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Chapter 5:

  • The Territorial question
  • -- an incident at the white House -- the Kansas and Nebraska bill -- the Missouri Compromise abrogated in 1850, not in 1854 -- origin of “Squatter sovereignty” -- sectional rivalry and its consequences -- the Emigrant aid Societies -- “the Bible and Sharpe's rifles” -- false Pretensions as to principle -- the strife in Kansas -- a retrospect -- the original equilibrium of power and its overthrow -- usurpations of the Federal Government -- the protective tariff -- origin and progress of abolitionism -- who were the friends of the Union? -- an illustration of political morality.


The organization of the territory of Kansas was the first question that gave rise to exciting debate after my return to the Senate. The celebrated Kansas-Nebraska bill had become a law during the administration of Pierce. As this occupies a large space in the political history of the period, it is proper to state some facts connected with it which were not public, but were known to me and to others yet living.

The declaration, often repeated in 1850, that climate and the will of the people concerned should determine their institutions when they should form a constitution, and as a state be admitted into the Union, and that no legislation by Congress should be permitted to interfere with the free exercise of that will when so expressed, was but the announcement of the fact so firmly established in the Constitution, that sovereignty resided alone in the states, and that Congress had only delegated powers. It has been sometimes contended that because the Congress of the Confederation, by the Ordinance of 1787, prohibited involuntary servitude in all the Northwestern Territory, the framers of the Constitution must have recognized such power to exist in the Congress of the United States. Hence the deduction that the prohibitory clause of what is known as the Missouri Compromise was justified by the precedent of the Ordinance of 1787. To make the action of the Congress of the Confederation a precedent for the Congress of the United States is to overlook the great distinction between the two.

The Congress of the Confederation represented the states in their sovereignty; as such representatives, it had legislative, executive, and, in some degree, judicial power confided to it. Virtually, it was an assemblage of the states. In certain cases a majority of nine states were required [24] to decide a question, but there is no express limitation, or restriction, such as is to be found in the ninth and tenth amendments to the Constitution of the United States. The general government of the Union is composed of three departments, of which the Congress is the legislative branch, and which is checked by the revisory power of the judiciary, and the veto of the executive, and, above all, is expressly limited in legislation to powers expressly delegated by the states. If, then, it be admitted, which is certainly questionable, that the Congress of the Confederation had power to exclude slave property northwest of the Ohio River, that power must have been derived from its character as representing the states in their sovereignty, for no indication of such a power is to be found in the Articles of Confederation.

If it be assumed that the absence of a prohibition was equivalent to the admission of the power in the Congress of the Confederation, the assumption would avail nothing in the Congress under the Constitution, where power is expressly limited to what has been delegated. More briefly, it may be stated that the Congress of the Confederation could, like the legislature of a state, do what had not been prohibited; but the Congress of the United States could only do what had been expressly permitted. It is submitted whether this last position is not conclusive against the possession of power by the United States Congress to legislate slavery into or exclude it from territories belonging to the United States.

This subject, which had for more than a quarter of a century been one of angry discussion and sectional strife, was revived, and found occasion for renewed discussion in the organization of territorial governments for Kansas and Nebraska. The Committees on Territories of the two houses agreed to report a bill in accordance with that recognized principle, provided they could first be assured that it would receive favorable consideration from the President. This agreement was made on Saturday, and the ensuing Monday was the day (and the only day for two weeks) on which, according to the order of business established by the rules of the House of Representatives, the bill could be introduced by the committee of that house.

On Sunday morning, January 22, 1854, gentlemen of each committee called at my house; Douglas, chairman of the Senate committee, fully explained the proposed bill, and stated their purpose to be, through my aid, to obtain an interview on that day with the President, to ascertain whether the bill would meet his approbation. The President was known to be rigidly opposed to the reception of visits on Sunday for [25] the discussion of any political subject, but in this case it was urged as necessary, in order to enable the committee to make their report the next day. I went with them to the executive mansion, and, leaving them in the reception room, sought the President in his private apartments and explained to him the occasion of the visit. He thereupon met the gentlemen, patiently listened to the reading of the bill and their explanations of it, decided that it rested upon sound constitutional principles, and recognized in it only a return to that rule which had been infringed by the compromise of 1820, and the restoration of which had been foreshadowed by the legislation of 1850. This bill was not, therefore, as has been improperly asserted, a measure inspired by Mr. Pierce or any of his cabinet. Nor was it the first step taken toward the repeal of the conditions or obligations expressed or implied by the establishment, in 1820, of the politico-sectional line of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes. That compact had been virtually abrogated, in 1850, by the refusal of the representatives of the North to apply it to the territory then recently acquired from Mexico. In May, 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska bill was passed; its purpose was declared in the bill itself to be to carry into practical operation the “propositions and principles established by the compromise measures of 1850.” The Missouri Compromise, therefore, was not repealed by that bill—its virtual repeal by the legislation of 1850 was recognized as an existing fact, and it was declared to be “inoperative and void.”

It was added that the “true intent and meaning” of the act was “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.”

