To properly understand the condition of things preceding the great war of the Rebellion, and the causes underlying that condition and the war itself, we must glance backward through the history of the Country to, and even beyond, that memorable 30th of November, 1782, when the Independence of the United States of America was at last conceded by Great Britain. At that time the population of the United States was about 2,500,000 free whites and some 500,000 black slaves. We had gained our Independence of the Mother Country, but she had left fastened upon us the curse of Slavery. Indeed African Slavery had already in 1620 been implanted on the soil of Virginia before Plymouth Rock was pressed by the feet of the Pilgrim Fathers, and had spread, prior to the Revolution, with greater or less rapidity, according to the surrounding adaptations of soil, production and climate, to every one of the thirteen Colonies.
But while it had thus spread more or less throughout all the original Colonies, and was, as it were, recognized and acquiesced in by all, as an existing and established institution, yet there were many, both in the South and North, who looked upon it as an evil—an inherited evil—and were anxious to prevent the increase of that evil. Hence it was that even as far back as 1699, a controversy sprang up between the Colonies and the Home Government, upon the African Slavery question—a controversy continuing with more or less vehemence down to the Declaration of Independence itself.
It was this conviction that it was not alone an evil but a dangerous evil, that induced Jefferson to embody in his original draft of that Declaration a clause strongly condemnatory of the African Slave Trade—a clause afterward omitted from it solely, he tells us, "in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never* attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it," as well as in deference to the sensitiveness of Northern people, who, though having few slaves themselves, "had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others" a clause of the great indictment of King George III., which, since it was not omitted for any other reason than that just given, shows pretty conclusively that where the fathers in that Declaration affirmed that "all men are created equal," they included in the term "men," black as well as white, bond as well as free; for the clause ran thus: "Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every Legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying of former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of our people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another."
[Prior to 1752, when Georgia surrendered her charter and became a Royal Colony, the holding of slaves within its limits was expressly prohibited by law; and the Darien (Ga.) resolutions of 1775 declared not only a "disapprobation and abhorrence of the unnatural practice of Slavery in America" as "a practice founded in injustice and cruelty, and highly dangerous to our Liberties (as well as lives) but a determination to use our utmost efforts for the manumission of our slaves in this colony upon the most safe and equitable footing for the masters and themselves."]
During the war of the Revolution following the Declaration of Independence, the half a million of slaves, nearly all of them in the Southern States, were found to be not only a source of weakness, but, through the incitements of British emissaries, a standing menace of peril to the Slaveholders. Thus it was that the South was overrun by hostile British armies, while in the North—comparatively free of this element of weakness—disaster after disaster met them. At last, however, in 1782, came the recognition of our Independence, and peace, followed by the evacuation of New York at the close of 1783.
The lessons of the war, touching Slavery, had not been lost upon our statesmen. Early in 1784 Virginia ceded to the United States her claims of jurisdiction and otherwise over the vast territory north-west of the Ohio; and upon its acceptance, Jefferson, as chairman of a Select Committee appointed at his instance to consider a plan of government therefor, reported to the ninth Continental Congress an Ordinance to govern the territory ceded already, or to be ceded, by individual States to the United States, extending from the 31st to the 47th degree of north latitude, which provided as "fundamental conditions between the thirteen original States and those newly described" as embryo States thereafter—to be carved out of such territory ceded or to be ceded to the United States, not only that "they shall forever remain a part of the United States of America," but also that "after the year 1800 of the Christian era, there shall be neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States"—and that those fundamental conditions were "unalterable but by the joint consent of the United States in Congress assembled, and of the particular State within which such alteration is proposed to be made."
But now a signal misfortune befell. Upon a motion to strike out the clause prohibiting Slavery, six States: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania, voted to retain the prohibitive clause, while three States, Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina, voted not to retain it. The vote of North Carolina was equally divided; and while one of the Delegates from New Jersey voted to retain it, yet as there was no other delegate present from that State, and the Articles of Confederation required the presence of "two or more" delegates to cast the vote of a State, the vote of New Jersey was lost; and, as the same Articles required an affirmative vote of a majority of all the States—and not simply of those present—the retention of the clause prohibiting Slavery was also lost. Thus was lost the great opportunity of restricting Slavery to the then existing Slave States, and of settling the question peaceably for all time. Three years afterward a similar Ordinance, since become famous as "the Ordinance of '87," for the government of the North-west Territory (from which the Free States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin have since been carved and admitted to the Union) was adopted in Congress by the unanimous vote of all the eight States present. And the sixth article of this Ordinance, or "Articles of Compact," which it was stipulated should "forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent," was in these words:
"Art. 6. There shall be neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory, otherwise than in punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted; provided always that any person escaping into the same from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed, and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor, or service, as aforesaid."
