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C. F. Robertson, "The Louisiana Purchase," etc. "Papers of the American Association," vol. I, pp. 262, 263.

This project did not assume serious proportions.

John Fiske in his school history says: "John Quincy Adams, a supporter of the embargo act of 1807, privately informed President Jefferson that further attempts to enforce it in the New England States would be likely to drive them to secession. Accordingly, the embargo was repealed, and the non-intercourse act substituted for it."

The spirit of nationality was yet in its infancy, threats of secession were common, and they came then mostly from New England. These threats were in no wise connected with slavery; agitators had not then made slavery a national issue; the idea of separation was prompted by the fear that power in the councils of the Union would pass into the hands of other sections.

June 15, 1813, the Massachusetts legislature endorsed the position taken in this speech.

"American State Documents and Federal Relations," p. 21.

Later, in 1814, a convention of representative New England statesmen met at Hartford, to consider of secession unless the non-intercourse act, which also bore hard on New England, should be repealed; but the war then pending was soon to close, and the danger from that quarter was over.

But secession was not exclusively a New England doctrine. "When the Constitution was adopted by the votes of States in popular conventions, it is safe to say there was not a man in the country, from Washington and Hamilton, on the one side, to George Clinton and George Mason, on the other, who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment, entered into by the States, and from which each and every State had the right to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised."

Henry Cabot Lodge's "Webster," p. 176.

It is perfectly true that the secession resolution of the Massachusetts legislature of 1844 was passed fourteen years after Webster's speech, but the Garrisonians had then been agitating the slavery question within her borders for fourteen years, and the old State was now beside herself with excitement.

There was another great factor in the rapid manufacture of Union sentiment at the North that had practically no existence at the South. It was immigration.

The new-comers from over the sea knew nothing, and cared less, about the history of the Constitution or the dialectics of secession. They had sought a land of liberty that to them was one nation, with one flag flying over it, and in their eyes secession was rebellion. Immigrants to America, practically all settling in Northern States, were during the thirty years, 1831-1860, 4,910,590; and these must, with their natural increase, have numbered at least six millions in 1860. In other words, far more than one-fourth of the people of the North in 1860 were not, themselves or their fathers, in the country in the early days when the doctrine of States' rights had been in the ascendant; and, as a rule, to these new people that old doctrine was folly.

In the South the situation was reversed. Slavery had kept immigrants away. The whites were nearly all of the old revolutionary stock, and had inherited the old ideas. Still, love of and pride in the Union had grown in them too. Nor were the Southerners all followers of Jefferson. From the earliest days much of the wealth and intelligence of the country, North and South, had opposed the Democracy, first as Federalists and later as Whigs. In the South the Whigs have been described as "a fine upstanding old party, a party of blue broadcloth, silver buttons, and a coach and four." It was not until anti-slavery sentiment had begun to array the North, as a section, against the South, that Southern Whigs began to look for protection to the doctrine of States' rights.

Woodrow Wilson says, in "Division and Reunion," p. 47, of Daniel Webster's great speech in 1830: "The North was now beginning to insist upon a national government; the South was continuing to insist upon the original understanding of the Constitution; that was all."

And in those attitudes the two sections stood in 1860-61, one upon the modern theory of an indestructible Union; the other upon the old idea that States had the right to secede from the Union.

In 1848 there occurred in Ireland the "Rebellion of the Young Irishmen." Among the leaders of that rebellion were Thomas F. Meagher and John Mitchel. Both were banished to Great Britain's penal colony. Both made their way, a few years later, to America. Both were devotees of liberty, both men of brilliant intellect and high culture. Meagher settled in the North, Mitchel in the South. This was about 1855. Each from his new stand-point studied the history and the Constitution of his adopted country. Meagher, when the war between the North and South came on, became a general in the Union army. Mitchel entered the civil service of the Confederacy and his son died a Confederate soldier.

The Union or Confederate partisan who has been taught that his side was "eternally right, and the other side eternally wrong," should consider the story of these two "Young Irishmen."

How fortunate it is that the ugly question of secession has been settled, and will never again divide Americans, or those who come to America!

EMANCIPATION PRIOR TO 1831

"Slavery and Anti-Slavery," 3d ed., 1885.

