Читать книгу The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct (Vol.1&2) - George Cary Eggleston - Страница 11

Table of Contents

The Mexican war and the subsequent negotiations added a vast territory to the national domain. Much of it lay south of the Missouri Compromise line, and into that part of it at least the advocates of slavery confidently expected to extend their labor system.

The introduction of the Wilmot Proviso and its passage by the House did not indeed result in the exclusion of slavery from those territories, for the reason that the proviso, failing in the Senate, did not become law.

But it alarmed the South. By the Southerners of the more radical pro-slavery school it was accepted as a notice to quit; a notification that so far as Northern anti-slavery sentiment could control the matter, there was to be no further addition of a single acre to the slave territory of the Union; that so far as that sentiment could influence national politics, the power of the Federal Government was thenceforth and forever to be exercised to prevent the extension of slavery into any new territory acquired or to be acquired by the Union north or south of the Missouri Compromise line, and in the end to abolish the system altogether.

Let us clearly understand this situation. The Wilmot Proviso and all the attempted legislation, by which it was sought to confine slavery within the boundaries prescribed for it by existing conditions, seemed to the opponents of slavery merely a legitimate effort to emphasize the fact that free labor was national, while slavery was a permitted evil within prescribed limits permitted solely because within those limits the national power was not authorized to exert itself for the extermination of the system. On the other hand, all these things seemed to the Southern mind to be an utterly unjust discrimination against a part of the people. The territories involved in the controversy had become national possessions, they contended, largely through the activities of Southern men and Southern statesmanship. It was felt to be a grievous wrong that Southern men should be forbidden to emigrate to those territories on equal terms with other citizens of the Union or that thus emigrating they should be forbidden to take with them their slave property, which represented in part their industrial system but in far greater part their domestic life.

The very proposal thus to exclude them from an equal participation in the opportunities and the privileges opened to other citizens of the Republic by the acquisition of these new territories seemed to them a threat, a notification that henceforth they were to be treated not as citizens of the Union entitled to the same protection and the same privileges that were extended to other citizens, but as inferior and offending persons, persons graciously permitted to exist, but persons to be excluded, because of their offenses, from an equal participation in the conquests and land purchases of the Nation and from the enjoyment of a share of the benefits resulting from the addition of a great and immeasurably rich territory to the national domain.

It is true that the proposal of their exclusion had failed to become law. But it had failed by a margin so narrow that its success might easily be anticipated as an event of the near future. It is true that neither the Wilmot Proviso nor any other legislation suggested at that time sought to forbid Southerners to migrate into the new territories. But it was proposed that they should be forbidden by law to take with them into those territories the slaves upon whose services they relied not only for agricultural work, but even more for that domestic service to which they had been accustomed all their lives to look for comfort. To tell them that they might remove their households into the new territories, but at the same time to say to them that they must leave behind all that had before contributed to their prosperity and to the comfort of their domestic arrangements, seemed to them something worse than a mockery.

Out of the agitation of these questions arose very important events.

The old sentiment at the South in favor of a gradual emancipation of the slaves, though it survived in some degree to the end, gave place, in large measure, to a new sentiment in behalf of slavery as a thing right in itself, a sentiment born of the instinct of self-preservation.

The manifest disposition to exclude slavery from the newly acquired Southern possessions prompted the men of the South to question the Missouri Compromise itself. The spirit of that compromise had been that slave property might be taken into territories south of 36° 30´ north latitude, with the assurance that such territories might become slave states, in return for the stipulation of the South that all territory lying north of that line should be forever exempted from slavery. When the new territory was acquired from Mexico, a large part of it lying south of that line, it was naturally expected that in those regions the people of the slave states were to find an outlet for emigration as freely as those of the Northern states found a like outlet north of that line. When a determined effort was made, with every prospect of success, to deny even this to them, they began seriously to question a compromise by which they had surrendered so much and seemed now destined to gain so little. They had secured Arkansas and Missouri as outlets for their superfluous, discontented, unfortunate or specially enterprising population; they had surrendered all claim to an equal opportunity in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas and all the rest of the rich regions embraced in the Louisiana Purchase. Obviously, it seemed to them, they had made a bad bargain, and now that they were threatened with a denial of their share in the benefits of it, so far as the territory acquired from Mexico was concerned, they were disposed to repent them of it or at the very least to question the extent to which its terms were binding on themselves.

The compromise, they reflected, was merely a matter of statutory law. It had no constitutional obligation back of it. It had been enacted by one congress. It could be repealed by another. In answer to the threat to disregard its spirit in dealing with the new territories, the Southerners made the counter-threat to repeal the compromise itself. It was all very natural, very human, but to the Republic it was very dangerous.

The lands that lay north of the dead line were still territories and still for the most part unoccupied. Nothing more binding than an easily repealable statute forbade Southerners to migrate into those territories with their negroes and in due time, by out-voting Northern immigrants, to make slave states of them. The essence of the compromise they held to be, that in return for the prohibition of slavery north of 36° 30´ north latitude, slavery should be freely permitted in all regions lying south of that line if the people settling there should so decide. If the contract was to be repudiated on the one hand, why, they asked, should it not be equally repudiated on the other? If the Missouri Compromise was to carry with it none of the benefits it conferred on the South why should it be held binding upon the South for the benefit of the North?

