PART VI. THE CRISIS OF DISUNION CHAPTER XIV APPROACHING THE CRISIS THE REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE AND THE squatter December 24, The cession of vast regions to the United States by 83. The Mexico in 1848 gave rise to a most absorbing problem in origin of our political history, namely, the competency of Congress sovereignty," or the general government to control slavery in the ter- 1847 ritories. Between the extreme free-soil doctrine of the Wilmot Proviso1 and the extreme Southern rights doctrine of the Calhoun-Rhett-Davis school,2 the compromise principle of "squatter sovereignty" was reached. It was 1 Moved by Wilmot of Pennsylvania, in the House, August 8, 1846, as an amendment to a bill to appropriate $2,000,000 to the President's use in purchasing a peace from Mexico: "Provided, That, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico... neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory." — Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 1st session, p. 1217. 2 Briefly this doctrine was that the territories were the property of the states and not of the general government. The states had not relinquished their co-sovereignty over the territories by allowing Congress to make "needful rules and regulations" for them (Constitution, Art. IV, Sect. III, par. 2); and in taking their slaves into the territories the Southerners were but "exercising a common right over a common property." Otherwise sovereignty over all the territories would be vested in only a part of the states, namely, the majority in Congress. See, for Calhoun's resolutions and Rhett's speech, Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 2d session, p. 455, and Appendix, pp. 244-246. [380] the principle applied in 1850 to Utah and New Mexico, and extended by Douglas in 1854 to Kansas and Nebraska; it was the issue on which the Republican party was formed in 1854; it was the topic of the great Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, and of innumerable other controversies in the press and the pulpit, in the halls of legislation, and in the market place, " until debate was silenced by the more eloquent bombardment of Sumter." The following letter from Lewis Cass, a prominent aspirant for presidential honors in 1848, to Mr. A. O. P. Nicholson of Tennessee, is the first clear announcement of the doctrine of squatter sovereignty.1 The theory of our government presupposes that its various members have reserved to themselves the regulation of all subjects relating to what may be termed their internal police. They are sovereign within their boundaries, except in those cases where they have surrendered to the General Government a portion of their rights, in order to give effect to the objects of the Union. [See the Preamble to the Constitution.] . . . Local institutions, if I may so speak, whether they have reference to slavery or to any other relations, domestic or private, are left to local authority. . . . Congress has no right to say there shall be slavery in New York, or that there shall be no slavery in Georgia; nor is there any human power, but the people of those States respectively, which can change the relation existing therein; and they can say, if they will, "We will have slavery in the former, and we will abolish it in the latter." In various respects, the Territories differ from the States. Some of their rights are inchoate, and they do not possess the peculiar attributes of sovereignty. Their relation to the General 1 The principle had already been recognized in the joint resolution for the admission of Texas, March 1, 1845: "And such states as may be formed out of that portion of said territory [Texas] lying south of 36° 30' north latitude . . . shall be admitted to the Union with or without slavery, as the people of each State asking admission may desire." - United States Statutes at Large, Vol. V, p. 798. Government is very imperfectly defined by the Constitution; and it will be found, upon examination, that in that instrument the only grant of power concerning them is conveyed in the phrase," Congress shall have the power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory and other property belonging to the United States." Certainly this phraseology is very loose, if it designed to include in the grant the whole power of legislation over persons, as well as things. ... The lives and persons of our citizens, with the vast variety of objects connected with them, cannot be controlled by an authority which is merely called into existence for the purpose of making rules and regulations for the disposition and management of property... If the relation of master and servant may be regulated or annihilated . . . so may the relation of husband and wife, of parent and child, and of any other condition which our institutions and the habits of our society recognize. . . . Such, it appears to me, would be the construction put upon this provision of the Constitution, were this question now first presented for consideration. ... Certain it is that the principle of interference should not be carried beyond the necessary implication, which produces it. It should be limited to the creation of proper governments for new countries, acquired or settled, and to the necessary provisions for their eventual admission to the Union; leaving, in the mean time, to the people inhabiting them, to regulate their internal concerns in their own way. They are just as capable of doing so as the people of the States; and they can do so, at any rate, as soon as their political independence is recognized by their admission into the Union. During this temporary condition [as territories], it is hardly expedient to call into exercise a doubtful and invidious authority [of prohibiting slavery] which questions the intelligence of a respectable portion of our citizens . . . an authority which would give Congress a despotic power, uncontrolled by the Constitution, over most important sections of our common country. . . . slaves When the authors of the "Georgia platform" concluded 84. Fugitive with timid confidence that "upon the faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Law by the proper authorities" would [385] depend "the preservation of our much-loved Union" (see No. 81, p. 353), they put their finger on the critical point in the compromise measures.1 The number of fugitives from Southern plantations was inconsiderable, but the spread of a sentiment of sympathy for them through the North, and of a disposition to repeal or evade the law compelling their return, stirred a spirit of reproachful indignation on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line. The temper of the South is well reflected in the following report of a committee of the legislature of Virginia in 1849: Look at the actual state of things in the sixtieth year of the Constitution! It is simply and undeniably this: That the South is wholly without the benefit of that solemn constitutional guaranty which was so sacredly pledged to it at the formation of this Union.... No citizen of the South can pass the frontier of a non-slaveholding State and there exercise his undoubted constitutional right of seizing his fugitive slave, with a view to take him before a judicial officer and there prove his right of ownership, without imminent danger of being prosecuted criminally as a kidnapper, or being sued in a civil action for false 1 In the very month in which the Georgia platform was adopted (December, 1850), Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, before a large audience at Rochester, New York, said: "Most of those who are present will have observed that leading men in this country have been putting forth their skill to secure quiet to the nation. A system of measures to promote this object was adopted a few months ago in Congress. The result of those measures is known. Instead of quiet, they have produced alarm; instead of peace, they have brought us war; and so it must ever be. While this nation is guilty of the enslavement of 3,000,000 innocent men and women, it is as idle to think of having a sound and lasting peace, as it is to think there is no God to take cognizance of the affairs of men." - Frederick Douglass, Lectures on American Slavery (a pamphlet, p. 16, Buffalo, 1851). 2 "The number of fugitives who escaped into the free States annually did not exceed one thousand. The number of arrests of fugitives, of which an account was had, from the passage of the 1850 law to the middle of 1856 was only two hundred."— J. F. Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, Vol. II, p. 76. |