The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct. Volume 1 of 2

In other words there was intolerance on both sides; misunderstanding on both; an utter failure on each side to grasp the considerations that controlled the acts of men on the other side; a fanatical dogmatism on the one side and upon the other that was open to no argument, no consideration of fact or circumstance, no reasoning of any kind.

Thus came about the "irrepressible conflict." These were the influences that created it and forced it to an issue of politics. How it resulted in the most stupendous war of modern times must be related in other chapters.

CHAPTER V

The Compromise of 1850

The Mexican war and the subsequent negotiations added a vast territory to the national domain. Much of it lay south of the Missouri Compromise line, and into that part of it at least the advocates of slavery confidently expected to extend their labor system.

The introduction of the Wilmot Proviso and its passage by the House did not indeed result in the exclusion of slavery from those territories, for the reason that the proviso, failing in the Senate, did not become law.

But it alarmed the South. By the Southerners of the more radical pro-slavery school it was accepted as a notice to quit; a notification that so far as Northern anti-slavery sentiment could control the matter, there was to be no further addition of a single acre to the slave territory of the Union; that so far as that sentiment could influence national politics, the power of the Federal Government was thenceforth and forever to be exercised to prevent the extension of slavery into any new territory acquired or to be acquired by the Union north or south of the Missouri Compromise line, and in the end to abolish the system altogether.

Let us clearly understand this situation. The Wilmot Proviso and all the attempted legislation, by which it was sought to confine slavery within the boundaries prescribed for it by existing conditions, seemed to the opponents of slavery merely a legitimate effort to emphasize the fact that free labor was national, while slavery was a permitted evil within prescribed limits permitted solely because within those limits the national power was not authorized to exert itself for the extermination of the system. On the other hand, all these things seemed to the Southern mind to be an utterly unjust discrimination against a part of the people. The territories involved in the controversy had become national possessions, they contended, largely through the activities of Southern men and Southern statesmanship. It was felt to be a grievous wrong that Southern men should be forbidden to emigrate to those territories on equal terms with other citizens of the Union or that thus emigrating they should be forbidden to take with them their slave property, which represented in part their industrial system but in far greater part their domestic life.

The very proposal thus to exclude them from an equal participation in the opportunities and the privileges opened to other citizens of the Republic by the acquisition of these new territories seemed to them a threat, a notification that henceforth they were to be treated not as citizens of the Union entitled to the same protection and the same privileges that were extended to other citizens, but as inferior and offending persons, persons graciously permitted to exist, but persons to be excluded, because of their offenses, from an equal participation in the conquests and land purchases of the Nation and from the enjoyment of a share of the benefits resulting from the addition of a great and immeasurably rich territory to the national domain.

It is true that the proposal of their exclusion had failed to become law. But it had failed by a margin so narrow that its success might easily be anticipated as an event of the near future. It is true that neither the Wilmot Proviso nor any other legislation suggested at that time sought to forbid Southerners to migrate into the new territories. But it was proposed that they should be forbidden by law to take with them into those territories the slaves upon whose services they relied not only for agricultural work, but even more for that domestic service to which they had been accustomed all their lives to look for comfort. To tell them that they might remove their households into the new territories, but at the same time to say to them that they must leave behind all that had before contributed to their prosperity and to the comfort of their domestic arrangements, seemed to them something worse than a mockery.

Out of the agitation of these questions arose very important events.

The old sentiment at the South in favor of a gradual emancipation of the slaves, though it survived in some degree to the end, gave place, in large measure, to a new sentiment in behalf of slavery as a thing right in itself, a sentiment born of the instinct of self-preservation.

