V. ORDINANCE OF 1787

The memorable Congress of 1776 was willing to do much to the end that slavery might be restricted, hence, as we have seen, it resolved "that no slaves be imported into any of the thirteen United Colonies."

Had it been possible thus early to stop effectually the slave trade, and to prevent the extension of slavery to new territory, slavery would have died out. Jefferson sought, shortly after the treaty of peace, to prohibit slavery extension, and to this end he prepared and reported an Ordinance (1784) prohibiting slavery after the year 1800 in all the territory then belonging to the United States above the parallel of 31° North latitude, which included what became the principal parts of the slave States of Alabama and Mississippi, all of Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as the whole Northwest Territory. In 1784 the United States owned no territory south of 31° North latitude.

This Ordinance of freedom was lost by a single vote. Had that one vote been reversed, what a "hell of agony" would have been closed, and what a sea of blood would have been saved! Slavery would have died in the hands of its friends and the new Republic would have soon been free in fact as well as name.

Jefferson, though himself a slaveholder, was desperately in earnest in advocacy of this Ordinance, and, speaking of its prohibitory slave-clause two years later, he wrote:

"The voice of a single individual would have prevented that abominable crime. Heaven will not always be silent; the friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail."

The most important victory for freedom in the civil history of the United States (until the Rebellion of 1861) was the Ordinance of 1787, reported by Nathan Dane, of Massachusetts, as a substitute for the defeated one just referred to, but differing from it in two important respects:

(1) It applied only to the territory northwest of the River Ohio recently (March 1, 1784) ceded to the United States by Virginia;

(2) It prohibited slavery at once and forever therein. Its sixth section is in these words:

"There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."

But it has been, with much force, claimed by those who denied the binding character of this Ordinance, that as it was an act of the old Congress under the Articles of Confederation, and established a territorial form of government, not in all respects in conformity with the Constitution, it was necessarily superseded by it.

This view was general on the meeting of the First Congress (1789) under the Constitution, but the Ordinance, so dear to the hearts of Jefferson and other lovers of liberty, was early attended to.

On August 7, 1789, the eighth act of the First Congress, embodying a long explanatory and declaratory preamble, was passed, and approved by President Washington. This act in effect re-enacted the Ordinance of 1787, adapting and applying it, however, to the Constitution by requiring the Governor of the Northwest Territory to report and become responsible to the President of the United States, instead of to Congress as originally provided.

The territory which the ordinance governed was in area 260,000 square miles, and included what is now the great states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, with, in 1890, 13,471,840 inhabitants.

The Ordinance is a model of perfection. It was the only great act of legislation under the Articles of Confederation. There is evidence that, as some members of the Congress that enacted the Ordinance were at the same time members of the Convention that framed the Constitution, there was much intercommunication of views between the members of the two bodies, especially on the slavery clause of the Ordinance. It is probable that the clause of the Constitution respecting the rendition of slaves, as well as other provisions, was copied from the Ordinance.

Upon the surpassing excellence of this Ordinance, no language of panegyric would be extravagant.

It is a matchless specimen of sagacious forecast. It provides for the descent of property, for the appointment of territorial officers, and for extending the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty by securing religious freedom in the inhabitants. It prohibits legislative interference with private contracts, secures the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus, trial by jury, and of the common law in judicial proceedings: it forbids the infliction of cruel or unusual punishments, and enjoins the encouragement of schools and the means of education.

The Ordinance has not only stood, unaltered, as the charter of government for the Northwest Territory, but its clause respecting slavery was incorporated into most of the acts passed prior to the Rebellion providing for territorial governments.

Historically, it will stand as the great Magna Charta, which, by the prescient wisdom of our fathers, dedicated in advance of the coming civilization the fertile and beautiful Northwest, with all its possibilities, for all time, to freedom, education, and liberty of conscience.

Frequent efforts to rescind or suspend the clause restricting slavery were made, especially after Indiana Territory was formed in 1800.

At the adoption of the Ordinance some slaves were held in what is now Indiana and Illinois by immigrants from Southern States. Slavery also existed at the Vincennes, Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and other French settlements, where it had been planted under the authority of the King of France while the territory was a part of the French possessions. The Government of Great Britain authorized the continuance of slavery when the territory was under its jurisdiction. Indians as well as black men were held as slaves in the French settlements.