This seems to have been the thought and attitude of the South at that time, and it soon found expression in legislation and in attempted legislation.

The discovery of gold in California quickly resulted in such a peopling of that region as made its admission to the Union as a state a necessity. The settlers there were mainly from the North and they naturally had no desire to make a slave state out of the territory. Without waiting for an enabling act they adopted a constitution in 1849 and knocked at the doors of the Union for admission as a free state.

Instantly the South took alarm. Quite half of California lay south of 36° 30´ north latitude. Apart from its gold, the region promised harvests of grain and fruit of incalculably greater value even than all the output of all its mines. There was nothing in the Missouri Compromise or in any other legislation to forbid the whole of California to become a slave state. There was only the decision of the people in that part of the country that they wanted the state to be free and that decision was not by any means unanimous. On the contrary it was believed to be at least possible that if the territory were divided into two substantially equal parts the southern half of it would elect to become a slave state.

This added enormously to the acrimony of the slavery controversy. There had from the beginning been accepted in the country a half formulated theory of the necessity of maintaining a "balance of power" between the opposing systems of slavery and free labor so far at least as the Senate, representing the states as such without regard to population, was concerned. From the beginning slave and free states had been admitted to the Union in effect in couples. Thus Vermont, admitted in 1791, was balanced by Kentucky, admitted in 1792. Tennessee came in in 1796 with no free state comrade till 1803, when Ohio was admitted. Louisiana, admitted in 1812, was offset by Indiana which became a state in 1816. Mississippi was admitted in 1817 and Illinois in the following year. Alabama, admitted in 1819, was balanced by Maine in 1820. Missouri came in in 1821 by a compromise that more than offset the omission to create a corresponding and compensatory free state. But when Arkansas was admitted in 1836, Michigan was thrown into the other scale in 1837. Florida and Texas, annexed in 1845, were balanced by Iowa in 1846 and Wisconsin in 1848. But for California as a free state there was no peopled region that could be carved into a compensatory slave state and for that reason, as well as because of the rise of the anti-slavery agitation to fever heat, the controversy about 1850 took on an angrier tone than ever, and one more seriously threatening to the Union.

The people of the country at that time might justly have been divided into three classes, viz:

1. Those extreme opponents of slavery who were ready and eager to sacrifice the Union itself and the Constitution to the accomplishment of their emancipating purpose;

2. Those extreme pro-slavery men who were equally ready to wreck the Union in order to perpetuate and extend the system of slave labor;

3. Those intense lovers of the Union, North and South, who were ready to put aside and sacrifice their convictions for or against slavery in order to save the Nation from disruption with all its horrible consequences of civil war.

This last class was at that time a dominant majority and for long afterwards it exercised a controlling and restraining influence over all the rest. It included men at the South who earnestly desired the extinction of slavery, and other men at the South who were sincerely convinced that the slave system was absolutely necessary to the cultivation of Southern fields and that its perpetuation was justified by the incurable inferiority of the black race, and the hopeless incapacity of the negro for freedom and self-government. At the North the class of those who cared more for the perpetuity of the Union than for either the extinction or the perpetuation of slavery included men of every shade of belief as regarded slavery itself, except the extreme opponents of the system. It included such men as Abraham Lincoln who, even after the war was on, persisted in holding to his heart as his supreme desire the perpetuity of the Union in order, as he splendidly phrased it in his Gettysburg speech, that "Government of the people by the people and for the people might not perish from the earth."

It was a magnificent conflict of human forces. Incidentally it brought into play passion, prejudice, malice, groveling self-interest and brutal disregard of others' rights and feelings. But in large part it was dominated, on the one side and upon the other, by a love of liberty, an instinct of justice and an exalted patriotism that did honor to those who were so inspired.

All these sentiments and aspirations were variously directed, giving rise sometimes to contradictory courses of action. But he who would understand and interpret the events of that time must fully conceive the fact that the inspiring impulses of the great majority were essentially and fundamentally the same on both sides, however variously they may have been interpreted into conduct. Only thus shall we understand how it was that men on opposite sides of a geographical line, men equally loving liberty and equally holding in reverence the traditions of the American Union, fell a-fighting in 1861 and for four years waged the bloodiest and most devastating war of which modern history anywhere makes record.

The controversy with respect to California and the territories was only a part of the disturbing influences of the middle of the nineteenth century.

The Constitution of the United States, in Section 3 of Article IV, distinctly imposed upon the states and upon the people thereof the duty of returning to their masters all fugitive slaves who might escape from one state to another. That provision of the Constitution was resented, even to the point of violence by the antagonists of slavery; it was insisted upon by the advocates of slavery—in the North as well as in the South—to the border-land of crime. It was defeated of its purpose, not only by the acts of individuals banded together with express intent to nullify it in practice, but still more by laws enacted in many states at the North to facilitate its nullifications. The law officers of many states either refused to exercise their authority for the enforcement of this law or going further, employed their authority to prevent its enforcement.

