Republican party was seated in power the government would be divorced from slavery. The mails would be used to disseminate seditious writings and servile insurrections would follow. Slavery would become a burden instead of a blessing to the South, and the border States in a few years would be compelled to throw their influence into the Northern scale. The slaves would be concentrated in the more southerly slaveholding States, and in less than twenty years would far outnumber the white population. Then universal emancipation would be decreed by the federal government, and such a deadly contest between the two races would follow as had never been known in the world's history. However unreasonable this fear it was a real terror to many Southern men. They looked forward with grave anxiety to the time when the slave population would outnumber the white. And these dangers were depicted in lurid colors in Alabama when it seceded.1

The loyal people of Missouri2 and other border States complained that the cotton States were to blame for the secession movement now in progress, and that these States had no right to take them out of the Union against their will, to which Iverson replied that the border States had no right to keep the cotton States in the Union against their will. As the States were sovereign and independent and had the right to decide these questions for themselves, let those who wished to remain in the Union remain there. But the border States were short-sighted, and unlike those of the Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic they did not understand the great revolution going on. The cotton States clearly foresaw what was coming in the Union: universal emancipation, and an attempt to turn loose 1 Smith's Alabama Debates, 1861, 201, et seq. 2 See Vol. III, p. 43.

SLAVERY TO BE PROTECTED.

609

upon society at the South a mass of corruption which emancipation would engender. The border States could get along without slavery; a subject which was discussed exhaustively in Kentucky in 1849.1 But the cotton States were obliged, he said, to have African slaves to cultivate their cotton, their rice and their sugar.2 The slave was property and his protection was essential to the prosperity of the South; a dogma repeated from colonial times till the abolition of slavery. The cotton States had voted for Breckinridge and Lane at the Presidential election of 1860, because they stood for congressional protection to slave property in the territories.3 The small party in the South opposed to that principle had supported Douglas, but in the Southern States it was so small as to be contemptible.* Southern men who supported the Bell and Everett ticket favored congressional protection to slavery, but a large portion of them were ardent supporters of the secession movement and especially because they had lost all hope of getting protection for slavery if they remained in the Union. Legislation or an amendment to the Constitution which fell short of permanent protection for slavery would not be accepted by the South. But the South was satisfied that there was no prospect of getting such legislation, therefore, Crittenden's resolutions were unnecessary and useless.

If the North yielded and gave the Southern States addi

1 See my Constitutional History of the American People, 17761850, Vol. II, 1-170.

2 Discussed at length in the Alabama Convention, 1861; Smith's Debates, 194-211.

3 Platform Breckinridge Democratic Convention, Baltimore, June 11-28, 1860.

4 Douglas had carried but one slave-holding State, Missouri, having nine electoral votes, and giving him 58,801 popular votes.

610

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT.

tional constitutional guarantees, the grant would spring only from an apprehension that the South was going to dissolve the Union; a concession made under such circumstances would be of little value to the South. Northern pledges would be valueless as long as a vitiated public sentiment toward slavery existed in the heart and minds of Northern people. The doctrine of the irrepressible conflict was taught at the North from every pulpit, every popular assembly, every schoolhouse. This Northern sentiment was beyond reform. The Union, therefore, was doomed.

It was twenty-five years since the anti-slavery agitation began; then the abolitionist could muster but seven thousand votes, now they had increased to one million eight hundred and fifty thousand votes.1 Through all these years the South had threatened to dissolve the Union if its expostulations continued to be ignored, and though it had been in control of the Federal government and its patronage, it had not been able to restrain the growth of the anti-slavery vote.

The secession movement included the States west of the Mississippi. If the border States desired any influence or part in the new Confederacy they must leave the Union quickly and send delegates to join in forming a constitution and organizing a government for the protection of slavery.2 It was not impossible that this would be done before they arrived. If the cotton States alone formed the Confederacy they might reopen the African slave trade and thus destroy the great monopoly of the

1 The vote for James G. Birney, 1840, was 7,059; in 1844, 62,300; for Martin Van Buren, 1848, 29,263; John P. Hale, 1852, 156,149; John C. Freemont, 1856, 1,341,264; Abraham Lincoln, 1860, 1,865,

2 See Vol. III, p. 47.

PURPOSE OF THE SOUTH, 1860.

611

negro market which Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina had so long possessed.1

Though Iverson was not a foremost leader of the secession movement this speech of his delivered in the United States Senate six days before South Carolina assembled in convention to pass a secession ordinance, remains the unconcealed exposition of the thought and purpose of the South in 1860. If all that he said was true, it may be asked why did Southern Senators delay in Washington? Why not join their constituency and hurry forward the program of secession agreed upon? The reason was obvious, they lost nothing by remaining at the capital. They and their friends were yet in control of the Federal government, and were exercising their vast powers to the best of their ability in furthering the ends of secession. By remaining they could participate in whatever action might be taken at an unguarded moment to put the national government in a state of defense, and by their votes paralyze the efforts in that direction. They were playing a bold but easy part, but they knew their ground thoroughly.

Senator Pugh, of Ohio, ventured to correct Iverson's statement that violations of the fugitive slave law had cost Virginia one hundred thousand dollars a year. He said that the statement was not only untrue of Virginia, but of the whole South since the act of 1793 was passed, and Douglas remarked that the law had been enforced "with as much fidelity as that in regard to the African slave trade." Secession quite monopolized the debate. Seward, Sumner and Chase believed that the day of deliverance was at hand when the government should pass into the control of the Republicans, and they kept silent. But Wade of Ohio, the most radical Republican

1 Globe, December 11, 1860, pp. 50, 51; Smith's Alabama Debates, 1861, p. 198.

612

BENJAMIN F. WADE.

in the Senate, would not allow Iverson to go unanswered, and his reply embodied the best exposition made during this session, of the principles of the new party.

The Southern Senators, said Wade, represented but little more than one-quarter of the free people of the United States, and yet their counsels had prevailed for at least ten years, and the party which they represented had also been in the majority in the cabinet and in the Supreme Court. Was it not strange, therefore, that they should now complain that their rights were struck down by the government? If anything in the Federal legislation was wrong they were responsible for it, for the Republican party had never for one hour been invested with sufficient power to modify or control federal legislation; therefore, when Senators justified the overthrow of the government they were acting merely upon the suspicion that the Republicans might somewhat affect their rights or violate the Constitution. The Republicans, he said, held no principle which had not had the sanction of the government in every department for more than seventy years. On the question of slavery it stood where Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe had stood, and where Adams, Jackson and even Polk had stood. It was the men of the South who had changed their opinions. The only legislation of which the South could complain was furnished by some evidence of hostility to slavery in the liberty laws of some of the Northern States. But the opinions embodied in these laws were held by the civilized nations of the world. All agreed that the day of compromises was at an end. The most solemn compromise had been violated without scruple, and one that had stood for more than thirty years had but recently been swept from the statute books by the Kansas-Nebraska act. The friends and foes of slavery extension had made it the great issue at the recent elec