V.

THE PERIOD OF AGITATION

AND THE DARK CHAPTER IN AMERICAN HISTORY.

E have brought our readers down the line of events to the time the twelfth President was about to take his seat of office. We have seen the continent redeemed from its savage inhabitants and settled with an active, energetic population of freemen who had acquired their independence, subdued the wilderness, developed its resources, spread their white-winged commerce on every sea, explored their own territory and made discoveries in other parts of the world, driven the pirates from their own borders and humbled the pirates in the Mediterranean, compelled the respect due their flag from other nations and established their widest boundaries by peaceful diplomacy or glorious war. They had grown from thirteen States to thirty and their domain now stretched in one broad' belt from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the lakes to the gulf, with no nation to challenge their right. They were prosperous at home and respected abroad. The industry, intelligence and enterprise of her citizens are unparalleled, and their inventions, discoveries and mechanical arts were astonishing to the inhabitants of the old world. The inventors and discoverers of the United States had revolutionized the commerce, the manufactures and the travel of the past. The steamboat, the electric telegraph, the cotton gin and the inventions in every department of trade had startled the inhabitants of Europe from their dream of centuries. But in spite of the growth in material strength, in national domain and wealth there was a dark blot upon the country, and the agitation and strife which it was continually causing, gave reasons for constant alarm to our wisest and best statesmen. How to deal with this dark subject was a serious question to the moralist, the patriot and the philanthropist. That question was the fearful presence of American slavery and its insatiate demand for more territory. To go back to the beginning: England had forced the African slave trade upon the unwilling colonists, and her Parliament had watched. with fostering care this hideous traffic. In the first half of the eighteenth century there was constant legislation in its favor, and every restraint upon its largest development was removed with solicitous regard. Twenty negro slaves were sold to the planters of Virginia in the same year the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, 1620, and these were the first brought into America. In December, 1671, Sir John Yeamans, Governor of South Carolina, brought two hundred black slaves with him from the West Indies. In 1641, the blacks were recognized in law as slaves by Massachusetts. In Connecticut

and Rhode Island in 1650; in New York in 1656; in Maryland in 1663, and in New Jersey in 1665. There were some slaves in Pennsylvania and Delaware about 1690. In North and South Carolina, they were introduced at the time of settlement. In Georgia the use of slaves was prohibited by law but the planters evaded the law by hiring servants for one hundred years, paying their owners in the other colonies the value of such slaves. In New Hampshire the slaves came with the settlers from Massachusetts. So we see that slavery could be found, under the sanction of law, in every one of the original thirteen States, at the opening of the eighteenth century. The British government seemed determined to encourage the importation of slaves into the West Indies and American Colonies by every means in her power. The Colonies sought to check the increase by imposing a tax on slaves brought into them, but Parliament compelled its repeal. A hundred acres of land in the West Indies was given to every planter who would keep four slaves. Forts were built and manned on the African coast to protect the men who were engaged in this traffic. The most humiliating chapter in the history of England was in regard to this subject. As late as the year 1749, the English Parliament passed an act bestowing still greater encouragement upon the traffic, in which it was stated: "The slave-trade is. very advantageous to Great Britain."

The moral sense of New England was opposed to slavery and very early the idea became prevalent there that it was unscriptural to hold a baptized person in slavery. They did not however liberate their slaves, but withheld religious instruction from them. The Bishops of the church and the officers of the crown endeavored to put them right on this question, and the Colonial Assemblies passed laws to reassure the people that it was right to hold Christians in slavery.

Before the Revolution three hundred thousand slaves had been brought into the Colonies from Africa, and at that time there were half a million slaves scattered over the country. These were in every Colony, although there were but thirty thousand in the North. The children of the Puritans owned Indians, and in due time came to hold Africans, but the soil was hard. and sterile and required that the tiller should be a person of thought and intelligence. All kinds of labor demanded brain as well as physical force and for this reason slave labor in the North was never remunerative, and gradually the slaves all died out or were shipped South. The moral sentiment as well as the conditions of the soil and climate of the North was opposed to the whole system of human servitude.

