At the period which I am now considering, the public men of the North who acted an important part in national affairs, and who belonged, as Mr. Buchanan unquestionably did belong, to the higher class of statesmen, had to act with a wise circumspection on this subject of slavery. There was nothing that such a man could do, if he regarded his public duty with an American statesman’s sense of public obligation, but to stand aloof from and to discountenance what was wrong in the doings of the anti-slavery agitators. In this course of conduct he had often to discriminate between conflicting claims of constitutional rights that unquestionably belonged to every citizen of the United States, and acts which no citizen had a right to do, or which it was in the highest and plainest sense inexpedient to allow him to do. In these conflicts, right and wrong became at times so mixed and intricate, that it required a resolute and clear intellect to separate them, and a lofty courage in meeting obloquy and misrepresentation. It was an easy matter, in the exciting period of those slavery questions, to impute to a Northern man of either of the great political parties of the time, a base truckling to the South for his own ambitious purposes. After ages must disregard the ephemeral vituperation of politics, and must judge the statesmen of the past by the situation in which they stood, by the soundness of their opinions, by their fidelity to every unquestionable right, by the correctness of their policy, and by the purity of their characters and their aims. There has been a passionate disposition in our day to judge the public men of the North, who had to act in great and peculiar crises of the sectional conflict, and who did not give themselves up to a purely sectional spirit, by a standard that was inapplicable to their situation, because it was unjust, illogical and inconsistent with the highest ideas of public duty in the administration of such a Government as ours.

The anti-slavery agitation, begun in the North at the time and carried on in the mode I have described, is to be deplored, because of the certainty that sudden emancipation, which was alone considered or cared for by the abolitionists, must be fraught with great evils.

In whatever way sudden, universal and unqualified emancipation was to be enforced, if it was to happen the negro could not be prepared for freedom. He must take his freedom without one single aid from the white man to fit him to receive it. Wise and thoughtful statesmen saw this—the abolitionist did not see it. Men who had passed their lives in the business of legislation and government, knew full well, not only that the fundamental political bond of the Union forbade interference by the people of the free States with the domestic institutions of the slave States, but that emancipation without any training for freedom could not be a blessing. Men who had passed their lives in an emotional agitation for instant freedom did not see or did not care for the inevitable fact, that freedom for which no preparation had been made could not be a boon. When the emancipation came, it came as an act of force applied in a civil war and in the settlements which the war was claimed to have entailed as necessities. No preparatory legislation, no helpful training in morality and virtue, no education, no discipline of the human being for his new condition, had prepared the negro to be a freeman. While, therefore, it may be and probably is true, that the whites of our Southern States have reason to rejoice, and do rejoice, in the change which they deprecated and against which they struggled, it is not true that the colored race have the same reason for thankfulness. The Christianity and the philanthropy of this age have before them a task that is far more serious, more weighty and more difficult, than it would have been if the emancipation had been a regulated process, even if its final consummation had been postponed for generations. To this day, after twenty years of freedom, the church, the press, society and benevolence have to encounter such questions as these:—Whether the negro is by nature vicious, intractable, thriftless—the women incurably unchaste, the men incurably dishonest; whether the vices and the failings that are so deplorable, and apparently so remediless, are to be attributed to centuries of slavery, or are taints inherent in the blood. Who can doubt that all such questions could have been satisfactorily answered, if the Christianity of the South had been left to its own time and mode of answering them, and without any external force but the force of kindly respectful coöperation and forbearing Christian fellowship.

It is a cause for exultation that slavery no longer exists in the broad domain of this Republic—that our theory and our practice are now in complete accord. But it is no cause for national pride that we did not accomplish this result without the cost of a million of precious lives and untold millions of money.

