1850.]

DEFENCE OF SLAVERY.

I I

was recognized and its relative duties regulated by Jesus Christ in his kingdom; and that it is full of mercy." It must be acknowledged that from his premises he made a very strong argument. His pamphlet was reprinted in various forms, and widely circulated; and in current literature the name of Stringfellow became almost as familiar as that of Longfellow. Another elaborate essay, which exhibited vast historical research and had great weight, was by Thomas R. Dew, ex-President of William and Mary College, who defended the institution on all the counts that had been made against it, and especially argued that slavery had ameliorated the condition of women-referring not to the black women, but to the wives and daughters of the slaveholders. Edward Everett, in one of his earliest speeches in Congress, defended the institution so vehemently that John Randolph, referring to it, said: "I envy neither the head nor the heart of any man from the North who can defend slavery on principle." Among other eminent men at the North who apologized for slavery was Prof. S. F. B. Morse, inventor of the magnetic telegraph. In 1835 the professor wrote a book to show that the American Republic was likely to be destroyed by the Roman Catholic Church; but he could see no danger lurking in the system of human bondage. The Rev. Joseph C. Stiles, speaking before the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Detroit, in 1850, set forth the astounding proposition that the strongest and purest expression of anti-slavery sentiment

12

DEFENCE OF SLAVERY.

[1858.

ever made by man had been uttered by the South, and that the people south of Mason and Dixon's line had done more to convert the heathen than the

whole world beside. His proof of the first proposition lay in a computation of the money value of the total number of slaves, 250,000, that had been manumitted from time to time; of the second, in estimating the number of converts by all the foreign missions at 200,000, and comparing with it the number of colored members of two denominations in the South, Baptist and Methodist-264,000. The Rev. Nehemiah Adams, of Boston, in his "South Side View of Slavery" (1854), arrived at the conclusion that "Religion in the masters destroys everything in slavery which makes it obnoxious; and not only so, it converts the relation of the slave into an effectual means of happiness." And the Rev. William G. Brownlow, afterward famous as an upholder of the Union cause among the secessionists of Tennessee, in 1858 maintained in a public debate in Philadelphia, that the institution ought to be fostered and extended.

Not only did the defenders of slavery seek by all sorts of ingenious arguments and Scripture citations to prove that the black man was best off in slavery, while freedom was a curse to him, but in one notable instance they attempted to make statistics corroborate their assertions. Having control of all departments of the national government, they were able to edit the census of 1840 to suit themselves. Somewhere between the original manuscripts of the marshals and the final printing

1858.]

DEFENCE OF SLAVERY.

13

of the volumes, the figures concerning the insane, deaf and dumb, blind, and idiotic, were changed, so that it was made to appear that these disabilities were alarmingly prevalent among the colored people of the North, and almost unknown among those of the South. Towns in New England that contained no colored people at all, were put down as having from two to six colored insane. Ex-President John Quincy Adams, then a member of the House of Representatives, made five determined attempts to have the matter investigated by Congress, but every time he was thwarted.

The constant discussion and agitation aroused all sorts of fears, distrust, and animosity, especially among Southerners, who believed, or professed to believe, that they were living over a volcano. "Abolitionist" became the severest term of reproach ever used in the South; and no Northern man, when known to entertain anti-slavery sentiments, was permitted to sojourn there, or even to travel on business. The mails were regularly examined in many Southern post-offices, and anything that appeared to be an "incendiary document" was immediately burned. When it was discovered that a botanist in the District of Columbia had some copies of an anti-slavery journal among the papers in which he preserved his plants, he was mobbed and thrown into prison, where he was kept for six months. At the North there were organizations, nominally secret, but pretty well known, and generally alluded to as "the underground railroad," for assisting fugitive slaves to

14

THE CONSTITUTION.

[1850.

escape from bondage and reach the Canada line. The churches North and South were violently agitated over the question of slavery, and the result was a division of the national organizations of three great denominations-Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist.

But

Each section accused the other of violating the Constitution, and both accusations were true. The Constitution guaranteed rights of property in slaves, and it provided that the citizens of each State should be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States. a Southern man could not travel in the North with his slaves, and a Northern man could not travel in the South with his opinions. The fact was, the compromises of the Constitution were an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. Slavery anywhere in the land was incompatible with freedom anywhere in the land- even freedom of speech. To the abolitionist, the Constitution, as one of them expressed it (borrowing the words of Isaiah), was a covenant with death and an agreement with hell; to the slaveholder, it was a failure unless it protected slavery. Neither preserved it intact, because neither could. The men of the South were not all slaveholders, nor were the men of the North all abolitionists. But the non-slaveholding class in the slave States - variously known as "poor whites," mean whites," "crackers," and "dirt-eaters"—had very little to do with public affairs, being almost as poor and ignorant as the bondmen themselves. And when Mr. Seward in

1856.]

THE ASSAULT ON SUMNER.

15

1850 proclaimed that there was "a higher law than the Constitution," and a few years later that we were in the midst of "an irrepressible conflict," and Mr. Lincoln said, "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," it was evident that the rising party at the North must sooner or later become an abolition party, whether it wanted to or not.

Two dramatic episodes intensified the feeling and increased the popular alarm on either side. One, in 1856, was an assault, for words spoken in debate, upon Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, by a South Carolina Congressman, who beat him upon the head with a heavy cane in the Senate Chamber, almost destroying his life. The real cause for alarm in this case lay not so much in the fact that an individual had lost his temper and done what he ought not to have done, as in the action of his constituents, who, instead of rebuking their representative, deliberately made his offence their own by unanimously re-electing him when he resigned after a majority (but not the necessary two thirds) had voted to expel him from his seat for the murderous deed. The other was John Brown's raid into Virginia in 1859, for the purpose of liberating the slaves by force of arms—a project that lacked all justification of possible success.

While the contest of opinion and the education of conscience were in progress, politicians and statesmen were working at the same problem on other lines. Alexander Hamilton, in urging the New York Convention to adopt the Federal Con