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

by George Cary Eggleston

In the North and South there had always been a radical distinction in men's minds and consciences, between slavery and the slave-trade; between the holding of men in hereditary bondage under a system essentially patriarchal and kindly, and the deliberate traffic in human beings for purposes of speculative profit.

There were two distinct questions with respect to slavery in the District of Columbia. To have abolished the institution there root and branch, as multitudes of petitioners prayed, would have been to menace the two states, Virginia and Maryland, which had given the District to the Union.[1] It would have been to establish within their borders and by national authority a little Canada into which fugitive slaves from either of those states might escape with the certainty of thereby achieving freedom; for in the temper of that time no fugitive slave law could by any possibility have been enforced there after once Congress had decreed the abolition of slavery within the District.

[1] Virginia's portion had been receded to that State in 1846.

But the abolition of the slave-trade within this peculiarly national domain was quite another matter. It left to all Southerners summoned thither on one or other sort of governmental business, or removing thither to reside, the right freely to bring then domestic servants with them without fear of molestation; but it made an end of that traffic in negroes as mere merchandise which was even more offensive to the better people of the South than to those of the North—which was socially as severely frowned upon in the one part of the country as in the other and concern with which made the slave-trader as completely a social outcast in Virginia as it might have done in Massachusetts.

Mr. Clay's five bills were framed and introduced in pursuit of his dominant purpose to preserve the American Union at whatever sacrifice of principle or of interest, and in like spirit they were enacted by both houses of Congress. They had the strong support of Daniel Webster in one of the ablest orations he ever delivered in behalf of the Union; a speech made, as Webster's biographers contend, in full knowledge of the fact that its delivery must cost him his very last hope of election to the presidency; a speech which brought upon him the odious accusation of having "sold out to the slave power."[2] They had the support also of men on both sides of the danger line of cleavage who strongly disapproved of some of them but who voted for all in the firm conviction that together they constituted a compromise necessary to the preservation of the Union.

[2] Unhappily for his reputation Mr. Webster gave color to this charge by accepting a large sum of money from Mr. Corcoran as a scarcely disguised reward for the speech.

That object was still supreme in the minds of the great majority, North and South alike. It was felt on both sides—in spite of personal convictions, personal interests, and the irritating friction of political agitation—that after all, the cause of human liberty, human progress, and the system of self-government among men was dependent upon the perpetuity of the union of these states. It was felt that the enslavement of the negro, now that the Constitution, the statute law, and the public sentiment of the country had robbed it of its most repugnant feature—the African slave-trade—was a matter of minor consequence in comparison with the perpetuity of the only government on God's earth which had ever rested its right to be upon the twin theories of unalienable rights and the consent of the governed.

To the two disunion parties, the one aggressively active at the North in behalf of abolition and the other equally aggressive at the South in behalf of slavery, these compromise measures were intensely offensive. But to the great majority of the American people their passage seemed imperatively necessary to the preservation of the Republic, and this sentiment found expression in the action of both houses of Congress upon them.

All of them were enacted by decisive majorities and all by the votes of statesmen from North and South, acting together and putting aside their sectional prejudices in behalf of the Union.

The bill for the admission of California as a free state, against which the strongest opposition was made from the South, had thirty-four senators in its favor against only eighteen in opposition, four of the votes in behalf of it being cast by the four great Southern leaders, Bell of Tennessee, Houston of Texas, Benton of Missouri, and Underwood of Kentucky—a list to which Mr. Clay, as the author and sponsor of the bill must be added as a king of men. In the House,—more directly representative of popular sentiment—the vote in favor of the bill was no less than one hundred and fifty, with only fifty-six against it. This was the bill most offensive to the South and so the vote upon it reflected the strength of the Southern desire for the perpetuity of the Union.