Life of James Buchanan, Fifteenth President of the United States. v. 2 (of 2)

by George Ticknor Curtis

Your friend,

James Buchanan.

CHAPTER XIII.

SUMMARY OF THE SLAVERY QUESTIONS FROM 1787 TO 1860—THE ANTI-SLAVERY AGITATION IN THE NORTH—GROWTH AND POLITICAL TRIUMPH OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY—FATAL DIVISIONS AMONG THE DEMOCRATS—MR. BUCHANAN DECLINES TO BE REGARDED AS A CANDIDATE FOR A SECOND ELECTION.

As the reader is now approaching the period when, for the first time in our political history, a President of the United States was elected by the votes of the free States alone, a retrospective view of those events which preceded and contributed to that result is necessary to a correct understanding of the great national schism of 1860-61.

The beginning of the year 1860 found the people of the United States in the enjoyment of as great a measure of prosperity as they had ever known. It was to close with a condition of feeling between the two sections of the Union entirely fatal to its peace and threatening to its perpetuity. In the future of our country there will come a time when our posterity will ask, why should there ever have been any “North” or any “South,” in the sense in which those divisions have been marked in so long a period of our national history. When the inquirer learns that from the time of the formation and establishment of the Constitution of the United States, the existence of slavery in certain States was nearly the sole cause of the sectional antagonism typified by those terms, he will have to trace, through various settlements, the successive adjustments of questions which related to this one dangerous and irritating subject.

This portion of our national history is divided into distinct stages, at each of which some thing intended to be definite and final was reached. It is also filled by the disastrous influence of causes which unsettled what had once been determined as a series of compacts between the sections; causes which continued to operate until the year that witnessed the beginning of a great catastrophe.

The Constitution of the United States, so far as it related in any way to the condition of slavery, was the result of agreements and adjustments between the Northern and the Southern States, which have been called “compromises.” It is not material to the present purpose to consider either the moral justification for these arrangements, or whether there was an equality or an inequality as between the two sections, in what they respectively gained or conceded. Both sections gained the Union of the whole country under a system of government better adapted to secure its welfare and happiness than it had known before; and what this system promised was abundantly fulfilled. The precise equivalent which the Southern States received, by the settlement made in the formation of the Constitution, was the recognition of slavery as a condition of portions of their population by a right exclusively dependent upon their own local law, and exclusively under their own control as a right of property; and to this right of property was annexed a stipulation that the master might follow his slave from the State whence he had escaped into any other State, and require him to be given up, even if the law of that other State did not recognize the condition of servitude. One other concession was made by the Northern States: that although the slaves of the Southern States were regarded as property, they should be so far considered as persons as to be reckoned in a certain ratio in fixing the basis of representation in the popular branch of Congress, and by consequence in fixing the electoral vote of the State in the choice of a President of the United States. The special equivalent which the Northern States received for these concessions was in the establishment of what is called “the commercial power,” or the power of Congress to regulate for the whole country the trade with foreign nations and between the States; a power which it was foreseen was to be one of vast importance, which was one of the chief objects for which the new Union was to be formed, and which proved in the event to be all, and more than all, that had been anticipated for it. Viewed in the light of mutual stipulations, these so-called “compromises” between the two sections were laid at the basis of the Constitution, forming a settlement fixed in the supreme law of the land, and therefore determinate and final.