The manifest disposition to exclude slavery from the newly acquired Southern possessions prompted the men of the South to question the Missouri Compromise itself. The spirit of that compromise had been that slave property might be taken into territories south of 36° 30´ north latitude, with the assurance that such territories might become slave states, in return for the stipulation of the South that all territory lying north of that line should be forever exempted from slavery. When the new territory was acquired from Mexico, a large part of it lying south of that line, it was naturally expected that in those regions the people of the slave states were to find an outlet for emigration as freely as those of the Northern states found a like outlet north of that line. When a determined effort was made, with every prospect of success, to deny even this to them, they began seriously to question a compromise by which they had surrendered so much and seemed now destined to gain so little. They had secured Arkansas and Missouri as outlets for their superfluous, discontented, unfortunate or specially enterprising population; they had surrendered all claim to an equal opportunity in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas and all the rest of the rich regions embraced in the Louisiana Purchase. Obviously, it seemed to them, they had made a bad bargain, and now that they were threatened with a denial of their share in the benefits of it, so far as the territory acquired from Mexico was concerned, they were disposed to repent them of it or at the very least to question the extent to which its terms were binding on themselves.

The compromise, they reflected, was merely a matter of statutory law. It had no constitutional obligation back of it. It had been enacted by one congress. It could be repealed by another. In answer to the threat to disregard its spirit in dealing with the new territories, the Southerners made the counter-threat to repeal the compromise itself. It was all very natural, very human, but to the Republic it was very dangerous.

The lands that lay north of the dead line were still territories and still for the most part unoccupied. Nothing more binding than an easily repealable statute forbade Southerners to migrate into those territories with their negroes and in due time, by out-voting Northern immigrants, to make slave states of them. The essence of the compromise they held to be, that in return for the prohibition of slavery north of 36° 30´ north latitude, slavery should be freely permitted in all regions lying south of that line if the people settling there should so decide. If the contract was to be repudiated on the one hand, why, they asked, should it not be equally repudiated on the other? If the Missouri Compromise was to carry with it none of the benefits it conferred on the South why should it be held binding upon the South for the benefit of the North?

This seems to have been the thought and attitude of the South at that time, and it soon found expression in legislation and in attempted legislation.

The discovery of gold in California quickly resulted in such a peopling of that region as made its admission to the Union as a state a necessity. The settlers there were mainly from the North and they naturally had no desire to make a slave state out of the territory. Without waiting for an enabling act they adopted a constitution in 1849 and knocked at the doors of the Union for admission as a free state.

Instantly the South took alarm. Quite half of California lay south of 36° 30´ north latitude. Apart from its gold, the region promised harvests of grain and fruit of incalculably greater value even than all the output of all its mines. There was nothing in the Missouri Compromise or in any other legislation to forbid the whole of California to become a slave state. There was only the decision of the people in that part of the country that they wanted the state to be free and that decision was not by any means unanimous. On the contrary it was believed to be at least possible that if the territory were divided into two substantially equal parts the southern half of it would elect to become a slave state.

This added enormously to the acrimony of the slavery controversy. There had from the beginning been accepted in the country a half formulated theory of the necessity of maintaining a "balance of power" between the opposing systems of slavery and free labor so far at least as the Senate, representing the states as such without regard to population, was concerned. From the beginning slave and free states had been admitted to the Union in effect in couples. Thus Vermont, admitted in 1791, was balanced by Kentucky, admitted in 1792. Tennessee came in in 1796 with no free state comrade till 1803, when Ohio was admitted. Louisiana, admitted in 1812, was offset by Indiana which became a state in 1816. Mississippi was admitted in 1817 and Illinois in the following year. Alabama, admitted in 1819, was balanced by Maine in 1820. Missouri came in in 1821 by a compromise that more than offset the omission to create a corresponding and compensatory free state. But when Arkansas was admitted in 1836, Michigan was thrown into the other scale in 1837. Florida and Texas, annexed in 1845, were balanced by Iowa in 1846 and Wisconsin in 1848. But for California as a free state there was no peopled region that could be carved into a compensatory slave state and for that reason, as well as because of the rise of the anti-slavery agitation to fever heat, the controversy about 1850 took on an angrier tone than ever, and one more seriously threatening to the Union.

