Democratic party. He was decidedly antislavery in sentiment and action, and had rendered essential service to the cause of human rights.

In this state of the principal parties, it being understood that the Free Soil members would not give them their votes, it became evident that neither the Whigs nor the Democrats could elect their candidates. Nor could both of the Free Soil members be gratified with the choice of theirs. Some compromise must be effected. The Whigs, in order to defeat the election of the Democratic candidate, and, on the part of the antislavery portion, for the purpose of carrying out their views, were ready to substitute for Mr. Ewing some person of more pronounced antislavery sentiments. The two Free Soil members had agreed that either should vote for the candidate of the other whenever there should be a prospect of his election. The Whigs were ready, and most of them were anxious, with the exception of two members, to vote for Mr. Giddings. As, however, none of the Democrats would vote for him, and as the two recusant members obstinately refused to yield, after three unsuccessful ballotings his name was withdrawn. The Democrats, for the purpose of defeating the Whig candidate, and with the understanding that the Free Soil members would support their candidates for judges of the Supreme Court, having substituted the name of Hon. Rufus P. Spaulding, afterward Republican Representative in Congress, for that of Judge Read, whom they could not consistently support, expressed a willingness to cast their votes for Mr. Chase. By this arrangement he was elected on the fourth ballot. When the vote was announced, an enthusiastic antislavery man in the galleries exclaimed, "Thank God!" to which were many answering responses wherever Mr. Chase was known, not only on account of the service he had already rendered, but for the confident expectation cherished of the large additions of strength and prestige he would bring to the struggling cause on the wider and more conspicuous theatre of the United States Senate.

Many, however, were greatly disappointed that the choice. did not fall on Mr. Giddings. Indeed, some of his friends felt

that he had been deprived of a position to which, by his longer and more self-sacrificing service, he was fairly entitled. The cause, however, was evidently the gainer by the decision which was finally reached; for, from that time onward, freedom had two potent advocates in the councils of the nation, instead of one; both, too, occupying in their respective spheres positions to which each seemed best adapted, and in which each rendered yeoman's service, for which the slave and the slave's friends should ever hold them in grateful remembrance.

CHAPTER XV.

STRUGGLES IN KENTUCKY.

Slaveholding aggressions. - Popular indorsement. Growing prejudices and increasing severity of the black codes. - Counter movements of antislavery men. - Constitutional convention in Kentucky. - Attempt to secure provisions for freedom in the proposed constitution. - Henry Clay's position. Public meeting at Lexington. Convention. Dr. Breckinridge's speech. Failure of movement. - Reasons.

THE years intervening between the opening of negotiations for the annexation of Texas in 1843 and the close of the Presidential election in 1852 have no parallel for the intensity, variety, and disastrous results of the slavery struggle. During those years the successful attempt was made to annex the foreign nation of Texas to the United States; the war with Mexico was fought; vast accessions of territory were secured, and the effort to devote them to freedom was made and failed; the Fugitive Slave Law was enacted and mercilessly executed; the misnamed compromise measures proposed by the slavemasters were adopted and accepted as a "finality" by the conventions of the great national parties; while the crowning act of those years of disaster and infamy was the indorsement by the people of this whole series of aggressions by the triumphant election of Franklin Pierce, whose whole public and partisan career had ever been fully and even ostentatiously committed to the purposes and plans of the Slave Power.

While, too, these aggressions were in progress on the wider domain of the nation at large, evidences of the same spirit and purpose were abundant in the States, as if prompted by a common inspiration, as they certainly tended to a common end. Even the attempts made by a few friends of the slave to ameliorate his condition and perhaps inaugurate measures for his ultimate emancipation were made the occasion, if not the

cause, of efforts not only to tighten his chains, but to increase the burdens, already fearful, that bore upon the free colored population, both at the North and the South. Not only were old laws, which had become a dead letter or comparatively inoperative, revived and executed with greater rigor, but new laws were enacted, which can hardly be read even now without a sense of shame and a shudder at their terrible injustice and inhumanity. Especially was this true in the Southern border States, with too many sympathizers and imitators in several of the Northern States; nominally free, though free in little but in name.

These persistent efforts of the propagandists in behalf of slavery could not but fix attention upon it as the cause of all these constant and disturbing movements, while it challenged investigation anew into the merits of a system for which such efforts were made and such sacrifices called for. Especially did this result from the relinquishment by its defenders of the former arguments that slavery was an entailed evil, for which the present generations were not responsible, a temporary evil, that carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and which must soon pass away in the presence and by the workings of free institutions. The new dogmas that slavery was a good, and not an evil; that it was not temporary, but to be permanent; that it was not sectional, but national; and that the Constitution carried it wherever it went, presented the whole subject in a new light. Many felt that it must be re-examined, and that the arguments and considerations that formerly reconciled could satisfy them no longer. These considerations, with the earnest teachings, warnings, and appeals of Abolitionists, reached a few open ears and tender consciences at the South, as evinced by the movements in several of the Border States to improve their legislation in regard to the colored race. Besides, these unblushing demands for new slave States took the question at once from the domain of mere abstractions, theoretical or sentimental, into the realms of the actual, where problems of the most imperative practical importance, involving not merely the well-being but the safety of the nation itself, compelled consideration. The men who

entertained these opinions and purposes were mainly ministers and members of Christian churches, who mostly occupied the western portions of Virginia and North Carolina and the eastern portions of Tennessee and Kentucky, being the more mountainous regions, where slavery had never gained so strong a foothold as in other portions of those States, and in the far South. They were, however, earnest and hopeful, though doomed to disappointment.

In Kentucky the activity was greatest. This was especially apparent in a convention called for a revision of the constitution in 1849. What position slavery should occupy in the new organic law of the State became a question of general and exciting interest, and the conflicting opinions of friends and foes of the system found frequent and forcible utterance from the pulpit and press, in meetings and conventions of the people. The Louisville "Examiner" became a bold and able organ of the radical emancipationists. It pronounced slavery to be "a political and moral deformity, "-" a wrong to the whole community, a wrong to republicanism, a wrong to religion." The "Courier," too, of the same city, rebuked the sentiments, often enunciated by the slaveholders, hostile to free labor as "anti-Christian, anti-republican," and as affording the strongest arguments in favor of emancipation.

In February of that year, Mr. Clay addressed a letter on emancipation to Richard Pendell of New Orleans, in which he expressed sentiments at once statesmanlike and Christian, though singularly at war with his subsequent course on the subject. He denounced the doctrine that slavery was a blessing, and urged as an argument that, if it were, whites should be made slaves when blacks could not be obtained. Concerning the argument derived from the alleged inferiority of the African race he said, if that was a legitimate reason for such enslavement, the same principle should apply to individuals, and the "wisest man in the world would have a right to make slaves of all the rest of mankind." For this alleged superiority, he said, we should be grateful, and admit the duties it imposed. "And these," he added, "would require us not to subjugate or deal unjustly with our fellow-men who are less