Let us frankly recognize the fact that these men were in effect disunionists, and the further fact that they were such upon conscientious conviction. All this was done in full faith that it was right and in response to the requirements of conscience. But it was done in flagrant violation of the constitutional compact. We may sympathize with the impulses of the sheriff or other officer who refused to aid in the return of an escaping negro to slavery, and still more easily we may sympathize with those unofficial persons who fed and housed and expedited escaping slaves, in their refusal to aid a system of human bondage of which they were conscientiously intolerant, but on the other hand we may not justly blink the fact that all this was in disobedience of the fundamental law of the land, in violation of that compact on which alone the Union rested, and in derogation of property rights which the compact of union pledged all the states to enforce and all the people to respect.

The whole trouble lay in the fact that there was an "irrepressible conflict" between the ideas that were dominant North and South and that laws and constitutions, and compacts, and agreements were powerless to enforce themselves or to get themselves enforced in opposition to intense conviction and strongly felt sentiment.

The feeling on both sides ran high and was intensely intolerant. It was heedless of reason or argument. It scoffed at compacts and agreements. It made of legal obligations a mockery and of constitutional requirements a laughing stock.

It entered also into every relation of life and mischievously disturbed every such relation. It divided families. It disrupted churches, producing divisions in them, some of which—most of which indeed—have not been healed even in our present time when the war and slavery and all things pertaining to them are matters of history.

Along the line of the Ohio river, where one brother had gone across the narrow stream to Indiana in search of fortune while another had remained behind in Kentucky, the specter of this implacable controversy wrought an estrangement that was at once cruel and unnatural. Skiffs lined the opposing shores. Intercourse was easy and the waterway between was of trifling width; but the skiffs were not used, and the intervening waterway was left uncrossed, because between those who dwelt upon the one side of the stream and those who lived upon the other there arose the black shadow of the irrepressible conflict. They were friends and near relatives. Their homes confronted each other with only a placid stream between. Their shores were far less than a mile apart, and their old loves for each other were uncooled, so far as they realized. But they gradually ceased to visit each other. Those courtships and marriages which had been the frequent occasions of rejoicing among them became of the very rarest occurrence and finally ceased to occur at all. And all this in spite of the fact that in northern Kentucky slavery was scarcely more than a name while the people on the other side of the river had, for the major part, been emigrants from Kentucky, accustomed in their childhood to such mild mannered slavery as still survived beyond the stream.

Here was the line of cleavage. Here was the barrier between men's minds and hearts and lives. On the one side slavery was permitted and, in self-preservation chiefly, was defended. On the other side there were softening memories of slavery as an institution that had surrounded the childhood of those concerned with the loving care and the affectionate coddling of negro mammies and negro uncles. But the issue between slavery and antagonism to it had become so sharply accentuated that even family affection and memories of childhood and the influences of near neighborhood and the ties of close kinship could not break down the barrier.

Still further, there had begun to grow up at the North a political party whose sole bond of union was antipathy to slavery. It was not at all respectable, for even yet it was not deemed respectable in many parts of the North to be an Abolitionist, and this was distinctly an Abolitionist party. Its sole reason for being was its purpose to abolish slavery in the United States. It was still a feeble party, so far as the number of votes it could command was concerned, but it was prepared to ally itself with any others whose purposes might tend even in the smallest degree in the direction in which it wished the Republic to go. It was ready to join in any effort that might help toward the extirpation of slavery, but its avowed purpose was not to assail slavery where that institution legally existed, but to prevent its extension to any new lands.

In that purpose many thousands sympathized who would scornfully have resented the imputation that they were Abolitionists.

This new "Free-soil" party had no less a personage than Ex-president Martin Van Buren as its candidate for the presidency in 1848 and while its following and its poll of votes were small its menace seemed to men of the South very great, a seeming that was destined to be confirmed ere long. In 1840 the Anti-slavery candidate, Birney, had received only 7,059 votes in the whole country, scarcely enough to be recorded in the election returns. In 1844 the same candidate received 62,300 votes—a great increase, but still not enough to be reckoned seriously. In 1848 Martin Van Buren, as the candidate of this Free-soil party, received 291,263 votes, thus greatly more than quadrupling the highest directly Anti-slavery vote previously polled. In 1856 the Free-soil party under the name of the Republican party, was in effect the only serious antagonist of the Democracy, the only party that seriously disputed with it the control of the National Government. In that election the new party polled 1,341,264 votes, against 1,838,169 for the Democratic candidate. It carried no less than 114 electoral votes out of a total of 296, its successful antagonist carrying 174.

All this occurred after the time which we are now considering, but the facts are presented here because their coming was anticipated in 1850 and because they serve to illustrate the rapidity with which the "irrepressible conflict" grew in intensity and fervor.

In 1850 the country was on the verge of a revolution.

The Southerners were exasperated to the point of armed revolt by the proposal to deny to them what they deemed their fair participation in the fruits of the Mexican War; by the increasingly active antagonism of the North; by the aggressive opposition there to the enforcement of property rights in fugitive slaves; by the condemnatory tone of the Northern press, pulpit and platform; by the insistent use of the mails for the circulation of literature which the South deemed dangerously incendiary; by the continual inflow of petitions to Congress for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; and by a score of other annoyances which were ceaseless in their aggression.

The feeling grew in the South that there was no longer any place in the Union for those states that permitted slavery; that there was no longer any tolerance for their people; that a war upon them had begun which would stop at nothing short of the forcible abolition of their institutions, with all of chaos and insurrection and servile revolt which they believed to be the necessary sequences of such abolition.

