Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 3

[494]

Chapter 20: Abraham Lincoln.—1860.

Seward retracts his “irrepressible conflict” for the sake of the Presidency, and falls under the censure of Garrison, as does the Republican Party for its platform. The Democratic Party breaks in two at Charleston, and Lincoln is elected President. Garrison hails the secession of South Carolina as the end of the old Union and of slavery.

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‘The lamentable tragedy at Harper's Ferry is clearly traceable’ to the ‘unjustifiable attempt to force slavery into Kansas by a repeal of the Missouri Compromise.’ So thought and wrote, to a New York meeting of¹ Union-savers ex-President Fillmore, in the fortnight succeeding the hanging of John Brown. It was the historic truth; and the work of Nemesis had but begun.

Directly after the attack on Harper's Ferry, the South initiated disunion by fortifying itself against domestic insurrection, both by extra vigilance and armed police, by legislative measures to force its free negro population² back into slavery or into removal, and by renewed stringency in excluding Northern Republican papers from the³ mails. Moreover, the mobbing and expulsion of Northern residents or visitors was revived on an unparalleled⁴ scale, so that Mr. Garrison was led to compile a tract of 144 pages for publication by the Hovey Fund, called “ The New Reign of Terror,” and printed and distributed by⁵ thousands. These outrages grew with the aging year, and warranted a fresh compilation in November, when violence⁶ and suspicion, with the shadows of the impending civil⁷ disruption, had brought about a white exodus—when even, as in Georgia, Northerners coming by sea were⁸ kept from landing. Mr. Garrison, himself still in doubt whether the Southern menace of disunion was anything more than vaporing and bluster, marvelled that the North⁹ could view tranquilly—without the least outward manifestation of feeling—this barbarous negation of the commonest right of Federal citizenship. [495]

On its face, however, the situation was not so much a crisis as a rather flagrant illustration of the glorious Union worshipped by all parties at the North. For a quarter of a century, with Government sanction, the¹⁰ Southern mails had been closed to Northern ideas; with Government and State indifference, Northerners had been lynched or driven out. The lapse of time had left no excuse for spontaneous heat over such trifles, any more than over a slave-burning like that in Georgia in October,¹¹ or over the perennial fear of slave risings, such as infected¹² the whole South after Harper's Ferry, and in the summer and autumn of 1860 raged afresh, so that, as President¹³ Buchanan said, in his annual message to Congress, ‘a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar.’ All these things were symptomatic, not of disunion, but of Union.

A genuine sign of revolution was the centripetal movement of Southerners, as in the case of the two hundred¹⁴ medical students in Philadelphia who renounced Northern instruction and seceded to their homes. Governor Wise received them at Richmond as precursors of the break-up.¹⁵ The North bade them good-bye with a smile at their silliness, and turned an incredulous ear to the Southern echoes of Harper's Ferry in both Houses of Congress. Had not Fremont's possible election in 1856 been made the ground¹⁶ of threats of secession? Why, then, pay heed to similar talk now in view of Seward's probable nomination and election by the Republican Party? Henry Wilson, in a speech in the Senate on January 25, 1860, put on record¹⁷ what had already been said during the current session. Two examples will suffice. Senator Iverson of Georgia¹⁸ was ready to lead away the Southern delegation on the mere election of John Sherman to the speakership of the House—a contingency happily averted; and in any event¹⁹ saw “but one path of safety for the South, but one mode of preserving her institution of domestic slavery, and that is, a confederacy of States having no incongruous and opposing elements.” Lib. 30.17. The election of a Black Republican [496] President would furnish the occasion. In the House, Singleton of Mississippi declared he would never suffer²⁰ the army and navy to pass into the hands of such an Executive (with control, too, as Governor Letcher of²¹ Virginia added, of the judiciary and the post-offices). His advice to his own State was: “The sooner we get out of the Union, the better. . . . A gallant son of the South, Jefferson Davis, led our forces into Mexico, and, thank God! he still lives, perhaps to lead a Southern army.” Lib. 30.9.

