The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct. Volume 1 of 2
On either side the popular desire for the preservation of the Union was complicated with the conviction that only the iniquities and injustices of the other side imperiled the Republic. On each side there was a profound conviction that if the other side would behave itself as it should, there would be no shadow of danger to the Union. Again on either side there was an intemperate press, representing an utterly intolerant party of extremists, and, shut their eyes as they might to facts, the statesmen of that time were aware that these extremists on the one side and upon the other, were daily adding to their numbers and daily becoming more and more nearly representative of popular sentiment.
The matter was complicated with partisanship, also, and with personal ambitions. There was the question of supremacy in the Nation, between the Whigs, who were then in power by virtue of Taylor's election in 1848, and the Democrats who, with one other brief interval, had been dominant in national affairs during the entire preceding half century. At the South the two parties, laying aside the questions of polity that had previously separated them, vied with each other in such support of slavery as should win the good will of the extreme pro-slavery party. At the North they were rivals as suitors for the favor of the new Free-soil faction – for at that time it was only a faction which Know-Nothingism was destined presently to relegate temporarily to the background.
But at the North the new Free-soil party drew more heavily on the Whigs than on the Democrats for its support, although its early leaders and presidential candidates, John P. Hale and Martin Van Buren, were distinguished Democratic statesmen.
Accordingly there arose in the country a contest between the two old parties for the favor of the two new ones. It became in fact a scrambling auction, in which each party in each section and each state and each district bid its convictions and its principles, without scruple, for votes. Each party sought to be more intensely pro-slavery than the other in those states and districts in which the pro-slavery sentiment was strong, while in those states and districts in which the anti-slavery sentiment was manifestly dominant, each party rivaled the other in its courtship of the prevailing dogma and its representative voters.
Quite naturally, men ambitious of political preferment trimmed their sails to catch these varying winds, and for the first time in the history of the country political conviction and principle very generally gave way to questions of self-interest. If the politician of that time was not quite "all things to all men," he was at any rate all things to the men who could cast the larger number of votes for his elevation to office.
The accusation of such selfish sacrifice of principle and conviction for the sake of personal aggrandizement was openly made against the foremost statesmen of the time, including Clay and Webster, and the President himself. Whatever any one of these did that was displeasing to one part of the country, was freely attributed to a desire to "curry favor," as the phrase went, with "the slave power" in the one case, or with "the abolitionist sentiment," in the other.
Without questioning the motives of the greater men, who offered their dominant devotion to the Union as the only and amply sufficient explanation of their actions and their votes, it is safe to say that the attitude and course and eloquence of a multitude of minor men possessed of ambition for political preferment were determined, on the one side or the other, chiefly by a consideration of votes.
Mr. Clay, Mr. Webster and the statesmen who aided them in adopting the Compromise of 1850, confidently believed that by their action in that matter they had laid the slavery question to rest for at least a generation to come. They had in fact, as the event proved, succeeded only in opening it anew and adding virulence to its discussion. Their very debates, preparatory to the passage of the compromise bills, had stirred the country to a discussion of the question, angrier than any other that had been known since the Constitution was framed. The measures themselves, so far from allaying excitement and controversy, intensified both. The South felt that it had been cheated in a bargain which gave one free state certainly and two, three or four prospectively, to the North, with absolutely no certainty and little probability of the admission of any slave state in compensation – for from the first the people of Texas resented and resisted the proposal to divide their great domain into the four states provided for at the beginning. On the other hand the Northern States felt that the new Fugitive Slave Law was an enactment with which they could not comply without such a sacrifice of conscience and conviction as could in no wise be made by honest and sincere men.
From the very first many of the Northern States set their legislative machinery at work to defeat the operation of this Fugitive Slave Law by the most effective counter legislation that legal ingenuity could devise. In so far as these devices succeeded in preventing the execution of that law they in effect nullified a national statute which the National Government was entirely competent to enact.
More important still from the point of view of history, is the fact that the compromise which was intended to allay all sectional feeling and work a pacification in behalf of the Union, directly and immediately wrought an opposite result. It additionally inflamed passion in all parts of the country. It strongly accentuated those differences of opinion which alone threatened the Union with dissolution and the country with devastating war.
The North set itself to nullify the Fugitive Slave Law. The South set itself to undo the Missouri Compromise.
