The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences: Four Periods of American History

by Hilary A. Herbert

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" lives to-day as a classic on book shelves and as a popular play. The present generation get most of their opinions about slavery as it was in the South from its pages, and not one in ten thousand of those who read it ever thinks of the inconsistency between the picture of slavery drawn there and that other picture, which all the world now knows of—the Confederate soldier away in the army, his wife and children at home faithfully protected by slaves—not a case of violence, not even a single established case, during four years, although there were four millions of negroes in the South, of that crime against white women that, after the reconstruction had demoralized the freedmen, became so common in that section.

The unwavering fidelity during the four years of war of so many slaves to the families of their absent masters, and the fact that those who, during that war, left their homes to seek their freedom invariably went without doing any vengeful act, is a phenomenon that speaks for itself. It tells of kindly relations between master and slave. It is not to be denied that where the law gave so much power to the master there were individual instances of cruelty, nor is it supposable that there were not many slaves who were revengeful; but at the same time there was, quite naturally, among slaves who were all in like case, a more clannish and all-pervading public opinion than could have been found elsewhere. It was that all-pervading and rigid standard of kindly feeling among the slaves to their masters that made the rule universal—fidelity toward the master's family, at least to the extent of inflicting no injury.

What a surprise to many this conduct of the slave was may be gathered from a telling Republican speech made by Carl Schurz during the campaign of 1860.[54] A devotee of liberty, recently a revolutionist in his native land, and, like other foreigners, disregarding all constitutional obstacles, Mr. Schurz had naturally espoused the cause of anti-slavery in this country. He had absorbed the views of his political associates and now contended that secession was an empty threat and that secession was impossible. "The mere anticipation of a negro insurrection," he said, "will paralyze the whole South." And, after ridiculing the alarm created by the John Brown invasion, the orator said that in case of a war between the South and the North, "they will not have men enough to quiet their friends at home; what will they have to oppose to the enemy? Every township will want its home regiment; every plantation its garrison; and what will be left for its field army?"

Slavery in the South eventually proved to be, instead of a weakness, an element of strength to the Confederates, and Mr. Lincoln finally felt himself compelled to issue his proclamation of emancipation as a military necessity—the avowed purpose being to deprive the Confederates of the slaves who were by their labor supporting their armies in the field.

The faithfulness during the war of the slave to his master has been a lesson to the Northerner, and it has been a lesson, too, to the Southerner. It argues that the danger of bloody insurrections was perhaps not as great as had been apprehended where incendiary publications were sent among them. That danger, however, did exist, and if the fear of it was exaggerated, it was nevertheless real, and was traceable to the Abolitionists.

The rights of the South in the territories had now been discussed for years and Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois, had reached the conclusion that under the Constitution Southerner and Northerner had exactly the same right to carry their property, whatever it might be, into the territories, which had been purchased with the common blood and treasure of both sections, a view afterward sustained by the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred Scott case. Douglas, "entirely of his own motion,"[55] introduced, and Congress passed, such a bill—the Kansas-Nebraska act. The new act replaced the Missouri Compromise. This the Southerners considered had been a dead letter for years. Every "personal liberty" law passed by a Northern State was a violation of it.

Ambition was now playing its part in the sectional controversy. Douglas was a Democrat looking to the presidency and had here made a bid for Southern support. On the other hand was Seward, an "old line Whig," aspiring to the same office. The South had been the dominant element in national politics and the North was getting tired of it. Seward's idea was to organize all the anti-slavery voters and to appeal at the same time to the pride and jealousy of the North as a section.

The immediate effect of the Kansas-Nebraska act was to aggravate sectionalism. It opened up the territory of Kansas, allowing it to come into the Union with or without slavery, as it might choose. Slave State and free State adventurers rushed into the new territory and struggled, and even fought, for supremacy. The Southerners lost. Their resources could not match the means of organized anti-slavery societies, and the result was an increase, North and South, of sectional animosity.

The overwhelming defeat of the old Whig party in 1852 presaged its dissolution. Until that election, both the Whig and Democratic parties had been national, each endeavoring to hold and acquire strength, North and South, and each combating, as best it could, the spirit of sectionalism that had been steadily growing in the North, and South as well, ever since the rise of Abolitionism. Both these old parties had watched with anxiety the increase of anti-slavery sentiment in the North. Both parties feared it. Alliance with the anti-slavery North would deprive a party of support South and denationalize it. For years prior to 1852 the drift of Northern voters who were opposed to slavery had been as to the two national parties toward the Whigs, and the tendency of conservative Northerners had been toward the Democratic party. Thus the great body of the Whig voters in the North had become imbued with anti-slavery sentiments, and now, with no hope of victory as a national party and left in a hopeless minority, the majority of that old party in that section were ready to join a sectional party when it should be formed two years later. William H. Seward was still a Whig when he made in the United States Senate his anti-slavery "higher law" speech of 1850.

The Kansas-Nebraska act was a political blunder. The South, on any dispassionate consideration, could not have expected to make Kansas a slave State. The act was a blunder, too, because it gave the opponents of the Democratic party a plausible pretext for the contention, which they put forth then and which has been persisted in till this day, that the new Republican party, immediately thereafter organized, was called into existence by, and only by, the Kansas-Nebraska act.