Davis, in spite of his having repeatedly pledged²² himself to disunion in case of Republican success, was the²³ favorite ‘standard-bearer in 1860’ with the more besotted Democrats of the North. And even as Singleton was nominating him commander-in-chief of a Confederate army, Davis was reading a letter from ex-President Pierce,²⁴ marking him as ‘the coming man’ for the national Democratic nomination, and confirming the writer's old assurance that a civil war would not rage solely on the border:²⁵

‘Without,’ said the ex-President, discussing the question of right—of abstract power to secede, I have never believed that actual disruption of the Union can occur without blood. And if, through the madness of Northern abolitionism, that dire calamity must come, the fighting will not be along Mason's and Dixon's line merely: it [will] be within our own borders, in our own streets, between the two classes of citizens to whom I have referred. Those who defy law and scout constitutional obligations, will, if we ever reach the arbitrament of arms, find occupation enough at home. Independent Democrat, Concord, N. H., Sept. 17, 1863; Greeley's Am. Conflict, 1.513; Lib. 33.158.

On the other hand, the acknowledged ‘coming man’ of the Republican Party, William H. Seward, doubtless well content to have been absent in Europe during the John Brown excitement, landed in New York on²⁶ December 27, 1859, to the sound of guns in the City Hall park, and made a triumphal progress to his home in Auburn. Resuming his place in the Senate, where he was shunned²⁷ by his virtuous Southern colleagues, he made his first manifesto in a speech on his bill to admit Kansas. Instead²⁸ of proclaiming afresh, with all the force of the latest evidence, [497] the irrepressible conflict, he argued that there was no need of collision. Instead of justifying his Rochester²⁹ speech with John Brown, he repudiated him and justified his punishment. Instead of pointing again to the inherent antagonism of slave and free society, he talked softly of ‘capital’ (slave) and ‘labor’ (free) States, and of the wise arrangement which assigned to each the exclusive care of its own institutions. The Constitution was no longer to be viewed as the leash of two irreconcilable social systems, but as a structure consisting of composite marbles, equally serviceable to the edifice, but in hue appealing to different tastes. The Republican Party was not sectional, but was truly a Union party; its motto (Webster's reversed, with a vengeance!) ‘Union and Liberty’—i. e., Union before Liberty. It was not a propagandist of negro equality—witness the free States; it³⁰ was, therefore, a white man's party.

Such was Seward's bid for the Presidency, seduced by that which led to Webster's fall. Calculating and heartless, Mr. Garrison found it, proceeding from a statesman³¹ —whom, in spite of rare intellectual and rhetorical gifts, he had never regarded ‘as other than the incarnation of political circumspection—cold in blood, cautious in action, wholly indisposed to anything like “ultraism” in any direction.’

Speaking defensively for the Republican Party, Mr. Seward³² says: “I know of only one policy which it has adopted or avowed—namely, the saving of the Territories of the United States, if possible, by constitutional and lawful means, from being the homes for slavery and polygamy.” When or where that party has made any distinctive issue with polygamy, more³³ than the Democratic Party, we do not know; the statement is obviously made for popular effect. “Only one policy” —not the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, where it now exists by the consent and approval of Mr. Seward and his party; not the abolition of the revolting domestic slave trade; not the repeal, or even modification, of the Fugitive Slave Law; not the prohibition of slavery in any of the Territories—but only to save them, if possible, from its establishment upon their soil; [498] so that if they determine not to incorporate it into their State organizations, their wishes shall be consulted—which is to leave no issue in Congress at all; for we see no intimation in this speech of any purpose or wish, by the Republican Party, to resist the admission of any new slave State into the Union. And, indeed, how can that party make any such resistance, on conscientious grounds, as a matter of principle, seeing it gives its sanction and support to fifteen slave States already in the Union? In fact, that party has virtually yielded to the atrocious dogma of “popular sovereignty,” as inculcated by Senator Douglas; being willing, like himself, that the people of every Territory should decide in favor of slavery, or against it, for themselves, and only asking that they may be allowed entire freedom of choice.

