Part 3 (1/2)
CHAPTER VII
THE UNDERLYING FORCES
Two master pa.s.sions strove for leaders.h.i.+p in the mind and heart of America. One was love of the united nation and ardor to maintain its union. The other was the aspiration to purify the nation, by removing the wrong of slavery. Unionist and Abolitionist stood face to face.
After many years they were to stand shoulder to shoulder, in a common cause. In a larger sense than he gave the words, Webster's utterance became the final watchword: ”Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”
In the retrospect of history, our attention naturally fastens on the conspicuous and heroic figures. But we must not forget the underlying and often determining forces,--the interests, beliefs, and pa.s.sions, of the ma.s.s of the community. And, while listening intently to the articulate voices, the impressive utterances, we are to remember that the life of the community as of the individual is shaped oftenest by the inarticulate, unavowed, half-unconscious sentiments:
Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say we feel,--below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.
The underlying human force in the slavery question was the primitive instinct in man to keep all he has got; the instinct of the man who lives at another's expense to keep on doing so. That underlay all the fine theories about differences of race, all the theological deductions from Noah's curse upon Canaan. Another great and constant factor was the absorption of men and communities, not personally concerned in a social wrong, in pursuits and interests of their own which shut out all outlook beyond. In our day we hear much about the crowding rush of material interests, but that crowd and rush was felt almost as much in the earlier generations, when hardly less than the most strident tones of the agitator could pierce the absorption of the street and market-place.
There was the inertia of custom; there were the commercial interests closely interwoven of the Southern planter and the Northern manufacturer; there was the prejudice of color and race; and all these influences, open or latent, told powerfully for keeping slavery as it was.
The great default, the fatal failure, was the omission of the Southern whites, especially their leaders by education and by popular recognition, to take deliberate and systematic measures for the removal of slavery. Difficult? Yes, very. Impossible? Why, almost every other country of North and South America,--including the Spanish-Americans on whom the English-Americans look down with such superiority,--these all got rid of slavery without violence or revolution. Whatever the case required,--of preparation, compensation, new industrial arrangement,--the Southern whites had the whole business in their hands, to deal with as they pleased. Whatever cries might be raised by a few for instant and unconditional emanc.i.p.ation, there never was a day when the vast ma.s.s of the American people, of all sections, were not avowedly and unmistakably committed to letting the Southern States treat slavery as their own matter, and deal with it as they pleased, provided only they kept it at home. Excuses for non-action there were, of course,--the perplexities of the situation, the irritation of criticism from without,--but Nature has no use for excuses. If there is a cancer in the system it is useless to plead the expense of the surgery or the pain of the knife. The alternative is simple--removal or death.
It is always impossible to distinguish closely in the causes of events between the action of human will and the wider forces which we call Nature or Providence. But in some eras we distinguish more clearly than in others the effect of human personalities. For example, in the making of the Const.i.tution we see a difficult situation taken wisely and resolutely in hand by a group of strong men; they made themselves a part of Fate. But in the fluctuating history of slavery, with its final catastrophe, we seem to be looking at elemental movements; ma.s.ses of men drifting under impulses, with no leaders.h.i.+p adequate to the occasion.
The men who seemingly might have mastered the situation, and brought it to a peaceful and right solution, either could not or would not do it.
What happened was, that two opposite social systems, existing within the same political body, came into rivalry, into hostility, and at last into direct conflict. In the early stages, slavery had on its side the advantage of an established place under the law, the support of its local communities becoming more and more determined, the long-time indifference and inertia of the free States, custom, conservatism, timidity, race prejudice. But against all this were operating steadily two tremendous forces. In the race for industrial advantage which is at last the decisive test, free society was superior to slave society by as much as the freeman is superior to the slave. The advantage of the Northern farmer or mechanic over the negro slave was the measure of the advantage of the North over the South. In increase of wealth; in variety, intensity, and productiveness of social life; in immigration; in intellectual progress, the free States outstripped the slave States by leaps and bounds. And, again, in the conscience of humanity,--in mankind's sense of right and wrong, which grows ever a more potent factor in the world's affairs,--the tide was setting steadily and swiftly against slavery. To impatient reformers who, as Horace Mann said, were always in a hurry, while G.o.d never is,--the tide might seem motionless or refluent, as to him who looks hastily from the ocean sh.o.r.e; but as the sea follows the moon, the hearts of men were following the new risen luminary of humanity's G.o.d-given rights.
And so, under each special phase of the conflict, slavery had against it that dominant force which acts on one side in the material progress of society, and on the other side in the human conscience; that force--”some call it Evolution, and others call it G.o.d.”
CHAPTER VIII
THE MEXICAN WAR
We have seen that about 1832-3 a new distinctness and prominence was given to the slavery question by various events,--the substantial victory of the South Carolina nullifiers, and the leaders.h.i.+p thenceforth of the South by Calhoun; Nat Turner's rising, and the rejection by Virginia of the emanc.i.p.ation policy; the compensated liberation of the West India slaves by the British Government; and the birth of aggressive Abolitionism under the lead of Garrison. We have now to glance at the main course of history for the next twenty years. Party politics had for a time no direct relation to slavery. The new organizations of Whigs and Democrats disputed on questions of a national bank, internal improvements, and the tariff. The Presidency was easily won in 1836 by Jackson's lieutenant, Van Buren; but the commercial crash of 1837 produced a revulsion of feeling which enabled the Whigs to elect Benjamin Harrison in 1840. His early death gave the Presidency to John Tyler of Virginia, who soon alienated his party, and who was thoroughly Southern in his sympathies and policy.