There were different conditions in the fertile and sunny South. The climate was congenial to the African and the soil was productive to the extreme of luxuriance. The crops were such as the unskilled labor of the slave could produce with profit to his master, tobacco, cotton and rice. The land in the South was divided into large plantations and the cities were mostly engaged in the export of their staple products. Yet for all this, at the time of the Revolution there was a very wide spread opposition to the

institution of slavery. The free spirit which influenced the patriots was antagonistic to the whole idea of human bondage. The leaders of the conflict were many of them slaveholders but they regarded the institution as odious and wrong.

Washington provided in his will for the freedom of his slaves. Hamilton was the member of a society which aimed at the gradual abolition of the whole system. John Adams was deadly opposed to it. Patrick Henry, Franklin, Madison and Monroe, were outspoken against it. Jefferson, the man who wrote the first draft of the Constitution, himself a Virginian, said of it, "I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just." When the convention that met to frame the Constitution assembled in Philadelphia, the feeling was strong against slavery, and had the majority followed their own conviction of right, a provision would have been incorporated for its gradual and final extinction. But the desire to frame a document that would be acceptable to all the States led to a tender treatment of the subject, and finally to one of these unholy compromises which has marked the whole course of legislation upon the subject for more than eighty years, and in time resulted in the most cruel and bloody internal war which has ever come to any nation. It was proposed to prohibit the importation of slaves at once, and all the Northern and most of the Southern members were in favor of it. But the delegates of South Carolina and Georgia threatened to withdraw from the convention if this was done; and instead, it was provided that Congress might abolish the traffic after twenty years if she saw fit.

Using the same threat of disunion, the slave States of the extreme South gained other concessions of great importance. First, that if a person escaped from a slave State to a free State that did not make him free; and second that in the apportionment for representatives to Congress the population of white citizens should be taken and to this should be added three fifths of all other persons excluding Indians not taxed. While the words slave and slavery are not to be found in the Constitution, by these unrighteous concessions to the extreme slave States, the vile institution was intrenched within the organic law of the land and the first and most important victory was gained for the monstrous evil.

Even in the South there was a strong public sentiment against the wrong. Slave owners acknowledged its evil and freely discussed it. The pulpit preached against it, and men prophesied its extinction, and the meanest black might hope that the time would come when the words of the Declaration of Independence would apply to him.

The accession of the vast domain of Louisiana from France, opened up a mighty region to the profitable cultivation of sugar cane and cotton by slave labor. The growth of cotton was becoming a matter of great importance. The invention of the spinning jenny by Richard Arkwright in England, in 1768, followed by the introduction of steam power by James Watts had created an extensive demand for cotton, which Great Britain could only find in sufficient quantity and proper quality in the Southern States of the