From the terms of this bill, as well as from the arguments that were used in its behalf, it is evident that its purpose was to leave the territories equally open to the people of all the states, with every species of property recognized by any of them; to permit climate and soil to determine the current of immigration, and to secure to the people themselves the right to form their own institutions according to their own will, as soon as they should acquire the right of self-government; that is to say, as soon as their numbers should entitle them to organize themselves into a state, prepared to take its place as an equal, sovereign member of the federal Union. The claim, afterward advanced by Douglas and others, that this declaration was intended to assert the right of the first settlers of a territory, in its inchoate, rudimental, dependent, and transitional [26] condition, to determine the character of its institutions, constituted the doctrine popularly known as “squatter sovereignty.” Its assertion led to the dissensions which ultimately resulted in a rupture of the Democratic party.

Sectional rivalry, the deadly foe of the “domestic tranquillity” and the “general welfare,” which the compact of union was formed to insure, now interfered, with gigantic efforts to prevent that free migration which had been promised, and to hinder the decision by climate and the interests of the inhabitants of the institutions to be established by these embryo states. Societies were formed in the North to supply money and send emigrants into the new territories; a famous preacher, addressing a body of those emigrants, charged them to carry with them to Kansas “the Bible and Sharpe's rifles.” The latter were of course to be leveled against the bosoms of their Southern brethren who might migrate to the same territory, but the use to be made of the Bible in the same fraternal enterprise was left unexplained by the reverend gentleman.

The war-cry employed to train the Northern mind for the deeds contemplated by the agitators was “No extension of slavery!” Was this sentiment real or feigned? The number of slaves (as has already been clearly shown) would not have been increased by their transportation to new territory. It could not be augmented by further importation, for the law of the land made that piracy. Southern men were the leading authors of that enactment, and the public opinion of their descendants, stronger than the law, fully sustained it. The climate of Kansas and Nebraska was altogether unsuited to the negro, and the soil was not adapted to those productions for which negro labor could be profitably employed. If, then, any negroes held to service or labor, as provided in the compact of union, had been transported to those territories, they would have been such as were bound by personal attachment mutually existing between master and servant, which would have rendered it impossible for the former to consider the latter as property convertible into money. As white laborers, adapted to the climate and its products, flowed into the country, negro labor would have inevitably become a tax to those who held it, and their emancipation would have followed that condition, as it has in all the Northern states, old or new—Wisconsin furnishing the last example.1 It may, therefore, be reasonably concluded that the warcry [27] was employed by the artful to inflame the minds of the less informed and less discerning, that it was adopted in utter disregard of the means by which negro emancipation might have been peaceably accomplished in the Territories, and with the sole object of obtaining sectional control and personal promotion by means of popular agitation.

The success attending this artifice was remarkable. To such an extent was it made available that Northern indignation was aroused on the absurd accusation that the South had destroyed “that sacred instrument, the compromise of 1820.” The internecine war which raged in Kansas for several years was substituted for the promised peace under the operation of the natural laws regulating migration to new countries. For the fratricide which dyed the virgin soil of Kansas with the blood of those who should have stood shoulder to shoulder in subduing the wilderness; for the frauds which corrupted the ballot-box and made the name of election a misnomer-let the authors of “squatters sovereignty” and the fomenters of sectional hatred answer to the posterity for whose peace and happiness the fathers formed the federal compact.

In these scenes of strife were trained the incendiaries who afterward invaded Virginia under the leadership of John Brown; at this time germinated the sentiments which led men of high position to sustain, with their influence and their money, this murderous incursion into the South.2

Now was seen the lightning of that storm, the distant muttering of which had been heard so long, and against which the wise and the patriotic had given solemn warning, regarding it as the sign which portended a dissolution of the Union.

Diversity of interests and of opinions among the states of the Confederation had in the beginning presented great difficulties in the way of the formation of a more perfect union. The compact was the result of compromise between the states, at that time generally distinguished as navigating and agricultural, afterward as Northern and Southern. When the first census was taken, in 1790, there was but little numerical difference in the population of these two sections, and (including states [28] about to be admitted) there was also an exact equality in the number of states. Each section had, therefore, the power of self-protection, and might feel secure against any danger of federal aggression. If the disturbance of that equilibrium had been the consequence of natural causes, and the government of the whole had continued to be administered strictly for the general welfare, there would have been no ground for complaint of the result.

Under the old Confederation the Southern states had a large excess of territory. The acquisition of Louisiana, of Florida, and of Texas, afterward greatly increased this excess. The generosity and patriotism of Virgina led her, before the adoption of the Constitution, to cede the Northwest Territory to the United States. The Missouri Compromise surrendered to the North all the newly acquired region not included in the state of Missouri, and north of the parallel of thirty-six degrees and a half. The northern part of Texas was in like manner given up by the compromise of 1850; and the North, having obtained, by those successive cessions, a majority in both houses of Congress, took to itself all the territory acquired from Mexico. Thus, by the action of the general government, the means were provided permanently to destroy the original equilibrium between the sections.

