In Virginia the reforms of 1829 had been inadequate. The slavery problem was still a burning question, and the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831, in which a few slaves rose against their masters and killed many men, women, and children, forced a reconsideration. Again the difficult problem was declared insoluble. Thomas R. Dew, a professor of political science in William and Mary College, gave the deciding counsel in elaborate testimony before a committee of the legislature, which was enlarged and published in book form in May, 1832. He contended that slavery was a positive good; that negroes could not live in the South except in a state of bondage; and that for the State of Virginia, at least, it was a most profitable institution. The time had passed, he contended, for men to believe or teach the fallacies of the Declaration of Independence. Society, certainly Southern society, was taking on a stratified form in which all men had their definite places; and the North, too, was fast drifting in the same direction, because of the influence of their growing industries, in which it was essential that some should be masters of great plants and direct the labor of thousands of people. Few books ever influenced Southern life so much as did this little word of clear reasoning and convincing statistics.

A year later Calhoun was offering the same arguments in the United States Senate; South Carolina had already come in a practical way to the same conclusion. North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana accepted the teaching that slavery was a beneficent social arrangement. In Kentucky and Tennessee, where James G. Birney and John Rankin had long worked for gradual emancipation, sentiment rapidly crystallized about the same dogma. Southern anti-slavery leaders emigrated to Ohio during the next few years, "leaving Ephraim joined to his idols"; and Southern men in Congress now replied with increasing earnestness to the petitions which came from Northern abolitionists. In 1837 it was decided not to receive such petitions, and John Quincy Adams was given his great theme for agitation; the United States mails were also closed to abolitionist literature intended for Southern distribution. The representatives of the great region which stretched from Baltimore to New Orleans and extended from the coast to the mountains, united almost to a man in defense of "the institutions of the South," and he who offered argument or example to the contrary was then unwelcome and later compelled to hold his tongue or emigrate.

Calhoun now became the undisputed leader of the plantation interests of the South, and few men were better fitted for the great commission. A keen and able debater and an enthusiastic Southerner, a combination in himself of the up-country ideals and the low-country purposes, he had become the idol of South Carolina. Conciliatory in manner and pure in all his public and private life, he won the respect and friendship of the best men in the North, like the Lowells and Winthrops of Massachusetts, and of Senators Allen, Hannegan, Breese, and the Dodges of the Northwest. Devoted to the ideal of a great American Union which he had made strong at the close of the second war with England, he was willing always to yield something to the West if only his "one institution" be left alone. Badly treated by Jackson and Van Buren, he had yet forgiven and joined hands with them both in 1840, in the hope that the power of Clay and his Eastern allies might be broken. In Congress and out he was the leader of the South as that section began to gird her loins for the fight over tariff, slavery, and expansion in 1840-44.

While the South was coming to one opinion on the great question of slavery, the West had been reviving her old ambitions and claims for more lands. So long as there was plenty of free lands and wide wildernesses, the Westerner felt that the American Republic was a free country; but when these began to fail he imagined himself hemmed in and stifled. In 1812 he had demanded Canada and Florida. He secured only the latter in 1819, and that after giving up Texas. The ink was hardly dry on the parchment of the treaty of that year before leading Westerners began their campaign for the "reannexation" of Texas. Stephen Austin, who settled in Texas, and Sam Houston, who deserted his wife for a home on the distant Southwestern frontier, kept the question alive. Thousands of Southerners and Westerners poured into the new cotton region between 1828 and 1836, and in the latter year they fought with the Mexicans the battle of San Jacinto, which gave Texas her freedom. A new American Republic with a pro-slavery constitution was speedily organized. Though Van Buren evaded the issue, Calhoun and the South urged immediate annexation.

There was thus a Southern call to the isolated President in 1842 to take up the Texas problem. Moreover, Virginia under the apportionment of 1841 lost five Representatives in the National House; South Carolina's number fell from nine to seven. North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia barely held their own. The older South was distinctly losing in the national race, despite the three-fifths rule on slavery. The Southwest gained some members, but the Northwest was growing faster. It was time for the South to act if she was to maintain her position in the country. In making up his Cabinet in the autumn of 1841, and again in filling the vacancies that occurred from time to time, the President selected men who favored expansion in the Southwest. The leaders of the Administration in the House of Representatives were ex-Governor Gilmer and Henry A. Wise, of Virginia, and the spokesmen of the South generally joined these in demanding the immediate annexation of Texas as a Southern measure. Calhoun, though not speaking so often, was the real leader of this cause in the Senate, and he constantly urged upon his friends the necessity of this acquisition as a distinct aid to his section.

Nearly all the West favored this Southern proposition; but an equally important matter to them was the occupation of Oregon. In Ohio, Michigan, and northern Illinois there was some indifference as to Texas, but none on the subject of Oregon. The vast region stretching from the forty-second parallel of north latitude to Alaska, and embracing an empire in itself, was held jointly with England, whose fur traders had actually occupied the country on the northern side of the Columbia River. England desired to hold the promising region. Under the agreement of 1818, renewed in 1828, either country was to give one year's notice of a purpose to abandon joint control, and, should the relation with England be dissolved, the stronger party would doubtless obtain the better part of the territory. The people of the Northwest under radical leadership soon learned to demand all Oregon; English fur interests understood the situation well, and they pressed their Government to seize all the territory along the Pacific to the Bay of California. And English relations with Mexico were such that Lower California was apt to be added to Oregon in case of a break with the United States.

In the East there had been reason for increasing irritation between the two Governments. British public opinion had been distinctly unfriendly since the Canadian insurrection of 1837-38, when so many Americans gave assistance to the insurgents. And this unfriendliness was fed by the ill-concealed desire of the people of the West for the annexation of Canada to the United States. When the American ship Caroline, which had been assisting the Canadian insurrectionists, was seized and destroyed by the English on Lake Erie, an American citizen was killed. This was amicably arranged; but in 1840 a certain Alexander McLeod, then in New York, avowed that he had killed the American and was promptly seized by the state authorities and put on trial for his life. McLeod now claimed that he had done the deed in obedience to orders, and the British Minister came to his assistance. Officers of the American State Department took the same view, but they were helpless, and for a time it seemed that one of the States would put to death as a murderer a man whom both England and the United States recognized to be innocent. War seemed imminent, but as so often happens in Anglo-Saxon procedure, a way out of the legal impasse was found in a fictitious alibi, and McLeod was acquitted.

When Sir Robert Peel became the head of the English Government in 1841 he sent, as Minister to Washington, Lord Ashburton, one of the Baring Brothers who had had such large business relations with many of the States and with the old National Bank. Ashburton and Webster were personal friends, and they were likely to find a solution to other important and pressing problems engaging the attention of both countries. One of these disputes had to do with the suppression of the nefarious African slave trade, which still flourished in spite of the most stringent of laws, national and international. The difficulty lay in the enforcement of law. The South did not regard slavery as an unmixed evil, and hence Southern Presidents had not been overzealous of invoking the severe law against the slave trade. England stood ready to enforce her laws, but then the traders would raise the American flag. This necessitated the exercise of the obsolete right of search of suspected vessels, if anything was to be done. But the people of the United States resented the exercise of the right, and Northern statesmen were also loath to allow this. To obviate all difficulty the two Governments agreed in 1842 to maintain a joint naval patrol of the African coast. The South was not quite pleased, and a great many people of the West were displeased that Webster had yielded the right of search in disguise, as it was thought.

At the same time a matter of larger importance to the North, the settlement of the long-disputed boundary between Maine and Nova Scotia, was pending. Since 1838 there had been quarrels and actual encounters along the northeastern boundary, which had won the name of "the Aroostook War." Both Maine and the National Congress had appropriated money to maintain American rights on the border, and here again there was reason to fear war. Webster and Ashburton took up the problem and by mutual concessions came to a fair but very unpopular agreement. They also settled outstanding disputes concerning the long boundary between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains.

But the question of dividing Oregon was left untouched even by these friendly diplomats. Nor could they do more than discuss the critical Creole trouble, which just now came to complicate the relations of both peoples, evidently desirous of avoiding war. The Creole was a vessel engaged in the domestic slave trade. In 1841 this ship, bound for New Orleans, was seized by the slaves on board, who killed its crew and carried it into the port of Nassau. The local courts punished some of the negroes as murderers and set the others free. Speaking for the American Government, Webster demanded of England an apology and compensation for the slaves. Ashburton defended his country stoutly and refused satisfaction. Again public opinion, at least Southern opinion, was greatly excited, but nothing was done about the Creole case until 1853, when it was submitted to arbitration, and compensation was allowed the owners of the slaves.

Thus the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 was a settlement of some threatening difficulties and a tacit compromise or ignoring of others. It served the useful purpose of keeping the peace between kindred peoples. The Oregon and Texas questions were left open, and these were assuming more dangerous forms with the passage of time.

