 Section 1 of History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard. Part 5, Sectional Conflict and Reconstruction. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard. Part 5, Sectional Conflict and Reconstruction. Chapter 13, The Rise of the Industrial System If Jefferson could have lived to see the stars and stripes planted on the Pacific Ocean, the broad empire of Texas added to the planting states and the valley of the Willamette waving with wheat sewn by farmers from New England, he would have been more than fortified in his faith that the future of America lay in agriculture. Even a staunch old Federalist like Governor Morris or Josiah Quincy would have mournfully conceded both the prophecy and the claim. Manifest destiny never seemed more clearly written in the stars. As the farmers from the Northwest and planters from the Southwest poured in upon the floor of Congress, the Party of Jefferson christened anew by Jackson, grew stronger year by year. Opponents there were no doubt, disgruntled critics and wigs by conviction, but in 1852 Franklin Pierce, the Democratic candidate for President, carried every state in the Union except Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee. This victory, a triumph under ordinary circumstances, was all the more significant in that Pierce was pitted against a hero of the Mexican War, General Scott, whom the wigs, hoping to win by rousing the martial ardor of the voters, had nominated. On looking at the election returns, the new President calmly assured the planters that, the general principle of reduction of duties with a view to revenue may now be regarded as the settled policy of the country. With equal confidence, he waved aside those agitators who devoted themselves to the supposed interests of the relatively few Africans in the United States. Like a watchman in the night, he called to the country, all's well. The Party of Hamilton and Clay lay in the dust. The Industrial Revolution As pride often goeth before a fall, so sanguine expectation is sometimes the symbol of defeat. Jackson destroyed the bank. Polk signed the Tariff Bill of 1846, striking an effective blow at the principle of protection for manufacturers. Pierce promised to silence the abolitionists. His successor was to approve a drastic step in the direction of free trade. Nevertheless all these things left untouched the springs of power that were in due time to make America the greatest industrial nation on the earth, namely vast national resources, business enterprise, inventive genius, and the free labor supply of Europe. Unseen by the thoughtless, unrecorded in the diaries of wise-acres, rarely mentioned in the speeches of statesmen, there was swiftly rising such a tide in the affairs of America as Jefferson and Hamilton never dreamed of in their little philosophies. The Inventors These men and a thousand more were destroying in a mighty revolution of industry the world of the stagecoach and the tallow candle, which Washington and Franklin had inherited little changed from the age of Caesar. Whitney was to make Cotton King. Watt and Fulton were to make steel and steam masters of the world. Agriculture was to fall behind in the race for supremacy. Industry Outstrips Planting The story of invention that tribute to the triumph of mind over matter, fascinating as a romance, need not be treated in detail here. The effects of invention on social and political life, multitudinous and never-ending, formed the very warp and wolf of American progress from the days of Andrew Jackson to the latest hour. Neither the great civil conflict, the clash of two systems, nor the problems of the modern age, nor the problems of the modern age, nor the problems of the modern age. days of Andrew Jackson to the latest hour. Neither the great civil conflict, the clash of two systems, nor the problems of the modern age, can be approached without an understanding of the striking phases of industrialism. First and foremost among them was the uprush of mills, managed by captains of industry, and manned by labour drawn from farms, cities, and foreign lands. For every planter who cleared a domain in the southwest, and gathered his army of bondmen about him, there rose in the north a magician of steam and steel who collected under his roof an army of free workers. In seven league boots this new giant strode ahead of the southern giant. Between 1850 and 1859, to use dollars and cents as the measure of progress, the value of domestic manufacturers, including mines and fisheries, rose from one billion, nineteen million, one hundred six thousand, six hundred sixteen dollars, to one billion nine hundred million, an increase of eighty six percent in ten years. In the same period, the total production of naval stores, rice, sugar, tobacco, and cotton, the staples of the south, went only from one hundred sixty five million dollars in round figures to two hundred four million dollars. At the halfway point of the century the capital invested in industry, commerce, and cities far exceeded the value of all the farmland between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Thus the course of economy had been reversed in fifty years. Tested by figures of production, King Cotton had shriveled by eighteen sixty to a petty prince in comparison. For each year the captains of industry turned out goods worth nearly twenty times all the bales of cotton picked on southern plantations. Iron boots and shoes and leather goods pouring from northern mills surpassed in value the entire cotton output. The agrarian west turns to industry. Nor was this vast enterprise confined to the old northeast where, as Madison had sagely remarked, commerce was early dominant. Cincinnati, runs an official report in eighteen fifty four, appears to be a great central depot for ready-made clothing and its manufacture for the western markets may be said to be one of the great trades of that city. There, wrote another traveller, I heard the crack of the cattle-driver's whip and the hum of the factory, the west