CH. XVIII. slave and its increase is the same, and as inviolable, as the right of the owner of any property whatever." 1858. Lib. 28: 155; N. Y. Herald, May 1, 1858. Lib. 28: 131; Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, 2:565. Moore. The bill allowed Kansas to enter the Union at once with slavery established, and a land grant was offered as an inducement. Should she obstinately hold out for freedom, she must first have a population of 92,000 before she could be deemed fit for admission. The bribe was promptly spurned and the menace disregarded by the Territory, which stood erect by more than ten thousand majority. The Slave Power had staked everything on Kansas and had lost. In both sections of the country there was a growing sense of the political revolution in progress, a growing conviction that the Republicans would at the next election take control of the Government. Governor Andrew B. Moore of Alabama, in his inaugural address to the Legislature in December, 1857, denounced the Black RepubliLib. 28: 1. can scheme to stop the extension of slavery-"confining it within the limits of the States where it now exists, so as ultimately to render slaves valueless to their owners, and thus effect their emancipation." The Legislature Lib. 28: 15. unanimously responded by asking him to call a State Convention if Congress refused to admit Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution. At the so-called Southern Commercial Convention held at Montgomery, Ala., on May 10, 1858, to discuss the African slave-trade and the relations of the South to the Union, Roger A. Pryor of Virginia could pledge his State to disunion in case a Black Republican President were installed at Washington with a majority in Congress. Henry W. Hilliard of Ibid., p. 385. Alabama agreed that the election of such a President would result in the subversion of the Government, and that the South would neither wait to see him installed, nor delay for some overt act. William L. Yancey of Ibid., p. 391. Alabama, though denying that Republican success at the next election would constitutionally justify secession, nevertheless held the Union to be already dissolved. He Lib. 28:87; eracy, p. 371. Ibid., p. 382. Cradle of the should at least expect Virginia to say, "Form your Confederacy, and we will see that you are not molested by a foe that should reach you across our territory." During the summer he agitated for a "League of United Southerners," and publicly discussed the probable course of the Ibid., p. 395. movement for a Confederacy when once initiated. On November 11, at Jackson, Miss., Jefferson Davis-disregarding the lines of demarcation which Union-saving Lib. 28: 193; Republicans ostentatiously drew between themselves and the Garrisonians - said the question of disunion would arise "if an Abolitionist be chosen President of the United States." He entreated Mississippi to make ready for the contest, and alter over its old arms. He reported having heard President Pierce say that when a Northern army should go to subjugate the South, its first fighting would be done on Northern soil.1 Davis took for his text the famous speech of Senator 30: 17. Seward at Rochester, N. Y., on October 25, 1858, in which Lib. 28:177. the latter foretold the supplanting of the Democratic Party in power by the Republican, and gave universal currency in a happy phrase to the old abolition view of Ante, 2:338. the existing "Union": "Shall I tell you what this collision [of two antagonistic sys- Lib. 28:177. tems continually coming into closer contact] means? They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation. Either the cotton and rice fields of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free labor, and Charleston and New Orleans become marts for legitimate merchandise alone, or else the rye-fields and wheat-fields of Massachusetts and New York must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and to the production of slaves, and Boston and 1 Compare a like warning on the part of Pierce's Attorney-General, Caleb Cushing, in Faneuil Hall, Dec. 9, 1859, in case his fellow-citizens of Massachusetts embarked in "a war of invasion [of the South] for the destruction of the Union and the Government of the Union" (Lib. 29 : 197). CH. XVIII. New York become once more markets for trade in the bodies and souls of men. It is the failure to apprehend this great truth 1858. that induces so many unsuccessful attempts at final compromise between the slave and free States; and it is the existence of this great fact that renders all such pretended compromises, when made, vain and ephemeral." At the West, in June, Abraham Lincoln had embodied the same truth in the less immediately famous sentence, Ante, p. 420. already quoted, depicting the "house divided against itself," and prophesying that it would ultimately become wholly one thing or the other. His successful rival for Lib. 28:193. the United States Senate, Stephen A. Douglas, repudiated the dictum alike of the statesman unanimously predesignated as the Republican candidate for President in 1860, and of the obscure Illinois politician who was in reality to stand and to be elected. The logic of Lincoln, he said on July 9, meant a war of extermination directed against the South. Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Pow er, 2: 572, 573. May 11, 1858. Lib. 28:83. Something more than philosophical reflections on the tendency of the Union was needed if the rôle of the North in the great change in prospect was to be anything more than passive. When Freedom could inspire the same jealousy, devotion, and unity- the same passion — as Slavery, the battle would be over. Mr. Garrison presented this view with his customary gravity in a speech at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York in May: "First, a word in regard to the South. "There are those who say they do not marvel at all that slaveholders are unwilling to part with their slave property. Well, I also think that Southern men are behaving very much according to human nature in its ordinary manifestations, in view of the fact that, inheriting an old institution, and finding it sustained by all that is deemed respectable, honorable, and religious in the South, they feel that to ask them to give up their slaves is tantamount to asking the men of the North to give up their houses and lands; and he, surely, would be regarded as a fool or a madman who should undertake to prove to the people of the North the enormity of holding horses, sheep, and swine as property, and 1858. should call upon them, in the name of the living God, to cease CH. XVIII. holding such as property. I do not wonder that slaveholders strain every nerve to perpetuate slavery. As slaveholders, they are sagacious, far-sighted, and prompt to do the very thing that needs to be done to preserve their slave-system intact. They are not extravagant in any effort they make; they do not employ one single slave-driver too many; they do not own one superfluous bloodhound; they have none too many fetters — none too many whips; they have a slave code exactly adapted to the necessities of their position-everything complete and perfect from beginning to end. "Now, I say, if slavery is to continue, we must have just this condition of things. It is absurd to talk about the cruel treatment by slaveholders of their slaves, while conceding the right of property in man. They are not unnecessarily brutal; they do the best they can under the circumstances. "If, then, it is to be expected that, on Southern soil, Southern men will stand up for slave institutions, let me ask you, men of the Empire State, men of the North, whether we are not bound, on our side of the line, to stand up as boldly and uncompromisingly in favor of free institutions? Why should we not do so? And if we are false to our own principles and professions, the more shame to us. "Now, throughout our mighty North, you know we have settled one thing - that slavery shall not be one of our institutions. Not a solitary slave clanks his chains on our Northern soil. We have put an end to chattel servitude as it once existed among us. This was well done, was it not? We abolished it because of its inherent injustice and immorality; because it could not be defended; because it was a blighting curse; because man was never made to be a slave, and freedom is the inalienable right of all. If this is so, then I hold that they who undertake to frame or furnish apologies in behalf of Southern slaveholders, and bring up objections against abolitionists, are not Northern men, but recreant to their own principles, and should migrate to the South. "We are 'fanatics,' forsooth! and the men who are flinging this taunt at us are the very men who have, by constitutional enactment, in the Empire State - throughout the whole North - subscribed to the doctrine of Garrisonian' abolitionism! No man is allowed to be a slaveholder here. Tell me, men of the Empire State, why not? How dare you pass a law making it penal for me to take even the very first step towards making a CH. XVIII. slave? How dare you have a law interfering with my benevolence and philanthropy, so that when I see a poor creature who 1858. T. W. Higginson. Sanborn's cannot take care of himself,' I may not seize him and claim him as my property for his good, of course? If you say, God has not authorized me to hold a slave here, then I say, he has not authorized it at the South. There are not two Gods - one for the North, and one for the South - but one God; and if he makes it immoral to hold slaves at the North, he makes it no less immoral to hold slaves at the South. Before you reject a single doctrine I have laid down, you have got to burn every Northern State Constitution. I do not transcend them a hair'sbreadth. The only difference between me and the people of the North is, that I am for a consistent and uncompromising adherence to the doctrine they have laid down, and they are not. . . . "I do not wonder that the North is driven to the wall, by the South, in this controversy. Against such glaring contradictions, such a shuffling morality, the slaveholder has the argument. For if you concede his right to hold slaves on his own plantation, on the ground of benevolence and in consistency with morality and religion, then he logically answers that it cannot be wrong to hold slaves in the Empire State, and slavery ought to be a universal institution. The argument, I repeat, is with the slaveholder." At the same meeting, Mr. Higginson dwelt at length on the "new element coming to settle the question of slavery by-and-bye on the soil where it exists." Probably no one who heard him could read John Brown between the lines. Life of John Mr. Higginson spoke with knowledge when he asked Brown, pp. 435.440.447, "Is it [slavery] destined, as it began in blood, so to end? Seriously and solemnly I say, it seems as if it were." 457-460. At the New England Convention in Boston on May 26, Ibid., pp. Theodore Parker (equally with Mr. Higginson a confi440,447,458460,463,511, dant of John Brown, and fresh from meeting him with 512: Weiss's his secret committee of backers at the Revere House) Life of Parker, 2:161. reiterated his belief that the time had passed "when the May 24, 1858. great American question of the nineteenth century could Lib. 28:94. have been settled without bloodshed." Mr. Garrison, who Ante, 2:183, had long since regarded a bloody solution as inevitable, nevertheless deprecated the deviation of abolitionists from the policy observed from the beginning: 184. |