Immigrants and old inhabitants favorable to slavery united in memorials to Congress asking a suspension of the article prohibiting slavery. The first of these was reported on adversely by a committee of Congress, May 12, 1796. Governor William Henry Harrison, December, 1802, presided, at Vincennes, over a meeting of citizens of the Indiana Territory, at which it was resolved to make an effort to secure a suspension of this article. A memorial was drawn up, which Governor Harrison, with a letter of his own favoring it, forwarded to Congress. They were referred to a special committee, of which John Randolph, of Virginia, was chairman.

He, March 2, 1803, reported:

"That it is inexpedient to suspend, even for a limited time, the operation of the sixth article of the compact between the original States and the people and States west of the river Ohio."

Adding, by way of reason, that:

"The rapid population of the State of Ohio sufficiently evinces, in the opinion of your committee, that the labor of slaves is not necessary to promote the growth and settlement of the colonies in that region."

This did not end the effort to secure slavery in the Indiana Territory. In March, 1804, a special committee of Congress reported in favor of the suspension of the inhibition for ten years; a similar report was made in 1806 by Mr. Garnett, of Virginia; and in 1807 Mr. Parker, delegate from Indiana, reported favorably on a memorial of Governor Harrison and the Territorial Legislature, praying for a suspension of that part of the Ordinance relating to slavery. These reports were not acted on in the House. Subsequently, Governor Harrison and his Legislature appealed to the Senate and a special committee to suspend the article, but when the committee reported adversely, all efforts to break down the legal barrier to slavery in the Northwest Territory ceased.

But notwithstanding the mandatory terms of the Ordinance, and the repeated failures in Congress to suspend the provision relating to slavery, it existed in the Northwest throughout its territorial existence and in the State of Illinois until 1844. The early slaveholding inhabitants well understood the Ordinance to mean the absolute emancipation of their slaves, and hence manumitted them or commenced to remove them to the Spanish territory beyond the Mississippi. Some few of the inhabitants complained to Governor St. Clair that the inhibition against slavery retarded the growth of the Territory. He volunteered the opinion that the Ordinance was not retroactive; that it did not apply to existing conditions; that it was "a declaration of a principle which was to govern the Legislature in all acts respecting that matter (slavery) and the courts of justice in their decisions in cases arising after the date of the Ordinance"; and that if Congress had intended the immediate emancipation of slaves, compensation would have been provided for to their owners. But he admitted Congress "had the right to determine that property of that kind afterwards acquired should not be protected in future, and that slaves imported into the Territory after that declaration might reclaim their freedom." This unfortunate opinion operated to continue slavery in the Territory, and fostered the idea that the sixth article might be annulled and slavery be made perpetual in the Territory. Governor St. Clair was President of the Congress when the Ordinance was passed, and his opinion in relation to it was therefore given much weight.

By Act of Congress, passed May 7, 1800, what is now the State of Ohio became the Territory of Ohio, and that part of the Northwest Territory lying west and north of Ohio was erected into the Territory of Indiana; by like Acts, January 11, 1805, the Territory of Michigan was formed, and February 3, 1809, all that part lying west of Indiana and Lake Michigan became the Territory of Illinois. Prior, however, to the last Act, the Legislature of Indiana Territory (September 17, 1807) passed an act "to encourage emigration," making it lawful to bring negroes and mulattoes into the Territory, "owing service or labor as slaves."

The act provided that these people and their children should be held for a term of years, and if they refused to serve as slaves they might be removed, "within sixty days thereafter," to any place where they could be lawfully held. This statute was substantially re-enacted by the Legislature of the Territory of Illinois in 1812.

The first Constitution (1818) of Illinois did not prohibit slavery. The first section of Article VI, declared that: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall hereafter be introduced into this State, otherwise than for the punishment of crimes." Slavery existed in Illinois after it became a State. The French and Canadian inhabitants or their descendants continued to hold colored and Indian slaves, and others were held under the Territorial Acts of 1807 and 1812. The old slaves and their descendants, held at the time of the cession by Virginia to the United States, were sold from hand to hand in the State, and transported to and sold in other slave States.

The Constitution of Indiana (1816) prohibited slavery, but slaves were held therein until its Supreme Court in 1820, in a habeas corpus case, held the Constitution freed all persons hitherto held in bondage, including the old French slaves, regardless of the Ordinance of 1787, of the deed of cession of Virginia, or of any treaty stipulations.

