The abolition crusade and its consequences

Front matter

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Prefatory Note

regard for law, and devotion to the common Constitution, will, as matter of course, aver that the question over which they fought for four years had two sides; that all the right was not on one side and all the wrong on the other. The North should welcome, therefore, accounts of the conflict written by candid Southern men.

Mr. Herbert, reared and educated in the South, believing in the moral and economical right of slavery, served as a Confederate soldier during the war, but after Appomattox, when thirty-one years old, he told his father he had arrived at the conviction that slavery was wrong. Twelve years later, when home-rule was completely restored to the South (1877), he went into public life as a Member of Congress, sitting in the House for sixteen years. At the end of his last term, in 1893, he was appointed Secretary of the Navy by President Cleveland, whom he faithfully served during his second administration, viii

PREFATORY NOTE

Such an experience Is an excellent training for the treatment of any aspect of the Civil War. Mr. Herbert's devotion to the Constitution, the Union, and the flag now equals that of any soldier of the North who fought against him. We should expect therefore that his work would be pervaded by practical knowledge and candor.

After a careful reading of the manuscript I have no hesitation in saying that the expectation is realized. Naturally unable to agree entirely with his presentation of the subject, I believe that his work exhibits a side that entitles It to a large hearing. I hope that It will be placed before the younger generation, who, unaffected by any memory of the heat of the conflict, may truly say:

James Ford Rhodes.

Boston, November^ 191 1.

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Preface

In 1890 Mr. L. E. Chittenden, who had been United States Treasurer under President Lincoln, pubHshed an interesting account of ^10,000,000 United States bonds secretly sent to England, as he said, in 1862, and he told all about what thereupon took place across the water. It was a reminiscence. General Charles Francis Adams in his recent instructive volume, "Studies Military and Diplomatic," takes up this narrative and, in a chapter entitled "An Historical Residuum," conclusively shows from contemporaneous evidence that the bonds were sent, not in 1862, but in 1863, but that, as for the rest of the story, the residuum of truth in it was about like the speck of moisture that is left when a soap bubble is pricked by a needle.

General Adams did not mean that Mr. Chittenden knew he was drawing on his im-

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agination. He was only demonstrating that one who intends to write history cannot rely on his memory.

The author, in the following pages, is undertaking to write a connected story of events that happened, most of them, in his lifetime, and as to many of the most important of which he has vivid recollections; but, save in one respect, he has not relied upon his own memory for any important fact. The picture he has drawn of the relations between the slave-holder and non-slave-holder in the South is, much of it, given as he recollects it. His opportunities for observation were somewhat extensive, and here he is willing to be considered in part as a witness. Elsewhere he has relied almost entirely upon contemporaneous written evidence, memory, however, often indicating to him sources of information.

Nowhere are there so many valuable lessons for the student of American history as in the story of the great sectional movement of 183 1, and of its results, which have

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profoundly affected American conditions through generation after generation.

An effort is here made to tell that story succinctly, tracing it, step after step, from cause to effect. The subject divides itself naturally into four historic periods:

1. The anti-slavery crusade, 183 1 to i860.

2. Secession and four years of war, 1861 to 1865.

3. Reconstruction under the Lincoln- Johnson plan, with the overthrow by Congress of that plan and the rule of the negro and carpet-bagger, from 1865 to 1876.

4. Restoration of self-government in the South, and the results that have followed.

The greater part of the book is devoted to the first period — 1831 to i860, the period of causation. The sequences running through the three remaining periods are more briefly sketched.

Italics, throughout the book, it may be mentioned here, are the author's.

Now that the country is happily reunited xiii

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in a Union which all agree is indissoluble, the South wants the true history of the times here treated of spread before its children; so does the North. The mistakes that were committed on both sides during that lamentable and prolonged sectional quarrel (and they were many) should be known of all, in order that like mistakes may not be committed in the future. The writer has, with diffidence, attempted to lay the facts before his readers, and so to condense the story that it may be within the reach of the ordinary student. How far he has succeeded will be for his readers to say. The verdict he ventures to hope for is that he has made an honest effort to be fair.

The author takes this occasion to thank that accomplished young teacher of history, Mr. Paul Micou, for valuable suggestions, and his friend, Mr. Thomas H. Clark, who with his varied attainments has aided him in many ways.

Hilary A. Herbert.

