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capture of Santa Anna; and the agents of the province were despatched to the United States to hasten the 1 recruiting of volunteers for the final struggle, and promote demonstrations of public sentiment and State action in2 favor of recognizing the independence of Texas.
Meantime, the Federal Senate admitted Arkansas with a constitution making slavery perpetual, while the House applied the gag-law for District petitions to remonstrances3 against confirming the action of the Senate, and then completed the iniquity.
The champions of freedom in the struggle of 1820 were now either dumb or impotent:4 the Missouri Compromise had extinguished their sensitiveness to the extension of the area of servitude.5
But the North was, if helpless, not indifferent.
She viewed with alarm the threatened increase of the Slave Power, and its new aggressiveness beyond its own bounds.
She felt herself on the defensive; and indeed, from this time the abolitionists no longer had to arouse the public conscience merely or mainly to the sin and shame and danger of the status quo, but could point to the portentous development of pro-slavery lust for power, and to act after act of aggrandizement for which no warning
4 Annual Report Mass. A. S. Soc., 1837, p. 39.
5 Webster dodged the vote in the Senate. His predecessor, Harrison Gray Otis, was no longer heard from. In 1820 the latter had said in the same body that he should ‘strenuously and forever oppose the extension of slavery, and all measures which should subject a freeman, of whatever color, to the degradation of a slave; . . . which should divest him of his property and rights, and interdict him from even passing into a country of which he was a legitimate co-proprietor with himself’ (Columbian Centinel, Jan. 24, 1821). Mayor Lyman had also opposed the Missouri Compromise in a 4th of July oration in 1820, and in 1821 had, as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, reported against a proposed law to check the immigration of pauper blacks. He, too, was now satisfied with the ‘Compact,’ as was John Quincy Adams, so far as concerned the bare admission of Arkansas as a slave State (Benton's Thirty years view, 1.636). Benton compliments the Northern members of Congress on their magnanimity in voting to ratify the treaty for the removal of the Cherokees (to make way for slavery), to enlarge the area of Missouri, by altering the compromise line so as to ‘convert free soil into slave soil,’ and to admit Arkansas with its slavery-perpetuating constitution—all in the session of 1835-36, amidst and in spite of ‘offensive criminations’ on the part of the South for the failure to suppress the abolitionists (Ibid., 1: 626, 627).
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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