The Garrisonian programme would undoubtedly have been considered highly objectionable by the South, even under to comparatively colorless slavery policy of 1790. Under the conditions to which cotton culture had advanced in 1830, it seemed to the South nothing less than a proposal to destroy, root and branch, the whole industry of that section, and it was received with corresponding indignation. Garrisonian abolitionists were taken and regarded as public enemies, and rewards were even offered for their capture. The germ of abolitionism in the Border States found a new and aggressive public sentiment arrayed against it; and an attempt to introduce gradual abolition in Virginia in 1832-33 was hopelessly defeated. The new question was even carried into Congress. A bill to prohibit the transportation of abolition documents by the Post-Office department was introduced, taken far enough to put leading men of both parties on the record, and then dropped. Petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia were met by rules requiring the reference of such petitions without reading or action; but this only increased the number of petitions, by providing a new grievance to be petitioned against, and in 1842 the "gag rule" was rescinded. Thence-forth the pro-slavery members of Congress could do nothing, and could only become more exasperated under a system of passive resistance.
Even at the North, indifferent or politically hostile as it had hitherto shown itself to the expansion of slavery, the new doctrines were received with an outburst of anger which seems to have been primarily a revulsion against their unheard of individualism. If nothing, which had been the object of unquestioning popular reverence, from the Constitution down or up to the church organizations, was to be sacred against the criticism of the Garrisonians, it was certain that the innovators must submit for a time to a general proscription. Thus the Garrisonians were ostracised socially, and became the Ishmalites of politics. Their meetings were broken up by mobs, their halls were destroyed, their schools were attacked by all the machinery of society and legislation, their printing presses were silenced by force or fraud, and their lecturers came to feel that they had not done their work with efficiency if a meeting passed without the throwing of stones or eggs at the building or the orators. It was, of course, inevitable that such a process should bring strong minds to the aid of the Garrisonians, at first from sympathy with persecuted individualism, and finally from sympathy with the cause itself; and in this way Garrisonianism was in a great measure relieved from open mob violence about 1840, though it never escaped it altogether until abolition meetings ceased to be necessary. One of the first and greatest reinforcements was the appearance of Wendell Phillips, whose speech at Faneuil Hall in 1839 was one of the first tokens of a serious break in the hitherto almost unanimous public opinion against Garrisonianism. Lovejoy, a Western anti-slavery preacher and editor, who had been driven from one place to another in Missouri and Illinois, had finally settled at Alton, and was there shot to death while defending his printing press against a mob. At a public meeting in Faneuil Hall, the Attorney-General of Massachusetts, James T. Austin, expressing what was doubtless the general sentiment of the time as to such individual insurrection against pronounced public opinion, compared the Alton mob to the Boston "tea-party," and declared that Lovejoy, "presumptuous and imprudent," had "died as the fool dieth." Phillips, an almost unknown man, took the stand, and answered in the speech which opens this volume. A more powerful reinforcement could hardly have been looked for; the cause which could find such a defender was henceforth to be feared rather than despised. To the day of his death he was, fully as much as Garrison, the incarnation of the anti-slavery spirit. For this reason his address on the Philosophy of the Abolition Movement, in 1853, has been assigned a place as representing fully the abolition side of the question, just before it was overshadowed by the rise of the Republican party, which opposed only the extension of slavery to the territories.
The history of the sudden development of the anti-slavery struggle in 1847 and the following years, is largely given in the speeches which have been selected to illustrate it. The admission of Texas to the Union in 1845, and the war with Mexico which followed it, resulted in the acquisition of a vast amount of new territory by the United States. From the first suggestion of such an acquisition, the Wilmot proviso (so-called from David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, who introduced it in Congress), that slavery should be prohibited in the new territory, was persistently offered as an amendment to every bill appropriating money for the purchase of territory from Mexico. It was passed by the House of Representatives, but was balked in the Senate; and the purchase was finally made without any proviso. When the territory came to be organized, the old question came up again: the Wilmot proviso was offered as an amendment. As the territory was now in the possession of the United States, and as it had been acquired in a war whose support had been much more cordial at the South than at the North, the attempt to add the Wilmot proviso to the territorial organization raised the Southern opposition to an intensity which it had not known before. Fuel was added to the flame by the application of California, whose population had been enormously increased by the discovery of gold within her limits, for admission as a free State. If New Mexico should do the same, as was probable, the Wilmot proviso would be practically in force throughout the best portion of the Mexican acquisition. The two sections were now so strong and so determined that compromise of any kind was far more difficult than in 1820; and it was not easy to reconcile or compromise the southern demand that slavery should be permitted, and the northern demand that slavery should be forbidden, to enter the new territories.