After the separation (1805) of Michigan from Indiana, the former's Territorial Chief Justice held slavery existed in Michigan by virtue of the Jay treaty (1796) with Great Britain (not otherwise) notwithstanding the Ordinance of 1787, but Michigan's Constitution (1837) put an end to slavery in the State, as did also the Constitution (1802) of Ohio, likewise the Constitution (1848) of Wisconsin. Slaves shown by census reports in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin after they became States, were there by tolerance, not by legal right.

Whatever contrariety of views obtained, and regardless of the conflicting opinions of the courts or judges as to the effect of the great Ordinance on the condition of the slaves in the Northwestern Territory, certain it is that the Ordinance operated to prevent, after its date, the legal importation of slaves into the Territory, and hence resulted in each of the States formed therefrom becoming free States. In the light of history it seems certain that at least Indiana and Illinois would have become slave States but for the Ordinance.

This Ordinance contained a clause requiring the rendition of fugitives from "service or labor," and being applicable to only a part of the Territory of the United States, partook of the nature of a compromise on the slavery question, and was the first of a series of compromises, some of which are found in the Federal Constitution, others in the Act of 1820 admitting Missouri as a State, and also the Compromise Measures of 1850, in which Clay, Webster, Calhoun, Seward, and others of the great statesmen of the Union participated, all of which were, however, ruthlessly overthrown by the Nebraska Act (1854), of which Douglas, of Illinois, was the author.

The slavery-restriction section of the Ordinance was copied into and became a part of the Act of 1848 organizing the Territory of Oregon, the champions of slavery, then in Congress, voting therefor; and three years after the enactment of the Compromise Measures of 1850, this provision of the Ordinance was again extended over the newly organized Territory of Washington by the concurrent votes of substantially the same persons who voted, a year later, that all such legislation was unconstitutional.

But neither origin, age, nor precedent then sanctified anything in the interest of freedom,—slavery only could appeal to such things for justification. The propagators of human slavery were on the track of this Ordinance; they overtook and overthrew it by Congressional legislation in 1854; then by the Dred Scott decision of 1857, as we shall soon see. But it reappeared in principle, in 1862, as we shall also see, and spread its wings of universal liberty (as was its great author's purpose in 1784) over all the territory belonging to the United States, to remain irrepealable through time, immortalized by the approval of President Lincoln, and endorsed by the just judgment of enlightened mankind.

Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia each held territory not subject to the Ordinance of 1787.

North Carolina (December, 1789), in ceding her territory west of her present limits, provided that:

"No regulations made or to be made by Congress shall tend to emancipate slaves."

Thus Tennessee became a slave State.

A year later (1790) Virginia consented to relinquish her remaining territory; as Kentucky it was (June 1, 1792) admitted into the Union and became a slave State, without ever having a separate territorial organization.

Georgia, in 1802, ceded the territory on her west to the United States, and provided that the Ordinance of 1787 should extend to the ceded territory, "the article only excepted which forbids slavery." Thus, later, Alabama and Mississippi each became a slave State.

XIII. NULLIFICATION—1832-3 (1835)

A debate arose in the United States Senate over a resolution of Senator Foote of Connecticut proposing to limit the sale of the public lands, which took a wide range. Hayne of South Carolina elaborately set forth the doctrine of nullification, claiming it inhered in each State under the Constitution. He boldly announced that the Union formed was only a league or a compact. This called forth from Webster his celebrated "Reply to Hayne," of January 26, 1830, in which he assailed and apparently overthrew the then new doctrine of nullification. He denounced its exercise as incompatible with a loyal adherence to the Constitution, and showed historically that the government formed under it was not a mere "compact" or "league" between sovereign or independent States terminable at will. He then asserted that any attempt of any State to act on the theory of nullification would inevitably entail civil war or a dissolution of the Union.

The first real attempt, however, at nullification, or the first attempt of a State to declare laws of Congress nugatory and of no binding force when not approved by the State, was made in South Carolina in 1832, under the leadership of John C. Calhoun, then Vice-President of the United States, and hitherto a statesman of so much just renown, and esteemed so moderate and patriotic in his views on all national questions as to have been looked upon, with the special approval of the North, as eminently qualified for the Presidency. He hopefully aspired to it until he quarrelled with President Jackson; he had been in favor of a protective tariff.

