The Great Conspiracy, Volume 5

by John Alexander Logan

They had also learned the valuable lesson that the single issue of Free-Trade was not sufficiently strong of itself to unite all the Southern States in a determination to secede, and thus dissolve the Union. They saw they must agitate some other issue to unify the South more thoroughly and justify Disunion. On looking over the whole field they concluded that the Slavery question would best answer their purpose, and they adopted it.

It was doubtless a full knowledge of the fact that they had adopted it, that led Jackson to make the declaration, heretofore in these pages given, which has been termed "prophetic." At any rate, thenceforth the programme of the Conspirators was to agitate the Slavery question in all ways possible, so as to increase, extend and solidify the influence and strength of the Slave power; strain the bonds uniting them with the Free States; and weaken the Free States by dividing them upon the question. At the same time the Free-Trade question was to be pressed forward to a triumphal issue, so that the South might be enriched and strengthened, and the North impoverished and weakened, by the result.

That was their programme, in the rough, and it was relentlessly adhered to. Free-Trade and Slavery by turns, if not together, from that time onward, were ever at the front, agitating our People both North and South, and not only consolidating the Southern States on those lines, as the Conspirators designed, but also serving ultimately to consolidate, to some extent—in a manner quite unlooked for by the Conspirators—Northern sentiment, on the opposite lines of Protection and Freedom.

The Compromise Tariff Act of 1833—which Clay was weak enough to concede, and even stout old Jackson to permit to become law without his signature—gave to the Conspirators great joy for years afterward, as they witnessed the distress and disaster brought by it to Northern homes and incomes—not distress and disaster alone, but absolute and apparently irreparable ruin.

The reaction occasioned by this widespread ruin having brought the Whigs into power, led to the enactment of the Protective-Tariff of 1842 and—to the chagrin of the Conspirators—industrial prosperity and plenty to the Free North again ensued.

Even as Cain hated his brother Abel because his sacrifices were acceptable in the sight of God, while his own were not, so the Southern Conspirators, and other Slave-owners also, had, by this time, come to hate the Northern free-thinking, free-acting, freedom-loving mechanic and laboring man, because the very fact and existence of his Godgiven Freedom and higher-resulting civilization was a powerful and perpetual protest against the—abounding iniquities and degradations of Slavery as practiced by themselves.

Hence, by trickery, by cajoling the People With his, and their own, assurances that he was in favor of Protection—they secured the election in 1844 of a Free-Trade President, the consequent repeal of the Protective-Tariff of 1842—which had repaired the dreadful mischief wrought by the Compromise Act of 1833—and the enactment of the infamous Free-Trade Tariff of 1846, which blasted the manufacturing and farming and trade industries of the Country again, as with fire.

The discovery of the great gold fields of California, and the enormous amount of the precious metal poured by her for many succeeding years into the lap of the Nation, alone averted what otherwise would inevitably have been total ruin. As it was, in 1860, the National credit had sunk to a lower point than ever before in all its history. It was confessedly bankrupt, and ruin stalked abroad throughout the United States.

But while, with rapid pen, the carrying out of that part of the Southern Conspirators' Disunion programme which related to Free-Trade, is thus brought again to mind, the other part of that programme, which related to Slavery, must not be neglected or overlooked. On this question they had determined, as we have seen, to agitate without ceasing—having in view, primarily, as already hinted, the extension of Slave territory and the resulting increase of Slave power in the Land; and, ulteriorly, the solidifying of that power, and Disunion of the Republic, with a view to its conversion into an Oligarchy, if not a Monarchy.

The bitterness of the struggle over the admission of Missouri as a Slave State in 1820, under the Missouri Compromise, was to be revived by the Conspirators, at the earliest possible moment.