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petitions for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law and the1 abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; Henry Wilson, by his bill for the more effectual suppression of2 the slave trade; but especially Owen Lovejoy, inviting by his speech of April 5 the fate of his martyr brother,3 redeemed the Republican Party from the stigma of universal cowardice.
‘If slavery is right in Virginia,’ said Lovejoy, ‘it is right in Kansas’—words of whose full logic he stopped short, indeed, but which confirmed the South in its habit of identifying the Republicans with the abolition propagandists.
‘The fault I find with the Republicans,’ said Wendell Phillips at New York in May,4 with a special reference to Mr. Seward, ‘is, that they are such children, that they are such infants, as to suppose that, with their past behind them, and with their future looking out of their eyes, the slaveholder, or the abolitionist either, believes the lies that they call speeches.’5
On the 23d of April, 1860, the Democratic National6 Convention met in Charleston, S. C., or, in other words, in the one city of the Union where the local feeling and influence would contribute the utmost possible to a pro-Southern determination of the candidates and destinies of the party.
The Convention at once came under the municipal law of the ‘peculiar institution’ which forbade the military band brought from New York to play7 after ten o'clock at night in the streets, since its drums might be mistaken for the dread alarm-signal of a slave
5 William Pinkney of Maryland, addressing the U. S. Senate on April 15, 1820, on the admission of Missouri, and repelling the intimation that the slave States did not possess ‘a republican form of government,’ as guaranteed by the Constitution, asked: ‘Do gentlemen perceive the consequences to which their arguments must lead if they are of any value? Do they reflect that they lead to emancipation in the old United States, or to an exclusion of Delaware, Maryland and all the South, and a great portion of the West, from the Union? . . . They have no disposition to meddle with slavery in the old United States. Perhaps not-but who shall answer for their successors. . . It is the natural office of such a principle to wrestle with slavery wheresoever it finds it’ ( “Library of am. Literature,” 4.188). This reasoning was applicable to the Republicans in 1860: the sentiment which was hostile to the extension of slavery into the Territories, could not rest quiet while slavery existed anywhere in the Union.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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