Cotton was, as we have seen, the principal article of export, and the slaveholding cotton planters conceived the idea that to secure a market for it there must be no duties on imports, and that home manufactures of needed articles for consumption would restrict the foreign demand for the raw material. Besides, the South with its slave labor could not indulge in manufacturing. A tariff on imports meant protection to home industries and to free white labor, both inimical to slavery. Some leading Southern statesmen, adherents of slavery, had vehemently opposed the ratification of the Constitution of 1787, on the ground that as it empowered Congress to levy import duties, it would encourage and build up home industries, with free labor; and they prophesied that with them slavery would eventually become unprofitable and therefore unpopular, hence would die. This idea never left the Southern mind, so, when the Confederacy of 1861 was formed, its Constitution (framed at Montgomery, Alabama) prohibited such duties for the express reason that no branch of industry was to be promoted in the new slave government, using this language:

"Nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry."

This was then supposed to be the highest bulwark of slavery. Its votaries understood its strength and weakness. Independent, well- paid free labor and industries would ennoble the men of toil, bring wealth and power, build up populous towns and cities, and consequently overwhelm, politically and otherwise, the institution of slavery, or draw into successful social competition with plantation life wealthy inhabitants who knew not slavery and its demoralizing influences.

Already, in 1832, the effects of protection on the prosperity of our country were manifest, especially since the Tariff Act of 1828, which levied a duty equivalent to 45 per cent. ad valorem. The Act of 1832 made a small reduction in the duties, but because it was claimed it did not distribute them equally, nullification was determined on as the remedy.

It was agreed by the strict constructionists of that day that a State Legislature could not declare a law of the United States void, but to do this the people must speak through a convention. Such a convention met in South Carolina, in November, 1832, and passed a Nullification Ordinance, declaring the tariff acts "null and void," not binding on the State, and that under them no duties should be paid in the State after February 1, 1833.

Immediately thereafter medals were struck, inscribed "John C. Calhoun, first President of the Southern Confederacy." Nullification, thus proclaimed, was the legitimate forerunner of secession.

President Jackson, with his heroic love of the Union, regarded the movement as only treason; he called it that in his proclamations; he prepared to collect the duties in Charleston or to confiscate the cargoes; he warned the nullifiers by the presence of General Scott there that he would be promptly used to coerce the State into loyalty; and he seemed eager to find an excuse for arresting, condemning for treason, and hanging Calhoun, who then went to Washington as a Senator, resigning the Vice-Presidency.

Jackson tersely said:

"To say that any State may, at pleasure, secede from the Union, is to say that the United States are not a nation."

The situation was too imminent for Calhoun's nerves. To confront an indignant nation, led by a fearless, never doubting President, was a different thing then from what it was in 1860-61 with Buchanan as President, surrounded as he was by traitors in his Cabinet. Calhoun and his State backed down, and import duties continued to be collected in South Carolina, although a gradual reduction of them was made an excuse for Calhoun and his friends in Congress, in 1833, to vote for a protective tariff act, so recently before by them declared unconstitutional.

On a "Force Bill" and a new tariff act being passed (March 15, 1833) the Nullification Ordinance was repealed in South Carolina. The next Ordinance of Secession of this State (1860) was based on the principles of the first one and the doctrines of Calhoun, slavery being the direct, as it had been the indirect, cause of their first enunciation. We must not anticipate here.

In the debate, in 1833, between Webster and Calhoun, the former, as in his great reply to Hayne, expounded the Constitution as a "Charter of Union for all the States."

Nullification, attempted first on account of a protective tariff to foster home and young industries and for needed revenue to carry on the Federal government, was in two years, by its author, Calhoun, transferred, for a new cause on which to attempt to justify it— from the tariff to domestic slavery. Calhoun soon discovered and admitted that the South could not be united against the North and for disunion on opposition to a protective tariff. He therefore promptly sought an opportunity to bring forward in Congress the slavery question, and to attack the "agitators" and opponents of slavery extension in the North, and to threaten disunion if the institution of slavery was not permitted to dictate the political policy of the Republic.

The exact method of reviving in Congress the whole subject of slavery so soon after nullification had been so signally suppressed by Jackson is worth briefly stating.

President Jackson, in his Annual Message, December, 1835, called attention to attempts to use the mails to circulate matter calculated to excite slaves to insurrection, but he did not recommend any legislation to prevent it. Mr. Calhoun moved in the Senate that so much of the message relating to mail transportation of incendiary publications be referred to a select committee of five.

He was made chairman of this committee, and, on his request, three others from the South, with but one from the North, were put on the committee, and he promptly made an elaborate and carefully- prepared report, going into the whole doctrine of states-rights and nullification.

