The idea that any of the Southern states resorted to secession because of the loss of the power and patronage of the government is not founded on fact, as neither had ever been used for their special benefit even when in the hands of Southern men, but it was the Northern states whose trade and factories had grown up under the fostering care of the government throughout its whole history, while the schools of the Northwest had been richly endowed from the public lands and the gigantic system of railroads in the same quarter had been built up mainly from grants of this common property.
It has been further alleged that it was the slave power which attempted to break up the government, because of its defeat, and that that power had hitherto controlled the government in its interest. In the first place, it is as well to state that as far as the executive branch of the government was concerned, there had been nothing of which to complain on the part of the Southern people. The great difficulty had been with the legislative department, which always manifested a disposition, more or less, to be aggressive on the subject of slavery, and the Southern people looked to the executive to interpose its conservative influence. The preponderance of Northern men in Congress, already increased by the admission of Oregon and Minnesota, and soon further to be increased by the admission of Kansas, had become so great, that the only hope of the South was in the executive, and when that branch of the government was also sectionalized, there was no safety for the weaker section. The people of the South had never asked the government to protect slavery; they had merely asked that it should be let alone, and left where the Constitution left it.
In entering the Union, they had stipulated for a government for certain general purposes, and not one to regulate their domestic affairs; and they claimed that the government should be confined to the purposes for which it was instituted. That government had in no way acted so as to strengthen slavery, and it had not been able to comply with the express stipulation for the return of fugitive slaves. Slavery had been excluded from an immense territory by the action of the government, but it had not been carried to one foot of territory by that action. All of the new states east of the Mississippi, except Florida, had been formed out of territory originally belonging to the slave states, and they had been admitted into the Union under that provision of the Constitution which declared that such states should be admitted upon the same footing in every respect with the original states and to add to this obligation not to interfere with their domestic institutions, the states ceding the territory had expressly stipulated that there should be no interference with slavery.
Louisiana came in by treaty as slave territory, and with a stipulation for the protection of the people in their property. Out of that territory, three slave states had been formed, and they were the last there was any prospect of forming; while the free states of Iowa, Oregon and Minnesota had already been admitted from the same territory with the prospect of the speedy admission of Kansas and Nebraska and the not remote prospect of an indefinite number of other free states from the same territory. Texas had come in as a state from the condition of an independent republic and the measures leading to her admission had resulted in the acquisition and admission of California as a free state with a prospect of more free states from the territory acquired. So that in every case of the introduction of new slave territory into the Union, there had been largely more than equivalent in territory for the formation of free states except in the case of the slave territory of Florida; and when that was acquired the vastly larger and more important slave territory of Texas had been surrendered. It is not a fact, then, in any sense of the term, that the government had been used for the protection and growth of the slave power. That power, if it might be called such, was relatively stronger the day the Constitution was formed than it was ever afterwards.
[CHAPTER VII]
Injurious Effect of Misinformation
In connection with this claim of the slave power were the most shocking misrepresentations of the condition of the slaves themselves and of the social relations of the Southern people, in order to array the prejudices of the world against their cause. This course of misrepresentation had long been pursued before the war, and was not confined to American writers, but many works appeared from the British press containing libels upon the society of the Southern states and false views of slavery as established there. Such works in both countries were evidently written by persons with prejudiced minds or who knew little practically of slavery as it existed in the South. Such was the intolerance of the public sentiment which had been fostered in both countries upon the subject, that no candid and impartial account of the workings of domestic slavery as it existed in the Southern states would be received with the slightest favor, whilst the exaggerated accounts of cruelty practiced by the slave-owners, and consequent sufferings of the slaves were eagerly accepted as the truth.
A very striking evidence of this prejudice was furnished by the reception given to the works of two female writers not many years since. The one, Miss Harriett Beecher, later Mrs. Stowe, wrote a work of fiction called "Uncle Tom's Cabin," containing misrepresentations of slavery and slanders upon Southern society. Drawing upon a fertile imagination and pandering to the prejudices of the uninformed, she published the book, which had a great run in Europe as well as America, and was translated into almost all of the continental languages. The incidents contained in the book were either erroneous in point of fact or greatly exaggerated, but the book itself was still more untrue as a picture of Southern society and slavery, and would have been a misrepresentation if every fact contained in it had been true in isolated cases. But the book was received as a true and faithful picture of society and slavery in the South, not merely by the agitators of abolition, but by that very considerable class of persons in the world who allow others to do their thinking, and when the authoress visited Great Britain, she was treated with great attention and extensively feted by the nobility, gentry and others. The view of Southern slavery which she drew is perhaps accepted by nine-tenths of the otherwise well informed persons in Europe.