The slaves coming to America went chiefly to the Southern colonies, because there only was slave labor profitable. The laws and conditions under which these negroes were sold in the American colonies were precisely the same as in the West Indies, except that the whites in the islands, so far as is known, never objected, whereas the records show that earnest protests came from Virginia and also from Georgia and North Carolina. The King of England was interested in the profits of the iniquitous trade and all protests were in vain.

Of the rightfulness, however, of slavery itself there was but little question in the minds of Christian peoples until the closing years of the eighteenth century. Then the cruelties practised by ship-masters in the Middle Passage attracted attention, and then came gradually a revolution in public opinion. This revolution, in which the churches took a prominent part, originated in England, but it soon swept over America also, both North and South.

England abolished the slave trade in 1807. The United States followed in 1808; the Netherlands in 1814; France in 1818; Spain in 1820; Portugal in 1830. The great Wilberforce, Buxton, and others, who had brought about the abolition of the slave trade in England, continued their exertions in favor of the slave until finally, in 1833, Parliament abolished slavery in the British West Indies, appropriating twenty millions sterling as compensation to owners--this because investments in slave property had been made under the sanction of existing law.

"Great Britain, loaded with an unprecedented debt and with a grinding taxation, contracted a new debt of a hundred millions of dollars to give freedom, not to Englishmen, but to the degraded African. This was not an act of policy, but the work of statesmen. Parliament but registered the edict of the people. The English nation, with one heart and one voice, under a strong Christian impulse and without distinction of rank, sex, party, or religious names, decreed freedom to the slave. I know not that history records a national act so disinterested, so sublime."

So wrote Dr. Channing, the great New England pulpit orator, in his celebrated letter on Texas annexation, to Henry Clay, in 1837.

While the rightfulness of slavery was being discussed in England, the American conscience had also been aroused, and emancipation was making progress on this side of the water.

Emancipation was an easy task in the Northern States, where slaves were few, their labor never having been profitable, and by 1804 the last of these States had provided for the ultimate abolition of slavery within its borders. But the problem was more difficult in the Southern States, where the climate was adapted to slave labor. There slaves were numerous, and slavery was interwoven, economically and socially, with the very fabric of existence. Naturally, it occurred to thoughtful men that there ought to be some such solution as that which was subsequently adopted in England, and which, as we have seen, was so highly extolled by Dr. Channing--emancipation of the slaves with compensation to the owners by the general government. The difficulty in our country was that the Federal Constitution conferred upon the Federal Government no power over slavery in the States--no power to emancipate slaves or compensate owners; and that for the individual States where the negroes were numerous the problem seemed too big. Free negroes and whites in great numbers, it was thought, could not live together. To get rid of the negroes, if they should be freed, was for the States a very serious, if not an unsurmountable task.

On the seventeenth of January, 1824, the following resolutions, proposed as a solution of the problem, were passed by the legislature of Ohio:

"State Documents on Federal Relations," Ames, pp. 203-4.

Ames, p. 203.

The resolutions required of the Southern States a complete surrender in this regard of their reserved rights; they feared what Governor Wilson called "the overwhelming powers of the general government," and were unwilling to make the admission required, that the slavery in the South was a question for the nation.

Another reason was that, although there was a quite common desire in the Southern States to get rid of slavery, the majority sentiment doubtless was not yet ready for the step.

Basing this plan on the "consent of the slave-holding States," as the Ohio legislature did, was an acknowledgment that the North had no power over the matter; while the proposition to share in the expense of transporting the negroes, after they were manumitted, seems to be a recognition of the joint responsibility of both sections for the existence of slavery in the South. However that may be, the generous concurrence of nine of the thirteen Northern States indicates how kindly the temper of the North toward the South was before the rise of the "New Abolitionism" in 1831. Had emancipation been, under the Federal Constitution, a national and not a local question, it is possible that slavery might have been abolished in America, as it was in the mother country, peacefully and with compensation to owners.

The Ohio idea of freeing and at the same time colonizing the slaves, was no doubt suggested by the scheme of the African Colonization Society. This Colonization Society grew out of a resolution passed by the General Assembly of Virginia, December 23, 1816. Its purpose was to rid the country of such free negroes and subsequently manumitted slaves as should be willing to go to Liberia, where a home was secured for them, and a government set up that was to be eventually controlled by the negro from America. The plan was endorsed by Georgia in 1817, Maryland in 1818, Tennessee in 1818, and Vermont in 1819.