In it he said:

Here, perhaps, was the clearest statement yet made, not only of the independence of States from Federal interference and of their right, on their own whim, to break the "compact," but of the right of the slaveholding States to dictate to the other States legislation on the subject of slavery.

It was at once a declaration of independence for the Southern States, and a declaration of their right to hold all the Northern States so far subject to them as to be obliged, on demand, to pass and enforce any prescribed law in the interest of slavery. The South was to be the sole judge of what law on this subject was requisite for slavery's purposes.

No duty was demanded on this question of the Federal Government; and Southern States, according to Calhoun, owed it none where slavery was concerned.

Calhoun and his committee could discover no power in the Southern States to enforce their demands save to act as separate and independent communities—that is, by setting up for themselves. This led logically to disunion, the result intended.

There was much in this report setting forth and professing to believe that it was the purpose of the North to emancipate the slaves, and through the agencies of organized anti-slavery societies bring about slave insurrections. The fanaticism of the North was descanted on, and the character of slavery and its wisdom as a social institution upheld.

He further said:

"He who regards slavery in those States simply under the relation of master and slave, as important as that relation is, viewed merely as a question of property to the slave-holding section of the Union, has a very imperfect conception of the institution, and the impossibility of abolishing it without disasters unexampled in the history of the world. To understand its nature and importance fully, it must be borne in mind that slavery, as it exists in the Southern States, involves not only the relation of master and slave, but also the social and political relation of the two races, of nearly equal numbers, from different quarters of the globe, and the most opposite of all others in every particular that distinguishes one race of men from another."

The whole report was replete with accusations against the North, and full of warning as to what the South would do should its demands not be complied with. The bill brought in by the committee was more remarkable than the report itself, and wholly inconsistent with its doctrine.

The bill provided high penalties for any postmaster who should knowingly receive and put into the mail any publication or picture touching the subject of slavery, to go into any State or Territory in which its circulation was forbidden by state law.

The report concluded:

Clay, Webster, Benton, and others ably and effectually combated both the report and the bill, and the latter failed (25 to 19) in the Senate.

Besides denying the doctrine of the report, they showed the evil was not in mailing, but in taking from the mails and circulating by their own citizens the supposed objectionable publications.

Benton, himself a slaveholder, then and in subsequent years assailed and pronounced the doctrine of this report as the "birth of disunion." He has also shown that Calhoun delighted over the agitation of slavery more than he deprecated it; that he profoundly hoped that on the slavery question the South would be united and a Slave-Confederacy formed.

In support of this Mr. Benton quotes from a letter of Mr. Calhoun to a gentleman in Alabama (1847) in which he says:

"I am much gratified with the tone and views of your letter, and concur entirely in the opinion you express, that instead of shunning, we ought to court the issue with the North on the slavery question. I would even go one step further and add that it is our duty to force the issue on the North. We are now stronger relatively than we shall be hereafter, politically and morally. Unless we bring on the issue, delay to us will be dangerous indeed. . . . Something of the kind was indispensable to the South. On the contrary, if we should not meet it as we ought, I fear, greatly fear, our doom will be fixed."

Comment is unnecessary, but the letter, almost exultantly, mentions as fortunate that the Wilmot Proviso was offered, as it gave an opportunity to unite the South.

It proceeds:

The letter, still proceeding to discuss modes of dissolution or retaliation against Northern States, declares a convention of Southern States indispensable, and their co-operation absolutely essential to success, and says:

"Let that be called, and let it adopt measures to bring about the co-operation, and I would underwrite for the rest. The non- slaveholding States would be compelled to observe the stipulations of the Constitution in our favor, or abandon their trade with us, or to take measures to coerce us, which would throw on them the responsibility of dissolving the Union. Their unbounded avarice would in the end control them."

It is certain that President Jackson's heroic proclamation of December, 1832, aborted the project of nullification under the South Carolina Ordinance, and certain it is, also, that the disappointed leaders of it turned from a protective tariff as a ground for it, to what they regarded as a better excuse, to wit: A slavery agitation, generated out of false alarms in the slave States.

After the tariff compromise of 1833, in which Calhoun sullenly acquiesced, he returned home and immediately announced that the South would never unite against the North on the tariff question, —"That the sugar interest of Louisiana would keep her out,—and consequently the basis of Southern union must be shifted to the slave question," which was then accordingly done.