At the most interesting and exciting epoch of his thirty years warfare, Mr. Garrison was disabled by a complicated bronchial disorder from undertaking his customary share of public speaking. At the close of 1859, he was put under medical prohibition, and a journey abroad³⁴ seemed desirable, and was even planned for the coming spring. When that season arrived, an appointment for the summer had been made, but also some relief had come³⁵ of abstinence, and the trip was finally abandoned; a recreation with his family among the White Mountains in August being substituted. But throat and lungs and a³⁶ slow fever confined him still, for the remainder of the year, to home and Boston. He wrote but little for the Liberator, for this reason and because he had, since 1857, had a very active editorial assistant in Charles K. Whipple; but above all because the mighty movement begun by him now swept irresistibly along without the need of any man. ‘Though the end is not yet,’ he said in his salutatory to the thirtieth volume of the Liberator, “surely it cannot be far distant—for the ‘battle waxes to the gate,’ and all the signs of the times are indicating that a great revolution is at hand.” Lib. 30.2. He pressed forward the renewal of the petitions to the Legislature for a law to make³⁷ slavecatching impossible in Massachusetts, and addressed the³⁸ Committee to whom they were referred, and who again [499] disappointed his hope, rather than his expectation. He³⁹ knew that so long as the Republican Party continued its professions of loyalty to the existing Union, it was to be neither followed nor trusted. He so declared in resolutions which he presented at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in January, 1860, and⁴⁰ of which we quote textually the following:

12. Resolved, That the acme of impudence and profligacy⁴¹ is seen in the constant accusation of the Republican Party, by the Democratic leaders and organs, as disloyal in spirit, if not in action, to the Union—at the very moment they are threatening to rend it asunder, and overturn the Government by force, if a majority of the voters shall choose the Republican, instead of the Democratic candidate for the Presidency—thus proving themselves to be a most desperate faction, full of treasonable intentions if they are not allowed to have their own way.

13. Resolved, That we are ready to certify that the Republican party has never even menaced the existence of the Union in any contingency; and that, of all the political parties that have yet been organized in this country, none has ever surpassed the Republican Party in its slavish subserviency to the Union; for while it is outlawed in all the South, and can neither hold meetings nor nominate candidates in that part of the country, and while neither Mr. Seward, nor Mr. Sumner, nor any other of its prominent men, is permitted freedom of speech south of Mason and Dixon's line, it is still insanely engaged in glorifying the Union, and pledging itself to frown upon all attempts to dissolve it.

Though no member of the Republican Party could escape this just condemnation, subserviency was in some merely a logical attitude. While Governor Banks vetoed⁴² a revised code of Massachusetts rather than tolerate the omission of the word white from its militia law, and revetoed the bill introduced and passed as a separate⁴³ measure; while Seward, equally with Douglas, dodged the⁴⁴ vote on imprisoning Thaddeus Hyatt for refusing to testify before Mason's Harper's Ferry investigating committee, other Republican Congressmen were true to their anti-slavery integrity. Sumner, by the introduction of [500] petitions for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law and the⁴⁵ abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; Henry Wilson, by his bill for the more effectual suppression of⁴⁶ the slave trade; but especially Owen Lovejoy, inviting by his speech of April 5 the fate of his martyr brother,⁴⁷ redeemed the Republican Party from the stigma of universal cowardice. ‘If slavery is right in Virginia,’ said Lovejoy, ‘it is right in Kansas’—words of whose full logic he stopped short, indeed, but which confirmed the South in its habit of identifying the Republicans with the abolition propagandists. ‘The fault I find with the Republicans,’ said Wendell Phillips at New York in May,⁴⁸ with a special reference to Mr. Seward, ‘is, that they are such children, that they are such infants, as to suppose that, with their past behind them, and with their future looking out of their eyes, the slaveholder, or the abolitionist either, believes the lies that they call speeches.’⁴⁹