The newly aroused anti-slavery enthusiasm in the North found expression in pet.i.tions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.
It was not intrinsically a great matter, but it was the one point where the national authority seemed clearly to have a chance to act--questions of new territory being for the time in abeyance. Pet.i.tions poured in on Congress with thousands of signatures--then with tens, then hundreds of thousands. There was a hot struggle as to whether the pet.i.tions should be received at all by the Senate and House. John Quincy Adams, willing after his Presidency to serve in the humbler capacity of congressman, was the champion of the right of pet.i.tion. Calhoun had entered the Senate in 1832 and remained there with a brief intermission until his death in 1850. He stood independent of the two great parties, with his own State always solidly behind him, and with growing influence over the whole South. He was the leader in opposing the admission of the pet.i.tions. He maintained that any discussion in Congress of such a topic was injurious and incendiary; he voiced the new sentiment of the South that all agitation of slavery was an invasion of its rights. ”Hands off!” was the cry. The question was settled in 1836, after long debates, by another compromise, proposed by James Buchanan of Pennsylvania; the pet.i.tions were given a formal reception, but instantly rejected without debate.
Another burning question was the circulation of anti-slavery doc.u.ments through the Southern mails. In 1835 a mob in Charleston broke open the post-office, and made a bonfire of all such matter they could find. The social leaders and the clergy of the city applauded. The postmaster-general under Jackson, Amos Kendall, wrote to the local postmaster who had connived at the act: ”I cannot sanction and will not condemn the step you have taken.” Jackson asked Congress to pa.s.s a law excluding anti-slavery literature from the mails. Even this was not enough for Calhoun; he claimed that every State had a right to pa.s.s such legislation for itself, with paramount authority over any act of Congress. But the South would not support him in this claim; and indeed he was habitually in advance of his section, which followed him generally at an interval of a few years. Congress refused to pa.s.s any law on the subject. But the end was reached without law; Southern postmasters systematically refused to transmit anti-slavery doc.u.ments--even of so moderate character as the New York _Tribune_--and this was their practice until the Civil War. ”A gross infraction of law and right!” said the North. ”But,” said the South, ”would you allow papers to circulate in your postoffices tending directly to breed revolt and civil war? If the mails cannot be used in the service of gambling and lotteries, with far more reason may we shut out incitements to insurrection like Nat Turner's.”
On a similar plea all freedom of speech in Southern communities on the question of slavery was practically denied. Anti-slavery men were driven from their homes. In Kentucky, one man stood out defiantly and successfully. Ca.s.sius M. Clay opposed slavery, advocated its compensated abolition, and was as ready to defend himself with pistols as with arguments. He stood his ground to the end, and in 1853 he settled Rev.
John G. Fee at Berea, who established a group of anti-slavery churches and schools, which was broken up after John Brown's raid, but after the war was revived as Berea College. But as a rule free speech in the South was at an end before 1840. No man dared use language like that of Patrick Henry and Madison; and Jefferson's _Notes on Virginia_, if newly published, would have been excluded from the mails and its author exiled.
South Carolina pa.s.sed a law under which negro seamen on s.h.i.+ps entering her ports were put in jail while their vessel remained, and if the jail fees were not paid, they were sold into slavery. When Ma.s.sachusetts seamen suffered under this law, the State government in 1844 dispatched an eminent citizen, Samuel h.o.a.r, to try to secure a modification of the enactment. Arriving in Charleston, accompanied by his daughter, Mr. h.o.a.r was promptly visited in his hotel by a committee of prominent men and obliged to leave the city and State at once.
The North had its share of violence. In Connecticut a school for negro children, kept by two white women, was forcibly broken up. In Illinois in 1837 an anti-slavery newspaper office was destroyed by a mob, and its proprietor, Elijah P. Lovejoy, was murdered.
In the Presidential election of 1840 slavery was almost forgotten. The Whigs were bent on overthrowing the Democratic administration, to which they attributed the hard times following 1837; and they raised a popular hurrah for the candidate of the ”plain people,” William Henry Harrison of Indiana, who had won a victory over the Indians at Tippecanoe. In a canva.s.s where ”log-cabins” and ”hard cider” gave the watchwords and emblems, national politics played little part. But now first those resolute anti-slavery men who were determined to bring their cause before the people as a political issue, and fight it out in that arena, with solid ranks be their forces ever so small,--came together and nominated for the Presidency James G. Birney. They could give him but a handful of votes, but it was the raising of a flag which twenty years was to carry to victory. Birney, never an extremist, had grown to a full recognition of all that was at stake. He wrote in 1835: ”The contest is becoming--has become--not one alone of freedom for the blacks, but of freedom for the whites.... There will be no cessation of the strife until slavery shall be exterminated or liberty destroyed.”
For a dozen years there had been only skirmis.h.i.+ng. Now came on a battle royal, or rather a campaign, from 1844 to 1850,--the annexation of Texas, the war with Mexico, and the last great compromise. Texas, a province of Mexico after Mexico became free from Spain, received a steady immigration from the American Southwestern States. These immigrants became restive under Mexican control, declared their independence in 1835, and practically secured it after sharp fighting.