The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences. Hilary A. Herbert
day, not long after Appomattox, he told his father he had reached the conclusion that slavery was wrong. The reply was, to the writer's surprise, that his mother in early life had been an avowed emancipationist; that she (who had lived until the writer was sixteen years old) had never felt at liberty to discuss slavery after the rise of the new abolitionists and the Nat Turner insurrection; and then followed the further information that when, in 1846, the family removed from South Carolina to Alabama, Greenville, Ala., was chosen for a home because it was thought that the danger from slave insurrections would be less there than in one of the richer "black counties."
What a creature of circumstances man is! The writer's belief about a great moral question, his home, his school-mates, and the companions of his youth, were all determined by a movement begun in Boston, Massachusetts, before he was born in the far South!
With a vivid personal recollection of the closing years of the great anti-slavery crusade always in his mind, the writer has studied closely many of the histories dealing with that movement, and he has found quite a consensus of opinion among Northern writers—a view that has even been sometimes accepted in the South—that it was not so much the fear of insurrections, created by Abolition agitation, that shut off discussion in the South about the rightfulness of slavery as it was the invention of the cotton-gin, that made cotton growing and slavery profitable. The cotton-gin was invented in 1792, and was in common use years before the writer's mother was born. A native of, she grew to maturity entirely in, the South, and in 1830 was an avowed emancipationist. The subject was then being freely discussed.
The author has ventured to relate in the pages that follow this introduction two or three incidents that were more or less personal, in the hope that their significance may be his sufficient excuse.
And now, having spoken of himself as a Southerner, the author thinks it but fair, when invoking for the following pages fair consideration, to add that, since 1865, he has never ceased to rejoice that slavery is no more, and that secession is now only an academic question; and, further, that he has, since Appomattox, served the government of the United States for twenty years as loyally as he ever served the Confederacy. He therefore respectfully submits that his experiences ought to render him quite as well qualified for an impartial consideration of the anti-slavery crusade and its consequences as are those who have never, either themselves or through the eyes of their ancestors, seen more than one side of those questions. Certain he is, in his own mind, that this Union has now no better friend than is he who submits this little study, conscious of its many shortcomings, claiming for it nothing except that it is the result of an honest effort to be fair in every statement of facts and in the conclusions reached.
Not much effort has been made in the direction of original research. Facts deemed sufficient to illustrate salient points, which alone can be treated of in a short story, have been found in published documents, and other facts have been purposely taken, most of them, from Northern writers; and the authorities have been duly cited. These facts have been compressed into a small compass, so that the book may be available to such students as have not time for a more extended examination.
Of the results of the crusade of the Abolitionists, and the consequent sectional war, George Ticknor Curtis, one of New England's distinguished biographers, says in his "Life of Buchanan," vol. II, p. 283:
"It is cause for exultation that slavery no longer exists in the broad domain of this republic—that our theory of government and practice are now in complete accord. But it is no cause for national pride that we did not accomplish this result without the cost of a million of precious lives and untold millions of money."
CHAPTER I
SECESSION AND ITS DOCTRINE
John Fiske has said in his school history: "Under the government of England before the Revolution the thirteen commonwealths were independent of one another, and were held together juxtaposed, rather than united, only through their allegiance to the British Crown. Had that allegiance been maintained there is no telling how long they might have gone on thus disunited."
They won their independence under a very imperfect union, a government improvised for the occasion. The "Articles of Confederation," the first formal constitution of the United States of America, were not ratified by Maryland, the last to ratify, until in 1781, shortly before Yorktown. In 1787 the thirteen States, each claiming to be still sovereign, came together in convention at Philadelphia and formed the present Constitution, looking to "a more perfect union." The Constitution that created this new government has been rightly said to be "the most wonderful work ever struck off, at a given time, by the brain and purpose of man."[1] And so it was, but it left unsettled the great question whether a State, if it believed that its rights were denied to it by the general government, could peaceably withdraw from the Union.
The Federal Government was given by the Constitution only limited powers, powers that it could not transcend. Nowhere on the face of that Constitution was any right expressly conferred on the general government to decide exclusively and finally upon the extent of the powers granted to it. If any such right had been clearly given, it is certain that many of the States would not have entered into the Union. As it was, the Constitution was only adopted by eleven of the States after months of discussion. Then the new government was inaugurated, with two of the States, Rhode Island and North Carolina, still out of the Union. They remained outside, one of them for eighteen months and the other for a year.
The States were reluctant to adopt the Constitution, because they were jealous of, and did not mean to give up, the right of self-government.
The framers of the Constitution knew that the question of the right of a State to secede was thus left unsettled. They knew, too, that this might give trouble in the future. Their hope was that, as the advantages of the Union became, in process of time, more and more apparent, the Union would grow in favor and come to be regarded in the minds and hearts of the people as indissoluble.
From the beginning of the government there were many, including statesmen of great influence, who continued to be jealous of the right of self-government, and insisted that no powers should be exercised by the Federal Government except such as were very clearly granted in the Constitution. These soon became a party and called themselves Republicans. Some thirty years later they called themselves Democrats. Those, on the other hand, who believed in construing the grants of power in the Constitution liberally or broadly, called themselves Federalists.
Washington was a Federalist, but such was his influence that the dispute between the Republicans and the Federalists about the meaning of the Constitution did not, during his administration, assume a serious aspect; but when a new president, John Adams, also a Federalist, came in with a congress in harmony with him, the Republicans made bitter war upon them. France, then at war with England, was even waging what has been denominated a "quasi war" upon us, to compel the United States, under the old treaty of the Revolution, to take her part against England; and England was also threatening us. Plots to force the government into the war as an ally of France were in the air.
Adams and his followers believed in a strong and spirited government. To strike a fatal blow at the plotters against the public peace, and to crush the Republicans at the same time, Congress now passed the famous alien and sedition laws.
One of the alien laws, June 25, 1798, gave the President, for two years from its passage, power to order out of the country, at his own will, and without "trial by jury" or other "process of law," any alien he deemed dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.
The sedition law, July 14, 1798, made criminal any unlawful conspiracy to oppose any measure of the government of the United States "which was directed by proper authority," as well as also any "false and scandalous accusations against the Government,