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

by Hilary A. Herbert

One of the great evils of slavery was that, as a rule, neither the slave-holder nor the non-slave-holder properly appreciated the dignity of labor. A witty student at a Southern university said that his chief objection to college life was that he could not have a negro to learn his lessons for him. The slave-holder quite generally disdained manual labor, and the non-slave-holder was also inclined to deprecate the necessity that compelled him to work.

The sudden abolition of slavery was the ruin of thousands of innocent families—a loss for which there was no recompense. But for the South at large, and especially to this generation, it is a blessing that all classes have come to see, that to labor and to be useful is not only a duty, but a privilege.

Political conditions, North and South, differed widely. The North was the majority section. Its majority could protect its rights; recourse to the limitations of the Federal Constitution was seldom necessary. The South, a minority section, with a devotion that never failed, held high the "Constitution of the fathers, the palladium" of its rights. To one section the Constitution was the bond of a Federal Union that was the security for interstate commerce and national prosperity; to the other it was a guaranty of peace abroad and local self-government at home. In the one section the brightest minds were for the most part engaged in business or in literary pursuits; in the other, politics absorbed much of its talent. In the North the staple of political discussion was usually some business or moral question, while in the South the political arena was a great school in which the masses were not only educated in the history of the formation of the Constitution, but taught an affectionate regard for that instrument as a revered "gift from the fathers" and the only safeguard of American liberty. Joint political discussions, which were common between the ablest men of opposing parties, were always numerously attended, and the Federal Constitution was an unfailing topic. The result was, an amount of political information in the average Confederate soldier that the average Union soldier in his business training had never acquired, and a devotion of the Southerner to the Constitution of his country which even the ablest historians of to-day have failed to comprehend.

It is often stated, as if it were an important fact in the consideration of the great anti-slavery crusade, that not many of the Abolitionists were as radical as Garrison, and that of the anti-slavery voters very few favored social equality between whites and blacks. Southerners did not stop to make distinctions like these. They saw the Abolitionists advocating mixed schools and favoring laws authorizing mixed marriages; saw them practising social equality; saw the general trend in that direction; and so from its very beginning the Republican party, which had absorbed the Abolitionists, was dubbed, North and South, the "Black Republican" party.

The whites of the South believed that the triumph of the "Black Republican" party, as they called it, would be ultimately the triumph of its most radical elements. Judge Reagan, of Texas, United States congressman in 1860-61, Confederate Postmaster-General, later United States senator, and always until 1860 an avowed friend of the Union, in his farewell speech to the Congress of the United States in January, 1861, gave expression to this idea when he said:

"And now you tender to us the inhuman alternative of unconditional submission to Republican rule on abolition principles, and ultimately to free negro equality, and a government of mongrels, or a war of races on the one hand, and on the other, secession and a bloody and desolating civil war."[71]

Judge Reagan was expressing in Congress the opinion that animated the Confederate soldier in the war that was to follow secession, an opinion the ex-Confederate did not see much reason to change when the era of Reconstruction had been reached, and the ballot had been given to every negro, while the leading whites were disfranchised.

In 1857 Hinton Rowan Helper, of North Carolina, wrote a notable book to show that slavery was a curse to the South, and especially to the non-slave-holders. It was an appeal to the latter to become Abolitionists. His arguments availed nothing; back of his book was the Republican party, now planting itself, as Garrison had planted himself, on an extract from the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, "all men are created equal." The Republican contention was, in platforms and speeches, that the Declaration of Independence covered negroes as well as whites,[72] and Southern whites, nearly all of Revolutionary stock, resented the idea. They rebelled at the suggestion that the signers, every one of whom, save possibly those from Massachusetts, represented slave-holding constituents, intended to say that the negroes then in the colonies were the equals of the whites. If so, why were these negroes kept in slavery, and why were they not immediately given the right to vote, to sit on juries, to be educated, and to intermarry with the whites?

All this, the Southerners said, as, indeed, did many Northerners also, was to be the logical outcome of the Republican doctrine, that negroes and whites were equals. It is passing strange that modern historians so often have failed to note that this thought was in the minds of all the opponents of the Republican party from the day of its birth—North and South it was called the "Black Republican" party. Douglas, in his debate with Lincoln, gave it that name and stood by it. In his speech at Jonesboro, Illinois, September 15, 1858, he charges the Republicans with advocating "negro citizenship and negro equality, putting the white man and the negro on the same basis under the law."[73]

John C. Calhoun, in a memorial to the Southern people in 1849, signed by many other congressmen, had said that Northern fanaticism would not stop at emancipation. "Another step would be taken to raise them [the negroes] to a political and social equality with their former owners, by giving them the right of voting and holding public office under the Federal Government.... But when raised to an equality they would become the fast political associates of the North, acting and voting with them on all questions, and by this perfect union between them holding the South in complete subjection. The blacks and the profligate whites that might unite with them would become the principal recipients of Federal patronage, and would, in consequence, be raised above the whites of the South in the social and political scale. We would, in a word, change conditions with them, a degradation greater than has as yet fallen to the lot of a free and enlightened people."[74]