Contemporaneously with the formation of the Constitution, and before its adoption, the Congress of the Confederation was engaged in framing an ordinance for the government of the Northwestern Territory, a region of country north and west of the Ohio, which Virginia and other States had ceded to the United States during the war of the revolution. From this region the ordinance excluded slavery by an agreement made in that Congress between the Northern and the Southern States. The Constitution did not take notice of this Northwestern Territory by its specific designation, but it was made to embrace a provision empowering the new Congress “to make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory and all other property of the United States,” and also a provision for the admission into the Union of new States, to be formed out of any territory belonging to the United States. For a long period after the adoption of the Constitution, these two provisions, taken together, were regarded as establishing a plenary power of legislation over the internal condition of any territory that might in any way become the property of the United States, while it remained subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress, and down to the time when its inhabitants were to be permitted to form themselves into a State that was to be admitted into the Union upon an equality with all the other States. Under this process, between the years 1792 and 1820, nine new States were admitted into the Union; five of them with slavery and four of them without it. Of these, three were formed out of parts of the Northwestern Territory, and they therefore derived their character as free States from the admitted force of the ordinance of 1787; while the others were not within the scope of that ordinance, but derived their character from the legislative authority of Congress under the Constitution.

It was not until the year 1820 that this recognized practice of admitting a State into the Union as a free or as a slave State, according to the character of its early settlement, and the legislation which governed the Territorial condition, incurred any serious danger of interruption. But in that year, Missouri, which was a part of the territory ceded in 1803 by France to the United States under the name of Louisiana, was in a condition to seek admission into the Union. Slavery had existed there from the first settlement of the country, and when it became necessary to authorize the free inhabitants to form a State constitution, preparatory to admission into the Union, it was certain that, if left to themselves, they would not abolish a domestic relation that had long existed among them, and in which no inconsiderable part of their wealth was involved. It was proposed to require them to abolish it, as a condition precedent to the admission of the State into the Union. On this so-called “Missouri Restriction,” a violent sectional struggle ensued in Congress, which ended in what has since been known as the “Missouri Compromise.” This was embodied in the organic act, passed on the 6th of March, 1820, which authorized the people of the then Territory of Missouri to form a State constitution and government. The compromise consisted, on the one hand, in the omission of the proposed restriction as a condition of admission into the Union, and, on the other hand, in a guarantee of perpetual freedom throughout all the remainder of the Louisiana territory lying north of the parallel of 36° 30´. This was accompanied, however, by a proviso, which saved the right to reclaim any person escaping into that region, from whom labor or service was lawfully claimed in any State or Territory of the United States. The parallel of 36° 30´ was adopted as the line north of which slavery or involuntary servitude might not be permitted to exist as an institution or condition recognized by the local law, because it was assumed as a practical fact that north of that line the slavery of the African race could not, from the nature of the climate, be profitably introduced, whilst it was equally assumed that in those portions of the Louisiana purchase south of that line, the habits of the contiguous States, and the character of the climate would induce a settlement by persons accustomed to hold and depend upon that species of labor in the cultivation of the soil, and in the wants of domestic life. The principle of the Missouri Compromise, therefore, as a final settlement made between the two sections of the Union in respect to the whole of the Louisiana purchase, was that north of the parallel of 36° 30´, slavery could never be introduced, but that south of that line, slavery might be established according to the will of the free inhabitants. Regarded in the light of a division of this vast territory, this compromise secured to the North quite as much as, if not more than, it secured to the South. Regarded in the light of a settlement of a dangerous and exciting controversy, on which the whole Union could repose, the Missouri Compromise disposed of the future character of all the territory then belonging to the United States, not including the Northwestern Territory, the character of which was fixed by the ordinance of 1787. For a quarter of a century afterward, the two sections of North and South rested in peace upon the settlement of 1820, so far as discussion of the subject of slavery in the halls of Congress could be induced by the application of new States to be admitted into the Union. But in 1845, when Texas, a foreign, an independent, and a slave State, was annexed to the Union, the subject of an increase in the number of slave States came again into discussion, in which angry sectional feeling was carried to a dangerous point. Texas was finally admitted into the Union as a slaveholding State, with a right to divide herself into four new States, with or without slavery; but one of the express conditions of the annexation was a recognition of the Missouri Compromise line, so that north of that line no new State could be framed out of any portion of Texas unless slavery should be excluded from it. The wisdom and policy of the Missouri Compromise were thus again recognized, and it remained undisturbed for a period of thirty-four years from the time of its enactment, as a covenant of peace between the North and the South.