Mr. Webster in his great speech for "the Constitution and the Union," as became a great statesman pleading for conciliation, measured the terms in which he condemned "personal liberty" laws and Abolitionism. But afterward, irritated by the attacks made upon him, he naturally spoke out more emphatically. McMaster quotes several expressions from his speeches and letters replying to these assaults, and says: "His hatred of Abolitionists and Free-soilers grew stronger and stronger. To him these men were a 'band of sectionalists, narrow of mind, wanting in patriotism, without a spark of national feeling, and quite ready to see the Union go to pieces if their own selfish ends were gained.'" Such, if this is a fair summing up of his views, was Webster's final opinion of those who were carrying on the great anti-slavery crusade.[52]
CHAPTER VII
EFFORTS FOR PEACE
The desire for peace in 1850 was wide-spread. Union loving people, North and South, hoped that the Compromise would result in a cessation of the strife that had so long divided the section; and the election of Franklin Pierce, in 1852, as President, on a platform strongly approving that Compromise, was promising. But anti-slavery leaders, instead of being convinced by such arguments as those of Webster, were deeply offended by the contention that legislators, in passing personal liberty laws, had violated their oaths to support the Constitution. They were angered also by the presumptuous attempt to "arrest the whole anti-slavery movement."
The new fugitive slave law was stringent; it did not give jury trial; it required bystanders to assist the officers in "slave-catching," etc. For these and other reasons the law was assailed as unconstitutional. All these contentions were overruled by the Supreme Court when a case eventually came before it. The court decided that the act was, in all its provisions, fully authorized by the Constitution.[53] But in their present mood, no law that was efficient would have been satisfactory to the multitudes of people, by no means all "Abolitionists," who had already made up their minds against the "wicked" provision of the Constitution that required the delivery of fugitive slaves. This deep-seated feeling of opposition to the return to their masters of escaping slaves was soon to be wrought up to a high pitch by a novel that went into nearly every household throughout the North—"Uncle Tom's Cabin." On its appearance the poet Whittier, who had so ferociously attacked Webster in the verses quoted in the last chapter, "offered up thanks for the fugitive slave law, for it gave us 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"
Rufus Choate, a celebrated lawyer and Whig leader, is reported to have said of "Uncle Tom's Cabin": "That book will make two millions of Abolitionists." Drawing, as it did, a very dark picture of slavery, it aroused sympathy for the escaping slave and pictured in glowing colors the dear, sweet men and women who dared, for his sake, the perils of the road in the darkness of night and all the dangers of the law. Mrs. Stowe was making heroes of law-breakers, preaching the higher law.
Mrs. Stowe declared she had not written the book for political effect; she certainly did not anticipate the marvellous results that followed it. That book made vast multitudes of its readers ready for the new sectional and anti-slavery party that was to be organized two years after its appearance. It was the most famous and successful novel ever written. It was translated into every language that has a literature, and has been more read by American people than any other book except the Bible. As a picture of what was conceivable under the laws relating to slavery there was a basis for it. Though there were laws limiting the master's power, cruelty was nevertheless possible.
Here, then, Mrs. Stowe's imagination had full scope. Her book, however, has in it none of the strident harshness, none of the purblind ferocity of Garrison, in whose eyes every slave-holder was a fiend. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" assailed a system; it did not assault personally, as the arch-agitator did, every man and woman to whom slaves had come, whether by choice or chance. Light and shadow and the play of human nature made Mrs. Stowe's picture as attractive in many of its pages as it was repulsive and unfair in others. Mrs. Shelby was a type of many a noble mistress, a Christian woman, and when financial misfortunes compelled the sale of the Shelby slaves and the separation of families, we have not only what might have been, but what sometimes was, one of the evils of slavery, which, by reason of the prevailing agitation, the humanity of the age could not remedy. But Mrs. Stowe's slave-master, Legree, was impossible. The theory was inconceivable that it was cheaper to work to death in seven years a slave costing a thousand dollars, than to work him for forty years. Millions of our people, however, have accepted "Uncle Tom" as a fact, and have wept over him; they have accepted also as a fact the monster Legree.