was more deeply concerned for the preservation and perpetuation of the Union than for any other matter that appealed to his mind. His attitude was identical with that of Mr. Lincoln while the war was on, when he declared his sole purpose to be the restoration of the Union and proclaimed his conviction that the question of slavery and all other questions were in his mind subordinate to that.

Clay saw grave danger to the Union in this Missouri controversy. In order to avert that danger, and regardless of everything else, he brought forward his compromise and succeeded in securing its enactment into law.

Under that compromise Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state; but it was stipulated that no other slave state should be carved out of territory north of 36° 80´ north latitude, that being the southern boundary line of Missouri.

In practical effect this compromise excluded slavery from all future states to be created out of the vast region embraced in the Louisiana Purchase, except the territory of Arkansas. Louisiana was already a state. Missouri was permitted by the compromise itself to become a state. The Indian Territory was forever set apart for a special purpose and, it was then held, could never become a state. There was no other acre of the Louisiana Purchase lying south of the line fixed by the compromise as the extreme northern limit to which the institution might extend. Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado and the rest were still Mexican possessions which the great Republic had not then the remotest thought of acquiring. On the other hand there were all the vast, fruitful regions now known as Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas and the states lying to the west of them into which by this agreement slavery might never go, from which it was supposedly as effectually excluded as it had been from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin by that clause which Thomas Jefferson—in his eagerness to make an end of the system—had written into the deed of cession by which the Northwest Territory became a national possession.

Clay fondly believed that this Missouri Compromise of his devising had finally laid to rest the entire controversy with regard to slavery. Thirty odd years later he was still laboring to induce his own state, Kentucky, to adopt a system of gradual emancipation, but in the meanwhile history had written itself in another way and in direct antagonism to his views.

There had grown up at the North an intolerance of slavery which freely expressed itself in denunciation of those who supported or countenanced the institution. There had grown up at the South a sentiment in advocacy of slavery such as did not exist in that region in the earlier years of the Republic. Men whose fathers and grandfathers had diligently sought means by which to free their native land of a curse, had little by little come to regard that curse as a blessing. Men whose forefathers had regarded slavery as an inherited misfortune, came to regard the institution as right in itself and to defend it as the best, most generous, and most humane labor system in the world. In support of this contention they could point to the factory system of old England, and New England and argue with some truth that nowhere in the world was labor so generously rewarded as at the South.

Moreover, the antagonism to the system which had developed at the North had its very natural reflex effect. The offensive terms in which slave owners were habitually spoken of in Northern prints were well calculated to impel Southern men to the angry and intemperate defense of their system. Still more effective in breeding a "thick and thin" pro-slavery sentiment at the South were the aggressive measures taken at the North for the annoyance of those who held slaves.

The laws for the rendition of fugitive slaves—not at that time so strict as they were afterwards made—were habitually set at naught. There existed a fairly well organized system called "the underground railroad" by which slaves were induced to run away and by means of which their flight was facilitated. All this was dictated by a profound conviction on the part of those who engaged in it that slavery was an institution so utterly wrong that any means by which its hold could be impaired were right in morals, no matter what the law might say.

All this was done in defiance of law, in violation of the statutes and in flagrant disregard of that compact of reciprocity upon which the Union was founded. We are not concerned in the twentieth century to discuss the question of the right or wrong of men's conduct in the first half of the nineteenth. But if we would understand the irritations that bred the war between the North and the South, we must recognize not only all the facts but equally all the refinements by which they were judged in their time.