On the 23d of April, 1860, the Democratic National⁵⁰ Convention met in Charleston, S. C., or, in other words, in the one city of the Union where the local feeling and influence would contribute the utmost possible to a pro-Southern determination of the candidates and destinies of the party. The Convention at once came under the municipal law of the ‘peculiar institution’ which forbade the military band brought from New York to play⁵¹ after ten o'clock at night in the streets, since its drums might be mistaken for the dread alarm-signal of a slave [501] 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 a⁵² 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 in⁵³ 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.⁵⁴ 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 the⁵⁵ American Anti-Slavery Society at New York on May 8,

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 [502] longer a unit in behalf of slavery; it has been divided—I trust, never again to be united by any compromise whatsoever with the Slave Power. It seems to me to be one of the most striking proofs of the cheering progress of the movement in which we are engaged that have yet been given to us. Only think of it! The party which has, for so many years, cried out, “There must be no agitation on this subject,” is now the most agitated of all the parties in the country! The party which declares that there ought not to be any sectionalism as against slavery, has now been sundered geographically, and on this very question! The party which has said, “ Let discussion cease for ever,” is busily engaged in the discussion, so that, possibly, the American Anti-Slavery Society might adjourn sine die, after we get through with our present meetings, and leave its work to be carried on in the other direction! The party which says that anti-slavery must be put down in this country, is itself divided, discomfited, and, I believe, overthrown. “ Oh, give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good; for his mercy endureth for ever.” “ To him that overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea; for his mercy endureth for ever!”

A week later the Republican National Convention met⁵⁶ in Chicago, and incorporated in its platform the Declaration of Independence (with a mental reservation)—resolving also against all schemes of disunion from any quarter (as if equally censurable), in favor of State rights, and against John Brown or Border-Ruffian invasions; against Judge Taney's doctrine that the Constitution carried slavery into the Territories; against the re-opening of the slave trade. To the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law, to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, no allusion. In the vote for candidates, to the infinite surprise of the Eastern States, to the grief even of many abolitionists, the prize of leadership was denied to William H. Seward and given to Abraham Lincoln of Illinois.

On the 18th of June, the dismembered Democratic⁵⁷ Convention, attended and watched, without participation, by the cotton-State delegates, met at Baltimore and nominated Stephen A. Douglas for President. A secession followed, and a rump convention nominated John C.⁵⁸ [503] Breckinridge of Kentucky as the ‘regular’ Democratic candidate.

The triumph of the Republican Party was now a foregone conclusion, and all eyes were turned in scrutiny upon Lincoln. To the country at large he was an obscure, not to say an unknown man. His visit to New England in the fall of 1848, when, during the Congressional recess, he took the stump for Zachary Taylor, had made no impression.⁵⁹ ‘Who is this huckster in politics?’ asked Wendell Phillips at the New England Convention on May 30.⁶⁰ ‘Who is this county-court advocate? Who is this who does not know whether he has got any opinions [about slavery]?’ It fell to Mr. Phillips, unhappily, to give the cue to the abolitionists concerning Mr. Lincoln. Such examination as he bestowed on the Illinois lawyer's brief Congressional career caused him to misinterpret and unjustly characterize a measure of Lincoln's intended to⁶¹ effect abolition in the District of Columbia, but accompanied by what seemed a necessary provision for the surrender of fugitive slaves —else had the District become a refuge for them from the adjoining States of Maryland and Virginia, and from the whole seaboard. Singling out this provision, Mr. Phillips published in the Liberator of June⁶² 22, 1860, a stinging article, headed, ‘Abraham Lincoln, the Slave-hound of Illinois,’ and beginning: ‘We gibbet a Northern hound to-day, side by side with the infamous Mason of Virginia.’ Mr. Garrison very reluctantly⁶³ admitted both the caption and the text (of the justice of which he had no means of forming an opinion), and only in consideration of the article being signed. Mr. Lincoln did not lack defenders, and in the end Mr. Phillips ⁶⁴ [504] produced a transcript of the bill. Lincoln's debates with⁶⁵ Douglas in 1858 were next overhauled by the abolitionists, with a not unfair emphasizing of expressions which showed how far the Whig Republican then was from acknowledging the brotherhood of man, or from objecting to the Dred Scott decision because of its disfranchising⁶⁶ the free blacks. His anticipation of Seward's “irrepressible conflict” Ante, p. 470; was quickly pointed out in mitigation—⁶⁷ proof of his statesmanship if not of his humanity.