Jackson, discussing nullification, is reported to have said:

"It was the tariff this time; next time it will be the negro."

This new and dangerous departure was not overlooked. The report and bill of 1835 relating to the use of the mails was only a chapter in execution of the new plan.

The observing friends of the Union did not overlook or misunderstand the movement. They at once took alarm. Mr. Clay, in May, 1833, wrote a letter to Mr. Madison expressing his apprehensions of the new danger, which brought from him a prompt response.

Mr. Madison in his letter said:

"It is painful to see the unceasing efforts to alarm the South by imputations against the North of unconstitutional designs on the subject of the slaves. You are right. I have no doubt that no such intermeddling disposition exists in the body of our Northern brethren. Their good faith is sufficiently guaranteed by the interest they have as merchants, ship-owners, and as manufacturers, in preserving a union with the slave-holding states. On the other hand, what madness in the South to look for greater safety in disunion."

What Clay and Madison saw in 1833 as the real starting-point for ultimate secession proved true to history. From that time dates the machinations which led, through the steps that successively followed, to actual dissolution of the Union in 1860-61; then to coercion—War; then to the eradication of slavery. It was Southern madness that hastened the destruction of American slavery. "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."

The excuse for even this much significance given to "nullification" is, that in less than thirty years, under a new name—"state-rights" —it worked secession—disunion, and lit up the whole country with the flames and frenzy of internal war that did not die down for four years more; and then only when slavery was consumed.

The great abolition movement commenced in earnest, January 1, 1831. Wm. Lloyd Garrison published, at Boston, the Liberator, with the motto—"Our countrymen are all mankind." Benjamin Lundy, and perhaps others, had preceded Garrison, but not until after the Webster-Hayne debate did the abolition movement spread. Thenceforth it took deeper root in the human conscience, and it had advocates of determined spirit throughout the North, led on fearlessly, not alone by Garrison, but by Rev. Dr. Channing, Rev. James Freeman Clarke, and, later, by Rev. Samuel May (Syracuse, N. Y.), Gerritt Smith, the poet Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, Horace Mann, Charles Sumner, Joshua R. Giddings, Owen Lovejoy, and others, who spoke from pulpit, rostrum, and some in the halls of legislation; others in the courts and through the press. The enforcement of the fugitive-slave law was often violent, and always added new fuel to the fierce and constantly growing opposition to slavery.

The Anti-Slavery party was not one wholly built on abstract sentiment of philanthropists, but it involved physical resistance: Violence to violence.

The American Anti-Slavery Society was founded at a National Anti-Slavery Convention held in Philadelphia, in December, 1831.

Hard upon the establishment of the Liberator came the Nat Turner insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia (August, 1831). This gave to the South a fresh ground to complain of the North. Turner's insurrection was held to be the legitimate fruit of abolition agitation. Turner was an African of natural capacity, who quoted the Bible fluently, prayed vehemently, and preached to his fellow slaves.

He told them, as did Joan of Arc, of "Voices" and "Visions," and of his communion with the Holy Spirit. An eclipse of the sun was the signal to strike their enemies and for freedom. The massacre lasted forty-eight hours, and sixty-one whites, women and children not spared, were victims. On the other hand, negroes were shot, tortured, hanged, and burned at the stake on whom the slightest suspicion of complicity fell.

The Nat Turner negro slave insurrection is the only one known to slavery in the United States. Others may possibly have been contemplated. The John Brown raid was not a negro insurrection. Even in the midst of the war (1861-65), believed by most slaves to be a war for their freedom, insurrections were unknown.

The African race, the most wronged through the centuries, has been the most docile and the least revengeful of the races of the world.

XVII. NEBRASKA ACT—1854

Over the disposition of the Territory of Nebraska it remained to have the last Congressional struggle for the extension of slavery. This Territory in 1854 comprised what are now the States of Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. It was a large part of the Louisiana Purchase, in area 485,000 square miles, twelve times as large as Ohio, about ten times the size of New York, 140,000 square miles larger than the original thirteen States, and more than four times the area of Great Britain and Ireland. It was what was left of the purchase after Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, and Indian Territory were carved out. It then had only about one thousand white inhabitants.

The desire to still placate the threatening South and to win its political favor, led some great and patriotic men of the North to attempt measures in the interest of slavery.

On January 4, 1854, Stephen A. Douglas, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, made a report embodying constitutional theories not hitherto promulgated, and questioning or repudiating others long supposed to have been settled.

