I THE ABOLITION CRUSADE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES THE ABOLITION CRUSADE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOUR PERIODS OF AMERICAN HISTORY BY HILARY A. HERBERT, LL.D. NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1912 Ce Copyright, 1912, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published April, 1912 -'' -^.t TO MY GRANDCHILDREN THIS LITTLE BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED IN THE HOPE THAT ITS PERUSAL WILL FOSTER IN THEM, AS CITIZENS OF THIS GREAT REPUBLIC, A DUE REGARD FOR THE CONSTITUTION OF THEIR COUNTRY AS THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND PREFATORY NOTE BY JAMES FORD RHODES "LiVY extolled Pompey In such a pane- gyric that Augustus called him Pompeian, and yet this was no obstacle to their friendship." That we find in Tacitus. We may therefore picture to ourselves Augus- tus reading Livy's "History of the Civil Wars" (in which the historian's republican sympathies were freely expressed), and learning therefrom that there were two sides to the strife which rent Rome. As we are more than forty-six years distant from our own Civil War, is it not incum- bent on Northerners to endeavor to see the Southern side? We may be certain that the historian a hundred years hence, when he contemplates the lining-up of five and one-half million people against twenty- two millions, their equal in religion, morals, vii PREFATORY NOTE regard for law, and devotion to the common Constitution, will, as matter of course, aver that the question over which they fought for four years had t\vo sides: that all the right was not on one side and all the wrong on the other. The North should welcome, therefore, accounts of the conflict written by candid Southern men. Mr. Herbert, reared and educated in the South, believing in the moral and econom- ical right of slavery, served as a Confeder- ate soldier during the war, but after Appo- mattox, when thirty-one years old, he told his father he had arrived at the conviction that slavery was wrong. Twelve years later, when home-rule was completely re- stored to the South (1S77), he went into public life as a Member of Congress, sitting in the House for sixteen years. At the end of his last term, in 1S93, he was appointed Secretary of the Navy by President Cleve- land, whom he faithfully served during his second administration. viii PREFATORY NOTE Such an experience is an excellent train- ing for the treatment of any aspect of the Civil War. Mr. Herbert's devotion to the Constitution, the Union, and the flag now equals that of any soldier of the Xorth who fought against him. We should expect therefore that his work would be pervaded by practical knowledge and candor. After a careful reading of the manuscript I have no hesitation in saying that the ex- pectation is realized. Naturally unable to agree entirely with his presentation of the subject, I believe that his work exhibits a side that entitles it to a large hearing. I hope that it will be placed before the younger generation, who, unaffected by any memory of the heat of the conflict, may truly say: Tros Tyriusve, mihi nullo discrimine agenir, James Ford Rhodes. Boston, November, 191 1, DC PREFACE In 1890 Mr. L. E. Chittenden, who had been United States Treasurer under Presi- dent Lincoln, pubhshed an interesting ac- count of ^10,000,000 United States bonds secretly sent to England, as he said, in 1862, and he told all about what thereupon took place across the water. It was a reminis- cence. General Charles Francis Adams in his recent instructive volume, "Studies Military and Diplomatic," takes up this narrative and, in a chapter entitled "An Historical Residuum," conclusively shows from contemporaneous evidence that the bonds were sent, not in 1862, but in 1863, but that, as for the rest of the story, the residuum of truth in it was about like the speck of moisture that is left when a soap bubble is pricked by a needle. General Adams did not mean that Mr. Chittenden knew he was drawing on his im- xi PREFACE agination. He was only demonstrating that one who intends to write history cannot rely on his memory. The author, in the following pages, is undertaking to write a connected story of events that happened, most of them, in his hfetime, and as to many of the most im- portant of which he has vivid recollections; but, save in one respect, he has not relied upon his own memory for any important fact. The picture he has drawn of the re- lations between the slave-holder and non- slave-holder in the South is, much of it, given as he recollects it. His opportunities for observation were somewhat extensive, and here he is willing to be considered in part as a witness. Elsewhere he has relied almost entirely upon contemporaneous writ- ten evidence, memory, however, often in- dicating to him sources of information. Nowhere are there so many valuable les- sons for the student of American history as in the story of the great sectional move- ment of 183 1, and of its results, which have xii PREFACE profoundly affected American conditions through generation after generation. An effort is here made to tell that story succinctly, tracing it, step after step, from cause to effect. The subject divides itself naturally into four historic periods: 1. The anti-slavery crusade, 183 1 to i860. 2. Secession and four years of war, 1861 to 1865. 3. Reconstruction under the Lincoln- Johnson plan, with the overthrow by Con- gress of that plan and the rule of the negro and carpet-bagger, from 1865 to 1876. 4. Restoration of self-government in the South, and the results that have followed. The greater part of the book is devoted to the first period — 1831 to i860, the period of causation. The sequences running through the three remaining periods are more brief- ly sketched. Italics, throughout the book, it may be mentioned here, are the author's. Now that the country is happily reunited xiii PREFACE in a Union which all agree is indissoluble, the South wants the true history of the times here treated of spread before its chil- dren; so does the North. The mistakes that were committed on both sides during that lamentable and prolonged sectional quarrel (and they were many) should be known of all, in order that like mistakes may not be committed in the future. The writer has, with diffidence, attempted to lay the facts before his readers, and so to condense the story that it may be within the reach of the ordinary student. How far he has suc- ceeded will be for his readers to say. The verdict he ventures to hope for is that he has made an honest effort to be fair. The author takes this occasion to thank that accomplished young teacher of his- tory, Mr. Paul Micou, for valuable sugges- tions, and his friend, Mr. Thomas H. Clark, who with his varied attainments has aided him in many ways. Hilary A. Herbert. Washington, D. C, March, 191 2. xiv CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Introduction 3 I. Secession and Its Doctrine ... 15 II. Emancipation Prior to 183 i . . 37 III. The New Abolitionists .... 56 IV. Feeling in the South — 1835 ... 77 V. Anti-Abolition at the North . . 84 VI. A Crisis and a Compromise ... 93 VII. Efforts for Peace 128 VIII. Incompatibilityof Slavery AND Free- dom 147 IX. Four Years of War 180 X. Reconstruction, Lincoln-Johnson Plan and Congressional . . . 208 XI. The South under Self-Government 229 Index 245 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES I INTRODUCTION THE Constitution of the United States attempts to define and limit the power of our Federal Government. Lord Brougham somewhere said that such an instrument was not worth the parchment it was written on; people would pay no regard to self-imposed limitations on their own will. When our fathers by that written Consti- tution established a government that was partly national and partly federal, and that had no precedent, they knew it was an experiment. To-day that government has been in existence one hundred and twenty- three years, and we proudly claim that the experiment of 1789 has been the success of the ages. Happy should we be if we could boast that, during all this period, the Constitu- tion had never been violated in any respect! The first palpable infringement of its provisions occurred in the enactment of 3 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE the alien and sedition laws of 1798. The people at the polls indignantly condemned these enactments, and for years thereafter the government proceeded peacefully; the people were prosperous, and the Union and the Constitution grew in favor. Later, there grew up a rancorous sec- tional controversy about slavery that lasted many years; that quarrel was followed by a bloody sectional war; after that war came the reconstruction of the Southern States. During each of these three trying eras it did sometimes seem as if that old piece of "parchment," derided by Lord Brougham, had been utterly forgotten. Nevertheless, and despite all these trying experiences, we have in the meantime ad- vanced to the very front rank of nations, and our people have long since turned, not only to the Union, but, we are happy to think, to the Constitution as well, with more devotion than ever. It may be further said that, notwith- standing all the bitter animosities that for long divided our country into two hostile sections, that wonderful old Constitution, handed down to us by our fathers, was al- 4 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES ways, and in all seasons, in the hearts of our people, and that never for a moment was it out of mind. Even in our sectional war Confederates and Federals were both fighting for it — one side to maintain it over themselves as an independent nation; the other to maintain it over the whole of the old Union. In the very madness of re- construction the fundamental idea of the Constitution, the equality of the States, ultimately prevailed — this idea it was that imperatively demanded the final restoration of the seceded States, with the right of self-government unimpaired. The future is now bright before us. The complex civilization of the present is, we do not forget, continually presenting new and complex problems of government, and we are mindful, too, that, for the people who must deal with these problems, a higher culture is required, but to all this our national and State governments seem to be fully alive. We are everywhere erecting memorials to our patriotic dead, we have our "flag day" and many ceremonies to stimulate patriotism, and, throughout our whole country, young Americans are being 5 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE taught more and more of American history and American traditions. The essence of these teachings presumably is that time has hallowed our Constitution, and that experience has fully shown the wisdom of its provisions. In this land of ours, where there are so much property and so many voters who want it, and where the honor and emoluments of high place are so tempting to the demagogue, there can be no such security for either life, liberty, or property as those safeguards which our fathers devised in the Constitution of the United States. Our teachers of history must therefore expose fearlessly every violation in the past of our Constitution, and point out the pen- alties that followed; and, above all, they cannot afford to condone, or to pass by in silence, the conduct of those who have here- tofore advocated, or acted on, any law which to them was higher than the American Con- stitution. One of the most serious troubles in the past, many think our greatest, was our ter- rible war among ourselves. Perhaps, after the lapse of nearly fifty years, we can all 6 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES now agree that if our people and our States had ahvays, between 1830 and i860, faith- fully observed the Federal Constitution we should have not had that war. However that may be, the crusade of the Abolition- ists, which began in 1831, was the beginning of an agitation in the North against the ex- istence of slavery in the South, which con- tinued, in one form or another, until the outbreak of that war. The negro is now located, geographically, much as he was then. If another attempt shall be made to project his personal status into national politics, the voters of the country ought to know and consider the mistakes that occurred, North and South, during the unhappy era of that sectional warfare. This little book is a study of that period of our history. It concludes with a glance at the war between the North and South, and the reconstruction that fol- lowed. The story of Cromwell and the Great Revolution it was impossible for any Eng- lishman to tell correctly for nearly or quite two centuries. The changes that had been wrought were too profound, too far-reach- 7 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE ing; and English writers were too human. The changes — economic, poHtical, and so- cial — wrought in our country by the great controversy over slavery and State-rights, and by the war that ended it, have been quite as profound, and the revolution in men's ideas and ways of looking at their past history has been quite as complete as those which followed the downfall of the government founded by Cromwell. But we are now in the twentieth century; history is becoming a science, and we ought to succeed better in writing our past than the Englishmen did. The culture of this day is very exacting in its demands, and if one is writing about our own past the need of fairness is all the more imperative. And why not.'' The masses of the people, who clashed on the battle- fields of a war in which one side fought for the supremacy of the Union and the other for the sovereignty of the States, had hon- est convictions; they differed in their con- victions; they had made honest mistakes about each other; now they would like their histories ito tell just where those mis- takes were; they do not wish these mis- 8 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES takes to be repeated hereafter. Nor is there any reason why the whole history of that great controversy should not now be writ- ten with absolute fairness; the two sections of our country have come together in a most wonderful way. There has been reunion after reunion of the blue and the gray. The survivors of a New Jersey regiment, forty- four years after the bloody battle of Salem Church, put up on its site a monument to their dead, on one side of which was a tab- let to the memory of the "brave Alabama boys," who were their opponents in that fight. One of those "Alabama boys" wrote the story of that battle for the archives of his own State, and the State of New Jersey has published it in her archives, as a fair account of the battle. The author has attempted to approach his subject in a spirit like this, and while he hopes to be absolutely fair, he is per- fectly aware that he sees things from a Southern view-point. For this, however, no apology is needed. Truth is many-sided and must be seen from every direction. Nearly all the school-books dealing with the period here treated of, and now con- 9 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE sidered as authority, have been written from a Northern stand-point; and many of the extended histories that are most widely read seem to the writer to be more or less partisan, although the authors were ap- parently quite unconscious of it. Attempts made here to point out some of the errors in these books are, as is conceived, in the interests of history. Of course it is important that readers should know the stand-point of an author who writes at this day of events as recent as those here treated of. Dr. Albert Bush- nell Hart, professor of history in Harvard University, in the preface to his "Slavery and Abolition" (Harper Brothers, 1906), says of himself: "It is hard for a son and grandson of abolitionists to approach so ex- plosive a question with impartiality." Fol- lowing this example, the writer must tell that he was born in the South, of slave- holding parents, three years after the Abo- lition crusade began in 1831. Growing up in the South under the stress of that cru- sade, he maintained all through the war, in which he was a loyal Confederate sol- dier, the belief in which he had been edu- 10 AND TTS CONSEQUENCES cated — that slavery was right, morally and economically. One day, not long after Appomattox, he told his father he had reached the conclu- sion that slavery was wrong. The reply was, to the writer's surprise, that his mother in early life had been an avowed emancipationist; that she (who had lived until the writer was sixteen years old) had never felt at liberty to discuss slavery after the rise of the new abolitionists and the Nat Turner insurrection; and then followed the further information that when, in 1846, the family removed from South Carolina to Alabama. Greenville, Ala., was chosen for a home because it was thought that the dan- ger from slave insurrections would be less there than in one of the richer "black coun- ties. What a creature of circumstances man is! The writer's belief about a great moral question, his home, his school-mates, and the companions of his youth, were all deter- mined by a movement begun in Boston, Massachusetts, before he was born in the far South! With a vivid personal recollection of the II THE ABOLITION CRUSADE closing years of the great anti-slavery cru- sade always in his mind, the writer has studied closely many of the histories deal- ing with that movement, and he has found quite a consensus of opinion among North- ern writers — a view that has even been sometimes accepted in the South — that it was not so much the fear of insurrections, created by Abolition agitation, that shut off discussion in the South about the right- fulness of slavery as it was the invention of the cotton-gin, that made cotton growing and slavery profitable. The cotton-gin was invented in 1792, and was in common use years before the writer's mother was born. A native of, she grew to maturity entirely in, the South, and in 1830 was an avowed emancipationist. The subject was then being freely discussed. The author has ventured to relate in the pages that follow this introduction two or three incidents that were more or less per- sonal, in the hope that their significance may be his sufficient excuse. And now, having spoken of himself as a Southerner, the author thinks it but fair, when invoking for the following pages fair 12 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES consideration, to add that, since 1865, he has never ceased to rejoice that slavery is no more, and that secession is now only an academic question; and, further, that he has, since Appomattox, served the govern- ment of the United States for twenty years as loyally as he ever served the Confederacy. He therefore respectfully submits that his experiences ought to render him quite as well qualified for an impartial consideration of the anti-slavery crusade and its conse- quences as are those who have never, either themselves or through the eyes of their an- cestors, seen more than one side of those questions. Certain he is, in his own mind, that this Union has now no better friend than is he who submits this little study, conscious of its many shortcomings, claim- ing for it nothing except that it is the re- sult of an honest effort to be fair in every statement of facts and in the conclusions reached. Not much effort has been made in the di- rection of original research. Facts deemed sufficient to illustrate salient points, which alone can be treated of in a short story, have been found in published documents, 13 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE and other facts have been purposely taken, most of them, from Northern writers; and the authorities have been duly cited. These facts have been compressed into a small compass, so that the book may be avail- able to such students as have not time for a more extended examination. Of the results of the crusade of the Abo- litionists, and the consequent sectional war, George Ticknor Curtis, one of New Eng- land's distinguished biographers, says in his *'Life of Buchanan," vol. II, p. 283: "It is cause for exultation that slavery no longer exists in the broad domain of this republic — that our theory of government and practice are now in complete accord. But it is no cause for national pride that we did not accomplish this result without the cost of a million of precious lives and untold millions of money." 14 CHAPTER I SECESSION AND ITS DOCTRINE JOHN FISKE has said in his school his- tory: "Under the government of Eng- land before the Revolution the thirteen commonwealths were independent of one another, and were held together juxtaposed, rather than united, only through their al- legiance to the British Crown. Had that allegiance been maintained there is no tell- ing how long they might have gone on thus disunited." They won their independence under a very imperfect union, a government im- provised for the occasion. The "Articles of Confederation," the first formal constitu- tion of the United States of America, were not ratified by Maryland, the last to ratify, until in 1781, shortly before York town. In 1787 the thirteen States, each claiming to be still sovereign, came together in conven- tion at Philadelphia and formed the pres- 15 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE ent Constitution, looking to "a more per- fect union." The Constitution that created this new government has been rightly said to be " the most wonderful work ever struck off, at a given time, by the brain and pur- pose of man."^ And so it was, but it left unsettled the great question whether a State, if it believed that its rights were denied to it by the general government, could peaceably withdraw from the Union. The Federal Government was given by the Constitution only limited powers, powers that it could not transcend. Nowhere on the face of that Constitution was any right expressly conferred on the general govern- ment to decide exclusively and finally upon the extent of the powers granted to it. If any such right had been clearly given, it is certain that many of the States would not have entered into the Union. As it was, the Constitution was only adopted by eleven of the States after months of dis- cussion. Then the new government was inaugurated, with two of the States, Rhode Island and North Carolina, still out of the Union. They remained outside, one of * Gladstone, " Kin Beyond the Sea." i6 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES them for eighteen months and the other for a year. The States were reluctant to adopt the Constitution, because they were jealous of, and did not mean to give up, the right of self-government. The framers of the Constitution knew that the question of the right of a State to secede was thus left unsettled. They knew, too, that this might give trouble in the fu- ture. Their hope was that, as the advan- tages of the Union became, in process of time, more and more apparent, the Union would grow in favor and come to be re- garded in the minds and hearts of the peo- ple as indissoluble. From the beginning of the government there were many, including statesmen of great influence, who continued to be jeal- ous of the right of self-government, and in- sisted that no powers should be exercised by the Federal Government except such as were very clearly granted in the Constitu- tion. These soon became a party and called themselves Republicans. Some thirty years later they called themselves Democrats. Those, on the other hand, who believed in 17 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE construing the grants of power in the Con- stitution Hberally or broadly, called them- selves Federalists. Washington was a Federalist, but such was his influence that the dispute between the Republicans and the Federalists about the meaning of the Constitution did not, during his administration, assume a serious aspect; but when a new president, John Adams, also a Federalist, came in with a congress in harmony with him, the Repub- licans made bitter war upon them. France, then at war with England, was even wa- ging what has been denominated a "quasi war" upon us, to compel the United States, under the old treaty of the Revolution, to take her part against England; and Eng- land was also threatening us. Plots to force the government into the war as an ally of France were in the air. Adams and his followers believed in a strong and spirited government. To strike a fatal blow at the plotters against the public peace, and to crush the Republicans at the same time, Congress now passed the famous alien and sedition laws. One of the alien laws, June 25, 1798, gave 18 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES the President, for two years from its pas- sage, power to order out of the country, at his own will^ and without ^^ trial by jury^^ or other "process of law J' any alien he deemed dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States. The sedition law, July 14, 1798, made criminal any unlawful conspiracy to oppose any measure of the government of the United States "which was directed by prop- er authority," as well as also any "false and scandalous accusations against the Govern- ment, the President, or the Congress." The opportunity of the Republicans had come. They determined to call upon the country to condemn the alien and sedition laws, and at the presidential election in 1800 the Federalists received their death- blow. The party as an organization sur- vived that election only a few years, and in localities the very name. Federalist, later became a reproach. The Republicans began their campaign against the alien and sedition laws by a se- ries of resolutions, which, drawn by Jeffer- son, were passed by the Kentucky legislature in November, 1798. Other quite similar 19 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE resolutions, drawn by Madison, passed the Virginia assembly the next year; and these together became the celebrated Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798-9.^ The alien and sedition laws were denounced in these resolutions for the exercise of powers not delegated to the general government. Adverting to the sedition law, it was de- clared that no power over the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of the press had been given. On the con- trary, it had been expressly provided by the Constitution that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of relig- ion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. ' VVarfield, in his "Kentucky Resolutions of 1798," relates that John Breckenridge introduced the Kentucky and John Taylor, of Caroline, moved the Virginia resolutions. In 1814 Taylor made it known that Madison was the author of the \'irginia re- solves, but not till 1821 did Jefferson admit his authorship of the Kentucky resolutions. Jefferson was Vice-President when they were drawn, and it would have been thought unseemly for him to appear openly in a canvass against the President, but by cor- respondence with his friends he "gradually drew out a program of action" (VVarfield, p. 17). The Kentucky Resolutions were sent by the Governor to the Legislatures of the other States, ten of which, being controlled by the Federalists, are known to have declared against them (Warfield, p. 115). But of course the resolutions were canvassed by the public before the presidential election of 1800. 20 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES The first of the Kentucky resolutions was as follows: "Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government, but that by compact, under the style and title of a constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for specific purposes, delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the gen- eral government assumes undelegated powers its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no effect: That to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: That the government created by this compact, was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its direction, and not the Consti- tution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no com- mon judge, each party has a right to judge for itself as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of re- dress." Undoubtedly it is from the famous reso- lutions of 1798-9 that the secessionists of a later date drew their arguments. The au- thors of these celebrated resolutions were, 21 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE both of them, devoted friends of the Union they had helped to construct. Why should they announce a theory of the Constitution that was so full of dangerous possibiHties? The answer is, they were announcing the theory upon which the States, or at least many of the States, had ten years before ratified the Constitution. A crisis in the hfe of the new government had now come. Congress had usurped powers not given; it had exercised powers that had been pro- hibited, and the government was enforcing the obnoxious statutes with a high hand. Dissatisfaction w^as intense. Jefferson and Madison were undoubtedly Republican partisans, Jefferson especially; but it is equally certain that they were both friends of the Union, and as such they con- cluded, with the lights before them, that the wise course would be to submit to the people, in ample time for full consideration, before the then coming presidential election, a full, clear, and comprehensive exposition of the Constitution precisely as they, and as the people, then understood it. This they did in the resolutions of 1798 and 1799, and the very same voters who had created 22 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES the Constitution of 1789, now, with their sons to aid them, endorsed these resolutions in the election of 1800, which had been laid before them by the legislatures of two Re- publican States as a correct construction of that instrument. The Republicans under Jefferson came into power with an immense majority. The people were satisfied with the Constitution as it had been construed in the election of 1800, and the country under control of the Republicans was happy and prosperous for three decades. Then the party in power began to split into National Republicans and Democratic Republicans. The National Republicans favored a liberal construction of the Constitution and became Whigs; the Democratic Republicans dropped the name Republican and became Democrats. The foregoing sketch has been given with no intent to write a political history, but only to show with what emphasis the Amer- ican people condemned all violations of the Constitution up to the time when, in 183 1, our story of the Abolitionists is to begin. The sketch has also served to explain the theory of State-rights, as it was held in 23 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE early days, and later, by the Southern peo- ple. Whether the union of the States under the Constitution as expounded by the Ken- tucky and Virginia resolutions would sur- vive every trial that was to come, remained to be seen. The question was destined to perplex Mr. Jefferson himself, more than once. Indeed, even while Washington was Pres- ident there had been disunion sentiment in Congress. In 1794 the celebrated Virgin- ian, John Taylor, of Caroline, shortly after he had expressed an intention of publicly resigning from the United States Senate, was approached in the privacy of a com- mittee room by Rufus King, senator from New York, and Oliver Ellsworth, a senator from Massachusetts, both Federalists, with a proposition for a dissolution of the Union by mutual consent, the line of division to be somewhere from the Potomac to the Hudson. This was on the ground "that it was utterly impossible for the Union to continue. That the Southern and the East- ern people thought quite differently," etc. Taylor contended for the Union, and noth- 24 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES ing came of the conference, the story of which remained a secret for over a hun- dred years. ^ "In the winter of 1803-4, immediately after, and as a consequence of, the acqui- sition of Louisiana, certain leaders of the Federal party conceived the project of the dissolution of the Union and the establish- ment of a Northern Confederacy, the justi- fying causes to those who entertained it, that the acquisition of Louisiana to the Union transcended the constitutional powers of the government of the United States ; that it created, in fact, a new confederacy to which the States, united by the former com- pact, were not bound to adhere; that it was ' Taylor was so deeply impressed by the conference, which was protracted, that two days later, May il, 1794, he made an ex- tended note of it which he sent to Mr. Madison. At the foot of his note Taylor says, among other things: "He (T.) is thoroughly convinced that the design to break up the Union is contem- plated. The assurance, the manner, the earnestness, and the countenances with which the idea was uttered, all disclosed the most serious intention. It is also probable that K. (King) and E. (Ellsworth) having heard that T. (Taylor) was against the (adoption of) the Constitution have hence imbibed a mistaken opinion that he was secretly an enemy of the Union, and con- ceived that he was a fit instrument (as he was about retiring) to infuse notions into the anti-federal temper of Virginia, consonant to their views." — -"Disunion Sentiment in the Congress in 1794" (with fac-simile of Taylor memorandum), by Gaillard Hunt, Edi- tor of Writings of James Madison. Lowdermilk Co., Washing- ton, D. C, 1905. 25 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE oppressive of the interests and destructive of the influence of the northern section of the Confederacy, whose right and duty it was therefore to secede from the new body politic, and to constitute one of their own."^ This project did not assume serious pro- portions. John Fiske in his school history says: "John Quincy Adams, a supporter of the embargo act of 1807, privately informed President Jefferson (in February, 1809) that further attempts to enforce it in the New England States would be likely to drive them to secession. Accordingly, the embargo was repealed, and the non-intercourse act sub- stituted for it." The spirit of nationality was yet in its infancy, threats of secession were common, and they came then mostly from New Eng- land. These threats were in no wise con- nected with slavery; agitators had not then made slavery a national issue; the idea of separation was prompted by the fear that power in the councils of the Union would pass into the hands of other sections. ' C. F. Robertson, "The Louisiana Purchase," etc. " Papers of the American Association," vol. I, pp. 262, 263. 26 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Massachusetts was heard from again in 1811, when the State of Louisiana, the first to be carved from the Louisiana purchase, asked to come into the Union. In dis- cussing the bill for her admission, Josiah Quincy said: "Why, sir, I have already heard of six States, and some say there will be at no great distance of time more. I have also heard that the mouth of the Ohio will be far to the east of the contemplated em- pire. ... It is impossible that such a power could be granted. It was not for these men that our fathers fought. It was not for them this Constitution was adopted. You have no authority to throw the rights and liberties and property of this people into hotchpot with the wild men on the Mis- souri, or with the mixed, though more respectable, race of Anglo-Hispano-Gallo- Americans who bask in the sands in the mouth of the Mississippi. . . . I am com- pelled to declare it as my deliberate opinion that, if this bill passes, the bonds of the Union are virtually dissolved; that the States which compose it are free from their 7noral obliga- itons; and that, as it will be the right of all, so it will he the duty of some, to prepare definitely 27 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE for a separation — aviicably, if they can; vio- lently, if they must.'' June 15, 1813, the Massachusetts legis- lature endorsed the position taken in this speech.