The language of his present supporters, even more than his own, furnished ground of abolition distrust of Lincoln. The Boston Advertiser said that to elect him was the⁶⁸ shortest way to repeal the Massachusetts Personal Liberty Law—an end for which the Republican press of the State strove both before and after the election.⁶⁹ Moreover, in Lincoln's own State, so cowardly were the Republicans that, Mr. Seward chancing to be in Chicago, and having recovered his tone in a late visit to Kansas, so as to be able to reaffirm the ‘irrepressible conflict,’ the⁷⁰ party managers wanted their torchlight procession to⁷¹ avoid passing his hotel! In the same city, Mayor John Wentworth having helped pay the fine of men⁷² imprisoned for aiding a fugitive to escape, and presided at a public deliverance meeting, ‘The party is crushed!’⁷³ was heard from the audience; ‘Lincoln is defeated!’ ‘Long John is playing thunder with us!’ ‘Long John has gone over to Douglas!’

The Higher Power at the helm of affairs paid no attention to such trivialities. The October State elections in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, following those in New⁷⁴ England, clearly foreshadowed the result of the national contest. “Will the South be so obliging as to secede from the Union?” Lib. 30.163. asked Mr. Garrison. And, ‘I salute your Convention with hope and joy,’ he wrote to his⁷⁵ friend Johnston in Vermont, on October 15. “All the omens are with us. Forward!” N. R. Johnston. On the sixth of November, Lincoln was elected by the vote of every Northern⁷⁶ State save one; and that array of the North under one [505] banner and the South under an opposing banner foreseen⁷⁷ by Mr. Garrison in 1843—with the issue sure, whether prudence or desperation ruled the counsels of the Slave Power—at length came to pass. ‘For the first time in our history,’ said Wendell Phillips, ‘the slave has chosen⁷⁸ a President of the United States. . . . Lincoln is in place, Garrison in power.’

The Governor of South Carolina, after the October handwriting on the wall, had called an extra session of⁷⁹ the Legislature to provide for a disunion convention in case of Lincoln's election, and meanwhile to arm the militia, and to accept, organize, and drill volunteers. This action, with the signs of adhesion on the part of other⁸⁰ States, threw the whole country into a vortex of agitation —the South arming against the Republican Administration not more than against its own fears (fed by a thousand idle rumors) of slave insurrections; the pro-slavery and halting Republican North in panic striving to stave off the inevitable by making every concession to the⁸¹ Slave Power, beginning with the surrender of the Personal Liberty laws, and by pursuing abolitionists with mob violence. In Boston, the ‘respectable’ progeny of the⁸² ‘respectable’ rioters of 1835 took possession of a meeting in Tremont Temple, commemorating John Brown's execution by its date, and discussing the trite question, ‘How can American slavery be abolished?’—a meeting,⁸³ needless to say, not called by Garrisonian abolitionists. Turned out of doors by the Mayor, it adjourned for the evening to the Belknap-Street (colored) Church, where the spirit of violence was still more rampant, at least at the close, when Mrs. Chapman was thought to have saved⁸⁴ Mr. Phillips's life by her companionship, and when he himself had to be escorted home by a body-guard. The orator's scarifying review of these proceedings, from⁸⁵ Theodore Parker's pulpit, on Sunday, December 16,—his topic being ‘Mobs and Education,’—brought him a second (daylight) assault as he issued from the Music Hall, and made his return home a street fight. On the same day, [506] in Brooklyn, Henry Ward Beecher had to be guarded by⁸⁶ police in Plymouth Church. In Philadelphia, George William Curtis, engaged to lecture on ‘Honesty’ in a lyceum course, was suppressed by the joint apprehensions⁸⁷ of the Mayor and the owners of the hall.