On the one hand it was contended that the Fugitive Slave Law made slavery a national instead of a state institution – a thing to which Northern sentiment and Northern conscience could in no wise consent. On the other hand it was stoutly insisted that the equality of the states under the Constitution was openly violated, not only by the personal liberty laws enacted by Northern States in order to nullify the national statute on the subject of fugitive slaves, but still more aggressively by the practical exclusion of slaveholders from the territories, so far at least as their slave property was concerned; and further by the decree of the Missouri Compromise that, whatever the will of the settlers in new regions might be, there should be no new slave states carved out of that portion of the Louisiana Purchase which lay north of the southern line of Missouri. This prohibition – taken in connection with the admission of California as a free state – amounted in effect to a provision that there should be no more slave states created anywhere; for, as Mr. Webster had clearly pointed out, there was no other part of the territory conquered or purchased from Mexico, into which slavery could be practically or profitably extended.
The attempts made to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law at the North, whether successful or baffled, served only to inflame passion on both sides and to intensify the very controversy which it had been the purpose of the act – as a part of a compromise – to allay. On the other hand the Southern conviction grew that by the two compromises the South had been cheated of its equal rights in the public domain, and out of that contention was destined almost immediately to grow a bloody war in Kansas and a still more acrimonious state of feeling between the North and the South.
The story of that matter is reserved for another chapter of this history. In the meanwhile, if the facts have been adequately set forth, it must be clear to the reader that the Compromise of 1850 not only failed of its purpose of pacification, but resulted immediately in the very marked increase of hostility between the sections, the intensifying of the irritation and the accentuation of the acrimony that pervaded and inspired the dispute.
The fundamental trouble was that the statesmen who fondly thought to settle the matter by a compromise, did not grasp the truth of the situation with which they were called upon to deal. They did not appreciate the fact that there was indeed an "irrepressible conflict," between the two systems, a conflict which no compromise could end, no arrangement could mollify, no agreement could by any possibility adjust.
War was already on between abolitionism and slavery. It was idle to seek for grounds of reconciliation between convictions so utterly antagonistic and so necessarily irreconcilable. The compromisers were men crying "Peace" where there was no peace and no possibility of peace. They were visionaries seeking to reconcile sentiments that were as opposite as the poles. In opinion and sentiment as well as in physics, there are affinities that may not be resisted and antagonisms that no power can overcome. There was no flux of political agreement that could fuse Northern and Southern sentiment on the subject of slavery into one homogeneous whole – no vehiculum in which the two antagonistic principles could mingle in harmony.
The key to the situation, as every sincere historian must recognize, if he would interpret the events of that time aright, was the fact that this conflict was indeed "irrepressible," and that it could end only with the extinction of slavery on the one hand, or with the universal and constitutional recognition of slavery as a national institution on the other.
The Compromise of 1850 was futile and a failure because it was founded upon the ignoring of this fundamental truth.
CHAPTER VI
Uncle Tom's Cabin
The failure of the Compromise of 1850 to accomplish its purpose did not at first appear in the national election returns. In fact the new Free-soil party polled fewer votes in 1852 than it had cast four years before, but in the elections of the several states of the North it was steadily gaining ground precisely as in the South the extreme disunion pro-slavery party was likewise doing.
Little by little the more conservative men on either side were being drawn into the radical propaganda.
In 1852 there appeared in print a novel which was destined to affect the history of the Union as no other novel ever did before or since. Every historian of that epoch must reckon with "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as one of the vital forces affecting the history of the time.
The novel was written by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who personally knew very little about slavery except by hearsay. Of necessity it abounded in inconsistencies, mistakes of facts, and impossibilities so far as its social depictions were concerned. All these things have been pointed out by criticism and need not now be recapitulated, the more because they have no historical importance whatever. But the novel made a tremendous appeal to the sentiment of humanity in antagonism to slavery. It argued no question, it offered no statistics, it presented no thesis. It simply appealed to the sentiments of men, and women, and children, for the abolition of slavery and its influence was immediate and well-nigh limitless.
As there are no fixed canons of criticism by which to determine the artistic merit or the dramatic value of any work of the imagination it is of course open to those who choose to contend, as many have done, that Mrs. Stowe's work was not at all great as a creation in fiction but that its immediate and stupendous success and influence were due solely to the adventitious circumstances of its publication. But those adventitious circumstances did not exist in the remote European countries into whose languages the novel was presently translated and among whose people it continues to be a classic to this day. These people knew nothing whatever of American slavery and cared little if at all about it. They were in no degree influenced in their judgment of Mrs. Stowe's romance by any of the considerations that vexed the politics of this Republic. They read the novel because of its intrinsic and intensely human interest and because of nothing else whatever.
The better judgment would seem to be that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was a work of extraordinary dramatic power and phenomenal fitness to appeal to the sympathies of men. It had for its subject one of the most picturesque states of society that has ever been known among men and one so unusual among modern nations that its very rarity added to its charm as a theme for the romance writer.