^ Later, in 18 14, a convention of represen- tative New England statesmen met at Hart- ford, to consider of secession unless the non- intercourse act, which also bore hard on New England, should be repealed; but the war then pending was soon to close, and the danger from that quarter was over. But secession was not exclusively a New England doctrine. "When the Constitu- tion was adopted by the votes of States in popular conventions, it is safe to say there was not a man in the country, from Wash- ington and Hamilton, on the one side, to George Clinton and George Mason, on the other, who regarded the new system as any- thing but an experiment, entered into by the States, and from which each and every State had the right to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised." - As late as 1844 the threat of secession '"American State Documents and Federal Relations," p. 21. "Henry Cabot Lodge's "Webster," p. 176. 28 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES was to come again from Massachusetts. The great State of Texas was applying for admission to the Union. But Texas was a slave State; Abolitionists had now for thir- teen years been arousing in the old Bay State a spirit of hostility against the exist- ence of slavery in her sister States of the South, and in 1844 the Massachusetts legis- lature resolved that "the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, faithful to the compact between the people of the United States, according to the plain meaning and intent in which it was understood by them, is sin- cerely anxious for its preservation; but that it is determined, as it doubts not other States are, to submit to undelegated powers in no body of men on earth^^ and that "the proj- ect of the annexation of Texas, unless ar- rested at the threshold, may tend to drive these States into a dissolution of the Union .^^ This was just seventeen years before the Commonwealth of Massachusetts began to arm her sons to put down secession in the South! The Southern reader must not, however, conclude from this startling about-face on the question of secession, that the people of Massachusetts, and of the North, did 29 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE not, 171 iS6i, honestly believe that under the Constitution the Union was indissoluble, or that the North went to war simply for the purpose of perpetuating its power over the South. Such a conclusion would be grossly unjust. The spirit of nationality, veneration of the Union, was a growth, and, after it had fairly begun, a rapid growth. It grew, as our country grew in prestige and power. The splendid triumphs of our ships at sea, in the War of 1812, and our victory at New Orleans over British regu- lars, added to it; the masterful decisions of our great Chief Justice John Marshall, pointing out how beneficently our Federal Constitution was adapted to the preserva- tion not only of local self-government but of the liberties of the citizen as well; peace with, and the respect of, foreign nations; free trade between the people of all sections, and abounding prosperity — all these things created a deep impression, and Americans began to hark back to the words of Wash- ington in his farewell address: "The unity of our government, which now constitutes you one people, is also dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of 30 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES your real independence, the support of your tranquillity at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize." But far and away above every other single element contributing to the develop- ment of Union sentiment was the wonder- ful speech of Daniel Webster, January 26, 1830, in his debate in the United States Senate with Hayne, of South Carolina. Hayne was eloquently defending States' rights, and his argument was unanswerable if his premise was admitted, that, as had been theretofore conceded, the Constitution was a compact between the States. Webster saw this and he took new ground; the Constitution was, he contended, not a com- pact, but the formation of a government. His arguments were like fruitful seed sown upon a soil prepared for their reception. No speech delivered in this country ever created so profound an impression. It was the foundation of a new school of political thought. It concluded with this eloquent peroration: "When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken 31 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE and dishonored fragments of a once glori- ous Union; on States dissevered, discord- ant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gracious ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high ad- vanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bear- ing for its motto no such miserable inter- rogatory as *What is all this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and folly, 'Liberty first and Union afterwards,' but everywhere, spread all over with living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every American heart — 'Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.'"' For many years every school-house in the land resounded with these words. By 1861 they had been imprinted on the minds and had sunk into the hearts of a whole genera- tion. Their effect was incalculable. 32 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES It is perfectly true that the secession res- olution of the Massachusetts legislature of 1844 was passed fourteen years after Web- ster's speech, but the Garrisonians had then been agitating the slavery question within her borders for fourteen years, and the old State was now beside herself with excite- ment. There was another great factor in the rapid manufacture of Union sentiment at the North that had practically no existence at the South. It was immigration. The new-comers from over the sea knew nothing, and cared less, about the history of the Constitution or the dialectics of se- cession. They had sought a land of liberty that to them was one nation, with one flag flying over it, and in their eyes secession was rebellion. Immigrants to America, practically all settling in Northern States, were during the thirty years, 1831-1860, 4,910,590; and these must, with their nat- ural increase, have numbered at least six millions in i860. In other words, far more than one-fourth of the people of the North in i860 were not, themselves or their fathers, in the country in the early days when the 33 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE doctrine of States' rights had been in the ascendant; and, as a rule, to these new peo- ple that old doctrine was folly. In the South the situation was reversed. Slavery had kept immigrants away. The whites were nearly all of the old revolution- ary stock, and had inherited the old ideas. Still, love of and pride in the Union had grown in them too. Nor were the South- erners all followers of Jefferson. From the earhest days much of the wealth and intel- ligence of the country. North and South, had opposed the Democracy, first as Feder- alists and later as Whigs. In the South the Whigs have been described as *'a fine upstanding old party, a party of blue broad- cloth, silver buttons, and a coach and four." It was not until anti-slavery sentiment had begun to array the North, as a section, against the South, that Southern Whigs began to look for protection to the doc- trine of States' rights. Woodrow Wilson says, in "Division and Reunion," p. 47, of Daniel Webster's great speech in 1830: "The North was now be- ginning to insist upon a national govern- ment; the South was continuing to insist 34 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES upon the original understanding of the Con- stitution; that was all." And in those attitudes the two sections stood in 1 860-61, one upon the modern theory of an indestructible Union ; the other upon the old idea that States had the right to secede from the Union. In 1848 there occurred in Ireland the " Rebellion of the Young Irishmen." Among the leaders of that rebellion were Thomas F. Meagher and John Mitchel. Both were banished to Great Britain's penal colony. Both made their way, a few years later, to America. Both were devotees of liberty, both men of brilliant intellect and high culture. Meagher settled in the North, Mitchel in the South. This was about 1855. Each from his new stand-point studied the history and the Constitution of his adopted country. Meagher, when the war between the North and South came on, became a general in the Union army. Mitchel entered the civil service of the Confederacy and his son died a Confederate soldier. The Union or Confederate partisan who has been taught that his side was "eter- nally right, and the other side eternally 35 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE wrong," should consider the story of these two "Young Irishmen." How fortunate it is that the ugly ques- tion of secession has been settled, and will never again divide Americans, or those who come to America! 36 CHAPTER II EMANCIPATION PRIOR TO 1831 IN the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- ries, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Span- ish, EngHsh, and American vessels brought many thousands of negroes from Africa, and sold them as slaves in the British West Indies and in the British-American colonies. William Goodell, a distinguished Abolition- ist writer, tells us^ that "in the importation of slaves for the Southern colonies the mer- chants of New England competed with those of New York and the South" (which never had much shipping). "They appear indeed to have outstripped them, and to have almost monopolized at one time the profits of this detestable trade. Boston, Salem, and Newburyport in Massachusetts, and New- port and Bristol in Rhode Island, amassed, in the persons of a few of their citizens, vast sums of this rapidly acquired and ill-gotten wealth."^ > "Slavery and Anti-Slavery," 3d ed., 1885. 37 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE The slaves coming to America went chiefly to the Southern colonies, because there only was slave labor profitable. The laws and conditions under which these ne- groes were sold in the American colonies were precisely the same as in the West In- dies, except that the whites in the islands, so far as is known, never objected, whereas the records show that earnest protests came from Virginia^ and also from Georgia^ and North Carolina.' The King of England was interested in the profits of the iniquitous trade and all protests were in vain. Of the rightfulness, however, of slavery itself there was but little question in the minds of Christian peoples until the clos- ing years of the eighteenth century. Then the cruelties practised by ship-masters in the Middle Passage attracted attention, and then came gradually a revolution in pub- lic opinion. This revolution, in which the churches took a prominent part, originated in England, but it soon swept over Amer- ica also, both North and South. England abolished the slave trade in ' Am. Archives, 4th series, vol. I, p. 696. *Ib., p. 1 136. ^ lb., p. 735. 38 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 1807. The United States followed in 1808; the Netherlands in 18 14; France in 181 8; Spain in 1820; Portugal in 1830. The great Wilberforce, Buxton, and others, who had brought about the abolition of the slave trade in England, continued their exertions in favor of the slave until finally, in 1833, Parliament abolished slavery in the British West Indies, appropriating twenty millions sterling (^100,000,000) as compensation to owners — this because investments in slave property had been made under the sanc- tion of existing law. "Great Britain, loaded with an unprec- edented debt and with a grinding taxation, contracted a new debt of a hundred mil- lions of dollars to give freedom, not to Englishmen, but to the degraded African. This was not an act of policy, but the work of statesmen. Parliament but registered the edict of the people. The English na- tion, with one heart and one voice, under a strong Christian impulse and without distinction of rank, sex, party, or religious names, decreed freedom to the slave. I know not that history records a national act so disinterested, so sublime." 39 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE So wrote Dr. Channing, the great New England pulpit orator, in his celebrated let- ter on Texas annexation, to Henry Clay, in 1837. While the rightfulness of slavery was being discussed in England, the American conscience had also been aroused, and eman- cipation was making progress on this side of the water. Emancipation was an easy task in the Northern States, where slaves were few, their labor never having been profitable, and by 1804 the last of these States had provided for the ultimate abolition of sla- very within its borders. But the problem was more difficult in the Southern States, where the climate was adapted to slave labor. There slaves were numerous, and slavery was interwoven, economically and socially, with the very fabric of existence. Naturally, it occurred to thoughtful men that there ought to be some such solution as that which was subsequently adopted in England, and which, as we have seen, was so highly extolled by Dr. Channing — emancipation of the slaves with compensa- tion to the owners by the general govern- 40 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES ment. The difficulty in our country was that the Federal Constitution conferred upon the Federal Government no power over slavery in the States — no power to emancipate slaves or compensate owners; and that for the individual States where the negroes were numerous the problem seemed too big. Free negroes and whites in great numbers, it was thought, could not live to- gether. To get rid of the negroes, if they should be freed, was for the States a very serious, if not an unsurmountable task. On the seventeenth of January, 1824, the following resolutions, proposed as a solu- tion of the problem, were passed by the legislature of Ohio:^ Resolved, That the consideration of a system providing for the gradual emancipation of the peo- ple of color, held in servitude in the United States, be recommended to the legislatures of the several States of the American Union, and to the Congress of the United States. Resolved, That, in the opinion of the general assembly, a system of foreign colonization, with correspondent measures, might be adopted that would in due time effect the entire emancipation of the slaves of our country without any violation ^ " State Documents on Federal Relations," Ames, pp. 203-4. 41 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE of the national compact, or infringement of the rights of individuals; by the passage of a law by the general government (with the consent of the slave- holding States) which would provide that all children of persons now held in slavery, born after the passage of the law, should be free at the age of twenty-one years (being supported during their minority by the persons claiming the service of their parents), provided they then consent to be transported to the intended place of colonization. Also: Resolved, That it is expedient that such a system should be predicated upon the principle that the evil of slavery is a national one, and that the people and the States of the Union ought mutually to par- ticipate in the duties and burthens of removing it. Resolved, That His Excellency the Governor be requested to forAvard a copy of the foregoing reso- lutions to His Excellency the Governor of each of the United States, requesting him to lay the same before the legislature thereof; and that His Excel- lency will also forward a like copy to each of our senators and representatives in Congress, request- ing their co-operation in all national measures hav- ing a tendency to effect the grave object embraced therein. By June of 1825 eight other Northern States had endorsed the proposition, Penn- sylvania, Vermont, New Jersey, Hlinois, Connecticut, Massachusetts. Six of the slave-holding States emphatically disap- 42 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES proved of the suggestion, viz., Georgia, South Carohna, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama.^ Reasons which in great part influenced all the Southern States thus rejecting the propo- sition may be gathered from the following words of Governor Wilson, of South Caro- lina, in submitting the resolutions: "A firm determination to resist, at the threshold, every invasion of our domestic tranquillity, and to presewe our sovereignty and indepen- de?ice as a State, is earnestly recommended."^ The resolutions required of the Southern States a complete surrender in this regard of their reserved rights; they feared what Governor Wilson called "the overwhelming powers of the general government," and were unwilling to make the admission re- quired, that the slavery in the South was a question for the nation. Another reason was that, although there was a quite common desire in the Southern States to get rid of slavery, the majority sentiment doubtless was not yet ready for the step. Basing this plan on the "consent of the * Ames, p. 203. " lb., p. 206. 43 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE slave-holding States," as the Ohio legisla- ture did, was an acknowledgment that the North had no power over the matter; while the proposition to share in the expense of transporting the negroes, after they were manumitted, seems to be a recognition of the joint responsibility of both sections for the existence of slavery in the South. How- ever that may be, the generous concurrence of nine of the thirteen Northern States in- dicates how kindly the temper of the North toward the South was before the rise of the "New Abolitionism" in 1831. Had emanci- pation been, under the Federal Constitu- tion, a national and not a local question, it is possible that slavery might have been abolished in America, as it was in the mother country, peacefully and with compensation to owners. The Ohio idea of freeing and at the same time colonizing the slaves, was no doubt suggested by the scheme of the African Colonization Society. This Colonization Society grew out of a resolution passed by the General Assembly of Virginia, Decem- ber 23, 1816. Its purpose was to rid the country of such free negroes and subse- 44 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES quently manumitted slaves as should be willing to go to Liberia, where a home was se- cured for them, and a government set up that was to be eventually controlled by the negro from America. The plan was endorsed by Georgia in 1817, Maryland in 18x8, Tenn- essee in 1818, and Vermont in 1819.^ The Colonization Society was composed of Southern and Northern philanthropists and statesmen of the most exalted char- acter. Among its presidents were, at times, President Monroe and ex-President Madi- son. Chief Justice Marshall was one of its presidents. Colonization, while relieving America, was also to give the negro an opportunity for self-government and self- development in his native country, aided at the outset by experienced white men, and Abraham Lincoln, when he was eulogizing the dead Henry Clay, one of the eloquent advocates of the scheme, seemed to be in love with the idea of restoring the poor African to that land from which he had been rudely snatched by the rapacious white man. The society, with much aid from phi- lanthropists and some from the Federal Gov- 'Ames, 195. 45 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE eminent, was making progress when, from 183 1 to 1835, the Abohtionists halted it.^ They got the ears of the negro and per- suaded him not to go to Liberia. Its friends thought the enterprise would stimulate emancipation by furnishing a home for such negroes as their owners were willing to manumit; but the new friends of the negro told him it was a trick of the slave-holder, and intended to perpetuate slavery — it was banishment. And Dr. Hart now, in his "Abolition and Slavery," calls it a move for the "expatriation of the negro." All together only a few thousand negroes went to Liberia. The enterprise lagged, and finally failed, partly because of opposi- tion, but chiefly because the negroes were slothful and incapable of self-government. The word came back that they were not prospering. For a time, while white men were helping them in their government, the outlook for Liberia had more or less prom- ise in it. When the whites, to give the ne- groes their opportunity for self-develop- ment withdrew their case was hopeless.^ ' See Garrison's "Garrison." * See article in Independent, 1906, Miss Mahony. 46 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES . In 1828, while emancipation was still , being freely canvassed North and South, Benjamin Lundy, an Abolition editor in charge of The Genius of Emancipation, then being published at Baltimore, in a slave State, went to Boston to "stir up" 1 the Northern people " to the work of abol- ^Hshing slavery in the South." Dr. Chan- ning, who has been previously quoted, wrote a letter to Daniel Webster on the 28th of May, 1828, in which, after reciting the purpose of Lundy, and saying that he was "aware how cautiously exertions are to be made for it in this part of the country," it being a local question, he said: "It seems to me that, before moving in this matter, we ought to say to them (our Southern breth- ren) distinctly, 'We consider slavery as your calamity, not your crime, and zve will share with you the burden of putting an end to it. We will consent that the public lands shall be appropriated to this object; or that the general government shall be clothed with the power to apply a portion of revenue to it.'' " I throw out these suggestions merely to illustrate my views. We must first let the Southern States see that we are their 47 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE friends in this affair; that we sympathize with them and, from principles of patriotism and philanthropy, are willing to share the toil and expense of aboHshing slavery, or, I fear, our Interference will avail nothing." ^ Mr. Webster never gave out this letter until February 15, 1851.- / In less than three years after that letter was written, Lundy's friend, William Lloyd Garrison, started in Boston a crusade against slavery in the South, on the ground that instead of being the ''calamity,'' as Dr. Channing deemed it to be, it was the ''crime'' of the South. Had no such ex- asperating sectional cry as this ever been raised, the story told in this little book would have been very different from that which is to follow. Even Spain, the laggard of na- tions, since that day has abolished slavery in her colonies. Brazil long ago fell into line, and it is impossible for one not blinded by the sectional strife of the past, now to conceive that the Southern States of this Union, whose people in 1830 were among the foremost of the world in all the elements ' "Webster's Works," vol. V, pp. 366-67, 185 1. ^Ib., ed. 1851, vol. V, pp. 266-67. 48 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES of Christian civilization, would not long, long ago, if left to themselves, have found some means by which to rid themselves of an institution condemned by the public sentiment of the world and even then de- plored by the Southerners themselves. The crime, if crime it was, of slavery in the South in 1830 was one for which the two sections of the Union were equally to blame. Abraham Lincoln said in his debate with Douglas at Peoria, Illinois, October 15, 1858: "When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any sat- isfactory way, I can understand and appre- ciate the saying. I surely do not blame them for not doing what I would not know how to do myself." * Prior to the rise of the Abolitionists in 183 1, emancipationists South had been free to grapple with conditions as they found them. What they and what the people of the North had accomplished we may gather from the United States census reports. The * " The Negro Problem," Pickett, 1809. 49 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE tables following are taken from ^'Larned's History of Ready Reference," vol. V. The classifications are his. We have numbered three of his tables, for the sake of reference, and have added columns 4 and 5, calculated from Larned's figures, to show "excess of free blacks" and "increase of free blacks, South. Let the reader assume as a fact, which will perhaps not be questioned, that "free blacks" in the census means freedmen and their increase, and these tables tell their own story, a story to which must be added the statement that slaves in the South had been freed only by voluntary sacrifices of owners. It will be noted that in 1790 the total "blacks" in the North was 67,479, and, although emancipation in these States had begun some years before, the excess of "free blacks" in the South was over 5,000. Also that at every succeeding census, down to and including that of 1830, the "excess of free blacks" increased with considerable regularity until 1830, when that excess is 44>547- There was always in the South, prior to 1 83 1, an active and freely expressed eman- 50 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 1 Su..._ ^% r^ -"t Q 00 O ^o oo r- O yri ■* o VOvO INCREA! IN FRE BLACKS SOUTB Tj-oo -< t^ m" lO oo' f^ CO CO m cT O CO N P) CO ■* r< M CO ■'^ CO c^ CM CS C^ CM XCESS ' FREE LACKS, lOUTH ■ CO ■ t-- ■ •* N • w • r^ • lO • o • •* • 00 • CO ■ Ti- • rt- • '* • M • CO ■ o. ■ Q. ■ ^ • lO . \r> ■ Q ■ Q, \/^ ' Tt ■ o" ■ ^ ^ ■ ^ 1-1 ■ vo" w o « t-t fO CO ^ ■* CO o o ,_, O t-^ t~- •* „ kJ "f w r^ • o ■ o • to • O ■ lO • CM ■ J? • < H !- rr • o^ • CO • q^ • 00_ • lO • o • H ^ C^ o C5~ tC lo tC fC ro c5^ c> CO m i-Tvo" 2" '^ 1 2 Tj- ir> ro »o (N O M M 8 CO O vc? <3 00 M in ■^ p; q; "" M rT -^ tC cm" O lO vo 00 ir> cm" b I-) - HD <><_ O CO 00 o vovC CM CM t>. w t-t H oT i-T e^ oT lO 01 so CO Ov ■>* u vo r~ CO 00 00 00 00 00 00 51 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE cipation sentiment. But #here was not enough of it to influence legislation. In all but three or four of these States, emancipa- tion was made difficult by laws which, among other conditions, required that slaves after being freed should leave the State. Emancipation in the North had not been completed in 1830. Professor Ingram, pres- ident of the Royal Irish Academy, says in his "History of Slavery," London, 1895, p. 184: "The Northern States — beginning with Vermont in 1777 and ending with New Jersey in 1804 — either abolished slavery or adopted measures to effect its gradual abolition within their boundaries. But the principal operation of (at least) the latter change was to transfer Northern slaves to Southern markets." There had been in 1820 an angry dis- cussion in Congress about the admission of Missouri — with or without slavery — which was finally settled by the Missouri Compromise. This dispute over the ad- mission of Missouri is often said to have been the beginning of the sectional quarrel that finally ended in secession; but the con- troversy over Missouri and that begun by 52 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES the "New Abolitionists" in 1831 were en- tirely distinct. They were conducted on different plans. In the Missouri controversy the only questions were as to the expediency and constitutionality of denying to a new State the right to enter the Union, with or with- out slavery, as she might choose. The en- tire dispute was settled to the satisfaction of both sections by an agreement that States thereafter, south of 36° 30', might enter the Union with or without slavery; and nobody denied, during all that discussio7i about Missouri, or at any time previous to 183 1, that every citizen was bound to maintain the Constitution and all laws passed in pur- suance of it, including the fugitive slave law. "The North submitted at that time (1828) to the obligations imposed upon it by the fugitive slave-catching clause of the Constitution and the fugitive slave law of 1793-"^ So say the biographers of William Lloyd Garrison for the purpose of estab- lishing, as they afterwards do, their claim that Garrison conducted a successful revolt against that provision of the Constitution. 'Garrison's "Garrison," vol. I, p. 113. 53 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE What strengthens the statement that the North in 1828 submitted without protest to the "fugitive slave-catching clause of the Constitution," is that the Compromise Act of 1820 contained a provision extending the fugitive slave law over the territory made free by the act, while it should continue to be territory, and until there should be formed from it States, to which the existing law would automatically apply. Every subsequent nullification of the fugitive slave laws of the United States, whether by gov- ernors or state legislatures, was therefore a palpable violation of a provision that zvas of the essence of the Missouri Compromise. The South was content with the Missouri Compromise, and from that date, 1820, until the rise of the "New Abolitionists," slavery was in all that region an open question. Judge Temple says in his "Covenanter, Cavalier, and Puritan," p. 208: "In 1826, of the 143 emancipation societies in the United States, 103 were in the South." The questions for Southern emancipa- tionists were : How could the slaves be freed, and in what time.^ How about compensa- tion to owners.? Where could the freed 54 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES slaves be sent, and how ? And, if deporta- tion should prove impossible, what system could be devised whereby the two races could dwell together peacefully? These were indeed serious problems, and required time and grave consideration. "Who can doubt," says Mr. Curtis, to quote once more his "Life of Buchanan," "that all such questions could have been satisfactorily answered, if the Christianity of the South had been left to its own time and mode of answering them, and without any external force but the force of kindly, respectful consideration and forebearing Christian fellowship?" ^ But this was not to be. * George Ticknor Curtis's "Life of Buchanan," vol. II, p. 283. 55 CHAPTER III THE NEW ABOLITIONISTS ON the first day of January, 183 1, there came out in Boston a new paper, The Liberator, WilHam Lloyd Garrison, editor. That was the beginning, historians now gen- erally agree, of "New Abolitionism." The editor of the new paper was the founder of the new sect. Benjamin Lundy was a predecessor of Garrison, on much the same lines as those pursued by the latter. Lundy had previously formed many Abolition societies. The Phi- lanthropist of March, 1828, estimated the number of anti-slavery societies as "up- wards of 130, and most of them In the slave States, and of Lundy's formation, among the Quakers." ^ But Garrison became the leader and Lundy the disciple. Garrison was a man of pleasing personal appearance, abstemious in habits, and of re- markable energy and will power. He was a ' Garrison's "Garrison," vol. I. 56 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE vigorous and forceful writer. Denunciation was his chief weapon, and he had "a genius for infuriating his antagonists." The follow- ing is a fair specimen of his style. Speaking of himself and his fellow-workers as the "soldiers of God," he said: "Their feet are shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. . . . Hence, when smitten on one cheek they turn the other also, being de- famed they entreat, being reviled they bless," etc. And on that same page,^ and in the same prospectus, showing how he "blesses" those who, as he understands, are outside of the "Kingdom of God," he says: "All without are dogs and sorcerers, and . . . and murderers, and idolaters, and whatsoever loveth a lie." Mr. Garrison had no perspective, no sense of relation or proportion. In his eye the most humane slave-holder was a wicked monster. He had a genius for organiza- tion, and a year after the first issue of The Liberator he and his little body of brother fanatics had grown into the New England Anti-Slavery Society. The new sect called themselves for a time ' lb., vol. II, p. 202. 57 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE the "New Abolitionists," because their doc- trines were new. The principles upon which this organization was to be based were not all formulated at once. The key-note was sounded in Garrison's "Address to the Pub- lic" in the first number of The Liberator: I shall strenuously contend for the immediate en- franchisement of our slave population. I shall be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice on this subject. / do not wish to think or speak or write with moderation. In an earlier issue, after denouncing sla- very as a "damning crime," the editor said: "Therefore my efforts shall be directed to the ex'posure of those who practise it.*^ The substance of Garrison's teachings was that slavery, anywhere in the United States, was the concern of all, and that it was to be put down by making not only slavery but also the slave-holder odious. And, further, it was the slave, not the slave-owner, who was entitled to compen- sation. Thus the distinctive features of the new crusade were to be warfare upon the personal character of every slave-holder and the con- S8 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES fiscation of his property. It was, too, the beginning of that sectional war by people of the North against the existence of slavery in the South, which, as we have seen, was deprecated by Dr. Channing in his letter three years before to Mr. Webster. The new sect began by assailing slavery in States other than their own, and very soon they were openly denouncing the Con- stitution of their country because under it slavery in those sections was none of their business; and of course they repudiated the Missouri Compromise absolutely, the essence of that compromise being that sla- very was the business of the States in which it existed. It was a part of their scheme to send cir- culars depicting the evils of slavery broad- cast through the South; and they were sent especially to the free negroes of that section. "In 1820," says Dr. Hart in his "Slavery and Abolition," "at Charleston (South Car- olina), Denmark Vesey, a free negro, made an elaborate plot to rise, massacre the white population, seize the shipping in the harbor, and, if hard pressed, to sail away to the West Indies. One of the negroes gave evidence, 59 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE Vesey was seized, duly tried, and with thirty-four others was hanged.'' ^ This plot, so nearly successful, was fresh in the minds of Southerners when the Abo- litionists began their programme, and natu- rally, the South at once took the alarm — an alarm that was increased by the massacre, in the Nat Turner insurrection, of sixty-one men, women, and children, which took place in Virginia seven months after the first issue of The Liberator. One of Turner's lieutenants is stated to have been a free negro. This insurrection the South attributed to The Liberator. Professor Hart says a free negro named Walker had previously sent out to the South, from Boston, a pamphlet, "the tone of which was unmistakable," and that "this pamphlet is known to have reached Virginia, and may possibly have influenced the Nat Turner insurrection."" If this surmise be correct, knowledge that Walker, a free negro, had been responsible for the Turner insurrection, would have lessened neither the guilt of the Abolition- ists nor the fears of the Southerners. But in 1832 Abolition agitation and the ' Hart's "Slavery and Abolition," p. 163. - lb., pp. 217-20. 60 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES fears of insurrection had not as yet entirely stifled the discussion of slavery in the South. A debate on slavery took place that year in the Virginia Assembly, the immediate cause of which was no doubt the Turner insurrec- tion. The members of that body had not been elected on any issue of that character. The discussion thus precipitated shows, therefore, the state of public opinion in Virginia on slavery. Of this debate a dis- tinguished Northern writer says:^ "In the year 1832 there was, nowhere in the world, a more enlightened sense of the wrong and evil of slavery than there was among the public men and people of Vir- ginia." In the Assembly of that year Mr. Ran- dolph brought forward a bill to acco?nplish gradual emancipation. Mr. Curtis continues : "No member of the House defended slav- ery. . . . There could be nothing said any- where, there had been nothing said out of Virginia, stronger and truer in deprecating the evils of slavery, than was said in that discussion, by Virginia gentlemen, debating '"Life of James Buchanan," George Ticknor Curtis, vol. II, pp. 277-78. 