The war between the United States and Mexico, which was terminated by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, resulted in the acquisition by the United States of a vast region of country which was not embraced by the Missouri Compromise. At the time of this acquisition, Mr. Buchanan earnestly advocated the extension of the line of 36° 30´ through the whole of this new territory to the Pacific Ocean, as the best mode of adjustment.
It is not necessary in this historical sketch to dwell on the advantages or disadvantages of this plan. All that needs to be said about it here is, that it commended itself to Mr. Buchanan as a plan more acceptable to the people of both sections of the Union than any other that could be devised. It was defeated by the proposal of the so-called “Wilmot Proviso,” which aimed to exclude slavery from all possible introduction into any part of this newly acquired territory, without regard to the principle of division which was the characteristic of the Missouri Compromise, and without recognizing any claim of the slaveholding States to an equal enjoyment of the common territory of the Union, in the manner in which they asserted that claim. The Southern claim was that of a right to emigrate into any Territory of the United States, with slaves, as part of the property of the emigrant, just as a Northern man could emigrate into such a Territory with whatever personal property he chose to take with him. When, therefore, the admission of California as a State, and the organization of Territorial governments for the other provinces of Mexico that had been ceded to the United States came before Congress, they came accompanied by a great sectional excitement, that was partly due to the anti-slavery agitation that had been going on in the North, and partly to the struggle for an increase of the political power of the free States on the one side, and of the slave States on the other, according as the future character of these new acquisitions might be determined.
Having now reached the year 1850, the reader stands at a period at which the character of freedom had been long impressed upon the whole of the Northwestern Territories; at which the character of the whole region of the Louisiana purchase had been for thirty years determined by the principle of the Missouri Compromise; and at which, what remained to be done was to adjust, by a final settlement, the future character of the territory acquired from Mexico, and to act upon any other questions concerning slavery that demanded and admitted legislation by Congress. There were two such questions that did not relate to the newly acquired territory. One of these concerned the toleration of the domestic slave trade in the District of Columbia, the abolition of which was loudly demanded by the North. The other related to a Southern demand of a more efficient law for the extradition of fugitives from service.
The Thirty-first Congress, assembled in December, 1849, was the one which enacted the series of measures known as the “Compromise of 1850,” and which settled all the slavery questions that remained for adjustment. In respect to the territory that had been acquired from Mexico, there was danger for a time that all harmony of action would be frustrated by the so-called “Wilmot Proviso,” which aimed to impose as a fundamental condition of any legislation respecting any part of that territory, a perpetual exclusion of slavery. Mr. Buchanan was out of public office at this time, but his influence was exerted in his own State, with success, to prevent the passage by her legislature of instructing resolutions in favor of that proviso. This led the way for its rejection by Congress. On the 4th of February, 1850, resolutions favoring the proviso were laid upon the table of the House of Representatives in Congress, by the vote of 105 to 75. This important vote was followed in the Senate by five measures, designed by Mr. Clay and supported by Mr. Webster and Mr. Calhoun, which, after a long discussion, became laws in September, 1850, with the general concurrence of both the Whig and the Democratic parties. The first of these Acts consisted of a new and more efficient law for the extradition of fugitives from service, to take the place of the old law of February 12th, 1793, which bore the signature of Washington. By reason of a decision of the Supreme Court, made in 1842, which had determined that Congress could not constitutionally require State magistrates to perform a duty which the Court declared to be one pertaining exclusively to the Federal power, the law of 1793 had become almost inoperative. Although the decision of the Court left the States at liberty to allow their magistrates to act in such cases, many of the Northern States had passed laws to prohibit them from rendering any official aid to the claimant of a fugitive from service. It had become necessary, therefore, for Congress to provide officers of Federal appointment to execute an express mandate of the Federal Constitution. This was the purpose of the new law of 1850.