But this Ordinance of '87, adopted almost simultaneously with the framing of our present Federal Constitution, was essentially different from the Ordinance of three years previous, in this: that while the latter included the territory south of the Ohio River as well as that north-west of it, this did not; and as a direct consequence of this failure to include in it the territory south of that river, the States of Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, which were taken out of it, were subsequently admitted to the Union as Slave States, and thus greatly augmented their political power. And at a later period it was this increased political power that secured the admission of still other Slave States—as Florida, Louisiana and Texas—which enabled the Slave States to hold the balance of such power as against the original States that had become Free, and the new Free States of the North-west.
Hence, while in a measure quieting the great question of Slavery for the time being, the Ordinance of '87 in reality laid the ground-work for the long series of irritations and agitations touching its restrictions and extension, which eventually culminated in the clash of arms that shook the Union from its centre to its circumference. Meanwhile, as we have seen—while the Ordinance of 1787 was being enacted in the last Congress of the old Confederation at New York—the Convention to frame the present Constitution was sitting at Philadelphia under the Presidency of George Washington himself. The old Confederation had proved itself to be "a rope of sand." A new and stronger form of government had become a necessity for National existence.
To create it out of the discordant elements whose harmony was essential to success, was an herculean task, requiring the utmost forbearance, unselfishness, and wisdom. And of all the great questions, dividing the framers of that Constitution, perhaps none of them required a higher degree of self abnegation and patriotism than those touching human Slavery.
The situation was one of extreme delicacy. The necessity for a closer and stronger Union of all the States was apparently absolute, yet this very necessity seemed to place a whip in the hands of a few States, with which to coerce the greater number of States to do their bidding. It seemed that the majority must yield to a small minority on even vital questions, or lose everything.
Thus it was, that instead of an immediate interdiction of the African Slave Trade, Congress was empowered to prohibit it after the lapse of twenty years; that instead of the basis of Congressional Representation being the total population of each State, and that of direct taxation the total property of each State, a middle ground was conceded, which regarded the Slaves as both persons and property, and the basis both of Representation and of Direct Taxation was fixed as being the total Free population "plus three-fifths of all other persons" in each State; and that there was inserted in the Constitution a similar clause to that which we have seen was almost simultaneously incorporated in the Ordinance of '87, touching the reclamation and return to their owners of Fugitive Slaves from the Free States into which they may have escaped.
The fact of the matter is, that the Convention that framed our Constitution lacked the courage of its convictions, and was "bulldozed" by the few extreme Southern Slave-holding States—South Carolina and Georgia especially. It actually paltered with those convictions and with the truth itself. Its convictions—those at least of a great majority of its delegates—were against not only the spread, but the very existence of Slavery; yet we have seen what they unwillingly agreed to in spite of those convictions; and they were guilty moreover of the subterfuge of using the terms "persons" and "service or labor" when they really meant "Slaves" and "Slavery." "They did this latter," Mr. Madison says, "because they did not choose to admit the right of property in man," and yet in fixing the basis of Direct Taxation as well as Congressional Representation at the total Free population of each State with "three-fifths of all other persons," they did admit the right of property in man! As was stated by Mr. Iredell to the North Carolina Ratification Convention, when explaining the Fugitive Slave clause: "Though the word 'Slave' is not mentioned, this is the meaning of it." And he added: "The Northern delegates, owing to their peculiar scruples on the subject of Slavery, did not choose the word 'Slave' to be mentioned."
In March, 1789, the first Federal Congress met at New York. It at once enacted a law in accordance with the terms of the Ordinance of '87—adapting it to the changed order of things under the new Federal Constitution—prohibiting Slavery in the Territories of the North-west; and the succeeding Congress enacted a Fugitive-Slave law.
In the same year (1789) North Carolina ceded her western territory (now Tennessee) south of the Ohio, to the United States, providing as one of the conditions of that cession, "that no regulation made, or to be made, by Congress, shall tend to emancipate Slaves." Georgia, also, in 1802, ceded her superfluous territorial domain (south of the Ohio, and now known as Alabama and Mississippi), making as a condition of its acceptance that the Ordinance of '87 "shall, in all its parts, extend to the territory contained in the present act of cession, the article only excepted which forbids Slavery."