61 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE in their own legislature, a matter that con- cerned themselves and their people." The bill was not pressed to a vote, but the House, by a vote of 65 to 38, declared "that they were profoundly sensible of the great evils arising from the condition of the colored population of the Commonwealth and were induced by policy, as well as humanity, to attempt the immediate re- moval of the free negroes; but that further action for the removal of the slaves should await a more definite development of public opinion.*' Mr. Randolph, who was from the large slave-holding county of Albemarle, was re- elected to the next assembly. But when the early summer of 1835 had come the fear of insurrection had created such wide-spread terror throughout the whole South that every emancipation so- ciety in that region had long since closed its doors; and now the Abolitionists were sending South their circulars in numbers. Many were sent to Charleston, South Carolina,^ where fifteen years before " the ' Referred to in " Life of Andrew Jackson," W. G. Sumner, p. 350. ^Hart, supra. 62 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES free negro, Denmark Vesey, had laid the plot to massacre the whites, that had been discovered just in time to prevent its con- summation. The President, Andrew Jackson, in his next message to Congress, December, 1835, called their "attention to the painful excite- ment produced in the South by attempts to circulate through the mails inflammatory ap- peals addressed to the passions of the slaves^ in prints and in various sorts of public atio7is calculated to stimulate them to insurrection and produce all the horrors of a servile warT The good people of Boston were now thoroughly aroused. They had from the first frowned on the Abolition movement. Garrison was complaining that in all the city his society could not "hire a hall or a meeting-house." The Abolition idea had been for a time thought chimerical and therefore negligible. Later, civic, business, social, and religious organizations had all of them in their several spheres been earnest and active in their opposition; now it seemed to be time for concerted action. In Garrison's "Garrison" (vol. I, p. 495), we read that "the social^ political^ religious 63 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE and intellectual elite of Boston filled Fan- euil Hall on the afternoon of Friday, Au- gust 3, 1835, to frame an indictment against their fellow-citizens." This "indictment" the Boston Transcript reported as follows: Resolved, That the people of the United States by the Constitution under which, by the Divine bless- ing, they hold their most valuable political privi- leges, have solemnly agreed with each other to leave to their respective States the jurisdiction per- taining to the relation of master and slave within their boundaries, and that no man or body of men, except the people of the governments of those States, can of right do any act to dissolve or impair the obligations of that contract. Resolved, That we hold in reprobation all attempts, in whatever guise they may appear, to coerce any of the United States to abolish slavery by appeals to the terror of the master or the passions of the slave. Resolved, That we disapprove of all associations instituted in the non-slave-holding States with the intent to act, within the slave-holding States, on the subject of slavery in those States without their consent. For the purpose of securing freedom of individual thought they are needless — and they af- ford to those persons in the Southern States, whose object is to effect a dissolution of the Union (if any such there may be now or hereafter), a pretext for the furtherance of their schemes. 64 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Resolved, That all measures adopted, the natural and direct tendency of zvhich is to excite the slaves of the South to revolt, or of spreading among them a spirit of insubordination, are repugnant to the duties of the man and the citizen, and that where such meas- ures become manifest by overt acts, which are rec- ognizable by constitutional laws, we will aid by all means in our power in the support of those laws. Resolved, That while we recommend to others the duty of sacrificing their opinions, passions and sym- pathies upon the altar of the laws, we are bound to show that a regard to the supremacy of those laws is the rule of our conduct — and consequently to deprecate all tumultuous assemblies, all riotous or violent proceedings, all outrages on person and prop- erty, and all illegal notions of the right or duty of executing summary and vindictive justice in any mode unsanctioned by law. The allusion in the last resolution is to a then recent lynching of negroes in Missis- sippi charged with insurrection. In speaking to these resolutions, Harrison Gray Otis, a great conservative leader, de- nounced the Abolition agitators, accusing them of "wishing to 'scatter among our Southern brethren firebrands, arrows, and death,' and of attempting to force Aboli- tion by appeals to the terror of the mas- ters and the passions of the slaves," and 65 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE decrying their "measures, the natural and direct tendency of which is to excite the slaves of the South to revolt," etc. Another of the speakers, ex-Senator Peleg Sprague, said (p. 496, Garrison's "Garri- son") that "if their sentiments prevailed it would be all over with the Union, which would give place to two hostile confeder- acies, with forts and standing armies." These resolutions and speeches, viewed in the light of what followed, read now like prophecy. It is a familiar rule of law that a contem- poraneous exposition of a statute is to be given extraordinary weight by the courts, the reason being that the judge then sitting knows the surrounding circumstances. That Boston meeting pronounced the deliberate judgment of the most intelligent men of Boston on the situation, as they knew it to be that day; it was in their midst that The Liberator was being published ; there the new sect had its head-quarters, and there it was doing its work. Quite as strong as the evidence furnished by that great Faneuil Hall meeting is the testimony of the churches. 66 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES The churches and rehgious bodies in America had heartily favored the general anti-slavery movement that was sweeping over all America between 1770 and 1831, while it was proceeding in an orderly manner and with due regard to law. In 18 1 2 the Methodist General Confer- ence voted that no slave-holder could con- tinue as a local elder. The Presbyterian General Assembly in 18 18 unanimously re- solved that "slavery was a gross violation of the most precious and moral rights of human nature," etc. These bodies represented both the North and the South, and this paragraph shows what was, and continued to be, the general attitude of American churches until after the Abolitionists had begun their assault on both slavery in the South and the Con- stitution of the United States, which pro- tected it. Then, in view of the awful social and political cataclysm that seemed to be threatened, there occurred a stupendous change. We learn from Hart that Garri- son "soon found that neither minister iior church anywhere in the lower South continued (as before) to protest against slavery; thai 67 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE the cloth in the North was arrayed against him; and that many Northern divines vigorously opposed him." Also that Moses Stuart, professor of Hebrew in Andover Theological Seminary; President Lord, of Dartmouth College, and Hopkins, the Epis- copal bishop of Vermont, now became de- fenders of slavery. ''The positive opposi- tion of churches soon followed." / And then we have cited, condemnations of Abolitionism by the Methodist Confer- ence of 1836, by the New York Methodist Conference of 1838, by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, by the American Home Missionary Society, the American Bible Society, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the Baptists. See for these statements, Hart, pp. 211-12. The import of all this is unmistakable; and this "about-face" of religious organiza- tions on the question of the morality of slavery has no parallel in all the history of Christian churches. Its significance cannot be overstated. It took place North and South. It meant opposition to a movement that was outside the church and with which religion could have no concern, except in so 68 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES far as it was a vital assault upon the State ^ and the peace of the State. To make their oppo- sition effective the Christians of that day did this remarkable thing. They reversed their religious views on slavery, which the Abolitionists were now assailing, and which they themselves had previously opposed. They re-examined their Bibles and found argu- ments that favored slavery. These argu- ments they used in an attempt to stem an agitation that, as they saw it, was arraying section against section and threatening the perpetuity of the Union. United testimony from all these Christian bodies is more conclusive contemporaneous evidence against the agitators and their methods than even the proceedings of all conservative Boston at Faneuil Hall in August, 1835. This new attitude of the church toward slavery meant perhaps also something fur- ther — it meant that slavery, as it actually existed, was not then as horrible to North- erners, who could go across the line and see it, which many of them did, as it is now to those whose ideas of it come chiefly from "Uncle Tom's Cabin." 69 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE In view of this phenomenal movement of Northern Christians it is not strange that Southern churches adhered, throughout the deadly struggle that was now on, to the po- sition into which they had been driven — that slavery was sanctioned by the Bible — nor is it matter of wonder that, as Professor Hart makes prominent on p. 137, "not a single Southern man of large reputation and influence failed to stand by slavery." Historians of to-day usually narrate with- out comment that nearly all the American churches and divines at first opposed the Abolitionists. It illustrates the courage with which the Abolitionists stood, as Dr. Hart delights to point out, "for a despised cause." They assuredly did stand by their guns. Later, another change came about in the attitude of the churches. In 1844 the Abo- litionists were to achieve their first victory in the great religious world. The Methodist Church was then disrupted, "squarely on the question whether a bishop could own slaves, and all the Southern members with- drew and organized the Methodist Episco- pal Church, South." Professor Hart, p. 214, 70 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES says of this: "Clearly, the impassioned agitation of the AboHtionists had made it impossible for a great number of Northern anti-slavery men to remain on terms oj friendship with their Southern brethren.'' That great Faneuil Hall meeting of Au- gust 31, 1835, was followed some weeks later by a lamentable anti-Garrison mob, which did not stand alone. In the years 1835, 1836, and 1837 a great wave of anti-Aboli- tion excitement swept over the North. In New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Alton (Illinois), and many other places, there were anti-Abolition riots, sometimes resulting in arson and bloodshed. The heart of the great, peace-loving, patriotic, and theretofore happy and con- tented North, was at that time stirred with the profoundest indignation against the Abolitionists. Northern opinion then was that the Abolitionists, by their unpatriotic course and their nefarious methods, were driving the South to desperation and en- dangering the Union. If the North at that time saw the situation as it really was, the historian of the present day should say so. If, on the other hand, the people of both 71 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE the North and South were then laboring under delusions, as to the facts that were occurring among them, those of this gener- ation, who are wiser than their ancestors, should give us the sources of their informa- tion. To know the lessons of history we must have the facts. ^ In 1854, at Framingham, Massachusetts, the Abolitionists celebrated the Fourth of July thus: Their leader, William Lloyd Garrison, held up and burned to ashes, be- fore the applauding multitude, one after another, copies of 1st. The fugitive slave law. 2d. The decision of Commissioner Loring in the case of Burns, a fugitive slave. ' The late Professor William Graham Sumner, of Yale, in his "Life of Andrew Jackson," 1888, treats of the excitement at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1835, during Jackson's adminis- tration, over Abolition circulars, etc. Dr. Albert Bushnell Hart, Professor of History at Harvard, in his "Abolition and Slavery," 1906, treats of the same subject. The following extracts from these books will show how these authors picture that exciting pe- riod, and our italics will emphasize the sang-froid with which they touch off what so profoundly affected public sentiment, both North and South, when the events were occurring. Professor Sumner has this to say: "The Abolition Society adopted the policy of sending docu- ments, papers, and pictures against slavery to the Southern States. " // the intention was, as charged, to excite the slaves to revolt, the device, as it seems to us now, must have fallen short of its ob- 72 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 3d. The charge to the Grand Jury of Judge Benjamin R. Curtis in reference to the effort of a mob to secure a fugitive slave. 4th. "Then, holding up the United States Constitution, he branded it as the source and parent of all other atrocities, 'a cove- nant with death and an agreement with hell,' and consumed it to ashes on the spot, exclaiming, 'So perish all compromises with tyranny ! And let all the people say. Amen ! ' A tremendous shout of 'Amen!' went up to heaven in ratification of the deed, mingled with a few hisses and wrathful exclamations ject, for the chance that anything could get into the hands of the black man must have been poor indeed. "These publications, however, caused a panic and a wild indig- nation in the South." — Sumner's "Jackson," p. 350. Why should the Southerners of that day go wild over conduct for which the professor of this era has no word of condemnation ? Dr. Hart follows Professor Sumner's treatment. These are his words: "The free negroes of the South, the Abolitionists could not reach except by mailing publications to them, a process which fearfully exasperated the South without reaching the persons ad- dressed." — Hart's "Abolition and Slavery," p. 216. Why should Southerners be "fearful" when they were inter- cepting all the dangerous circulars, etc., they could find? And why should they be exasperated at all? Dr. Hart's chair at Harvard is within gunshot of Fancuil Hall, yet the great meeting there of August 31, 1835, is not mentioned in either his or Professor Sumner's book, nor is there to be found in either of them any explanation of the reasons underlying the gen- eral and emphatic condemnation throughout the North at that period of the Abolitionists and their methods. 73 \ THE ABOLITION CRUSADE from some, who evidently were in a rowdy- ish state of mind, but who were at once cowed by the popular feeling." ^ The Abolitionist movement was radical; it was revolutionary. When an accredited teacher of history, in one of the greatest of our universities, writes a volume on "Abo- lition and Slavery," why should he restrict himself in comment, as Dr. Hart thus does in his preface.^ The book is "intended to show that there was more than one side to the controversy, and that both the milder form of opposition called anti-slavery and the extreme form called Abolition^ were con- Jro7ited by practical difficulties which to many public men seemed insurmountable." Why should not the historian, in addition to pointing out the "difficulties" encoun- tered by these extremists, show how and why the people of that day condemned their conduct ? Condonation of the Abolitionists, and a proper regard for the Constitution of the United States, cannot be taught to the youth of America at one and the same time. 'Garrison's "Garrison," vol. Ill, p. 412. 74 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES The writer has been unable to find any of the incendiary pamphlets that had proved so inflammatory. He has, however, before him a little anonymous publication entitled ''Slavery Illustrated in its Effects upon Woman," Isaac Knapp, Boston, 1837. It was for circulation in the North, being "Affectionately Inscribed to all the Mem- bers of Female Anti-Slavery Societies," and it is only cited here as an illustration of the almost inconceivable venom with which the crusade was carried on to embitter the North against the South. It is a vicious attack upon the morality of Southern men and women, and upon Southern churches. None of its charges does it claim to authenticate, and it gives no names or dates. One inci- dent, related as typical, is of two white women, all the time in full communion with their church, under pretence of a boarding- house, keeping a brothel, negro women be- ing the inmates. In the chapter entitled "Impurity of the Christian Churches" is this sentence: "At present the Southern Churches are only one vast consociation of hypocrites and sinners." 75 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE The booklet was published anonymously, but at that time any prurient story about slavery in the South would circulate, no matter whether vouched for or not. 76 CHAPTER IV FEELING IN THE SOUTH— 1835 NOT stronger than the proceedings of a great non-partisan pubHc meeting, or than the action of reHgious bodies, but go- ing more into detail as to pubhc opinion in the South and the effect upon it of Abohtion agitation, is the evidence of a quiet observer, Professor E. A. Andrews, who, in July, 1835, had been sent out as the agent of "The Bos- ton Union for the Rehef and Improvement of the Colored Race." His reports from both Northern and Southern States, consisting of letters from various points, constitute a book, "Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade," Boston, 1836. July 17, 1835, from Baltimore, Professor Andrews reports that a resident clergyman, who appears to have his entire confidence, says, among other things, "that a disposi- tion to emancipate their slaves is very preva- lent among the slave-holders of this State, could they see any way to do so consistently n THE ABOLITION CRUSADE with the true interest of the slave, but that it is their universal belief that no means of doing this is now presented except that of colonizing them in Africa." From the same city, July 17, 1835, he writes, p. 53: '*In this city there appears to be no strong attachment to slavery and no wish to perpetuate it." Again, on p. 95: "There is but one sen- timent amongst those with whom I have conversed in this city, respecting the possi- bility of the white and colored races living peaceably together in freedom, nor during my residence at the South and my subse- quent intercourse with the Southern people, did I ever meet with one who believed it possible for the two races to continue together after etnancipation. . . . When the slaves of the South are liberated they form an integral part of the population of the country, and must influence its destiny for ages — perhaps forever." From Fredericksburg, Virginia, Professor Andrews writes: Since I entered the slave-holding country I have seen but one man who did not deprecate wholly and absolutely the direct interference of Northern 78 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Abolitionists with the institutions of the South. "I was an Abolitionist," has been the language of num- bers of those with whom I have conversed; ''I was an Abolitionist, and zvas laboring earnestly to bring about a prospective system of emancipation. I even saw, as I believed, the certain and complete success of the friends of the colored race at no distant period, when these Northern Abolitionists interfered, and by their extravagant and impracticable schemes frustrated all our hopes. . . . Our people have become exasperatedy the friends of the slaves alarmed, etc.*- . . . Equally united are they in the opinion that the servitude of the slaves is far more rigorous now than it would have been had there been no interference with them. In proportion to the danger of revolt and insurrection, have been the severity of the enactments for controlling them and the diligence with which the laws have been executed." From a private letter, written at Green- ville, Alabama, August 30, 1835, by a dis- tinguished lawyer, John W. Womack, to his brother, we quote: The anti-slavery societies in the Northern and Middle States are doing all they can to destroy our domestic harmony by sending among us pamphlets, tracts, and newspapers — for the purpose of exciting dissatisfaction and insurrection among our slaves. . . . Meetings have been held in Mobile, in Mont- ' " Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade," Andrews, pp. 156-57- 79 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE gomery, in Greensboro, and in Tuscaloosa, and in different parts of all the Southern States. At these meetings resolutions have been adopted, disclaim- ing (sic) and denying the right of the Northern people to interfere in any manner in our internal domestic concerns. ... It is my solemn opinion that this question (to wit, slavery) will ultimately bring about a dissolution of the Union of the States. It should be remembered that in 1832 the massacre in Santo Domingo of all the whites by the blacks was fresh in mind. It had occurred in 18 14 — after manumission — and had produced, especially in the minds of statesmen and of all observers of the many signs of antagonism between the two races, a profound and lasting impression. /" The fear that the races, both free, could I not live together was in the mind of Thomas Jefferson, of Henry Clay, and of every other / Southern emancipationist. /And deporta- tion, its expense, and the want of a home to . which to send the negro — here was a stum- \ bling-block in the way of Southern emanci- ] pation. J Indeed, the incompatibility of the races was an appalling thought in the minds of Southerners for the whole thirty years of anti-slavery agitation. It was even with 80 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Abraham Lincoln, and weighed upon his mind when, at last, in 1862, military neces- sity placed upon his shoulders the responsi- bility of emancipating the Southern slaves. Serious as was the responsibility, the ques- tion was not new to him. When Mr. Lin- coln said, in his celebrated Springfield speech in 1858, "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," and added that he did not expect the government to fail, he certainly expected that emancipation in the South was com- ing; and, of course, he thought over what the consequences might be. In that same debate with Douglas, in his speech at Charleston, Illinois, Mr. Lincoln said: "There is a physical difference be- tween the white and black races, which, I believe, will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and po- litical equality." In his memorial address on Henry Clay, in 1852, he had said: '*If, as the friends of colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen shall by some means succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery, and at 81 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE the same time in restoring a captive people to their long lost father-land, ... it will, indeed, be a glorious consummation. And if to such a contribution the efforts of Mr. Clay shall have contributed . . . none of his labors will have been more valuable to his country and his kind." In his famous emancipation proclamation he promised " that the effort to colonize per- sons of African descent upon this continent or elsewhere, with the consent of the govern- ment existing there, will be continued." It must have been with a heavy heart that the great President announced the failure of all his efforts to find a home outside of America for the freedmen, when he ijiformed Congress hi his December fuessage, 1862, that all in vaifi he had asked permission to send the negroes, when freed, to the British, the Danish, and the French West Indies; and that the Spanish-America7i countries in Central A^ner- ica had also refused his request. He could find no places except Hayti and Liberia. He even made the futile experiment of send- ing a ship-load to a little island off Hayti. ^ ' Within perhaps a year Mr. Lincoln was compelled to bring these negroes home; they were starving. 82 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Hume, in "The Abolitionists," tells us that Mr. Lincoln for a time considered setting Texas apart as a home for the negroes — so much was he disturbed by this trouble. 83 CHAPTER V ANTI-ABOLITION AT THE NORTH SOUTHERNERS, save perhaps a few who were wise enough to foresee what the consequences might be, were deeply gratified when they read (183 5-1 83 8) of the violent opposition In the North to the desperate schemes of the Abohtlonists. Surely these mobs fairly represented public opinion, and that public opinion certainly was a strong guaranty to the South of fu- ture peace and security. But the Abolitionists themselves were not dismayed. They may have misread, Indeed It is certain they did misunderstand, the signs of the times. Garrison in his Liber- ator took the ground — as do his children in their life of him, written fifty years later — that the great Faneuil Hall meeting of August 31, 1835, which they themselves declare represented "the Intelligence, the wealth, the culture, and the religion of Boston," was but an indication of the **pro- 84 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE slavery" sentiment then existing. In reality it was just what it purported to be — an authoritative condemnation, not of the anti-slavery opinions, but of the avowed purposes and methods of the new sect. The mobbing of Garrison and the sacking of his printing office in Boston on Septem- ber 26th, however, and the lawless violence to Abolitionists that followed the denuncia- tions of that despised sect by speakers, and by the public press, in New York, in Phila- delphia, in Cincinnati, and elsewhere in the North, proved disastrous in the extreme. While that great wave of anti-Abolition feeling was sweeping over that whole region from East to West, there were many good people who deluded themselves with the idea that this new sect with its visionary and impracticable ideas was being consigned to oblivion, but in what followed we have a lesson that unfortunately some of our peo- ple have not yet fully learned. Mob law in any portion of our free country, where there is law with officers to enforce it, is a mis- take, a mistake that is likely to be followed sooner or later by most disastrous results. The mobs that marked the beginning of 85 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE our Revolution in 1774 were legitimate; they meant revolt, revolt against constituted authorities. But where a mob does not mean the overthrow of government, where it only means to substitute its own blind will for the arm of the law, not good but evil — it may be long deferred, but evil event- ually — is sure to follow. When mobs as- sailed Abolitionists because they threatened the peace and tranquillity of the country, evil followed swiftly. Violent and harsh treatment of these mis- chievous agitators almost everyvvhere in the North, and the heroism with which they endured ignominy and insult, brought about a revulsion of public sentiment. To under- stand the philosophy of this, read two ex- tracts from the writings of that great, and universally admired, pulpit orator, Dr. William E. Channing of Boston, the first written sometime prior to that August meeting: The adoption of the common system of agitation by the Abolitionists has not been justified by suc- cess. From the beginning it has created alarm in the considerate, and strengthened the sympathies of the Free States with the slave-holder. It has made 86 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES converts of a few individuals, but alienated multi- tudes. Its influence at the South has been ahnost wholly evil. It has stirred up bitter passions, and a fierce fanaticism, which have shut every ear and every heart against its arguments and. persuasions. These efforts are more to be deplored, because the hope of freedom to the slave lies chiefly in the dispositions of his master. The Abolitionist proposed indeed to convert the slave-holder; and for this end he approached them with vituperation, and exhausted upon them the vocabulary of reproach. And he has reaped as he sowed. . . . Perhaps (though I am anxious to repel the thought) something has been lost to the cause of freedom and humanity.^ These were Dr. Channing's opinions of the Abohtionists prior to August, 1835, and he seems to have kept silent for a time after the mobbing that followed that great Fan- euil Hall meeting; but a year later, when many other things had happened along the same line, he spoke out in an open letter to James G. Birney, an Abolitionist editor who had been driven from Cincinnati, and whose press, on which The Philanthropist was printed, had been broken up. In that let- ter, p. 157, supra, speaking of course not for himself alone. Dr. Channing says: ' " Channing's Works," vol. II, ed. 1837, pp. 131-32. 87 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE I think it best ... to extend my remarks to the spirit of violence and persecution which has broken out against the Abolitionists throughout the whole country. Of their merits and demerits as Abolition- ists I have formerly spoken. ... I have expressed my fervent attachment to the great end to which they are pledged and at the same time my disappro- bation, to a certain extent, of their spirit and measures. . . . Deliberate, systematic efforts have been made, not here and there, but far and zvide, to wrest from its adherents that liberty of speech and the press, which our fathers asserted in blood, and which our Na- tional and State Governments are pledged to protect as our most sacred right. Its most conspicuous ad- vocates have been hunted and stoned, its meetings scattered, its presses broken up, and nothing but the patience, constancy and intrepidity of its mem- bers has saved it from extinction. , . . They are sufferers for the liberty of thought, speech and press; and in maintaining this liberty, amidst insult and violence, they deserve a place among its honorable defenders. Still admitting that "their writings have been blemished by a spirit of intolerance, sweeping censure, and rash, injurious judg- ment," this great man now threw all the weight of his influence on the side of the Abolitionists, because they were the cham- pions of free speech. Their moral worth AND ITS CONSEQUENCES and steady adherence to their ideas of non- resistance he pointed to admiringly, and it must always be remembered to their credit that the private hves of Garrison and his leading co-workers were irreproachable. In- deed, the unselfish devotion of these agi- tators and their high moral character were ^ in themselves a serious misfortune. They \ soon attracted a lot of zealots, male and female, who became as reckless as they were. • And these out-and-out fanatics were not i themselves office-seekers. What they feared, j they said, was that a "lot of soulless scamps I would jump on to their shoulders to ride into office"; ^ and there really was the great ; danger, as appeared later. In the results that followed the mobbing of Abolitionists in the North, from 1834 to 1836, is to be found another lesson for those voters of this day who can profit by the teachings of history. The violent assaults on the Abolitionists by the friends of the Constitution and the Union constituted an epoch in the lives of these people. It gave them a footing and a hearing and many converts. 'Garrison's "Garrison," vol. Ill, p. 214. 89 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE We have already noted some wonderful and instructive changes in the tide of events set in motion by the radical teachings of the New Abolitionists. The churches, as has been shown, to save the country, North and South, changed their attitude on slavery itself. Dr. Channing, who had opposed the methods of the Abolitionists, became, as many others did with him, when mobs had assailed these people, their defender and eulogist, because they were martyrs for the sake of free speech; and now we are to see in John Quincy Adams another change, equally notable, a change that was to make Mr. Adams thenceforward the most mo- mentous figure, at least during its earlier stages, in the tragic drama that is the sub- ject of our story. Elected to the House of Representatives after the expiration of his term as President, Mr. Adams was not in sympathy with the methods of the Abolitionists. Indeed, prior to December 31, 1831, he had shown as lit- tle interest in slavery as he did when on that day in presenting to the House fifteen peti- tions against slavery he "deprecated a dis- cussion which would lead to ill-will, to heart- 90 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES burning, to mutual hatred . . , without accompHshing anything else."^ The petitions presented by Mr. Adams were referred to a committee. The Southerners had not then become so exasperated as to insist on Congress re- fusing to receive AboHtion petitions. But multiplying these petitions was a ready means of provoking the slave-holders, and soon petitions poured in from many quar- ters, couched, most of them, in language, not disrespectful to Congress but provoking to slave-holders. Unfortunately, the lower house of Con- gress on May 26, 1836, which was while mobs in the North were still trying to put down the Abolitionists, passed a resolution that all such petitions, etc., should there- after be laid upon the table, without further action. Adams voted against it as "a direct violation of the Constitution of the United States." The Constitution forbids any law "abridging the freedom of speech ... or the right ... to petition the government for a redress of grievances." The resolu- tion to lay all anti-slavery petitions on the * Hart's "Slaven^ and Abolition," p. 256. 91 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE table without further action was passed, "with the hope that it might put a stop to the agitation that seemed to endanger the existence of the Union." But it had the opposite effect. It soon became known as the "gag resolution," and was, for years, the centre of the most aggravating discussions that had, up to that time, ever occurred in Congress. Mr. Adams in these debates be- came, without, it seems, ever having been in full sympathy with the agitators, thence- forward their champion in Congress, and so continued until the day of his death in 1848. The Abolitionists were happy. They were succeeding in their programme — making the Southern slave-holder odious by exasper- ating him into offending Northern senti- ment. 92 I 3 CHAPTER VI ^ Q^ P^ A CRISIS AND A COMPROMISE *^ .» .''' IN 1840 there were ioo Abolition societies, i with a membership of over 200,000. ' Agitation had created all over the North a spirit of hostility to slavery as it existed in the South, and especially to the admission of new slave States into the Union. In 1840 the~struggle over the application of Texas for admission into the Union had already, for three years, been mooted. Objections to the admission of the new State were many, such as: American adventurers had wrong- fully wrested control of the new State from Mexico; boundary lines were unsettled; war with Mexico would follow, etc.; but chiefly, Texas was a slave State, which was, in the South, a strong reason for annexa- tion. There were, however, many sound and unanswerable arguments for the admis- sion of the new State, just such as had in- fluenced Jefferson in purchasing the Loui- 93 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE siana territory: Texas was contiguous, her territory and resources immense. On the issue thus joined the first great gun had been fired by Dr. Channing, who, though still more moderate than some, might now be classed as an Abolitionist. August I, 1837, he wrote a long open letter to Henry Clay against annexation, and in that letter he said: To me it seems not only the right but the duty of the Free States, in case of the annexation of Texas, to say to the slave-holding States, "We regard this act as the dissolution of the Union; the essential conditions of the National Compact are violated." ^ This was very like the pronunciamento already made by Garrison — "no union with slavery." The underlying reasons that controlled Southern statesmen in this contest over Texas, and the motives that animated them in the fierce battles they fought later for new slave States, are thus stated by Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, of New England. - It should in justice be remembered that the effort at that period to enlarge the area of slavery was an effort ' "Channing's Works," vol. II, ed. 1847, p. 237. ' "Life of Buchanan," vol. II, p. 280. 