The people of the country at that time might justly have been divided into three classes, viz:

1. Those extreme opponents of slavery who were ready and eager to sacrifice the Union itself and the Constitution to the accomplishment of their emancipating purpose;

2. Those extreme pro-slavery men who were equally ready to wreck the Union in order to perpetuate and extend the system of slave labor;

3. Those intense lovers of the Union, North and South, who were ready to put aside and sacrifice their convictions for or against slavery in order to save the Nation from disruption with all its horrible consequences of civil war.

This last class was at that time a dominant majority and for long afterwards it exercised a controlling and restraining influence over all the rest. It included men at the South who earnestly desired the extinction of slavery, and other men at the South who were sincerely convinced that the slave system was absolutely necessary to the cultivation of Southern fields and that its perpetuation was justified by the incurable inferiority of the black race, and the hopeless incapacity of the negro for freedom and self-government. At the North the class of those who cared more for the perpetuity of the Union than for either the extinction or the perpetuation of slavery included men of every shade of belief as regarded slavery itself, except the extreme opponents of the system. It included such men as Abraham Lincoln who, even after the war was on, persisted in holding to his heart as his supreme desire the perpetuity of the Union in order, as he splendidly phrased it in his Gettysburg speech, that "Government of the people by the people and for the people might not perish from the earth."

It was a magnificent conflict of human forces. Incidentally it brought into play passion, prejudice, malice, groveling self-interest and brutal disregard of others' rights and feelings. But in large part it was dominated, on the one side and upon the other, by a love of liberty, an instinct of justice and an exalted patriotism that did honor to those who were so inspired.

All these sentiments and aspirations were variously directed, giving rise sometimes to contradictory courses of action. But he who would understand and interpret the events of that time must fully conceive the fact that the inspiring impulses of the great majority were essentially and fundamentally the same on both sides, however variously they may have been interpreted into conduct. Only thus shall we understand how it was that men on opposite sides of a geographical line, men equally loving liberty and equally holding in reverence the traditions of the American Union, fell a-fighting in 1861 and for four years waged the bloodiest and most devastating war of which modern history anywhere makes record.

The controversy with respect to California and the territories was only a part of the disturbing influences of the middle of the nineteenth century.

The Constitution of the United States, in Section 3 of Article IV, distinctly imposed upon the states and upon the people thereof the duty of returning to their masters all fugitive slaves who might escape from one state to another. That provision of the Constitution was resented, even to the point of violence by the antagonists of slavery; it was insisted upon by the advocates of slavery – in the North as well as in the South – to the border-land of crime. It was defeated of its purpose, not only by the acts of individuals banded together with express intent to nullify it in practice, but still more by laws enacted in many states at the North to facilitate its nullifications. The law officers of many states either refused to exercise their authority for the enforcement of this law or going further, employed their authority to prevent its enforcement.

Let us frankly recognize the fact that these men were in effect disunionists, and the further fact that they were such upon conscientious conviction. All this was done in full faith that it was right and in response to the requirements of conscience. But it was done in flagrant violation of the constitutional compact. We may sympathize with the impulses of the sheriff or other officer who refused to aid in the return of an escaping negro to slavery, and still more easily we may sympathize with those unofficial persons who fed and housed and expedited escaping slaves, in their refusal to aid a system of human bondage of which they were conscientiously intolerant, but on the other hand we may not justly blink the fact that all this was in disobedience of the fundamental law of the land, in violation of that compact on which alone the Union rested, and in derogation of property rights which the compact of union pledged all the states to enforce and all the people to respect.

The whole trouble lay in the fact that there was an "irrepressible conflict" between the ideas that were dominant North and South and that laws and constitutions, and compacts, and agreements were powerless to enforce themselves or to get themselves enforced in opposition to intense conviction and strongly felt sentiment.

The feeling on both sides ran high and was intensely intolerant. It was heedless of reason or argument. It scoffed at compacts and agreements. It made of legal obligations a mockery and of constitutional requirements a laughing stock.

