entirely and permanently changed the industrial aspects in many of the States of the Union.

It was during the administration of Mr. Buchanan that the preliminary skirmishes, moral and physical, which immediately preceded the late Civil War, occurred. Both parties were then putting on their armor and preparing their weapons for the mighty struggle. The political organization by which the new President had been elected had, for some time, coalesced with the friends and supporters of the slave-labor system in their

efforts not only to extend the public domain so as to allow the almost indefinite expansion of their cherished institution, but to make it national. That coalition and sympathy were manifested in various ways. The two wings of the Democratic party (one of them leaning toward an anti-slavery policy and called the "Free-Soil Democracy") had been reconciled, and worked together in the national convention at Cincinnati in June, 1856, which nominated Mr. Buchanan for the Presidency. In their resolutions, put forth as a platform of principles, they approved the invasion' and usurpation of Walker, in Nicaragua, as efforts of the people of Central America "to regenerate that portion of the continent which covers the passage across the interoceanic isthmus." They approved the doctrine of the "Ostend Manifesto," by resolving that "the Democratic party were in favor of the acquisition of Cuba," and Mr. Buchanan. was chosen to be their standard-bearer because of his known sympathy with these movements for the extension of the area and perpetuation of the slave system. Senator A. G. Brown, of Mississippi, one of the committee appointed to call upon Mr. Buchanan and officially inform him of his nom ination, wrote to a friend, saying: "In my judgment, Mr. Buchanan is as worthy of Southern confidence and Southern votes as ever Mr. Calhoun was." One of the most vitally important skirmishes before the Civil War

JAMES BUCHANAN.

!

CHAP. I.

THE DRED SCOTT CASE.

1397

actually began occurred at about the time of Mr. Buchanan's accession to the Presidency of the Republic. It was of a moral and not of a physical nature, and is known in our judicial history as "the Dred Scott case."

Dred Scott was a young negro slave of Dr. Emerson, a surgeon in the United States Army, living in Missouri. When the latter was ordered to Rock Island, in Illinois, in 1834, he took Scott with him. There Major Taliaferro, of the army, had a feminine slave, and when the two masters were transferred to Fort Snelling (now in Minnesota) next year, the two slaves were married with the consent of the masters. They had two children born in the free-labor Territory; and the mother had been bought by Dr. Emerson, who finally took parents and children back to Missouri, and there sold them to a New Yorker. Dred sued for his freedom, on the plea of his involuntary residence in a free-labor State and Territory for several years, and the Circuit Court of St. Louis decided in his favor. The Supreme Court of Missouri reversed the decision of the inferior court, and it was carried, by an appeal, to the Supreme Court of the United States, then presided over by Roger B. Taney, a Maryland slaveholder. A majority of that court were in sympathy with the friends of the slave-labor system, and their decision, about to be given in 1856, was, for prudential reasons, withheld until after the Presidential election that year. When it was known that Buchanan was elected, the decision was made against Scott, but it was not promulgated until after the inauguration of the new President of the Republic. The decision, through the Chief Justice, declared that any person "whose ancestors were imported into this country and held as slaves had no right to sue in any court of the United States; in other words, denying any right of citizenship to a person who had been a slave or was the descendant of a slave.

The only legitimate business of the court was to decide the question of jurisdiction in the case; but the Chief Justice, with the sanction of a majority of the court, further declared that the framers and supporters of the Declaration of Independence did not include the negro race in our country in the great proclamation that "all men are created equal;" that the patriots of the Revolution, and their progenitors "for more than a century before," regarded the negroes as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might lawfully be reduced to slavery for his (the white man's) benefit. The Chief Justice further declared that they were never spoken of except as property; and that in the days of our fathers, even emancipated blacks "were identified in the public mind with the race

to which they belonged, and regarded as a part of the slave population rather than the free."

How much at variance with the plain teachings of history were these statements, let our public records testify. In the English-American colonies, the most enlightened men looked on slavery with great disfavor, as a moral wrong, and they made attempts, from time to time, to limit or eradicate it. The utterances and writings of men like General Washington, Henry Laurens, Thomas Jefferson, and other slaveholders, and of Dr. Franklin, John Jay, and many leading patriots of the Revolution, directly refute the assertion of Judge Taney, that in their time Africans by descent were "never thought or spoken of except as property." The Declaration of Independence, framed by a slaveholder, was a solemn protest against human bondage in every form; and in his original draft of that document, Mr. Jefferson made the protest stronger than the Congress finally approved.

Among the public acts of the fathers of the Republic in favor of human freedom and restriction of the slave-system, was the famous Ordinance of 1787 (see page 1114), adopted before the National Constitution was framed, which was the final result of an effort commenced in the Continental Congress in 1784 to restrict slavery. That effort was made in proposing a plan for the government of a Territory including the whole region west of the old thirteen States, as far south as the thirty-first degree of north latitude, and embracing several of the late slave-labor States. The plan was submitted. by a committee, of which Thomas Jefferson was chairman. It contemplated the ultimate division of that Territory into seventeen States, eight of them below the latitude of the present city of Louisville, in Kentucky. Among the rules for the government of that region, reported by Mr. Jefferson, was the following: "That after the year 1800 of the Christian Era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States, otherwise than in the punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been convicted to be personally guilty." On motion of Carolinians, this clause was stricken out. A majority of the States were in favor of it, but as it required the votes of nine States to carry a proposition, it was not adopted. This rule, omitting the words "after the year 1800 of the Christian Era," was incorporated in the Ordinance of 1787, above alluded to, and so secured freedom to the territory northward of the Ohio River.

