In Charleston the people refused to allow the postmaster to deliver the objectionable mail matter. The subject was carried to President Jackson in 1835, and he decided that the uneasy masters of South Carolina were justified in their protest. Calhoun, like Adams in New England, became the champion of his section, and devoted the remainder of his life to a vain defense of slavery against the “foul slanders” of anti-slavery agitators.
In May, 1836, after a fierce struggle in the House, it was decided to lay upon the table without debate all petitions which dealt with slavery. The right of petition was thus formally denied, since a hearing is the one thing prayed for in such documents. John Quincy Adams declared that the rights of his constituents, as guaranteed in the Constitution, were thus abrogated. On the other hand, Calhoun declared in the Senate, with equal truth, that the constitutional rights of his constituents would be jeopardized if the petitions were received and debated. Great excitement prevailed throughout the country, for the contending sections were too strong for any easy-going compromise to be possible. Keen observers then visiting Washington wrote home that the great Republic would go to pieces if either side won.
In the summer of 1837, Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered at Alton, Illinois, where he was trying to publish, against the wishes of the people, an anti-slavery weekly like Garrison's. And in Boston the following December a young aristocrat, a Harvard graduate and a promising lawyer, arose before a large audience, before whom the Attorney-General of the State had just been defending the Alton people against attack, and declared that the “earth should have yawned and swallowed up” the author of such treasonable words. It was Wendell Phillips, and from that day till the close of the bitter sectional struggle, he was the greatest champion of immediate abolition, the fervent orator who was ready to destroy the Union in order to destroy slavery. Four years after Phillips began his public career, Frederick Douglass, escaping from a slave plantation in Maryland, came into contact with Garrison, who at once commissioned him an orator of abolition, and the brilliant mulatto soon developed powers that gave rise to jealous heartburnings among the leading agitators. Lewis Tappan, Gerrit Smith, the Misses Grimké, born in South Carolina, and a host of other enthusiastic democrats and idealists professed the new faith. Contemptuous of Church and State, of union and nationality, these apostles of the new cause laid the foundations of the great sectional party which was later to bear the name Republican, thus appealing to the memories of Jefferson and his followers of 1800.
It was this hostility of the sections, always dangerous, but exceedingly so in 1836, when Texas was asking admission as a slave State, that caused so many of the best men of the time to talk freely of the disruption of the Union. If Texas were annexed, the East would secede; if it were not annexed, the South would secede. Van Buren, the head of the Democratic party, and Clay, the master of the Whigs, exerted all their influence in 1844 to avoid the expected conflict. But President Tyler, without close party affiliations and standing in need of an issue, was ready to take the risk. Radical expansionists, supported by substantial economic interests in the South, urged the immediate annexation of Texas, while Adams and twenty-one of his colleagues from the restless sections of the North declared that the addition of the new region to the Union would be equivalent to a dissolution of the ties which held the warring sections together;[5] and they published, in May, 1843, a formal address to their constituents calling upon them to secede. The members of Congress who signed this address represented the districts, almost without exception, in which abolition had won a footing.
The important question was: Should the East remain passive while the annexation of “another Louisiana” was being consummated and thus allow herself to be submerged.
Charles Sumner, an ambitious young man, an intellectual kinsman of Wendell Phillips, one of those “transcendentalists” of Massachusetts of whom the country was to hear a great deal in the future, answered this question in his famous “grandeur-of-nations” oration of July 4, 1845. The élite of Boston had gathered for the occasion in Tremont Temple, and they had invited the officers of a warship then lying in the harbor, the local military men, and others who took pride in the martial deeds of their ancestors, to join in the accustomed celebration of the Fourth. Dressed in gay, super-fashionable attire, the young Sumner poured forth in matchless language a denunciation of war, of military and naval armaments, of President Polk and the party in power, which drove one half of his audience frantic with resentment and anger. “There is no war which is honorable, no peace which is dishonorable,” he declared at the outset, and for two hours he massed his arguments and statistics to prove the thesis. The conservatives of Boston declared that it would be the last of the young man. But Garrison and Phillips had raised up another recruit. The oration which had insulted half of those who heard it was published in edition after edition and distributed in the country districts of the North. Sumner was ever after in great demand as a speaker and anti-Southern agitator. He would not, however, dissolve the Union to escape slavery; he sought rather to mobilize the forces which the abolitionists were stirring to activity.
