The Middle Period, 1817-1858

by John William Burgess

CHAPTER XI.

ABOLITION

[The Philosophy of Abolition]—[William Lloyd Garrison]—[The Civil Status under the Constitution of 1787]—[Points at which Slavery Could be Legally Attacked]—[Garrison's Methods]—[The Southampton Massacre]—[The Attempt to Suppress the Abolition Movement at the North]—[Growth of the Abolition Movement]—[The Methods of the Moderate Abolitionists]—[The Abolition Petitions]—[The Earlier Method of Dealing with the Petitions]—[Beginning of the Conflict over the Abolition Petitions]—[The New Method for Dealing with Petitions in the House of Representatives]—[True View of the Right of Petition]—[Mr. Polk's Fatal Error in Regard to the Right of Petition]—[The Pinckney Resolutions]—[The New Rule of the House of Representatives in Regard to the Abolition Petitions]—[The Increase of Petitions, and the Denunciation of the Pinckney Rule]—[The Final Denial of the Right of Petition on the Subject of Slavery by the House of Representatives]—[The Abolition Petitions in the Senate]—[Mr. Rives and Mr. Calhoun in Regard to the Morality of Slavery]—[Mr. Calhoun's Resolutions in Regard to the Political Relations of Slavery]—[The Anti-Slavery Petition from the Vermont Legislature]—[The Abolition Documents and the United States Mails]—[The Postmaster-General's Ruling in Regard to the Abolition Documents in the Mails]—[Jackson on the Use of the Mails by the Abolitionists]—[Mr. Calhoun's Report and Bill on the Subject]—[Clay's Criticism of Calhoun's Proposition]—[The Act of Congress Protecting the Abolition Documents in the Mails]—[General Results of the Struggle over the Right of Petition and the Freedom of the Mails.]

The ends of the state.

When a state has fairly accomplished the primal end of establishing its governmental system, its public policy will be found to be pursuing, in ultimate generalization, two great all-comprehending purposes, namely, national development and universal human progress. Rarely, if ever, will any state be found to have succeeded in so balancing these two principal objects of its public policy as to make the resultant of its two main lines of progress follow an unchanging angle. At one period, the principle of national development will prevail, even to the point of national exclusiveness; at another, an enthusiastic humanism will almost threaten the existence of national distinctions. But in all the convulsions of political history, described as advance and reaction, the scientific student of history is able to discover that the zigzags of progress are ever bearing in the general direction which the combined impulses toward nationalism and humanism compel.

The purposes of the state, as seen in the history of the United States.

After the humanitarian outburst of the revolutionary period in the latter part of the eighteenth century had expended its force, the states of the world veered in their policies toward the line of national development. The United States, which had been excessively humanitarian during that period, both in its doctrine of rights and in its policy, became, in the succeeding period, the first three decades of the nineteenth century, more and more national in disposition and in practice, until industrial exclusiveness and race domination appeared, at the close of the period, to be the sole principles of the policy of the country.

Had the two elements of this policy been equally, or almost equally, sustained throughout the whole country, there is little question that the human purpose, the world-purpose, as Hegel calls it, of state existence, would have been ignored to a higher degree, and for a longer period, than it was. But curiously and fortunately, the race domination in the South produced economic conditions which demanded trade and commerce with the world, and which finally forced upon the North the conviction that the cause of those conditions—race domination, slavery—must be removed, in order to secure the industrial interests of the North against the competition of the world's markets. The destruction of that domination must proceed, however, upon a humanitarian principle, namely, the right of man to personal liberty. Thus it clearly appears that the two elements of the national exclusiveness of the United States in 1830 were, in the peculiar relation which finally obtained between them, preparing the nation for a new advance in the direction of world intercourse and human rights.

The Revolution of 1830.