This served to direct attention to the Pacific Coast and even the Far East, where New England merchants and shipowners had long driven a profitable trade. President Tyler sent Commodore Jones to the Pacific to protect American interests; he proposed to send a commissioner to China in the hope of aiding American commerce there, and he began to consult members of Congress about the possibility of obtaining Texas, California, and Oregon all in treaties with Mexico and England. He offered to send Webster to London to conduct the negotiations, and at his instance John Quincy Adams wrote Edward Everett, the American Minister to England, that he might resign and go to China to do pioneer work for New England interests. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty was to be followed by a greater one, securing to the United States the coveted expansion southwest, west, and northwest. Thus Calhoun and his extreme Southerners, Benton and his ardent imperialist followers, and the radical Northwest were all to be satisfied at a single stroke of state, and Webster, the New Englander, was to be the happy instrument and perhaps become President in consequence.

Everett refused to resign, and Webster had promised his Whig friends to leave the State Department. Tyler did not despair; when the great New Englander retired in 1842, like Clay, to private life, he invited Hugh S. Legare, of Charleston, to the vacant place. A year later Abel P. Upshur succeeded to the office. All the while the President was seeking to guide the Administration into other channels than the old ones of tariff, bank, and internal improvements.

The Texan envoys to Washington repeatedly urged unofficially the annexation of their country, which had fallen into a state of semi-bankruptcy, and whose governor, Sam Houston, was making overtures for English protection as an alternative to failure to get a favorable hearing in Washington. Southern States petitioned for annexation, while Middle Westerners met in a convention at Cincinnati in August, 1843, and demanded the immediate seizure of Texas and prompt occupation of Oregon. Thousands of emigrants left Missouri during the summer of 1843 for the Columbia Valley, under the encouragement of Senator Benton and for the purpose of holding the country against English fur traders or more permanent settlers. Under all this pressure the Administration let it be known in Congress that at least Texas would be annexed. Upshur reopened negotiations with the Texan envoy in Washington. Immediately John Quincy Adams protested, declaring the "Confederacy" to be dissolved in case Tyler's "nefarious" scheme should be consummated; but the President continued to press the Texan negotiations.

When the treaty with the new republic was about concluded, Upshur was accidentally killed by the explosion of a gun on the ship Princeton. Calhoun, whose ardent candidacy for the Democratic nomination had failed, was called to the State Department to take up the unfinished work. Meanwhile the campaigns of the two great parties were already far advanced. Clay was the acknowledged candidate of the Whigs, and Van Buren had obtained the pledged support of two thirds of the delegations to the next Democratic Convention, which was to meet in Baltimore in May, 1844. Instinctively dreading new issues, Van Buren arranged a visit to Jackson in the early spring, and on his return he called on Clay at Lexington, Kentucky, where it seems to have been agreed that the two candidates should eventually eliminate the Texas proposition from the platforms of the two great parties. On April 20, when Clay was in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Van Buren was at his home at Lindenwald, New York, public letters were given out by both leaders. Both advised against discussing the one thing everybody was discussing. The simultaneous appearance of these formal statements, each advising the same thing, caused a national sensation. Men thought that the two candidates had agreed beforehand what the people should not do. In Virginia, South Carolina, and Mississippi, where Texas feeling ran high, Democratic opinion could not be restrained, and meetings were called to reconsider the instructions of their delegations to the Baltimore Convention; nor were the Southern Whigs less anxious about the outcome, though the party as a whole acquiesced in Clay's wish that Texas should be eliminated from their forthcoming platform.

At this point Robert J. Walker, Senator from Mississippi, a shrewd little man who had gone to the Southwest eighteen years before to make his fortune, assumed the management of the Democratic party. A bold land speculator and an able lawyer, connected with the powerful Dallas and Bache families in Pennsylvania, he quickly rose to a commanding position in his State and was sent to the United States Senate, where he soon made himself felt as the most radical representative of Southern and Western interests, urging the rapid removal of the Indians beyond the western frontiers, free homesteads for all who would go West, and the immediate annexation of Texas. An intimate friend of Van Buren, a persistent opponent of Calhoun, and a rival of Benton for national honors, Walker published on Jackson Day, January 8, 1844, a letter to the public which was immediately reprinted in the newspapers of the South and West, and which in pamphlet form had a very wide circulation. In this letter he came out boldly for the "reannexation of Texas and the reoccupation of Oregon,"—all Oregon. His rhetorical language and his defiance of England gained the public ear on both Texas and Oregon, while his shrewd suggestions of commercial expansion in the Pacific won powerful support in New York and Boston. But the greatest stroke of this publication was the apparent Southern demand for all Oregon, and before the Van Buren-Clay "self-denying ordinances" appeared, Walker was forging the union of South and West on the proposition, reannexation of Texas and reoccupation of Oregon, and maneuvering in Washington for what was later called the "bargain of the Baltimore Convention." Walker's relations with the Pennsylvania leaders gave him a strong position in that great Democratic community, and he soon secured the support of Thomas Ritchie, the master politician in Virginia. When the Democrats met, late in May, the "little Senator" was in perfect control. He renewed and vitalized the rule of the Democratic party whereby the candidate must secure two thirds of all votes cast in order to receive the nomination. He procured the passage of this resolution by a mere majority vote, and thus Van Buren, who had a majority of the delegates instructed to vote for him, was deprived of the leadership of the party. The Walker slogan, "All of Texas, all of Oregon," was adopted by the convention, and James K. Polk, formerly Speaker of the House of Representatives, was nominated for the Presidency. Walker's brother-in-law, George M. Dallas, a Pennsylvania protectionist, was nominated for the Vice-Presidency. It was but a few days before the Northwestern men indicated the trend of events by giving every assurance of their support and adding to the campaign cry of Walker the "fifty-four-forty-or-fight" slogan which was heard on every stump from June till November.

Van Buren was humiliated and eliminated from the counsels of the party; Clay laughed at his "dark-horse" competitor, of whom he affected never to have heard; Calhoun, the legitimate beneficiary of the Texas propaganda, joined Walker with heart and soul and aided greatly in the management of the campaign. A new Democratic regime—the South and West cooeperating—had been founded. This second coalition aimed at Clay and the East resembled very strikingly that of 1828. And new issues had been injected into the national discussion. A rapid extension of the national domain to the Rio Grande, to the Pacific, and to 54 deg. 40' of north latitude in the Far Northwest was opposed to Clay's well-worn program of a protective tariff, national bank, and internal improvements.

Meanwhile Calhoun and Tyler completed their treaty with Texas and submitted it to the Senate, where it was held in suspense until after the meeting of the conventions. Tyler, after some hesitation, gave his support to Polk and Dallas. Calhoun suppressed uprisings against the new leadership in South Carolina, where strong doubt prevailed as to the purposes of Walker and Dallas with reference to the tariff. The old statesman, isolated though he was, thought that if the South and West could be held together the future would be secure. He took pleasure in the belief that "this is the end of Clay," who had so long troubled the national waters, while the politicians of the new coalition assured him that he would succeed Polk in 1848. Webster said little during the campaign; New England was divided by the promises of a great commercial expansion and the annexation of Oregon. The election of Polk and Dallas justified the bold moves of the Baltimore Convention. The scheme of Tyler, looking to the annexation of Texas, California, and Oregon, was now to be put into effect, even at the risk of war with England, whence serious warnings had been coming since the new national purpose became clear.

After years of uncertainty and deadlock, the country was now prepared for a forward movement, and though Polk was not her ideal statesman, the people rallied with fair unanimity to his standard. The new Administration would represent the new Democratic party—a resolute South and an ardent West. And the President-elect, simple and direct in all his ways, was determined to carry out the purposes of his supporters, namely, set the country upon a career of expansion hitherto unparalleled in its history.

In Illinois, Missouri, and throughout the South the demand was well-nigh unanimous that the disputed region along the Rio Grande should be held as against Mexico, and that California and Oregon should be seized and colonized. Cass, the older, and Douglas, the younger leader of the Northwest, were agreed in these extreme demands; even Benton, the disappointed friend of Van Buren, found compensation in the proposed Pacific frontier, while a powerful group of Southerners led by Governor Gilmer, of Virginia, Robert Barnwell Rhett, of South Carolina, William L. Yancey, of Alabama, and Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, took up the program of Calhoun and pressed it almost daily upon Congress and the country. The South was about to resume control of the national fortunes.

