The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences Part 9

[57] Vol. I, p. 66.

For a time the new Republican party had a powerful compet.i.tor in another new organization. This was the American or Know-Nothing party. This other aspirant for power made an honest effort to revitalize the old Whig party under a new name and, by gathering in all the conservatives North and South, to put an end to sectionalism. Its signal failure conveys an instructive lesson. After many and wide-spread rumors of its coming, the birth of the American party was formally announced in 1854.

It had been organized in secret and was bound together with oaths and pa.s.swords; its members delighted to mystify inquirers by refusing to answer questions, and soon they got the name of "Know-Nothings." The party had grown out of the "Order of the Star Spangled Banner,"

organized in 1850 to oppose the spread of Catholicism and indiscriminate immigration--the two dangers that were said to threaten American inst.i.tutions.

The American party made its appeal: For the Union and against sectionalism; for Protestantism, the faith of the Fathers, against Catholicism that was being imported by foreigners; its s.h.i.+bboleth was "America for the Americans."

The Americans or Know-Nothings everywhere put out in 1854 full tickets and showed at once surprising strength. In the fall elections of that year they polled over one-fourth of all the votes in New York, two-fifths in Pennsylvania, and over two-thirds in Ma.s.sachusetts, where they made a clean sweep of the State and Federal offices.[58]

[58] Smith, "Parties and Slavery," pp. 118-20.

They struck directly at sectionalism by exacting of their adherents the following oath:

"You do further swear that you will not vote for any one ... whom you know or believe to be in favor of a dissolution of the Union ... or who is endeavoring to produce that result."

The effect of this oath at the South was almost magical. The Whig party there was speedily absorbed by the Americans, and Southern Democrats by thousands joined the new party that promised to save the Union.[59] But the att.i.tude of the Northern and Southern members of the American party soon became fundamentally different. Southerners saw their Northern allies in Vermont, Maine, and Ma.s.sachusetts pa.s.sing "personal liberty"

laws.[60]

[59] The writer's father, who had been a nullifier and a lifelong follower of Calhoun, joined the Know-Nothings in the hope of saving the Union, but withdrew when he found that in the North the party was not true to its Union pledges. Here was a typical case of Southern unwillingness to resort to secession.

[60] _Ib._, pp. 138-9.

The Know-Nothings were strong enough in the elections of 1855 to directly check the progress of the new Republican party; but the American party, though it succeeded in electing a Speaker of the national House of Representatives in February, 1856, soon afterward went down to defeat. Even though led by such patriots as John Bell, of Tennessee, and Edward Everett, of Ma.s.sachusetts, it could not stand against the storm of pa.s.sion that had been aroused by the crusade against slavery.

There was a fierce and protracted struggle between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery men in Kansas for possession of the territorial government.

Rival const.i.tutions were submitted to Congress, and the debates over these were extremely bitter. In their excitement the Democrats again delighted their adversaries by committing what now seems to have been another blunder. They advocated the admission of Kansas under the "Lecompton Const.i.tution." A review of the conflicting evidence appears to show that the Southerners were fairly outnumbered in Kansas and that the Lecompton Const.i.tution did not express the will of the people.[61]

[61] Theodore Clarke Smith, "Parties and Slavery."

While "the war in Kansas" was going on, Charles Sumner, an Abolitionist from Ma.s.sachusetts, delivered in the Senate a speech of which he wrote his friends beforehand: "I shall p.r.o.nounce the most thorough Philippic ever delivered in a legislative body." He was a cla.s.sical scholar. _His purpose was to stir up in the North a greater fury against the South than Demosthenes had aroused in Athens against its enemies, the Macedonians._ His speech occupied two days, May 28 and 29, 1855. At its conclusion, Senator Ca.s.s, of Michigan, arose at once and p.r.o.nounced it "the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of this high body." The speech attacked, without any sufficient excuse, the personal character of an absent senator, Butler of South Carolina, a gentleman of high character and older than Sumner. Among other unfounded charges, it accused him of falsehood. Preston Brooks, a representative from South Carolina, attacked Sumner in the Senate chamber during a recess of that body and beat him unmercifully with a cane. The provocation was bitter, indeed, but Brooks's a.s.sault was unjustifiable. Nevertheless, the exasperated South applauded it, while the North glorified Sumner as a martyr for free speech.

In less than two years the new Republican party had absorbed all the Abolition voters, and in the election of 1856 was in the field with its candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency--Fremont and Dayton--upon a platform declaring it the duty of Congress to abolish in the territories "those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery."

Excitement during that election was intense. Rufus Choate, the great Ma.s.sachusetts lawyer, theretofore a Whig, voiced the sentiment of conservatives when he said it was the "duty of every one to prevent the madness of the times from working its maddest act--the permanent formation and the actual present triumph of a party which knows one-half of America only to hate it," etc.

Senator Toombs, of Georgia, said: "The object of Fremont's friends is the conquest of the South. I am content that they shall own us when they conquer us."

The Democrats elected Buchanan; Democrats 174 electoral votes; Republicans 74, all Northern; and the Know-Nothings, combined with a remnant of Whigs, 8.

The work of sectionalism was nearly completed.