It entered also into every relation of life and mischievously disturbed every such relation. It divided families. It disrupted churches, producing divisions in them, some of which – most of which indeed – have not been healed even in our present time when the war and slavery and all things pertaining to them are matters of history.

Along the line of the Ohio river, where one brother had gone across the narrow stream to Indiana in search of fortune while another had remained behind in Kentucky, the specter of this implacable controversy wrought an estrangement that was at once cruel and unnatural. Skiffs lined the opposing shores. Intercourse was easy and the waterway between was of trifling width; but the skiffs were not used, and the intervening waterway was left uncrossed, because between those who dwelt upon the one side of the stream and those who lived upon the other there arose the black shadow of the irrepressible conflict. They were friends and near relatives. Their homes confronted each other with only a placid stream between. Their shores were far less than a mile apart, and their old loves for each other were uncooled, so far as they realized. But they gradually ceased to visit each other. Those courtships and marriages which had been the frequent occasions of rejoicing among them became of the very rarest occurrence and finally ceased to occur at all. And all this in spite of the fact that in northern Kentucky slavery was scarcely more than a name while the people on the other side of the river had, for the major part, been emigrants from Kentucky, accustomed in their childhood to such mild mannered slavery as still survived beyond the stream.

Here was the line of cleavage. Here was the barrier between men's minds and hearts and lives. On the one side slavery was permitted and, in self-preservation chiefly, was defended. On the other side there were softening memories of slavery as an institution that had surrounded the childhood of those concerned with the loving care and the affectionate coddling of negro mammies and negro uncles. But the issue between slavery and antagonism to it had become so sharply accentuated that even family affection and memories of childhood and the influences of near neighborhood and the ties of close kinship could not break down the barrier.

Still further, there had begun to grow up at the North a political party whose sole bond of union was antipathy to slavery. It was not at all respectable, for even yet it was not deemed respectable in many parts of the North to be an Abolitionist, and this was distinctly an Abolitionist party. Its sole reason for being was its purpose to abolish slavery in the United States. It was still a feeble party, so far as the number of votes it could command was concerned, but it was prepared to ally itself with any others whose purposes might tend even in the smallest degree in the direction in which it wished the Republic to go. It was ready to join in any effort that might help toward the extirpation of slavery, but its avowed purpose was not to assail slavery where that institution legally existed, but to prevent its extension to any new lands.

In that purpose many thousands sympathized who would scornfully have resented the imputation that they were Abolitionists.

This new "Free-soil" party had no less a personage than Ex-president Martin Van Buren as its candidate for the presidency in 1848 and while its following and its poll of votes were small its menace seemed to men of the South very great, a seeming that was destined to be confirmed ere long. In 1840 the Anti-slavery candidate, Birney, had received only 7,059 votes in the whole country, scarcely enough to be recorded in the election returns. In 1844 the same candidate received 62,300 votes – a great increase, but still not enough to be reckoned seriously. In 1848 Martin Van Buren, as the candidate of this Free-soil party, received 291,263 votes, thus greatly more than quadrupling the highest directly Anti-slavery vote previously polled. In 1856 the Free-soil party under the name of the Republican party, was in effect the only serious antagonist of the Democracy, the only party that seriously disputed with it the control of the National Government. In that election the new party polled 1,341,264 votes, against 1,838,169 for the Democratic candidate. It carried no less than 114 electoral votes out of a total of 296, its successful antagonist carrying 174.

All this occurred after the time which we are now considering, but the facts are presented here because their coming was anticipated in 1850 and because they serve to illustrate the rapidity with which the "irrepressible conflict" grew in intensity and fervor.

In 1850 the country was on the verge of a revolution.

