THE SLAVE POWER, ITS CHARACTER, CAREER, AND DESIGNS. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. THE CASE STATED. THOSE who have followed the discussions in this country on the American contest are aware that the view taken of that event by the most influential organs of the English press has, during the period which has elapsed since its commencement, undergone considerable modification. The first announcement by South Carolina of its intention to secede from the Union was received in this country with simple incredulity. There were no reasons, it was said, for secession. What the constitution and laws of the United States had been on the eve of Mr. Lincoln's election, that they were on its morrow. It was absurd to suppose that one half of a nation should separate from the other because a first magistrate had been elected in the ordinary constitutional course. The agitation for secession was therefore pronounced to be a political feint intended to cover a real movement in some other direction. But when the contest had passed beyond its first stages, when the example set by South Carolina was followed by the principal States of the extreme South with a rapidity and decision shewing evident concert, when the treacherous seizure of Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbour gave further significance to the votes of the conventions, when lastly the attack on Fort Sumpter awoke the North, as one man, to arms, belief in the reality of the movement could no longer be withheld, and speculation was directed to the causes of the catastrophe. The theory at first propounded was nearly to this effect. Commercial and fiscal differences were said to be at the bottom of the movement. 2 18 CAUSES OF THE WAR. The North fancied she had an interest in protection; the South had an obvious interest in free trade. On this and other questions of less moment North and South came into collision, and the antagonism thus engendered had been strengthened and exacerbated by a selfish struggle for place and power-a struggle which the constitution and political usages of the Americans rendered more rancorous and violent than elsewhere. But in the interests of the two sections, considered calmly and apart from selfish ends, there was nothing, it was said, which did not admit of easy adjustment, nothing which negotiation was not far more competent to deal with than the sword. As for slavery, it was little more than a pretext on both sides, employed by the leaders of the South to arouse the fears and hopes of the slaveholders, and by the North in the hope of attracting the sympathies of Europe and hallowing a cause which was essentially destitute of noble aims. The civil war was thus described as having sprung from narrow and selfish views of sectional interests (in which, however, the claims of the South were coincident with justice and sound policy), and sustained by passions which itself had kindled ; and the combatants were advised to compose their differences, and either return to their political partnership, or agree to separate and learn to live in harmony as independent allies. With the progress of events these views have undergone some change, principally in excluding more completely than at first from the supposed causes of the movement the question of slavery, and in bringing more prominently into view the right of nations to decide on their own form of political existence as identified with the cause of the South. "The watchword of the South," said the Times,* "is Independence, of the North Union, and in these two war-cries the real issue is contained." That there is much plausibility in this view of the American crisis for those who have no more knowledge of American history than is possessed by the bulk of educated men in this country needs not be denied. Superficial appearances, perhaps we should say the facts most immediately prominent, give it some support. The occasion on which secession was proclaimed was the election of a Republican President, who, far from being the uncompromising champion of abolition, had declared himself ready to maintain the existing régime of slavery with the whole power of the Federal government. On the retirement of the Southern representatives and senators * September 19, 1861. THE POPULAR VIEW. 19 from Congress, the Republican party became supreme in the legislature; and in what way did they employ this suddenly acquired power? In passing a law for the abolition of slavery in the Union or even in repealing the odious Fugitive Slave Law? Nothing of the kind; but in passing the Morrill Tariff —in enacting a measure by which they designed to aggrandize the commercial population of the North at the expense of the South. Since the breaking out of hostilities, again, some of