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THREE DECADES OF FEDERAL LEGISLATION.

Mr. Calhoun regarded slavery as a natural relation. Of all the questions of the period, it was the abolition movement that gave him the deepest concern. He firmly believed that in the event of its success, the fate of the Southern people "would be worse than that of the aborigines." To destroy the relation of master and slave would be to restore the fruitful fields of the South to their primeval condition. Calhoun clearly saw the coming conflict. He did not see anything but ruin in emancipation. "To destroy the existing relations," said he, "would be to destroy the prosperity of the Southern States, and to place the two races in a state of conflict which must end in the expulsion or extirpation of one or the other." He regarded social and political equality as the necessary incidents of emancipation, and believed that such equality between the races was impossible. How fallible at the best is human judgment! In Calhoun's life-time, the great mass of the American people were conscientious believers in the incompatibility of the two races. Even Lincoln, at first, looked to the expatriation of the emancipated slaves, as the only practicable course. Yet, what a change of conditions; what an explosion of political and social fallacies, and decay of prejudices has this generation witnessed! Slavery has been abolished. Each year brings to the South a larger return from its industries. In Calhoun's own state the former slave and master now exercise the political and civil functions of citizenship with equal right. Social equality still remains as impracticable as Calhoun regarded it. It does not exist in any race or people. It never will. Some must ever be the masters. The mass must ever be the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. He had less apprehension of the destruction of the Union by the assertion of states rights through secession, than of its destruction by consolidation. Any one who has observed the tendency toward the latter mode of destruction will not be disposed to disregard its dangers.

In the commencement of his career, Mr. Calhoun favored what was afterwards known as Whig measures, viz., a national bank, a protective tariff, and the development of internal improvements by the general government. About the year 1823 he changed his views in regard to these measures, and in 1828 he characterized the tariff bill of that year as a "bill of abominations." This was the bill that led to the nullification act in South Carolina. He devoted his life to the maintenance of slavery and the preservation of the Union. He died on the last day of March, 1850, almost in the forum. The last words of his last speech in the Senate, uttered in the early part of that month, were these: "Having faithfully done my duty to the best of my ability, both to the Union and my section, throughout this agitation, I shall have the consolation, let what will come, that I am free from all responsibility." Two friends then led him out of the Senate Chamber, and his seat

was vacant.

THE

CHAPTER III.

THIRTY-FIFTH CONGRESS- - ITS ORDEAL AS TO SLAVERY EXTENSION - KANSAS AND THE TERRITORIAL QUESTIONS QUADRILATERAL CONTEST FOR THE PRESIDENCY -THE CHARLESTON CONVENTION THE DOUGLAS MAJORITY-THE TWO-THIRDS RULE-THE SOUTHERN DELEGATES WITHDRAW - MR. LINCOLN ELECTED THE SPECTRE OF WAR.

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HE writer of this volume begins the first of his three decades in 1855. But he was not then a member of Congress. It was the refluent wave that followed the excitement growing out of the Kansas question, which carried him into that position with the administration of Mr. Buchanan. That issue was triangular. It had been somewhat changed in so far as the Northern states were concerned. The Southern party had insisted on the doctrine that the Constitution by its own vigor carried slavery into the territories. This was the Breckenridge, or extreme Southern doctrine. The Southern vote was in its support. But the great bulk of the Northern Democratic vote favored the doctrine of Judge Douglas, familiarly called "Squatter Sovereignty." The Republican party favored a congressional proviso, like that of Judge Wilmot, forbidding slavery in the territories.

The travail which gave birth to Kansas as a state was the old agony as to slavery. It was prolonged and it eventuated in civil strife.

To understand the immediate cause of the war requires a special discussion of the conduct of the Thirty-fifth Congress. Its Speaker was a liberal South Carolinian, James C. Orr. He afterwards took a large part in the resurrection of his state after the war. The consequences of congressional action as herein detailed bring us very close to the great struggle which threatened the Union with disseverance, and seemed to set back the hands on the dial-plate of time in our Western Continent.