The second of these “compromise measures” was an Act for the immediate admission of California into the Union, as a free State, embracing its whole territory, both south and north of the line of the Missouri Compromise. The third and fourth measures were Acts for the establishment of Territorial governments in New Mexico and Utah, which secured to them respectively the right of admission as States into the Union, “with or without slavery as their respective constitutions might require.” The Act relating to New Mexico declared that “no citizen of the United States shall be deprived of his life, liberty or property in said Territory, except by the judgment of his peers and the laws of the land;” thus making, from abundant caution, a provision of the Federal Constitution obligatory upon the Territorial legislature. Thus these two Acts, along with the Missouri Compromise, comprehended all the territory belonging to the United States, whether derived from Mexico or from France; there was no territory remaining for the Wilmot Proviso to act upon, and consequently the agitation of that proviso was excluded from the halls of Congress. Moreover, the Act for establishing the Territory of New Mexico withdrew from the jurisdiction of a slave State all that portion of Texas which lay north of the parallel of 36° 30´, by including it within the boundary of New Mexico. The fifth of the compromise measures of 1850 was a law abolishing the domestic slave trade within the District of Columbia.
It is not singular that a final settlement, which disposed of all the slavery questions on which Congress could in any way act, should have been acceptable to the people of the whole Union, excepting the extremists of the two sections. The abolitionists of the North denounced it, because it admitted of the possible and theoretical establishment of slavery in New Mexico, notwithstanding the patent fact that neither the soil nor the climate of that region could ever make it a profitable form of labor, and because it recognized and provided for the execution of that provision of the Constitution which required the extradition of fugitives from service. The extreme men of the South disliked the settlement, because it admitted the great and rich State of California as a free State. But when the Presidential election of 1852 approached, the general approval of this settlement was made manifest. The national convention of the Whig party nominated as its candidate for the Presidency General Scott, who was supposed to be somewhat closely affiliated, both personally and politically, with public men who opposed and continued to denounce the compromise. But in their “platform” the Whigs pledged themselves to maintain it as a binding settlement, and to discountenance all attempts in or out of Congress to disturb it. The Democratic national convention not only made equally emphatic declarations of their purpose to maintain this settlement inviolate, but by nominating a candidate who could not be suspected of any lukewarmness on this, the great political question of the time, they secured a majority of the electoral votes of both free and slave States that was almost unprecedented. General Pierce received 254 electoral votes out of 296, or 105 votes more than were necessary to a choice. All the free States, excepting Massachusetts and Vermont, and all the slave States, excepting Kentucky and Tennessee, gave him their electoral votes. Never did a party come into power with greater strength, and never was there a more distinct political issue than that which placed General Pierce at the head of the Government. The people at large distrusted the soundness of the Whig candidate and his friends upon the compromise of 1850, and being determined to maintain that settlement as final, and to have no more agitation of slavery questions in Congress, they entrusted the destinies of the country to the Democratic party.
But as not infrequently happens, the Democrats were in a majority so large that it became unwieldy; and before the administration of General Pierce had closed, a step was taken that was to lead to the most serious consequences. This step was the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The settlement, or “compromise” of 1850, made by the consentaneous action of the North and the South, rested, as on a corner stone, upon the inviolable character of the settlement of 1820, known as the Missouri Compromise. To preserve that earlier compromise intact, was to preserve the later one; for if the settlement made in 1820 in regard to all the territory derived from France should be renounced, the door would be open for the renunciation of the settlement made in 1850 respecting New Mexico and Utah. Sweep away the compact which dedicated the whole Louisiana territory north of 36° 30´ to perpetual freedom, and which gave to the South whatever parts of it below that line might be adapted to slave labor, and all Territories everywhere would be subject to a new contention over the dogma that slavery did or that it did not go into every Territory by virtue of a right derived from the Constitution of the United States. There was no security for the peace and harmony of the country, but to act upon the principle that the settlement of 1850 rested for its foundation upon the inviolable character and perpetual duration of the settlement of 1820.