In that region, where cotton was king, and tobacco, sugar, and rice were powerful allies, a unique civilization had grown up. The plantation was the model, and the patriarchal master of slaves the ideal character which the ambitious poor imitated everywhere. The elegant life of the colonial plantation houses, which adorned the banks of the winding rivers of the old South in the days of the Revolution, had gradually moved westward and southwestward until the larger tobacco area of the Piedmont region extended from Petersburg, Virginia, to Greensboro, North Carolina, and from the falls of the rivers to the slopes of the Blue Ridge. Instead of running away from their slaves, as John Randolph had feared Southern gentlemen would be compelled to do, the tobacco planters found their business increasingly prosperous as the great cotton area south of them opened larger markets for their crops and higher prices for their surplus negroes. Even the wheat-growers of Virginia and Maryland became again prosperous when the great canals and the improved turnpikes reached the valley of Virginia and opened still wider areas of rich lands to the Richmond and Baltimore markets. The plantation form of life penetrated the high lands of Virginia almost to the Tennessee border, and slavery was fastening its hold upon the up-country people who had formerly been hostile.



But the vast cotton region, embracing the better part of middle and eastern North Carolina and the accessible lands of the lower South to Eastern Texas, and extending over most of the Mississippi Valley to St. Louis, was the heart of the South, which supported the Polk Administration and waged the war upon Mexico soon to begin. In this fine country, men of ability made fortunes in a few years and learned to imitate the life of the old southern manor houses. Forests were cleared away in winter by the sturdy hands of slaves, and new fields were opened to cotton culture each spring to supply the places of those that had been rapidly worn down by unscientific methods of agriculture. The cabins which made the homes of well-to-do men in the Jeffersonian epoch gave way to substantial frame houses with massive columns and wide verandas, with great hallways and broad banquet-rooms, which so much delighted the heart of the planter of Calhoun's day. In a warm climate like that of the cotton region the object of the builder was always to attain cool recesses and retired gardens, where the social life of the time displayed itself.

The houses were built on hilltops covered with primeval oaks, which cast a dense shade over all. Sometimes stone or brick walls protected the premises against the outer world, and wide entrances, guarded on either side by sculptured lions or tigers, gave a dignity and a splendor which reminded one of the estates of English noblemen. In the rear of these pretentious and sometimes beautiful houses were the rows of negro cabins, with their little gardens for the raising of vegetables and the ranges for chickens, as dear to the palates of negro slaves as to those of visiting clergymen. The barns and carriage houses completed the outfit. Where hundreds of bales of cotton and thousands of barrels of corn were grown annually, there would be driving or saddle horses for the master's family and many Kentucky mules for the work of the fields; and a plantation took on the appearance of a busy colony in a new country. Sixty to a hundred negroes were regarded as the best labor unit for profitable agriculture. Of these there would be a few house servants trained in all the intricacies of patriarchal hospitality and courtesy. The carriage driver and keeper of the stables, sometimes clad in the extra dignity of a special livery and a tall silk hat, a tyrant to all the little negroes, but an obsequious flatterer to those who were welcome at the master's house, was perhaps the most envied man of the estate. To see this matchless son of Africa mounted on the high seat of an old-fashioned English carriage, as he drove his prancing horses to the front door of the "great house" and asked if all were ready for church, was to get a glimpse of the old South itself. The boasted freedom of "poor white trash" or of "impudent free issue negroes" had no attractions to him who enjoyed these high prerogatives.

The master who was responsible for the multitudinous life of the plantation, arbiter of the fortunes, sometimes, of a thousand men, was usually conscious of his power and, when "times were good," kind to his dependents. He liked to see his negroes fat and happy, for a "likely slave" was as good as money in the bank. Accustomed to the exercise of authority, he was apt to be a member of the county court, the actual governing agency of the old South, and as such he was always "squire." From the county court he went to the state legislature, where he and his fellow planters made the laws of these sovereign States of the old regime. From local magistrate to chief executive the Southern community was governed by the owners of slaves, and the great men whom they chose to speak for the South in Congress or to advise the President and his Cabinet or to sit upon the benches of the federal courts were invariably masters of plantations, trained from early youth to the exercise of authority and accustomed to receive the homage of their neighbors. It was a mighty social and economic organization which had grown up in and spread over the richer lands of South and West, as far as the borders of Mexico and the valleys of the Ohio and Missouri. The wheat and tobacco growers, the rice and sugar planters were allied to the more powerful cotton lords, and, though there were party differences, all spoke the same voice in the national life. Of the five or six millions of southern white people in 1845 only seven or eight thousand were great plantation masters, though some three hundred thousand were either owners of slaves or members of the privileged families—a larger proportion than usual for a favored class, but still a small number when compared to the total population of the country which was, from 1845 to 1860, controlled by them.

As was natural, the professional classes of the South, the lawyers, clergymen, physicians, and teachers, were in close alliance with the planters, their callings and their incomes being directly dependent on them. A successful professional man soon became a master and usually retired to a country seat. If a poor but capable young man gave promise of power and leadership he was soon accepted by his dominant neighbors and became a son-in-law of a privileged family; if a preacher rose to fame doubting or even condemning the institutions of the South, he was apt to find a way to change his views and to become a part of the system before he reached his mature years. The articulate South was, therefore, in economic and social life a unit in 1845, and this unit was the strongest group in the country as a whole. Its demand for expansion towards the southwest was based upon the common desire, the common law of growth, and this growth was the only means of winning new votes in Congress and in the electoral college. It was the same motive which actuated the farmers of the Northwest and the commercial leaders of New England when they demanded of the Federal Government the seizure of Oregon or the protection of ships upon the ocean.



If the planter and dominant element of the South urged Polk and Walker onward in their course and gave power to Calhoun, the greater masses of non-slaveholding Southerners were hardly less enthusiastic. The earlier jealousy and fear of the planters had everywhere weakened as the new lands of the South and West gave opportunity to the more ambitious to rise in the social and economic scale. The sons of small farmers and landless men in the old South had built the cotton kingdom of the lower South, and were now drawing aristocratic Virginia and the Carolinas into a close union with the new region. The widening of the area of slavery was equivalent to the opening of a social safety valve to the older and stratifying life of the South. Young men who had been hostile to slavery at home became friendly allies in a new environment. Thus the small farmers became enthusiastic supporters of the great machine of which slavery was the base.

Not only so, the growers of corn and wheat in the remote hills and mountains of the South, the men who distilled their grain into strong drink, those who raised pigs or cotton a hundred or two hundred miles west of the tobacco and cotton belts, could always find a market in the plantation towns where calicos, "store-clothes," and trinkets could be had for themselves and families. The long trains of quaint, covered tobacco wagons which wound their way over rough roads from the mountains to the black belt carried whiskey or other up-country products to the plantations; the droves of mules, cattle, or hogs which poured into the Carolinas and the Gulf region from East Tennessee and Kentucky were bonds of attraction between the planters and the non-slaveholding elements too powerful to be ignored. And as time passed the legislatures under planter control built better highways and projected railways into the richer sections of the interior, which invariably made allies of these new economic communities, and gradually slavery followed in the wake of the new channels of communication.

The most helpless of the Southern groups were the poorer farmers, who lived on the semi-sterile lands which the planters refused to occupy or in the pine barrens of the eastern Carolinas, and the landless class which hung on to the skirts of slavery. Unambitious, ignorant, and improvident, frequently the "ne'er-do-wells" of the old families, ignored by the wealthy and spurned by the slaves, who gave them the name of "poor white trash," their lot was hard, indeed. They earned a few dollars a year at odd jobs, raised a few hogs or at most a bale or two of cotton, and lived in cabins little better than those occupied by the negroes. Their children were numerous, without educational advantages, and accustomed to the poor and meager cultural life of an outcast class. Their outlook was no better than that of their parents. Barefoot, half-clad, yet alert and agile, hating negroes and fearing the masters, these "Anglo-Saxons" offered the problem of the South. Unaccustomed to independent voting, they did not endanger the existing order, and even when they were aroused to a sense of their position, their ignorance and dependence and prejudices prevented them from organizing in self-defense. They usually followed their economic superiors, and learned to denounce the tariff, internal improvements, and "scheming Yankees" as roundly as did their wealthy neighbors.

Still, life in the South was in the open; the joys and the sports of the people were those of healthy rural communities. The well-to-do and even the poorer classes lived on horseback, bet on the races, and participated in the rough-and-tumble games of the court days. The wealthy did not refuse all relations with "the people" on such occasions. The planter knew and called familiarly by name every man in his part of the county, and the magistrates who made up the courts of the people exercised a kindly patriarchal authority over their "inferiors," the dependent whites. There were few occupants of jails or penitentiaries; poorhouses were often tenantless, and asylums for the insane were not numerous or crowded. Beggars and tramps were unknown. Judged by the facts of life the system of slavery and large proprietors was not so bad as it appeared; and as the South came into full self-consciousness, say with the inauguration of Polk and Dallas, the problems of adjustment of the different economic groups, of providing better educational facilities for the poorer classes, and of meeting certain religious and social requirements of the slaves themselves, were fully recognized by the masters, and beginnings of improvement in all these matters were already making.