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise during the administration of President Pierce (May, 1854), followed, as it was three years afterwards, by a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, that Congress could not constitutionally prohibit slavery in a Territory of the States, gave a vast impetus to the tendencies which were already bringing about a consolidation of most of the elements of the anti-slavery feeling of the North into a single political party. When Mr. Buchanan became the nominee of the Democratic party for the Presidency, although the repeal of the Missouri Compromise had already taken place, the decision of the Supreme Court in the celebrated case of “Dred Scott” had not occurred,[[59]] and consequently the Republican party, for this and other reasons, had not acquired sufficient force to enable it to elect its candidate, General Fremont. But during the administration of Mr. Buchanan, the scenes which occurred in Kansas and which were direct consequences of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, with the added excitement which followed the announcement by a majority of the judges of the Supreme Court of doctrines which the people of the North would not accept, there was a field for sectional political action, such as the Union had never before known. So that when the Republican party, in the spring of 1860, assembled its delegates in convention at Chicago, for the nomination of its candidates for the Presidency and the Vice Presidency, adopted a “platform” on which no Southern man of any prominence could place himself, and selected Northern candidates for both offices, it was plain that the time had come when there was to be a trial of political strength between the two sections of the Union.

The “Chicago platform,” on which Mr. Lincoln was nominated and elected as the candidate of the Republican party, while repudiating with great precision the idea that Congress could in any way act upon slavery in the States, contained the following resolution on the subject of slavery in the Territories of the United States:

“That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom; that as our republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that 'no person should be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law,' it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of Congress, of a Territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any Territory of the United States.”

On the motives that dictated the assertion of this doctrine, I have no speculations to offer, for I am not dealing with motives. That it was a new political doctrine, and that it was a new departure in the legislation of Congress on this subject of slavery in Territories cannot be doubted. It rejected entirely the principle on which Congress had acted for many years, for there had been acts of Congress which had given legal existence to slavery in a Territory, and acts of Congress which had prohibited it. It rejected the principle of the Missouri Compromise, which had sanctioned an agreed division of the Territories into those where slavery might not and those where it might be allowed. It rejected all claim of right on the part of the Southern slaveholder to take his slave property into a Territory and have it there recognized as property while the Territorial condition remained. It was a reading of the Constitution diametrically opposed to the Southern reading. The political men who framed this “platform” doubtless considered that the time had come for a direct antagonism between the North and the South on this subject, so that it might be decided by the votes of the people in a Presidential election, whether the Southern claim for recognition of slave property in any Territory of the United States, wherever situated, was to prevail or be rejected. That such antagonism was the consequence and the purpose of this declaration of a new principle of action on this subject will be denied by no one.

It is equally certain that a political party could not come into the field in a contest for the Presidency upon such a declaration, without drawing into the discussion the whole subject of slavery as a domestic institution, or a condition of society, both in States and Territories. The intention was to draw a well defined line between the relations of Congress to slavery in the States and the relations of Congress to slavery in the Territories. Yet in the excitements of a Presidential canvass, the Republican party of necessity gathered into its folds those who had been for years regardless of that distinction, and who assailed slavery in the regions which were under the legislative power of Congress for the purpose of assailing it everywhere. The campaign literature, the speeches, the discussions, which dwelt on “the irrepressible conflict” between slavery and freedom, and which proclaimed the issue to be whether the United States would sooner or later become a slaveholding nation or a free-labor nation—whether the Northern States were to remain free or to become slave States—set forth with great distinctness in the writings and the harangues, could have no other effect than to array the two sections of the Union in a bitter hostility, while in the South there were those who believed, or affected to believe, that the people of the North, if successful in electing a President upon this basis, would put forth all their efforts to destroy slavery everywhere, as an institution incompatible with the continued existence of freedom in the North. All this hazard might, however, have been encountered and parried if the Democratic party had been in a condition to nominate a suitable candidate upon a “platform” fit to be opposed to that of the Republicans, and capable of commending itself alike to Northern and Southern voters. But when this party assembled in convention at Charleston, on the 23d of April, 1860, it was in no condition to do any good to the Union or to itself. If Mr. Buchanan had been a younger man, and had been disposed to be a second time a candidate for the Presidency, he might have united his party upon a basis of action in regard to this dangerous matter of slavery in the Territories, that would have commanded the support of a sufficient number of States, Northern as well as Southern, to have elected him. But he was averse to any longer continuance in public life, and he was well aware how much Mr. Douglas had done which had tended to divide the Northern and the Southern wings of his party. On the 14th of April, 1860, he sent to Charleston the following letter, which put an end to the idea, so far as it may have been entertained, of his being regarded as a candidate for the nomination by the Democratic National Convention.

[MR. BUCHANAN TO HON. ARNOLD PLUMER.]