The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences

of most of our people down to 1861. The first to announce the absolute impossibility of such coexistence seems to have been Will

orally impossible for them to endure together in the same nation, and that the

ear that time his paper's motto w

seems to have been one who did not dream of disunion. No such thought was in the mind

become one thing or the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind will rest in the belief that it is

the South could not, if it would, force slavery on the North, he was announcing the intention o

t was "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces; and it means that the United States mu

ctly radical. The question was, would this radic

insurrections. With a few followers and 1,300 stands of arms for the slaves who were to join him, he captured the United States arsenal at Ha

a son-in-law, he went at night down Pottowattamie Creek, stopping at three houses. The men who lived in them were well known pro-slavery men; they seem to have been rough characters; their most specific offence (according to Sanborn, Brown's biographer and eulogist) was the drivin

andidate for the presidency; and Theodore Parker, Dr. Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, of Boston, who were all members of a "secret committee to col

ere held and orators extolled him as a martyr. Emerson, the greatest thinker in all that region, declared that if John Brown was hanged he would glorify the gallows as Jesus glorified the cross; and now many Sout

e really conservative, said of Brown's raid, in a speech at Faneuil Hall, that its design was to "let loose the hell hounds of a servile

ten somewhat later during the State canvass in New York by Horace Greeley to Schuyler Colfax. Horace Greeley afterward proved himself in many ways a broad-minded, magnanimous man, but now he wrote: "Do not be downhearted about the ol

llowing Garrison. Garrison, the father of the Abolitionists, had begun his campaign against slave-holders by "exhausting upon them the vocabulary of abuse," and he had shown "a genius for infuriating his antagonists.

. No assertion was too extravagant for belief, provided only its tendency was to disparage the Southern white man or win sympathy for the negro. From the noted "Brownlow and Pryne's Debate," Philadelphi

s and outcasts of Great Britain.... Oh, glorious chivalry and hereditary aristocracy of the South! Peerless first families of

ne, and here was a retort fro

oundhead, rebel refuse of England, which ... has ever been an unruly sect of Pharisees ... the

the pitiless pelting of the storm. He was sustaining the s

a class the lordly slave-holder despised his poor white fellow-citizen. The average non-slave-holding Southern agriculturist, whether farming for himself or for others, was a type of man that no one who knew him, least of all the Southern slave-holder

hite trash," and the belief was inculcated that their imperious slave-holding neighbors applied that term to them. "Poor white trash," on its face, is "nigg

conditions in the other during that memorable sectional controversy. It is on a par with the idea that prevailed

of the wars of the Revolution, of 1812, and with Mexico, and Fourth of July celebratio

re, as a rule, very shiftless; too lazy to work, they were still too proud to beg, as the very poor usually do in other countries. The mountaineers were hardier than the sand-hillers, and it was from the mountains of Tennessee, Alabama, etc., that the Union armies gathered m

and high-schools, and the country was dotted with "old field schools," most of them not good, but

higher esteem. This is a great gain, but still more is due to improved transportation, to better prices for timber and cotton, to commercial fertilizers, and an awakeni

e-holder and non-slave-holder was the pride of caste. Every white

es would be loyal to Great Britain because the Church of England had there a large establishment, he said: "It is certainly true. There is, however, a circumstance attending these colonies which in my opinion fully counter-balances this difference, and makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty

tes together, and it was infinitely strengthened by a crusade that seemed, from a Southern stand-point,

that gave tone to Southern society. The performance of duty always ennobles, and this is especially true of duty done by superiors to inferiors. The master and mistress of a slave establishment were responsible for the moral and material welfare of their dependents. When they appreciated and fulfilled their responsibilities, as the best families usually did, there was found what was called the Southern aristocracy. The habit of command, assured position, and high ideals,

of either culture or Christian feeling, or both, as also when, as was now and then the

t it also made for a high sense of honor among slave-holders and non-slave-holders as well. Both slave-holders and non-slave-holders were extremely punctil

ctice now very properly condemned. But it made for a high sense of honor. Demagogues wer

o, were quite common to ascertain who was the "best man" in a community or county. The rule

m slavery. Sometimes it was unduly exhibited in Congress during the controversy over slavery and S

itty student at a Southern university said that his chief objection to college life was that he could not have a negro to learn his lessons for him. Th

was no recompense. But for the South at large, and especially to this generation, it is a blessing t