94 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES on the part of the South, dictated by a desire to remain in the Union, and not to accept the issue of an inher- ent incompatibility of a political union between slave- holding and non-slave-holding States. In 1840 the first effort for the annexation of Texas, by treaty, was defeated in the Senate. If the Southerners had been as ready to accept the doctrine of an inherent incom- patibihty between slave and free States as were Dr. Channing and those other AboH- tionists who were now declaring for "no union with slave-holders," they would at once have seceded and joined Texas; but the South still loved the Union, and strove, down to i860, persistently, and often pas- sionately, for power that would enable it to remain safely in its folds. Texas was finally admitted in 1845, after annexation had been passed on by the peo- ple in the presidential election of 1844. In that election Clay was defeated by the Abolitionists. Because Clay was not unre- servedly against annexation the Abolition- ists drew from the Whigs in New York State enough votes, casting them for Bir- ney, to defeat Clay and elect Polk; and 95 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE now Abolitionism was a factor in national politics. The two great national parties were the Democrats and the Whigs, the voters some- what equally divided between them. For years both parties had regarded the Aboli- tionists precisely as did the non-partisan meeting at Faneuil Hall, in August, 1835 — as a band of agitators, organized for the purpose of interfering with slavery where it was none of their business; and both parties had meted out to this new and, as they deemed it, pestilent sect, unstinted con- demnation. But at last the voters of this despised cult had turned a presidential elec- tion and were making inroads in both par- ties. Haifa dozen Northern States, in which in 1835 "no protest had been made against the fugitive slave law of 1793," had already passed "personal liberty laws" intended to obstruct and nullify that law. And now it was "slave-catchers" and not Abolitionists who were being mobbed in the North. Boston had reversed its attitude toward the AboHtionists. On May 31, 1849, the New England Anti-Slavery Society was holding its annual convention in that very 96 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Faneull Hall where, in 1835, Abolitionism had been so roundly condemned; and now Wendell Phillips, pointing to one of two fugitive slaves, who then sat triumphantly on the platform, said, "amid great applause, . . . *We say that they may make their little laws in Washington, but that Faneuil Hall repeals thevi, in the name of the hu- manity of Massachusetts.'" ^ Poets headed by Whittier and Long- fellow, authors like Emerson and Lowell, and orators like Theodore Parker and Wen- dell Phillips, had joined the agitators, and all united in assaulting the fugitive slave law. The following, from James Russell Lowell's "Biglow Papers," No. i, June, 1840, is a specimen of the literature that was stirring up hostility against slavery and the "slave-catcher" in the breasts of many thousands, who were joining in an anti- slavery crusade while disdaining compan- ionship with the Abolitionists: "Ain't it cute to see a Yankee Take such everlastin' pains All to get the Devil's Thankee Helpin' on 'em weld their chains?** 'Garrison's "Garrison," vol. Ill, p. 247. 97 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE W'y it's jest es clear es figgers, Clear es one and one makes two, Chaps that makes black slaves of niggers Want to make w'ite slaves o' you. In the meantime the people of the South, much excited, were resorting to repression, passing laws to prevent slaves from being taught to read, and laws, in some States, inhibiting assemblages of slaves above given numbers, unless some white person were present — all as safeguards against insur- rection. Thus, in 1835, an indictment was found in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, against one Williams, who had never been in Alabama, for circulating there an alleged incendiary document, and Governor Gayle made requisition on Governor Marcy, of New York, for the extradition of Williams. Governor Marcy denied the request. The case was the same as that more recently decided by the Supreme Court of the United States, when it held that editors of New York and Indiana papers could not be brought to the District of Columbia for trial. The South, all the while clamoring to have the agitators put down, had by still other 98 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES means than these contributed to the ever- v increasing excitement in the North. South- erners had mobbed AboHtionists, and \ i whipped and driven out of the country \\ persons found in possession of The Liberator v or suspected of circulating other incendi- ary Hterature. And violence in the South \ against the Abolitionists had precisely the same effect on the Northern mind as the violence against them in the North had from 1835 to 1838, but there was this difference: the refugee from the distant South, whether he were an escaped slave or a fleeing Abo- litionist, could color and exaggerate the wrongs he had suffered and so parade him- self as a martyr. While this was true, it was also quite often true that the outrage committed in the South against the suspect was real enough — a mob had whipped and expelled him without any trial. A^id this is another of the lessons as to the evil effects of mob law that crop out all through the history of the anti-slavery crusade. No good can come from violating the law. In 1848 another presidential election turned on the anti-slavery vote, this time again in New York State. Anti-slavery 99 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE Democrats bolted the Democratic ticket, thus electing General Taylor, the Whig candidate. In the canvass preceding this election originated, we are told, the catch-phrase applied to Cass, the Democratic candidate — "a Northern man with Southern prin- ciples." The phrase soon became quite common. South and North — "a Southern man with Northern principles," and vice versa. The invention and use of it in 1848 shows the progress that had been made in array- ing one section of the Union against the other. Later, a telling piece of doggerel in Southern canvasses, and it must also have been used North, was He wired in and wired out, Leaving the people all in doubt, Whether the snake that made the track Was going North, or coming back. Over the admission of California in 1849 there was another battle. California, 734 miles long, with about 50,000 people (less than the usual number), and with a consti- tution improvised under military govern- 100 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES ment, applied for admission as a State. Southerners insisted on extending the Hne of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific, thereby making of the new territory two States. The South had been much embit- tered by the opposition to the admission of Texas. Texas was, nearly ail of it, below the Missouri Compromise line, and the South thought it was equitably entitled to come in under that agreement. Its case, too, differed from that of Missouri, which already belonged to the United States when it applied for admission as a State. Texas, with all its vast wealth, was asking to come in without price. Another continuing and increasing cause of distraction had been the use made by Abolitionists of the right of petition. As already shown, petitions to Congress against slavery had been received without question till 1836, when Northern conservatives and Southern members, hoping to abate this source of agitation, had combined to pass a resolution to lay them on the table, which meant that they were to be no further no- ticed. The Abolitionists were so delighted over the indefensible position into which lOI THE ABOLITION CRUSADE they had driven the conservatives — the "gag law" — that they continued, up to the crisis of 1850, with unflagging zeal to hurry in monster petitions, one after another. The debates provoked by the presentation of these petitions, and the more and more heated discussions in Congress of slavery in the States, which was properly a local and not a national question, now attracted still wider public attention. The Abolitionists had almost succeeded in arraying the entire sections against each other, in making of the South and North two hostile nations. Professor John W. Burgess, dean of the Faculty of Political Science in Columbia University, says: "It would not be extrava- gant to say that the whole course of the internal history of the United States from 1836 to 1 86 1 was more largely determined by the struggle in Congress, over the Aboli- tion 'petitions and the use of the mails for the Abolition literature, than anything else." ^ The South had Its full share in the hot debates that took place over these matters in Congress. Its congressmen were quite * "The Middle Period," John \V. Burgess, p. 274. 102 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES as aggressive as those from the North, and they were accused of being imperious in manner, when demanding that a stop should be put to Abohtion petitions, and AboHtion hterature going South in the mails. There was another cause of complaint from the South, and this was grave. By the "two underground railroads" that had been established, slaves, estimated at 2,000 annually, abducted or voluntarily escaping, .; were secretly escorted into or through the \ free States to Canada. To show how all this was then regarded by those who sym- pathized with the Abolitionists, and how it is still looked upon by some modern his- torians, the following is given from Hart's "Abolition and Slavery": "The underground railroad was manned chiefly by orderly citizens, members of churches, and philanthropical citizens. To law-abiding folk what could be more delight- ful than the sensation of aiding an oppressed slave, exasperating a cruel master, and at the same time incurring the penalties of defying an unrighteous law?'' Southerners at that time thought that conductors on that line were practising, and 103 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE readers of the above paragraph will prob- ably think that Dr. Hart in his attractive rhetoric is now extolling in his history, "higher law doctrines." It is undoubtedly true that, in 1850, a large majority of the Northern people strongly disapproved of the Abolitionists and their methods. Modern historians care- fully point out the difference between the great body of Northern anti-slavery people and the Abolitionists. Nevertheless, here were majorities in eleven Northern States voting for, and sustaining, the legislators who passed and kept upon the statute books laws which were intended to enable South- ern slaves to escape from their masters. The enactment and the support of these laws was an attack upon the constitutional rights of slave-holders; and Southern people looked upon all the voters who sustained these laws, and all the anti-slavery lecturers, speakers, pulpit orators, and writers of the North, as engaged with the Abolitionists in one common crusade against slavery. From the Southern stand-point a difference be- tween them could only be made by a Hudibras: 104 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES He was in logic a great critic Profoundly skilled in analytic, He could distinguish and divide A hair 'twixt South and South West side. As to how much of the formidable anti- slavery sentiment of that day had been created by the Abohtionists, we have this opinion of a distinguished English traveller and observer. Mr. L. W. A. Johnston was in Washington, in 1850, studying America. He says: " Extreme men like Garrison seldom have justice done to them. It is true they may be impracticable, both as to their measures and their men, but that unmixed evil is the result of their exertions, all history of opin- ion in every country, I think, contradicts. Such ultra men are as necessary as the more moderate and reasonable advocates of any growing opinion; and, as an impartial per- son, who never happened to fall in with one of the party in the course of my tour, I must express my belief that the present wide diffusion of anti-slavery sentiment in the United States is, in no small degree, owing to their exertions." ^ ' "Notes on North America," London, 1851, vol. II, p. 486. 105 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE And Professor Smith, of Williams College, speaking of the anti-slavery feeling in the North in 1850, says: "This sentiment of the free States re- garding slavery was to a large degree the result of an agitation for its abolition which had been active for a score of years (183 1- 1850) without any positive results." ^ But no matter what had produced it, the anti-slavery sentiment that pervaded the North in 1850 boded ill to slavery and to the Constitution, and the South was bitterly complaining. Congress met in December, 1849, and was to sit until October, 1850. Lovers of the Union, North and South, watched its proceedings with the deepest anxiety. The South was much excited. The continual torrent of abuse to which it was subjected, the refusal to allow slavery in States to be created from territory in the South-west that was below the parallel of the Missouri Compromise, and the complete nullification of the fugitive slave law, seemed to many to be no longer tolerable, and from sundry sources in that section came threats of secession. ^ "Parties and Slavery," Smith, pp. 3, 4. 106 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES In 1849-50 the South was demanding a division of CaHfornia, an eflficient fugitive slave law, and that the territories of New Mexico and Arizona should be organized with no restrictions as to slavery. Other minor demands were unimportant. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Stephen A. Douglas, Lewis Cass, and other conserva- tive leaders came forward and, after long and heated debates in Congress, the Com- promise of 1850 was agreed on. To satisfy the North, California, as a whole, came in as a free State, and the slave trade was abol- ished in the District of Columbia. To sat- isfy the South, a new and stringent fugitive slave law was agreed on, and the territories of New Mexico and Arizona were organized with no restrictions as to slavery. In bringing about this compromise, Daniel Webster was, next to Clay, the most con- spicuous figure. He was the favorite son of New England and the greatest statesman in all the North. On the yth of March, 1850, Mr. Webster made one of the greatest speeches of his life on the Compromise meas- ures. Rising above the sectional prejudices of the hour, he spoke for the Constitution 107 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE and the Union. The manner in which he and his reputation were treated by popular historians in the North, for half a century afterward, on account of this speech, is the most pathetic and, at the same time, the most instructive story in the whole history of the anti-slavery crusade. Mr. Webster was under the ban of North- ern public opinion for all this half a century, not because of inconsistency between that speech and his former avowals, an averment often made and never proven, but because he was consistent. He stood squarely upon his record, and the venom of the assaults that were afterward made upon him was just in proportion to the love and venera- tion which had been his before he offended. His offence was that he would not move with the anti-slavery movement.^ He did not stand with his section in a sectional dispute. Henry Clay, old and feeble, had come back into the Senate to render his last service to his country. He was the author of the Compromise. Daniel Webster was everywhere known as the champion of the ' McMaster says: "The great statesman was behind the times." — "Webster," p. 19. 108 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Union. Henry Clay was known as the "Old Man Eloquent," and he now spoke with all his old-time fire ; but Webster's great speech probably had more influence on the result. Before taking up Mr. Webster's speech his previous attitude toward slavery must be noted. The purpose of the friends of the Union was, of course, to effect a compromise that would, if possible, put an end to sec- tional strife. Compromise means concession, and a compromise of political differences, made by statesmen, may involve some con- cession of view previously held by those who advocate as well as by those who accept it. Webster thought his section of the Union should now make concessions. Fanaticism, however, concedes nothing; it never compromises, although statesman- ship does. One of the most notable utter- ances of Edmund Burke was: ''All government, indeed every human bene- fit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter." Great statesmen, on great occasions, speak not only to their countrymen and for the time being, but they speak to all 109 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE mankind and for all time. So spoke Burke in that famous sentence when advocating, in the British Parliament in 1776, ''concili- ation with America"; and so did Daniel Webster speak, in the Senate of the United States, on the 7th of March, 1850, for "the Constitution and the Union." If George III and Lord North had heeded Burke, and if the British government and people, from that day forth, had followed the wise counsels given in that speech by their greatest states- man, all the English-speaking peoples of the world, now numbering over 170,000,000, might have been to-day under one govern- ment, that government commanding the peace of the world. And if all the people of the United States in 1850 and from that time on, had heeded the words of Daniel Webster, we should have been spared the bloodiest war in the book of time; every State of the Union would have been left free to solve its own domestic problems, and it is not too much to say that these problems would have been solved in full accord with the advancing civilization of the age. The sole charge of inconsistency against Webster that has in it a shadow of truth no AND ITS CONSEQUENCES relates to the proposition he made in his speech as to the "Wilmot proviso." That celebrated proviso was named for David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, its author. It provided against slavery in all the territory acquired from Mexico. The South had op- posed the Wilmot proviso because the ter- ritory in question, much of It, was south of the Missouri Compromise line extended. Mr. Webster had often voted for the Wil- mot proviso, as all knew. In his speech for the Compromise, by which the South was urged to and did give up its contentions as to the admission of California, and its con- tentions as to the slave trade in the District of Columbia, Webster argued that the North might forego the proviso as to New Mexico and Arizona for the reason that the pro- viso was, as to these territories, immaterial. Those territories, he argued, would never come in as slave States, because the God of nature had so determined. Climate and soil would forbid. Time vindicated this argument. In 1861 Charles Francis Adams said, in Congress, that New Mexico, open to slave-holders and their slaves for more than ten years, then had only twelve slaves III Hu THE ABOLITION CRUSADE domiciled on the surface of over 200,000 square miles of her extent.^ Daniel Webster's services to the cause of the Union, the preservation of which had been the passion of his life, had been abso- lutely unparalleled. It is perhaps true that without him Abraham Lincoln and the armies of the Union in 1861-65 would have been impossible. The sole and, as he then stated and as time proved, immaterial con- cession this champion of the Union now (1850) made for the sake of preserving the Union was his proposition as to New Mex- ico and Arizona. Henry Clay spoke before Webster. These words were the key-note of Clay's great speech: "In my opinion the body politic cannot be preserved unless this agitation, this distraction, this exasperation, which is going on between the two sections of the country, shall cease." The country waited with anxiety to hear from Webster. Hundreds of suggestions and appeals went to him. Both sides were hopeful." Anti-slavery people knew his * "Vindication of Webster," William C. Wilkinson, p. 69. ^McMaster's "Webster." 112 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES aversion to slavery. He had never coun- tenanced anti-slavery agitation, but he had voted for the Wilmot proviso. They knew, too, that he had long been ambitious to be President, and, carried away by their en- thusiasm, they hoped that Webster would swim along with the tide that was sweeping over the majority section of the Union. In view of Mr. Webster's past record, how- ever, it would be difficult to believe that Abolitionists were really disappointed in him had we not many such proofs as the following stanza from Whittier's ode, pub- lished after the speech: Oh! dumb be passing, stormy rage When he who might Have lighted up and led his age Falls back in night! The conservatives also were hopeful. They knew that, though Webster had al- ways been, as an individual, opposed to sla- very, he had at all times stood by the Con- stitution, as well as the Union. At no time had he ever qualified or retracted these words in his speech at Niblo's Garden in 1839: "Slavery, as it exists in the States, is 113 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE beyond the reach of Congress. It is a con- cern of the States themselves. They have never submitted it to Congress, and Con- gress has no rightful power over it. I shall concur therefore in 710 act, no measure, no menace, no indication of purpose which shall interfere or threaten to interfere with the ex- clusive authority of the several States over the subject of slavery, as it exists within their respective limits. All this appears to me to be matter of plain imperative duty." Nullifying the fugitive slave law was a plain "interference" with the rights of the slave States. Mr. Webster's intent, when he spoke on the Compromise measures, is best explained by his own words, on June 17, while these measures were still pending: "Sir, my ob- ject is peace. My object is reconciliation. My purpose is not to make up a case /or the North or a C2lsg for the South. My object is not to continue useless and irritating con- troversies. I am against agitators. North and South, and all narrow local contests. I am an American, and I know no locality but America." 114 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES In his speech made on the 7th of March he dwelt at length on existing conditions, on the attitude of the North toward the fugi- tive slave law, and argued fully the ques- tions involved in the "personal liberty" laws passed by Northern States. Referring to the complaints of the South about these, he said: "In that respect the South, in my judgment, is right and the North is wrong. Every member of every Northern legisla- ture is bound by oath, like every other officer in the country, to support the Constitution of the United States; and the article of the Constitution which says to these States that they shall deliver up fugitives from ser- vice is as binding in honor and conscience as any other article. No man fulfils his duty in any legislature who sets himself to find excuses, evasions, escapes, from this constitutional ob- ligation.'' And further on he .said: "Then, sir, there are the Abolition societies, of which I am unwilling to speak, but in regard to which I have very clear notions and opinions. I do not think them useful. / think their oper- ations for the last twenty years have produced nothing good or valuable. . . . I cannot but 115 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE see what mischief their interference with the South has produced y In these statements is the substance of Webster's offending. Webster's speech was followed, on the nth of March, by the speech of Senator Seward, of New York, in the same debate. Quoting the fugitive slave provision of the Federal Constitution, Mr. Seward said : "This is from the Constitution of the United States in 1787, and the parties were the Republican States of the Union. The law of nations disavows such corn-pacts; the law of nature, written on the hearts and consciences of freemen, repudiates them."^ The people of the North, instead of following Webster, chose to follow Seward, the apostle of a law higher than the Constitutio7i; and when, ten years later, it appeared to them that the whole North had given in its adhesion to the "higher law" doctrine, the people of eleven Southern States seceded, and put over themselves in very substance the Con- stitution that Seward had flouted and Web- ster had pleaded for in vain. ^Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, ist session, Appendix, p. 263. 116 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES / Anti-slavery enthusiasts in the North gen- erally, and Abolitionists especially, in their comments on Webster's speech scouted the idea that the preservation of the Union depended upon the faithful execution of the fugitive slave law or the cessation of anti- slavery agitation. "What," said Theodore Parker, "cast off the North! They set up for themselves! Tush! Tush! Fear boys with bugs! ... I think Mr. Webster knew there was no danger of a dissolution of the nion. The immediate effect of the speech was wonderful; congratulations poured in upon Mr. Webster from conservative classes in every quarter, and he must have felt grati- fied to know that he had contributed greatly to the enactment of measures that, for a time, had some effect in allaying sectional strife. But the revilings of the Abolition- ists prevailed, and it turned out that Dan- iel Webster, great as he was, had under- taken a task that was too much even for him. His enemies struck out boldly at once : and years afterward, when the anti-slavery movement that Webster's appeals could ' "Vindication of Webster," William C. Wilkinson, p. 191. 117 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE not arrest had culminated in secession, and when the Union had been saved by arms, the triumphant hosts of the anti-slavery crusade all but succeeded in writing Daniel Webster down permanently in the history of his country as an apostate from principle for the sake of an office he did not get. Here is their verdict, which Mr. Lodge, a biographer of Webster, passes on into history: "The popular verdict has been given against the 7th of March speech, and that verdict has passed into history. Nothing can be said or done which will alter the fact that the people of this country, zuho main- tained and saved the Unions have passed judg- ment on Mr. Webster^ and condemned w^hat he said on the yth of March as zurong in principle and mistaken in policy. ^^ Here are specimens of the assaults that were made on Webster after his speech. They are selected from among many given by one of his biographers.^ *" Webster,' said Horace Mann, 'is a fallen star! Lucifer descended from Heaven.' . . . 'Webster,' said Sumner, 'has placed * McMaster's "Webster," p. 316 et seq. 118 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES himself in the dark hst of apostates.' When Whittier named him Ichabod, and mourned for him in verse as one dead, he did but ex- press the feeling of half New England : 'Let not the land once proud of him Mourn for him now, Nor brand with deeper shame his dim Dishonored brow. Then pay the reverence of old days To his dead fame! Walk backward with averted gaze And hide his shame.' " After much more to the same effect, Pro- fessor McMaster proceeds: "The attack by the press, the expressions of horror that rose from New England, Webster felt keenly, but the absolute isolation in which he was left by his New England colleagues cut him to the quick." ^ On Mr. Webster's speech. Its purpose and effect, we have this opinion from Mr. Lodge : "The speech, if exactly defined, is in re- * Professor McMaster in the chapter preceding that containing these extracts, has collected much evidence to show that Web- ster aspired to be President, and the biographer entitles the chapter, "Longing for the Presidency," apparently the author's clod on the grave of a buried reputation. 119 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE ality a powerful effort, not for a compromise, or for the fugitive slave law, or for any other one thing, but to arrest the whole anti-slavery 77iovement,y and in that way put an end to the danger which threatened the Union and restore harmony to the jarring sections." And then he adds: "It was a viad project. Mr. Webster might as well have attempted to stay the in- coming tide at Marshfield with a rampart of sand, as to check the anti-slavery movement with a speech." To undertake at this time to arrest the whole anti-slavery movement by holding up the Constitution was indeed useless. Seward, who had spoken for the "higher law," was riding on the tide of anti-slavery sentiment that was submerging "the Sage of Marshfield," who had stood for the Con- stitution. Seward's reputation, in the years following, went steadily up, while Web- ster's was going down. Webster died, in dejection, in 1852. Seward, at Rochester, in 1854, later on in the same crusade, made another famous dec- laration — there was an "irrepressible con- flict between slavery and freedom." The 120 AND ITS CONSEQaENCES conflict was "irrepressible," as Seward well knew; and this was simply and solely be- cause the anti-slavery crusade could not be suppressed. Clay and Webster, now both dead and gone, had tried it in vain. Every one knew that if, in 1850, or at arfy other time, the anti-slavery hosts had halted, and asked for, or consented to, peace, they could have had it at once. Mr. Lodge, in the following paragraph, seems to have almost made up his mind to defend Webster. He says: "What most shocked the North were his utterances in regard to the fugitive slave law. There can be no doubt that, under the Constitution^ the South had a perfect right to claim the extra- dition of fugitive slaves. The legal argu- ment to support that right was excellent.'" This would seem to justify the speech in that regard. "But," Mr. Lodge adds, "the Northern people could not feel that it was necessary for Daniel Webster to make it." They wanted him to be sectional or to hold his tongue. Then Mr. Lodge goes on to say: "The fugitive slave law was in abso- lute conflict with the awakened conscience and moral sentiment of the North** 121 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE The conscience of the North at that time, Mr. Lodge means, was a higher law than the Co7istitutio7i; and Webster's "excellent ar- gument," therefore, fell on deaf ears. No American historian stands higher as an authority than Mr. Rhodes. He says on page i6i, vol. I, of his "History of the United States," published in 1892: " U7itil the closing years of our century a dispassion- ate judgment could not be made of Webster; but we see now that in the war of secession his principles were mightier than those of Garrison. It was not ' No Union with slave- holders,' but Liberty and Union that won." This tribute to services Webster had ren- dered to the Union in his great speech in 1850, in which he advocated "Liberty and Union, now and forever," exactly as he was advocating it in 1830, is just. How pathetic that the historian was impelled also to record the fact, in the same sentence, that for nearly half a century partisan prejudice had rendered it impossible to form a dis- passionate judgment of him who had pleaded in vain for the Union without war! After an able analysis of his "7th of March speech," and a discussion of his 122 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES record, in which he paralleled Webster and Edmund Burke, Mr. Rhodes declares: *'His dislike of slavery was strong, but his love of the Union was stronger, and the more powerful motive outweighed the other, for he believed that the crusade against slavery had arrived at a point where its further prose- cution was hurtfid to the Union. As has been said of Burke, 'He changed his front but he never changed his ground/" ^ Daniel Webster's name and its place in history may be likened to a giant oak, a monarch of the forest, that, while towering high above all others, was stripped of its branches; for a time it stood, a rugged trunk, robbed of its glory by a cyclone; but its roots were deep down in the rich earth; the storm is passing away; the tree has put out buds again; now^ its branches are stretching out once more into the clear reaches of the upper air. Mr. Rhodes seems to be the first historian of note to do justice to Daniel Webster and the great speech which, McMaster takes pains to inform us, historians have written down as his "yth of March speech," in spite ' lb., p. i6o. 123 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE of the fact that Mr. Webster himself en- titled it "The Constitution and the Union." Other historians besides Mr. Rhodes have come to the rescue of Webster's speech for "the Constitution and the Union." Mr. John Fiske says of it in a volume (post- humous) published in 1907: "So far as Mr. Webster's moral attitude was concerned, although he was not prepared for the bitter hostility that his speech provoked in many quarters, he must nevertheless have known it was quite as likely to injure him at the North as to gain support for him in the South, and his resolute adoption of a policy that he regarded as national rather than sectional was really an instance of high moral courage." ^ Mr. William C. Wilkinson has recently written an able "Vindication of Daniel Webster," and, after a conclusive argu- ment on that branch of his subject, he says: "Webster's consistency stands like a rock on the shore after the fretful waves are tired with beating upon it in vain." ^ * "Daniel Webster and the Sentiment of Union," John Fiske, Essays Historical and Literary," pp. 408-9. - "Daniel Webster: A Vindication," p. 47. 124 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Mr. E. P. Wheeler, concluding a masterly sketch of Daniel Webster, setting forth his services as statesman and expounder of the Constitution, and not deigning to notice the partisan charges against him, concludes with these words: ''Great men elevate and ennoble their countrymen. In the glory of Webster we find the glory of our whole country." The story of Daniel Webster and his great speech in 1850 has been told at some length because it is instructive. The historians who had set themselves to the task of upholding the idea that it was the aggressiveness of the South, during the controversy over slavery, and not that of the North, that brought on secession and war, could not make good their contention while Daniel Webster and his speech for "the Constitution and the Union" stood in their way. They, there- fore, wrote the great statesman "down and out," as they conceived. But Webster and that speech still stand as beacon lights in the history of that crusade. The attack came from the North. The South, standing for its constitutional rights in the Union, was the conservative party. Southern 125 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE leaders, it is true, were, during the contro- versy over slavery, often aggressive, but they were on the defensive — aggressive, just as Lee was when he made his campaign into Pennsylvania for the purpose of stopping the invasion of his own land ; and the South lost in her political campaign just for the same reason that Lee lost in his Gettysburg campaign: numbers and resources were against her. "The stars in their courses fought against Sisera." Mr. Webster in his great speech for "the Constitution and the Union," as became a great statesman pleading for conciliation, measured the terms in which he condemned "personal liberty" laws and Abolitionism. But afterward, irritated by the attacks made upon him, he naturally spoke out more emphatically. McMaster quotes sev- eral expressions from his speeches and letters replying to these assaults, and says: "His hatred of Abolitionists and Free-soilers grew stronger and stronger. /To him these men were a "band of sectionalists, narrow of mind, wanting in patriotism, without a spark of national feeling, and quite ready to see the Union go to pieces if their own 126 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES selfish ends were gained." Such, if this is a fair summing up of his views, was Web- ster's final opinion of those who were carrying on the great anti-slavery crusade/ ^ McMaster's " Webster," p. 340. 