NORTHERN STATE RESOLUTIONS.

419

was considered as nothing more than its re-annexation and the majority of the voters held that Congress had no power to impose conditions on slavery extension or to trespass on State sovereignty in any way. Florida and South Carolina went further, for their legislatures urged that the South be put in a state of defense.2

5

The resolutions by Northern legislatures were less extreme but no less firm in their demands. There was unanimity of opinion that the joint occupancy of Oregon with Great Britain should cease. 3 Illinois strongly favored the re-annexation of Texas, but toward slavery extension all the Northern legislatures were hostile. New York insisted that slavery should be forbidden in all the newly acquired regions. The typical Northern resolution was that of Ohio, which demanded that the ordinance of 1787 should be extended over all the territory acquired from Mexico, and the legislature of this State claimed that Congress had power to exclude slavery from acquired territory. Thus, the North and the South agreed in demanding the expansion of the country to the Pacific, but disagreed over the extension of slavery. The extremes of opinion were expressed by the legislatures of Vermont and Virginia; the one declaring that the perpetuation of slavery was a violation of the national

1 Mississippi Resolutions, February 25, 1842; South Carolina, December 17, 1841; Tennessee, February 7, 1842.

2 Florida Resolutions, January 13, 1849; South Carolina Resolutions, December 20, 1850.

3 Michigan Resolutions, March 11, 1844; Illinois Resolutions, February 21, 1843; February 27, 1845.

4 Resolutions, February 27, 1845.

1850.

Resolutions, January 27, 1847; January 13, 1848; January 16,

6 Resolutions, February 13, 1847; February 25, 1848.

7 Resolutions, February 24, 1848.

compact; the other that any limitation of it or attempt to prevent the removal of slavery from the territory was unconstitutional. There could be no mistake in fixing on the great national issues, slavery extension, and it continued to develop ominous proportions until the adoption of the thirteenth amendment twenty years later. At the close of the Mexican war conservative anti-slavery sentiment at the North was demanding that the principles of 1787 and of the Missouri Compromise should be applied to the California country.2

The movement of population had been setting westward for many years, but the crest of the wave did not reach Iowa and Oregon until about 1840. Between these two regions was a vast unoccupied and unbroken wilderness. Iowa was free soil by the Missouri Compromise, but at the time that Compromise was made, the Oregon country was occupied jointly with Great Britain and it seemed impossible that it would be brought within the control of Congress during the century. The contest for its possession came to an end in 1842, and within three years immigrants were passing in increasing numbers into Oregon, chiefly from Missouri and the Southwest. It became necessary to give it a territorial government, and on the sixth of August, 1846, Stephen A. Douglas, of the House Committee on Territories, reported a bill organizing the Territory of Oregon. In Committee of the Whole, the anti-slavery clause from the ordinance of 1787, was added, but no further action was taken during the session. When Congress reassembled Douglas again reported his bill, but the anti-slavery amendment was voted down in Com

1 Vermont Resolutions of 1844; Virginia Resolutions, March 8, 1847; January 20, 1849.

2 Pennsylvania Resolutions, January 22, 1847; see the Massachusetts Resolutions of April 23, 1838.

mittee of the Whole. Burt, a member from South Carolina, promptly revived the amendment, because, as he said, the entire territory lay north of the Missouri Compromise line. His purpose was not so much to exclude slavery north of the line, as to legalize it south of it, and thus establish a precedent for future use. Texas had been "reannexed," but the South was not satisfied and its legislatures were demanding more slave territory. Burt's amendment, however, was rejected and Congress adjourned with Oregon still unorganized. When it re

3

assembled in December, 1847, it was met by Polk's message2 urging action on the Oregon question, but it still delayed, and not until the twenty-ninth of May, when the President sent a special message on the subject, did it set seriously to work to pass a territorial bill. On the second of August, by a sectional vote, the North against the South, the bill was passed in the House with an antislavery provision. The Senate, on the tenth, struck out this provision, but the amendment originally proposed by Douglas was carried, by which the line of the Missouri Compromise was extended to the Pacific. On the following day the House having rejected the Douglas amendment passed its own original bill, to which the Senate finally agreed, the principle of the ordinance of 1787, restricting slavery, was thus embodied in the organization of our first Territory on the Pacific.

With the creation of the Territory of Oregon, the entire national domain, excepting the California country, was given a civil organization. Oregon was eliminated

1 December 15, 1846.

2 December 7, 1847; Richardson, IV, 532.

8 Yeas 128, nays 71.

4 August 14, 1848; Statutes at Large, IX, 323. In the Senate 29 to 25 of negative votes from slave States.

422

SLAVERY IN CALIFORNIA.

from the slavery issue, and was considered by the slavocrats as an offset to California. They confidently expected to organize the entire California purchase as slave soil. The contest opened with the assertion by slave owners of their right to carry slave property into any part of the new country. The exercise of this right would transform it into slave soil, and compensate the South for its loss through the Missouri Compromise and the recent Oregon act. With the California country given over to slavery, with a strict execution of the fugitive slave act, and with a complete, and if necessary, enforced cessation of anti-slavery agitation, the pro-slavery people of the United States, North and South, thought that the country might have peace. No subject in American history has been so prolific a source of literature as slavery. Its aspects were innumerable; it touched American life at every point. With much that has been written that is true there has gone more which is false; and perhaps the consummation of falsity has been the emphasis of the causes which precipitated the final struggle, culminating unexpectedly in the abolition of slavery.

The contest in 1848, while differing from that of 1820, resembled it in many essential features, the contest over the rights of property. Slavery in America was a far more merciful institution than slavery in any form had been in any former time. Ill treatment of the slave at the South was the exception, but slavery is an evil thing, however kind the master may be, and moralists at the North found in it ample texts for sermonizing, a social condition that demanded reform. The essential difficulty was the law of the land: not only the Constitution of the United States and acts of Congress, but the State constitutions and the statutes. Nor were these all, for behind them lay public opinion, and public opinion was

SLAVERY A QUESTION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS. 423

against the negro, whether bond or free. The South in demanding protection of the right to carry its property into the territory believed that it was asking no more than did the North when it asked protection for its personal property, its chattels of various kinds with which its hardy immigrants moved into the new region north of Missouri. The laws of the country equally recognized the rights of property, whether of horses and plows at the North, or of negroes and plows at the South. Primarily, the question was economic and industrial, and the very fact that its solution was attempted through politics also made it one of the most dangerous questions which the people could face. At the South the issue was very clearly recognized as one of property, an economic truth emphasized in Kentucky, Maryland and Virginia, in 1850.

He who would understand the causes of the rise and fall of slavery in America must devote himself to a study of its economic features, and though he will find less literature on this phase of the subject than he might be led to expect, he will be rewarded, if he pursues his investigation, with an opportunity of examining the sources of all our knowledge concerning slavery, and finally, with the discovery of the causes which were sooner or later to compel its abandonment. As soon as property in slaves became too insecure for profitable investment, the institution of slavery was doomed. After 1848, the contest nar

1 This was brought out very clearly in the Kentucky Constitutional Convention of 1849, for an account of which see my Constitutional History of the American People, 1776-1850, Vol. II, Chaps. I-VI. Essentially the same conclusions were reached in Maryland and Virginia about the same time; see the Debates and Proceedings of the Maryland Convention, November 4, 1850; May 13, 1851, 2 Vols., Annapolis, 1851; Journals and Documents of the Virginia Convention, October 14, 1850; August 1, 1851; Richmond, 1851.