Mr. Benton did not speak upon this bill at the time of its passage; he had done that before, in a previous stage of the question, and when Mr. Clay proposed to make it a part of his compromise measures. He (Mr. Benton) was opposed to confounding an old subject of constitutional obligation with new and questionable subjects, and was ready to give the subject an independent consideration, and to vote for any bill that should be efficient and satisfactory. He said:
"We have a bill now—an independent one—for the recovery of these slaves. It is one of the oldest on the calendar, and warmly pressed at the commencement of the session. It must be about ripe for decision by this time. I am ready to vote upon it, and to vote any thing under the constitution which will be efficient and satisfactory. It is the only point, in my opinion, at which any of the non-slaveholding States, as States, have given just cause of complaint to the slaveholding States. I leave out individuals and societies, and speak of States in their corporate capacity; and say, this affair of the runaway slaves is the only case in which any of the non-slaveholding States, in my opinion, have given just cause of complaint to the slaveholding States. But, how is it here? Any refusal on the part of the northern members to legislate the remedy? We have heard many of them declare their opinions; and I see no line of east and west dividing the north from the south in these opinions. I see no geographical boundary dividing northern and southern opinions. I see no diversity of opinion but such as occurs in ordinary measures before Congress. For one, I am ready to vote at once for the passage of a fugitive slavery recovery bill; but it must be as a separate and independent measure."
Mr. Benton voted upon the amendments, and to make the bill efficient and satisfactory; but failed to make it either, and would neither vote for it nor against it. It has been worth but little to the slave States in recovering their property, and has been annoying to the free States from the manner of its execution, and is considered a new act, though founded upon that of '93, which is lost and hid under it. The wonder is how such an act came to pass, even by so lean a vote as it received—for it was voted for by less than the number of senators from the slave States alone. It is a wonder how it passed at all, and the wonder increases on knowing that, of the small number that voted for it, many were against it, and merely went along with those who had constituted themselves the particular guardians of the rights of the slave States, and claimed a lead in all that concerned them.
Those self-constituted guardians were permitted to have their own way; some voting with them unwillingly, others not voting at all. It was a part of the plan of "compromise and pacification," which was then deemed essential to save the Union: and under the fear of danger to the Union on one hand, and the charms of pacification and compromise on the other, a few heated spirits got the control, and had things their own way. Under other circumstances—in any season of quiet and tranquillity—the vote of Congress would have been almost general against the complex, cumbersome, expensive, annoying, and ineffective bill that was passed, and in favor of the act (with the necessary amendment) which Washington recommended and signed—which State and Federal judiciaries had sanctioned—which the people had lived under for nearly sixty years, and against which there was no complaint until slavery agitation had become a political game to be played at by parties from both sides of the Union. All public men disavow that game. All profess patriotism. All applaud the patriotic spirit of our ancestors. Then imitate that spirit. Do as these patriotic fathers did—the free States by reviving the sojournment laws which gave safety to the slave property of their fellow-citizens of other States passing through them—the slave States by acting in the spirit of those who enacted the anti-slavery ordinance of 1787, and the Missouri Compromise line of 1820. New York and Pennsylvania are the States to begin, and to revive the sojournment laws which were in force within them for half a century. The man who would stand up in each of these States and propose the revival of these acts, for the same reasons that Messrs. Marcy and Seward opposed their repeal, would give a proof of patriotism which would entitle him to be classed with our patriotic ancestors.
[CHAPTER CXCVIII.]
DISUNION MOVEMENTS: SOUTHERN PRESS AT WASHINGTON: SOUTHERN CONVENTION AT NASHVILLE: SOUTHERN CONGRESS CALLED FOR BY SOUTH CAROLINA AND MISSISSIPPI.
"When the future historian shall address himself to the task of portraying the rise, progress, and decline of the American Union, the year 1850 will arrest his attention, as denoting and presenting the first marshalling and arraying of those hostile forces and opposing elements which resulted in dissolution; and the world will have another illustration of the great truth, that forms and modes of government, however correct in theory, are only valuable as they conduce to the great ends of all government—the peace, quiet, and conscious security of the governed."
So wrote a leading South Carolina paper on the first day of January, 1850—and not without a knowledge of what it was saying. All that was said was attempted, and the catastrophe alone was wanting to complete the task assigned to the future historian.
The manifesto of the forty-two members from the slave States, issued in 1849, was not a brutum fulmen, nor intended to be so. It was intended for action, and was the commencement of action; and regular steps for the separation of the slave from the free States immediately began under it. An organ of disunion, entitled "The Southern Press," was set up at Washington, established upon a contribution of $30,000 from the signers to the Southern manifesto, and their ardent adherents—its daily occupation to inculcate the advantages of disunion, to promote it by inflaming the South against the North, and to prepare it by organizing a Southern concert of action. Southern cities were to recover their colonial superiority in a state of sectional independence; the ships of all nations were to crowd their ports to carry off their rich staples, and bring back ample returns; Great Britain was to be the ally of the new "United States South;" all the slave States were expected to join, but the new confederacy to begin with the South Atlantic States, or even a part of them; and military preparation was to be made to maintain by force what a Southern convention should decree. That convention was called—the same which had been designated in the first manifesto, entitled The Crisis, published in the Charleston Mercury in 1835; and the same which had been repulsed from Nashville in 1844. Fifteen years of assiduous labor produced what could not be started in 1835, and what had been repulsed in 1844. A disunion convention met at Nashville! met at the home of Jackson, but after the grave had become his home.