Washington, D. C, March, 191 2. xiv

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Introduction 3

I. Secession and Its Doctrine ... 15

Introduction

THE Constitution of the United States attempts to define and limit the power of our Federal Government.

Lord Brougham somewhere said that such an instrument was not worth the parchment it was written on; people would pay no regard to self-imposed limitations on their own will.

When our fathers by that written Constitution established a government that was partly national and partly federal, and that had no precedent, they knew it was an experiment. To-day that government has been in existence one hundred and^twentythree years, and we proudly claim ,that the experiment of 1789 has been the success of the ages.

Happy should we be if we could boast that, during all this period, the Constitution had never been violated in any respect!

The first palpable infringement of its provisions occurred in the enactment of the alien and sedition laws of 1798. The people at the polls indignantly condemned these enactments, and for years thereafter the government proceeded peacefully; the people were prosperous, and the Union and the Constitution grew in favor.

Later, there grew up a rancorous sectional controversy about slavery that lasted many years; that quarrel was followed by a bloody sectional war; after that war came the reconstruction of the Southern States. During each of these three trying eras it did sometimes seem as if that old piece of "parchment," derided by Lord Brougham, had been utterly forgotten. Nevertheless, and despite all these trying experiences, we have in the meantime advanced to the very front rank of nations, and our people have long since turned, not only to the Union, but, we are happy to think, to the Constitution as well, with more devotion than ever.

It may be further said that, notwithstanding all the bitter animosities that for long divided our country into two hostile sections, that wonderful old Constitution, handed down to us by our fathers, was always, and in all seasons, in the hearts of our people, and that never for a moment was it out of mind. Even in our sectional war Confederates and Federals were both fighting for it — one side to maintain it over themselves as an independent nation; the other to maintain it over the whole of the old Union. In the very madness of reconstruction the fundamental idea of the Constitution, the equality of the States, ultimately prevailed — this idea it was that imperatively demanded the final restoration of the seceded States, with the right of self-government unimpaired.

The future is now bright before us. The complex civilization of the present is, we do not forget, continually presenting new and complex problems of government, and we are mindful, too, that, for the people who must deal with these problems, a higher culture is required, but to all this our national and State governments seem to be fully alive. We are everywhere erecting memorials to our patriotic dead, we have our "flag day" and many ceremonies to stimulate patriotism, and, throughout our whole country, young Americans are being taught more and more of American history and American traditions.

The essence of these teachings presumably is that time has hallowed our Constitution, and that experience has fully shown the wisdom of its provisions. In this land of ours, where there are so much property and so many voters who want it, and where the honor and emoluments of high place are so tempting to the demagogue, there can be no such security for either life, liberty, or property as those safeguards which our fathers devised in the Constitution of the United States.

Our teachers of history must therefore expose fearlessly every violation in the past of our Constitution, and point out the penalties that followed; and, above all, they cannot afford to condone, or to pass by in silence, the conduct of those who have heretofore advocated, or acted on, any law which to them was higher than the American Constitution.

One of the most serious troubles in the past, many think our greatest, was our terrible war among ourselves. Perhaps, after the lapse of nearly fifty years, we can all now agree that if our people and our States had ahvays, between 1830 and i860, faithfully observed the Federal Constitution we should have not had that war. However that may be, the crusade of the Abolitionists, which began in 183 1, was the beginning of an agitation in the North against the existence of slavery in the South, which continued, in one form or another, until the outbreak of that war.

The negro is now located, geographically, much as he was then. If another attempt shall be made to project his personal status into national politics, the voters of the country ought to know and consider the mistakes that occurred. North and South, during the unhappy era of that sectional warfare. This little book is a study of that period of our history. It concludes with a glance at the war between the North and South, and the reconstruction that followed.

The story of Cromwell and the Great Revolution it was impossible for any Englishman to tell correctly for nearly or quite two centuries. The changes that had been wrought were too profound, too far-reaching; and English writers were too human. The changes — economic, pohtical, and social — wrought in our country by the great controversy over slavery and State-rights, and by the war that ended it, have been quite as profound, and the revolution in men's ideas and ways of looking at their past history has been quite as complete as those which followed the downfall of the government founded by Cromwell. But we are now in the twentieth century; history is becoming a science, and we ought to succeed better in writing our past than the Englishmen did.