There is another important fact which must be taken into consideration in estimating the influence of that work of fiction. At that time all the churches frowned upon novel-reading as a sin. A few of T. S. Arthur's temperance tales were cautiously permitted to the elect, but as a rule the reading of novels was rigidly forbidden to those who constituted the congregations of the churches. Even Dickens, who was then in the midst of his extraordinary popularity, was read only secretly and with shamefacedness by those who submitted themselves to the instruction of the clergy. The Methodists in particular – and Methodism was, as it still is, a very great power in the land – frowned upon all works of fiction as the devil's agencies for the perversion of the human mind and the destruction of the human soul. Novel-reading was classed by all the pulpits of the time with such sins as Sabbath-breaking, whiskey-drinking, dancing, and other devices of Satan. The great majority of men and women of that generation were effectually forbidden to read even the great masterpieces of their mother tongue, from Shakespeare onward. But here in Mrs. Stowe's work was a novel approved of all the clergy, a novel which anybody might virtuously read, and a generation hungry for creative literature of a date later than the "Pilgrim's Progress" eagerly welcomed the opportunity to read a novel, full of flesh-and-blood interest, that appealed strongly to the kindlier and better sentiments of human nature. The preachers read the book and recommended it to their parishioners and as a consequence everybody read it – men, women and children.
Very naturally this universal reading of such a romance greatly inflamed the sentiment of antagonism to slavery and incidentally aroused something like hatred of the slaveholder though Mrs. Stowe had probably not intended that to be the effect of her written words.
There were a dozen or a score of more or less inane novels put forward in answer to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" but their only effect was to intensify the interest in that work.
Coming as it did upon the heels of the new and peculiarly offensive Fugitive Slave Law Mrs. Stowe's romance converted pretty nearly all the people of the North to the anti-slavery cause and hastened the growth of the anti-slavery party into formidable proportions. It awakened sentiment, and sentiment is always an immeasurably more potent factor in human affairs than mere intellectual conviction is. It enlisted in the anti-slavery cause every gentle and every rampant impulse of the people of the North. It rubbed out of multitudes of men's minds every consideration of constitutional restriction, every thought of states' rights, every dogma of the law and every decree of the courts. It quickly bred a new crusade against slavery. It everywhere stimulated the thought that slavery was a wrong for which the whole Nation was responsible and the extermination of which, at all costs, the Union was bound to accomplish as its first and highest duty. In brief, this novel bred a spirit of abolitionism such as the country had never before known.
The time had not yet come when any political party could plant itself, with the smallest hope of success, upon a platform of openly avowed abolitionism. Those who were ready to advocate an aggressive political warfare upon the system of slavery where it legally existed and to insist upon its abolition by force of Federal enactment in contravention of the Constitution were still in a hopeless minority. They were opportunists in politics, however, and they saw and seized their opportunity. If they could not gain all that they desired they were ready to accept whatever might be accomplished in the direction of the end they sought. The Free-soil party presented itself to their minds as an easily available instrumentality. It is true that that party had expressly and with extreme circumspection disclaimed all purpose and all constitutional right to interfere with slavery in the states in which it legally existed. But the avowed antagonism of the party to the system of slavery rendered it a conveniently available agency for the execution of the will of those who desired that slavery should cease to be at all costs. All the abolitionists joined the party at once, in spite of its voluntary and to them offensive limitation of its activity to the purpose of preventing the extension of the slave system into new territories. On the other hand men by scores and hundreds of thousands throughout the North who would have bitterly resented the still opprobrious epithet of "abolitionists" eagerly joined the new party in the undefined but warmly cherished hope that it might somehow find means of ridding the Republic of the curse and the scandal of slavery.
CHAPTER VII
The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise, The Kansas-Nebraska Bill and Squatter Sovereignty
The Missouri Compromise was in effect repealed by the compromise measures of 1850 but there was as yet no formal repeal. The effect of the compromise measures of 1850 was presently to stir up a greater strife than ever on the subject of slavery and even to raise new questions with regard to it. The ultra Southern men began to see that the Compromise of 1850 had given them practically nothing whatever in the way of territory out of which to create future slave states.
It had admitted California as a free state. It had opened Utah, which lay mostly to the north of the dead line, to the possible introduction of slavery if its future settlers should so decree upon coming into the Union, as no sane man in any quarter of the country imagined that they ever would. It had also separated New Mexico which lay mostly south of the dead line, from the slave state of Texas with a like license to its future settlers if there should ever be any such, to choose for themselves whether or not they would permit slavery in their domain.