They were affronted, offended and alarmed. States' rights had been freely invoked against them as a means of evading and defeating such laws as then existed for the rendition of fugitive slaves. They, in their turn, looked to states' rights as perhaps affording to them a way of escape from their difficulties and tribulations.

"If the Union can no longer protect us," they asked themselves, "why should we remain parties to that compact? If we are to have no share in its benefits or even in its territorial conquests and purchases, why should we go on bearing our share of its burdens and obligations? If it cannot or will not fulfil those duties which it has assumed towards us, why should we not repudiate those obligations which we have assumed in return for its pledges of protection? If we cannot be members of the Union upon equal terms with other members of the Union, why should we continue to be members of the Union at all?"

There was nowhere in the South the slightest doubt of the right of any state in the Union to withdraw from the compact and resume those attributes of sovereignty which, in creating the Federal Government, the several states had delegated to it. Indeed up to that time there had been scarcely any doubt anywhere, North or South, of the existence of this right of the states, as a right reserved in the formation of the Federal Union.

Accordingly there grew up in the South a distinctly "disunion" party, a party which favored the withdrawal of the slave states from a confederacy which, they contended, had failed to render them the protection or secure to them the equality of rights and privileges which it had been instituted to render and secure.

This impulse of withdrawal was very strong, but like the radical impulse of disunion at the North for the sake of abolition at all costs or hazards, it was for a long time overborne by the dominant sentiment of devotion to the Union and loyalty to the traditions of the Republic. The majority at the South were unwilling to give up the memory of Bunker Hill, Lexington, Concord, Saratoga and Trenton, as a national heritage of glory and likewise the majority at the North were reluctant to forget the victories of Marion and Sumter, or to relinquish the glorious memory of Yorktown.

Thus in 1850 there was a party at the North eager to sacrifice everything, including the Republic itself with all its traditions, in order to secure the extinction of slavery; and there was also a similarly radical party at the South ready and willing to destroy the Union in order to be rid of what it regarded as the unreasonable and intemperate hostility to the South within the Union.

Both these radical parties were in an apparently hopeless minority each in its own section, but each manifested a tendency to growth which boded ill for the future. Nevertheless the overwhelming majority of men on the one side and upon the other intensely detested and bitterly resented every suggestion to sacrifice the Union for any imaginable cause or upon any conceivable occasion.

It was to this great majority, North and South, that Henry Clay at that critical time appealed. The dominant passion of that statesman's soul was his love of the Union and his desire that it might endure during all time. To that one god of his adoration he had made sacrifices from the beginning. In its behalf he had put aside his lifelong desire for the gradual emancipation of the slaves. In its behalf he had sacrificed the supreme ambition of his life—the ambition to be president. In behalf of the Union he had made himself anathema maranatha—at the North as a slaveholder and at the South as an abolitionist. He was in fact both at once. He held slaves under a system of which he could not rid himself without arming them, in Jefferson's phrase, "with freedom and a dagger." He wanted them emancipated and was ready to make sacrifice in that behalf, but on the other hand he desired beyond all other things the preservation of that Union, to the perpetuity of which his whole life had been devoted, and to the perpetuity of which he looked for the enduring memory of whatever was worthy of remembrance in American history.

In an extraordinary degree Clay rose above the passions of the hour, as did Webster and certain other statesmen of that time—though certain other statesmen of the time did not.

He saw the situation clearly. The Union had been formed in candid recognition of the fact that slavery existed in full force and effect in certain of the states, while in certain other states, chiefly by reason of its unprofitableness, it was slowly passing away at the time of the Constitution's framing. He perfectly understood that the Constitution was a compact between states that could ratify or reject it at will, and that but for concessions made on the one side and on the other, the Constitution could never have become the fundamental law of the Republic. He clearly understood that the dealings of the Constitution with this question of slavery constituted a compromise to which the moral sentiments and the material interests of both sides were parties.

But as has been explained, there had grown up at the North and at the South two parties of extremists who cared little or nothing for the Union and everything for their opposing purposes: the Northern party for the abolition of slavery at all costs, even at cost of the destruction of the Union itself; and the Southern party organized for the perpetuation and extension of slavery regardless of everything else, regardless of the Union and of all that it signified of human liberty and of the practical realization of the doctrine of self-government among men.

Neither party represented the people in whose behalf it professed to speak. The abolitionists, whose petition for the dissolution of the Union we shall hereafter present, certainly did not represent the thought or desire of the great majority of the Northern people. In the same way the Southern disunionists who sought the disruption of the Union in order that slavery might "have free course to run and be glorified," did not represent the great body of Southern citizens, many of whom deprecated slavery and longed for its extinction by some safe process of gradual emancipation. But in both cases the extremists were accepted on the opposing side as representatives of the general thought; the extravagant opinions and demands of fanatical persons on the one side or the other were interpreted as the settled convictions of the great body of the people on the side thus misrepresented to its hurt.

Among the extremists on both sides the disruption of the Union was jauntily contemplated as a ready remedy for ills complained of.