and the east meeting. Louisville and St. Louis were already famous for their clothing trades and the manufacture of cotton bagging. Five hundred of the two thousand woollen mills in the country in eighteen sixty were in the western states. Of the output of flour and grist mills which almost reached in value the cotton crop of eighteen fifty, the Ohio Valley furnished a rapidly growing share. The old home of Jacksonian democracy, where Federalists had been almost as scarce as monarchists, turned slowly backward as the needle to the pole toward the principle of protection for domestic industry espoused by Hamilton and defended by Clay. THE EXTENSION OF CANALS AND RAILWAYS As necessary to mechanical industry as steel and steam power was the great market spread over a wide and diversified area and knit together by efficient means of transportation. This service was supplied to industry by the steamship which began its career on the Hudson in eighteen oh seven by the canals of which the eerie opened in eighteen twenty fifty five was the most noteworthy and by the railways which came into practical operation about eighteen thirty. With sure instinct the eastern manufacturer reached out for the markets of the northwest territory where free farmers were producing annually staggering crops of corn, wheat, bacon, and wool. The two great canal systems, the eerie connecting New York City with the waterways of the Great Lakes and the Pennsylvania chain linking Philadelphia with the headwaters of the Ohio, gradually turned the tide of trade from New Orleans to the eastern seaboard. The railways followed the same paths. By eighteen sixty New York had rail connections with Chicago and St. Louis, one of the routes running through the Hudson and Mohawk valleys and along the Great Lakes and the other through Philadelphia and Pennsylvania and across the rich wheat fields of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Baltimore, not to be outdone by her two rivals, reached out over the mountains for the western trade and in eighteen fifty seven had trains running into St. Louis. In railway enterprise the south took more interest than in canals and the friends of that section came to its aid. To offset the magnet drawing trade away from the Mississippi Valley lines were built from the Gulf to Chicago, the Illinois central part of the project being a monument to the zeal and industry of a Democrat better known in politics than in business, Stephen A. Douglas. The swift movement of cotton and tobacco to the north or to seaports was of common concern to planters and manufacturers. Accordingly lines were flung down along the southern coast linking Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah with the northern markets. Other lines struck inland from the coast giving a rail outlet to the sea for Raleigh, Columbia, Atlanta, Chattanooga, Nashville, and Montgomery. Nevertheless in spite of this enterprise the mileage of all the southern states in eighteen sixty did not equal that of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois combined. Banking and finance. Out of commerce and manufacturers and the construction and operation of railways came such an accumulation of capital in the northern states as merchants of old never imagined. The banks of the four industrial states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania in eighteen sixty had funds greater than the banks in all the other states combined. New York City had become the money market of America. The center to which industrial companies, railway promoters, farmers, and planters turned for capital to initiate and carry on their operation. The banks of Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia, it is true, had capital far in excess of the banks of the northwest but still they were relatively small compared with the financial institutions of the east. The growth of the industrial population. A revolution of such magnitude in industry, transport and finance, overturning as it did the agrarian civilization of the old northwest and reaching out to the very borders of the country, could not fail to bring, in its train, consequences of a striking character. Some were immediate and obvious. Others require a fullness of time not yet reached to reveal their complete significance. Out standing among them was the growth of an industrial population detached from the land, concentrated in cities and, to use Jefferson's phrase, dependent upon the caprices and casualties of trade for a livelihood. This was a result, as the great Virginian had foreseen, which flowed inevitably from public and private efforts to stimulate industry as against agriculture. It was estimated in 1860, on the basis of the census figures, that mechanical production gave employment to one million one hundred thousand men and two hundred eighty five thousand women, making, if the average number of dependents upon them be reckoned, nearly six million people or about one sixth of the population of the country sustained from manufacturers. This, runs the official record, was exclusive of the number engaged in the production of many of the raw materials and of the food for manufacturers, in the distribution of their products, such as merchants, clerks, draymen, mariners, the employees of railroads, expresses and steamboats, of capitalists, various artistic and professional classes, as well as carpenters, bricklayers, painters, and the members of other mechanical trades not classed as manufacturers. It is safe to assume, then, that one third of the whole population is supported, directly or indirectly, by manufacturing industry. Taking, however, the number of persons directly supported by manufacturers, namely about six millions, reveals the astounding fact that the white laboring population, divorced from the soil, already exceeded the number of slaves on southern farms and plantations. Immigration. The more carefully the rapid growth of the industrial population is examined, the more surprising is the fact that such an immense body of