The extremes to which some of the Southern people now resorted show the madness of the times. They encouraged filibustering expeditions to capture Cuba and Nicaragua. These wild ventures were absolutely indefensible. They had no official sanction and were only spontaneous movements, but they met with favor from the Southern public, the outgrowth of a feeling that, if these countries should be captured and annexed as slave States, the South could the better, by their aid, defend its rights in the Union. _The Wanderer_ and one or two other vessels, contrary to the laws of the United States, imported slaves from Africa, and when the partic.i.p.ants were, some of them, indicted, Southern juries absolutely refused to convict.

"Judgment had fled to brutish beasts, And men had lost their reason."

When later the Southern States had seceded and formed a government of their own their const.i.tution absolutely prohibited the slave traffic.

CHAPTER VIII

INCOMPATIBILITY OF SLAVERY AND FREEDOM

That it was possible for slave States and free States to coexist under our Federal Const.i.tution was the belief of its framers and of most of our people down to 1861. The first to announce the absolute impossibility of such coexistence seems to have been William Lloyd Garrison. In 1840, at Lynn, Ma.s.sachusetts, the Ess.e.x County Anti-Slavery Society adopted this resolution, offered by him:

"That freedom and slavery are natural and irreconcilable enemies; that it is morally impossible for them to endure together in the same nation, and that the existence of the one can only be secured by the destruction of the other."[62]

[62] Garrison's "Garrison."

Garrison's remedy was disunion. Near that time his paper's motto was "No Union with Slave-Holders."

The next to announce the idea of the incompatibility of slave States and free States seems to have been one who did not dream of disunion. No such thought was in the mind of Abraham Lincoln when, in a speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 15, 1858, he said:

"_A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be divided. It will become one thing or the other._ Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind will rest in the belief that _it is in the course of ultimate extinction_; or its advocates will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the States--old as well as new--North as well as South."

When the Southerners read that statement they concluded that, as Mr.

Lincoln knew very well that the South could not, if it would, force slavery on the North, he was announcing the intention of his party to place slavery "in course of ultimate extinction," const.i.tution or no const.i.tution.

Senator Seward, at Rochester, New York, some weeks later, reannounced the doctrine, declaring that the contest was "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces; and it means that the United States _must and will_, sooner or later, become either an entirely slave-holding nation or entirely a free labor nation."

The utterances of Lincoln and Seward were distinctly radical. The question was, would this radical idea ultimately dominate the Republican party?

Less than eighteen months after the announcement in 1858 of the doctrine of the "irrepressible conflict," John Brown raided Virginia to incite insurrections. With a few followers and 1,300 stands of arms for the slaves who were to join him, he captured the United States a.r.s.enal at Harper's Ferry. Only a few slaves came to him and, after a brief struggle, with some bloodshed, Brown was captured, tried by a jury, and hanged.

In the South the excitement was intense; the horror and indignation in that section it is impossible to describe. Brown was already well known to the public. He was not a lunatic. Not long before this, in Kansas, "at the head of a small group of men, including two of his sons and a son-in-law, he went at night down Pottowattamie Creek, stopping at three houses. The men who lived in them were well known pro-slavery men; they seem to have been rough characters; their most specific offence (according to Sanborn, Brown's biographer and eulogist) was the driving from his home, by violent threats, of an inoffensive old man. John Brown and his party went down the creek, called at one after the other of three houses, took five men away from their wives and children, and deliberately shot one and hacked the others to death with swords."[63]

[63] "The Negro and the Nation," George Spring Merriam, p. 120.

Quite a number of people, some of them men of eminence in the North, aided Brown in his enterprise. Among the men of repute were Gerrit Smith, a former candidate for the presidency; and Theodore Parker, Dr.

Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, of Boston, who were all members of a "secret committee to collect money and arms for the expedition." With them was F. S. Sanborn, who has since the war vauntingly revealed the scheme in his "Life of John Brown."[64]

[64] Sanborn's "Life of John Brown," p. 466.

Sanborn intimates that Henry Wilson, subsequently vice-president, was more or less privy to the design.[65] At various places in the North church bells were tolled on the day of John Brown's execution; meetings were held and orators extolled him as a martyr. Emerson, the greatest thinker in all that region, declared that if John Brown was hanged he would glorify the gallows as Jesus glorified the cross; and now many Southern men who loved the Union reluctantly concluded that separation was inevitable. John Bell, of Tennessee, Union candidate for President in 1860, is said to have cried like a child when he heard of Brown's raid.

[65] _Ib._, p. 515.

The great body of the Northern people condemned John Brown's expedition without stint. Edward Everett, voicing the opinion of all who were really conservative, said of Brown's raid, in a speech at Faneuil Hall, that its design was to "let loose the h.e.l.l hounds of a servile insurrection, and to bring on a struggle which, for magnitude, atrocity, and horror, would have stood alone in the history of the world."

But they who had been preaching the "irrepressible conflict," they whom public opinion might hold responsible, did not feel precisely as Mr.

Everett did. They were concerned about political consequences, as appears from a letter written somewhat later during the State canva.s.s in New York by Horace Greeley to Schuyler Colfax. Horace Greeley afterward proved himself in many ways a broad-minded, magnanimous man, but now he wrote: "Do not be downhearted about the old John Brown business. Its present effect is bad and throws a heavy load on us in this State ...

_but the ultimate effect is to be good.... It will drive the slave power to new outrages.... It presses on the irrepressible conflict_."[66]

[66] "History of United States," Rhodes, vol. I.