As early as 1844 the Legislature of Massachusetts had resolved "That the project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested on the threshold, may tend to drive these states into a dissolution of the Union." Again, in 1845, the Legislature of Massachusetts passed and the governor of that state approved, a resolution asserting a right of nullification and declaring that the admission of Texas as a state in the Union "would have no binding force whatever on the people of Massachusetts." That resolution could mean nothing less than that Massachusetts would withdraw from the Union in the event of the admission of Texas, for otherwise laws enacted by virtue of the vote of Texas senators must have "binding force" upon the people of Massachusetts as upon those of all the other states.

There were other resolutions of similar purport adopted by the Legislature of Massachusetts that it is not necessary to set forth in a history which is not an indictment but merely an expository setting forth of facts by way of accounting for events.

On both sides disunion was constantly and freely threatened if either side could not have its way. A convention of Southerners held at Nashville, Tennessee, distinctly recommended the secession of the South and called for a Southern congress to consider and adopt that policy. About the same time Mr. Hale of New Hampshire introduced in the Senate (Feb. 1, 1850) a petition deliberately calling upon the national legislative body to adopt measures for the dissolution of the Union.

The petitioners were citizens of Pennsylvania and Delaware, but they constituted only a small fraction of the people of those states and unquestionably their proposal, if put to a vote in Pennsylvania and Delaware, would have been buried under a mountainous majority of adverse ballots. Yet the petitioners deliberately assumed to be and to speak for "the inhabitants" of those states, and their petition was undoubtedly accepted at the South as representing popular opinion in the region whence it came, if not indeed in the entire North. It was the mischief of such things that, while they were the work of a fanatical few, they managed to pass themselves off as utterances representative of public sentiment in the quarter from which they emanated.

The petition was as follows:

We, the undersigned, inhabitants of Pennsylvania and Delaware, believing that the Federal Constitution, in pledging the strength of the whole nation to support slavery, violates the Divine Law, makes war upon human rights, and is grossly inconsistent with republican principles; that its attempt to unite freedom and slavery in our body politic has brought upon the country great and manifold evils, and has fully proved that no such union can exist but by the sacrifice of freedom and the supremacy of slavery, respectfully ask you to devise and propose, without delay, some plan for the immediate, peaceful dissolution of the American Union.

Daniel Webster fitly exposed the character and significance of this petition by moving that it be prefaced with a preamble as follows:

Whereas, at the commencement of the session, you and each of you took your solemn oaths, in the presence of God and on the Holy Evangelists, that you would support the Constitution of the United States; now, therefore, we pray you to take immediate steps to break up the Union, and overthrow the Constitution of the United States as soon as you can.

So repulsive was this proposal of disunion that only three senators voted even to receive the petition embodying it and in the House a like refusal was made. But those three senators were Mr. Seward, of New York, Mr. Chase of Ohio, and Mr. Hale of New Hampshire—three great leaders of Northern thought who were destined soon to become three men of dominant influence in the new party of Free-soil and leaders in antagonism to the Southern claim to a share in the new territories.

There might have been a score of other votes for the petition which would have had far less significance. The votes of these three senators meant clearly that the Free-soil party looked upon disunion just as the extreme pro-slavery men of the South did, as a legitimate and always available remedy for existing ills or a prophylactic against evils anticipated.

As early as 1847 Mr. Calhoun had set forth the Southern contention with regard to the territories in a series of carefully worded resolutions which read as follows:

Resolved, that the territories of the United States belong to the several States composing this Union, and are held by them as their joint and common property.

Resolved, that Congress, as the joint agent and representative of the States of this Union, has no right to make any law, or do any act whatever, that shall directly, or by its effects, make any discrimination between the States of this Union, by which any of them shall be deprived of its full and equal right in any territory of the United States, acquired or to be acquired.

Resolved, that the enactment of any law which should, directly or by its effects, deprive the citizens of any of the States of this Union from emigrating, with their property, into any of the territories of the United States, would make such discrimination, and would, therefore, be a violation of the Constitution and the rights of the States from which such citizens emigrated, and in derogation of that perfect equality which belongs to them as members of this Union, and would tend directly to subvert the Union itself.

Resolved, that it is a fundamental principle of our political creed, that a people, in forming a Constitution, have the unconditional right to form and adopt the government which they may think best calculated to secure their liberty, prosperity, and happiness; and that, in conformity thereto, no other condition is imposed by the Federal Constitution on a State, in order to be admitted into this Union, except that its constitution shall be republican; and that the imposition of any other by Congress would be not only in violation of the Constitution, but in direct conflict with the principle on which our political system rests.

Here we have from the South a threat of disunion, a trifle more disguised, perhaps, than the threats that had come from the North, but not less positive. The resolutions were intended especially to cover the new territories which the country was then acquiring from Mexico by conquest and treaty, but they covered with equal effect all of that territory which had been added to the Union by the Louisiana Purchase, and the greater part of which had been set apart by the Missouri Compromise to be formed into free states. They were a challenge to the Missouri Compromise, and the assertion of a doctrine which afterwards greatly vexed the country and contributed in an important way to the bringing about of war. They constituted a plea for that repeal of the Missouri Compromise which was to come a very few years later.