The culture of this day is very exacting in its demands, and if one is writing about our own past the need of fairness is all the more imperative. And why not? The masses of the people, who clashed on the battlefields of a war in which one side fought for the supremacy of the Union and the other for the sovereignty of the States, had honest convictions; they differed in their convictions; they had made honest mistakes about each other; now they would like their histories to tell just where those mistakes were; they do not wish these mistakes to be repeated hereafter. Nor is there any reason why the whole history of that great controversy should not now be written with absolute fairness; the two sections of our country have cotne together in a most wonderful way. There has been reunion after reunion of the blue and the gray. The survivors of a New Jersey regiment, forty- .» four years after the bloody battle of Salem Church, put up on its site a monument to their dead, on one side of which was a tablet to the memory of the "brave Alabama boys," who were their opponents in that fight. One of those " Alabama boys " wrote the story of that battle for the archives of his own State, and the State of New Jersey has published it in her archives, as a fair account of the battle.

The author has attempted to approach his subject in a spirit like this, and while he hopes to be absolutely fair, he is per- / fectly aware that he sees things from a Southern view-point. For this, however, no apology is needed. Truth is many-sided and must be seen from every direction.

Nearly all the school-books dealing with the period here treated of, and now considered as authority, have been written from a Northern stand-point; and many of the extended histories that are most widely read seem to the writer to be more or less partisan, although the authors were apparently quite unconscious of it. Attempts made here to point out some of the errors in these books are, as is conceived, in the interests of history.

Of course it is important that readers should know the stand-point of an author who writes at this day of events as recent as those here treated of. Dr. Albert Bushnell Hart, professor of history in Harvard University, in the preface to his "Slavery and Abolition" (Harper Brothers, 1906), says of himself: "It is hard for a son and grandson of abolitionists to approach so explosive a question with impartiality." Following this example, the writer must tell that he was born in the South, of slave-holding parents, three years after the Abolition crusade began in 1831. Growing up in the South under the stress of that crusade, he maintained all through the war, in which he was a loyal Confederate soldier, the belief in which he had been educated — that slavery was right, morally and economically.

One day, not long after Appomattox, he told his father he had reached the conclusion that slavery was wrong. The reply was, to the writer's surprise, that his mother in early life had been an avowed emancipationist; that she (who had lived until the writer was sixteen years old) had never felt at liberty to discuss slavery after the rise of the new abolitionists and the Nat Turner insurrection ; and then followed the further information that when, in 1846, the family removed from South Carolina to Alabama, Greenville, Ala., was chosen for a home because it was thought that the danger from slave insurrections would be less there than in one of the richer "black counties."

What a creature of circumstances man is! The writer's belief about a great moral question, his home, his school-mates, and the companions of his youth, were all determined by a movement begun in Boston, Massachusetts, before he was born in the far South!

With a vivid personal recollection of the II closing years of the great anti-slavery crusade always in his mind, the writer has studied closely many of the histories dealing with that movement, and he has found quite a consensus of opinion among Northern writers — a view that has even been sometimes accepted in the South — that it was not so much the fear of insurrections, created by Abolition agitation, that shut off discussion in the South about the rightfulness of slavery as it was the invention of the cotton-gin, that made cotton growing and slavery profitable. The cotton-gin was invented in 1792, and was in common use years before the writer's mother was born. A native of, she grew to maturity entirely in, the South, and in 1830 was an avowed emancipationist. The subject was then being freely discussed.

The author has ventured to relate in the pages that follow this introduction two or three incidents that were more or less personal, in the hope that their significance may be his sufficient excuse.

And now, having spoken of himself as a Southerner, the author thinks it but fair, when invoking for the following pages fair consideration, to add that, since 1865, he has never ceased to rejoice that slavery is no more, and that secession is now only an academic question; and, further, that he has, since Appomattox, served the government of the United States for twenty years as loyally as he ever served the Confederacy. He therefore respectfully submits that his experiences ought to render him quite as well qualified for an impartial consideration of the anti-slavery crusade and its consequences as are those who have never, either themselves or through the eyes of their ancestors, seen more than one side of those questions. Certain he is, in his own mind, that this Union has now no better friend than is he who submits this little study, conscious of its many shortcomings, claiming for it nothing except that it is the result of an honest effort to be fair in every statement of facts and in the conclusions reached.