The report announced the discovery of a new principle of the Compromise measures of 1850.

It declared:

"They were intended to have a far more comprehensive and enduring effect than the mere adjustment of difficulties arising out of the recent acquisition of Mexican territory. They were designed to establish certain great principles, which would not only furnish adequate remedies for existing evils, but in all time to come avoid the perils of similar agitation by withdrawing the question of slavery from the halls of Congress and the political arena, committing it to the arbitration of those who are immediately interested in and alone responsible for its consequences. . . . A question has arisen in regard to the right to hold slaves in the Territory of Nebraska. . . . It is a disputed point whether slavery is prohibited in the Nebraska country by valid enactment. In the opinion of eminent statesmen. . . . the eighth section of the act preparatory to the admission of Missouri is null and void."

The eighth section prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of 36° 30´, hence from the Nebraska Territory. The report reiterated the absurd doctrine:

"That the Constitution. . . . secures to every citizen an inalienable right to move into any of the Territories with his property, of whatever kind and description, and to hold and enjoy the same under the sanction of law."

(What law? The law of the place whence it came, or the law of the place to which it was taken? Not even an ox or an ass can be held as property save under the law of the place where it is; nor is the title to the soil valid except under the law of the place where it is located. As well as might a person claim the right to move to a Territory and there own the land by virtue of the Constitution and the laws of the State of his former residence as to claim under them the right to own and sell his slave in a Territory. The difficulty is, while the emigrant might take with him his human chattel, he could not take with him the law permitting him to hold it.)

The report did not, however, as presented, propose to repeal the Missouri Compromise line that had stood thirty-four years with the approval of the first statesmen of all parties in the Union.

It assumed simply to interpret for the dead Clay and Webster their only four-year-old work, and ran thus:

"The Compromise Measures of 1850 affirm and rest upon the following propositions:

"First—That all questions pertaining to slavery in the Territories, and the new States to be formed therefrom, are to be left to the decision of the people residing therein.

"Second—That 'all cases involving the title to slaves' and 'questions of personal freedom' are to be referred to the jurisdiction of the local tribunals, with the right to appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States.

"Third—That the provisions of the Constitution, in respect to fugitives from service, are to be carried into faithful execution in all 'the organized Territories,' the same as in the States."

The first of these propositions, in another form, announced the new doctrine of popular sovereignty, soon thereafter popularly called "Squatter Sovereignty," in derision of the rights thus to be vested in the territorial squatter, however temporary his stay might be. It was opposed to the principle of Congressional right (expressly granted by the Constitution) to provide rules (laws) and regulations for United States territory until it became clothed with statehood.

The second proposition announced nothing new, as cases involving titles to slaves, or questions of personal freedom, must necessarily go for final determination to the courts, with a right of appeal.

The third proposition, like the second, was a mere platitude.

The bill accompanying the report, as first presented, required that any part of Nebraska Territory admitted as a state (as provided in the New Mexico and Utah Acts of 1850) "shall be received into the Union with or without slavery, as its Constitution may prescribe at the time of admission." This, too, was not new in any sense, as new States had ever been thus received. The anti-slavery press and societies, and all people opposed to further slavery aggression and extension, at once took alarm and violently assailed the new doctrines of the report; the South, too, at first viewed them with surprise, denominating them "a snare set for the South," yet later regarded them as favorable to the extension of slavery. Southern statesmen, however, determined to force Douglas to amend them so as to accomplish the ends of the South. Accordingly, Senator Dixon of Kentucky, on January 16th, offered an amendment to the Nebraska Bill providing for the absolute repeal of the Missouri Compromise line. This amendment Douglas, apparently with reluctance, accepted, after a consultation with Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, and President Pierce, both of whom promised it their support.

January 23, 1854, Douglas presented a substitute for his original bill, wherein it was provided that the restriction of the Missouri Compromise "was superseded by the principles of the legislation of 1850, and is hereby declared inoperative."

The new bill divided the Territory in two parts; the southern, called Kansas, lay between 37° and 40° of latitude, extending west to the Rocky Mountains, and the northern was still called Nebraska.

As early as 1853 a movement in Missouri was started, avowedly to make Nebraska slave Territory, and this was well known to Douglas and the supporters of his newly announced doctrines. Kansas, lying farthest south, was climatically better suited for slavery than the new Nebraska. Before the bill passed, plans were made to invade Kansas from Missouri and Arkansas by slaveholders with their slaves.