the most salient acts of the drama have only tended to confirm the view which these occurrences would suggest. When slaves have escaped to the Federal army, instead of being received by the general with open arms as brothers for whose freedom he is fighting, they have been placed upon the footing of property, and declared to be contraband of war. When a Federalist general, transcending his legitimate powers, issues a proclamation declaring that slaves shall be free, it is not a proclamation of freedom to slaves as such, but only to the slaves of "rebels," while no sooner is this half-hearted act of manumission known at head-quarters than it is disavowed and over-ruled. All this, and more to the same purpose, may be urged, as it has been urged, in favour of the view of the American crisis taken by some leading organs of the English press; yet I venture to say that never was an historical theory raised on a more fragile foundation; never was an explanation of a political catastrophe propounded in more daring defiance of all the great and cardinal realities of the case with which it professed to deal. One is tempted to ask, whether those who thus expound American politics suppose the present crisis to be an isolated phenomenon in American history, disconnected from all the past; or, to look at the question from another point of view, whether they imagine that the coincidence of the political division of parties with the geographical division of slave and free States is an accident-that, to borrow the expression of Jefferson, "a geographical line coinciding with a marked principle" has no significance. It seems almost trifling with the reader to remind him that the present outbreak is but the crowning result, the inevitable climax of the whole past history of American politics-the catastrophe foreseen with more or less distinctness by all the leading statesmen of America from Washington to Webster and Clay, which was the constant theme of their forebodings, and to escape or defer which was the great problem of their political lives. And equally superfluous does it seem to mention what was the grand central question in that history-the question to which all others were 20 SLAVERY THE CENTRAL PROBLEM subordinate, and around which all political divisions ranged themselves.* * In opposition to the views propounded by the most influential organs in England, and in support of what I may venture to call the obvious (though little recognized) account of the war, I am glad to be able to quote the high authority of two leading French Reviews, the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the Revue Nationale:- "Il faut aimer à discuter contre l'evidence pour se persuader que la question de l'esclavage n'est point la cause principale de la crise actuelle. Dans ce conflit qui depuis trente ans va toujours en s'aggravant et qui vient enfin d'aboutir à la guerre civile, quelle question va toujours en grandissant et finit par dominer toute le reste, sinon cette redoubtable question d'esclavage? Ils n'ont pas lu les discours de Calhoun, de Webster, de Seward, de Douglas, de Clay, de Sumner, ceux qui croient que la question de l'esclavage n'a dans la politique americaine qu'une importance secondaire. Ils oublient que toute la Virginie s'est levée en armes contre John Brown et ces vingt-cinq compagnons. Voici un fait d'ailleurs: quels sont belligérans? D'un côté les états sans esclaves, de l'autre les états à esclaves, et l'on prétendrait que la question de l'esclavage est étrangère à la guerre ! Entre les états du nord et ceux du sud il y a des états frontières, les border states, qui, sans être des états libres, contiennent moins d'esclaves que les états cotonniers. Chose étrange! la fidélité de ces états à l'Union est précisément en raison inverse du nombre de possesseurs d'esclaves; la Virginie, qui a des esclaves se rallie au mouvement sécessioniste; la partie occidentale de cet état, oasis sans esclaves, séparée du reste par une chaine des Alleghanys, reste fidèle à l'Union et lui donne des soldats. Le nord du Delaware, qui n'a plus d'esclaves, renferme à peine un sécessioniste; le sud, qui en a un grand nombre, contient beaucoup d'adversaires de l'Union. Le sud et l'est du Maryland sont remplis d'esclaves, et en conséquence de sécessionistes ; l'ouest du Maryland, où l'on voit très peu de noirs non affranchis, est presque unanime pour l'Union. Les six mille esclaves de Baltimore appartiennent à l'aristocratie de cette ville, et l'on sait que cette aristocratie n'est retenue dans la obéissance que par des mesures de rigueur. Le Tennessee occidental, abandonné au travail servilé, est un centre de rébellion; le Tennessee oriental, où le travail libre l'emporte de beaucoup, est sympathique à l'Union. Le Kentucky ne fait pas exception à cet règle: dans les comtés du nord et de l'est, où il y a peu d'esclaves, il y a peu de sécessionistes; dans les autres, où ils sont nombreux, on se prononce pour la ‘neutralité,' ce qui n'est qu'une forme de la trahison. Dans le Missouri, la ligne de démarcation est nettement établie entre le travail libre et le travail servile. Les Allemands détestent l'esclavage, et forment le noyau le plus fidèle de l'état; les unionistes anglo-saxons sont plutôt en faveur de la neutralité, tandis que les maîtres d'esclaves sont en armes contre l'Union. Il y a quelques sympathies pour l'Union jusque dans le Texas occidental, parce qu'on y voit peu d'esclaves et beaucoup d'Allemands. Quel est l'état sécessioniste par excellence? C'est la Caroline du sud, qui contient relativement plus d'esclaves que tous les autres états. Dira-t-on encore que le défense de l'esclavage n'est pas la cause des sécessionistes? S'il resta des doutes dans quelques esprits, qu'on écoute donc le propre témoignage des gens du sud."-Revue des Deux Mondes, I re Nov. 1861. *In an article by M. Pressensé, in the Revue Nationale, the point is put with equal perspicuity and force:-" Je sais qu'on s'efforce d'en dissimuler la gravité, et que d'un certain côté on essaye de la réduire à un simple conflit constitutionnel, à une question de droit politique, à l'interprétation du contrat que lie entre eux les divers Etats de la confédération puissante dont les gigantesques progrès étonnaient naguère le monde. Mais cette explication mesquine de la crise actuelle de l'Amérique du Nord n'est qu'un sophisme destiné à excuser une lâcheté. On essaye de donner ainsi la change à la conscience publique, qui ne comprendrait pas et ne permettrait pas que l'on hésitât en Europe entre le Nord et le Sud, une fois que la question de l'esclavage serait nettement posée entre eux. Ceux qui trouvent leur intérêt à incliner vers le Sud se plaisent à rabaisser le conflit américain OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 21 Never surely was the unity of a national drama better preserved. From the year 1819 down to the present time the history of the United States has been one record of aggressions by the Slave Power, feebly, and almost always unsuccessfully, resisted by the Northern States, and culminating in the present war. At the time of the revolution, as is well known, slavery was regarded by all the great founders of the Republic, whether Northern or Southern men, as essentially an immoral system: it was, indeed, recognized by the Constitution, but only as an exceptional practice, a local and temporary fact. In the unsettled territory then belonging to the Union it was by a special ordinance prohibited. Even in 1819, although in the interval the Slave Power had pushed its dominion and pretensions far beyond their original limits, the claim was scarcely advanced for slavery to rank as an equal with free institutions in any district where it was not already definitively established, and certainly no such claim was acknowledged. Of this the Missouri Compromise affords the clearest proof, since, regarded as a triumph by the slaveowners, it only secured the admission of slavery to Missouri on the express condition that it should be confined for the future to the territory south of a certain parallel of latitude. But what has been the career of the Slave Power since that time? It is to be traced through every questionable transaction in foreign and domestic politics in which the United States has since taken partthrough the Seminole war, through the annexation of Texas, through the Mexican war, through filibustering expeditions under Walker, through attempts upon Cuba, through the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, through Mr. Clay's compromises, through the repudiation of the Missouri Compromise so soon as the full results of that bargain had been reaped, through the passing of the Nebraska Bill and the legislative establishment of the principle of "Squatter Sovereignty," through the invasion of Kansas, through the repudiation of "Squatter Sovereignty" when that principle had been found unequal to its purposes, and lastly, through the Dred-Scott decision and the demand for protection of slavery in the Territories-pretensions which, if admitted, would have converted the whole Union, the Free States no less than the Territories, into one great domain for slavery. This has been the point at which the Slave à des proportions misérables qui mettent la conscience hors de cause; mais cela est moins facile que cela ne semble commode, et ils ont beau faire, la vraie situation se dessine toujours mieux." The same view is sustained by Le Comte Agénor De Gasparin with remarkable eloquence in his work, Un Grand Peuple qui se relève.' |