In nothing was this more evident than in Southern religious life. The South which followed Jefferson was largely indifferent to religious dogmas of all kinds. Most of the greater leaders had been deists rather than Christians; nor had they suffered for these opinions at the hands of the people. Calhoun's Unitarianism had in no way retarded his political career. But before 1830 a change was taking place. The stout Presbyterianism of the up-country forced the retirement of one of the professors of the University of Virginia, in its earlier years, and it compelled the resignation of President Cooper of the University of South Carolina, in 1836, because of his denial of the inspiration of the Pentateuch. The Presbyterians had grown powerful and wealthy; they asserted their influence in Virginia and South Carolina, and they were already recognized as leaders in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. What this denomination did was applauded by the more numerous Baptists and Methodists, whose membership was as yet too poor to command the influence of their rivals.

Before 1844, however, these great religious organizations in the South, with a combined membership of nearly a million, received full recognition. With a small-farmer and landless membership they had opposed slavery and the whole aristocratic system before 1820, but as the years passed, tobacco and cotton culture made many of them wealthy and opened the way to all who were ambitious to rise. At once the official attitude began to change. The preachers ceased first to denounce "the institution," and finally without offense became slave-owners themselves. The clergy's stern rebukes of fashion, of dancing, and of "the wearing of fine raiment" ceased or lost its effect. Presbyterians had long believed in an educated ministry, and when they forced their influence into political life, they were already friendly to the dominant ideas of the South. Now the Baptists and Methodists built colleges for the training of young ministers, and preaching in their simple churches was made to conform to the canons of good taste. Throughout the South the churches became the allies of the existing economic and social order, and they presented a solid front to those who proposed to discipline men for holding other men in bondage. Their clergy formulated a strong Biblical and patriarchal defense of the South. Slavery, from being an institution to be lamented as an evil, became a blessing sustained by the Holy Scriptures, according to the ablest ministers of God.

When the Northern branches of these churches found how completely their Southern brethren had yielded to the powerful social pressure of their local life, a vigorous attempt was made to correct the tendency. It failed, and in 1844-45 the Baptists of the East and those of the upper Northwest refused to cooeperate with Southern churches which insisted on the right to send out missionaries who owned slaves. A Southern Baptist Church was the immediate result. In the same year, 1844, the Methodists of the East and upper West refused to recognize the ministrations of a bishop who owned slaves, and a break-up of the church followed. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was organized at Louisville the following year. The Presbyterians and Episcopalians had become so completely reconciled to the aristocratic life which slavery connoted that they sustained no serious breach in their ranks. In the North as well as in the South they accepted slavery. A notable result of these breaks in the Baptist and Methodist churches was the rapid increase of membership of both in the South. Within a period of ten years the Southern Baptists were as powerful as the American Baptists had been in 1844. The same is true of the Methodists, and what happened in the South was paralleled in the North. Pro-slavery churches in the South and anti-slavery churches in the North seemed to be required by the people. Revivals, educational improvements, and missionary zeal were the fruits of the "reformation." Politicians like Calhoun, who watched and counseled these peaceful schisms, urged that the Union must in due time likewise break into pieces; but the great economic forces of the country were as yet too strong; common markets, interlocking transportation systems, and the extraordinary prosperity which followed the Polk regime defeated the wishes of those who thought that two confederations within the area of the United States would be better than one.

Thus, when Polk took up the forward program which had been outlined at Baltimore, and which was to antiquate the "American System" over which Clay and Jackson and their respective groups had fought so bitterly since 1824, the South was rapidly crystallizing into a solid section with definite ideas and purposes. The plantation owners were in full command; the older and small-farmer element was falling into line behind their pro-slavery leaders; the social and religious life had become orthodox and stratified; and the clergy, who now preached acceptably to great masses of people, were, like those of New England, in full sympathy with the dominant economic interests of their time. The immediate future of the South was fairly certain, and Southern leaders assumed a militant tone indicative of the wishes of their people.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Justin H. Smith's Annexation of Texas (1911) and G. P. Garrison's Westward Extension (1906), in American Nation series, give full and trustworthy accounts of the Texas movement; while Lyon G. Tyler's Times of the Tylers (1884); C. H. Ambler's Life of Thomas Ritchie (1913); J. W. DuBose's Life of William L. Yancey (1892); and J. F. H. Claiborne's Life and Correspondence of John A. Quitman (1860), supply abundant material showing the temper and purposes of the different parts of the South in 1840. U. B. Phillips's The Plantation and Frontier (1909) is an excellent source-book for the period, and the Adams Memoir, Clay Correspondence (Colton), Calhoun Correspondence (Jameson), and Mrs. A. M. Coleman's The Life of John J. Crittenden (1871) are most useful for these years. The debates of Congress for the period of 1833 to 1873 are found in the Congressional Globe and Appendices. For the philosophy of slavery and the Southern social system of which slavery was the basis read The Pro-Slavery Argument (1852), containing Thomas R. Dew's and James H. Hammond's writings on the subject.



CHAPTER VIII

WAR AND CONQUEST

The treaty which Upshur and Calhoun negotiated with the Texan envoys in the spring of 1844 was presented to the Senate in April, and held in committee until after the two party conventions had met in Baltimore. The Whigs condemned it, as has been noted, and the Democrats accepted it. It was a mere matter of form, then, for the Whig Senate to reject the treaty which had become in a great measure the platform of their opponents. When Congress reassembled in December the result of the election had made it plain that Calhoun and Walker, and not Clay and Van Buren, represented the wishes of the people, though the majority of the popular vote was exceedingly small.

Tyler seemed anxious to hasten the work of annexation, and he recommended the accomplishment of his purpose by joint resolution of the two houses of Congress. Benton, who disliked Tyler and hated Calhoun, and who had opposed the adoption of the treaty in the preceding spring, now gave his influence to the Administration, and during the closing hours of the session the House and the Senate passed the joint resolution making Texas a State by narrow majorities. There was widespread opposition to the annexation of new territory, especially pro-Southern territory, by the new method. Joint resolutions in State legislatures that were evenly divided were not unknown; but for Congress to evade a plain rule of the Constitution requiring two thirds of the Senate by a mere majority of both houses was denounced as the rankest usurpation. Without serious concern as to public opinion in the East or great deference to the President-elect, Tyler and Calhoun hastened messengers to Texas and ordered two regiments of troops, under the command of Colonel Zachary Taylor, to take position at Corpus Christi on the southern bank of the Nueces River, and sent a squadron of the navy, under Commodore Conner, to the mouth of the Rio Grande. This disposition of the military and naval forces of the United States was made to protect Texas against a possible invasion by Mexico; but it was sharp notice that the disputed region between the Nueces and the Rio Grande would be held for Texas. Tyler retired to his Virginia plantation, leaving to Polk the more difficult task of securing all Oregon.

Polk had already shown his self-reliance in refusing to appoint Calhoun Secretary of State. That eminent statesman was thoroughly familiar with the foreign relations of the Government, and he enjoyed a prestige that would have distinguished any administration; besides, he was certain that he could bring matters to a peaceful conclusion with both Mexico and England. Nor had he failed in his loyalty to the new President during the recent campaign. Still Polk gave James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania, the first place in the Cabinet. Robert J. Walker asked and received the second place—the Treasury. William L. Marcy, of New York, and John Y. Mason, of Virginia, represented in the Cabinet those large Democratic constituencies, while George Bancroft, the historian, spoke for New England, though the people of that section would never have named him for the honor.



To the surprise of old political heads Polk announced blandly in his inaugural that he would proceed to "reoccupy Oregon"; that is, he would execute the mandate of the Baltimore Convention even at the cost of war with England! But Calhoun had practically agreed with the British Minister to compromise the conflicting claims to Oregon. Buchanan, being a man of yielding temper, was disposed to the same easy solution of the most dangerous problem of the Administration. The President, however, restrained his Secretary, and in the annual message of December, 1845, he asked Congress to give him authority to dissolve the copartnership of England and the United States with reference to Oregon. This was taken in both countries as inviting war.

Calhoun regarded this move as likely to be fatal to the retention of Texas and certain to lose for the country all of Oregon. He returned to the Senate for the avowed purpose of preventing war. Webster, in the Senate again, was on friendly terms with the leaders of the English governing party, and both he and they were striving to prevent the expansionists from committing an overt act of hostility. Benton, the foremost of expansionists before Tyler became President, was also ready to compromise the dispute. This meant that Calhoun, Webster, and Benton would unite their influence to defeat the foreign policy of the President if it were not modified to suit their views.

