Over the admission of California in 1849 there was another battle. California, 734 miles long, with about 50,000 people (less than the usual number), and with a constitution improvised under military government, applied for admission as a State. Southerners insisted on extending the line of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific, thereby making of the new territory two States. The South had been much embittered by the opposition to the admission of Texas. Texas was, nearly all of it, below the Missouri Compromise line, and the South thought it was equitably entitled to come in under that agreement. Its case, too, differed from that of Missouri, which already belonged to the United States when it applied for admission as a State. Texas, with all its vast wealth, was asking to come in without price.
Another continuing and increasing cause of distraction had been the use made by Abolitionists of the right of petition. As already shown, petitions to Congress against slavery had been received without question till 1836, when Northern conservatives and Southern members, hoping to abate this source of agitation, had combined to pass a resolution to lay them on the table, which meant that they were to be no further noticed. The Abolitionists were so delighted over the indefensible position into which they had driven the conservatives—the "gag law"—that they continued, up to the crisis of 1850, with unflagging zeal to hurry in monster petitions, one after another. The debates provoked by the presentation of these petitions, and the more and more heated discussions in Congress of slavery in the States, which was properly a local and not a national question, now attracted still wider public attention. The Abolitionists had almost succeeded in arraying the entire sections against each other, in making of the South and North two hostile nations. Professor John W. Burgess, dean of the Faculty of Political Science in Columbia University, says: "It would not be extravagant to say that the whole course of the internal history of the United States from 1836 to 1861 was more largely determined by the struggle in Congress, over the Abolition petitions and the use of the mails for the Abolition literature, than anything else."[39]
The South had its full share in the hot debates that took place over these matters in Congress. Its congressmen were quite as aggressive as those from the North, and they were accused of being imperious in manner, when demanding that a stop should be put to Abolition petitions, and Abolition literature going South in the mails.
There was another cause of complaint from the South, and this was grave. By the "two underground railroads" that had been established, slaves, estimated at 2,000 annually, abducted or voluntarily escaping, were secretly escorted into or through the free States to Canada. To show how all this was then regarded by those who sympathized with the Abolitionists, and how it is still looked upon by some modern historians, the following is given from Hart's "Abolition and Slavery":
"The underground railroad was manned chiefly by orderly citizens, members of churches, and philanthropical citizens. To law-abiding folk what could be more delightful than the sensation of aiding an oppressed slave, exasperating a cruel master, and at the same time incurring the penalties of defying an unrighteous law?"
Southerners at that time thought that conductors on that line were practising, and readers of the above paragraph will probably think that Dr. Hart in his attractive rhetoric is now extolling in his history, "higher law doctrines."
It is undoubtedly true that, in 1850, a large majority of the Northern people strongly disapproved of the Abolitionists and their methods. Modern historians carefully point out the difference between the great body of Northern anti-slavery people and the Abolitionists. Nevertheless, here were majorities in eleven Northern States voting for, and sustaining, the legislators who passed and kept upon the statute books laws which were intended to enable Southern slaves to escape from their masters. The enactment and the support of these laws was an attack upon the constitutional rights of slave-holders; and Southern people looked upon all the voters who sustained these laws, and all the anti-slavery lecturers, speakers, pulpit orators, and writers of the North, as engaged with the Abolitionists in one common crusade against slavery. From the Southern stand-point a difference between them could only be made by a Hudibras:
He was in logic a great critic
Profoundly skilled in analytic,
He could distinguish and divide
A hair 'twixt South and South West side.
As to how much of the formidable anti-slavery sentiment of that day had been created by the Abolitionists, we have this opinion of a distinguished English traveller and observer. Mr. L. W. A. Johnston was in Washington, in 1850, studying America. He says:
"Extreme men like Garrison seldom have justice done to them. It is true they may be impracticable, both as to their measures and their men, but that unmixed evil is the result of their exertions, all history of opinion in every country, I think, contradicts. Such ultra men are as necessary as the more moderate and reasonable advocates of any growing opinion; and, as an impartial person, who never happened to fall in with one of the party in the course of my tour, I must express my belief that the present wide diffusion of anti-slavery sentiment in the United States is, in no small degree, owing to their exertions."[40]