Baltimore and the Nineteenth of April, 1861: A Study of the War

by George William Brown

THE COMPROMISES OF THE CONSTITUTION IN REGARD TO SLAVERY. — A DIVIDED HOUSE. — THE BROKEN COMPACT. — THE RIGHT OF REVOLUTION.

For a period the broad provisions of the Constitution of the United States, as expounded by the wise and broad decisions of the Supreme Court, had proved to be equal to every emergency. The thirteen feeble colonies had grown to be a great Republic, and no external obstacle threatened its majestic progress; foreign wars had been waged and vast territories had been annexed, but every strain on the Constitution only served to make it stronger. Yet there was a canker in a vital part which nothing could heal, which from day to day became more malignant, and which those who looked beneath the surface could perceive was surely leading, and at no distant day, to dissolution or war, or perhaps to both. The canker was the existence of negro slavery.

In colonial days, kings, lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, all united in favoring the slave trade. In Massachusetts the Puritan minister might be seen on the Sabbath going to meeting in family procession, with his negro slave bringing up the rear. Boston was largely engaged in building ships and manufacturing rum, and a portion of the ships and much of the rum were sent to Africa, the rum to buy slaves, and the ships to bring them to a market in America. Newport was more largely, and until a more recent time, engaged in the same traffic.

In Maryland, even the Friends were sometimes owners of slaves; and it is charged, and apparently with reason, that Wenlock Christison, the Quaker preacher, after being driven from Massachusetts by persecution and coming to Maryland by way of Barbadoes, sent or brought in with him a number of slaves, who cultivated his plantation until his death. In Georgia, the Calvinist Whitefield blessed God for his negro plantation, which was generously given to him to establish his "Bethesda" as a refuge for orphan children.

In the Dred Scott case, Chief Justice Taney truly described the opinion, which he deplored, prevailing at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, as being that the colored man had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.[3]

The Constitution had endeavored to settle the question of slavery by a compromise. As the difficulty in regard to it arose far more from political than moral grounds, so in the settlement the former were almost exclusively considered. It was, however, the best that could be made at that time. It is certain that without such a compromise the Constitution would not have been adopted. The existence of slavery in a State was left in the discretion of the State itself. If a slave escaped to another State, he was to be returned to his master. Laws were passed by Congress to carry out this provision, and the Supreme Court decided that they were constitutional.

For a long time the best people at the North stood firmly by the compromise. It was a national compact, and must be respected. But ideas, and especially moral ideas, cannot be forever fettered by a compact, no matter how solemn may be its sanctions. The change of opinion at the North was first slow, then rapid, and then so powerful as to overwhelm all opposition. John Brown, who was executed for raising a negro insurrection in Virginia, in which men were wounded and killed, was reverenced by many at the North as a hero, a martyr and a saint. It had long been a fixed fact that no fugitive slave could by process of law be returned from the North into slavery. With the advent to power of the Republican party—a party based on opposition to slavery—another breach in the outworks of the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, had been made. Sooner or later the same hands would capture the citadel. Sooner or later it was plain that slavery was doomed.

In the memorable Senatorial campaign in Illinois between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, the latter, in his speech before the Republican State Convention at Springfield, June 17, 1858, struck the keynote of his party by the bold declaration on the subject of slavery which he then made and never recalled.

This utterance was the more remarkable because on the previous day the convention had passed unanimously a resolution declaring that Mr. Lincoln was their first and only choice for United States Senator, to fill the vacancy about to be created by the expiration of Mr. Douglas's term of office, but the convention had done nothing which called for the advanced ground on which Mr. Lincoln planted himself in that speech. It was carefully prepared.

The narrative of Colonel Lamon in his biography of Lincoln is intensely interesting and dramatic.[4]