But the new leadership embraced a group of able and bold men: John A. Dix, of New York; Caleb Cushing, a Whig recruit from Massachusetts; James M. Mason, of Virginia; Robert Barnwell Rhett, William L. Yancey, and Jefferson Davis, of the lower South; and David Atchison, Stephen A. Douglas, Lewis Cass, and William Allen, of the Northwest,—all ardent expansionists and "big Americans" who would not readily suffer the defeat of the party program. During the summer and autumn of 1845 their policy had been worked out in detail and discussed among the men who were to be responsible for its execution. In domestic affairs their scheme embraced the settlement of the long-disputed financial policy in a new Independent or Sub-Treasury Bill which Secretary Walker was preparing. The Tariff of 1842, which had offended the Democratic South, was also to be reformed, and Walker had written the new schedules which Congress was to enact in due time. In order to secure the necessary Western support for these Southern purposes, the old internal improvements program was revived in an enlarged rivers and harbors bill. This was a big plan and the Democratic majorities in House and Senate were very narrow. The outlook was anything but encouraging, with Webster, Calhoun, and Benton likely to be in opposition on every point.

But Congress passed the Sub-Treasury Bill, by which most of the financial measures of the preceding administrations since 1833, resting on the mere orders of President or Secretary of the Treasury, were legalized. It was in the main the same law which Van Buren had labored so long to secure, but which the Whigs had repealed in 1841. The money of the Government was henceforth to be kept in certain designated sub-treasuries in leading cities like New York, Baltimore, and New Orleans, and drawn upon by the Secretaries of the Treasury when needed. There was thus to be no national bank; and the state banks were to continue issuing their paper, which was to be the money of the people. Gold and silver, coined by the government mint at Philadelphia, were seldom demanded in ordinary business transactions, though coin or bullion still remained the redemption money of the banks and served as the basis of exchange with foreign countries.

The South had preached free trade since 1828. Polk and his Secretary of the Treasury had been prominent exponents of the idea, despite some campaign bargaining with Pennsylvania. In England Richard Cobden, John Bright, and Sir Robert Peel were about to secure the repeal of the age-old protective system, and in both France and Germany the free-trade agitation was daily winning recruits. Polk and his advisers set themselves the task of securing the passage of a "free-trade tariff" for the United States. Walker submitted an able report in December, 1845. A very high rate was recommended on all luxuries, including wines and liquors; an average duty of twenty-five per cent was to be laid on the great bulk of imports which would compete with American cotton, wool, and iron manufactures; and a long list of articles of every day consumption on which no duties should be imposed was submitted. Though the Pennsylvanians denounced the proposed tariff bill as un-Democratic, it became a law in July, 1846, proved to be successful, and remained the corner-stone of the Democratic structure till 1861.

The douceur, in the form of a bill for liberal internal improvements for the Northwest, whose leaders all voted for the tariff reductions, passed both houses of Congress; but the members from the lower South, led by Robert Barnwell Rhett, protested to the last. Polk accepted their view and vetoed the bill. Northwestern men cried out "treachery" so loudly that summer, in a great mass meeting in Chicago, that the President feared the party was seriously endangered. Still, the three problems over which Clay, Calhoun, and Webster had wrestled since 1816 had been solved. The United States was henceforth to manage its finances independently; the free-trade element had won the ascendancy, and there was not to be another high-tariff campaign until after the Civil War; and internal improvements on a large national scale were not to be undertaken until the passage of the Pacific Railway Bill in 1862. The only cloud above the political horizon was the anger of the Northwestern Democrats.

There was more danger in carrying forward the program which was intended to secure to the United States Oregon, California, and New Mexico. But the first step had already been taken. In April, 1846, both House and Senate, in spite of the opposition of the older leaders, authorized the President to give notice to England that joint occupation should cease at the expiration of a year. The English people were much excited, and the idea prevailed that this was only a move on the part of the United States to seize Canada, but the British Government renewed the proposition to compromise on the forty-ninth parallel, Vancouver Island to remain in British possession. A treaty to this effect was accepted by both Governments during the summer of 1846. Polk could boast that the Oregon question had been settled. Again the Northwestern Democrats, who had been promised all of Oregon, were sorely disappointed. One of their most popular leaders declared in the Senate: "James K. Polk has spoken words of falsehood, and with the tongue of a serpent." Would the Northwestern wing of the party continue loyal? This may, perhaps, best be answered when we come to discuss the Wilmot Proviso.

When the Oregon question was at its acutest stage, in the autumn of 1845, Polk sent John Slidell, an adroit politician of Louisiana, to Mexico, to renew the friendly relations which had been broken off immediately after the passage of the joint resolution by Congress. Slidell was authorized to negotiate a treaty by which European influence, then being exerted in Mexico against the United States, was to be counteracted, the annexation of Texas approved, and all of the claims of American citizens against Mexico were to be definitely satisfied. But as Mexico had no funds in her treasury, Slidell was to assume for the United States all these obligations, and pay the Mexicans $5,000,000 in return for the cession of New Mexico, a part of which was claimed by Texas. Finally Slidell was to purchase California, if that were found to be possible, and raise the cash payment from $5,000,000 to $25,000,000. Slidell's mission was supported by a naval demonstration in Mexican waters, and the meaning of his presence was made very plain to the people of the distressed republic.

The new Minister was rejected, however, and Taylor was ordered to move his troops toward the Rio Grande. Mexico resented this, and near Matamoras on April 24, 1846, came the first pass at arms. Slidell returned to Washington about the time that the news of this encounter reached the President. On May 11, war was declared and Taylor was ordered to cross the border and "conquer a peace." In August Colonel S. W. Kearny seized New Mexico and set out with a troop of three hundred men to take California. But Commodore John Drake Sloat had been sent to the Pacific with a squadron of the navy to prevent the seizure of Monterey by the English. And to make certainty more certain, Consul Thomas O. Larkin at Monterey had been instructed, about the time of Slidell's appointment to Mexico, to be in readiness for any emergency. Before Kearny could cross the mountains, Larkin and Sloat had taken possession of California, almost unresisted.

In September, 1846, General Taylor won a brilliant victory at Monterey, twenty miles south of the Rio Grande, and his forces were being augmented every day for the march overland to the City of Mexico. Whig politicians hailed at once the new general as their candidate for the Presidency in 1848. Naturally the Administration did not care to aid their opponents in their political plans, and its leaders cast about for a Democratic general. None was to be found; and Thomas H. Benton, willing that Jackson's plan for his elevation to the Presidency should be fulfilled, asked Polk to make him commander-in-chief of all the forces operating in Mexico. Benton had never had any military experience, and Polk was relieved to find that such an appointment would not be confirmed by the Senate. General Winfield Scott, already quarreling with the Secretary of War, and hence out of favor with the Administration, was the only alternative. Scott was also a candidate for the Whig nomination for the Presidency. After much hesitation most of the troops of Taylor were placed under the command of Scott and reinforced with still others, and all set sail for Vera Cruz, then as now the great port of Mexico. The city fell on March 29, 1847, and the march to the City of Mexico was about to begin.

Meanwhile, Santa Anna had been made commander of all the Mexican armies, and he, learning of Taylor's weak and isolated position south of Monterey, hastened with twenty thousand soldiers to surround and capture him. Taylor moved forward and met the enemy at Buena Vista, after receiving some raw recruits, on February 23, 1847, and completely routed him, thus adding to the laurels he had already won and convincing the country that he had been badly treated by the authorities in Washington.

Scott began the march to the Mexican capital on April 8. He met resolute resistance at Cerro Gordo, where on April 17 and 18 a large army of the enemy was attacked and defeated. At this point Nicholas Trist, envoy from the President, with instructions to treat with Mexico on the basis of Slidell's proposals of 1845, arrived. Trist was a clerk in the Department of State, and Scott refused to recognize or have any relations with him. After much unseemly bickering and the conciliatory services of the British Minister to Mexico, the general and the envoy made peace, and negotiations were opened, only to be broken off by Santa Anna upon his arrival from the north. On August 19 and 20, the battle of Cherubusco seemed to convince the Mexicans that further resistance would be futile, and Trist again offered peace on the terms of 1845, except that the United States would reduce the amount of money to be paid by $5,000,000. But the armistice under which the negotiations had been renewed was broken, and on September 8 and 13, the battles of Molino del Rey and Chapultepec were fought, and the capital was occupied on September 14. A revolution in the affairs of Mexico now took place, and the new Government appointed commissioners on November 22, to treat with Trist.

However, the news of these battles and victories had aroused the expansionist instincts of the people of the United States, or at least of the articulate classes, to the point of demanding the annexation of the whole of Mexico. Sober newspapers, like the New York Evening Post, officers of the navy and the army, like Commodore Stockton and Colonel Jefferson Davis, the hero of the battle of Buena Vista, and leading politicians, John A. Dix, Lewis Cass, and Secretary Walker, urged the Government to make an end of Mexico by prompt dismemberment. Although the election of Representatives in 1846 had resulted in giving the Whigs control of the House, Congress seemed disposed to yield to the popular clamor as they came together in December, 1847, when the news of the raising of the American flag over the city of Mexico was fresh in the public mind.