Had the Democratic party which came into power with Mr. Buchanan and the Thirty-fifth Congress united in wisdom to thrust aside the Lecompton

Constitution, there would have been no distraction in its ranks as early as 1860. But it is not so sure that the slavery question would not have come in some other form to have kept up the irrepressible conflict. Had they thus united, perhaps the Charleston Convention of 1860 would have agreed. In inquiring into the real, if not the proximate causes of the war and the alienation of the sections, we cannot ignore the questions as to Kansas.

To be sure, Kansas was the occasion, rather than the cause, of conflict. The slavery agitation was the paramount cause. There is something ineffably repugnant to the human heart in the relation of master and slave. The idea of one human being owning another human being would thrust itself forward in all these struggles, irrepressibly foremost. Whether in resistance to the constitutional authorities — as in the case of fugitives from justice and labor- or in the admission of new states, or in the organization of territories, the anti-slavery zealot, whether sincere or not, handled a weapon so tempered with seeming justice, so flashing, as it were, in defense of a higher than human law, and wreathed as with the "beauty of the lilies" by the lyric poetry of the time, that the sanctions of authority were as mere houses of cards before his blows. No wonder that with such an impulse the devotees of anti-slavery, in the language of one of their eloquent champions, "would rend the Union to destroy slavery, though hedged round by the triple bars of the national compact, and though thirty-three crowned sovereigns, with arms in their hands, stood around it." The pro-slavery men of 1856-7 forgot the growing power of this sentiment, and the increasing power of the North to enforce it. They desperately struggled to force Kansas into the Union as a slave state, by a stupendous fraud. In the reaction against its perpetration, a fresh agitation was aroused. This new agitation outlasted the interest in the case of Kansas. It absorbed all the ✓ energies of debate. The whole country became a Kansas. The first elaborate speech made by the author in Congress, and, as already noted, the first made in the new hall of the House, on the 16th of December, 1857, was also the first delivered against Lecompton by any one in the lower branch of Congress. It was taken to Judge Douglas on the Sunday preceding the discussion, to read him parts of it in manuscript. The Globe of that time will show the debate and the attempt by Southern statesmen, Messrs. Bocock, Quitman, Jones, and others, to cut it off. As a consequence of this speech, the writer lost caste with the Administration.

The excitement accompanying that discussion has long since subsided. The points of the argument will appear from this extract:

"I propose now to nail against the door, at the threshold of this Congress, my theses. When the proper time comes, I will defend them, whether from the assaults of political friend or foe. I would fain be silent, sir, here and now. But silence, which is said to be as harmless as a rose's breath,' may be as perilous as the pestilence. This peril comes from the at

6

DEMOCRATIC POLICY.

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tempt to forego the capital principle of Democratic policy, which I think has been done by the constitutional convention of Kansas. I maintain: 1. That the highest refinement and greatest utility of Democratic policythe genius of our institutions—is the right of self-government. 2. That this self-government means the will of the majority, legally expressed. 3. That this self-government by majority rule was sacredly guaranteed in the organic act of Kansas. 4. That it was guaranteed upon the question of slavery in terms; and generally with respect to all the domestic institutions of the people. 5. That domestic institutions include all which are local, not national — state, not Federal. The phrase means that and that only — that always. 6. That the people were to be left perfectly free to establish or abolish slavery, as well as to form and regulate their other institutions. 7. That this doctrine was recognized in every part of the Confederacy by the Democracy; fixed in their national platform; asserted by their speakers and presses; reiterated by their candidates; incorporated in messages and instructions; and formed the feature which distinguished the Democracy from the opposition, who maintained the doctrine of congressional intervention. 8. The Lecompton Constitution, while it is asserted that it is submitted to the people in the essential point, thus recognizing an obligation to submit it in some mode, cannot, in any event, be rejected by the people of Kansas. The vote must be for its approval, whether the elector votes one way or another. The people may be unwilling to take either of the propositions, and yet they must vote one or the other of them. They have to vote 'constitution with slavery,' or 'constitution with no slavery'; but the constitution they must take."