Not much effort has been made in the direction of original research. Facts deemed sufficient to illustrate salient points, which alone can be treated of in a short story, have been found in published documents, and other facts have been purposely taken, most of them, from Northern writers; and the authorities have been duly cited. These facts have been compressed into a small compass, so that the book may be available to such students as have not time for a more extended examination.

Of the results of the crusade of the Abolitionists, and the consequent sectional war, George Ticknor Curtis, one of New England's distinguished biographers, says in his "Life of Buchanan," vol. II, p. 283:

"It is cause for exultation that slavery no longer exists in the broad domain of this republic — that our theory of government and practice are now in complete accord. But it is no cause for national pride that we did not accomplish this result without the cost of a million of precious lives and untold millions of money."

Chapter I Secession And Its Doctrine

JOHN FISKE has said in his school history: ''Under the government of England before the Revolution the thirteen commonwealths were independent of one another, and were held together juxtaposed, rather than united, only through their allegiance to the British Crown. Had that allegiance been maintained there is no telling how long they might have gone on thus disunited."

They won their independence under a very imperfect union, a government improvised for the occasion. The "Articles of Confederation," the first formal constitution of the United States of America, were not ratified by Maryland, the last to ratify, until in 1781, shortly before Yorktownf In 1787 the thirteen States, each claiming to be still sovereign, came together in convention at Philadelphia and formed the present Constitution, looking to "a more perfect union." The Constitution that created this new government has been rightly said to be " the most wonderful work ever struck off, at a given time, by the brain and purpose of man."i And so it was, but it left unsettled the great question whether a State, if it believed that its rights were denied to it by the general government, could peaceably withdraw from the Union. The Federal Government was given by the Constitution only limited powers, powers that it could not transcend. Nowhere on the face of that Constitution was any right expressly conferred on the general government to decide exclusively and finally upon the extent of the powers granted to it. If any such right had been clearly given, it is certain that many of the States would not have entered into the Union. As it was, the Constitution was only adopted by eleven of the States after months of discussion. Then the new government was inaugurated, with two of the States, Rhode Island and North Carolina, still out of the Union. They remained outside, one of

i6 them for eighteen months and the other for a year.

The States were reluctant to adopt the Constitution, because they were jealous of, and did not mean to give up, the right of self-government.

The framers of the Constitution knew that the question of the right of a State to secede was thus left unsettled. They knew, too, that this might give trouble in the future. Their hope was that, as the advantages of the Union became, in process of time, more and more apparent, the Union would grow in favor and come to be regarded in the minds and hearts of the people as indissoluble.

From the beginning of the government there were many, including statesmen of great influence, who continued to be jealous of the right of self-government, and insisted that no powers should be exercised by the Federal Government except such as were very clearly granted in the Constitution. These soon became a party and called themselves Republicans. Some thirty years later they called themselves Democrats. Those, on the other hand, who believed in construing the grants of power in the Constitution liberally or broadly, called themselves Federalists.

Washington was a Federalist, but such was his influence that the dispute between the Republicans and the Federalists about the meaning of the Constitution did not, during his administration, assume a serious aspect; but when a new president, John Adams, also a Federalist, came in with a congress in harmony with him, the Republicans made bitter war upon them. France, then at war with England, was even waging what has been denominated a "quasi war" upon us, to compel the United States, under the old treaty of the Revolution, to take her part against England; and England was also threatening us. Plots to force the government into the war as an ally of France were in the air.

Adams and his followers believed in a strong and spirited government. To strike a fatal blow at the plotters against the public peace, and to crush the Republicans at the same time, Congress now passed the famous alien and sedition laws.

One of the alien laws, June 25, 1798, gave iS the President, for two years from its passage, power to order out of the country, at his own will^ and without *' trial by jury'* or other ''process of law," any alien he deemed dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.

The sedition law, July 14, 1798, made criminal any unlawful conspiracy to oppose any measure of the government of the United States "which was directed by proper authority," as well as also any "false and scandalous accusations against the Government, the President, or the Congress."

The opportunity of the Republicans had come. They determined to call upon the country to condemn the alien and sedition laws, and at the presidential election in 1800 the Federalists received their deathblow. The party as an organization survived that election only a few years, and in localities the very name. Federalist, later became a reproach.