Polk found his Cabinet divided on the subject of "all Mexico," with the preponderance of influence in favor of annexation. Buchanan gave out a public letter in which he said, "Destiny beckons us to hold and civilize Mexico." Walker threatened to urge the absorption of Mexico in his report to Congress. The flag should never be hauled down from the ramparts of the captured capital of Mexico. Polk resisted this pressure, but he recalled Trist just before the beginning of the final negotiations with Mexico. On the advice of General Scott, Trist refused to obey the President, and both he and the general hastened the negotiations.

Although the Whigs were also infected with the expansionist fever, Henry Clay came out of his retirement at Ashland, near Lexington, and on November 13, made an impassioned appeal to the country against the wickedness of despoiling a helpless neighbor; John Quincy Adams, nearing the end of his career, continued to denounce the whole Mexican movement. But Webster, an ardent candidate now for the Whig nomination in 1848, said little and took this occasion to visit the South and West. Calhoun made it his especial business in the Senate to defeat what he thought was the President's purpose, the annexation of all Mexico. But the prospect of success of these "little Americans" was far from bright.

When the Trist treaty, giving satisfaction on all the points raised in Slidell's mission and selling to the United States both California and New Mexico, reached Washington in February, 1848, there was every temptation to reject it. The ablest members of the Cabinet insisted upon its rejection; a scheme for the establishment of a protectorate over Yucatan, which was expected to eventuate in annexation, was being urged, and the rumors of approaching convulsions in Europe were heartening leading members of Congress. Why should not the United States fulfill her destiny? There was none to interfere or make afraid. Senator Foote, of Mississippi, urged in glowing terms the advantages of "extending American liberty" over Central America; Senator Hannegan, of Indiana, fairly represented his section when he said that the time had come for the United States to take Canada, too, and make the boundaries of North America the boundaries of the great Republic; and Senator Cass was making his campaign for the Democratic nomination on the plea that the time was ripe for the extinguishment of the remnants of European authority on the continent.

The President, worn out with the toils of office and determined not to seek renomination, decided to accept the treaty, and the Senate, in spite of the warmest harangues of the extremists, promptly approved the work of Trist and Scott, for the general had had much to do with the negotiations. The war had come to an end, though there were still further efforts to undo the treaty by seizing Yucatan, and there was much complaint from leading Senators and Representatives at the alleged weakness of Polk.



At a cost of a few thousand lives and some eighty million dollars, eight hundred thousand square miles of territory had been added to the country and the long-standing quarrel with Mexico about Texas had been brought to an end. The Treasury had stood well the heavy strain of war, every bond that had been issued had been readily taken at par and on a low rate of interest—an unprecedented fact in American history. The hard times of the preceding decade seemed to be brought to a conclusion. No one complained at the tariff, and even the veto of the internal improvements bill was passing out of the public mind. The South and the West had carried their program. Polk retired to his home to die a few months later. There had been no appreciable public demand for his renomination; and, rather strange to say, both the people and the historians consigned him to comparative oblivion.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

G. P. Garrison's Westward Extension (1906), in the American Nation series, has given us the best brief general survey of the expansion movement which closed with the war with Mexico. An exhaustive treatment of the Texas question is Justin H. Smith's The Annexation of Texas (1911), and George L. Rives's The United States and Mexico, 1821-1848 (1913), is almost as complete for the Mexican War. A good history of Oregon and the Oregon movement has not yet been written; but Robert Greenhow's History of Oregon (1870), H. H. Bancroft's Oregon, in his voluminous Western history series, and Josiah Royce's California, in the American Commonwealths series, are all valuable. Some special articles of importance are: The Slidell Mission to Mexico, by L. M. Sears, in South Atlantic Quarterly for 1912; E. G. Bourne's The United States and Mexico, 1847-48, in the American Historical Review, vol. v, p. 491; and W. E. Dodd's The West and the War with Mexico, in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society for 1911. The sources which some may wish to consult are The Diary of James K. Polk, edited by M. M. Quaife and published by the Chicago Historical Society (1910); Lyon G. Tyler's The Times of the Tylers, already mentioned; John Quincy Adams's Memoir, also frequently cited; The Correspondence of John C. Calhoun, The Works of Calhoun (1853-55), edited by R. K. Cralle; and the writings of both Clay and Webster as given in the notes to previous chapters. Niles's Register, a weekly periodical published in Baltimore from 1811 to 1849, is a never-failing resource for the current of public opinion.



CHAPTER IX

THE ABOLITIONISTS

The overthrow of the Democratic party in 1848 was due, not to the ruthless exploitation of Mexico nor to dissatisfaction with the new economic policy, but to the abiding distrust of the aristocratic South and its slavery system by the small business men and farmers of the North. The greater the success of Polk, the greater the danger to the older virtues of the Republic, a simple life and faith in the ideals of freedom and equality. As we have seen, the South had given up these ideals, and the tobacco, cotton, and sugar planters governed there with increasing success and acceptability.

There had been persistent economic and religious opposition to the growth of the plantation system. In the closing years of the eighteenth century most people in the South disliked slavery, and in Kentucky majorities of the voters sustained the first abolition movement of radical tendencies in the country; but the excitement over the Alien and Sedition Laws eclipsed at the critical moment the public interest in the anti-slavery struggle. Other outcroppings of the same hostility to slavery, as already noted, were made evident in the meetings of Presbyterian and Methodist church conferences between 1815 and 1825 in Maryland, western Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. But all these efforts failed and the Southern abolitionists, as we have seen, having "fought the good fight," emigrated to the Northwest about 1830, when Virginia failed to rid herself of the growing "incubus." Just as Birney and Rankin "took up arms" in Ohio there arose a fiercer champion of their cause in the East, where distance from the scene, lack of intimate knowledge of "the system," and a strong popular dislike of the South gave unwonted strength to the new evangelism. William Lloyd Garrison, son of a Massachusetts sea captain, was in a humor to reform a world which "sat in darkness." He declared negro slavery the one great evil of his generation, and the Federal Constitution, which protected it, "an agreement with Hell." After some ill-luck and untoward experience in Baltimore, he set up in Boston, in 1831, his famous Liberator, in which he said he would be heard, and henceforth his paper appeared every week until the close of the Civil War. Every scrap of news, true or untrue, which reflected the cruelty of the slavery system, the lust of some brutal master, or the growing power of the Southern States in national politics he repeated and exploited. It was "yellow journalism" in a peculiar sense. But a single weekly paper published in Boston, where the commercial and industrial interests had created an aristocracy almost as exclusive as that of the South, could hardly be expected to accomplish a great deal. The other papers of the city would not publish his "stories," nor pay any attention to his earnest appeals.

He made another move upon the intrenched position of the enemy. Between 1831 and 1835 he organized abolition societies, whose members took vows to "fight on and fight ever" till success should be attained. These societies were naturally numerous in all those sections of New England, the Middle States, and the Northwest where hostility and even hatred to the masterful South prevailed. Pure idealists, small farmers, village merchants, the unsuccessful, and debtors who dreamed of an America of which the Declaration of Independence speaks became abolitionists. Orators were employed, speaking campaigns were arranged, and the slogan was always immediate and uncompensated abolition of negro slavery. The more democratic churches were invaded and their preachers were enlisted; or, when these resisted, placarded as unfriendly to mankind. Before 1840 not less than fifteen thousand Methodists refused association with other Methodists who would not declare war on slavery. Nearly all of these lived in western Massachusetts and upper New York. These revolutionists carried their cause to the Methodist General Conference in New York in 1844, and the great Church was broken into two branches: a Northern and a Southern. The Baptists of New England refused the same year to support a missionary who was also a slaveholder, and immediately the Alabama Baptists refused to fellowship their Northern brethren. The Southern Baptist Convention, head of the denomination for all the Southern States, was organized the next year at Augusta. The fact, already noted, that both these sundered denominations almost doubled their membership in the next few years shows the strong sectionalism of the issue.

Nor did the public men of the North escape the ordeal of ardent abolitionism. William H. Seward, a conservative by nature, became an anti-slavery Whig of national influence in 1843; Joshua R. Giddings, of the Western Reserve, and Elijah P. Lovejoy, of Illinois, accepted the agitator's commissions and sought to unite the new idealism with the old Americanism. But John Quincy Adams, who had never been a democrat and who did not sympathize with Garrison, became the arch-leader of the abolitionists in Congress from 1836 to his death in 1848. Smarting under the ill-treatment of Southern politicians, it was easy for the able ex-President to become the political exponent of the new anti-Southern agitation. In no other country of that time could a movement like American abolitionism have gained such a hearing. In England the Government, that is the people, never dreamed of destroying without compensation the millions of property in the West Indian slaves. But American abolitionists declared that there could be no property in man, just as the socialists say there can be no property in land. To destroy outright the property which underlay the Southern political power and the Southern aristocracy was the aim of Garrison, and he found able men, owners of large estates in the North, who were willing to do what he urged.