Thus while the road was open and had been taken advantage of, at the earliest moment, by the Federal Congress to prohibit Slavery in all the territory north-west of the Ohio River by Congressional enactment, Congress considered itself barred by the very conditions of cession from inhibiting Slavery in the territory lying south of that river. Hence it was that while the spread of Slavery was prevented in the one Section of our outlying territories by Congressional legislation, it was stimulated in the other Section by the enforced absence of such legislation. As a necessary sequence, out of the Territories of the one Section grew more Free States and out of the other more Slave States, and this condition of things had a tendency to array the Free and the Slave States in opposition to each other and to Sectionalize the flames of that Slavery agitation which were thus continually fed.
Upon the admission of Ohio to Statehood in 1803, the remainder of the North-west territory became the Territory of Indiana. The inhabitants of this Territory (now known as the States of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin), consisting largely of settlers from the Slave States, but chiefly from Virginia and Kentucky, very persistently (in 1803, 1806 and 1807) petitioned Congress for permission to employ Slave Labor, but—although their petitions were favorably reported in most cases by the Committees to which they were referred—without avail, Congress evidently being of opinion that a temporary suspension in this respect of the sixth article of the Ordinance of '87 was "not expedient." These frequent rebuffs by Congress, together with the constantly increasing emigration from the Free States, prevented the taking of any further steps to implant Slavery on the soil of that Territory.
Meanwhile the vast territory included within the Valley of the Mississippi and known at that day as the "Colony of Louisiana," was, in 1803, acquired to the United States by purchase from the French—to whom it had but lately been retroceded by Spain. Both under Spanish and French rule, Slavery had existed throughout this vast yet sparsely populated region. When we acquired it by purchase, it was already there, as an established "institution;" and the Treaty of acquisition not only provided that it should be "incorporated into the Union of the United States, and admitted as soon as possible, according to the principles of the Federal Constitution," but that its inhabitants in the meantime "should be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and the religion which they professed"—and, as "the right of property in man" had really been admitted in practice, if not in theory, by the framers of that Constitution itself—that institution was allowed to remain there. Indeed the sparseness of its population at the time of purchase and the amazing fertility of its soil and adaptability of its climate to Slave Labor, together with the then recent invention by Eli Whitney, of Massachusetts, of that wonderful improvement in the separation of cotton-fibre from its seed, known as the "cotton-gin"—which with the almost simultaneous inventions of Hargreaves, and Arkwright's cotton-spinning machines, and Watt's application of his steam engine, etc., to them, marvelously increased both the cotton supply and demand and completely revolutionized the cotton industry—contributed to rapidly and thickly populate the whole region with white Slave-holders and black Slaves, and to greatly enrich and increase the power of the former.
When Jefferson succeeded in negotiating the cession of that vast and rich domain to the United States, it is not to be supposed that either the allurements of territorial aggrandizement on the one hand, or the impending danger to the continued ascendency of the political party which had elevated him to the Presidency, threatening it from all the irritations with republican France likely to grow out of such near proximity to her Colony, on the other, could have blinded his eyes to the fact that its acquisition must inevitably tend to the spread of that very evil, the contemplation of which, at a later day, wrung from his lips the prophetic words, "I tremble for my Country when I reflect that God is just." It is more reasonable to suppose that, as he believed the ascendency of the Republican party of that day essential to the perpetuity of the Republic itself, and revolted against being driven into an armed alliance with Monarchical England against what he termed "our natural friend," Republican France, he reached the conclusion that the preservation of his Republican principles was of more immediate moment than the question of the perpetuation and increase of human Slavery. Be that as it may, it none the less remains a curious fact that it was to Jefferson, the far-seeing statesman and hater of African Slavery and the author of the Ordinance of 1784—which sought to exclude Slavery from all the Territories of the United States south of, as well as north-west of the Ohio River—that we also owe the acquisition of the vast territory of the Mississippi Valley burdened with Slavery in such shape that only a War, which nearly wrecked our Republic, could get rid of!
Out of that vast and fertile, but Slave-ridden old French Colony of "Louisiana" were developed in due time the rich and flourishing Slave States of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas.
