an “irrepressible” desire to congratulate you all upon the triumphant progress of the “irrepressible conflict ” in all parts of our country. In the free States, undeniably, the conflict is going on; and may I not say that in all the slave States it is going on, with even more vehemence and zeal than among ourselves? For at last even the invincible Democratic Party have been reached; and, by the power which has been brought to bear upon it through the anti-slavery agitation, thank God! that party is no
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rising.
Other conditions had been sought to be imposed by the cotton States.
Months before, the Alabama Legislature had warned the South not to commit itself to a1 Presidential candidate who denied the equal right of slave property in the Territories, and to enter no Convention not pledged to this doctrine in advance.
For ten days, amid scenes of turbulence and passion unparalleled in2 American political history, the battle raged over this point.
Both wings of the party were agreed in reaffirming the Cincinnati platform of 1856, in denouncing the Personal Liberty laws of the North, in demanding the annexation of Cuba—which meant simply the revival of the slave trade.3 The fire-eaters, however, called for Federal protection of the right to hold slaves in the Territories, while the Douglas faction wished to relegate the question to the Supreme Court.
The latter triumphed, and the fire-eaters bolted the Convention, which, in default of any nominations after fifty-five ballots, was adjourned to Baltimore.
‘I feel,’ said Mr. Garrison, to his fellow-members of the4 American Anti-Slavery Society at New York on May 8,
3 Mr. Gaulden, one of the delegates from Georgia, spoke openly (and humorously) on May 1 in favor of this revival, without which, he said, it would be impossible to colonize new slave States except by depleting the old ones and throwing them into the ranks of the North. The African slave trade, he insisted, was much more moral than that of the slavebreeders in Virginia, who trafficked not in the heathen raw product, but in the manufactured article—in civilized and Christian men! (Lib. 30: 77.) At this time the participation of American ships in slave ventures for Cuba and the Southern U. S. seaboard was assuming flagrant proportions (Lib. 30: 83,103, 158, 167), though the Episcopal Convention in New York on Sept. 27 was much scandalized by John Jay's proposing a resolution condemning the trade (Lib. 30.158).
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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