do not shut them from it), and in general literature; why not show them the mistake boldly, and combat it? Is there anything, even with a child, so to be dreaded from the Liberator that you would submit, in order to avoid it, to lose for him the influence of such a spirit as W. L. G.'s? Were you dying, and leaving your child to grow up, would you pray that he might be much in the sight and shadow of some exactly orthodox friend of yours - but far from the company of W. L. G.? And could you hope, if your prayer were answered, that your child would meet you in heaven more closely modelled in spirit after his Great Master because you had never let him know our glorious Pioneer? I would prefer to mould my children wholly myself; but as this is impossible, and I must submit to the influence of others in some degree, let me bathe them in the spirit of G. rather than any other I know. The best prayer I could offer for any whose fate I was to influence, would be that they might be worthy to sit with him in another world." CHAP. IX. 1849. CHAP. X. 1850. Wm. Jay. CHAPTER X. THE RYNDERS MOB.-1850. "W to this E talk of the South and the North being parties to this question, and of the Slave Power being identified with the South. Do you remember how many slaveholders there are?" This question, put by John G. Lib. 20:38. Palfrey at the Free Soil Convention held in Faneuil Hall on February 27, 1850, he answered by computing from the latest "census" of Kentucky that, out of some 5,000,000 whites in the South, only 100,000, including women and minors, held slaves. Judge Jay, reckoning from the same basis, but applying it to the census of Lib. 20:34. 1840, arrived at the sum of 117,000, which, if we were to enlarge it by 70,000, would still exceed by less than Lib. 20:183. one-half the population of Boston in this year of compromise, reaction, and violence.1 For the sake of the moneyed interests and social and political supremacy of this oligarchy, the whole country was plunging headlong into a frightful abyss of idolatry of the Union, and utter repudiation of the claims of humanity in the person of the enslaved — and especially of the fleeing, hunted, and imploring-negro. 1 We have sought in vain to discover the common data upon which Palfrey and Jay relied. There has never been a Kentucky State census, nor is any document known to the Auditor's Department which gives any clue to the number of slaveholders. Slaveholders were never enumerated in a United States census; but the Southerner, De Bow, who superintended that of 1850, estimated the total number at 347,525, or, excluding the hirers of slaves, 186,551. This would make an average holding of 17, whereas the Kentucky average reported to Palfrey and Jay was 22, and seemed too low to apply to the South at large, as the size of gangs increased going Gulfward (Lib. 20:38). In a speech delivered in 1844, Cassius Clay said, 1850. Lib. 20:6; cf. 21:14. Correspondingly small, in its own relation, was the CHAP. X. group of three popular leaders who brought about this national degradation. All of them nearing or past the term of threescore years and ten, and standing on the brink of the grave,-two of them gray and extinct volcanoes of Presidential ambition, the third still glowing cavernously, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster worked, in unequal and even discordant partnership, to establish a new reign of terror for anti-slavery fanatics and ensure the lasting domination of the Slave Power. They wielded a packed Senate in whose twenty-seven standing committees the South had sixteen chairmanships, to say nothing of those which she had assigned to Northern doughfaces, while in sixteen committees she had carefully secured a majority of actual slaveholders, and from all had insolently excluded the three truly Northern Senators, Hale, Seward, and Chase. A House, packed in like manner, completed the Congress whose destiny it was to pour oil upon the flames of the agitation it sought to extinguish. For eight months after Mr. Clay introduced his so-called Compromise Resolutions, they, and the measures to which they gave birth in an Omnibus Bill, engrossed the attention of both Houses and of the country. No appropriation bill could be passed. Lib. 20:118. Everybody was in a fever of excitement till a "settlement" should be arrived at; and when the settlement was enacted, all peace and quiet was at an end. Lib. 20:32. J. P. Hale. ard. S. P. W. H. Sew Chase. Jan. 21. 1850; 20:21. Clay's programme was: To yield to the inevitable in Lib. 20:21. the case of California, and admit her as a free State "31,495 only [of the then population of Kentucky] the Auditor's books show to be slaveholders" (MS. June 11, 1888, C. M. Clay to Gen. Fayette Hewitt, Auditor of Kentucky; and see Greeley's 'Life of C. M. Clay'). De Bow's estimate for the same State, in 1850, hirers included, was 38,385. Clay, again, in a letter to the National Republican Convention at Pittsburg of Feb. 22, 1856 (Lib. 26:41), put the Southern slaveholders at 300,000, but De Bow's larger estimate was generally current -350,000 (Josiah Quincy, June 5, 1856, Library of American Literature,' 4:308; Wm. H. Herndon, 1856, Lib. 26: 70; Theodore Parker, 1856, Lib. 26: 81; Harriet Martineau, 1857, Lib. 27: 173); 400,000 (W. L. G., 1857, Lib. 27: 72; Owen Lovejoy, April 5, 1860, Lib. 30:62). VOL. III.