In the meantime, the Presidential election of 1848 had come and gone. It had been marked by the appearance of a new party, the Free Soilers, an event which was at first extremely embarrassing to the managers of both the Democratic and Whig parties. On the one hand, the northern and southern sections of the Whig party had always been very loosely joined together, and the slender tie was endangered by the least admission of the slavery issue. On the other hand, while the Democratic national organization had always been more perfect, its northern section had always been much more inclined to active anti-slavery work than the northern Whigs. Its organ, the Democratic Review, habitually spoke of the slaves as "our black brethren"; and a long catalogue could be made of leaders like Chase, Hale, Wilmot, Bryant, and Leggett, whose democracy was broad enough to include the negro. To both parties, therefore, the situation was extremely hazardous. The Whigs had less to fear, but were able to resist less pressure. The Democrats were more united, but were called upon to meet a greater danger. In the end, the Whigs did nothing; their two sections drew further apart; and the Presidential election of 1852 only made it evident that the national Whig party was no longer in existence. The Democratic managers evolved, as a solution of their problem, the new doctrine of "popular sovereignty," which Calhoun re-baptized "squatter sovereignty." They asserted as the true Democratic doctrine, that the question of slavery or freedom was to be left for decision of the people of the territory itself. To the mass of northern Democrats, this doctrine was taking enough to cover over the essential nature of the struggle; the more democratic leaders of the northern Democracy were driven off into the Free-Soil party; and Douglas, the champion of "popular sovereignty," became the leading Democrat of the North.
Clay had re-entered the Senate in 1849, for the purpose of compromising the sectional difficulties as he had compromised those of 1820 and of 1833. His speech, as given, will show something of his motives; his success resulted in the "compromise of 1850." By its terms, California was admitted as a free State; the slave trade, but not slavery, was prohibited in the District of Columbia; a more stringent fugitive slave law was enacted; Texas was paid $10,000,000 for certain claims to the Territory of New Mexico; and the Territories of Utah and New Mexico, covering the Mexican acquisition outside of California, were organized without mentioning slavery. The last-named feature was carefully designed to please all important factions. It could be represented to the Webster Whigs that slavery was excluded from the Territories named by the operation of natural laws; to the Clay Whigs that slavery had already been excluded by Mexican law which survived the cession; to the northern Democrats, that the compromise was a formal endorsement of the great principle of popular sovereignty; and to the southern Democrats that it was a repudiation of the Wilmot proviso. In the end, the essence of the success went to the last-named party, for the legislatures of the two territories established slavery, and no bill to veto their action could pass both Houses of Congress until after 1861.
The Supreme Court had already decided that Congress had exclusive power to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution, though the fugitive slave law of 1793 had given a concurrent authority of execution to State officers. The law of 1850, carrying the Supreme Court's decision further, gave the execution of the law to United States officers, and refused the accused a hearing. Its execution at the North was therefore the occasion of a profound excitement and horror. Cases of inhuman cruelty, and of false accusation to which no defence was permitted, were multiplied until a practical nullification of the law, in the form of "personal liberty laws," securing a hearing for the accused before State magistrates, was forced by public opinion upon the legislature of the exposed northern States. Before the excitement had come to a head, the Whig convention of 1852 met and endorsed the compromise of 1850 "in all its parts." Overwhelmed in the election which followed, the Whig party was popularly said to have "died of an attempt to swallow the fugitive-slave law"; it would have been more correct to have said that the southern section of the party had deserted in a body and gone over to the Democratic party. National politics were thus left in an entirely anomalous condition. The Democratic party was omnipotent at the South, though it was afterward opposed feebly by the American (or "Know Nothing ") organization, and was generally successful at the North, though it was still met by the Northern Whigs with vigorous opposition. Such a state of affairs was not calculated to satisfy thinking men; and this period seems to have been one in which very few thinking men of any party were at all satisfied with their party positions.
This was the hazardous situation into which the Democratic managers chose to thrust one of the most momentous pieces of legislation in our political history-the Kansas-Nebraska bill. The responsibility for it is clearly on the shoulders of Stephen A. Douglas. The over-land travel to the Pacific coast had made it necessary to remove the Indian title to Kansas and Nebraska, and to organize them as Territories, in order to afford protection to emigrants; and Douglas, chairman of the Senate committee on Territories, introduced a bill for such organization in January, 1854. Both these prospective Territories had been made free soil forever by the compromise of 1820; the question of slavery had been settled, so far as they were concerned; but Douglas consented, after a show of opposition, to reopen Pandora's box. His original bill did not abrogate the Missouri compromise, and there seems to have been no general Southern demand that it should do so. But Douglas had become intoxicated by the unexpected success of his "popular sovereignty" make-shift in regard to the Territories of 1850; and a notice of an amendment to be offered by a southern senator, abrogating the Missouri compromise, was threat or excuse sufficient to bring him to withdraw the bill. A week later, it was re-introduced with the addition of "popular sovereignty": all questions pertaining to slavery in these Territories, and in the States to be formed from them, were to be left to the decision of the people, through their representatives; and the Missouri compromise of 1820 was declared "inoperative and void," as inconsistent with the principles of the territorial legislation of 1850. It must be remembered that the "non-intervention" of 1850 had been confessedly based on no constitutional principle whatever, but was purely a matter of expediency; and that "non-intervention" in Utah and New Mexico was no more inconsistent with the prohibition of slavery in Kansas and Nebraska than "non-intervention" in the Southwest Territory, sixty years before, had been inconsistent with the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Territory. Whether Douglas is to be considered as too scrupulous, or too timid, or too willing to be terrified, it is certain that his action was unnecessary.
After a struggle of some months, the Kansas-Nebraska bill became law. The Missouri compromise was abrogated, and the question of the extension of slavery to the territories was adrift again, never to be got rid of except through the abolition of slavery itself by war. The demands of the South had now come fully abreast with the proposal of Douglas: that slavery should have permission to enter all the Territories, if it could. The opponents of the extension of slavery, at first under the name of "Anti-Nebraska men," then of the Republican party, carried the elections for representatives in Congress in 1854-'55, and narrowly missed carrying the Presidential election of 1856. The percentage of Democratic losses in the congressional districts of the North was sufficient to leave Douglas with hardly any supporters in Congress from his own section. The Democratic party was converted at once into a solid South, with a northern attachment of popular votes which was not sufficient to control very many Congressmen or electoral votes.
Immigration into Kansas was organized at once by leading men of the two sections, with the common design of securing a majority of the voters of the territory and applying "popular sovereignty" for or against slavery. The first sudden inroad of Missouri intruders was successful in securing a pro-slavery legislature and laws; but within two years the stream of free-State immigration had become so powerful,in spite of murder, outrage, and open civil war, that it was very evident that Kansas was to be a free-State. Its expiring territorial legislature endeavored to outwit its constituents by applying for admission as a slave State, under the Lecompton constitution; but the Douglas Democrats could not support the attempt, and it was defeated. Kansas, however, remained a territory until 1861.
The cruelties of this Kansas episode could not but be reflected in the feelings of the two sections and in Congress. In the former it showed too plainly that the divergence of the two sections, indicated in Calhoun's speech of 1850, had widened to an absolute separation in thought, feeling, and purpose. In the latter the debates assumed a virulence which is illustrated by the speeches on the Sumner assault. The current of events had at least carried the sections far enough apart to give striking distance; and the excuse for action was supplied by the Dred Scott decision in 1857.