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

by George Ticknor Curtis

The founders of the Northern anti-slavery societies, while taking their stand in opposition to the Constitution, had yet, in all that they asked Congress to do, to address themselves to a public body every member of which had taken an oath to support that instrument. In their own communities, those who carried on the agitation could appeal to the emotional natures of men, women and children upon the wrongs and the sin of slavery, and fill them with hatred of the slaveholder, without discriminating between questions on which the citizens of a non-slaveholding State could and those on which they could not legitimately act. A great moral force of abhorrence of slavery could thus be, and in fact was, in process of time accumulated. This force expended itself in two ways; first, in supplying to the managers of the agitation the means of sending into the Southern States, pamphlets, newspapers and pictorial representations setting forth the wrongs and cruelties of slavery. For this purpose, the mails of the United States had, by the year 1835, been so much used for the circulation in the South of matter which was there regarded as incendiary and calculated to promote servile insurrections, that President Jackson deemed it to be his duty to propose legislation to arrest such abuses of the post office. Congress did not adopt his recommendation, and the abuse remained unchecked.[^[58]] Another mode in which the anti-slavery agitation expended itself was in petitions to Congress. During the session of 1835-6, and for several of the following years, Congress was flooded with what were called “abolition petitions.” On some of them Congress could legitimately act: such as those which prayed for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and in the forts, arsenals, and dock-yards of the United States situated in slaveholding States. On others, which petitioned for a dissolution of the Union on account of the existence of slavery in some of the States, or for action on the subject of slavery in general, Congress of course could do nothing. A question arose whether such petitions could be received at all, which led to a very memorable and a very excited discussion of the right of petition. Not only was a large part of the time of Congress taken up with these topics, but the opposing representatives of the two sections were guilty of excesses in crimination and recrimination, which foreshadowed the formation of two geographical parties, one Northern and the other Southern, having nothing but slavery as the cause of their division.

One of the questions to which those who are to come after us will seek for an answer, will be, what was the justification for this anti-slavery agitation, begun in 1832 and continued for a period of about ten years, during which there was no special effort on the part of the South to extend the area of slavery? What, again, was the unquestionable effect of this agitation in producing a revulsion of feeling on the whole subject of slavery among the slaveholders themselves? Was the time propitious for the accomplishment of any good? Were the mode, the method, and the spirit of the agitation such as men would resort to, who had a just and comprehensive sense of the limitations upon human responsibility?

The time was most unfortunate. The Southern conscience did not then need to be quickened or enlightened on the inherent wrong of African slavery; nor did it need to be told that the system was one that inflicted many evils upon society. Plans of emancipation, which the Southerners themselves were far better fitted to form than any one who was a stranger to their social condition, had already begun to be considered by enlightened men in more than one of the older Southern States. All that could be done by others who were beyond their limits, to aid them in any aspect of the subject, was limited by just such restraints as apply to any evil existing in a community to which it is confined, and on which strangers can offer nothing but the most considerate and temperate discussion of remedies originating among those who have the burthen to bear. The grand error of our early abolitionists was that they would not observe the limitations of human duty. They were either citizens or residents of non-slaveholding States. Foreigners, in respect to this matter, to the States in which slavery existed, they carried on their discussions, publications and organizations in communities whose public opinion could have but an extremely narrow and subordinate right to act on the subject at all. They either disregarded the fact that the Constitution of the United States could never have been established if it had not recognized the exclusive right of each Southern State to govern the relation of master and slave—nay, that the foreign slave trade without that Constitution could not have been ended when it was, if at all—or else they denounced the Constitution as an emanation from the bottomless pit. Grant that the relation of servitude was a moral wrong, that the idea that man can hold property in man was repugnant to the law of nature or the law of God; grant that the political system of the Union, as our fathers made it, ought to have been reformed by their descendants;—were there no moral restraints resting upon those who enjoyed the advantages and blessings of a Union which had been purchased by certain concessions to the slaveholder? Did not the Constitution itself provide for regular and peaceful changes which the progress of society and the growing philanthropy of the age might find to be necessary to the fuller practical development of the great truths of liberty? Was there no way to deal with slavery but to attack the slaveholder as a sinner, stained with the deepest of crimes against God and his fellow-men? Was there nothing to be done to aid him in ridding himself of the burthen of his sin, by discussing with him the economical problems of his situation? Was it necessary for strangers to demand instant and unqualified manumission, regardless of what was to follow? Was it necessary to assail the Constitution as an unholy covenant with sin, and, rejecting its restraints, to disregard the wisdom that takes human nature as it is, that is careful not to provoke reaction, that looks before and after, and shapes its measures with a rational forecast of their adaptation to the end?