127 CHAPTER VII EFFORTS FOR PEACE THE desire for peace in 1850 was wide- spread. Union loving people, North and South, hoped that the Compromise would result in a cessation of the strife that had so long divided the section; and the election of Franklin Pierce, in 1852, as President, on a platform strongly approv- ing that Compromise, was promising. But anti-slavery leaders, instead of being con- vinced by such arguments as those of Web- ster, were deeply offended by the contention that legislators, in passing personal liberty laws, had violated their oaths to support the Constitution. They were angered also by the presumptuous attempt to "arrest the whole anti-slavery movement." The new fugitive slave law was strin- gent; it did not give jury trial; it required bystanders to assist the officers in "slave- catching," etc. For these and other reasons the law was assailed as unconstitutional. 128 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE All these contentions were overruled by the Supreme Court when a case eventually came before it. The court decided that the act was, in all its provisions, fully authorized by the Constitution.^ But in their present mood, no law that was effi- cient would have been satisfactory to the multitudes of people, by no means all "AboHtionists," who had already made up their minds against the "wicked" provision of the Constitution that required the de- livery of fugitive slaves. This deep-seated feeling of opposition to the return to their masters of escaping slaves was soon to be wrought up to a high pitch by a novel that went into nearly every household through- out the North — "Uncle Tom's Cabin." On its appearance the poet Whittier, who had so ferociously attacked Webster in the verses quoted in the last chapter, "offered up thanks for the fugitive slave law, for it gave us *Uncle Tom's Cabin.'" Rufus Choate, a celebrated lawyer and Whig leader, is reported to have said of "Uncle Tom's Cabin":;' "That book will make two millions of Abohtionists." Draw- 1 Ableman v. Boothe, 21 How., 506. 129 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE ing, as it did, a very dark picture of slavery, it aroused sympathy for the escaping slave and pictured in glowing colors the dear, sweet men and women who dared, for his sake, the perils of the road in the darkness of night and all the dangers of the law. Mrs. Stowe was making heroes of law- breakers, preaching the higher law. Mrs. Stowe declared she had not written the book for political effect; she certainly did not anticipate the marvellous results that followed it. That book made vast multitudes of its readers ready for the new sectional and anti-slavery party that was to be organized two years after its appearance. It was the most famous and successful novel ever written. It was translated into every language that has a literature, and has been more read by American people than any other book except the Bible. As a picture of what was conceivable under the laws relating to slavery there was a basis for it. Though there were laws limiting the master's power, cruelty was nevertheless possible. Here, then, Mrs. Stowe's imagination had full scope. Her book, however, has in it none of the strident harshness, none of the 130 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES purblind ferocity of Garrison, in whose eyes every slave-holder was a fiend. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" assailed a system; it did not assault personally, as the arch-agitator did, every man and woman to whom slaves had come, whether by choice or chance. Light and shadow and the play of human nature made Mrs. Stowe's picture as attractive in many of its pages as it was repulsive and unfair in others. Mrs. Shelby was a type of many a noble mistress, a Christian woman, and when financial misfortunes compelled the sale of the Shelby slaves and the sepa- ration of families, we have not only what might have been, but what sometimes was, one of the evils of slavery, which, by reason of the prevailing agitation, the humanity of the age could not remedy. But Mrs.\ Stowe's slave-master, Legree, was impos-\ sible. The theory was inconceivable that it was cheaper to work to death in seven years a slave costing a thousand dollars, than to work him for forty years. Millions of our people, however, have accepted "Uncle Tom" as a fact, and have wept over him; they have accepted also as a fact the monster Legree. 131 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE "Uncle Tom's Cabin" lives to-day as a classic on book shelves and as a popular play. The present generation get most of their opinions about slavery as it was in the South from its pages, and not one in ten thousand of those who read it ever thinks of the inconsistency between the picture of slavery drawn there and that other picture, which all the world now knows of — the Confederate soldier away in the army, his wife and children at home faith- fully protected by slaves — not a case of violence, not even a single established case, during four years, although there were four millions of negroes in the South, of that crime against white women that, after the reconstruction had demoralized the freed- men, became so common in that section. The unwavering fidelity during the four years of war of so many slaves to the families of their absent masters, and the fact that those who, during that war, left their homes to seek their freedom invariably went with- out doing any vengeful act, is a phenomenon that speaks for itself. It tells of kindly re- lations between master and slave. It is not to be denied that where the law gave so 132 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES much power to the master there were in- dividual instances of cruelty, nor is it sup- posable that there were not many slaves who were revengeful; but at the same time there was, quite naturally, among slaves who were all in like case, a more clannish and all-pervading public opinion than could have been found elsewhere. It was that all- pervading and rigid standard of kindly feel- ing among the slaves to their masters that made the rule universal — fidelity toward the master's family, at least to the extent of inflicting no injury. What a surprise to many this conduct of the slave was may be gathered from a telling Republican speech made by Carl Schurz during the campaign of 1860.^ A devotee of liberty, recently a revolutionist in his native land, and, like other foreigners, dis- regarding all constitutional obstacles, Mr. Schurz had naturally espoused the cause of anti-slavery in this country. He had ab- sorbed the views of his political associates and now contended that secession was an empty threat and that secession was im- possible. "The mere anticipation of a negro »Fite, "Presidential Campaign of i860," p. 243. THE ABOLITION CRUSADE insurrection," he said, "will paralyze the whole South." And, after ridiculing the alarm created by the John Brown invasion, the orator said that in case of a war between the South and the North, "they will not have men enough to quiet their friends at home; what will they have to oppose to the enemy? Every township will want its home regiment; every plantation its garrison; and what will be left for its field army?" Slavery in the South eventually proved to be, instead of a weakness, an element of strength to the Confederates, and Mr. Lincoln finally felt himself compelled to issue his proclamation of emancipation as a military necessity — the avowed purpose being to deprive the Confederates of the slaves who were by their labor supporting their armies in the field. The faithfulness during the war of the slave to his master has been a lesson to the Northerner, and it has been a lesson, too, to the Southerner. It argues that the danger of bloody insurrections was perhaps not as great as had been apprehended where incendiary publications were sent among them. That danger, however, did exist, and 134 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES if the fear of it was exaggerated, it was nevertheless real, and was traceable to the Abolitionists. The rights of the South in the territories had now been discussed for years, and Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois, had reached the conclusion that under the Constitution Southerner and Northerner had exactly the same right to carry their property, whatever it might be, into the territories, which had been pur- chased with the common blood and treasure of both sections, a view afterward sustained by the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred Scott case. Douglas, "entirely of his own motion," ^ introduced, and Congress passed, such a bill — the Kansas- Nebraska act. The new act replaced the Missouri Compromise. This the Southern- ers considered had been a dead letter for years. Every " personal liberty" law passed by a Northern State was a violation of it. Ambition was now playing its part in the sectional controversy. Douglas was a Dem- ocrat looking to the presidency and had '"Parties and Slavery," Theodore Clarke Smith, professor of history in Williams College, p. 96. THE ABOLITION CRUSADE here made a bid for Southern support. On the other hand was Seward, an "old hne Whig," aspiring to the same office. The South had been the dominant element in national politics and the North was getting tired of it. Seward's idea was to organize all the anti-slavery voters and to appeal at the same time to the pride and jealousy of the North as a section. The immediate effect of the Kansas- Nebraska act was to aggravate sectionalism. It opened up the territory of Kansas, allow- ing it to come into the Union with or with- out slavery, as it might choose. Slave State and free State adventurers rushed into the new territory and struggled, and even fought, for supremacy. The Southerners lost. Their resources could not match the means of organized anti-slavery societies, and the result was an increase, North and South, of sectional animosity. The overwhelming defeat of the old Whig party in 1852 presaged its dissolution. Un- til that election, both the Whig and Demo- cratic parties had been national, each en- deavoring to hold and acquire strength. North and South, and each combating, as 136 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES best it could, the spirit of sectionalism that had been steadily growing in the North, and South as well, ever since the rise of Aboli- tionism. Both these old parties had watched with anxiety the increase of anti-slavery sentiment in the North. Both parties feared it. Alliance with the anti-slavery North would deprive a party of support South and denationalize it. For years prior to 1852 the drift of Northern voters who were opposed to slavery had been as to the two national parties toward the Whigs, and the tendency of conservative Northern- ers had been toward the Democratic party. Thus the great body of the Whig voters in the North had become imbued with anti- slavery sentiments, and now, with no hope of victory as a national party and left in a hopeless minority, the majority of that old party in that section were ready to join a sectional party when it should be formed two years later. William H. Seward was still a Whig when he made in the United States Senate his anti-slavery "higher law" speech of 1850. The Kansas-Nebraska act was a political blunder. The South, on any dispassionate 137 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE consideration, could not have expected to make Kansas a slave State. The act was a blunder, too, because it gave the opponents of the Democratic party a plausible pre- text for the contention, which they put forth then and which has been persisted in till this day, that the new Republican party, immediately thereafter organized, was called into existence by, and only by, the Kansas- Nebraska act. As far back as 1850 it was clear that a new party, based on the anti-slavery sentiment that had been created by twenty years of agitation, was inevitable. Mr. Rhodes, speaking of conditions then, says: "It was, moreover, obvious to an astute politician like Seward, and probably to others, that a dissolution of parties was imminent; that to oppose the extension of slavery, the dif- ferent anti-slavery elements must be organized as a whole; it might be called Whig or some other name, but it would be based on the principle of the Wilmot proviso"^ — the meaning of which was, no more slave States. Between 1850 and the passage of the ' "Rhodes," vol. I, p. 192. 138 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Kansas-Nebraska act in 1854, ^^^ impulse had been given anti-slavery sentiment by fierce assaults on the new fugitive slave law and, as has been seen, by "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The Kansas-Nebraska act did serve as a cry for the rallying of all anti- slavery voters. That was all. It was a drum-call, in answer to which soldiers al- ready enlisted fell into ranks, under a new banner. Any other drum-call — the appli- cation of another slave State for admission into the Union — would have served quite as well. Thus the Republican party came into existence in 1854. ^r. Rhodes sums up the reason for the existence of the new party and what it subsequently accomplished in the following pregnant sentence, "The moral agitation had accomplished its work, the cause (of anti-slavery) . . . was to be consigned to a political party that brought to a successful conclusion the movement begun by the moral sentiment of the community,"^ — which successful conclusion was, of course, the freeing of the slaves by a successful war. For a time the new Republican party had a powerful competitor in another new ' Vol. I, p. 66. 139 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE organization. This was the American or Know-Nothing party. This other aspirant for power made an honest effort to revitaUze the old Whig party under a new name and, by gathering in all the conservatives North and South, to put an end to sectionalism. Its signal failure conveys an instructive les- son. After many and wide-spread rumors of its coming, the birth of the American party was formally announced in 1854. I^ had been organized in secret and was bound together with oaths and passwords; its members delighted to mystify inquirers by refusing to answer questions, and soon they got the name of " Know-Nothings." The party had grown out of the "Order of the Star Spangled Banner," organized in 1850 to oppose the spread of Catholicism and indiscriminate immigration — the two dan- gers that were said to threaten American institutions. The American party made its appeal: For the Union and against sectionalism; for Protestantism, the faith of the Fathers, against Catholicism that was being imported by foreigners; its shibboleth was "America for the Americans." 140 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES The Americans or Know-Nothings every- where put out in 1854 full tickets and showed at once surprising strength. In the fall elections of that year they polled over one-fourth of all the votes in New York, two- fifths in Pennsylvania, and over two-thirds in Massachusetts, where they made a clean sweep of the State and Federal offices.* They struck directly at sectionalism by exacting of their adherents the following oath: "You do further swear that you will not vote for any one . . . whom you know or believe to be in favor of a dissolution of the Union ... or who is endeavoring to pro- duce that result." The effect of this oath at the South was almost magical. The Whig party there was speedily absorbed by the Americans, and Southern Democrats by thousands joined the new party that promised to save the Union." But the attitude of the North- ' Smith, "Parties and Slavery," pp. 118-20. - The writer's father, who had been a nullifier and a lifelong follower of Calhoun, joined the Know-Nothings in the hope of savnng the Union, but withdrew when he found that in the North the party was not true to its Union pledges. Here was a typical case of Southern unwillingness to resort to secession. 141 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE ern and Southern members of the American party soon became fundamentally different. Southerners saw their Northern allies in Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts pass- ing "personal liberty" laws.^ The Know-Nothings were strong enough in the elections of 1855 to directly check the progress of the new Republican party; but the American party, though it succeeded in electing a Speaker of the national House of Representatives in February, 1856, soon afterward went down to defeat. Even though led by such patriots as John Bell, of Tennessee, and Edward Everett, of Massa- chusetts, it could not stand against the storm of passion that had been aroused by the crusade against slavery. There was a fierce and protracted struggle between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery men in Kansas for possession of the territo- rial government. Rival constitutions were submitted to Congress, and the debates over these were extremely bitter. In their excitement the Democrats again delighted their adversaries by committing what now seems to have been another blunder. They ^ Ih., pp. 138-9. 142 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES advocated the admission of Kansas under the "Lecompton Constitution." A review of the conflicting evidence appears to show that the Southerners were fairly outnum- bered in Kansas and that the Lecompton Constitution did not express the will of the people.^ While "the war in Kansas" was going on, Charles Sumner, an Abolitionist from Mas- sachusetts, delivered in the Senate a speech of which he wrote his friends beforehand: "I shall pronounce the most thorough Phi- lippic ever delivered in a legislative body." He was a classical scholar. His purpose was to stir up in the North a greater fury agai^ist the South than Demosthenes had aroused in Athe7is against its enemies, the Macedonians. His speech occupied two days. May 28 and 29, 1855- At its conclusion. Senator Cass, of Michigan, arose at once and pronounced it "the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of this high body." The speech attacked, without any sufficient excuse, the personal character of an absent senator, Butler of South Caro- lina, a gentleman of high character and older ' Theodore Clarke Smith, "Parties and Slavery." 143 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE than Sumner. Among other unfounded charges, it accused him of falsehood. Pres- ton Brooks, a representative from South Carohna, attacked Sumner in the Senate chamber during a recess of that body and beat him unmercifully with a cane. The provocation was bitter, indeed, but Brooks's assault was unjustifiable. Nevertheless, the exasperated South applauded it, while the North glorified Sumner as a martyr for free speech. In less than two years the new Republican party had absorbed all the Abolition voters, and in the election of 1856 was in the field with its candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency — Fremont and Dayton — upon a platform declaring it the duty of Congress to abolish in the territories " those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery." Excitement during that election was in- tense. Rufus Choate, the great Massachu- setts lawyer, theretofore a Whig, voiced the sentiment of conservatives when he said it was the " duty of every one to prevent the madness of the times from working its mad- 144 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES dest act — the permanent formation and the actual present triumph of a party which knows one-half of America only to hate it," etc. Senator Toombs, of Georgia, said: "The object of Fremont's friends is the conquest of the South. I am content that they shall own us when they conquer us." The Democrats elected Buchanan; Demo- crats 174 electoral votes; Republicans 74, all Northern; and the Know-No things, combined with a remnant of Whigs, 8. The work of sectionalism was nearly completed. The extremes to which some of the South- ern people now resorted show the madness of the times. They encouraged filibustering expeditions to capture Cuba and Nicaragua. These wild ventures were absolutely inde- fensible. They had no official sanction and were only spontaneous movements, but they met with favor from the Southern public, the outgrowth of a feeling that, if these countries should be captured and annexed as slave States, the South could the better, by their aid, defend its rights in the Union. The Wanderer and one or two other vessels, THE ABOLITION CRUSADE contrary to the laws of the United States, imported slaves from Africa, and when the participants were, some of them, indicted, Southern juries absolutely refused to con- vict. "Judgment had fled to brutish beasts. And men had lost their reason." When later the Southern States had se- ceded and formed a government of their own their constitution absolutely prohibited the slave traffic. 146 CHAPTER VIII INCOMPATIBILITY OF SLAVERY AND FREEDOM THAT it was possible for slave States and free States to coexist under our Federal Constitution was the belief of its framers and of most of our people down to 1861. The first to announce the absolute impossibility of such coexistence seems to have been William Lloyd Garrison. In 1840, at Lynn, Massachusetts, the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society adopted this resolution, offered by him: "That freedom and slavery are natural and irreconcilable enemies ; that it is morally impossible for them to endure together in the same nation, and that the existence of the one can only be secured by the destruc- tion of the other." ^ \ Garrison's remedy was disunion. Near that time his paper's motto was "No Union with Slave-Holders." / ' Garrison's "Garrison." THE ABOLITION CRUSADE The next to announce the idea of the in- compatibiHty of slave States and free States seems to have been one who did not dream of disunion. No such thought was in the mind of Abraham Lincoln when, in a speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 15, 1858, he said: " ^ house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this govenwient cannot endure perma- nently half slave and half free. I do not ex- pect the Unio7i to be divided. It will become one thi7ig or the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind will rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the States — old as well as new — North as well as South." When the Southerners read that state- ment they concluded that, as Mr. Lincoln knew very well that the South could not, if it would, force slavery on the North, he was announcing the intention of his party to place slavery "in course of ultimate ex- tinction," constitution or no constitution. Senator Seward, at Rochester, New York, 148 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES some weeks later, reannounced the doctrine, declaring that the contest was "an irre- pressible conflict between opposing and en- during forces; and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either an entirely slave-holding nation or entirely a free labor nation." The utterances of Lincoln and Seward were distinctly radical. The question was, would this radical idea ultimately dominate the Republican party.? Less than eighteen months after the an- nouncement in 1858 of the doctrine of the "irrepressible conflict," John Brown raided Virginia to incite insurrections. With a few followers and 1,300 stands of arms for the slaves who were to join him, he captured the United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry. Only a few slaves came to him and, after a brief struggle, with some bloodshed. Brown was captured, tried by a jury, and hanged. In the South the excitement was intense; the horror and indignation in that section it is impossible to describe. Brown was al- ready well known to the public. He was not a lunatic. Not long before this, in Kan- sas, "at the head of a small group of men, 149 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE including two of his sons and a son-in-law, he went at night down Pottowattamie Creek, stopping at three houses. The men who lived in them were well known pro- slavery men ; they seem to have been rough characters; their most specific offence (ac- cording to Sanborn, Brown's biographer and eulogist) was the driving from his home, by violent threats, of an inoffensive old man. John Brown and his party went down the creek, called at one after the other of three houses, took five men away from their wives and children, and deliberately shot one and hacked the others to death with swords."^ Quite a number of people, some of them men of eminence in the North, aided Brown in his enterprise. Among the men of repute were Gerrit Smith, a former candidate for the presidency; and Theodore Parker, Dr. Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, of Boston, who were all members of a "se- cret committee to collect money and arms for the expedition." With them was F. S. Sanborn, who has since the war vauntingly ' "The Negro and the Nation," George Spring Merriam, p. 1 20. 150 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES revealed the scheme in his "Life of John rown. Sanborn intimates that Henry Wilson, subsequently vice-president, was more or less privy to the design.^ At various places in the North church bells were tolled on the day of John Brown's execution; meet- ings were held and orators extolled him as a martyr. Emerson, the greatest thinker in all that region, declared that if John Brown was hanged he would glorify the gallows as Jesus glorified the cross; and now many Southern men who loved the Union reluc- tantly concluded that separation was in- evitable. John Bell, of Tennessee, Union candidate for President in i860, is said to have cried like a child when he heard of Brown's raid. The great body of the Northern people condemned John Brown's expedition with- out stint. Edward Everett, voicing the opinion of all who were really conservative, said of Brown's raid, in a speech at Faneuil Hall, that its design was to "let loose the hell hounds of a servile insurrection, and to bring on a struggle which, for magnitude, ' Sanborn's "Life of John Brown," p. 466. ^ lb., p. 515. THE ABOLITION CRUSADE atrocity, and horror, would have stood alone in the history of the world." But they who had been preaching the "irrepressible conflict," they whom public opinion might hold responsible, did not feel precisely as Mr. Everett did. They were concerned about political consequences, as appears from a letter written somewhat later during the State canvass in New York by Horace Greeley to Schuyler Colfax. Horace Greeley afterward proved himself in many ways a broad-minded, magnani- mous man, but now he wrote: "Do not be downhearted about the old John Brown business. Its present effect is bad and throws a heavy load on us in this State . . . but the ultimate effect is to be good. . . . It will drive the slave power to new outrages. . , . It presses on the irrepressible conflict.''^ The fact that such a man as Horace Gree- ley was taking comfort because that outrage would "drive the slave power to new out- rages"" throws a strong side-light on the tactics of the anti-slavery leaders. They were following Garrison. Garrison, the * " History of United States," Rhodes, vol. I. ^ Channing. 152 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES father of the AboHtionists, had begun his campaign against slave-holders by "ex- hausting upon them the vocabulary of abuse," and he had shown "a genius for infuriating his antagonists." ^ The new party — his successor and beneficiary, was now felicitating itself that ultimate good would come, even from the John Brown raid. It would further their policy of ''driving the slave power to new outrages.'* People at the North, conservatives and all, held their breath for a time after Har- per's Ferry. Then the crusade went on, in the press, on the rostrum, and from the pulpit, with as much virulence as ever. No assertion was too extravagant for belief, provided only its tendency was to disparage the Southern white man or win sympathy for the negro. From the noted "Brown- low and Pryne's Debate," Philadelphia (Lippincott) y we take the following as a specimen of the abuse a portion of the Northern press was then heaping on the Southern people. Brownlow quotes from the New York Independent of November, 1856: "The mass of the population of the At- ■ Hart. 153 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE lantic Coast of the slave region of the South are descended from the transported con- victs and outcasts of Great Britain. . . . Oh, glorious chivalry and hereditary aris- tocracy of the South! Peerless first families of Virginia and Carolina! . . . Progeny of the highwaymen, and horse-thieves and sheep-stealers, and pick-pockets of Old England!" The South was not to be outdone, and here was a retort from De Bow's Review, July, 1858: "The basis, framework, and controlling influence of Northern sentiment is Puri- tanism — the old Roundhead, rebel refuse of England, which . . . has ever been an un- ruly sect of Pharisees . . . the worst bigots on earth and the meanest of tyrants when they have the power to exercise it."^ And the non-slave-holder of the South did not escape from the pitiless pelting of the storm. He was sustaining the slave- holder, and this was not only an offence but a puzzle. It became quite common in the North for anti-slavery writers to classify the non-slave- * Theodore Clarke Smith, "Parties and Slavery," p. 303. AND ITS CONSEQUENCES holding agricultural classes of the South as "poor whites," thus distinguishing them from the slave-holders; and the idea is cur- rent even now in that section that as a class the lordly slave-holder despised his poor white fellow-citizen. The average non- slave-holding Southern agriculturist, whether farming for himself or for others, was a type of man that no one who knew him, least of all the Southern slave-holder, his neighbor and pohtical ally, could despise. Educated and uneducated, these people were inde- pendent voters and honest jurors, the very backbone of Southern State governments that always will be notable in history for efficiency, purity, and economy. This class of voters, however, came in for much abuse in the literature of the crusade. They were all lumped together as "poor whites," sometimes as "poor white trash," and the belief was inculcated that their im- perious slave-holding neighbors applied that term to them. " Poor white trash," on its face, is "nigger talk," caught up, doubtless, from Southern negro barbers and bootblacks, and used by writers who, from information thus derived, pictured Southern society. 155 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE This is a sample of the numerous errors that crept into the hterature of one section of our Union about social conditions in the other during that memorable sectional con- troversy. It is on a par with the idea that prevailed, in some quarters in the South, that the Yankee cared for nothing but money, and would not fight even for that. Southerners were practically all of the old British stock. Homogeneity, common mem- ories of the wars of the Revolution, of 1 812, and with Mexico, and Fourth of July cele- brations, all tended to bind together strong- ly the Southern slave-holder and non-slave- holder. There were, of course, many classes of non-slave-holders — the thrifty farmer, the unthrifty, and the laborer who worked for hire, but more frequently for "shares of the crop." Then there were others — the inhabi- tants of the "sand-hills" and the mountain regions. These people were, as a rule, very shiftless; too lazy to work, they were still too proud to beg, as the very poor usually do in other countries. The mountaineers were hardier than the sand-hillers, and it was from the mountains of Tennessee, Ala- 156 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES bama, etc., that the Union armies gathered many recruits. This was not, as is often stated, because mountaineers love Hberty better than others, but because these moun- taineers never came into contact with either master or slave. The crusade against slav- ery, therefore, did not threaten to affect their personal status. There were very few public schools in the South, but in the cities and towns there were academies and high-schools, and the country was dotted with "old field schools," most of them not good, but sufficient to train those who became efficient leaders in social, re- ligious, and political circles. The wonderful progress made by the Southern white man during the last thirty- five years is by no means all due to the abo- lition of slavery. Labor, it is true, is held in higher esteem. This is a great gain, but still more is due to improved transporta- tion, to better prices for timber and cotton, to commercial fertilizers, and an awakening interest in education. The South is also developing its mineral resources and is now rapidly forging to the front. The white man is making more cotton than the negro. 157 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE But the very strongest bond that bound together the Southern slave-holder and non- slave-holder was the pride of caste. Every white man was a freeman; he belonged to the superior, the dominant race. Edmund Burke, England's philosopher- statesman, in his speech on "Conciliation with America" at the beginning of our Rev- olution, complimented in high terms the spirit of liberty among the dissenting pro- testants of New England. Then, alluding to the hopes indulged in by some gentlemen, that the Southern colonies would be loyal to Great Britain because the Church of England had there a large establishment, he said: **It is certainly true. There is, however, a circumstance attending these colonies which in my opinion fully counter- balances this difference, and makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than in those to the Northward. It is, that in Virginia and Carolina they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case, in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom with them is not only an enjoyment, but a kind oi rank and privilege.'' 