CHAPTER XXIX

SLAVERY AGITATION

1848-1860

In eight years, the vote for slavery restriction had increased from seven thousand to two hundred and ninetyone thousand, and a well-organized party now demanded that Congress should make the territories free soil. It declared that Congress had no power to interfere with slavery within the states. Half of these were slave states. West of the free states, beyond the Mississippi, extended the vast region north of 36° 30', in which slavery was prohibited by the compromise of 1820. West of the slave states lay the recent acquisition from Mexico, much of it south of 36° 30'.. It was free soil when acquired. Should it be opened or closed to slavery?

The people of the slave-holding states were united in their feelings about the matter. These were their views: They complained that the fugitive slave law was persistently violated in the North. Fugitive slaves were aided to escape, not merely by individuals, but by the legislature and the courts. Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island had passed laws, popularly called "personal liberty bills," which made it an offense of a serious nature to assist in capturing or returning fugitive slaves, and the state courts in these states would not hear fugitive slave cases; they must be heard in the United States courts.

Abolitionists throughout the North kept up a constant and dangerous anti-slavery agitation. They held meetings, published books and papers, and sent them into slave states, for the purpose of making slave property insecure. Remonstrance by the South was in vain. The agitation was becoming more vehement and dangerous. every day.

The slave-holding states, equal in number to the free

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ANTI-SLAVERY

389

states, had equal rights under the Constitution. These rights were, to settle anywhere with slave property and have it protected. The Louisiana and Mexican acquisitions were due as much to the people of the South as to those of the North. The South believed in African slavery, and that the territories should be open to slavery without restriction. Therefore, the Missouri Compromise (1820) was all wrong, and a discrimination against the South. Congress had no power over slavery whatever.

The Wilmot proviso was an attack on the South which, it said, should be resisted by arms if necessary. Congress had no right to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of Maryland and Virginia. Was it not time to form a southern confederacy and leave the free states to themselves?

Public feeling in the North was by no means unanimous, for the South had many sympathizers there. Those who utterly differed from the South in opinion declared again and again that they were not its enemy, but the enemy of slavery. But anti-slavery feeling on the question of the extension of slavery into the territories was decided, and ran as follows:

Congress had power to exclude slavery from the territories, because by the Constitution they were wholly under its control. This applied to the District of Columbia. Not only was this the opinion of the Free-Soilers and abolitionists, but of the state legislatures. They passed resolution after resolution affirming the right and power of Congress to keep slavery out of the territories, and many of them instructed their Congressmen and requested their Senators to vote for the restriction of slavery from the territories. But no legislature gave instructions to vote for the abolition of slavery within the slave-holding states. At this time the slave trade flourished in the District of Columbia. The northern The northern members of Congress were instructed to vote for its abolition.

The anti-slavery people of the North complained that anti-slavery literature was thrown out of the southern mails, in violation of right, if not of law; that men who opposed slavery were in danger of their lives, and that

some, like Elijah P. Lovejoy,* had been murdered for their opinions, and that from 1836 to 1844 Congress had refused to entertain anti-slavery petitions, under the "gag rule.

The abolitionists asserted that the "personal liberty bills' were just; that slavery was wrong; that the whole country ought to be free soil; and that the Missouri Compromise merely made a wicked concession, and ought to be repealed.

But only a small portion of the people of the North were abolitionists. They insisted that the Free-Soil party did not go far enough, as it said nothing against slavery within the states. Slavery ought to be destroyed. The Free-Soilers said: "Exclude it forever from the territories."

Thus on the subject of slavery the people of the United States in 1849 were much divided. Up to the 28th of January, 1848, the question of forbidding or permitting slavery in the territories, though a critical was not a pressing question. The news of that day suddenly changed the history of the Far West and made slavery in the territories and in the states the most important question for the nation to settle.

