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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.
The extreme opponents of slavery had taken more advanced ground than ever before. They denounced the Fugitive Slave Law as a statute which Congress had no right to enact and which no citizen should obey. They pointed out that it was in violation of that very doctrine of state sovereignty to which the advocates of slavery had appealed. The ultra ones among them planted themselves upon the doctrine first enunciated by Mr. Seward of New York, that there is a "higher law" than the statutes or the Constitution, and that men of enlightened consciences were bound to obey that higher law even to the extent of violating the statutes, and setting the Constitution at naught.
The time had obviously come when there was no longer any use in the adoption of compromises or the passage of conciliatory laws by statesmen whose first concern was for the preservation of the Union. Compromises were no longer binding upon men's consciences or conduct. Political parties refused to regard them and even states in their organized capacity legislated for their nullification, asserting their right of sovereignty to that extent.
It is obvious that peace could not long continue in a country thus violently divided against itself in opinion and sentiment. Sooner or later by one means or another, but with the same certainty that governs the rising and the setting of the sun, such a condition meant war. In this case it meant that within the Union so afflicted there was an "irrepressible conflict" of opinion, a conflict that would yield to no argument, submit itself to no law, accommodate itself to no circumstance and would stoutly insist upon irreconcilable contentions on the one side and the other until the matter should be decided by that last brutal arbitrament of man, a conflict of cannon, musketry, and mortars.
Precisely that condition of affairs had been reached in the United States when the compromise measures of 1850 were repudiated, defied and nullified by both popular and legislative authority. Logically the war between North and South should have occurred then, and undoubtedly it would have occurred at that time but for the persistence of that sentiment of devotion to the Union which still dominated the minds of a majority of men both at the North and at the South.
It was in obedience to that sentiment that statesmen refused to see the hopelessness of the situation and went on endeavoring to find some way out of the difficulty that should bring peace where there was no peace, and save the Union from disruption.
The trouble with all such efforts was that everything proposed by way of placating those on one side of the controversy additionally inflamed those on the other.
The most notable legislative outcome of this vexed situation was the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, for which Senator Douglas made himself sponsor. That bill provided for the erection of the two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, leaving it to those who should settle within that domain to permit or exclude slavery as they might please when the time should come for them to apply for admission to the Union as states. By direct implication at least slaves might freely be taken into those territories during the period of their territorial existence if the settlers there so desired.
In justice to the memory of a patriotic statesman who served his country to the best of his ability, it is only fair that his doctrine and his opinions shall be presented in his own words.
In the speech by which, in 1850, he placated the animosity that had greeted him at Chicago, he set forth his thought as follows:
These measures [the compromise measures of 1850] are predicated upon the great fundamental principle that every people ought to possess the right of framing and regulating their own internal concerns and domestic institutions in their own way… These things are all confided by the constitution to each state to decide for itself, and I know of no reason why the same principle should not be extended to the territories.
Three years later Mr. Douglas carefully set forth his doctrine again in the Kansas-Nebraska Bill itself. Referring to the Missouri Compromise, with its prohibition of slavery in the states to be erected out of Louisiana territory north of 36° 30´, the bill said:
Which being inconsistent with the principle of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the states and territories, as recognized by the legislation of 1850 … is hereby declared inoperative and void; it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any territory or state, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.
Mr. Douglas's doctrine, popularly known as "Squatter Sovereignty," was open to criticism on very obvious constitutional and historical grounds.
The original conception of the Union had undoubtedly been that it was a confederacy of states, each sovereign within itself except in so far as it had surrendered to the National Government a part of its sovereignty by accepting the Federal Constitution and entering the Union. It was deemed an axiom that each state was free by the will of its own citizens to regulate its domestic affairs in its own way, permitting or forbidding slavery at its own free will. After the great slavery controversy arose the South contended still for this doctrine of states' rights, and by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, this sovereignty of the states was extended to the territories also.
The student of history must observe however that that doctrine had been very greatly impaired if not indeed set aside by the act of Virginia in ceding her claims in the Northwest Territory and the acceptance of that cession by the general government. In that cession it had been stipulated that slavery should never be permitted in any of the territory thus made a part of the national domain. The cession was made with the direct intent that the region concerned should presently be divided and admitted into the Union as a number of states. But those states were thus forbidden in advance to permit the existence of slavery within their borders. So far as they were concerned, therefore, the supposed right of a state to legislate at will on that subject was taken away from them even before their birth.
Here it would seem there was an abrogation or at least an important modification of the doctrine of the right of each state to determine this question for itself, and that modification had been made by Virginia and everywhere accepted.
The Missouri Compromise in precisely the same manner had taken away that right of determination from all the states that might be formed out of the Louisiana territory lying north of the southern line of Missouri. If the prohibition thus laid upon yet unborn states was permissible as regards the cession of the Northwest Territory it would seem to have been equally so with regard to the new domain west of the Mississippi.
Further than this the sovereign right of a state to determine this question for itself did not extend at any time to the territories. Under the Constitution as uniformly interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States, Congress is supreme in the territories and may make any law that it pleases for their governance. In other words the people of the territories have absolutely no rights of self-government except such as Congress may from time to time see fit to confer upon them.
This statement is not made speculatively or as an opinion of the historian. It is a well settled doctrine of constitutional law, affirmed by every court to which the question has at any time been submitted.
Senator Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Bill was based upon an assumption precisely the reverse of this. It extended to the territories a sovereignty which under the Constitution belonged only to states, and which, as has been suggested, the states themselves had in a large degree surrendered by the acceptance of the cession of the Northwest Territory.