158 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES The privilege of belonging to the superior race and of being free was a bond that tied all Southern whites together, and it was infinitely strengthened by a crusade that seemed, from a Southern stand-point, to have for its purpose the levelling of all dis- tinctions between the white man and the slave hard by. Socially, there were classes in the South as there are everywhere. The controlling class consisted of professional men, lawyers, physicians, teachers, and high-class mer- chants (though the merchant prince was unknown), and slave-holders. Slave-holders were, of course, divided into classes, chiefly two: those who had acquired culture and breeding from slave-holding ancestors, and those who had little culture or breeding, principally the newly rich. It was the former class that gave tone to Southern society. The performance of duty always ennobles, and this is especially true of duty done by superiors to inferiors. The master and mistress of a slave establishment were responsible for the moral and material wel- fare of their dependents. When they appre- ciated and fulfilled their responsibilities, as 159 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE the best families usually did, there was found what was called the Southern aristocracy. The habit of command, assured position, and high ideals, coming down, as these often did, with family traditions, gave these favored people ease and grace, and they were social favorites, both in the North and Europe. At home they dispensed a hospitality that made the South famous. They were ex- emplars, giving tone to society, and it was notable that breeding and culture, and not wealth, gave tone to Southern society. There was perhaps in Virginia and South Carolina an aristocracy that was somewhat more exclusive than elsewhere. Slavery was at its worst when masters were not equal to their responsibilities, for want of either culture or Christian feeling, or both, as also when, as was now and then the case, a brutal overseer was in charge of a plantation far away from the eye of the owner. The influence of the slave-holder and his lavish hospitality did not make for thrift among his less fortunate brethren; it made perhaps for prodigality, but it also made for a high sense of honor among slave-holders i6o AND ITS CONSEQUENCES and non-slave-holders as well. Both slave- holders and non-slave-holders were ex- tremely punctilious. Money did not count where honor was concerned, and Southern- ers do well to be proud of the record in this respect that has been made by their states- men. Among the more cultured classes in the period here treated of, the duel prevailed, a practice now very properly condemned. But it made for a high sense of honor. Dema- gogues were not common when a false state- ment on "the stump" was apt to result in a mortal combat. Among the less cultured classes insult was answered with a blow of the fist. Fisti- cuffs, too, were quite common to ascertain who was the "best man" in a community or county. The rules were not according to the Marquis of Queensbury, but they al- ways secured "fair play."^ This combative spirit of Southerners was undoubtedly a result of the spirit of caste that came from slavery. Sometimes it was ' For the humorous side of life in the South in the old day, see "Simon Suggs," J. J. Hooper; "Georgia Scenes," Judge Longstreet, and "Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi," by Baldwin. i6i THE ABOLITION CRUSADE unduly exhibited in Congress during the controversy over slavery and State's rights, and excited Southerners occasionally sub- jected themselves to the charge of arrogance. One of the great evils of slavery was that, as a rule, neither the slave-holder nor the non-slave-holder properly appreciated the dignity of labor. A witty student at a Southern university said that his chief ob- jection to college life was that he could not have a negro to learn his lessons for him. The slave-holder quite generally disdained manual labor, and the non-slave-holder was also inclined to deprecate the necessity that compelled him to work. The sudden abolition of slavery was the ruin of thousands of innocent families — a loss for which there was no recompense. But for the South at large, and especially to this generation, it is a blessing that all classes have come to see, that to labor and to be useful is not only a duty, but a privi- lege. Political conditions. North and South, differed widely. The North was the major- ity section. Its majority could protect its ri{xhts; recourse to the limitations of the 162 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Federal Constitution was seldom necessary. The South, a minority section, with a devo- tion that never failed, held high the "Con- stitution of the fathers, the palladium" of its rights. To one section the Constitution was the bond of a Federal Union that was the security for interstate commerce and national prosperity; to the other it was a guaranty of peace abroad and local self- government at home. In the one section the brightest minds were for the most part engaged in business or in literary pursuits; in the other, politics absorbed much of its talent. In the North the staple of political discussion was usually some business or moral question, while in the South the po- litical arena was a great school in which the masses were not only educated in the his- tory of the formation of the Constitution, but taught an affectionate regard for that instrument as a revered **gift from the fathers" and the only safeguard of American liberty. Joint political discussions, which were common between the ablest men of opposing parties, were always numerously attended, and the Federal Constitution was an unfailing topic. The result was, an 16^. THE ABOLITION CRUSADE amount of political information in the aver- age Confederate soldier that the average Union soldier in his business training had never acquired, and a devotion of the South- erner to the Constitution of his country which even the ablest historians of to-day have failed to comprehend. It is often stated, as if it were an important fact in the consideration of the great anti- slavery crusade, that not many of the Abo- litionists were as radical as Garrison, and that of the anti-slavery voters very few favored social equality between whites and blacks. Southerners did not stop to make distinctions like these. They saw the Aboli- tionists advocating mixed schools and favor- ing laws authorizing mixed marriages; saw them practising social equality; saw the general trend in that direction ; and so from its very beginning the Republican party, which had absorbed the Abolitionists, was dubbed, North and South, the "Black Re- publican" party. The whites of the South believed that the triumph of the "Black Republican" party, as they called it, would be ultimately the triumph of its most radical elements. Judge 164 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Reagan, of Texas, United States congress- man in 1 860-6 1, Confederate Postmaster- General, later United States senator, and always until i860 an avowed friend of the Union, in his farewell speech to the Con- gress of the United States in January, 1861, gave expression to this idea when he said: "And now you tender to us the inhuman alternative of unconditional submission to Republican rule on abolition principles, and ultimately to free negro equality, and a govern- ment of mo7igrels, or a war of races on the one hand, and on the other, secession and a bloody and desolating civil war." * Judge Reagan was expressing in Congress the opinion that animated the Confederate soldier in the war that was to follow seces- sion, an opinion the ex-Confederate did not see much reason to change when the era of Reconstruction had been reached, and the ballot had been given to every negro, while the leading whites were disfranchised. In 1857 Hinton Rowan Helper, of North Carolina, wrote a notable book to show that slavery was a curse to the South, and espe- cially to the non-slave-holders. It was an ' "Memoirs of John H. Reagan," p. 261. 165 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE appeal to the latter to become Abolition- ists. His arguments availed nothing; back of his book was the Republican party, now planting itself, as Garrison had planted himself, on an extract from the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, "all men are created equal." The Republican contention was, in platforms and speeches, that the Declaration of Independence cov- ered negroes as well as whites,^ and South- ern whites, nearly all of Revolutionary stock, resented the idea. They rebelled at the sug- gestion that the signers, every one of whom, save possibly those from Massachusetts, represented slave-holding constituents, in- tended to say that the negroes then in the colonies were the equals of the whites. If so, why were these negroes kept in slavery, and why were they not immediately given the right to vote, to sit on juries, to be edu- cated, and to intermarry with the whites? All this, the Southerners said, as, indeed, did many Northerners also, was to be the logical outcome of the Republican doctrine, that negroes and whites were equals. It is ■ Mr. Lincoln took that position in his great speech at Chicago, in 1858, when beginning his campaign for the senatorship. 166 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES passing strange that modern historians so often have failed to note that this thought was in the minds of all the opponents of the Republican party from the day of its birth — North and South it was called the "Black Republican" party. Douglas, in his de- bate with Lincoln, gave it that name and stood by it. In his speech at Jonesboro, Illinois, September 15, 1858, he charges the RepubHcans with advocating "negro citizenship and negro equality, putting the white man and the negro on the same basis under the law." ^ John C. Calhoun, in a memorial to the Southern people in 1849, signed by many other congressmen, had said that Northern fanaticism would not stop at emancipation. "Another step would be taken to raise them [the negroes] to a political and social equality with their former owners, by giving them the right of voting and holding public office under the Federal Government. . . . But when raised to an equality they would become the fast political associates of the North, acting and voting with them on all questions, and by this perfect union be- ' Lincoln, "Complete Works," vol. IV, p. 9. 167 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE tween them holding the South in complete subjection. The blacks and the profligate whites that might unite with them would be- come the principal recipients of Federal patronage, and would, in consequence, be raised above the whites of the South in the social and political scale. We would, in a word, change conditions with them, a deg- radation greater than has as yet fallen to the lot of a free and enlightened people.'' ^ In the light of Reconstruction, this was prophecy. These words, once heard by a Southern white man, of course sank into his heart. They could never have been forgotten. The argument of Helper fell on deaf ears. If Helper had come with the promise (and an assurance of its fulfilment) that the negroes, when emancipated, would be sent to Liberia, or elsewhere oiit of the country^ the South would have become Republicanized at once. Even if the slave-holder had been unwill- ing, the Southern non-slave-holder, with his three, and often five, to one majority, would have seen to it. And it is not too much to say that if the ' "Calhoun's Works," vol. VI, p. 311. 168 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES negro had been, as the AboHtionists and ultimately many RepubHcans contended he was, the equal of the white man, Liberia would have been a success. What a glorious consummation of the dreams of statesmen and philanthropists that would have been! Abolitionists, unable to frustrate their scheme, and the American negro, profiting by the civilization here received from con- tact with the white man, building by his own energy happy homes for himself and his kinsmen, and enjoying the blessings of a great government of his own, in his own great continent! Africa with its vast resources is a prize that all Europe is now contending for. It is believed to be adapted even to white men. Most assuredly, for the negro Liberia offered far better opportunities than did the rocky coast of New England to the white men who settled it. Liberia had been carefully se- lected as a desirable part of Africa. It was an unequalled group of statesmen and phi- lanthropists that had planted the colony; they provided for it and set it on its feet. But it failed; failed just for the same rea- son that prevented the aboriginal African 169 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE from catching on to the civihzation that be- gan to develop thousands of years ago, close by his side on the borders of the Mediter- ranean; failed for the same reason that Hayti, now free for a century, has failed. The failure of the plan of the American Col- onization Society to repatriate the American negro in Africa was due primarily to the in- capacity of the negro. A very complete and convincing story will be found in an article entitled "Liberia, an Example of Negro Self-Government,"^ by Miss Agnes P. Mahony, for five years a missionary in that country. The author of the article was a sympathizing friend. She says: "In 1847 the colony was considered healthy enough to stand alone. ... So our flag was lowered on the African continent, and the protectors of the colony retired, leaving the people to govern the country in their own way." Then she recites that in order to test their capacity for self-gov- ernment their constitution (1847) provided that no white man should hold property in the country; and to this Miss Mahony traces the failure that followed. When she ' Independent, 1906. 170 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES wrote, the Liberian negroes, for fifty-nine years under the protectorship of the United States, had been troubled by no foreign enemy; yet their failure was complete — not a foot of railroad, no cable communi- cation with foreign countries, no telegraphic communication with the interior, etc. Still the devoted missionary thinks that Liberia might prosper, if it could but have "the en- couraging example of and contact with the right kind of white men.'' The presidential campaign of i860 was very exciting. There were four tickets in the field, Douglas and Johnson, Democrats; Breckenridge and Lane, Democrats; Lincoln and Hamlin, Republicans, and Bell and Everett representing the "Constitutional Union" party. As the election approached it became apparent that the Republicans were leading, and far-seeing men, like Sam- uel J. Tilden, of New York, became much alarmed for fear that the election of Lincoln would bring about secession in the South. Mr. Tilden, in view of the danger that to him was apparent, wrote, shortly before the elec- tion, to William Kent, of New York City, 171 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE an open letter in which he earnestly urged a combination in New York State of the supporters of other candidates, in order to defeat Abraham Lincoln. The letter was so alarming that some of Tilden's friends thought he had lost his balance; but now that letter is regarded as a remarkable proof of his sagacity. In the first volume of Mr. Tilden's "Life and Letters," by Bigelow, appears an "Appreciation" by James C. Carter and an analysis of this letter. Of this the following is a brief abstract: Mr. Tilden first argued that two strictly sec- tional parties, arrayed upon the question of destroying an institution which one of them, not unnaturally, regarded as essential to self-existence, would bring war. Then Mr. Tilden further said that if the Republican party should be successful in establishing its dominion over the South, the national government in the Southern States would cease to be self-government and become a government of one people over a distinct people, a thing impossible with our race, except as a consequence of a successful war, and even then incompatible with our democratic institutions. He also 172 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES said: "I assert that a controversy between powerful communities, organized into gov- ernments, of a nature like that which now divides the North and South, can be settled only by convention or by war." And again: "A condition of parties in which the Federative Government shall be carried on by a party, having no affiliations in the Southern States, is impossible to con- tinue. Such a government would be out of all relations to those States. It would have neither the nerves of sensation, which con- vey intelligence to the intellect of the body politic, nor the ligaments and muscles, which hold its parts together and move them in harmony. It would be in substance the government of one people by another peo- ple. That system will not do for our race." Mr. Tilden, when he spoke of " two sec- tional parties arrayed upon the question of destroying an institution," viz.^ slavery, saw the situation exactly as the South did. To prove that the Republican party was look- ing to the ultimate destruction of the insti- tution, Mr. Tilden cited the leadership of Chase and his speeches in which he was pro- pounding the higher law theory; asserting 173 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE that the conflict was "irrepressible"; sug- gesting the power of the North to amend the Constitution, etc. The South noted this, and it regarded, not the platform, but the record of the Repub- lican party and of the statesmen the party was following. Long before i860, that great American scholar, George Ticknor, saw the dilemma in which the North was involving itself by its concern over slavery in the South, and he thus stated it, in a letter to his friend, William Ellery Channing, April 30, 1842:^ "On the subject of our relations with the South and its slavery, we must — as I have always thought — do one of two things; either keep honestly the bargain of the Con- stitution as it shall be interpreted by the authorities — of which the Supreme Court of the United States is the chief and safest — or declare honestly that we can no longer in our conscience consent to keep it, and break it." The North had failed to "keep honestly the bargain of the Constitution" by faith- ' Life and Letters and Journals of George Ticknor. AND ITS CONSEQUENCES fully delivering fugitive slaves and leaving the question of slavery to be dealt with by the States in which it existed, and was now, in i860, upon the other horn of the dilemma — repudiating and denouncing a de- cision of the Supreme Court, which, as Mr. Ticknor had said, was the "chief and safest authority." But during that campaign of i860 very many, perhaps a majority of the Republican voters, failed to realize what their party was standing for. Indeed, down to this day the members of that organiza- tion, taught as they have been, indignantly deny that a vote for Lincoln and Hamlin in i860 looked to an interference with slavery in the States. But now Professor Emerson David Fite, of Yale University, sees in 1911 what was the underlying hope, and consequently the ultimate aim, of the Republican party in i860, exactly as the South saw it then. In a powerful summing up of more evidence than there is room to recite here, he says: ''The testimony of the Democracy and of the leaders of the Republican party accords well with the evidence of daily events in revealing Republican aggression. The party ^7S THE ABOLITION CRUSADE hoped to destroy slavery^ and this was some- thing new in a large political organization.^' * That this party, when it should ultimately come into full power, would, to carry out the purpose which Professor Fite now sees, ignore the Federal Constitution was, in i860, evident to Southerners from the fol- lowing facts: In 1 84 1 the governor of Virginia de- manded of the governor of New York the extradition of two men indicted in Virginia for enticing away slaves from their mas- ters. Governor Seward, of New York, re- fused the demand, on the ground that no such offence existed in New York. This case did not go to the courts, but in i860 the governor of Kentucky made a similar demand in a like case on the governor of Ohio, who placed his refusal on the same grounds as had Governor Seward in the former case. The Supreme Court of the United States in this case decided that the governor of Ohio, in refusing to deliver up the fugitive, was violating the Constitution. The court further said : "If the governor of Ohio refuses to dis- * "The Presidential Campaign of i860," p. 195, Fite, 1911. 176 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES charge this duty there is no power delegated to the general government, either through the ju- dicial department or any other department, to use any coercive means to compel him." ^ If these two governors had defied the Federal Constitution, so had eleven State legislatures. From 1854 to i860, inclu- sive, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wiscon- sin, Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, had all passed new "personal liberty laws" to abrogate the new fugitive slave law of 1850. Of these laws Professor Alexander John- ston said: "There is absolutely no excuse for the personal liberty laws. If the rendition of fugitive slaves was a federal obligation, the personal liberty laws were flat disobedience to the law; if the obligation was upon the States, they were a gross breach of good faith, for they were intended and operated to prevent rendition; and, in either case, they were in violation of the Constitution." ^ And now came the State of Wisconsin. Its Supreme Court intervened and took from ' "Virginia's Attitude on Slavery and Secession," Mumford, pp. 211-12. * Alexander Johnston, "Lalor's Encyclopaedia," vol. Ill, p. 163. ^77 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE the hands of the federal authorities an al- leged fugitive slave. The Supreme Court of the United States reversed the case and or- dered the slave back into the custody of the United States marshal;^ and thereupon the General Assembly of Wisconsin expressly re- pudiated the authority of the United States Supreme Court. The Wisconsin assembly asserted its right to nullify the Federal law, basing its action on the Kentucky Resolu- tions of 1798 — a recrudescence of a doctrine long since abandoned even in the South. In reality all this defiance of the Consti- tution of the United States by State execu- tives, State legislatures, and a State court, was on the ground that whatever was dic- tated by conscience to these officials was a "higher law than the Constitution of the United States"; and modern historians recognize, as Tilden did, the leadership of the statesman who in 1850 announced that startling doctrine. It is Alexander Johnston who says, "Seward's speeches in the Senate made him the leader of the Republican party from its first organization."' ' Ableman -'. Booth, 21 How. ^Alexander Johnston, "Lalor's Encyclopaedia," vol. Ill, p. 707. 178 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES To the minds of Southerners it seemed clear that if the Southern States desired to preserve for themselves the Constitution of the fathers, they must secede and set it up over a government of their own. This eleven of these States did. Many of them were re- luctant to take the step; all their people had loved the old Union, but they passed their ordinances of secession, united as the Confederate States of America, and their officials took an oath to maintain inviolate the old Constitution, which, with unimpor- tant changes in it, they had adopted. The new government sent delegates to ask that the separation should be peaceful. The application was denied and the war followed. Attempts to secede were made in Kentucky and Missouri. In neither of these States did the seceders get full control. They were represented, however, in the Con- federate Congress by senators and represent- atives elected by the troops from those States that were serving in the Confederate army. 179 CHAPTER IX FOUR YEARS OF WAR THE bitter fruits of anti-slavery agita- tion were secession and four years of bloody war. The Federal Government waged war to coerce the seceding States to remain in the Union. With the North it was a war for the Union; the South was fighting for independence — denominated by Northern writers as "the Civil War." It was in reality a war between the eleven States which had seceded, as autonomous States, and were fighting for independence, as the Confederate States of America, against the other twenty-two States, which, as the United States of America, fought against se- cession and for the Union of all the States. It is true the States remaining in the Union had with them the army and the navy and the old government, but that govern- ment could not, and did not, exercise its functions within the borders of the seceded States until by force of arms in the war 1 80 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE that was now waged it had conquered a control. It was a war between the States for such control; for independence on the one hand, and for the Union on the other. It was not, save in exceptional cases, a war between neighbor and neighbor; it was a war between States as entities, and therefore not properly a civil war. The result of the war did not change the principles upon which it was fought, though it did decide finally the issues that were involved, the right of secession primarily, and slavery inci- dentally. Jefferson Davis, afterward the much- loved President of the Confederacy, in his farewell speech in the United States Senate, March 21, 1861, thus stated the case of the South: ''Then, senators, we recur to the compact which binds us together. We re- cur to the principles upon which this gov- ernment was founded, and when you deriy them, and when you deny to us the right to withdraw from a Union which thus per- verted threatens to be destructive of our rights, we but tread in the path of our fathers whefi we proclaim our independe7ice and take the hazard. This is done not in hostility to 181 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE others, not to injure any section of our coun- try, not even for our own pecimiary benefit, but from the high and solemn motive of defend- ing and protecting the rights we inherited and which it is our duty to transmit ufishorn to our children." Southerners were, as Mr. Davis under- stood it, treading in the path of their fathers when they proclaimed their independence and fought for the right of self-government. Professor Fite, of Yale, justifies secession on the following ground: "In the last analysis the one complete justification of secession was the necessity of saving the vast property of slavery from destruction; secession was a commercial necessity designed to make those billions se- cure from outside interference. Viewed in this light, secession was right, for any peo- ple, prompted by the commonest motives of self-defence and with no moral scruples against slavery, would have followed the same course. The present generation of Northerners, born and reared after the war, must shake off their inherited political pas- sions and prejudices and pronounce the ver- dict of justification for the South. Believ- 182 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES ing slavery to be right, it was the duty of the South to defend it. It is time that the words 'traitors,' 'conspirators,' 'rebels,' and 'rebeihon' be discarded."^ These words of Professor Fite will waken a responsive echo in the hearts of Southern- ers, but Southerners place, and their fathers planted, themselves on higher ground than commercial considerations. The Confeder- ates were defending their inherited right of. local self-government and the Federal Con- stitution that secured it. It was for these rights that, as Mr. Davis had said, they were willing to follow the path their fathers trod. The preservation of the Union the North was fighting for, was a noble motive; it looked to the future greatness and glory of the republic; but devotion to the Union had been a growth, the product largely of a single generation ; the devotion of the South to the right of local self-government was an older and deeper conviction; it had been bred in the bone for three generations; it dated from Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and Yorktown. Close as the non-slave- 1 "The Presidential Campaign of i860," Emerson David Fite, 191 1, introductorj^ chapter. 183 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE holders of the South were to the slave- holders, of the same British stock, and with the same traditions, blood kinsmen as they were, they might not have been willing to dare all and do all for the protection of prop- erty in which they were not interested; but they were ready to, and they did, wage a death struggle to maintain against a hostile sectional majority, their inherited right to govern themselves in their own way. Added to this was the ever-present conviction of Southerners all, that they were battling not only for the supremacy of their race but for the preservation of their homes. There was a little ditty quite prevalent in the Army of Northern Virginia, of which nothing is now remembered except the refrain, but that of itself speaks volumes. It ran: "Do you belong to the rebel band Fighting for your homer" Northerners had, most of them, convinced themselves that the South would never dare to secede. The danger of servile insur- rections, if nothing else, would prevent it.^ * See Fite, "Campaign of i860," passim, and es- pecially speech of Schurz, p. 244 et seq. 184 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Many Southerners, on the other hand, could not see how, under the Constitution, the North could venture on coercion. But to the South the greatest surprise fur- nished by the events of that era has been Abraham Lincoln — as he appears now in the light of history. What, in the minds of Southerners, fixed his status personally, dur- ing the canvass of i860, was the statement he had made in his speech at Chicago, pre- liminary to his great debate with Douglas in 1858, that the Union could not "continue tb exist half slave and half free." And he was now the candidate of the "Black Republi- can" party, a party that was denouncing a decision of the Supreme Court; that, in nearly every State in the North, had nulli- fied the fugitive slave law, and that stood for "negro equality," as the South termed it. There were other statements by Mr. Lin- coln in that debate with Douglas that the South has had especial reason to take note of since the period of Reconstruction. At Springfield, Illinois, September 18, 1858, he said: "There is a physical difference be- tween the white and black races which, I believe, will forever forbid the two races liv- 18s THE ABOLITION CRUSADE ing together on terms of social and political equality, and, inasmuch as they can not so live, while they do live together there must be the position of superior and inferior; and /, as much as any other man, am in favor of having that position assigned to the white man!^ The new Confederacy took the Constitu- tion of the United States, so modified as to make it read plainly as Jefi^erson had ex- pounded it in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. Other changes were slight. The presi- dential term was extended to six years and the President was not to be re-eligible. The slave trade was prohibited and Congress was authorized to forbid the introduction of slaves from the old Union. Abraham Lincoln became President, with a fixed resolve to preserve the Union but with no intent to abolish slavery. Had the war for the Union been as successful as he hoped it would be, slavery would not have been abolished by any act of his. It is clear that, when inaugurated, he had not changed his opinions expressed at Springfield, nor those others, which, at Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, he had stated thus: "When our Southern brethren tell us they 1 86 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES are no more responsible for slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said the institution exists and it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I will surely not blame them for not doing what_I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia, their na- tive land." This, he said, it was impracticable to do, at least suddenly, and then proceeded: "To free them all and keep them among us as underlings — is it quite certain that this would better their condition? . . . What next.^ Free them and make them politically and socially our equals.?" This question he answered in the negative, and continued: "It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted, but for their tardiness I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South." In these extracts from his speeches we find a central thread that runs through the history of his whole administration. We see 187 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE it again when, pressed by extremists, Mr. Lincoln said in an open letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by free- ing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that." Indeed, Congress had, in 1861, by joint resolution declared that the sole purpose of the war was the preservation of the Union. In no other way, and for no other purpose, could the North at that time have been in- duced to wage war against the South. Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, and Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States, were both Kentuckians by birth, both Americans. In the purity of their lives, public and pri- vate, in patriotic devotion to the preserva- tion of American institutions as understood by each of them, they were alike; but they represented different phases of American thought, and each was the creature more or AND ITS CONSEQUENCES less of his environment. Both were men of commanding abihty, but the destiny of each was shaped by agencies that now seem to have been directed by the hand of Fate. Mr. Lincoln, by nature a political genius, was carried to Illinois when a child, reared in the North-west among those to whom, with the Mississippi River as their only outlet to the markets of the world, disunion, with its loss of their highway to the sea, was unthinkable. Lincoln became a Whig, with the Union of the States the passion of his life, and finally, by forces he had not himself put in motion, he was placed at the head of the Federal Government at a time when sectionalism had decided that the question of the permanence of the Union was to be tried out, once and forever. Mr. Davis went from Kentucky further South. He was a Democrat, and environ- ment also moulded his opinions. During the long sectional controversy between the North and the South, "State-rights" be- came the passion of his life, and when the clash between the sections came, he found himself, without his seeking, at the head of the Confederacy. He had been prominent 189 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE among the Southerners at Washington, who had hoped that the South, by threats of secession, might obtain its rights in the Union, as had been done in Jefferson's days by New England. In the movement (1860- 61) that resulted in secession, the people at home had been ahead of their congress- men. William L. Yancey, then in Alabama, not Jefferson Davis at Washington, was the actual leader of the secessionists. Mr. Davis feared a long and bloody war and, un- like Yancey, he had doubts as to its result.* Mr. Lincoln, standing for the Union, suc- ceeded in the war, but just as he was on the * Mrs. Chestnut, wife of the Confederate general, James Chest- nut, writes in her "Diary from Dixie," under date of 1861, at ■ Montgomery, Alabama, then the Confederate capital: "In Mrs. Davis's drawing-room last night, the President took a seat by me on the sofa where I sat. He talked for nearly an hour. He laughed at our faith in our own powers. We are like the British. We think every Southerner equal to three Yankees at least. We will have to be equivalent to a dozen now. After his experience of the fighting qualities of Southerners in Mexico, he believes that we will do all that can be done by pluck and muscle, endurance and dogged courage, dash, and red-hot patriotism. And yet his tone was not sanguine. There was a sad refrain running through it all. For one thing, either way, he thinks it will be a long war. That floored me at once. It has been too long for me already. Then he said, before the end came we would have many bitter experiences. He said only fools doubted the courage of the Yankees, or their willingness to fight when they saw fit. And now that we have stung their pride, we have roused them till they will fight like devils." 