The mother-country, from which a larger portion of the patriots of our Revolution had sprung, had just swept slavery from the dominions of Great Britain when the old war for independence was a-kindling. It was done by a decision of Chief Justice Mansfield in the case of James Somerset, a native of Africa, who was first carried to Virginia and sold as a slave, then

CHAP. 1.

SLAVERY IN ENGLAND.

1399

taken to England by his master, and there induced, by philanthropic men, to assert his freedom. Chief Justice Mansfield decided that he was a free

man.

So early as 1597, it was held by the lawyers in England, that "negroes being usually bought and sold among merchants as merchandise, and also being infidels, there might be a property in them sufficient to maintain. trover," or the gaining possession of any goods by whatever means. This position was overruled by Chief Justice Holt, who decided that "so soon as a negro lands in England, he is free." It was to this decision that Cowper alluded in his lines:

"Slaves cannot breathe in England;

That moment they are free they touch our country,

And their shackles fall."

In 1702, Justice Holt also decided that "there is no such thing as a slave by the laws of England;" but in 1729, an opinion was obtained from the crown-lawyer, that negroes legally enslaved elsewhere might be held as slaves in England, and that baptism was no bar to the master's claim. This was a sort of fugitive slave-law for the benefit of the English-American colonists, that was obeyed until the sweeping decision of Chief Justice Mansfield, which would have abolished slavery here had not the Revolution broken out soon afterward.

After Chief Justice Taney had made his declaration about the feelings of our forefathers concerning the negro as a man, he declared that the Missouri Compromise Act and all other acts for the restriction of slavery were unconstitutional; and that neither Congress nor local legislatures had any authority for restricting the spread of the institution all over the Union. The majority of the Supreme Court sustained not only the legitimate decision, but the extra-judicial opinion of the Chief Justice; and the dominant party who had elected Mr. Buchanan assumed that the decision was final-that slavery was a national institution having the right to exist anywhere in the Union, and that Mr. Toombs might legally "call the roll of his slaves on Bunker's Hill." It was assumed by the leaders of that party that, in consequence of the promulgated opinion of five or six fallible men, evidently based upon a perversion of historical facts, the nation was bound to consent to the turning back of the bright tide of Christian civilization into the darker channels of a barbarous age from which it had escaped. To this proposition the conscience of the nation refused acquiescence. Large numbers of the dominant party deserted their leaders, and every lover of freedom was impelled to prepare for the inevitable conflict which this extra-judicial opinion of the 89

highest court in the land would certainly arouse. It being extra-judicial, it was no more binding, in law, upon the people, than was the opinion of any citizen of the Republic.

The new President had been informed of this decision before it was promulgated, and in his inaugural address he foreshadowed his own course in the treatment of the subject. Indeed, that decision was a chief topic of the discourse. He spoke of the measure as one that would "speedily and finally" settle the slavery question, and he announced his intention to cheerfully submit to it, declaring that the question was wholly a judicial one, which only the Supreme Court of the Republic could settle, and that by its decision the admission or rejection of slavery in any Territory was to be determined by the legal votes of the people thereof. "The whole territorial question," he said, "was thus settled upon the principle of popular sovereignty a principle as ancient as free government itself." He averred that "everything of a practical nature" had been settled, and he expressed a sincere hope that the long agitation of the subject of slavery was "approaching its end."

Alas! it was only the beginning of the dreadful scenes that marked its end. That decision and opinion of the Chief Justice rekindled the fire spoken of by the Georgian in debate in Congress on the admission of Missouri (see page 1324), which, he said, "all the waters of the ocean would not put out, and which only seas of blood could extinguish."

As we have observed, there was actual civil war in Kansas in the earlier portions of 1856. It assumed alarming aspects during the spring and summer of that year, as we have noticed. The actual settlers from free-labor States outnumbered emigrants from elsewhere; and a regiment of young men from Georgia and South Carolina, under Colonel Buford, fully armed, went into the Territory for the avowed purpose of making it a slave-labor State" at all hazards." They were joined by armed Missourians, and for several months they spread terror over the land. They sacked the town of Lawrence, and murdered and plundered individuals in various places. Steamboats ascending the Missouri River with emigrants from free-labor States were stopped, and the passengers were frequently robbed of their money; and persons of the same class, crossing the State of Missouri, were arrested and turned back. Lawlessness reigned supreme in all that region. Justice was bound, and there was general defiance of all mandates of right.

The civil war in Kansas, so begun, was more wasteful than bloody, and there was only one battle with any semblance of regularity fought there. That conflict took place on an open prairie. It was waged between twentyeight emigrants, led by John Brown, of Ossawattamie, and fifty-six armed