Petitions asking the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia were presented to Congress by John Quincy Adams in increasing numbers from 1831 to 1836. Southern men denied that the national legislature had the power to destroy property protected by the Constitution; Northern men, especially representatives of the farmer districts, insisted that the right of petition was fundamental to the Constitution itself. There was a deadlock in Congress, for the South controlled the Senate, while the North controlled the House. In this state of things, Southern legislatures formally denounced the abolition movement as endangering the Union, and asked Congress to protect them from the floods of abolition literature which the United States mails carried into communities where negro slaves were in the majority and where insurrections were likely to occur.

In Charleston the people refused to allow the postmaster to deliver the objectionable mail matter. The subject was carried to President Jackson in 1835, and he decided that the uneasy masters of South Carolina were justified in their protest. Calhoun, like Adams in New England, became the champion of his section, and devoted the remainder of his life to a vain defense of slavery against the "foul slanders" of anti-slavery agitators.

In May, 1836, after a fierce struggle in the House, it was decided to lay upon the table without debate all petitions which dealt with slavery. The right of petition was thus formally denied, since a hearing is the one thing prayed for in such documents. John Quincy Adams declared that the rights of his constituents, as guaranteed in the Constitution, were thus abrogated. On the other hand, Calhoun declared in the Senate, with equal truth, that the constitutional rights of his constituents would be jeopardized if the petitions were received and debated. Great excitement prevailed throughout the country, for the contending sections were too strong for any easy-going compromise to be possible. Keen observers then visiting Washington wrote home that the great Republic would go to pieces if either side won.

In the summer of 1837, Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered at Alton, Illinois, where he was trying to publish, against the wishes of the people, an anti-slavery weekly like Garrison's. And in Boston the following December a young aristocrat, a Harvard graduate and a promising lawyer, arose before a large audience, before whom the Attorney-General of the State had just been defending the Alton people against attack, and declared that the "earth should have yawned and swallowed up" the author of such treasonable words. It was Wendell Phillips, and from that day till the close of the bitter sectional struggle, he was the greatest champion of immediate abolition, the fervent orator who was ready to destroy the Union in order to destroy slavery. Four years after Phillips began his public career, Frederick Douglass, escaping from a slave plantation in Maryland, came into contact with Garrison, who at once commissioned him an orator of abolition, and the brilliant mulatto soon developed powers that gave rise to jealous heartburnings among the leading agitators. Lewis Tappan, Gerrit Smith, the Misses Grimke, born in South Carolina, and a host of other enthusiastic democrats and idealists professed the new faith. Contemptuous of Church and State, of union and nationality, these apostles of the new cause laid the foundations of the great sectional party which was later to bear the name Republican, thus appealing to the memories of Jefferson and his followers of 1800.

It was this hostility of the sections, always dangerous, but exceedingly so in 1836, when Texas was asking admission as a slave State, that caused so many of the best men of the time to talk freely of the disruption of the Union. If Texas were annexed, the East would secede; if it were not annexed, the South would secede. Van Buren, the head of the Democratic party, and Clay, the master of the Whigs, exerted all their influence in 1844 to avoid the expected conflict. But President Tyler, without close party affiliations and standing in need of an issue, was ready to take the risk. Radical expansionists, supported by substantial economic interests in the South, urged the immediate annexation of Texas, while Adams and twenty-one of his colleagues from the restless sections of the North declared that the addition of the new region to the Union would be equivalent to a dissolution of the ties which held the warring sections together;[5] and they published, in May, 1843, a formal address to their constituents calling upon them to secede. The members of Congress who signed this address represented the districts, almost without exception, in which abolition had won a footing.

[Footnote 5: See chap. VII, pp. 126-127.]

The important question was: Should the East remain passive while the annexation of "another Louisiana" was being consummated and thus allow herself to be submerged.

Charles Sumner, an ambitious young man, an intellectual kinsman of Wendell Phillips, one of those "transcendentalists" of Massachusetts of whom the country was to hear a great deal in the future, answered this question in his famous "grandeur-of-nations" oration of July 4, 1845. The elite of Boston had gathered for the occasion in Tremont Temple, and they had invited the officers of a warship then lying in the harbor, the local military men, and others who took pride in the martial deeds of their ancestors, to join in the accustomed celebration of the Fourth. Dressed in gay, super-fashionable attire, the young Sumner poured forth in matchless language a denunciation of war, of military and naval armaments, of President Polk and the party in power, which drove one half of his audience frantic with resentment and anger. "There is no war which is honorable, no peace which is dishonorable," he declared at the outset, and for two hours he massed his arguments and statistics to prove the thesis. The conservatives of Boston declared that it would be the last of the young man. But Garrison and Phillips had raised up another recruit. The oration which had insulted half of those who heard it was published in edition after edition and distributed in the country districts of the North. Sumner was ever after in great demand as a speaker and anti-Southern agitator. He would not, however, dissolve the Union to escape slavery; he sought rather to mobilize the forces which the abolitionists were stirring to activity.



The war with Mexico came, victories were won, and the national enthusiasm was running high when President Polk asked Congress in August, 1846, to vote him two million dollars in order that he might have the means of inducing Mexico to make satisfactory cessions of territory. The Western Democrats were smarting under the sting of the veto of their internal improvements bill, and the "people at home" were much disappointed at the loss of half of Oregon, "given away," some said, by a President who was only interested in "Southern policies."[6] Jacob Brinkerhoff, who had had a quarrel with Polk about the patronage, drew a proviso to be added to the appropriation bill, which declared that slavery should be forever forbidden throughout the proposed accessions of territory. Judge Wilmot, a quiet member from Pennsylvania, was induced to offer the amendment. He awoke next day a famous man.

[Footnote 6: See chap. VIII, 152.]

Northern Whigs who had been compelled by popular sentiment to support the Administration in all its war measures seized the opportunity to vote for the proviso; of course the Northwestern Democrats, who were dissatisfied because of other matters, took this chance to pay the President for his neglect of them. The abolitionists who were in politics became more active, and many orthodox, that is non-voting, followers of Garrison changed their views and thenceforward fought in the ranks of party organization. It was a critical time for the dominant South. Only the conservative Senate saved the President from a second unpopular veto. A strong popular sentiment supported the proviso movement, and when Congress reassembled in December the determination of the opposition to prevent the extension of slavery into the new territory was stronger than ever. The House attached the proviso to the appropriation bill, which came up again, and the Senate a second time defeated the anti-slavery forces.

The South was by this time greatly excited, and Virginia, South Carolina, and Alabama declared that the passage of the proposed amendment would be resisted to the point of making open war. In the East and Northwest, where the abolitionists were numerous, the leaders were equally resolute in their purpose that slavery should not profit by the war with Mexico. Horace Greeley, William H. Seward, and Salmon P. Chase, a vigorous anti-slavery leader of Ohio, who now came into national prominence, were the most powerful spokesmen of the various elements of the opposition, and they were actively laying the foundations of an abolition and sectional party which should ere long outvote the South.

The candidacy of Zachary Taylor, strongly supported by Thurlow Weed, checked and even defeated the sectional purposes of the radicals. Taylor was the master of a great plantation in Louisiana, and John J. Crittenden, of Kentucky, Ballard Preston, of Virginia, and Alexander Stephens, of Georgia, all good pro-slavery men, rallied at once to the popular military chieftain. Clay was promptly snubbed and Webster's claims were unceremoniously brushed aside. The Whig Convention of 1848 met in Philadelphia in May. It was under the control of Weed and his Southern allies. Taylor was nominated, and Webster, Clay, and the other disgruntled leaders finally gave him their support. Nothing was said of the great issue, the spread of slavery over the new accessions; and the party, as in 1840, went before the country without a platform. Nor was the candidate allowed to make speeches or write public letters, which was doubtless wise, for Taylor knew little of public questions. It was said that he had never voted, and he claimed to belong to no party. The Whigs took him on his reputation as a soldier and on the recommendation of the great New York "boss." His candidacy probably saved the party from breaking into two hostile wings.

When the Democratic Convention assembled in Baltimore in May, 1848, Cass met with little opposition. His stout imperialism had won him the leadership of the expansionist West and South. The radical pro-slavery men of the lower South, who feared his former friendliness to the Wilmot Proviso leaders, had been satisfied, with a few exceptions, by the Nicholson letter of December, 1847, in which Cass laid down the doctrine that the settlers in any new region should be allowed to determine for themselves whether they would have slaves or not. It was the same idea which Douglas made famous in his Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, and which the country then dubbed "squatter-sovereignty." Cass was nominated and the Nicholson letter was made the platform; all the leaders of the party gave him hearty support, save those who had been humiliated at Baltimore four years before by the defeat of Van Buren. Van Buren himself doubtless remembered that Cass had lent assistance to the astute Southern politicians who had compassed his fall.

