428

NORTH AND SOUTH COMPARED.

gether irrelevant. Among the startling comparisons which the census emphasized a few may be selected. The South exported about seventy-five millions ($74,866,310) worth of cotton, rice and tobacco yearly; but the agricultural products of the State of New York, exceeded this aggregate by nearly thirty-three million dollars, ($108,275,281). The free States manufactured articles to the value of one hundred and ninety-seven millions annually ($197,658,400), but the slave States to the value of only about one-fifth as much ($42,178,184). The aggregate annual earnings of the slave States were four hundred millions ($403,429,718); that of the free States six hundred and fifty millions ($658,705,108). difference was less striking when the two sections were compared as a whole than in the case of individual States. The yearly value of the productions of the State of New York was greater by over four millions, than the aggregate income for the same time of the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. The small county of Essex in Massachusetts, with a population of ninetyfive thousand, produced yearly as much as the entire State of South Carolina, with a population of nearly five hundred and fifty thousand.

The

Striking as were these contrasts in material strength, the contrast in higher forms of wealth was more startling. The primary schools in the slave-holding States enrolled two hundred thousand pupils (201,085); but such schools in the free States enrolled nearly eight times as many (1,626,028). The pupils in these schools in the State of Ohio alone outnumbered by nearly eighteen thousand the enrollment in all the slave States. Southern high schools were attended by thirty-six thousand scholars (35,935). The Northern high schools by four hundred and thirty thousand (432,388). The attendance in these

NORTH AND SOUTH COMPARED.

429

schools in the smallest free State, Rhode Island, exceeded by a thousand pupils the attendance in the largest slave State, Virginia, and these schools in Massachusetts enrolled nearly four times as many students as were enrolled in all such schools in the slave States. The schools and colleges at the North were attended by more than two million persons (2,213,444); those at the South by less than one-sixth as many (301,172). It must be remembered, however, that the population of the free States was twice as great as that of the slave-holding, but even this disparity in numbers could not explain the neglect of education. That was explicable by the presence of the slaves, who constituted nearly one-half the Southern population and were rigorously excluded from school privileges. One effect of the neglect of education at the South by the white race was shown in the prevalence of illiteracy. One person out of every ten of the white population at the South could neither read nor write; at the North the proportion was one to one hundred and fifty-six.

These facts and many others which the census disclosed were freely talked about at the South;1 and the census which yielded them had been taken nearly ten years before. Presumptively, therefore, the census of 1850 would show even a more startling contrast. These economic conditions between the two sections were not familiar knowledge to the country; few took the trouble to investigate the census. But the leaders of the people knew the facts and sought to compromise the different interests and activi

1 The lessons of the census of 1840, were the subject of Theodore Parker's letter to the People of the United States Touching the Matter of Slavery; Boston, James Monroe and Company, MDCCCXLVIII; 120 pages,-a pamphlet written with great power and destined to wide influence. Parker's letter was carefully discussed in the Constitutional Convention of Kentucky of 1849; see its Debates and Proceedings, 870, et seq.

430

A COMPROMISE PENDING.

ties which produced them. Clearly, if a lasting compromise was to be made, it must rest upon a true economic basis, and it was doubtful whether such a basis would support a compromise.

When Congress met in December, 1849, there was a widespread understanding in the country, that a compromise of some kind would be attempted. There had been a serious effort three years before in Congress to exclude slavery from the entire California country. David Wilmot, a representative from Pennsylvania, on the eighth of August, 1846, had proposed that an antislavery proviso should be added to the bill appropriating two million dollars for the purpose of conducting peace negotiations with Mexico.1 He proposed to exclude slavery forever from the soil acquired from Mexico, and in Committee of the Whole, his proposition was carried by a vote of eighty-three to sixty-four. It is believed that the proviso would have succeeded in the Senate, had not Davis, of Massachusetts, persisted in delivering a long and untimely speech on the subject, in the midst of which Congress adjourned, and the opportunity for passing the Wilmot proviso was forever lost. All efforts in the next Congress to revive it failed. The pro-slavery men pronounced it a plain violation of the Constitution, and the Whigs as a party inclined to the same view. Calhoun, the leader of the slavocrats demanded the enactment of a law declaring that the Constitution and laws of the United States applicable to a territory were extended over the Mexican purchase.2 This would have made it slave soil. The principle of the Wilmot proviso and that of Calhoun's proposition seemed irreconcilable, but they were

1 See Polk's Message, August 8, 1846; Richardson, IV, 569: Benton's Debates, XV, 646, et seq., XVI, 54, et seq.

2 Calhoun's Works, IV, 346, 498.

CLAY'S EIGHT RESOLUTIONS.

431

the elements out of which a compromise must be constructed.

On the twenty-ninth of January, 1850, Henry Clay, in the Senate, offered eight resolutions covering, he said, all points in controversy and adjusting them upon a fair and equitable basis. He proposed to admit California as a free State; to organize Utah and New Mexico as Territories without mention of slavery; to purchase a portion of the State of Texas and attach it to New Mexico, and for compensation assume the public debt of Texas contracted before its annexation; to abolish the slave trade, but not slavery within the District of Columbia; and to enact a more effective fugitive slave law than that of 1793, but to leave the trade between the slave-holding States wholly under their control.1 The support of Webster and the lesser Whig leaders was secured and both Houses, it was supposed, would be willing to concede to the pacific purpose and practical wisdom of the proposed compromise. In support of it Clay delivered a powerful speech,2 in which he took up each resolution, showing its scope, purpose and, as he believed, its inevitable pacific

effect.

The heterogeneous resolutions were reported in one bill in May, but it was speedily discovered that there were so many elements of discord in it as to make its passage impossible. The debate ran on through the summer, and the propositions were finally taken up separately and passed. Every prominent member in both branches of Congress spoke on the resolutions; but their constitutional elements were best interpreted in three great speeches by Calhoun, Webster and Seward.

Calhoun opposed Clay's resolutions and prepared a 1 Benton's Debates, XVI, 386.

2 February 5, 1850.

432

CALHOUN ON THE COMPROMISE.

speech to prove their inexpediency and unconstitutionality. When the time came for its delivery, he was sick in bed, but by a characteristic exercise of will power took his seat in the Senate and listened to the reading of his speech by Senator Wilson, of Virginia. Its opening thought indicated the major premise of his argument, that the agitation of the subject of slavery if not prevented soon and effectively would end in the disruption of the Union. The public discontent had not originated with demagogues or disappointed politicians, its cause would be found in the conviction of the Southern people, that they could no longer remain in the Union, if the existing state of affairs was suffered to run on. The primary cause was the destruction of the equilibrium between the two sections of the government. The North now had a majority of votes in the electoral college and in the House of Representatives. It had a majority of the population and would soon have a majority of the States; California, Oregon and Minnesota were in prospect, but not a single State at the South. The time was at hand when there would be twenty Northern to twelve Southern States, with forty Northern and twenty-four Southern Senators. The destruction of the old equilibrium between the sections was attributable to the legislation of the general government. It had begun, he said, in a series of acts excluding the South from the common territory. It had been continued by the adoption of a revenue system, by which, said Calhoun, an undue proportion of the burden of taxation had been imposed upon the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the North.

The first act which deprived the South of its share of the territories was the ordinance of 1787, which had entirely excluded it from the northwest territory. The next