Whilst it is not to be denied that our “Abolitionists” were men of a certain kind of courage developed into rashness, of unbounded zeal, of singular energy, of persistent consistency with their own principles of action, and of that fanatical force which is derived from the incessant contemplation[contemplation] of one idea to the exclusion of all others, it must nevertheless be said that they were not statesmen. There was no one among them of whom it can be said that he acted with a statesmanlike comprehension of the difficulties of this great subject, or with a statesman’s regard for the limitations on individual conduct. Their situation was very different from that of the public or private men in England, who gallantly led the early crusade against the slave trade, or of those who afterwards brought about emancipation in the British colonies. Whatever Parliament thought fit to do in regard to slavery under the British flag or in the British dominions, it had ample power to do, and what Parliament might be made to do, was for the nation to determine. An English statesman or philanthropist had, in either character, no constitutional restraints to consider. He had to deal with both moral and economical questions, and he could deal freely with either. He could use argument, persuasion, invective, or denunciation, and he could not be told by the Jamaica slaveholder, you have entered into a solemn public compact with me which secures to me the exclusive cognizance of this domestic relation, and by that compact you purchased the very existence of the general government under which we both live. But a citizen of the United States, or a foreigner, taking his stand in a free State, stirring up popular hatred of the slaveholder, sending into the Southern States publications which were there regarded as incendiary, persuading legislative bodies in the North to act against one of the express conditions of the Federal Union, and renouncing all Christian fellowship with Southern churches, surely violated the spirit and in some respects the letter of the Constitution. He provoked a sudden revulsion of feeling in the South, and brought about a state of opinion which aimed to maintain slavery by texts of scripture, by the examples of other nations, by the teachings of Christ and his apostles, by the assumed relations of races, by the supposed laws of public economy, and the alleged requirements of a southern clime. He promoted, by an effect as inevitable as the nature of man, a purpose to defend slavery through an increase of its political power, to which a multiplication of slave States would make a large addition. He thus sowed the wind, and, left to another generation to reap the whirlwind.

These assertions must not be left unsupported by proof, and the proof is at hand. In all periods of our history, prior to the civil war, Virginia exercised great influence over the whole slaveholding region. I have said that she was on the verge of emancipation when the first anti-slavery society was organized in the North; and although half a century has since elapsed, there are those living who, like myself, can recollect that she was so. But to others the fact must be attested by proof. It may be asserted as positively as anything in history that, in the year 1832, there was nowhere in the world a more enlightened sense of the wrong and the evil of slavery, than there was among the public men and the people of Virginia. The movement against it was spontaneous. It reached the general assembly by petitions which evinced that the policy and justice of emancipation had taken a strong hold on the convictions of portions of the people of the State, whom no external influence had then reached, and who, therefore, had free scope. Any Virginian could place himself at the head of this movement without incurring hostility or jealousy, and it was a grandson of Jefferson, Mr. Jefferson Randolph, by whom the leading part in it was assumed.

Mr. Randolph represented in the assembly the county of Albemarle, which was one of the largest slaveholding counties of the State. He brought forward a bill to accomplish a gradual emancipation. It was debated with the freedom of men who, undisturbed by external pressure, were dealing with a matter of purely domestic concern. No member of the house defended slavery, for the day had not come when Southern men were to learn that it was a blessing, because those who knew nothing of its burthens told them that it was a curse. There could be nothing said anywhere, there had been nothing said out of Virginia, stronger and truer, in depicting the evils of slavery, than was said in that discussion by Virginia gentlemen, debating in their own legislature a matter that concerned themselves and their people. But finding that the house was not prepared for immediate action on so momentous a subject, Mr. Randolph did not press his bill to a vote. A resolution, however, was adopted, by a vote of 65 to 58, which shows what was the condition of the public sentiment of Virginia at that moment. It declared, as the sense of the house, “that they were profoundly sensible of the great evils arising from the condition of the colored population of the commonwealth, and were induced by policy, as well as humanity, to attempt the immediate removal of the free negroes; but that further action for the removal of the slaves should await a more definite development of public opinion.”