This was the condition of things which Congress had to confront on its assembling in December, 1849. Disunion was everywhere in the air and on each side there was a party openly advocating it as the only remedy for existing and threatened ills. Both in the North and the South this party of disunion was in a hopeless minority, but by reason of its ceaseless and aggressive activity it had managed to make itself seem the authorized exponent of public opinion for each side.

The questions before the country were many, but they all related, directly or indirectly, to slavery. Should California be admitted to the Union as a free state? If so with what boundaries? for California then included Utah, Nevada and adjacent territory. Or should California, limited to the present boundaries of that state, be divided into two commonwealths, so that the Southern half might come in as a slave state to offset the Northern half in the Senate and the electoral college? Texas had already been admitted as a slave state, but its boundaries were still vague and undefined. It claimed jurisdiction over all that we now know as New Mexico and Arizona. Should that vast region—the sterility of which was at that time wholly unappreciated—be added to the domain of slavery, or should it be set apart in the hope that it might be erected presently into two or three or possibly half a dozen free states?

There were also two complaints of arrogant aggression from the opposing sides. At the North there was complaint that the "slave power," as it was called, sought and threatened to make itself dominant and supreme in the Union by its demands for the rendition of fugitive slaves. At the South there was complaint that the homes and firesides of the Southern people were menaced with servile insurrection by the activities of those who sought to breed discontent among the negroes and spread among them sentiments dangerous to public peace and order. There was complaint at the North that the constitutional and statutory provisions for the rendition of fugitive slaves exacted of Northern people an obligation which many of them could not conscientiously fulfil, making them unwilling parties to a system which their consciences abhorred, or, if they refused obedience, condemning them to the condition of lawbreakers and denouncing them as criminals because of their refusal to do that against which their very souls revolted. On the other hand the people of the South complained that their Northern brethren, or many of them, not only assisted runaway slaves to escape but deliberately incited them to that course and that the constitutional compact upon that subject was not enforced by any adequate statutory law.

On both sides discontent was rampant and threatening. On both sides dissatisfaction had begun to look to the dissolution of the Republic as the readiest remedy available.

There were statesmen like Senator Benton who laughed to scorn the idea that any considerable part of the people could ever seriously contemplate an assault upon the integrity of the Federal Union, but that the Union was truly and very gravely in danger subsequent events conclusively demonstrated.

It was to save the Union from disruption at the hands of Northern or Southern fanatics—all of whom were threatening that disaster—that Clay framed, Webster supported, Congress adopted, and the President approved the compromise measures of 1850.

Those measures covered substantially all the points in controversy. The bills were five in number.

The first provided for the separation of New Mexico from Texas, with compensation to Texas, and for the admission of that territory to the Union as a state when it should become populous enough, with or without slavery as its own people should at such time determine.

The second set off Utah from California and provided in a precisely similar manner for its ultimate admission to the Union as a state.

Neither of these two measures ever resulted in anything practical. Even unto this day New Mexico has remained too sparsely populated for statehood and Utah was not admitted to the Union until long after the Constitution of the United States had been so amended as to prohibit slavery in any part of the Republic.

The third of Clay's compromise bills provided for the admission of California to the Union as a state under the Constitution which it had adopted, which made no provision for the existence of slavery within its borders.

The fourth of the bills was a new and more strenuous fugitive slave law than any that had ever before existed. It was intended to carry out the provision of the Constitution of the United States on that subject and it was supposed to be offset to Northern sentiment by the fifth of the compromise measures which forbade the slave trade within the strictly national domain of the District of Columbia.

It had long been a grievance to Northern minds that this peculiarly national territory, governed as it was exclusively by a Congress representative of all the states in the Senate and of all their people in the House, and wholly without any expression of the will of its inhabitants, was made a slave mart, into which the slave-trader from Maryland or Virginia could take his chattels for sale on the auction block to other slave-traders who were there to buy speculatively that they might sell again to the owners of cotton and rice fields at the South.

In the North and South there had always been a radical distinction in men's minds and consciences, between slavery and the slave-trade; between the holding of men in hereditary bondage under a system essentially patriarchal and kindly, and the deliberate traffic in human beings for purposes of speculative profit.

There were two distinct questions with respect to slavery in the District of Columbia. To have abolished the institution there root and branch, as multitudes of petitioners prayed, would have been to menace the two states, Virginia and Maryland, which had given the District to the Union.1 It would have been to establish within their borders and by national authority a little Canada into which fugitive slaves from either of those states might escape with the certainty of thereby achieving freedom; for in the temper of that time no fugitive slave law could by any possibility have been enforced there after once Congress had decreed the abolition of slavery within the District.

1 Virginia's portion had been receded to that State in 1846.

But the abolition of the slave-trade within this peculiarly national domain was quite another matter. It left to all Southerners summoned thither on one or other sort of governmental business, or removing thither to reside, the right freely to bring then domestic servants with them without fear of molestation; but it made an end of that traffic in negroes as mere merchandise which was even more offensive to the better people of the South than to those of the North—which was socially as severely frowned upon in the one part of the country as in the other and concern with which made the slave-trader as completely a social outcast in Virginia as it might have done in Massachusetts.