Nor was this the only injury to which the South was subjected. Under the power of Congress to levy duties on imports, tariff laws were enacted, not merely “to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,” as authorized by the Constitution, but, positively and primarily, for the protection against foreign competition of domestic manufactures. The effect of this was to impose the main burden of taxation upon the Southern people, who were consumers and not manufacturers, not only by the enhanced price of imports, but indirectly by the consequent depreciation in the value of exports, which were chiefly the products of Southern states. The imposition of this grievance was unaccompanied by the consolation of knowing that the tax thus borne was to be paid into the public treasury, for the increase of price accrued mainly to the benefit of the manufacturer. Nor was this all: a reference to the annual appropriations will show that the disbursements made were as unequal as the burdens borne—the inequality in both operating in the same direction.

These causes all combined to direct immigration to the Northern section; and with the increase of its preponderance appeared more and more distinctly a tendency in the federal government to pervert functions [29] delegated to it, and to use them with sectional discrimination against the minority.

The resistance to the admission of Missouri as a state in 1820 was evidently not owing to any moral or constitutional considerations, but merely to political motives; the compensation exacted for granting what was simply a right was the exclusion of the South from equality in the enjoyment of territory which justly belonged equally to both, and which was what the enemies of the South stigmatized as “slave territory,” when acquired.

The sectional policy then indicated brought to its support the passions that spring from man's higher nature, but which, like all passions, if misdirected and perverted, become hurtful and, it may be, destructive. The year 1835 was marked by the public agitation for the abolition of that African servitude which existed in the South, which antedated the Union, and had existed in every one of the states that formed the Confederation. By a great misconception of the powers belonging to the general government, and the responsibilities of citizens of the Northern states, many of those citizens were, little by little, brought to the conclusion that slavery was a sin for which they were answerable, and that it was the duty of the federal government to abate it. Though, at the date above referred to, numerically so weak, when compared with either of the political parties at the North, as to excite no apprehension of their power for evil, the public demonstrations of the Abolitionists were violently rebuked generally at the North. The party was contemned on account of the character of its leaders, and the more odious because chief among them was an Englishman, one Thompson, who was supposed to be an emissary, whose mission was to prepare the way for a dissolution of the Union. Let us hope that it was reverence for the obligations of the Constitution as the soul of the Union that suggested lurking danger, and rendered the supposed emissary for its destruction so odious that he was driven from a Massachusetts hall where he attempted to lecture. But bodies in motion will overcome bodies at rest, and the unreflecting too often are led by captivating names far from the principles they revere.

Thus, by the activity of the propagandists of abolitionism, and the misuse of the sacred word Liberty, they recruited from the ardent worshipers of that goddess such numbers as gave them in many Northern states the balance of power between the two great political forces that stood arrayed against each other; then and there they came to be courted by both of the great parties, especially by the Whigs, who had become the weaker party of the two. Fanaticism, to which is usually accorded [30] sincerity as an extenuation of its mischievous tenets, affords the best excuse to be offered for the original abolitionists, but that cannot be conceded to the political associates who joined them for the purpose of acquiring power; with them it was but hypocritical cant, intended to deceive. Hence arose the declaration of the existence of an “irrepressible conflict,” because of the domestic institutions of sovereign, selfgovern-ing states—institutions over which neither the federal government nor the people outside of the limits of such states had any control, and for which they could have no moral or legal responsibility.

Those who are to come after us, and who will look without prejudice or excitement at the record of events which have occurred in our day, will not fail to wonder how men professing and proclaiming such a belief should have so far imposed upon the credulity of the world as to be able to arrogate to themselves the claim of being the special friends of a Union contracted in order to insure “domestic tranquillity” among the people of the states united; that they were the advocates of peace, of law, and of order, who, when taking an oath to support and maintain the Constitution, did so with a mental reservation to violate one of the provisions of that Constitution—one of the conditions of the compact— without which the Union could never have been formed. The tone of political morality which could make this possible was well indicated by the toleration accorded in the Senate to the flippant, inconsequential excuse for it given by one of its most eminent exemplars—“Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?”—meaning thereby, not that it would be the part of a dog to violate his oath, but to keep it in the matter referred to.3

1 Extracts from a speech of Davis of Mississippi in the Senate of the United States, May 17, 1860: “There is a relation belonging to this species of property, unlike that of the apprentice or the hired man, which awakens whatever there is of kindness or of nobility of soul in the heart of him who owns it; this can only be alienated, obscured, or destroyed, by collecting this species of property into such masses that the owner is not personally acquainted with the individuals who compose it. In the relation, however, which can exist in the Northwestern Territories, the mere domestic connection of one, two, or at most half a dozen servants in a family, associating with the children as they grow up, attending upon age as it declines, there can be nothing against which either philanthropy or humanity can make an appeal. Not even the emancipationist could raise his voice; for this is the highroad and the open gate to the condition in which the masters would, from interest, in a few years, desire the emancipation of every one who may thus be taken to the northwestern frontier.”

2 See “Report of Senate Committee of Inquiry into the John Brown Raid.”

3 See Appendix D.

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