they enacted those measures that became known as the compromises of 1850, the principal ones being the Fugitive Slave Law and the act repealing the Missouri Compromise. Both of them pronounced these acts to be "a finality," and both of them in national convention declared there should be no further agitation of the subject. They set out to muzzle all the Anti-Slavery voices of the country.
By this time it was perfectly manifest that there was not only nothing the slaveholders might demand which the old parties would not concede, but that there was, so far as the slavery issue was involved, absolutely no difference between them. It is a notable fact that in the eight years following 1840, of the four presidential candidates put in nomination by the two parties, three were slaveholders, the fourth being a Northern "doughface," and both of the two who were elected held slaves.
For the nomination and election of one of these men, whom he describes as "a slaveholder from Louisiana" (General Taylor), Mr. Roosevelt is disposed to hold the Abolitionists accountable. They forced the poor Whigs into those proceedings, he intimates, probably by telling them they ought to do nothing of the kind, that being what they actually did tell them. But as the Abolitionists, four years earlier, in the same way defeated the Whigs when they were supporting a slaveholder from Kentucky (Clay), and a man who, in his time, did more for the upbuilding of slavery than any other person in America, it would appear that the score of responsibility on their part was fairly evened up.
In citing the action of Joshua R. Giddings as an
anti-third-party man, Mr. Roosevelt is not altogether fortunate. Subsequent to the presidential campaign of 1844, the third-party Abolitionists held a convention in Pittsburg, in which Giddings was a leading actor. As chairman of the committee on platform, he submitted a resolution declaring that both of the old parties were "hopelessly corrupt and unworthy of confidence."
The Abolitionists could not see that they were under obligation to either of the old parties, believing they could do far better service for the cause they championed by standing up and being counted as candidates honestly representing their principles. They fought both of the old parties, and finally beat them. They killed the Whig party out and out, and so far crippled the Democrats that they have been limping ever since. Their action, in the long run, as attested by the verdict of results, proved itself to be not only the course of abstract right, but of political expediency.
In 1840, the vote of the third-party Abolitionists, then for the first time in the political field, was 7000; in 1844 it was 60,000, and in 1848 it was nearly 300,000. From that time, with occasional backsets, Mr. Roosevelt's "political criminals" went steadily forward until they mastered the situation. From the first, they were a power in the land, causing the older parties to quake, Belshazzar-like, at sight of their writing on the wall.
But according to Mr. Roosevelt, the men of the Liberty-Free-Soil party had no share in fathering and nurturing the Republican party, to which he assigns all the credit for crushing slavery. Says he, "
The Liberty party was not in any sense the precursor of the Republican party, which was based as much on expediency as on abstract right." It is very true that many Republicans, especially in the earlier days, were neither Abolitionists nor Anti-Slavery people. A good many of them, like Abraham Lincoln, were sentimentally adverse to slavery, but under existing conditions did not want it disturbed. Many of them, having broken loose from the old parties, had no other place of shelter and cared nothing for slavery one way or the other, some being of the opinion of one of the new party leaders whom the writer hereof heard declare that "the niggers are just where they ought to be." All this, however, does not prove that the third-party people were not the real forerunners and founders of the Republican party. They certainly helped to break up the old organizations, crushing them in whole or part. They supplied a contingent of trained and desperately earnest workers, their hearts being enlisted as well as their hands. And what was of still greater consequence, they furnished an issue, and one that was very much alive, around which the detached fragments of the old parties could collect and unite. Their share in the composition and development of the new party can be illustrated. Out in our great midland valley two rivers—the Missouri and the Mississippi—meet and mingle their waters. The Missouri, although the larger stream, after the junction is heard of no more; but being charged with a greater supply of sedimentary matter, gives its color to the combined flood of the assimilated waters. Abolitionism was merged
in Republicanism. It was no longer spoken of as a separate element, but from the beginning it gave color and character to the combination. The whole compound was Abolitionized.