190 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES threshold of his great work of Reconstruc- tion he fell, the victim of a crazy assassin. Martyrdom to his cause has naturally added some cubits to the just measure of his won- derful reputation. Jefferson Davis and his cause failed; and the triumphant forces that swept the Con- federacy out of existence have long (and quite naturally) sought to bury the cause of the South and its chosen leader in igno- miny. But the days of hate and passion are past; reason is reasserting her sway; and history will do justice to both the Con- federacy and its great leader, whose ability, patriotism, and courage were conspicuous to the end. Mr. Davis was also a martyr — his long imprisonment, the manacles he wore, the sentinel gazing on him in the bright light that day and night disturbed his rest; the heroism with which he endured all this, and the quiet dignity of his after life — these have doubly endeared his memory to those for whose cause he suffered. Mr. Lincoln had remarkable political tact — he seemed to know how long to wait and when to act, and, if we may credit Mr. 191 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE Welles/ his inflexibly honest Secretary of the Navy, he was, with the members of his cabinet, wonderfully patient and even long- suffering. And although he was the sub- ject of much abuse, especially at the hands of Southerners who then totally misunder- stood him, he was animated always by the philosophy of his own famous words, " With malice towards none, with charity for all." Never for one moment did he forget, amidst even the bitterest of his trials, that the Con- federates, then in arms against him, were, as he regarded them, his misguided fellow- citizens; and the supreme purpose of his life was to bring them back into the Union, not as conquered foes, but as happy and contented citizens of the great republic. The resources of the Confederacy and the United States were very unequal. The Con- federacy had no army, no navy, no factories, save here and there a flour mill or cotton factory, and practically no machine shops that could furnish engines for its railroads. It had one cannon foundry. The Tredegar Iron Works, at Richmond, Virginia, was a fully equipped cannon foundry. The Con- ' " Diary of Gideon Welles," 3 vols., passim. 192 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES federacy's arms and munitions of war were not sufficient to supply the troops that vol- unteered during the first six months of mili- tary operations. Its further supplies, ex- cept such as the Tredegar works furnished, depended on importations through the blockade soon to be established and such as might be captured. The North had the army and navy, fac- tories of every description, food in abun- dance, and free access to the ports of the world. The population of the North was 22,- i* 339,978- The population of the South was 9,103,- \ 332, of which 3,653,870 were colored. The total white male population of the Con- federacy, of all ages, was 2,799,818. The reports of the Adjutant-General of the United States, November 9, 1880, show 2,859,132 men mustered into the service of the United States in 1861-65. General Mar- cus J. Wright, of the United States War Records Office, in his latest estimate of Confederate enlistments, places the out- side number at 700,000. The estimate of Colonel Henderson, of the staff of the British 193 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE army, in his "Life of Stonewall Jackson," is 900,000. Colonel Thomas J. Livermore, of Boston, estimates the number of Confeder- ates at about 1,000,000, and insists that in the Adjutant-General's reports of the Union enlistments there are errors that would bring down the number of Union soldiers to about 2,000,000. Colonel Livermore's estimates are earnestly combated by Con- federate writers. General Charles Francis Adams has, in a recently published volume,* cited figures given mostly by different Confederate au- thorities, which aggregate 1,052,000 Con- federate enlistments. What authority these Confederate writers have relied on is not clear. The enlistments were for the most part directly in the Confederate army and not through State officials. The captured Confederate records should furnish the high- est evidence. But it is earnestly insisted that these records are incomplete, and there is no purpose here to discuss a disputed point. The call to arms was answered enthusi- ' "Studies, Military and Diplomatic," p. 282 et seq. These studies make a volume of rare historic; value. 194 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES astically in both sections, but the South was more united in its convictions, and practically all her young manhood fell into line, the rich and the poor, the cultured and uncultured serving in the ranks side by side. The devotion of the noble women of the North, and of its humanitarian associations, to the w elfare of the P ederal soldiers was re- markable, but there was nothing in the sit- uation in that section that could evoke such a wonderful exhibition of heroism and self- sacrifice as was exhibited by the devoted women of the South, who made willingly every possible sacrifice to the cause of the Confederacy. Both sides fought bravely. Excluding from the Union armies negroes, foreigners, and the descendants of recent immigrants, the Confederates and the Union soldiers were mainly of British stock. The Confeder- ates had some notable advantages. Except- ing a few Union regiments from the West, the Southerners were better shots and better horsemen, especially in the beginning of the war, than the Northerners; and the South- erners were fighting not only for the Consti- 195 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE tution of their fathers and the defence of their homes, but for the supremacy of their race. They had also another mihtary ad- vantage, that would probably have been de- cisive but for the United States navy: they had interior lines of communication which would have enabled them to readily concen- trate their forces. But the United States navy, hovering around their coast-line, not only neutralized but turned this advantage into a weakness, thus compelling the Con- federates to scatter their armies. Every port had to be guarded. In the West the Federals were almost uniformly successful in the greater battles, the Confederates winning in these but two decisive victories, Chickamauga and Sabine Cross Roads, in Louisiana. Estimating, ac- cording to the method of military experts, the percentage of losses of the victor only, Chickamauga was the bloodiest battle of the world, from and including Waterloo down to the present time. Gettysburg and Sharps- burg also rank as high in losses as any battle fought elsewhere in this long period, which takes in the Franco-German and the Russo-Japanese wars. At Sharpsburg or 196 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Antietam the losses exceeded those in any other one day's battle.^ The Confederates were successful, except- ing Antietam or Sharpsburg and Gettysburg, and perhaps Seven Pines or Fair Oaks, in all the great battles in the East, down to the time when the shattered remnant of Lee's army was overwhelmed at Petersburg and surrendered at Appomattox. The elan the Southerners acquired in the many victories they won fighting for their homes is not to be overlooked. But the failure of the North with its overwhelming numbers and resources, to overcome the resistance of the half-famished Confederates until nearly four years had elapsed, can only be fully ac- counted for, in fairness to the undoubted courage of the Union armies, by the fact, on which foreign military critics are agreed, that the North had no such generals as Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Only by the supe- rior generalship of their leaders could the 1 According to that standard work, E. P. Alexander's "Me- moirs," pp. 244, 245, and 274, the Confederates, who stood their ground at Sharpsburg on the day of battle and the day after, lost in killed and wounded thirty-two per cent. The French army at Waterloo entirely dissolved, with a loss in killed and wounded of only thirty-one per cent. (See figures in Henderson's "Stone- wall Jackson.") 197 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE Confederates have won as many battles as they did against vastly superior numbers. But against the United States navy the brilliant generalship of the Confederates and their marvellous courage were powerless. Accepted histories of the war have been written largely by the army and its friends, and, strangely enough, the general historians have been so attracted by the gallantry dis- played in great land battles, and the imme- diate results, that they have utterly failed to appreciate the services of the United States navy. The Southerners accomplished remark- able results with torpedoes with the Merri- mac or Virginia and their little fleet of com- merce destroyers; but the United States navy, by its effective blockade, starved the Confederacy to death. The Southern gov- ernment could not market its cotton, nor could it import or manufacture enough mili- tary supplies. Among its extremest needs were rails and rolling stock to refit its lines of communication. For want of transpor- tation it was unable to concentrate its armies, and for the same reason its troops were not half fed. 198 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES In addition to its services on the block- ade, which, in Lord Wolseley's opinion, decided the war, the navy, with General Grant's help, cut the Confederacy in twain by way of the Mississippi. It penetrated every Southern river, severing Confederate communications and destroying depots of supplies. It assisted in the capture, early in. the war, of Forts Henry and Donelson, and it conducted Union troops along the Ten- nessee River into east Tennessee and north Alabama. It furnished objective points and supplies at Savannah, Charleston, and Wilmington, to Sherman on his march from Atlanta; and finally Grant, the great Union general, who had failed to reach Richmond by way of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, and Cold Harbor, achieved success only when the navy was at his back, holding his base, while he laid a nine months' siege to Petersburg. That distinguished author, Charles Fran- cis Adams, himself a Union general in the Army of the Potomac, says that the United States navy was the deciding factor in the Civil War. He even says that every single successful operation of the Union forces "hinged and depended on naval supremacy." 199 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE The following is from the preface to "The Crisis of the Confederacy," in which, published in 1905, a foreign expert. Captain Cecil Battine, of the King's Hussars, con- denses all that needs further to be said here about the purely military side of the Civil War: The history of the American Civil War still re- mains the most important theme for the student and the statesman because it was waged between adversaries of the highest intelligence and courage, who fought by land and sea over an enormous area with every device within the reach of human inge- nuity, and who had to create every organization needed for the purpose after the struggle had begun. The admiration which the valor of the Confederate soldiers, fighting against superior numbers and re- sources, excited in Europe; the dazzling genius of some of the Confederate generals, and in some meas- ure jealousy at the power of the United States, have ranged the sympathies of the world during the war and ever since to a large degree on the side of the vanquished. Justice has hardly been done to the armies which arose time and again from sanguinary repulses, and from disasters more demoralizing than any repulse in the field, because they were caused by political and military incapacity in high places, to redeem which the soldiers freely shed their blood as it seemed in vain. If the heroic endurance of the Southern people and the fiery valor of the Southern 200 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES armies thrill us to-day with wonder and admiration, the stubborn tenacity and courage which succeeded in preserving intact the heritage of the American nation, and which triumphed over foes so formid- able, are not less worthy of praise and imitation. The Americans still hold the world's record for hard fighting. The great majority of the Union soldiers enlisted for the preservation of the Union and not for the abolition of slavery. But among these soldiers there was an abolition element, and very soon the tramp of fed eral regiments was keeping time to "John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the ground. As we go marching on." Early in the war Generals Fremont and Butler issued orders declaring free the slaves within the Union lines; these orders Presi- dent Lincoln rescinded. But Abolition sen- timent was growing in the army and at the North, and the pressure upon the President to strike at slavery was increasing. The Union forces were suffering repeated defeats ; slaves at home were growing food crops and caring for the families of Confederates who were fighting at the front, and in September, 201 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 1862, President Lincoln issued his prelim- inary proclamation of emancipation, basing it on the ground of military necessity. It was to become effective January i, 1863. And here was the same Lincoln who had declared in 1858 his opinion that whites and blacks could not live together as equals, socially and politically; and it was the very same Lincoln who had repeatedly said he cherished no ill-will against his Southern brethren. If the slaves were to be freed, they and the whites should not be left together. He therefore sought diligently to find some home for the freedmen in a foreign country. But unfortunately, as already seen, the American negro, a bone of contention at home, was now a pariah to other peoples. Most nations welcome immigrants, but no country was willing to shelter the American freedman, save only Liberia, long before a proven failure, and Hayti, where, under the blacks, anarchy had already been chronic for half a century. Hume tells us, in "The Abolitionists," that for a time Mr. Lincoln even considered setting Texas apart as a home for the negro. Later the surrender of the Confederate 202 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES armies, together with the adoption of the Thirteenth Aniendmcni to the Constitu- tion, consumiiifjvcd emancipation, foreseeing which President Lincohi formulated his plan of Reconstruction. Suffrage in the recon- structed States under his plan was to be limited to those who were qualified to vote at the date of secession, which meant the whites. The sole exception he ever made to this rule was a suggestion to Governor Hahn, of Louisiana, that it might be well for the whites (of Louisiana) to give the ballot to a few of the most intelligent of the negroes and to such as h;.d sers^ed in the army. The part the soldiers played. Federal and Confederate, in restoring the Union, is a short story. The clash between them set- tled without reserve the only question that was really in issue — secession; slavery, that had been the origin of sectional dissensions, was eliminated because it obstructed the success of the Union armies. By their gal- lantry in battle and conduct toward each other the men in blue and the men in gray restored between the North and the South the mutual respect that had been lost in 203 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE the bitterness of sectional strife, and with- out which there could be no fraternal Union. Mr. Gladstone, when the war was on, said that the North was endeavoring to "propagate free institutions at the point of the sword.'* The North was not seeking to propagate in the South any new institution whatever. Mr. Gladstone's paradox loses its point because both sections were fighting for the preservation of the same system of government. The time has now happily come when, to use the language of Senator Hoar, as Amer- icans, we can. North and South, discuss the causes that brought about our terrible war "in a friendly and quiet spirit, without re- crimination and without heat, each under- standing the other, each striving to help the other, as men who are bearing a common burden and looking forward with a common hope." The country, it is believed, has already jeached the conclusions that the South was absolutely honest in maintaining the right of secession and absolutely unswerving m its devotion to its ideas of the Constitution, and that the North was equally honest and 204 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES patriotic in its fidelity to the Union. We need to advance one step further. Some- body was to blame for starting a quarrel between brethren who were dwelling to- gether in amity. If Americans can agree in fixing that blame, the knowledge thus acquired should help them to avoid such troubles hereafter. It seems to be a fair conclusion that the initial cause of all our troubles was the forma- tion by Garrison of those Abolition societies which the Boston people in their resolutions of August I, 1835, "disapproved of" and described as "associations instituted in the non-slave-holding States, with the intent to act, within the slave-holding States, on the subject of slavery in those States, without their consent." And further, that it was the creation of these societies, the methods they resorted to, and their explicit defiance of the Constitution that roused the fears and pas- sions of the South and caused that section to take up the quarrel that, afterward be- came sectional; and that, after much hot dispute and many regrettable incidents. North and South, resulted in secession and war. 205 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE In every dispute about slavery prior to 1 83 1, the Constitution was always regarded by every disputant as supreme. The quar- rel that was fatal to the peace of the Unio?i be- gan when the New Abolitionists put in the new claim, that slavery in the South was the con- cern of the North, as well as of the South, and that there was a higher law than the Constitu- tion. If the conscience of the individual, in- stead of human law, is to prescribe rules of conduct, society is at the mercy of anarchists. Czolgosz was conscientious when he murdered McKinley. Had all Americans continued to agree, after 183 1, as they did before that time, that the Constitution of the United States was the supreme law of the land, there would have been no fatal sectional quarrel, no se- cession, and no war between the North and South. The immediate surrender everywhere of the Confederates in obedience to the orders of their generals was an imposing spectacle. There was no guerilla warfare. The Con- federates accepted their defeat in good faith and have ever since been absolutely loyal 206 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES to the United States Government, but they have never changed their minds as to the justice of the cause they fought for. They fought for Hberty regulated by law, and against the idea that there can be, under our system, any higher law than the Constitu- tion of our country. That the Constitution should always be the supreme law of the land, they still believe, and the philosophic student of past and current history should be gratified to see the tenacity with which Southern people still cling to that idea. It suggests that not only will the Southerners be always ready to stand for our country against a foreign foe, but that whenever our institutions shall be assailed, as they will often be hereafter by visionaries who ar^ impatient of restraints, the cause of liberty, regulated by law, will find staunch defenders in the Southern section of our country. ao7 CHAPTER X RECONSTRUCTION, LINCOLN-JOHNSON PLAN AND CONGRESSIONAL. PRESIDENT LINCOLN'S theory was that acts of secession were void, and that when the seceded States came back into the Union those who were entitled to vote, by the laws existing at the date of the at- tempted secession, and had been pardoned, should have, and should control, the right of suffrage. Mr. Lincoln had acted on this theory in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Texas, and he further advised Congress, in his message of December, 1863, that this was his plan. Congress, after a long debate, re- sponded in July, 1864, by an act claiming for itself power over Reconstruction. The President answered by a pocket veto, and after that veto Mr. Lincoln was, in Novem- ber, 1864, re-elected on a platform extolling his "practical wisdom," etc. Congress, during the session that began in December, 1864, did not attempt to reassert its au- 208 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE thority but adjourned, March 4, 1865, in sight of the collapse of the Confederacy, leaving the President an open field for his declared policy. But unhappily, on the 14th of April, 1865, Mr. Lincoln was assassinated, and his death just at this time was the most appalling ca- lamity that ever befell the American people. The blow fell chiefly upon the South, and it was the South the assassin had thought to benefit. Had the great statesman lived he might, and it is fully believed he would, like Washington, have achieved a double success. Washington, successful in war, was success- ful in guiding his country through the first eight stormy years of its existence under a new constitution. Lincoln had guided the country through four years of war, and the Union was now safe. With Lee's surrender the war was practically at an end. Gideon Welles says that on the loth of April, 1865, Mr. Lincoln, "while I was with him at the White House, was informed that his fellow-citizens would call to congratu- late him on the fall of Richmond and sur- render of Lee; but he requested their visit 209 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE should be delayed that he might have time to put his thoughts on paper, for he desired that his utterances on such an occasion should be deliberate and not liable to misap- prehension, misinterpretation, or miscon- struction. He therefore addressed the people on the following evening, Tuesday the nth, in a carefully prepared speech intended to promote harmony and union. *'In this remarkable speech, delivered three days before his assassination, he stated he had prepared a plan for the reinauguration of the sectional authority and reconstruction in 1863, which would be acceptable to the ex- ecutive government, and that every member of the cabinet fully approved the plan," etc.^ In view of his death three days later, this, his last and deliberate public utterance, may be regarded as Abraham Lincoln's will, de- vising as a legacy to his countrymen his plan of reconstruction. That plan in the hands of his successor was defeated by a partisan and radical Congress. That it was a wise plan the world now knows. Senator John Sherman, of Ohio, was one ' Gideon Welles in an essay, " Lincoln and Johnson," The Galaxy, April, 1872. 210 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES of the most influential of those who suc- ceeded in defeating it, and yet he lived to say, in his book pubHshed in 1895,^ Andrew Johnson "adopted substantially the plan proposed and acted on by Mr. Lincoln. After this long lapse of time I am con- vinced that Mr. Johnson's scheme of reor- ganization was wise and judicious. It was unfortunate that it had not the sanction of Congress and that events soon brought the President and Congress into hostility." And the present senator, Shelby Cul- lom, of Illinois, who as a member of the House of Representatives voted to over- throw the Lincoln-Johnson plan of Recon- struction, has furnished us further testi- mony. He says in his book, published in 1911:^ "To express it in a word, the motive of the opposition to the Johnson plan of Re- construction was a firm conviction that its success would wreck the Republican party and, by restoring the Democracy to power, bring back Southern supremacy and North- ern vassalage." / *"John Sherman's Recollections," vol. I, p. 361. *" Fifty Years of Public Service," Cullom, p. 146. 211 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE The Republican party, then dominant in Congress, felt when confronting Reconstruc- tion that it was facing a crisis in its exist- ence. The Democratic party, unitedly op- posed to negro suffrage, was still in Northern States a power to be reckoned with. Allied with the Southern whites, that old party might again control the government unless, by giving the negro the ballot, the Repub- licans could gain, as Senator Sumner said, the "aUies it needed." But the masses at the North were opposed to negro suffrage, and only two or three State constitutions sanctioned it. Indeed, it may be safely said that when Congress convened in December, 1865, a majority of the people of the North were ready to follow Johnson and approve the Lincoln plan of Reconstruction. But the extremists in both branches of the Con- gress had already determined to defeat the plan and to give the ballot to the ex-slave. To prepare the mind of the Northern peo- ple for their programme, they had resolved to rekindle the passions of the war, which were now smouldering, and utilize all the machinery, military and civilian, that Con- gress could make effective. 212 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Andrew Johnson,' who as vice-president now succeeded to the presidency, though a man of abiUty, had Httle personal influence and none of Lincoln's tact. Johnson re- tained Lincoln's cabinet, and McCullough, who was Secretary of the Treasury under both presidents, says in his " Men and Meas- ures of Half a Century," p. 378: "The very same instrument for restoring the national authority over North Carolina and placing her where she stood before her secession, which had been approved by Mr. Lincoln, was, by Mr. Stanton, presented at the first cabinet which was held at the execu- tive mansion after Mr. Lincoln's death, and, having been carefully considered at two or three meetings, was adopted as the Recon- struction policy of the administration." Johnson carried out this plan. All the eleven seceding States repealed their ordi- nances of secession. Their voters, from which class many leaders had been excluded by the presidential proclamation, all took 1 The final estimate of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy under both Lincoln and Johnson, is this: "He (Johnson) has been faithful to the Constitution, although his administrative capa- bilities and management may not equal some of his predecessors. Of measures he was a good judge but not always of men."— "Diary of Gideon Welles," vol. Ill, p. 556. 213 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE the oath of allegiance, and reconstructed their State governments. From most of the reconstructed States, senators and rep- resentatives were in Washington asking to be seated when Congress convened, De- cember 4, 1865. The presidential plan of Reconstruction had been promptly accepted by the people of the prostrate States. Almost without exception they had, when permitted, taken the oath and returned to their allegiance. The wretchedness of these people in the spring of 1865 was indescribable. The labor system on which they depended for most of their money-producing crops was destroyed. Including the disabled, twenty per cent of the whites, who would now have been bread- winners, were gone. The credit system had been universal, and credit was gone. Banks were bankrupt. Confederate currency and bonds were worthless. Provisions were scarce and money even scarcer. Many land- holders had not even plough stock with which to make a crop. There was some cotton, however, that had escaped the ravages of war, and a large part of this also escaped the rapacious 214 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES United States agents, who were seizing it as Confederate property. This cotton was a godsend. There was another supply of money that came from an unexpected source. The old anti-slavery controversy had made it seem perfectly clear to many moneyed men, North, that free labor was always su- perior to slave labor; and now, when cotton was bringing a good price, enterprising men carried their money, altogether some hun- dreds of thousands of dollars, into the sev- eral cotton States, to buy plantations and make cotton with free negro labor. Free negro labor was not a success. Those who had reckoned on it lost their money; but this money went into circulation and was helpful. Above all else loomed the negro problem. Five millions of whites and three and a half millions of blacks were to live together. Thomas Jefferson had said, "Nothing is more certainly written in the Book of Fate than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free , cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines between them.'' ^ And it may truly be said » "Jefferson's Works," vol. I, p. 48. 215 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE of Jefferson that he was, as quite recently he was declared to be by Dr. Schurman, President of Cornell Universit}^, the "apos- tle of reason, and reason alone." What system of laws could Southern con- ventions and legislatures frame, that would enable them to accomplish what Jefferson had declared was impossible? This was the question before these bodies when called to- gether in 1865-66 by Johnson to rehabili- tate their States. Two dangers confronted them. One was, armed bands of negroes, headed by returning negro soldiers. Mr. Lincoln had feared this. Early in April of that very year, 1865, he said to General Butler: " I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace unless we can get rid of the negroes, whom we have armed and disciplined, and who have fought with us, to the amount, I believe, of one hundred and fifty thousand." Mississippi, and perhaps one other State, to guard against the danger from this source, enacted that negroes were only to bear arms when licensed. This law was to be fiercely attacked. The other chief danger was that idleness among the negroes would lead to crime. 216 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES It soon became apparent that the negro idea was that freedom meant freedom from work. They would not work steadily, even for their Northern friends, who were offer- ing ready money for labor in their cotton fields, and multitudes were loitering in towns and around Freedmen's Bureau of- fices. Nothing seemed better than the old- time remedies, apprenticeship and vagrancy laws, then found in every body of British or American statutes. These laws Southern legislatures copied, with what appeared to be necessary modifications, and these laws were soon assailed as evidence of an intent to reduce the negro again to slavery. Mr. James G. Blaine, in his "Twenty Years," selected the Alabama statutes for his at- tack. In the writer's book, "Why the Solid South," pp. 31-36, the Alabama statutes cited by Mr. Blaine are shown to be very similar to and largely copied from the stat- utes of Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Had Mr. Lincoln been living he would have sympathized with these Southern law- makers in their difficult task. But to the radicals in Congress nothing could have been 217 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE satisfactory that did not give Mr. Sumner's party the "alhes it needed." The first important step of the Congress that convened December 4, 1865, was to refuse admission to the congressmen from the States reconstructed under the Lincohi- Johnson plan, and pass a joint resolution for the appointment of a Committee of Fifteen to inquire into conditions in those States. The temper of that Congress may be gauged by the following extract from the speech of Mr. Shellabarger, of Ohio, on the passage of the joint resolution : ''They framed iniquity and universal murder into law. . . . Their pirates burned your unarmed commerce on the sea. They carved the bones of your dead heroes into ornaments, and drank from goblets made out of their skulls. They poisoned your fountains; put mines under your soldiers' prisons; organized bands, whose leaders were concealed in your homes; and com- missions ordered the torch and yellow fever to be carried to your cities and to your women and children. They planned one universal bonfire of the North from Lake Ontario to the Missouri," etc. 218 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Congress, while refusing admission to senators elected by the legislatures of the reconstructed States, was permitting these very bodies to pass on amendments to the Federal Constitution; and such votes were counted. Congress now proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, Section III of which provided that no person should hold office under the United States who, having taken an oath, as a Federal or State officer, to support the Constitution, had subse- quently engaged in the war against the Union. The Southerners would not vote for a provision that would disfranchise their leaders; they refused to ratify the Four- teenth Amendment, and this helped further to inflame the radicals of the North. After the Committee of Fifteen had been appointed. Congress proceeded to put the reconstructed States under military control. In the debate on the measure, February i8, 1867, James A. Garfield, who was, at a later date, to become generous and conservative, said exultingly: "This bill sets out by lay- ing its hands on the rebel governments and taking the very breath of life out of them; in the next place, it puts the bayonet at the 219 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE breast of every rebel in the South; in the next place, it leaves in the hands of Con- gress utterly and absolutely the work of Reconstruction." And Congress did its work. Lincoln was in his grave, and Johnson, even with his vetoes, was powerless. By the acts of March 2 and March 23, 1867, the reconstructed governments were swept away. Universal suffrage was given to the negro and most of the prominent whites were disfranchised. The first suffrage bill was for the Dis- trict of Columbia, during the debate on which Senator Sumner said: "Now, to my mind, nothing is clearer than the absolute necessity of suffrage for all colored persons in the disorganized States. It will not be enough, if you give it to those who can read and write; you will not in this way acquire the voting force you need there for the protection of Unionists, whether white or black. You will not acquire the new allies who are essential to the national cause." In the forty-first Congress, beginning March 4, 1871, the twelve reconstructed States, including West Virginia, were repre- sented by twenty- two Republicans and two 220 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Democrats in the Senate, and forty-eight Republicans and twelve Democrats in the House of Representatives. Mr. Sumner's "new aUies" were ready to answer to the roll-call. When Congress had convened in Decem- ber, 1865, its radical leaders were already bent on universal suffrage for the negro, but the Northern mind was not yet prepared for so radical a measure. The "Committee of Fifteen" was the first step in the programme, which was to hold the Southern States out of the Union and make an appeal to the passions and prejudices of Northern voters in the congressional elections of November, 1866. Valuable material for the coming campaign was already being furnished by the agents of the Freedmen's Bureau. These "adventurers, broken down preachers, and politicians," as Senator Fessenden, of Maine, called them, were, and had been for some time, reporting "outrages," swearing ne- groes into midnight leagues, and selecting the offices they hoped to fill. But the chief source of the material relied upon in the congressional campaign of 1866 221 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE to exasperate the North, and prod voters to the point of sanctioning negro suffrage in the South, was the official information from the Committee of Fifteen. Its subcommit- tee of three, to take testimony as to Virginia, North and South CaroHna, Georgia, Ala- bama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, were all Republicans. The doings of this subcom- mittee in Alabama illustrate their methods. Only five persons, who claimed to be citi- zens, were examined. These were all Re- publican politicians. The testimony of each was bitterly partisan. "Under the govern- ment of the State as it then existed, no one of these witnesses could hope for official preferment. When this Reconstruction plan had been completed the first of these five witnesses became governor of his State; the second became a senator in Congress; the third secured a life position in one of the departments in Washington; the fourth be- came a circuit judge in Alabama, and the fifth a judge of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia — all as Republicans. There was no Democrat in the subcommit- tee which examined these gentlemen, to cross- examine them; and not a citizen of Alabama 222 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES was called before that subcommittee to con- fute or explain their evidence." ^ With the material gathered by these means and from these sources, the honest voters of the North were deluded into the election of a Congress that went to Wash- ington, in December, 1866, armed with au- thority to pass the Reconstruction laws of March, 1867. Southern counsels were now much divided. Many good men, like Governor Brown, of Georgia; General Longstreet and ex-Senator Albert Gallatin Brown, of Mississippi, ad- vised acquiescence and assistance, **not be- cause we approve the policy of Reconstruc- tion, but because it is the best we can do." These advisers hoped that good men, well known to the negroes, might control them for the country's good; and zealous efforts were made along this line in every State, but they were futile. The blacks had already, before they got the suffrage, accepted the leadership of those claiming to be the "men who had freed them." These leaders were not only bureau agents but army camp- followers ; and there was still another brood, 1 "Why the Solid South," p. 20. 