It was difficult to say which of the great parties was the weaker, the Whigs with both Webster and Clay sulking, or the Democrats with the shrewd Van Buren awaiting his opportunity to punish his enemies. The opportunity came in the nomination of Van Buren by the Liberty Party Convention, which met later in the summer at Syracuse. The Van Buren wing of the New York Democracy approved the Syracuse Convention, and the Free-Soil party began its first and only campaign with the ex-President as its candidate. Van Buren received nearly 300,000 votes in November and prevented Cass from becoming President. He had avenged himself. The South found her alliance with the Northwest broken, but a Southern slave-owner was to be the next President.

As so often happens in American history, the election settled nothing, for the victorious Whigs, as in 1840, had no program, and their candidate had no political record. When the Administration began its work, it was found expedient to underwrite practically all that the Polk Administration had accomplished. There was no idea of reopening the bank or financial questions; and the tariff was already so successful that it would have been plain folly to change it. In the foreign policy of the country the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with England dealt with the proposed isthmian canal. By this agreement the two contracting parties promised not to acquire further interests in Central America, and thus in a way nullified the concessions of Colombia of 1846, under which Polk had hoped for the building of a canal across Panama.

The one absorbing question after the inauguration of Taylor was that which both the great parties had side-stepped during the campaign, namely, what should be done with slavery in the Territories. The Southern Whigs sought day and night to gain the ear of the President, and the Southern Democrats were not less persistent. Both aimed at the same thing, the extension of their favorite institution. And now that the fight for slavery in Oregon was recognized as lost, this Southern wooing of the new President became the more intense. It was a desperate situation for the South. The Northwest was rapidly expanding toward the Pacific and building up free States which might at any time repudiate their allegiance to the South. Now the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo opened a great hinterland for the South, extending by the easiest passes over the mountains to California. But the abolitionists declared that the South should not expand in that direction save at the expense of slavery. The President's attitude might determine the matter.

The discovery of gold in amazingly rich deposits in California hastened the conflict of the rival sections. During the second half of 1848 and all through 1849 thousands of Southerners, Easterners, and Westerners rushed pell-mell into the new Eldorado, bent on making hasty fortunes and oblivious of the anxious thoughts of statesmen. The motley gold-diggers needed government. They asked Polk to provide it. He failed to grant it. Congress could not do so because of the deadlock over slavery. Benton wrote a public letter to the Californians advising them to form a government for themselves, and his son-in-law, John C. Fremont, went to the new community to help the cause and perhaps to come back to Washington as one of their Senators. In 1849, the Californians formed a State Government, and the new legislature sent their constitution and two Senators, one of whom was Fremont, on to Washington early the next year. Admission as a full-fledged State was asked. They had failed to mention slavery in their constitution.

President Taylor had at last decided to admit to his counsels the anti-slavery leaders of the Whig party, and he filled his Cabinet with men who would support him as against Clay and Webster. William H. Seward became the confidential adviser to the President and a sort of Administration leader of the Senate. Southern Whigs like Stephens, who had done much to secure for Taylor the Presidency, were without influence, and they feared that all the anti-slavery elements of the North were combining to control the Government.

While California was shaping her own course and the President was making his decision as between the factions of his party, South Carolina and Mississippi took the lead in a movement to prevent that or any other State or Territory from being brought into the Union if slavery were not duly recognized. Whigs and Democrats joined in great mass meetings, which showed conclusively that the lower South was in earnest. All classes of the people united in what seemed to be almost the unanimous wish of the South, that the new Southwest should be preserved for the expansion of slavery. These meetings spread over all the lower Southern States, and as a result, a convention was called to meet in Nashville in June, 1850. The object of this general convention was to present to Congress a Southern ultimatum, and in the event that this should not be heeded, to urge the secession of the slaveholding States.

In the West the crisis did not seem so acute. But Clay, now seventy-four years old, and cured of his ambition to be President, was sent back to the Senate in the hope of averting the calamity of a disruption of the Union. Thomas H. Benton, though recently defeated in a campaign for reelection, was still in the Senate. Cass was again a member of the Senate, and he, too, felt that the Union was about to be dissolved. Douglas and the other younger representatives of the Northwest, who had suffered somewhat from the legislation of 1846, ceased to nurse their grievances against the party, and deplored the "treason" of the abolitionists who were making all the trouble. There was undoubtedly a crisis which Southern leaders like Davis, Stephens, Yancey, and Robert Toombs, another able Georgian who now came into national prominence, took pains to lay to the charge of the radical anti-slavery people of the East; that is, to Seward and his followers, who were allowing Garrison and Phillips and the radical abolitionists to drive them into open opposition to the South.

When Clay came back to Washington, Taylor and his Cabinet had taken their stand, which was to recommend the admission of California as a free State. The Mormons in Deseret and a few Americans and Mexicans in New Mexico had taken steps toward organizing Territories in the region between Texas and eastern California, and they were to be made Territories with or without slavery, as they chose. If all this were done, the South would secede and the Administration would be in a dilemma. Taylor was a stubborn man; he had made up his mind, and he sent to Congress a fatherly message in which his devotion to the Union above everything else was very evident. If the Southerners, who were then offering Texas military assistance to make good her claim to a large part of New Mexico, chose to resist the lawful authority of the Administration and war came, the fault would be theirs, not his.

But Henry Clay and Daniel Webster still enjoyed much more of the confidence of the people of the country, North and South, than the President. Nor was Webster less popular because he had been ignored by the Administration. He was in his place in the Senate. Calhoun was also there. It was an exceedingly able Congress, that to which Taylor and Seward must look for support. With scant courtesy to the President, Clay took the lead in the Senate late in January and offered his plan of compromising the sectional quarrel. He would make a free State of California, allow Utah, as Deseret came to be called, and New Mexico to form Territorial Governments without mention of slavery, pay Texas ten million dollars for her claims against New Mexico, abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and enact a Fugitive Slave Law which would satisfy the border Southern States.

Excitement was too intense for the two parties in the Senate and House to accept immediately this comprehensive plan. The President opposed it; the extreme men of the South opposed it. But Clay had not lost his power to charm, and he was still a good manager, according to the polite phraseology of the day. He quietly secured the support of Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Democratic organ at Washington, The Union; he broke the hold of Calhoun on Mississippi by winning to his side Senator Henry S. Foote, a fiery Democrat and foremost advocate of Southern resistance; and within the next three months most of the Southern Whigs who were preparing to take part in the Nashville convention indicated their change of heart. Clay's method, almost exactly parallel to that by which Jackson had defeated Calhoun in 1833, was to steal away the hearts of Whigs and Westerners, to whom the Union was still sacred, and leave the radical South isolated. And in support of his compromise the old statesman made most moving appeals during February and March. It was the greatest moment of his life, he thought, and in this his colleagues were fully agreed.

But Calhoun and the ardent representatives of the lower South, supported by nearly all of the spokesmen of Virginia and North Carolina, were the obstacles in the way of a settlement. They demanded a slave State in California and free access, under the protection of the Union, to all the new Mexican territory. The extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific would have satisfied them. Or failing in this, Calhoun asked for an amendment to the Federal Constitution which should create a dual presidency in which each section was always to have a veto over the legislation of Congress. Permanent deadlock was thus proposed as the remedy for the ills of sectional conflict. Resolute as the old nationalist was, he could not bring himself in these closing days of his life to pronounce to his party the word "secession." It was pathetic to see the disappointed and broken leader of the South as he literally wore his life away trying to defeat Clay, his lifelong antagonist, or to conciliate Webster, for whom he had always entertained a hearty respect.

Upon Webster and his conservative Eastern support depended the outcome. He had never been a democrat, and as he had grown older, he had come to sympathize more than formerly with the great property interests of the South, which were not unlike the industrial interests of the East, for which he had broken many a lance. He, too, had been a rival of Clay since 1832, and three times a disappointed candidate for the Whig nomination for the Presidency. But both he and Clay had been brushed aside in 1848 by Thurlow Weed and the young William H. Seward with rather scant ceremony. And the abolitionists of New England were as noisome to him as were the radical secessionists to Henry Clay. Charles Sumner and his friends were already waging incessant war upon him. He took his stand on March 7, and he made the day famous. He spoke for the Union, and the effect of the speech was probably the postponement of the Civil War. Although he was again the follower of Clay, he was henceforth "the Godlike Webster" to Northern conservatives, and the large business interests of his section applauded him more heartily than they had ever done before. But the price which he paid for this epoch-making speech was fearful. The Massachusetts abolitionists groaned at the mention of his name, and the poet Whittier pilloried him in the famous lines:—