Mr. Randolph was again elected by his constituents, upon this special question. But in the mean time came suddenly the intelligence of what was doing at the North. It came in an alarming aspect for the peace and security of the whole South; since it could not be possible that strangers should combine together to assail the slaveholder as a sinner and to demand his instant admission of his guilt, without arousing fears of the most dangerous consequences for the safety of Southern homes, as well as intense indignation against such an unwarrantable interference. From that time forth, emancipation, whether immediate or gradual, could not be considered in Virginia or anywhere else in the South. Public attention became instantly fixed upon the means of resisting this external and unjustifiable intermeddling with a matter that did not concern those who intermeddled. A sudden revulsion of public sentiment in Virginia was followed by a similar revulsion wherever Southern men had begun to consider for themselves what could be done for the amelioration of the condition of the colored race and for ultimate emancipation. As the Northern agitation went on, increasing in bitterness and gathering new forces, Southern statesmen cast about for new devices to strengthen the political power of their section in the Federal Government. These devices are to be traced to the anti-slavery agitation in the North as their exciting cause, as distinctly as anything whatever in the history of sectional feeling can be traced back from an effect to a cause which has produced it.

But this was not the whole of the evil produced by the anti-slavery agitation. It prevented all consideration by the higher class of Northern statesmen of any method of action by which the people of the free States could aid their Southern brethren in removing slavery; and it presented to Northern politicians of the inferior order a local field for cultivating popularity, as the excitement went on increasing in violence and swept into its vortex the voters whose local support was found to be useful. That there was a line of action on which any Northern statesman could have entered, consistently with all the obligations flowing from the letter and the spirit of the Federal Constitution, is perfectly plain.

While it was impracticable for the people of the North to act directly upon slavery in any State through the Federal Government, it was not impracticable for that Government to follow, with cautious steps, in auxiliary measures to aid what it could not initiate. There were States which were becoming ripe for changes in the condition of their colored population. Of course such changes could be proposed, considered and acted upon only in each of those States, as a measure that concerned its own domestic condition. But there were many ways in which the Federal Government, without transcending its constitutional powers, could incidentally assist any State in what the State had of itself determined to do. The line which separated what the Federal power could legitimately and properly do from what was prohibited to it by every political and moral consideration, was not difficult to be discovered. For example, if the State of Virginia had in 1832-33 adopted any system for colonizing her negroes, what was there to prevent the Federal Government from granting a portion of the public lands for such a purpose? If the subject of prospective emancipation had been approached in this manner, without the disturbance produced by the anti-slavery societies of the North, who can doubt that experiments of the utmost consequence could have been tried, and tried successfully, in a country possessing an almost boundless public domain? But the sudden irruption of those societies into the field, their disregard of all prudential and all constitutional restraints, their fierce denunciations of the slaveholder, their demand for instant and unqualified manumission, at once converted a question which should have remained a matter for joint and friendly coöperation of the two sections, into a struggle for political supremacy of one section over the other in the councils of the Federal Government. All measures and tendencies in the South, which might have opened the way for subsidiary aid on the part of the Federal power, were at once arrested; and it became a study with Southern statesmen how they were to raise new barriers for the defence of slavery, by increasing the political power of their section within the Union. The old barriers had become, in their eyes, but a feeble defence against those who proclaimed that the Union itself was an accursed thing, and that if immediate emancipation of the slaves was not adopted, the Union ought to be broken up.

While it is true that the doctrines of the abolitionists were at first regarded by the great body of the Northern people as the ravings of fanatics, insomuch that they were sometimes subjected to popular violence, they were nevertheless making progress. Year after year the agitation was carried on in the same spirit, and year after year the excitement on the whole subject of slavery continued to grow until it reached a fresh impulse in the proposed annexation of Texas. It should in justice be remembered that the effort at that period to enlarge the area of slavery was an effort on the part of the South, dictated by a desire to remain in the Union, and not to accept the issue of an inherent incompatibility of a political union between slaveholding and non-slaveholding States. It was not at this period that the Southern States embraced, or were much disposed to embrace, the doctrine of “secession.” The views of the nature of the Union, maintained by their most distinguished and powerful statesman, Mr. Calhoun, in 1830-33, led logically to the deduction that every State has, by the terms of the Federal compact, a right to quit the Union when, in its own judgment, it deems that step necessary. But no considerable body of persons in the South, out of his own State, accepted his premises or followed them to their conclusion, until long after he was in his grave; nor did he himself propose secession as a remedy against what he and the whole South regarded as the unwarrantable aggressions of the Northern abolitionists. He aimed to strengthen the political power of his section within the Union, and his whole course in regard to the acquisition of Texas shows his conviction that if that country were not brought under our dominion, there would be an exposed frontier, from which England and the American abolitionists would operate against slavery in the Southern section of the United States. The previous history of the Union shows very plainly that prior to the commencement of the Northern anti-slavery agitation, the political equilibrium between the two sections had not been seriously disturbed.