But in all free countries governed by political parties, and especially at times when the party in power is in an extraordinary majority, there are always men who feel that they are wiser than others, and who are apt to couple their own aims as statesmen, looking to the highest honors of their country, with new plans for the management of public affairs. Such a man was the late Stephen A. Douglas, a Senator in Congress from the State of Illinois from 1847 until his death, in 1861; a distinguished leader of the Democratic party, who had been several times a candidate for the nomination by his party to the Presidency. This very able man, who had a considerable body of friends attached to him from his energetic and somewhat imperious qualities, had been a strenuous supporter of the Compromise of 1850, and had rendered very efficient service in the adoption of that settlement. He seems to have been somewhat suddenly led, in 1854, to the adoption of the idea that it would be wise to repeal the Missouri Compromise, and that in its place might be substituted a doctrine that the people of a Territory have the same right and ought to have the same sovereign power, while in the Territorial condition, to shape their domestic institutions in their own way, as the people of a State. He does not appear to have had the foresight to see that the practical application of this doctrine would lead, in the circumstances of the country, to a sectional struggle for the possession and political dominion of a Territory, between slaveholders and non-slaveholders, without the superintending and controlling authority of Congress to prevent such a conflict by determining the character of the Territory one way or the other. As he could not remove the Missouri settlement without attacking the constitutional power of Congress to legislate as it might see fit on the condition of a Territory, he boldly determined to make that attack, and to put in the place of the authority of Congress the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” as a substitute for Congressional legislation on the relations of master and slave. When this ill-advised legislation, which tended in the most direct manner to concentrate into political organization the Northern dislike of slavery, received the sanction of the President, General Pierce, on the 30th of May, 1854, Mr. Buchanan was out of the country. He never approved of it, and had he been at home, it is quite certain that it would have encountered his strenuous opposition.
Turning now aside from the history of these successive settlements, and the modes in which they were unsettled, in order to appreciate the condition of feeling between the two sections of the Union at the time when the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency was effected exclusively by the electoral votes of the free States, the reader should learn something of the history of the anti-slavery agitation in the North; something of the effort to extend the political power of the slave States as a barrier against anticipated encroachments upon Southern rights; and something of the causes which led to the assertion of the supposed right of State secession from the Union, as a remedy against dangers apprehended to be in store for the people of the South.
By the universal admission of all persons, whatever were their sentiments or feelings concerning slavery, the Constitution of the United States conferred no power upon Congress to act on it in any State of the Union. This was as much acknowledged by the early abolitionists as by all other men. They regarded the Constitution as a “pro-slavery” instrument. They admitted that the supreme law of the land recognized and to a certain extent upheld the principle that slaves were property; and they therefore sought for a justification of their attacks upon the Constitution in what they denominated the “higher law,” which meant that when the individual citizen believes that the moral law is in conflict with the law of the land, the latter cannot rightfully bind his conscience or restrain his conduct. Proclaiming it to be sinful to live in a political confederacy which tolerated slavery anywhere within its limits, they began by denouncing the Constitution as a “league with death and a covenant with hell;” and it was not long before this doctrine of the higher law was preached from pulpits and disseminated by numerous publications in the New England States. The dates of the organized anti-slavery societies are important to be observed, because of the spontaneous movement in Virginia towards the removal of slavery which shortly preceded them. The New England Anti-slavery Society was organized in Boston, on the 30th of January, 1832; the New York Society in October, 1833; and the National Society at Philadelphia in December, 1833. Affiliated local societies of the same kind sprang up at once in many towns and villages of the North. At the time when these organizations were first gathered, and for a long period thereafter, there was no pending question upon the subject of the extension of slavery into Territories of the United States. The country had been reposing since 1820 upon the Missouri settlement; it was not until 1845 that any addition of slave territory was threatened; and at the moment when the first anti-slavery society was organized in Boston, Virginia was on the verge of emancipating her slaves. Accordingly, the nature, purposes and methods of the Northern anti-slavery agitation between the year 1832 and the annexation of Texas in 1845, and thence to the year 1860, form a most important subject of political study.