The Southerners were exasperated to the point of armed revolt by the proposal to deny to them what they deemed their fair participation in the fruits of the Mexican War; by the increasingly active antagonism of the North; by the aggressive opposition there to the enforcement of property rights in fugitive slaves; by the condemnatory tone of the Northern press, pulpit and platform; by the insistent use of the mails for the circulation of literature which the South deemed dangerously incendiary; by the continual inflow of petitions to Congress for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; and by a score of other annoyances which were ceaseless in their aggression.

The feeling grew in the South that there was no longer any place in the Union for those states that permitted slavery; that there was no longer any tolerance for their people; that a war upon them had begun which would stop at nothing short of the forcible abolition of their institutions, with all of chaos and insurrection and servile revolt which they believed to be the necessary sequences of such abolition.

They were affronted, offended and alarmed. States' rights had been freely invoked against them as a means of evading and defeating such laws as then existed for the rendition of fugitive slaves. They, in their turn, looked to states' rights as perhaps affording to them a way of escape from their difficulties and tribulations.

"If the Union can no longer protect us," they asked themselves, "why should we remain parties to that compact? If we are to have no share in its benefits or even in its territorial conquests and purchases, why should we go on bearing our share of its burdens and obligations? If it cannot or will not fulfil those duties which it has assumed towards us, why should we not repudiate those obligations which we have assumed in return for its pledges of protection? If we cannot be members of the Union upon equal terms with other members of the Union, why should we continue to be members of the Union at all?"

There was nowhere in the South the slightest doubt of the right of any state in the Union to withdraw from the compact and resume those attributes of sovereignty which, in creating the Federal Government, the several states had delegated to it. Indeed up to that time there had been scarcely any doubt anywhere, North or South, of the existence of this right of the states, as a right reserved in the formation of the Federal Union.

Accordingly there grew up in the South a distinctly "disunion" party, a party which favored the withdrawal of the slave states from a confederacy which, they contended, had failed to render them the protection or secure to them the equality of rights and privileges which it had been instituted to render and secure.

This impulse of withdrawal was very strong, but like the radical impulse of disunion at the North for the sake of abolition at all costs or hazards, it was for a long time overborne by the dominant sentiment of devotion to the Union and loyalty to the traditions of the Republic. The majority at the South were unwilling to give up the memory of Bunker Hill, Lexington, Concord, Saratoga and Trenton, as a national heritage of glory and likewise the majority at the North were reluctant to forget the victories of Marion and Sumter, or to relinquish the glorious memory of Yorktown.

Thus in 1850 there was a party at the North eager to sacrifice everything, including the Republic itself with all its traditions, in order to secure the extinction of slavery; and there was also a similarly radical party at the South ready and willing to destroy the Union in order to be rid of what it regarded as the unreasonable and intemperate hostility to the South within the Union.

Both these radical parties were in an apparently hopeless minority each in its own section, but each manifested a tendency to growth which boded ill for the future. Nevertheless the overwhelming majority of men on the one side and upon the other intensely detested and bitterly resented every suggestion to sacrifice the Union for any imaginable cause or upon any conceivable occasion.

It was to this great majority, North and South, that Henry Clay at that critical time appealed. The dominant passion of that statesman's soul was his love of the Union and his desire that it might endure during all time. To that one god of his adoration he had made sacrifices from the beginning. In its behalf he had put aside his lifelong desire for the gradual emancipation of the slaves. In its behalf he had sacrificed the supreme ambition of his life – the ambition to be president. In behalf of the Union he had made himself anathema maranatha– at the North as a slaveholder and at the South as an abolitionist. He was in fact both at once. He held slaves under a system of which he could not rid himself without arming them, in Jefferson's phrase, "with freedom and a dagger." He wanted them emancipated and was ready to make sacrifice in that behalf, but on the other hand he desired beyond all other things the preservation of that Union, to the perpetuity of which his whole life had been devoted, and to the perpetuity of which he looked for the enduring memory of whatever was worthy of remembrance in American history.

In an extraordinary degree Clay rose above the passions of the hour, as did Webster and certain other statesmen of that time, – though certain other statesmen of the time did not.