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sacred, and its abolition not to be entertained.
This irrefragable argument for disunion demonstrated likewise the essential barrenness of the final victory of1 Mr. Adams's contention for the rescinding of the gag-rule against anti-slavery petitions—to which South Carolina responded that if Congress should next attempt2 antislavery legislation, the Federal compact would be at an end.
She was already proving it at an end, as far as Northern rights were concerned.
The State of Massachusetts had3 sent one of its most respectable citizens, Samuel Hoar of Concord, a lawyer and ex-Congressman, to Charleston, to test in the Federal courts the validity of the South4 Carolina law of December 19, 1835, providing for the jailing of colored seamen arriving at her ports.
The transmission of Mr. Hoar's credentials by the Governor of South Carolina to the State Legislature produced, in the Senate,5 resolutions pronouncing the mission a gross insult, and promising resistance to an adverse decision of the Federal courts.
The press reverberated with like menaces, intimating that South Carolina would anticipate a conflict6 with the United States by making one directly with Massachusetts—‘the Fort Moultrie State’ against ‘the Bunker Hill State.’
Calhoun's organ, the South Carolinian, hoped no lawyer would take a fee from Mr. Hoar.
Both branches of the Legislature called upon the Governor7 to expel him; and, this patriotic duty having been begun8 by his hotel-keeper, nothing remained for Mr. Hoar but to9 flee the State, which he did, under escort—the company of his daughter more than the gray hairs of this man of sixty-six insuring him from summary violence.
‘I am in hopes,’ wrote Edmund Quincy to Richard Webb, ‘that10 Massachusetts will at last be kicked into some degree of spirit.
I don't know that anything is left for her but reprisals.11 But slavery has n't left her pluck enough for that, I fancy’—the melancholy truth.
10 Ms. Dec. 14, 1844.
11 Mr. Hoar himself, in a letter on the Latimer case in 1842 (ante, p. 66), referred to the law of Louisiana ordering the arrest of any colored man entering the State from another State, and asked, why, then, might not every free State imprison every incoming native of a slaveholding State (Lib. 12: 177). He reached Charleston on Nov. 28, 1844; his colleague, Henry Hubbard of Pittsfield, Mass., delegated to Louisiana, arrived in New Orleans Dec. 1, and was likewise expelled, but less fiercely (Smith's “History of Pittsfield,” p. 405; and Lib. 15: 2, 9, 14, 17, 25). See the law enacted by the South Carolina Legislature to prevent the recurrence of like missions: ‘An Act to provide for the punishment of persons disturbing the peace of this State, in relation to slaves and free persons of color’ (Lib. 15: 14; 18: 65), and a similar one by Louisiana (Lib. 15: 17, 25).
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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