On that January day, a millwright named Marshall, who had come to the coast from New Jersey, while at work on a millrace for Captain Sutter, near Sutter's fort, on the American River, a fork of the Sacramento, saw yellow particles in the loose mud and gravel brought down by the water. Suspecting its nature, he collected specimens and carried them to his employer. Sutter made a few rude but reliable tests and pronounced the particles gold. The secret could not be kept. First, a Mormon laborer suspected, and then proved the discovery. Then the news spread up and down the valley, up and down the coast; over California, along the trails of the Mississippi Valley; over the

*Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered at Alton, Illinois, November 7, 1837, while defending his newspaper, The Observer, against a pro-slavery mob. The changes wrought by time are suggested: on November 7, 1897, a monument of colossal proportions was erected to his memory on the bluff at Alton, and Lieutenant-Governor Northcott made an address on behalf of the State.

1849]

CALIFORNIA AND THE UNION

391

East, the North, and the South; to Europe and Asia and Australia, and so over the whole world.

Never did news work a more sudden transformation. Nearly a year passed before President Polk told the news to Congress, but by that time the rush for the mines was well under way. In less than a year and a half, two hundred thousand men had reached California. Sutter's sawmill was converted into a hotel, and rented for thirty thousand dollars a year. Cities sprang up in a few months. Civil government was for a time in abeyance. But the instinct of the American is for law and order. The men of California sent delegates to a convention at Monterey in September, 1849, made a state constitution, and asked for admission into the Union. President Taylor had advised them to do so. The new state would be the thirty-first, and either the sixteenth free or the sixteenth slave state. It asked for admission as a free state.

The request for admission complicated the slavery question. Its admission would break the equality of the states in the Senate, whose sixty members were equally divided as representatives of fifteen free and fifteen slave states, and give the free states thirty-two Senators. In the House the free states already had one hundred and thirty-nine members; the slave states ninety-one. The differences between the North and the South, specified a few paragraphs back, were now keen and critical. Would the South consent to another free state, in California, which extended far south of 36° 30'? Was the Union to be broken up?

As in 1820 and in 1833, Henry Clay now came forward with a compromise measure, which proposed to admit California at once as a free state; to abolish the slave trade, but not slavery, in the District of Columbia; to make a more severe and effective fugitive slave law, to organize Utah and New Mexico as territories, with no mention of slavery, and to buy from Texas all she claimed of New Mexico and thus fill the empty treasury of that state.

It may be noticed that the first and second propositions favored anti-slavery men; the third and fourth favored pro-slavery men; the fifth made the fourth possible and put money into the empty treasury of Texas.

The question of admitting the thirty-first state into the Union came before the thirty-first Congress. Its oldest members were now old men, who were children when Washington was President. Most eminent of this group, in the Senate, were Clay and Webster, Benton and Calhoun; of those whose memory went back to Madison's administration were Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine; John P. Hale, of New Hampshire; William H. Seward, of New York; William L. Dayton, of New Jersey; James M. Mason, of Virginia; Willie P. Mangum, of North Carolina; Thomas Corwin and Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio; Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi; Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois, and Lewis Cass, of Michigan.

In the House, among the men who recalled the War of 1812 vividly, and who were now in middle life, were: Robert C. Winthrop, of Massachusetts; Thaddeus Stevens and David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania: Howell Cobb, Alexander H. Stephens, and Robert Toombs, of Georgia; Jacob Thompson, of Mississippi; Joshua R. Giddings and Robert C. Schenck, of Ohio; Humphrey Marshall, of Kentucky; Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, and Edward D. Baker, of Illinois. The thirty-first Congress contained a large number of the most famous men our country has produced. Some of them were as old as the government. Webster, Clay, and Calhoun were in the Senate together for the last time. A little younger than they were the men who were soon to take their places as leaders: Seward, Chase, and Davis.

Clay, in February, opened the great debate with an explanatory speech, and in a second, discussed the allabsorbing theme of his resolutions, with unsurpassed fire and all the fascinating power with which, though now an old man, he had in former years moved the multitude. March followed with three speeches that have gone into history. Calhoun came from his sick-chamber and listened, "like some disembodied spirit reviewing the deeds of the flesh," while Senator Mason read his speech for him on the 4th of March. It was Calhoun's last word.

"I have, Senators, believed from the first," said he, "that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in