A CRISIS AND A COMPROMISE
In 1840 there were 200 Abolition societies, with a membership of over 200,000. Agitation had created all over the North a spirit of hostility to slavery as it existed in the South, and especially to the admission of new slave States into the Union. In 1840 the struggle over the application of Texas for admission into the Union had already, for three years, been mooted. Objections to the admission of the new State were many, such as: American adventurers had wrongfully wrested control of the new State from Mexico; boundary lines were unsettled; war with Mexico would follow, etc.; but chiefly, Texas was a slave State, which was, in the South, a strong reason for annexation. There were, however, many sound and unanswerable arguments for the admission of the new State, just such as had influenced Jefferson in purchasing the Louisiana territory: Texas was contiguous, her territory and resources immense.
On the issue thus joined the first great gun had been fired by Dr. Channing, who, though still more moderate than some, might now be classed as an Abolitionist. August 1, 1837, he wrote a long open letter to Henry Clay against annexation, and in that letter he said:
To me it seems not only the right but the duty of the Free States, in case of the annexation of Texas, to say to the slave-holding States, "We regard this act as the dissolution of the Union; the essential conditions of the National Compact are violated."[36]
This was very like the pronunciamento already made by Garrison—"no union with slavery."
The underlying reasons that controlled Southern statesmen in this contest over Texas, and the motives that animated them in the fierce battles they fought later for new slave States, are thus stated by Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, of New England.[37]
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 slave-holding and non-slave-holding States.
In 1840 the first effort for the annexation of Texas, by treaty, was defeated in the Senate.
If the Southerners had been as ready to accept the doctrine of an inherent incompatibility between slave and free States as were Dr. Channing and those other Abolitionists who were now declaring for "no union with slave-holders," they would at once have seceded and joined Texas; but the South still loved the Union, and strove, down to 1860, persistently, and often passionately, for power that would enable it to remain safely in its folds.
Texas was finally admitted in 1845, after annexation had been passed on by the people in the presidential election of 1844. In that election Clay was defeated by the Abolitionists. Because Clay was not unreservedly against annexation the Abolitionists drew from the Whigs in New York State enough votes, casting them for Birney, to defeat Clay and elect Polk; and now Abolitionism was a factor in national politics.