Neither of these territories promised, at that time, to become a state within the life of the generation then in being, and in point of fact neither did. Utah was not admitted to the Union until 1896, long after the utter abolition of slavery had been accomplished by constitutional amendment, and New Mexico, at the beginning of the twentieth century is still a territory of vast area and very small population.
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law was in fact the only return the Compromise of 1850 had made to the South for what the South regarded as a practical surrender of territory that might otherwise have been molded into slave states. At the North this compensatory enactment was everywhere regarded as an excessive return for such concessions as had been made. The great body of the Northern people would not and could not lend themselves to the execution of a law which offended their consciences as no other law had ever done. They could not make themselves, as that law required them to do, participants in a system which they held to be utterly wrong and iniquitous.
Thus the South felt itself wronged and cheated in the compromise and the North felt that its conscience had been outraged and its integrity of mind assailed.
It was altogether inevitable that the calmer consideration and the discussion of this matter should bring up new questions and create new situations. The Missouri Compromise had not yet been formally repealed. That Compromise forbade the creation of slave states out of any part of the Louisiana territory lying north of the southern line of Missouri, and by implication it forbade the carrying of slaves into any such territory prior to its admission as a state. Under the Compromise Missouri and Arkansas had been admitted to the Union as slave states and for thirty years the Compromise had stood as a bulwark against disunion.
But now there appeared a tendency on the part of the territories lying north of the Missouri Compromise line to become populous. Emigration seemed to be setting in that direction and the fertility of the region promised presently to tempt great multitudes of men to settle there. That part of the territory which now constitutes Kansas was especially tempting to emigration. The eastern half of Kansas was a part of the Louisiana Purchase. Its western half was a part of the region acquired from Mexico. The eastern half of it, therefore, was subject to the Missouri Compromise's prohibition of slavery while the western half by virtue of the compromise measures of 1850 was free from that restriction.
Out of all the conditions here briefly noted there arose at the South a clamor for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Men argued that as it was only a statute repealable at any session of Congress, and as, in their contention, it robbed and wronged the slave-holding half of the Union, it ought to be repealed. At the North it was felt that repeal would in effect make of slavery a national institution, and rob the anti-slavery sentiment of the benefit it had secured by consenting to the admission of Missouri and Arkansas as slave states.
There was a very strong man in the Senate at that time, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. He was a born leader of men, a man of great ability and courage, and he had ambition to become president of the United States. He was a master of statecraft and an opportunist in politics. He had sought some years before to settle the question with regard to the new territories once for all by enacting a law to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, thus excluding slavery north of that line from all the new as well as from all the older possessions of the Republic and by implication permitting it south of that line.
As his proposal was rejected it is not worth while now to speculate upon what effect its acceptance might have had. In lieu of it the compromise measures of 1850 were enacted. Their effect was almost immediately to increase and intensify an inflammation of the popular mind which it is difficult in our time even to conceive. Senator Douglas voted for these measures and advocated them strongly in the Senate. When he returned to his own state at the end of the session he found himself an object of public hatred and condemnation. The City Council of Chicago greeted his coming with a set of resolutions in denunciation of him. The resolutions declared him to be a traitor and pronounced the compromise measures a violation of the law of God. The City Council instructed the police, and advised all citizens to disregard the new laws. A mass meeting was called and by resolution it declared it to be the duty of all good citizens "to defy death, the dungeon and the grave" in resisting the Fugitive Slave Law, but so uncertain was the popular mind, even in its fury, that Douglas promptly challenged it and met it in a great mass meeting before which he delivered an impassioned speech explaining his views. By this single speech he secured an immediate and well-nigh unanimous rescinding of the resolutions of censure and a little later he was again elected to represent the state in the Senate.
Three years later, in 1853, on his return from Washington to Illinois and after he had made himself sponsor for that Kansas-Nebraska Bill of which an account will presently be given, he picturesquely said that he had traveled all the way from Washington to Chicago "by the light of his own burning effigies." Nevertheless when his term expired a few years later he was again elected to the Senate after a conspicuous canvass of the state in which his reëlection was practically the only question at issue and in which Abraham Lincoln was his opponent on the stump.
It must not be supposed that Northern sentiment on the questions then dividing the country was uniform. It was on the contrary as sharply divided as ever, with a distinct preponderance of it in favor of letting the slavery question rest, so far as legislation was concerned, where it had been placed by the compromise measures of 1850. But the sentiment in antagonism to slavery was everywhere growing even among those who deprecated the agitation of the subject.