Mr. Clay's five bills were framed and introduced in pursuit of his dominant purpose to preserve the American Union at whatever sacrifice of principle or of interest, and in like spirit they were enacted by both houses of Congress. They had the strong support of Daniel Webster in one of the ablest orations he ever delivered in behalf of the Union; a speech made, as Webster's biographers contend, in full knowledge of the fact that its delivery must cost him his very last hope of election to the presidency; a speech which brought upon him the odious accusation of having "sold out to the slave power."2 They had the support also of men on both sides of the danger line of cleavage who strongly disapproved of some of them but who voted for all in the firm conviction that together they constituted a compromise necessary to the preservation of the Union.

2 Unhappily for his reputation Mr. Webster gave color to this charge by accepting a large sum of money from Mr. Corcoran as a scarcely disguised reward for the speech.

That object was still supreme in the minds of the great majority, North and South alike. It was felt on both sides—in spite of personal convictions, personal interests, and the irritating friction of political agitation—that after all, the cause of human liberty, human progress, and the system of self-government among men was dependent upon the perpetuity of the union of these states. It was felt that the enslavement of the negro, now that the Constitution, the statute law, and the public sentiment of the country had robbed it of its most repugnant feature—the African slave-trade—was a matter of minor consequence in comparison with the perpetuity of the only government on God's earth which had ever rested its right to be upon the twin theories of unalienable rights and the consent of the governed.

To the two disunion parties, the one aggressively active at the North in behalf of abolition and the other equally aggressive at the South in behalf of slavery, these compromise measures were intensely offensive. But to the great majority of the American people their passage seemed imperatively necessary to the preservation of the Republic, and this sentiment found expression in the action of both houses of Congress upon them.

All of them were enacted by decisive majorities and all by the votes of statesmen from North and South, acting together and putting aside their sectional prejudices in behalf of the Union.

The bill for the admission of California as a free state, against which the strongest opposition was made from the South, had thirty-four senators in its favor against only eighteen in opposition, four of the votes in behalf of it being cast by the four great Southern leaders, Bell of Tennessee, Houston of Texas, Benton of Missouri, and Underwood of Kentucky—a list to which Mr. Clay, as the author and sponsor of the bill must be added as a king of men. In the House—more directly representative of popular sentiment—the vote in favor of the bill was no less than one hundred and fifty, with only fifty-six against it. This was the bill most offensive to the South and so the vote upon it reflected the strength of the Southern desire for the perpetuity of the Union.

On the other hand the Northern desire for the accomplishment of that end was reflected in the vote upon the Fugitive Slave Law which constituted a part of Clay's compromise scheme—a part of it intended to offset to the South the admission of the whole of the present state of California as a free state.

This Fugitive Slave Act was passed by a vote of twenty-seven to twelve in the Senate, and by a vote of one hundred nine to seventy-six in the House. Three Northern senators voted for it and one other, Mr. Dickinson of New York—who wished to vote for it, was paired with his colleague Mr. Seward. In the House thirty-two members from Northern states voted in favor of the Fugitive Slave Law.

But the discussion of these compromise measures lasted for eight months, and it was by no means confined to the halls of Congress. There was the fourth estate—the newspaper press—to be reckoned with, and behind that were the people. The people themselves and the newspaper representatives of popular opinion took a free part in the discussion, and both were unrestrained by parliamentary etiquette or by any of those considerations of polity and statecraft to which members of either house of Congress made obeisance. There was a great devotion to the Union it is true among press and people, but it did not take statesmanlike form or consider those nice questions that statesmen were bound to take into account.

On either side the popular desire for the preservation of the Union was complicated with the conviction that only the iniquities and injustices of the other side imperiled the Republic. On each side there was a profound conviction that if the other side would behave itself as it should, there would be no shadow of danger to the Union. Again on either side there was an intemperate press, representing an utterly intolerant party of extremists, and, shut their eyes as they might to facts, the statesmen of that time were aware that these extremists on the one side and upon the other, were daily adding to their numbers and daily becoming more and more nearly representative of popular sentiment.

The matter was complicated with partisanship, also, and with personal ambitions. There was the question of supremacy in the Nation, between the Whigs, who were then in power by virtue of Taylor's election in 1848, and the Democrats who, with one other brief interval, had been dominant in national affairs during the entire preceding half century. At the South the two parties, laying aside the questions of polity that had previously separated them, vied with each other in such support of slavery as should win the good will of the extreme pro-slavery party. At the North they were rivals as suitors for the favor of the new Free-soil faction—for at that time it was only a faction which Know-Nothingism was destined presently to relegate temporarily to the background.

But at the North the new Free-soil party drew more heavily on the Whigs than on the Democrats for its support, although its early leaders and presidential candidates, John P. Hale and Martin Van Buren, were distinguished Democratic statesmen.

Accordingly there arose in the country a contest between the two old parties for the favor of the two new ones. It became in fact a scrambling auction, in which each party in each section and each state and each district bid its convictions and its principles, without scruple, for votes. Each party sought to be more intensely pro-slavery than the other in those states and districts in which the pro-slavery sentiment was strong, while in those states and districts in which the anti-slavery sentiment was manifestly dominant, each party rivaled the other in its courtship of the prevailing dogma and its representative voters.

Quite naturally, men ambitious of political preferment trimmed their sails to catch these varying winds, and for the first time in the history of the country political conviction and principle very generally gave way to questions of self-interest. If the politician of that time was not quite "all things to all men," he was at any rate all things to the men who could cast the larger number of votes for his elevation to office.