-18 1850. CHAP. X. yet with the air of conceding something. To organize the Territories acquired from Mexico without raising the question of slavery - virtuously resisting the Southern demand for the prolongation of the Missouri Compromise parallel (because, said he, that would be to vote for the positive introduction of slavery, which Heaven forbid Henry Clay should do either north or south of 36° 30′— Lib. 20: and because slavery would have an advantage in putting [22]. up no fences!). To bribe Texas to relinquish her preLib. 20:74. posterous claims to New Mexican territory. To gratify Northern sentiment, not by abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, or the slave-traffic within it, but by Lib. 20:146, excluding adjacent slave-breeders from the Washington market. Finally, to satisfy the claims of the South by a more stringent law for the reclaiming of fugitive slaves. 170. Lib. 20: 125. Cf. Lib. 21:93. Lib. 20: 125. Robert Toombs. Lib. 20:49. - In summing up, he showed that the South would secure the practical abandonment of the Wilmot Proviso, and prevent a Texan invasion of New Mexico, which President Taylor would resist with Federal troops, even though the other Southern States sided forcibly with Texas — as would surely happen in a civil war. Moreover, the Free Soilers would have the ground cut from under them. "As certain as that God exists in heaven," he cried to John P. Hale with passionate blasphemy, "your business, your avocation is gone! . . . There is California she is admitted into the Union; will they [the Free Soilers] agitate about that? Well, there are the Territorial governments established-will they agitate about them? There is the settlement of the Texan boundary questionupon what can they agitate? Then, will they agitate about the [abolition of the] slave-trade in the District of Columbia? That is accomplished." There remained the abolition disunionists, the Garrisonians, of whom Senator Toombs of Georgia had said: "In my judgment, their line of policy is the fairest, most just, most honest and defensible of all the enemies of our institutions and such will be the judgment of impartial history"- they might, indeed, agitate, but impotently. CHAP. X. 1850. Butler. Calhoun's glazed eye, almost fixed in death, saw more clearly than Clay's. His last speech, read for him in the Senate, protested not against the Kentuckian's aims in behalf of slavery, but his methods. Disunion was the necessary end of an agitation which imperilled the equilibrium of slave and free States; and the Compromise did not protect that equilibrium. The Fugitive Slave Bill introduced by Senator Butler of South Carolina would Andrew P. not meet the hopes of its author and supporters. "It is impossible to execute any law of Congress until the people Lib. 20: 46. of the States shall coöperate." He did not despise the influence of the Garrisonians: he had seen its working since 1835 [and longer, but he naturally remembered by landmarks of mob violence], and witnessed the beginning of disunion in the rending of the great religious denomi- Ante, 2:152. nations—the Episcopal alone remaining intact.1 Lib. 20:41. Cf. ante, 2:59. 43, 45. Daniel Webster's incredible 7th of March speech, in Lib. 20:42, wholesale support of the Compromise, carried dismay to the Conscience Whigs, who had built their hopes of him on random utterances disconnected by any logic of principle or behavior, and infused by no warmth of heart or ray of pity for the slave. True, he had said at Marshfield, Lib. 20:47; in September, 1842: "We talk of the North. There has for a long time been no North. I think the North Star is at last discovered; I think there will be a North" exhibiting "a strong, conscientious, and united opposition to slavery." True, he had said in New York in March, 1837, during the Texas excitement: "The subject [of slavery] has not only attracted attention as a question of politics, but it has struck a far deeper-toned chord. 1 This encomiastic exception was merited. Mr. Garrison wrote in June, 1850 (Lib. 20: 104): "The conscience of the Episcopal Church of this country, so far as the colored population are concerned, whether bond or free, is harder than adamant." On Sept. 26, 1850, the Protestant Episcopal Convention in New York city refused to admit delegates from its own colored churches (Lib. 20: [158]). Save the Rev. E. M. P. Wells of Boston, who early withdrew from the cause (ante, 2 54, 85, 252), we recall no Episcopal clergyman -as no Catholic priest - who ever identified himself with the abolitionists. As is well known, a slaveholding Southern Episcopal Bishop became a Confederate Major-General. Webster's Webster's |