The Republicans began their campaign against the alien and sedition laws by a series of resolutions, which, drawn by Jefferson, were passed by the Kentucky legislature in November, 1798. Other quite similar resolutions, drawn by Madison, passed the Virginia assembly the next year; and these together became the celebrated Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798-9.^ The alien and sedition laws were denounced in these resolutions for the exercise of powers not delegated to the general government. Adverting to the sedition law, it was declared that no power over the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of the press had been given. On the contrary, it had been expressly provided by the Constitution that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech^ or of the press.

* Warfield, in his "Kentucky Resolutions of 1798," relates that John Breckenrldge introduced the Kentucky and John Taylor, of Caroline, moved the Virginia resolutions. In 1814 Taylor made it known that Madison was the author of the Virginia resolves, but not till 1821 did Jefferson admit his authorship of the Kentucky resolutions. Jefferson was Vice-President when they were drawn, and it would have been thought unseemly for him to appear openly in a canvass against the President, but by correspondence with his friends he "gradually drew out a program of action" (Warfield, p. 17). The Kentucky Resolutions were sent by the Governor to the Legislatures of the other States, ten of which, being controlled by the Federalists, are known to have declared against them (Warfield, p. 115). But of course the resolutions were canvassed by the public before the presidential election of 1800.

The first of the Kentucky resolutions was as follows:

"Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government, but that by compact, under the style and title of a constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for specific purposes, delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that ivhensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no effect: That to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: That the government created by this compact, was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its direction, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has a right to judge for itself as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress."

Undoubtedly it is from the famous resolutions of 1798-9 that the secessionists of a later date drew their arguments. The authors of these celebrated resolutions were, 21 both of them, devoted friends of the Union they had helped to construct. Why should they announce a theory of the Constitution that was so full of dangerous possibilities?

The answer is, they were announcing the theory upon which the States, or at least many of the States, had ten years before ratified the Constitution. A crisis in the life of the new government had now come. Congress had usurped powers not given; it had exercised powers that had been prohibited, and the government was enforcing the obnoxious statutes with a high hand. Dissatisfaction was intense.

Jefferson and Madison were undoubtedly Repubhcan partisans, Jefferson especially; but it is equally certain that they were both friends of the Union, and as such they concluded, with the lights before them, that the wise course would be to submit to the people, in ample time for full consideration, before the then coming presidential election, a full, clear, and comprehensive exposition of the Constitution precisely as they, and as the people, then understood it. This they did in the resolutions of 1798 and 1799, and the very same voters who had created the Constitution of 1789, now, with their sons to aid them, endorsed these resolutions in the election of 1800, which had been laid before them by the legislatures of two Republican States as a correct construction of that instrument.

The Republicans under Jefferson came into power with an immense majority. The people were satisfied with the Constitution as it had been construed in the election of 1800, and the country under control of the Republicans was happy and prosperous for three decades. Then the party in power began to split into National Republicans and Democratic Republicans. The National Republicans favored a liberal construction of the Constitution and became Whigs; the Democratic Republicans dropped the name Republican and became Democrats.

The foregoing sketch has been given with no intent to write a political history, but only to show with what emphasis the American people condemned all violations of the Constitution up to the time when, in 183 1, our story of the Abolitionists is to begin. The sketch has also served to explain the theory of State-rights, as it was held in early days, and later, by the Southern people.

Whether the union of the States under the Constitution as expounded by the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions would survive every trial that was to come, remained to be seen. The question was destined to perplex Mr. Jefferson himself, more than once.

Indeed, even while Washington was President there had been disunion sentiment in Congress. In 1794 the celebrated Virginian, John Taylor, of Caroline, shortly after he had expressed an intention of publicly resigning from the United States Senate, was approached in the privacy of a committee room by Rufus King, senator from New York, and Oliver Ellsworth, a senator from Massachusetts, both Federalists, with a proposition for a dissolution of the Union by mutual consent, the line of division to be somewhere from the Potomac to the Hudson. This was on the ground " that it was utterly impossible for the Union to continue. That the Southern and the Eastern people thought quite differently," etc. Taylor contended for the Union, and nothing came of the conference, the story of which remained a secret for over a hundred years.^

"In the winter of 1803-4, immediately after, and as a consequence of, the acquisition of Louisiana, certain leaders of the Federal party conceived the project of the dissolution of the Union and the establishment of a Northern Confederacy, the justifying causes to those who entertained it, that the acquisition of Louisiana to the Union transcended the constitutional powers of the government of the United States ; that it created, in fact, a new confederacy to which the States, united by the former compact, were not bound to adhere; that it was