The accusation of such selfish sacrifice of principle and conviction for the sake of personal aggrandizement was openly made against the foremost statesmen of the time, including Clay and Webster, and the President himself. Whatever any one of these did that was displeasing to one part of the country, was freely attributed to a desire to "curry favor," as the phrase went, with "the slave power" in the one case, or with "the abolitionist sentiment," in the other.

Without questioning the motives of the greater men, who offered their dominant devotion to the Union as the only and amply sufficient explanation of their actions and their votes, it is safe to say that the attitude and course and eloquence of a multitude of minor men possessed of ambition for political preferment were determined, on the one side or the other, chiefly by a consideration of votes.

Mr. Clay, Mr. Webster and the statesmen who aided them in adopting the Compromise of 1850, confidently believed that by their action in that matter they had laid the slavery question to rest for at least a generation to come. They had in fact, as the event proved, succeeded only in opening it anew and adding virulence to its discussion. Their very debates, preparatory to the passage of the compromise bills, had stirred the country to a discussion of the question, angrier than any other that had been known since the Constitution was framed. The measures themselves, so far from allaying excitement and controversy, intensified both. The South felt that it had been cheated in a bargain which gave one free state certainly and two, three or four prospectively, to the North, with absolutely no certainty and little probability of the admission of any slave state in compensation—for from the first the people of Texas resented and resisted the proposal to divide their great domain into the four states provided for at the beginning. On the other hand the Northern States felt that the new Fugitive Slave Law was an enactment with which they could not comply without such a sacrifice of conscience and conviction as could in no wise be made by honest and sincere men.

From the very first many of the Northern States set their legislative machinery at work to defeat the operation of this Fugitive Slave Law by the most effective counter legislation that legal ingenuity could devise. In so far as these devices succeeded in preventing the execution of that law they in effect nullified a national statute which the National Government was entirely competent to enact.

More important still from the point of view of history, is the fact that the compromise which was intended to allay all sectional feeling and work a pacification in behalf of the Union, directly and immediately wrought an opposite result. It additionally inflamed passion in all parts of the country. It strongly accentuated those differences of opinion which alone threatened the Union with dissolution and the country with devastating war.

The North set itself to nullify the Fugitive Slave Law. The South set itself to undo the Missouri Compromise.

On the one hand it was contended that the Fugitive Slave Law made slavery a national instead of a state institution—a thing to which Northern sentiment and Northern conscience could in no wise consent. On the other hand it was stoutly insisted that the equality of the states under the Constitution was openly violated, not only by the personal liberty laws enacted by Northern States in order to nullify the national statute on the subject of fugitive slaves, but still more aggressively by the practical exclusion of slaveholders from the territories, so far at least as their slave property was concerned; and further by the decree of the Missouri Compromise that, whatever the will of the settlers in new regions might be, there should be no new slave states carved out of that portion of the Louisiana Purchase which lay north of the southern line of Missouri. This prohibition—taken in connection with the admission of California as a free state—amounted in effect to a provision that there should be no more slave states created anywhere; for, as Mr. Webster had clearly pointed out, there was no other part of the territory conquered or purchased from Mexico, into which slavery could be practically or profitably extended.

The attempts made to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law at the North, whether successful or baffled, served only to inflame passion on both sides and to intensify the very controversy which it had been the purpose of the act—as a part of a compromise—to allay. On the other hand the Southern conviction grew that by the two compromises the South had been cheated of its equal rights in the public domain, and out of that contention was destined almost immediately to grow a bloody war in Kansas and a still more acrimonious state of feeling between the North and the South.

The story of that matter is reserved for another chapter of this history. In the meanwhile, if the facts have been adequately set forth, it must be clear to the reader that the Compromise of 1850 not only failed of its purpose of pacification, but resulted immediately in the very marked increase of hostility between the sections, the intensifying of the irritation and the accentuation of the acrimony that pervaded and inspired the dispute.

The fundamental trouble was that the statesmen who fondly thought to settle the matter by a compromise, did not grasp the truth of the situation with which they were called upon to deal. They did not appreciate the fact that there was indeed an "irrepressible conflict," between the two systems, a conflict which no compromise could end, no arrangement could mollify, no agreement could by any possibility adjust.

War was already on between abolitionism and slavery. It was idle to seek for grounds of reconciliation between convictions so utterly antagonistic and so necessarily irreconcilable. The compromisers were men crying "Peace" where there was no peace and no possibility of peace. They were visionaries seeking to reconcile sentiments that were as opposite as the poles. In opinion and sentiment as well as in physics, there are affinities that may not be resisted and antagonisms that no power can overcome. There was no flux of political agreement that could fuse Northern and Southern sentiment on the subject of slavery into one homogeneous whole—no vehiculum in which the two antagonistic principles could mingle in harmony.

The key to the situation, as every sincere historian must recognize, if he would interpret the events of that time aright, was the fact that this conflict was indeed "irrepressible," and that it could end only with the extinction of slavery on the one hand, or with the universal and constitutional recognition of slavery as a national institution on the other.

The Compromise of 1850 was futile and a failure because it was founded upon the ignoring of this fundamental truth.