oad and local self-government at home. In the one section the brightest minds were for the most part engaged in business or in literary pursuits; in the other, politics absorbed much of its talent. In the North the staple of political discussion was usually some business or moral question, while in the South the political arena was a great school in which the masses were not only educated in the history of the formation of the Constitution, but taught an affectionate regard for that instrument as a revered "gift from the

favored social equality between whites and blacks. Southerners did not stop to make distinctions like these. They saw the Abolitionists advocating mixed schools and favoring laws authorizing mixed marriages; saw them

elements. Judge Reagan, of Texas, United States congressman in 1860-61, Confederate Postmaster-General, later United States senator, and always until 18

abolition principles, and ultimately to free negro equality, and a government of mongrels, or a wa

o follow secession, an opinion the ex-Confederate did not see much reason to change when the era of Reconstruct

t from the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, "all men are created equal." The Republican contention was, in platforms and speeches, that the Declaration of Independence covered negroes as well as whites,[72] and Southern whites, nearly all of Revolutionary stock, resented the idea. They rebelled at the suggestion that the signers, eve

d to note that this thought was in the minds of all the opponents of the Republican party from the day of its birth-North and South it was called the "Black Republican" party. Douglas, in his debate with Lincoln, gave it that name

olding public office under the Federal Government.... But when raised to an equality they would become the fast political associates of the North, acting and voting with them on all questions, and by this perfect union between them holding the South in complete subjection. The blacks and the profligate whites that might

Reconstruction,

ome with the promise (and an assurance of its fulfilment) that the negroes, when emancipated, would be sent to Liberia, or elsewhere out of the country, the South would have b

glorious consummation of the dreams of statesmen and philanthropists that would have been! Abolitionists, unable to frustrate their scheme, and the American negro, profiting by the civilization her

as a desirable part of Africa. It was an unequalled group of statesmen and philanthropists that had planted the colony; they provided for it and set it on its feet. But it failed; failed just for the same reason that prevented the aboriginal African from catching on to the civilization that began to develo

protectors of the colony retired, leaving the people to govern the country in their own way." Then she recites that in order to test their capacity for self-government their constitution (1847) provided that no white man should hold property in the country; and to this Miss Mahony traces the failure that followed. When she wrote, the Liberian negroes, for fifty-nine years under the p

Lincoln would bring about secession in the South. Mr. Tilden, in view of the danger that to him was apparent, wrote, shortly before the election, to William Kent, of New York City, an open letter in which he earnestly urged a combination in New York State of the supporters of other candidates, in order to defeat Abraham Lincoln. The letter was so alarming that some of Tilden's friends thought he had lost his balance; but now that letter is

and become a government of one people over a distinct people, a thing impossible with our race, except as a consequence of a successful war, and even then incompatible with our democratic institutions. H

government would be out of all relations to those States. It would have neither the nerves of sensation, which convey intelligence to the intellect of the body politic, nor the ligame

did. To prove that the Republican party was looking to the ultimate destruction of the institution, Mr. Tilden cited the leadership of Chase and his speeches in

platform, but the record of the Republican part

ch the North was involving itself by its concern over slavery in the South, and he th

eep honestly the bargain of the Constitution as it shall be interpreted by the authorities-of which the Supreme Court of the Uni

of the dilemma-repudiating and denouncing a decision of the Supreme Court, which, as Mr. Ticknor had said, was the "chief and safest authority." But during that campaign of 1860 very many, perhaps a majority of the Republican voters, failed

South saw it then. In a powerful summing up of more evidence than there is room to recite here, he says: "The testimony of the Democracy and of the leaders of the Republican party ac

carry out the purpose which Professor Fite now sees, ignore the Federal C

nd that no such offence existed in New York. This case did not go to the courts, but in 1860 the governor of Kentucky made a similar demand in a like case on the governor of Ohio, who placed his refusal on the same grounds a

delegated to the general government, either through the judicial departm

860, inclusive, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, Ohio,

ofessor Alexande

rsonal liberty laws were flat disobedience to the law; if the obligation was upon the States, they were a gross breach of good fai

ase and ordered the slave back into the custody of the United States marshal;[80] and thereupon the General Assembly of Wisconsin expressly repudiated the authority of the United States Supreme Cou

science to these officials was a "higher law than the Constitution of the United States"; and modern historians recognize, as Tilden did, the leadership of the statesman who in 1850

nment of their own. This eleven of these States did. Many of them were reluctant to take the step; all their people had loved the old Union, but they passed their ordinances of secess

o secede were made in Kentucky and Missouri. In neither of these States did the seceders get full control. They were represented, however, i