The origin and the present necessity of the Free Soil party may be briefly stated. Some years previous to the annexation of Texas, an apprehension existed that that great breach of the constitution and outrage upon northern principles and feelings were meditated. Mr. John Quincy Adams sounded the alarm; but men were so engrossed by their business, and by their paltry local and temporary political strifes, that even his voice, potent and prophetic as it was, passed by unheeded. Some respect, however, was due, at least from policy if not from principle, to the many humble but earnest opponents of so flagrant a wrong. Before the consummation of that iniquity, the Massachusetts legislature passed strong resolutions against it. The question was taken by yeas and nays, and all the Whigs and almost all the Democrats in the general court recorded their names on the side of the constitution and liberty. But the slave power then had possession of all the departments of the national government, and under the auspices of a slaveholding President, a breach was made in the walls of the constitution wide enough to let in a foreign government, with all its burden of slavery on its back. Yet, notwithstanding this perfidy to all the principles of a true democracy, such was the external pressure brought to bear upon the members of the Democratic party, that but few of them abandoned its ranks. They “acquiesced,” as the modern phrase is, when any thing specially iniquitous is to be sanctioned. They were told, as the Whigs are now told in regard to the compromise and the Fugitive Slave law, that the act was done and irrevocable. The merchants were told, as the Whig merchants now are, that the crime of extending slavery would at least be attended by increased profits of trade. The manufacturers were told, as the Whig manufacturers now are, that if the number of slaves were increased at the south, it must create an increased demand for whips and negro cloths. And the mere blind political partisans were told, as the same class of Whigs are now, that if God designed to stop the heaven-defying enormity of spreading slavery over this continent, he must do it in some way consistent with the integrity of the Democratic party. Precisely the arguments which were then used to seduce and corrupt the Democratic party into “acquiescence” are used by leading Whigs and Whig presses now for the same unhallowed purpose. They are alike, except that in the one case there was the crime of originality, and in the other, the meanness of plagiarism.
But from the fatal day of the annexation of Texas, thousands and thousands of honest and intelligent Democrats, though still remaining true to what they believed to be the principles of the party, became alienated from its leaders. From that day, the claims of the party lay lightly, but the sins of the party heavily, upon their souls; and some there were who, like Daniel of old, went into their chambers three times every day, and, throwing open the windows which looked towards the Jerusalem of liberty, prayed aloud to the true God, although within hearing of the wild beasts which had been prepared to devour them.
The Whig party at the north, and particularly in Massachusetts, flourished under the reäction of the Texas fraud. Some of its leaders, it is true, shouted a welcome to Texas, though yet afar off; and, even while she stood outside of the Union, they threw their arms around her blood-besmeared form, hideous as Milton’s picture of Sin, with all her hell-hound progeny of future slave states howling in her womb, and gave her a fraternal embrace; and when the time came, they were also ready to vote men and money,—human blood and human souls,—for the robber atrocities of the Mexican war, which a majority of the House of Representatives in Congress, on motion of Mr. Ashmun, of Massachusetts, declared to be “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced.” My friends, in your observations of men, you will find there are some moral nonentities,—political availabilities though they may be,—who can listen most sanctimoniously to the Saint Stephens, when they prophesy, and then hold the clothes of the Lynchers who stone them to death.
During all this period, however, the managers and the presses of the Whig party discoursed and printed very edifying anti-slavery homilies. As the harvest months came on, an anti-slavery zeal became an epidemic among them; and sporadic cases happened at other times, depending upon the days and places appointed by the governor and council for special elections. Every body remembers how the Boston Atlas used to stir up the pure minds of the Democratic party by way of remembrance, by publishing,—periodically, as they say, and sometimes oftener,—the names of those Democratic senators or representatives in our general court who had voted for freedom and against Texas, in order to show their flagrant inconsistency in still adhering to a party that had been false to liberty. That paper has done some good service to our cause, especially in holding up for a long time the Fugitive Slave act to reprobation, while the other Whig presses in the city were daily striving to hide its atrocities from public view, and to defend what they could not hide. I trust the reluctant and struggling editors of that paper are not to be overcome by the mammon of slavery, whatever disguises it may assume or compulsion it may use. I trust the slave power will never be able to use towards them the language which hell’s portress addressed to Satan:—
“At first they called me Sin, and for a sign
Portentous held me; but, familiar grown,
I pleased, and with attractive graces won
The most averse; thee chiefly.”
Those prosperous days of the Massachusetts Whigs continued until 1848. They thrived in basket and in store, until, like Jeshurun, they waxed fat, and, at least in the fourth and fifth congressional districts, they performed some very hard kicking. Then came the nomination of General Taylor. General Taylor was a Louisiana slaveholder. He had been the hero of the Florida war,—as great an outrage against a race as ever Rome or Russia committed. He had been a prominent, and, as many believed, a willing instrument in spilling the innocent blood of a sister republic. Even should the executive divest him of military command, or he should grow too old for service, it was universally known that there was a full black battalion on his own plantation which he would always command. The south demanded his nomination absolutely. They would hear no terms, and would offer no terms. In the northern canvass it was strongly asserted that he had written a letter, saying in so many words that he would not veto the Wilmot proviso; but that letter was so warily kept in a certain unmentionable part of a Whig merchant’s wardrobe, that neither Mesmerizers nor spiritual rappers could read it aloud to the people.
Hence all omens foreboded evil. Those which we looked for on the earth augured ill to our earthly interests; and those which we looked for above were in the wrong quarter of the heavens. The character of many of General Taylor’s friends brought distrust upon himself. He owed his election far more to the repulsion which good men felt towards his opponent, [General Cass,] than to any attraction they had towards him.