223 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE who espied from afar a political Eden in the prostrate States and forthwith journeyed to it. All these Northern adventurers were called "carpet-baggers" — they carried their worldly goods in their hand-bags. The Southerners who entered into a joint-stock business with them became "scalawags." These people mustered the negroes into leagues, and everywhere whispered it into their ears that the aim of the Southern whites was to reenslave them. Politics in the South in the days before the war had always been more or less in- tense, partly because there were so many who had leisure, and partly because the gen- eral rule was joint political discussions. The seams that had divided Whigs and Demo- crats, Secessionists and Union men, had not been entirely closed up, even by the melting fires of the Civil War. Old feuds for a time played their part in Southern politics, even after March, 1867. These old feuds made it difficult for Southern whites to get to- gether as a race; and, in fact, conservative men dreaded the idea. It tended toward an actual race war which, for many years, had been a nightmare; but in every recon- 224 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES structed State the negro and his aUies finally forced the race issue. The new rulers not only increased taxes and misappropriated the revenues of coun- ties, cities, and States; they bartered away the credit of State after State. Some of the States, after they were redeemed, scaled their debts by compromising with creditors; others have struggled along with their in- creased burdens. There were hundreds of negro policemen, constables, justices of the peace, and legis- lators who could not write their names. Justice was in many localities a farce. Ex-slaves became judges, representatives in Congress, and United States senators. The eleven Confederate States had been divided into military districts. Many of the officers and men who were scattered over the coun- try to uphold negro rule sympathized with the whites and evidenced their sympathy in various ways. Others, either because they were radicals at heart, or to commend them- selves to their superiors, who were some of them aspiring to political places, were super- serviceable: and it was not uncommon for a militar}^ officer, in a case where a negro was 225 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE a party, to order a judge to leave the bench and himself take the place. In communi- ties where negro majorities were overwhelm- ing there were usually t\vo factions, and when political campaigns were on agents for these clans often scoured the fields clear of labor- ers to recruit their marching bands. In cities these bands made night hideous with shouts and the noise of fifes and drums. The negro would tolerate no defection from his ranks to the whites, and negro women were more intolerant than the men. It sometimes happened that a bloody clash between the races was imminent when white men sought to protect a negro who had dared to speak in favor of the Democratic and Conservative party. In truth, the civ- ilization of the South was being changed from white to negroid. The final triumph of good government in all the States was at last accomplished by accepting the race issue, as in Alabama in 1 874. The first resolution in the platform of the "Democratic and Conservative party" in that State then was, "The radical and dominant faction of the Republican party in this State persistently, and by fraudulent 226 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES representations, have inflamed the passions and prejudices of the negroes, as a race, against the white people, and have thereby made it necessary for the white people to unite and act together in self-defence and for the preservation of white civilization." The people of North Carolina recovered the right of self-government in 1870. Other States followed from time to time, the last two being Louisiana and South Carolina in 1877. Edwin L. Godkin, who was for long at the head of the Natiofi and the Evening Posty of New York, is thought by some competent judges to have been the ablest editor this country has ever had. After the last of the negro governments set up in the South had passed away, looking back over the whole bad business, Mr. Godkin, in a letter to his friend Charles Eliot Norton, written from Sweet Springs, West Virginia, September 3, 1877, said: "I do not see in short how the negro is ever to be worked into a system of government for which you and I could have much respect."^ 'Ogden's "Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin," vol. II, p. 114. 227 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE Garrison is dead. At the centenary of his birth, December 12, 1904, an effort was made to arouse enthusiasm. There was only a feeble response; but we still have extre- mists. Professor Josiah Royce, of Harvard, in "Race Questions" (1906), speaking of race antipathies as "trained hatred," says, pp. 48-49: "We can remember that they are childish phenomena in our lives, phenomena on a level with the dread of snakes or of mice, phenomena that we share with the cats and with the dogs, not noble phenom- ena, but caprices of our complex nature." 228 CHAPTER XI THE SOUTH UNDER SELF-GOVERNMENT FIR now more than thirty years, whites and blacks, both free, have lived to- gether in the reconstructed States. In some of them there have been local clashes, but in none of them has there been race war, pre- dicted by Jefferson and feared by Lincoln; and there probably never will be such a war, unless it shall come through the interven- tion of such an outside force as produced in the South the conflict between the races at the polls in 1868-76. Every State government set up under the plan of Congress had wrought ruin, and the ruin was always more complete where the negroes were most numerous, as in South Carolina and Louisiana. The rule of the carpet-bagger and the negro was now superseded by governments based on Abraham Lincoln's idea, the idea he expressed in the debate with Douglas in 1858, when he said: "While they [the two 229 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE races] do remain together there must be the position of inferior and superior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of hav- ing the superior position assigned to the white man." Conducted on this basis, the present gov- ernments in the reconstructed States have endured'now for periods varying from thirty- six to forty- two years, and in every State, without any exception, the prosperity of both whites and blacks has been wonderful, and this in spite of the still existent abnor- mal animosities engendered by congressional reconstruction. In the present State governments the race problem seems to have reached, in its larger lines, its only practicable solution. There is still, however, much friction between whites and blacks. Higher culture among the masses, especially of the dominant race, and wise leadership in both races, will in time minimize this, but it is not to be expected, nor is it ever to be desired, that racial an- tipathies should entirely cease to exist. The result of such cessation would be amalgama- tion, a solution that American whites will never tolerate. 230 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Deportation, as a solution of the negro problem, is impracticable. Mr. Lincoln, much as he desired the separation of the races, could not accomplish it, even when he had all the war power of the government in his hands. He was, as we have seen, un- able to find a country that would take the 3,500,000 of blacks then in the seceded States. Now, there are in the South, includ- ing Delaware, according to the census of 1910, 8,749,390, and, quite naturally, the American negro is more unwilling than ever to leave America. Another solution sometimes suggested in the South is the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, which declares that the negro shall not be deprived of the ballot because of his race, but agitation for this would ap- pear to be worse than useless. The negro vote in the reconstructed States is, and has for years been, quite small, not large enough to be considered a factor in any of them. One cause of this is that the whites enforce against the blacks rigidly the tests required by law, but the chief reason is, that the negro, who is qualified, does not often apply for registration. He finds work 231 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE now more profitable than voting. He can not, he knows, control, nor can he, if dis- posed to do so, sell his ballot as he once did. One of the most signal and durable evils of Congressional Reconstruction was the utter debasement of the suffrage in eleven States where the ballot had formerly been notably pure. Gideon Welles saw clearly when he said in his diary, June 23, 1867 (p. 102, vol. Ill): "Under the pretence of elevating the negro the radicals are degrading the whites and debasing the elective franchise, bringing elections into contempt." During the rule of the negro and the alien, in every black county, where the negro majority was as two to one, there were, as a rule, two Re- publican candidates for every fat office, and an election meant, for the negro, a golden harvest. Rival candidates were mercilessly fleeced by their black constituencies, and the belief South is that as a rule the carpet- baggers, in their hegira, returned North as poor as when they came. In the Reconstruction era the whites fought fraud with fraud; and even after re- covering control they, the whites, felt justi- fied in continuing to defraud the negro of 232 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES his vote. To restore the purity of the ballot-box was the chief reason for the amendments to State constitutions, by means of which amendments, having in view the limitations of the Federal Consti- tution, as many negroes and as few whites as was practicable were excluded. This accounts in part for the smallness of the negro vote South. A more potent reason is that the Democratic party, dominated by whites, selects its candidates in primaries; and the negro, seeing no chance to win, does not care to pay a poll tax or otherwise qual- ify for registration. Southern whites have now for more than three decades been governing the blacks in their midst. It is the most difficult task that has ever been undertaken in all the his- tory of popular government, but sad experi- ence has demonstrated that legal restriction of the negro vote in the South there must be. Party spirit tends always to blind the vi- sion, and, as we have seen in this review of the past, it often stifles conscience; and this even where the masses of the people are approximately homogeneous. Southern statesmen are now dealing not only with 233 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE party spirit, but with perpetual race fric- tion manifesting itself in various forms. Failure there must be in minor matters and in certain localities; the progress that has been made can only be fairly estimated by considering general results. Those who sym- pathize with the South think they see there among the whites a growing spirit of altru- ism, begotten of responsibility, and this promises much for the amelioration of race friction. Since obtaining control of their State gov- ernments the whites in the Southern States have as a rule increased appropriations for common schools by at least four hundred per cent, and though paying themselves by far the greater proportion of these taxes, they have continued to divide revenues pro rata between the white and colored schools. Industrial results have been amazing. The following figures, taken from the Annual Blue Book, 191 1 edition, of the Manufac- turers* Record, Baltimore, Maryland, in- clude West Virginia among the recon- structed States. The population of these States was, in 1880, 13,608,703; in 1910, 23,613,533. 234 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Manufacturing capital, 1880, ^147,156,- 624. In 1900 — twenty years — it was $1,019,056,200. Cotton crop, whole South, 1880, 5,761,- 252 bales. In 191 1 it was about 15,000,000. Of this cotton crop Southern mills took, in 1880, 321,337 bales, and in 1910, 2,344,- 343 bales. In 1880 the twelve reconstructed States cut, of lumber, board measure, 2,981,274,- 000 feet; and in 1909 22,445,000,000 feet. Their output of pig-iron was, in 1880, 264,991 long tons; in 1910, 3,048,000 tons. The assessed value of taxable property was, in 1880, $2,106,971,271; in 1910, $6,522,- 195,139- The negro, though the white man, with his superior energy and capacity, far out- strips him, has shared in this material pros- perity. His property in these States has been estimated as high as $500,000,000. During the last decade, 1900-1910, the white population of the South increased by 24.4 per cent, while the negro population in the same States increased only 10.4 per cent. There has been a ver}^ considerable gain of whites over blacks since 1880, the result largely of a greater natural increase of whites 23s THE ABOLITION CRUSADE over blacks, immigrants not counted. All this indicates that the negro problem is gradually being minimized. Taken in the aggregate, the shortcomings of the negro are numerous and regrettable, but not greater than was to be expected. The general advance of an inferior race will never equal that of one which is superior by nature and already centuries ahead. The laggard and thriftless among the inferior people will naturally be more, and it is from these classes that prison houses are filled. There is a very considerable class of ne- groes who are improving mentally and mor- ally, but improvidence is a characteristic of the race, and very many of them, even though they labor more or less steadily, will never accumulate. The third class, much larger than among the whites, is composed of those who are idle, dissipated, and crim- inal. Taken altogether, however, what Booker Washington says is true: "There cannot be found, in the civilized or uncivil- ized world, a like number of negroes whose economic, educational, and religious life is so far advanced as that of the ten millions within this country."^ This advancement • Pickett, pp. 399-400, 236 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES is one of the results of slavery. When the negroes come to recognize this, as some of their leaders already do,^ and come to ap- preciate the advantages for further improve- ment they have had since their emancipa- tion, they will cease to repine over the bondage of their ancestors. There were undoubtedly evils in slavery, but, after all, there was some reason in the advice given by the good Spanish Bishop Las Casas to the King of Spain — that it would be right- ful to enslave and thus Christianize and civilize the African savage. Herbert Spen- cer, "Illustrations of Universal Progress" (p. 444), says: "Hateful though it is to us, and injurious as it would be now, slavery was once beneficial, was one of the necessary phases of human progress'' Sir Harry Johnston, African explorer and student of the negro race, in both the old and the new world, and perhaps the most eminent authority on a question he has, in a fashion, made his own, says: "Intellect- ually, and perhaps physically, he (the negro) has attained the highest degree of advance- ment as yet in the United States.^ ' "The Negro Problem," Pickett, 1909, pp. 399-400. ' "The Negro in the New World," Sir Harry Johnston, p. 478. 237 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE *'In Alabama (most of all) the American negro is seen at his best, as peasant, peasant proprietor, artisan, professional man, and member of society."^ Race animosities are now abnormal, both South and North. The prime reasons for this are two: I. The bitter conflict during reconstruc- tion for race supremacy and the false hopes once held out to the negro of ultimate social equality with the whites. Among the early measures of congressional reconstruction was a "civil rights" enactment which the negroes regarded as giving to them all the rights of the white man. Their Supreme Court in Alabama decided, in "Burns vs. The State," that the "civil rights" laws con- ferred the right to intermarriage. Negroes, North, no doubt also believed in this con- struction. But the Supreme Court of the United States later held that the States, and not Congress, had jurisdiction over the marriage relation within the States. All the Southern and a number of the Northern States have since forbidden the intermarriage of whites and blacks, and so the negro's hopes of equal rights in this regard have vanished. * lb., p. 470. 238 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES This disappointment and his utter fail- ure to secure the social equality that once seemed his, have tended to embitter the negro against the white man. 2. Whites have been embittered against blacks by the frequency in later years of the crime of the negro against white women. This horrible offence began to be common in the South some thirty-two or three years since, or perhaps a little earlier, and some- what later it appeared in the North, where it seems to have been as common, negro population considered, as in the South. The crime was almost invariably followed by lynching, which, however, was not always for the same crime. The following is the list of lynchings in the sections, as kept by the Chicago Tribune since it began to com- pile them: 1885 184 1893 200 1886 138 1894 190 1887 122 1895 171 1888 142 1896 181 1889 176 1897 166 1890 127 1898 127 1891 192 1899 107 1892 205 1900 107 239 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE 1901 185 1906 66 1902 96 1907 68 1903 104 1908 100 1904 87 1909 87 1905 66 1910 74 The general decrease, while population is increasing, is encouraging; but lynching it- self is a horrible crime ; and lynching for one crime begets lynching for another. Of the total number lynched last year, nine were whites ; sixty-five were negroes, among them three women; and only twenty-two were for crimes of negroes against white women. The other crimes were murder, attempts to murder, robbery, arson, etc. Census returns indicate that in the coun- try at large the criminality of the negro, as compared with that of the white man, is nearly three times greater, and that the ratio of negro criminality is much higher North than South. Such returns also in- dicate that so far education has not lessened negro criminality,^ but it is not known that any well-educated negro has been guilty of the crime against white women. ' "The Negro Problem," William Pickett, pp. 136-38. Rare Traits, etc., of the Negro, Statistician, Prudential Ins. Co. of America, p. 219 el seq, 240 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES In the South the negro is excluded from many occupations for which the best of them are fitted, but in the North his industrial conditions are worse. Fewer occupations are open to him and the wisest members of his race are counselling him to remain in the more favorable industrial atmosphere of the South. The dislike of negroes for whites has been increased South by the laws which separate them from whites in schools, public con- veyances, etc. But it is to be remembered that these laws were intended to prevent intermarriage ; they are in part the result of race antipathies. But the sound reason for them is that they tend to prevent intimacies which, at the points where the races are in closest touch with each other, might result in intermarriage. Professor E. D. Cope, of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the very highest of American authorities on the race question, in a powerful article published in 1890,^ advocated the deportation of the negroes from the South, no matter at what cost. Otherwise he predicted eventual amal- » "Two Perils of the Indo-European," The Open Court, Janu- ary 23, 1890, p. 2052. 241 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE gamation, which would be the destruction of a large portion of the finest race in the world. This little study now comes to a close. An effort has been made to sketch briefly in this chapter the difficulties the South has en- countered in dealing with the negro prob- lem, and to outline the measure of success it has achieved. However imperfectly the author may have performed his task, it must be clear to the reader that no such problem as the present was ever before presented to a self-governing people. Never was there so much need of that culture from which alone can come a high sense of duty to others. The negro must be encouraged to be self-helpful and useful to the community. If he is to do all this and remain a separate race, he must have leadership among his own people. In the Mississippi Black Belt there is now a town of some 4,000 negroes, Mound Bayou, completely organized and prospering. It may be that in the future negroes seeking among themselves the amen- ities of life may congregate into communi- ties of their own, cultivating adjacent lands, as the French do in their agricultural vil- 242 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES lages. Wherever they may be, they must practise the civic virtues, honesty, and obe- dience to law. W. H. Councill, a negro teacher, of Huntsville, Alabama, said some years since in a magazine article: "When the gray-haired veterans who followed Lee and Jackson pass away, the negro will have lost his best friends." This is true, but it is hoped that time and culture, while not pro- ducing social equality, will allay race ani- mosities and bring the negro other friends to take the place of the departing veterans. The white man, with his pride of race, must more and more be made to feel that noblesse oblige. His sense of duty to others must measure up to his responsibilities and opportunities. He must accord to the ne- gro all his rights under the laws as they exist. The South is exerting itself to better its common schools, but it cannot compete in this regard with the North. Northern phi- lanthropists are quite properly contributing to education in the South. They should consider well the needs of both races. Any attempt to give to the negroes advantages superior to those of the whites, who are now 243 THE ABOLITION CRUSADE treating the negro fairly In this respect, might look like another attempt to put, in negro language, "the bottom rail on top." Looking over the whole field covered by this sketch, it is wonderful to note how^ the chain of causation stretches back into the past. Reconstruction was a result of the war; secession and war resulted from a move- ment in the North, in 183 1, against condi- tions then existing in the South. The negro, the cause of the old quarrel between the sec- tions, is located now much as he was then. How full of lessons, for both the South and the North, is the history of the last eighty years ! There is even a chord that connects the burning of a negro at Coatesvllle, Pennsyl- vania, by an excited mob on the 13 th of August, 191 1, with the burning of the Fed- eral Constitution at Framingham, Massachu- setts, by that other excited mob of madmen, under Garrison, on the fourth day of July, 1854. One body of outlaws was defying the laws of Pennsylvania; the other was defy- ing the fundamental laws of the nation.. 244 INDEX Abolitionists, mobbed, 71; bum U. S. Constitution, 72; private lives of leaders irreproachable, 89; become factor in national politics; Boston captured by; "slave-catchers" now mobbed; national election turns on vote, 95-6; anti-slavery in Faneuil Hall, 97; election again turns on vote of, 99; impartial ob- server on influence of, 105; Pro- fessor Smith on, 106 Abolition petitions in Congress, influence of, 102 Abolition societies, in 1840, 93 Adams, John Quincy, becomes champion of Abolitionists, 90; defends right of petition, 91 Alien and Sedition laws, 1798, 18; nature of, 19 Americans, world's record for hard fighting, 20 r Andrews, Prof. E. A., slavery con- ditions South, 79 Anti-slavery people and Abolition- ists grouped, 104; Douglas charged "Black Republican" party with favoring "negro citi- zenship and negro equality," 167 Aristocracy in South, 159, 160, 161 Articles of Confederation, 15 Author, antecedents, explanation of, lO-II Author's conclusions, 242-3-4 Biglow Papers, 97-8 Birney, James G., mobbed, 87 Boston meeting. Dr. Hart over- looks, 73 Boston Resolutions, 64 Burke, Edmund, on conciliation, 109; spirit of liberty in slave- holding communities, 1 58 Calhoun, John C, prophecy of, 107-8 Cause of sectional conflict, Aboli- tion societies and their methods, 205 Channing, Dr. Wm. E., encomium on Great Britain, 39; letter to Webster, 47; opinion of Aboli- tionists, 87; his change, 88 Characters and careers, of Abra- ham Lincoln and Jefferson Da- vis, 188-192 Churches, North and South, oppo- sition to slavery; a stupendous change, 67; "whole cloth ar- rayed against" Garrison, 68; Southern churches still defend slavery; Northern changed; Methodist church disrupted, 70 Coatesville lynching, 224 Colonies, ju.xtaposed, not united, IS . Colonization Society, origin of and purposes, 44; its supporters, 45; making progress; Abolitionists halted it, 46 Compromise of 1850; e.xcitement in Congress, 106; great leaders in; Webster on 7th of March, 107; Clay's sp>eech, 112; new fugitive slave law gave offence, 128 Confederate States with old Con- stitution — changes slight, 18O Constitution, AHen and Sedition Laws first palpable infringe- ment, 3; powers conferred bj- discussed, 16; as supreme law Southerners still cling to, 207 Cope, Prof. E. D., advocated de- portation to prevent amalgama- tion, 241 Cotton gin, accepted theory as to denied, 12 Courage of, and losses in, both ar- mies, I OS Criminality, of negroes greater than of whites, 240 245 INDEX Cromwel! and the Great Revolu- tion, analogy to, 8 Curtis, George Ticknor, quotation from "Life of Buchanan," 14 Davis, Jefferson, farewell speech, 181; doubts about success — sad- ness, 190 Democrats, North, opposed negro suffrage, 212 Deportation, no country ready to take negro, 82 Disunion, project among Federal- ist leaders, 1803-4, 25; senti- ment in Congress, 1794, 24 Emancipation, easy North; dif- ficult South, 40; Federal gov- ernment, no power over, 41; status North in 1830, 52 Emancipations, South, what ac- compUshed in 1831, 50; census tables, 51 Embargo of 1807, why repealed, 26 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, eulogizes John Brown, 15 Everett, Edward, denunciation of John Brown expedition, 152 Extradition, refused, of abductors of slaves, Supreme Court power- less, 176 Federalists, construed Constitu- tion liberally, 17 Fite, Professor at Yale, declares Republicans in i860 hoped to destroy slavery, 175; justifica- tion of secession, 182 Freedman's Bureau, its composi- tion, 221 Free speech, Channing defends Abolitionists as champions of, 87; John Quincy Adams be- comes advocate, 90 Fugitive slave law. North not opposing in 1828, 53; Missouri Compromise provided for, 54 Garrison, William Lloyd, began Liberator; personahty and char- acteristics, 56; key-note, slavery the concern of all; slave-holders to be made odious, 58 246 Godkin, E. L., on negro as factor in politics, 237 Greeley, Horace, draws comfort from John Brown's raid, 153 Hartford Convention, 28 Helper, Hinton Rowan, his book, 1 6s Higher law idea, prompted Abo- lition Crusade — and Czolgosz to murder McKinley, 206 Immigration and Union sentiment ; number of immigrants, 33 ; few South, 34 Incendiary Uterature, sent South, 62; North aroused; Andrew Jackson's message, 63; Boston Resolutions, 64; indictment in Alabama; requisition on Gov- ernor of New York, 98 Incompatibility of slavery and freedom; Lincoln's Springfield speech, 81; Garrison first to announce doctrine; Abraham Lincohi next; then Seward, 147-8 Insurrections, Denmark Vesey plot at Charleston, 59; Nat Turner in Virginia; Walker's pamphlet, 60 Irish patriots, Mitche! and Mea- gher, divide^on secession, 35 John Brown's raid, 149; his secret committee, 151 Johnson, Andrew, succeeding Lincoln, carried out plan, 213 Johnston, Sir Harry, on negro in South, highest degree of ad- vancement, 257 Kansas, fierce struggles in; Sum- ner's bitter speech, 142-3 Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas originated, 135; aggravated sec- tionalism, 136 Kentucky Resolutions, 1798, 19; Jefferson the author, 20; copy of first of, 21 Kentucky and Virginia Resolu- tions of 1798-g; Secessionists relied on, 21; Jefferson and Madison's reasons for, 22 INDEX Know-Nothing party, its origin; purposes; appeal for the Union, 140-1-2 Las Casas, Bishop, advice to King of Spain, 237 Liberia, sending negroes to, called "expatriation"; enterprise a failure, 46; Lincoln's hopes of, 81; why it failed — Miss Ma- honey's account, 169-70-71 Lincoln, South no more responsible for slavery than North, 40; sp)eech at Charleston, 111., 81; finds no country ready to take American negro, 82; South in i860 thought him radical; had favored white supremacy in 1858, 185; speech at Peoria, 186; assassination of, 209 Lodge, Henry Cabot, declares popular verdict against Web- ster, 118; he had undertaken the impossible, 120; his argu- ment good, he not man to make it, 121 Lundy, Benjamin, attempts to stir up North against slavery South, 47 Lynchings, tables, 239; comments on, 240 McMaster, affirms Webster behind the times (note), 100 Missouri, controversy over slavery, 52; distinct from that begun later by "New Abolitionists," 53 Mobs, Garrison mobbed; many anti-slavery riots North, 71; violence toward Abolitionists in North reacted, 85; oppo- nents became defenders, 86 Mound Bayou, a negro town, 242 Nationality, spirit of; causes of, development of, 30; grows. North; South on old lines, 35 Navy, U. S., deciding factor in war, 198-9 Negro, the, located now much as in i860, 7; Lincoln could find no home abroad for, 206; reasons for smallness of vote South, 233 ; improvement; Booker Wash- ington's opinion, 236; bene- fited by slavery; attained South highcht degree of advance- ment, 237; best opiwrtunities South, 241; Confederate veter- ans best friends there, 243 Ohio; Resolutions looking to co- operative emancipation; re- sponses of other States to, 42; Southern reason for, 43 ; North- ern, kindly temper of, 44 Otis, Harrison Gray, on Boston Resolutions, 65 Pamphlets, venomous one cited, 75 Personal liberty laws, eleven States passed; Alexander Johnston says absolutely without excuse, 177 Petition, right of, in Congress, 90; "gag resolution," 92 Political conditions, North and South compared, 162-3-4 "Poor whites," discussion of, and of social conditions South, 155- 6-7 Presidential campaign 1860, ex- citement, 171 Press, Northern slandering South, 153; Southern slandering North, 154 Race animosities, negro's aspira- tions to social equality; legal enactments, 238; whites em- bittered by crime against white women, 239 Reagan, "Republican rule on Abo- lition principles," 105 Reconstruction, Lincoln's theory; veto of resolution asserting power of Congress over, 208; last speech, adhering to plan, 210 Reconstruction by Johnson under Lincoln plan; wisdom of Lincoln-Johnson plan, John Sherman; opposition to it par- tisan. Senator CuUom, 211; South accepts plan; senators and representatives, 214; negro problem and Jefferson's pre- 247 INDEX diction, 215; apprenticeship and vagrancy laws, Blaine's at- tack on, 217 Reconstruction, Congressional, ex- tremists bent on negro suffrage when Congress convened in 1865, 212; preparations for; committee of fifteen; Shella- barger's appeal to war passions, 215; South denied representa- tion; Southerners reject Four- teenth Amendment; Garfield de- nounces rebel government, 2ig; Johnson's reconstructed State governments swept awaj'; uni- versal suffrage for negro; South sends Republicans to Congress, 220; witnesses before "'Com- mittee of Fifteen" rewarded; Southern counsels divided, 223; carpet-baggers and scalawags, 224; intolerable political condi- tions; race issue forced upon whites, 226; whites recover self- government, 227 Republican party, the modern; its origin; Mr. Rhodes on, 138- 139; nominates Fremont and Dayton; denounces slavery; ex- citement; defeated, 144 Resources, war, North and South compared, 191-2-3 Salem Church monument, 9 Santo Domingo, memory of mas- sacre in, 80 Seceded States, wretched condi- tions in 1865, 214 Seceding States, desire to pre- serve Constitution, 179 Secession, early threats of not con- nected with slavery, 26; Josiah Quincy threatens, 1 Si I ; Massa- chusetts legislature endorses him, 28; in early days belief in general, 28; Massachusetts legislature threatens, 1844, 20; eleven States seceded, 179; Prof. Fite justifies, his ground, 182; motives for in 1860-1, 183 Self-government restored; local clashes, no race war; based on Lincoln's idea, superiority of white man, 229; constitutional amendments to restore purity of ballot, 233; industrial results amazing, 234-5; negro vote small — reasons, 231 Seward, leader of Republican party, 178 Situation in Alabama in 1835 — letter of John W. Womack, 79 Slavery, Great Britain abolishes, comp>ensates owners, 39; South's "calamity not crime," 48; de- bate in Virginia A.ssembly, 61 Slaves, protect masters' families during war, 132-3; a surprise to North, 133-4 Slave-trade, New England's part in, 37; South protests against; sentiment against arises in Eng- land, sweeps over America, 38 Social conditions South, 155-60 South unwilling to accept idea of incompatibility of slave and free States, 94-5; bitterness in, loi; on defensive-aggressive, 126; excited; fihbustering; importa- tion of slaves, 145 Spencer, Herbert, slavery once a necessary phase of human prog- ress, 237 Sprague, Peleg, on Boston Resolu- tions, 60 Suffrage, Lincoln thought Southerners themselves should control, 203 Sumner, Charles, philippic against South; Brooks's attack on, 143-4; negro suffrage to give "Unionists" new allies, 220 Texas, application for admission, 93; Chamiing threatens seces- sion if admitted, 94 Tilden, Samuel J., letter to Kent, secession inevitable if Lincoln elected, 172-3-4 Underground railroads. Professor Hart's picture of, 103 L^nion, the, Webster's great speech for in 1S30, 31; effect of, :i2 Union sentiment South; Whigs, 34 "Uncle Tom's Cabin," influence on Northern sentiment, 129- 133 248 INDEX War, the, nature of, i8o Washington, a Federalist, 18; his appeal for Union, 30 Webster, on 7th of March, 107; his sole concession, iii; con- demns personal liberty laws and Abolitionists, 115; congratu- lated and denounced, 117; "Ichabod," iig; Rhodes's esti- mate of, 122; his speech for "The Constitution and the Union"; Wilkinson's estimate of, 122; E. P. Wheeler's esti- mate of, 125; Webster's opin- ion of Abolitionists and Free- soilers, 126 Welles, Gideon, opinion in 1867 as to debasing elective franchise, 2,52 Whites, South, fought fraud with fraud during Reconstruction, till Constitution amended continued it, 232; difficulties of their task, 233; growing spirit 01 altruism; school taxes divided pro rata, 234 Wilmot proviso, 1 1 1 Wisconsin nullifies fugitive slave law, 178 Women, devotion of during war. North and South, 105 249 rn i\j 131^ 31^77-2 i1 ?^t ^