The subject [of slavery] has not only attracted attention as8 a question of politics, but it has struck a far deeper-toned chord.
This text is part of:
[275]
Calhoun's glazed eye, almost fixed in death, saw more clearly than Clay's. His last speech, read for him in the Senate, protested not against the Kentuckian's aims in behalf of slavery, but his methods.
Disunion was the necessary end of an agitation which imperilled the equilibrium of slave and free States; and the Compromise did not protect that equilibrium.
The Fugitive Slave Bill introduced by Senator Butler of South Carolina would1 not meet the hopes of its author and supporters.
“It is impossible to execute any law of Congress until the people of the States shall cooperate.”
Lib. 20.46. He did not despise the influence of the Garrisonians: he had seen its working2 since 1835 [and longer, but he naturally remembered by3 landmarks of mob violence], and witnessed the beginning of disunion in the rending of the great religious4 denominations—the Episcopal alone remaining intact.5
Daniel Webster's incredible 7th of March speech, in6 wholesale support of the Compromise, carried dismay to the Conscience Whigs, who had built their hopes of him on random utterances disconnected by any logic of principle or behavior, and infused by no warmth of heart or ray of pity for the slave.
True, he had said at Marshfield,7 in September, 1842: ‘We talk of the North.
There has for a long time been no North.
I think the North Star is at last discovered; I think there will be a North’ exhibiting ‘a strong, conscientious, and united opposition to slavery.’
True, he had said in New York in March, 1837, during the Texas excitement:
3 Cf. ante, 2.59.
4 Ante, 2.152.
5 This encomiastic exception was merited. Mr. Garrison wrote in June, 1850 (Lib. 20: 104): ‘The conscience of the Episcopal Church of this country, so far as the colored population are concerned, whether bond or free, is harder than adamant.’ On Sept. 26, 1850, the Protestant Episcopal Convention in New York city refused to admit delegates from its own colored churches (Lib. 20: [158]). Save the Rev. E. M. P. Wells of Boston, who early withdrew from the cause (ante, 2: 54, 85, 252), we recall no Episcopal clergyman—as no Catholic priest—who ever identified himself with the abolitionists. As is well known, a slaveholding Southern Episcopal Bishop became a Confederate Major-General.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.