For all this, the movement went on. On December 17 the Secession Convention opened its sessions with prayer in Charleston, and with the Palmetto flag flying over all the city and harbor save at Fort Moultrie. On December 20, it passed an ordinance of secession based primarily⁸⁸ on the violation of Constitutional rights by the passage of Personal Liberty laws—i. e., on the statutory achievements of the Garrisonian abolitionists. In place of quoting the language of the ordinance regarding the nature of the compact alleged to have been nullified by the North, let us take that of John Quincy Adams, from the familiar armory of the abolitionists:

Yes! it cannot be denied—the slaveholding lords of the⁸⁹ South prescribed, as a condition of their assent to the Constitution, three special provisions to secure the perpetuity of their dominion over their slaves. The first was the immunity for twenty years of pursuing the African slave trade; the second was the stipulation to surrender fugitive slaves—an engagement positively prohibited by the laws of God delivered from Sinai; and thirdly, the exaction, fatal to the principles of popular representation, of a representation for slaves—for articles of merchandise, under the name of persons ...

The delegates from South Carolina and Georgia distinctly avowed that, without this guarantee of protection to their property in slaves, they would not yield their assent to the Constitution; and the freemen of the North, reduced to the alternative of departing from the vital principles of their liberty, or of forfeiting the Union itself, averted their faces, and with trembling hand subscribed the bond.

And now let the secession ordinance itself be heard in its particular arraignment of the North—a hopeless mixture of truth, falsehood, and childishness:⁹⁰

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has [507] been made destructive of them, by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding⁹¹ upon the propriety of our domestic institutions, and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution. They have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted the open establishment⁹² among them of societies whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States; they have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes, and those who remain have been incited by emissaries, books, and⁹³ pictures to servile insurrection. For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to⁹⁴ forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that article establishing the executive department the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government because he has declared that that “government cannot endure permanently half slave, half⁹⁵ free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the subversion of the Constitution has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy hostile to the South, and destructive of its peace and safety. On the 4th of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory; that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional; and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

The lines we have italicized indicated the Southern ultimatum of compromise, if compromise could avert the impending catastrophe: the abolitionists must be suppressed—the American conscience on the subject of slavery must be extirpated. Already the respectable mob in Boston and other great cities had manifested⁹⁶ [508] its eagerness to make the attempt. There was yet time before the inauguration of Lincoln to arrange a ‘final’ compromise to restore forever the tottering ‘Union as it was.’ In this fatuous endeavor Massachusetts Republicans were destined to take part—among them the son of John Quincy Adams. In 1820 the father wrote in his⁹⁷ Diary:

I have favored this Missouri Compromise, believing it to be all that could be effected under the present Constitution, and from extreme unwillingness to put the Union at hazard. But perhaps it would have been a wiser as well as a bolder course to have persisted in the restriction upon Missouri, till it should have terminated in a convention of the States to revise and amend the Constitution. This would have produced a new Union of thirteen or fourteen States unpolluted with slavery, with a great and glorious object to effect, namely, that of rallying to their standard the other States by the universal emancipation of their slaves. If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break.

As to the result of the breach, the great statesman's prevision was clear:

If slavery be the destined sword, in the hand of the destroying angel, which is to sever the ties of this Union, the same sword will cut asunder the bonds of slavery itself. Quincy's Life of Adams, p. 114; Lib. 28.170.

Garrison's perception was identical with Adams's. He greeted his readers at the opening of the thirty-first⁹⁸ volume of the Liberator with these words, suggested by the political situation: ‘All Union-saving efforts are simply idiotic. At last, “the covenant with death is annulled,” and “the agreement with hell ” broken—at least by the action of South Carolina, and ere long by all the slaveholding States, for their doom is one.’

Joy! But, alas! not by Northern manhood, conscience, church, and clergy; not by measures projected against slavery in the States, or even by the election of a President troubled by the compromises of the Constitution and eager to amend them away; not by one single act or threat of the political anti-slavery party, as a unit, in [509] contravention of the Constitution; but, on the one hand, by the simple fidelity of a remnant pledged to eternal hostility to slavery wherever found and legalized, and to incessant agitation—on the other, by the sheer wickedness and dementia of the short-sighted Slave Power—

The bloody Writing is forever torn.

⁹⁹