American Union. Eli Whitney, a New England farmer's son, was a born mechanic. In 1792, he was on a visit to the home of Mrs. Greene, in the State of Georgia, and heard of the trouble which surrounded the cotton planters in separating the fibers of the cotton from the seed, and the wish. that some device would be invented to overcome this. Young Whitney set his inventive genius at work to construct a machine for this purpose, and after much study, many improvements, and oft repeated failures, finally invented the cotton gin. The planters of Georgia saw in the rudely constructed machine exhibited to them in the back room of Mrs. Greene's residence the possibilities of untold wealth for them, and heeded it as a sign of their deliverance from this trouble. The cotton gin made the growing of cotton vastly more remunerative than ever before. But the South treated the brain work of the "Yankee mudsill" the same as they did the toil of the poor African. They stole it without paying for it, and the inventor of the instrument which gave the cotton growing States their supremacy in the markets of the world, and brought a constant flow of wealth to their doors, died a poor man. To return from this digression. Ten years after Whitney's cotton gin had been invented, Louisiana was added to the United States, and there was a great demand for slaves. The northern tier of slave States began to grow slaves for the southern market. Human beings were bred and used like cattle to be sold. Great God! how could such things be in a country that boasted of freedom, and claimed to be a beacon to the oppressed in all nations? John C. Calhoun, for eight years Vice President of the United States, was the leader and apostle of the slave holders. He was a South Carolinian of great force and eloquence. He taught the people that slavery was good for the black. It was a civilizing and benign institution, which gave the slave a greater measure of intelligence than he could attain in freedom, and surrounded him with Christianizing influences which he never would have had in his native land. The inference was easily drawn that it was a Providential design for the advancement of both Hence opposition to this heaven-appointed institution was profane, and abolitionism was only a species of infidelity running rank in the North. This Calhoun taught; and the people were eager to catch upon an excuse for their pet institution. Calhoun's last utterance in Congress was to the effect that the opposition to slavery would result in the destruction of the Union, and his latest conversation was upon the all-absorbing topic. The people of the South were taught from pulpit and press, from the rostrum, and in the schools, that it was a divine institution, ordained of Heaven, and they were willing enough to believe it. Laws were passed which were extremely barbarous. The slave was regarded not as a person, but a thing. He had no rights. The most holy ordinance of marriage, was set aside at the will of the master. Parents had no claim on the offspring of their own bodies. The child followed the condition of its mother no matter what that of the father might be. It was a statutory offense to teach a slave to read. The life of the slave was in the hand of his master, and a slave who would not submit to

a flogging by his master's order, might be shot. If a white man killed a slave, not his own, he could settle with the master of the slave, by paying his value. If a slave killed a white man, he might be shot without trial. No black, bond or free, could give testimony in court. There was a very slender show of protecting the right of the slave. The practice of the slave owners was not better than their laws. Families were separated; husbands from wives; and children from parents. And the men and women were compelled to pair as often, and with whom their masters wished. The hunting of fugitive slaves became a business in which trained bloodhounds were used, and the owners of the slaves paying for those returned. Discussions against slavery were not permitted in the slave States; and no papers, pamphlets, or books opposing the institution were allowed to find sale or to pass through the mails. To such an extreme of madness had the defenders and upholders of the system gone that many northern men were subjected to the most cruel indignities, and even in numerous instances to death. Shipmasters from northern ports were obliged to submit to seizure and search-the very thing for which the country had gone to war with England in 1812. Mobs were raised and the North denounced.

We do not wish to tear open the old wounds, but are writing sober history which is proven by the records of the past. There were good masters and Christian principles taught in many instances. The blacks under such conditions were contented and happy, but the death of their owner and the settlement of his estate might change all this in a day. The whole system was evil, and the stifled conscience of the enlightened people knew it to be

So.

When the State of Louisiana was admitted into the Union, in 1812, the vast northern part of the purchase from France was left in a territory without inhabitants. This was rich in natural resources. Iron, copper and coal enough to supply the earth, lay beneath its surface. Large rivers flowed in natural highways to the seas. The climate was genial and mild. Gradually settlers came flocking thither. The slave-holder with his human chattels was the first in the field, and the free settler turned aside to the northwest, from which slavery had been excluded by the act of the Continental Congress. So Missouri became a slave State. In 1818, there were sixty thousand persons in the Territory of Missouri, and she was knocking at the doors of Congress for admission. The slave States of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, had been admitted before this without any controversy, but now the slave power was becoming too aggressive and reaching far to the north. The first great contest between the North and the South was fought over this question. For more than two years the conflict waged, and after a desperate fight in the Halls of Congress and before the people, resulted in the compromise measure. There had been heated debates which had agitated the whole country from Maine to Louisiana. The compromise was that slavery should be allowed in all States south of 36 degrees, 30 minutes north latitude, and excluded from all States and territories north of that latitude.