January 24, 1854, the Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States was published.

Chase and Giddings of Ohio were its authors; some verbal additions, however, were made to it by Sumner and Gerritt Smith.

This Appeal was signed by S. P. Chase, Charles Sumner, Joshua R. Giddings, Edward Wade, Gerritt Smith, and Alexander De Witt; three at least of whom were then, or soon became first among the great statesmen opposed to human slavery. The Appeal declared the new Nebraska Bill would "open all the unorganized Territories of the Union to the ingress of slavery." A plot to convert them "into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves," to the exclusion of immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States. It reviewed the history of Congressional legislation on slavery in the Territories, reciting, among other things, that President Monroe approved the Missouri Compromise after his Cabinet had given him a written opinion that the section restricting slavery was constitutional.

John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State, John C. Calhoun, Secretary of War, Wm. H. Crawford, Secretary of the Treasury, and Wm. Wirt, Attorney-General—three from slave States—then constituted Monroe's Cabinet.

The Appeal warningly proceeded:

These patriotic expressions electrified the whole country. The North was aroused to their truth, the South seized upon them as threats of disunion, and still louder than before, if possible, called for a united South to vindicate slavery's rights in the Territories. Douglas attempted in the Senate to answer the Appeal. This led to an acrimonious debate, participated in by Chase, Sumner, Seward, Everett, and others, too long to be reviewed here.

Senator Benjamin F. Wade, of Ohio, took a prominent part in the memorable debate over the Douglas-Nebraska Bill. He was bold, and never dealt in sophistry, but in plain speech.

Mr. Badger, of North Carolina, while making a slavery-dilution argument, appealingly said:

"Why, if some Southern gentleman wishes to take the nurse who takes charge of his little baby, or the old woman who nursed him in childhood, and whom he called 'Mammy' until he returned from college, . . . and whom he wishes to take with him . . . into one of these new Territories, . . . why, in the name of God, should anybody prevent it?"

Mr. Wade responded:

"The Senator entirely mistakes our position. We have not the least objection, and would oppose no obstacle to the Senator's migrating to Kansas and taking his old 'Mammy' along with im. We only insist that he shall not be empowered to sell her after taking her there."

Mr. Chase moved to amend the bill by adding the words:

"Under which the people of the Territories, through their appropriate representatives, may, if they see fit, prohibit the existence of slavery therein."

This amendment failed, but it served to test the good faith of those who supported the squatter sovereignty feature of the bill.

After a long struggle the bill passed, and was approved by the
President in May, 1854.

XXIII. SECESSION OF STATES—1860-1

From what has been said, it will be seen the hour had arrived for practical secession—disunion—or a total abandonment by the South of its defiant position on slavery. The latter was not to be expected of the proud race of Southern statesmen and slaveholders. They had pushed their cause too far to recede, and the North, though conceding generally that there was no constitutional power to interfere with slavery where it existed, was equally determined not to permit its extension. In secession lay the only hope of either forcing the North to recede from its position, or, if successful, to create a new government wherein slavery should be universal and fundamental. Never before had it been proposed to establish a nation solely to perpetuate human slavery.

The election of Lincoln was already announced as a sufficient cause for secession. The South had failed to make California slave; to make four more slave States out of Texas; to secure pledges that out of the New Mexico Territory other slave States should be formed; and to make Kansas a slave State. It had also failed to acquire Cuba, already slave, for division into more slave States. There was, moreover, a certainly that many more free States would be admitted from the territorial domain of the great West. The political equilibrium in Congress on the line of slavery had therefore become impossible for all the future. These were the grievances over which the South brooded.

But was it not in the divine plan that slavery in the Republic should come to a violent end? Nowhere among the kingdoms and empires of the earth had it become, or had it ever been so deeply implanted, as a part of a political system. In the proud, boastful, free Republic of America, in the afternoon of the nineteenth century, where the Christian religion was taught, where liberty of conscience was guaranteed by organic law, where civilization was assumed to exist in its most enlightened and progressive stage, there, alone, the slave owner marshalled boastfully his human slaves, selling them on the auction block or otherwise at will, to be carried to distant parts, separating wife and husband, parents and children, and in a thousand ways shocking all the purer instincts of humanity.

Nor did its evil effects begin or cease with the black slave.

Jefferson, speaking of slavery in the United States when it existed in a more modified form, described its immoral effect on the master and his family thus: