G. P. Garrison's Westward Extension (1906), in the American Nation series, has given us the best brief general survey of the expansion movement which closed with the war with Mexico. An exhaustive treatment of the Texas question is Justin H. Smith's The Annexation of Texas (1911), and George L. Rives's The United States and Mexico, 1821-1848 (1913), is almost as complete for the Mexican War. A good history of Oregon and the Oregon movement has not yet been written; but Robert Greenhow's History of Oregon (1870), H. H. Bancroft's Oregon, in his voluminous Western history series, and Josiah Royce's California, in the American Commonwealths series, are all valuable. Some special articles of importance are: The Slidell Mission to Mexico, by L. M. Sears, in South Atlantic Quarterly for 1912; E. G. Bourne's The United States and Mexico, 1847-48, in the American Historical Review, vol. v, p. 491; and W. E. Dodd's The West and the War with Mexico, in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society for 1911. The sources which some may wish to consult are The Diary of James K. Polk, edited by M. M. Quaife and published by the Chicago Historical Society (1910); Lyon G. Tyler's The Times of the Tylers, already mentioned; John Quincy Adams's Memoir, also frequently cited; The Correspondence of John C. Calhoun, The Works of Calhoun (1853-55), edited by R. K. Cralle; and the writings of both Clay and Webster as given in the notes to previous chapters. Niles's Register, a weekly periodical published in Baltimore from 1811 to 1849, is a never-failing resource for the current of public opinion.
CHAPTER IX[ToC]
THE ABOLITIONISTS
The overthrow of the Democratic party in 1848 was due, not to the ruthless exploitation of Mexico nor to dissatisfaction with the new economic policy, but to the abiding distrust of the aristocratic South and its slavery system by the small business men and farmers of the North. The greater the success of Polk, the greater the danger to the older virtues of the Republic, a simple life and faith in the ideals of freedom and equality. As we have seen, the South had given up these ideals, and the tobacco, cotton, and sugar planters governed there with increasing success and acceptability.
There had been persistent economic and religious opposition to the growth of the plantation system. In the closing years of the eighteenth century most people in the South disliked slavery, and in Kentucky majorities of the voters sustained the first abolition movement of radical tendencies in the country; but the excitement over the Alien and Sedition Laws eclipsed at the critical moment the public interest in the anti-slavery struggle. Other outcroppings of the same hostility to slavery, as already noted, were made evident in the meetings of Presbyterian and Methodist church conferences between 1815 and 1825 in Maryland, western Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. But all these efforts failed and the Southern abolitionists, as we have seen, having “fought the good fight,” emigrated to the Northwest about 1830, when Virginia failed to rid herself of the growing “incubus.” Just as Birney and Rankin “took up arms” in Ohio there arose a fiercer champion of their cause in the East, where distance from the scene, lack of intimate knowledge of “the system,” and a strong popular dislike of the South gave unwonted strength to the new evangelism. William Lloyd Garrison, son of a Massachusetts sea captain, was in a humor to reform a world which “sat in darkness.” He declared negro slavery the one great evil of his generation, and the Federal Constitution, which protected it, “an agreement with Hell.” After some ill-luck and untoward experience in Baltimore, he set up in Boston, in 1831, his famous Liberator, in which he said he would be heard, and henceforth his paper appeared every week until the close of the Civil War. Every scrap of news, true or untrue, which reflected the cruelty of the slavery system, the lust of some brutal master, or the growing power of the Southern States in national politics he repeated and exploited. It was “yellow journalism” in a peculiar sense. But a single weekly paper published in Boston, where the commercial and industrial interests had created an aristocracy almost as exclusive as that of the South, could hardly be expected to accomplish a great deal. The other papers of the city would not publish his “stories,” nor pay any attention to his earnest appeals.
He made another move upon the intrenched position of the enemy. Between 1831 and 1835 he organized abolition societies, whose members took vows to “fight on and fight ever” till success should be attained. These societies were naturally numerous in all those sections of New England, the Middle States, and the Northwest where hostility and even hatred to the masterful South prevailed. Pure idealists, small farmers, village merchants, the unsuccessful, and debtors who dreamed of an America of which the Declaration of Independence speaks became abolitionists. Orators were employed, speaking campaigns were arranged, and the slogan was always immediate and uncompensated abolition of negro slavery. The more democratic churches were invaded and their preachers were enlisted; or, when these resisted, placarded as unfriendly to mankind. Before 1840 not less than fifteen thousand Methodists refused association with other Methodists who would not declare war on slavery. Nearly all of these lived in western Massachusetts and upper New York. These revolutionists carried their cause to the Methodist General Conference in New York in 1844, and the great Church was broken into two branches: a Northern and a Southern. The Baptists of New England refused the same year to support a missionary who was also a slaveholder, and immediately the Alabama Baptists refused to fellowship their Northern brethren. The Southern Baptist Convention, head of the denomination for all the Southern States, was organized the next year at Augusta. The fact, already noted, that both these sundered denominations almost doubled their membership in the next few years shows the strong sectionalism of the issue.
Nor did the public men of the North escape the ordeal of ardent abolitionism. William H. Seward, a conservative by nature, became an anti-slavery Whig of national influence in 1843; Joshua R. Giddings, of the Western Reserve, and Elijah P. Lovejoy, of Illinois, accepted the agitator's commissions and sought to unite the new idealism with the old Americanism. But John Quincy Adams, who had never been a democrat and who did not sympathize with Garrison, became the arch-leader of the abolitionists in Congress from 1836 to his death in 1848. Smarting under the ill-treatment of Southern politicians, it was easy for the able ex-President to become the political exponent of the new anti-Southern agitation. In no other country of that time could a movement like American abolitionism have gained such a hearing. In England the Government, that is the people, never dreamed of destroying without compensation the millions of property in the West Indian slaves. But American abolitionists declared that there could be no property in man, just as the socialists say there can be no property in land. To destroy outright the property which underlay the Southern political power and the Southern aristocracy was the aim of Garrison, and he found able men, owners of large estates in the North, who were willing to do what he urged.
Petitions asking the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia were presented to Congress by John Quincy Adams in increasing numbers from 1831 to 1836. Southern men denied that the national legislature had the power to destroy property protected by the Constitution; Northern men, especially representatives of the farmer districts, insisted that the right of petition was fundamental to the Constitution itself. There was a deadlock in Congress, for the South controlled the Senate, while the North controlled the House. In this state of things, Southern legislatures formally denounced the abolition movement as endangering the Union, and asked Congress to protect them from the floods of abolition literature which the United States mails carried into communities where negro slaves were in the majority and where insurrections were likely to occur.