Ames, 195.

The Colonization Society was composed of Southern and Northern philanthropists and statesmen of the most exalted character. Among its presidents were, at times, President Monroe and ex-President Madison. Chief Justice Marshall was one of its presidents. Colonization, while relieving America, was also to give the negro an opportunity for self-government and self-development in his native country, aided at the outset by experienced white men, and Abraham Lincoln, when he was eulogizing the dead Henry Clay, one of the eloquent advocates of the scheme, seemed to be in love with the idea of restoring the poor African to that land from which he had been rudely snatched by the rapacious white man. The society, with much aid from philanthropists and some from the Federal Government, was making progress when, from 1831 to 1835, the Abolitionists halted it. They got the ears of the negro and persuaded him not to go to Liberia. Its friends thought the enterprise would stimulate emancipation by furnishing a home for such negroes as their owners were willing to manumit; but the new friends of the negro told him it was a trick of the slave-holder, and intended to perpetuate slavery--it was banishment. And Dr. Hart now, in his "Abolition and Slavery," calls it a move for the "expatriation of the negro."

See Garrison's "Garrison."

All together only a few thousand negroes went to Liberia. The enterprise lagged, and finally failed, partly because of opposition, but chiefly because the negroes were slothful and incapable of self-government. The word came back that they were not prospering. For a time, while white men were helping them in their government, the outlook for Liberia had more or less promise in it. When the whites, to give the negroes their opportunity for self-development withdrew their case was hopeless.

"Webster's Works," vol. V, pp. 366-67, 1851.

The crime, if crime it was, of slavery in the South in 1830 was one for which the two sections of the Union were equally to blame. Abraham Lincoln said in his debate with Douglas at Peoria, Illinois, October 15, 1858: "When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely do not blame them for not doing what I would not know how to do myself."

"The Negro Problem," Pickett, 1809.

Let the reader assume as a fact, which will perhaps not be questioned, that "free blacks" in the census means freedmen and their increase, and these tables tell their own story, a story to which must be added the statement that slaves in the South had been freed only by voluntary sacrifices of owners.

It will be noted that in 1790 the total "blacks" in the North was 67,479, and, although emancipation in these States had begun some years before, the excess of "free blacks" in the South was over 5,000. Also that at every succeeding census, down to and including that of 1830, the "excess of free blacks" increased with considerable regularity until 1830, when that excess is 44,547.

There was always in the South, prior to 1831, an active and freely expressed emancipation sentiment. But there was not enough of it to influence legislation. In all but three or four of these States, emancipation was made difficult by laws which, among other conditions, required that slaves after being freed should leave the State.

Emancipation in the North had not been completed in 1830. Professor Ingram, president of the Royal Irish Academy, says in his "History of Slavery," London, 1895, p. 184: "The Northern States--beginning with Vermont in 1777 and ending with New Jersey in 1804--either abolished slavery or adopted measures to effect its gradual abolition within their boundaries. But the principal operation of the latter change was to transfer Northern slaves to Southern markets."

There had been in 1820 an angry discussion in Congress about the admission of Missouri--with or without slavery--which was finally settled by the Missouri Compromise. This dispute over the admission of Missouri is often said to have been the beginning of the sectional quarrel that finally ended in secession; but the controversy over Missouri and that begun by the "New Abolitionists" in 1831 were entirely distinct. They were conducted on different plans.

Garrison's "Garrison," vol. I, p. 113.

The South was content with the Missouri Compromise, and from that date, 1820, until the rise of the "New Abolitionists," slavery was in all that region an open question. Judge Temple says in his "Covenanter, Cavalier, and Puritan," p. 208: "In 1826, of the 143 emancipation societies in the United States, 103 were in the South."

The questions for Southern emancipationists were: How could the slaves be freed, and in what time? How about compensation to owners? Where could the freed slaves be sent, and how? And, if deportation should prove impossible, what system could be devised whereby the two races could dwell together peacefully? These were indeed serious problems, and required time and grave consideration.

"Who can doubt," says Mr. Curtis, to quote once more his "Life of Buchanan," "that all such questions could have been satisfactorily answered, if the Christianity of the South had been left to its own time and mode of answering them, and without any external force but the force of kindly, respectful consideration and forebearing Christian fellowship?"

George Ticknor Curtis's "Life of Buchanan," vol. II, p. 283.

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