It will have been observed that this acquisition of the Colony of Louisiana and the contemporaneous inventions of the cotton-gin, improved cotton-spinning machinery, and the application to it of steam power, had already completely neutralized the wisdom of the Fathers in securing, as they thought, the gradual but certain extinction of Slavery in the United States, by that provision in the Constitution which enabled Congress, after an interval of twenty years, to prohibit the African Slave Trade; and which led the Congress, on March 22, 1794, to pass an Act prohibiting it; to supplement it in 1800 with another Act in the same direction; and on March 2, 1807, to pass another supplemental Act—to take effect January 1, 1808—still more stringent, and covering any such illicit traffic, whether to the United States or with other countries. Never was the adage that, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley," more painfully apparent. Slaves increased and multiplied within the land, and enriched their white owners to such a degree that, as the years rolled by, instead of compunctions of conscience on the subject of African Slavery in America, the Southern leaders ultimately persuaded themselves to the belief that it was not only moral, and sanctioned by Divine Law, but that to perpetuate it was a philanthropic duty, beneficial to both races! In fact one of them declared it to be "the highest type of civilization."
In 1812, the State of Louisiana, organized from the purchased Colony of the same name, was admitted to the Union, and the balance of the Louisiana purchase was thereafter known as the Territory of Missouri.
In 1818 commenced the heated and protracted struggle in Congress over the admission of the State of Missouri—created from the Territory of that name—as a Slave State, which finally culminated in 1820 in the settlement known thereafter as the "Missouri Compromise."
Briefly stated, that struggle may be said to have consisted in the efforts of the House on the one side, to restrict Slavery in the State of Missouri, and the efforts of the Senate on the other, to give it free rein. The House insisted on a clause in the Act of admission providing, "That the introduction of Slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited, except for the punishment of crimes whereof the party has been duly convicted; and that all children born within the said State, after the admission thereof into the Union, shall be declared Free at the age of twenty-five years." The Senate resisted it—and the Bill fell. In the meantime, however, a Bill passed both Houses forming the Territory of Arkansas out of that portion of the Territory of Missouri not included in the proposed State of Missouri, without any such restriction upon Slavery. Subsequently, the House having passed a Bill to admit the State of Maine to the Union, the Senate amended it by tacking on a provision authorizing the people of Missouri to organize a State Government, without restriction as to Slavery. The House decidedly refused to accede to the Senate proposition, and the result of the disagreement was a Committee of Conference between the two Houses, and the celebrated "Missouri Compromise," which, in the language of another—[Hon. John Holmes of Massachusetts, of said Committee on Conference, March 2, 1820.]—, was: "that the Senate should give up its combination of Missouri with Maine; that the House should abandon its attempt to restrict Slavery in Missouri; and that both Houses should concur in passing the Bill to admit Missouri as a State, with" a "restriction or proviso, excluding Slavery from all territory north and west of the new State"—that "restriction or proviso" being in these words: "That in all that territory ceded by France to the United States under the name of Louisiana, which lies north of thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes north latitude, excepting only such part thereof as is included within the limits of the State contemplated by this act, Slavery and involuntary servitude, otherwise than in the punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall be and is hereby forever prohibited; Provided always, that any person escaping into the same, from whom labor and service is lawfully claimed in any State or Territory of the United States, such Fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service, as aforesaid." At a subsequent session of Congress, at which Missouri asked admission as a State with a Constitution prohibiting her Legislature from passing emancipation laws, or such as would prevent the immigration of Slaves, while requiring it to enact such as would absolutely prevent the immigration of Free Negroes or Mulattoes, a further Compromise was agreed to by Congress under the inspiration of Mr. Clay, by which it was laid down as a condition precedent to her admission as a State—a condition subsequently complied with—that Missouri must pledge herself that her Legislature should pass no act "by which any of the citizens of either of the States should be excluded from the enjoyment of the privileges and immunities to which they are entitled under the Constitution of the United States."
This, in a nut-shell, was the memorable Missouri Struggle, and the "Compromise" or Compromises which settled and ended it. But during that struggle—as during the formation of the Federal Constitution and at various times in the interval when exciting questions had arisen—the bands of National Union were more than once rudely strained, and this time to such a degree as even to shake the faith of some of the firmest believers in the perpetuity of that Union. It was during this bitter struggle that John Adams wrote to Jefferson: "I am sometimes Cassandra enough to dream that another Hamilton, another Burr, may rend this mighty fabric in twain, or perhaps into a leash, and a few more choice spirits of the same stamp might produce as many Nations in North America as there are in Europe."
It is true that we had "sown the wind," but we had not yet "reaped the whirlwind."
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