These were the points elaborated in that discussion. Differing with Mr. Buchanan, the author was constrained afterwards to differ with Judge Douglas on the Compromise bill reported by a Committee of Conference. He voted for the latter on the ground that it returned for a fair election the fraudulent constitution to the people, and because there were people enough for a state in Kansas. This action was fully justified by the subsequent action of the people under that bill. Subsequently the writer voted to receive the free State of Kansas; and, after justifying his former vote, scarcely exaggerated the rancour of the campaign, when he said in the House that:

"For voting for this Conference bill, even after I was justified by the popular vote of Kansas in the summer of 1858, I was compelled to meet from Republicans of Ohio a campaign unexampled for its unprovoked fierceness, its base and baseless charges of personal corruption, its conceit, its ignorance, its impudence, its poltroonery, its billingsgate, its brutality, its moneyed corruption, its fanatical folly, its unflagging slang, its drunken saturnalia, and its unblushing libels and pious hypocrisy! [The writer had not then learned meekness.] At the capital of Ohio, in its most noble and intelligent precincts, the people, ashamed of and indignant at the audacious falsehood and brazen clamor from the presses of the state, and from the little penny-a

liners and pettifoggers, who echoed the libels of members fresh from this floor in spite of all this, the people doubled my majority of 1856. I had the satisfaction-prouder than a temporary victory-of seeing the policy I had voted for with the earnest conviction of duty, and with the sustaining advice of such a statesman as Robert J. Walker, vindicated by time, and sustained by its practical operation. As the crowning act of this triumph, I shall vote for the admission of Kansas under this constitution. In doing this, I court all criticism, defy all menace, and truly represent almost every man, woman, and child in my district."

Inasmuch as that vote for the Conference bill was greatly impugned and as it seemed to be a departure from the original position of Judge Douglas, the writer was solicitous to have the Judge explain their mutual relations to this question. This he did during the campaign of 1860. On the 20th of September he spoke to an immense meeting at Columbus, Ohio, in which he thus explained the differences between himself and other Democrats:

me.

"I made the first speech in the Senate against the Lecompton Constitution, and without consulting Mr. Cox or any one else, and Mr. Cox made the first speech against it in the House, without consultation or dictation from We fought it through on our own responsibility until Lecompton was dead; and when Lecompton was defeated, its friends got up the English bill to cover its retreat. The Hon. Robert J. Walker, then Governor of Kansas, advised Mr. Cox and myself to go for it, giving assurance that when presented to the people of Kansas, they would kill it, ten to one. Under these circumstances, some of our men felt it their duty to go for the bill. I did not think ✓ it a fair submission to the will of the people, and determined to fight it too. Mr. Cox said he had consulted the members of the Ohio delegation, that they all agreed to vote for it, and that under the circumstances he should vote with them. I told him I had no quarrel with those of my friends who differed with me honestly on that point, and afterwards I wrote letters in favor of the election of some of those who had voted for the English bill." The Judge concluded by urging his friends in the District to "nail the slander by re-electing Mr. Cox."

Had Judge Douglas yielded his resolution on this subject, and voted for the Conference bill, the territorial question would not have been mooted at the Charleston Convention, with so marked a personal application. His nomination would have been made without division. For a time, at least, secession would have been prevented, and war averted. The contests of that time were much embittered by the Dred Scott case. The decision of the Supreme Court in that case was calculated to divide and disintegrate the old parties and to build up the Republicans. Mr. Douglas and the Northern Democrats sustained that decision; but they could not venture to sustain the Lecompton Constitution, without inviting certain ruin to the party and defeating his personal aspirations. It was on this question that he