free laborers could be found, particularly when it is recalled to what desperate straits the colonial leaders were put in securing immigrants. Slavery, indentured servitude, and kidnapping being the fruits of their necessities. The answer to the enigma is to be found partly in European conditions and partly in the cheapness of transportation after the opening of the era of steam navigation. Shrewd observers of the course of events had long foreseen that a flood of cheap labor was bound to come when the way was made easy. Some, among them Chief Justice Ellsworth, went so far as to prophesy that white labor would in time be so abundant that slavery would disappear as the more costly of the two labor systems. The processes of nature were aided by the policies of government in England and Germany. The Coming of the Irish. The opposition of the Irish people to the English government, ever furious and irrepressible, was increased in the mid-40s by an almost total failure of the potato crop, the main support of the peasants. Catholic in religion they had been compelled to support a Protestant church. Tillers of the soil by necessity they were forced to pay enormous tributes to absentee landlords in England whose claim to their estates rested upon the title of conquest and confiscation. Intensely loyal to their race the Irish were subjected in all things to the Parliament at London in which their small minority of representatives had little influence save in holding a balance of power between the two contending English parties. To the constant political irritation the potato famine added physical distress beyond description. In cottages and fields and along the highways the victims of starvation lay dead by the hundreds, the relief which charity afforded only bringing misery more sharply to the foreground. Those who were fortunate enough to secure passage money sought escape to America. In 1844 the total immigration into the United States was less than eighty thousand. In 1850 it had risen by leaps and bounds to more than three hundred thousand. Between 1820 and 1860 the immigrants from the United Kingdom numbered two million seven hundred fifty thousand of whom more than one half were Irish. It has been said with a touch of exaggeration that the American canals and railways of those days were built by the labour of Irishmen. The German migration. To political discontent and economic distress such as was responsible for the coming of the Irish may likewise be traced the source of the Germanic migration. The potato blight that fell upon Ireland visited the Rhine Valley and southern Germany at the same time with results as pitiful if less extensive. The calamity inflicted by nature was followed shortly by another inflicted by the despotic conduct of German kings and princes. In 1848 there had occurred throughout Europe a popular uprising in behalf of republics and democratic government. For a time it rode on a full tide of success kings were overthrown or compelled to promise constitutional government and tyrannical ministers fled from their palaces. Then came reaction. Those who had championed the popular cause were imprisoned, shot or driven out of the land. Men of attainments and distinction, whose sole offence was opposition to the government of kings and princes, sought an asylum in America carrying with them to the land of their adoption the spirit of liberty and democracy. In 1847 over 50,000 Germans came to America, the forerunners of a migration that increased almost steadily for many years. The record of 1860 showed that in the previous twenty years nearly a million and a half had found homes in the United States. Far and wide they scattered from the mills and shops of the sea coast towns to the uttermost frontiers of Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Labor of Women and Children. If the industries, canals and railways of the country were largely manned by foreign labor, still important native sources must not be overlooked, above all, the women and children of the New England textile districts. Spinning and weaving, by a tradition that runs far beyond the written records of mankind, belonged to women. Indeed, it was the dexterous housewives, spinsters, and boys and girls that laid the foundations of the textile industry in America, foundations upon which the mechanical revolution was built. As the wheel and loom were taken out of the homes to the factories operated by water power or the steam engine, the women, and, to use Hamilton's phrase, the children of tender years, followed as a matter of course. The cotton manufacturer alone employs six thousand persons in Lowell, wrote a friendship server in 1836. Of this number nearly five thousand are young women from seventeen to twenty-four years of age, the daughters of farmers from the different New England states. It was not until after the middle of the century that foreign lands proved to be the chief source from which workers were recruited for the factories of New England. It was then that the daughters of the Puritans, outdone by the competition of foreign labor, both of men and women, left the spinning Jenny and the loom to other hands. The Rise of Organized Labor. The changing conditions of American life, marked by the spreading mill towns of New England, New York, and Pennsylvania, and the growth of cities like Buffalo, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago in the West, naturally brought changes, as Jefferson had prophesied, in manners and morals. A few mechanics, smiths, carpenters and masons, widely scattered through farming regions and rural villages, raised no such problems as tens of thousands of workers collected in one center in daily intercourse, earning the power of cooperation and union. Even before the coming of steam and machinery, in the good old days of handicrafts, laborers in many trades, printers, shoemakers, carpenters, for example, had begun to draw together in the towns for the advancement of their interests in the form of higher wages, shorter days, and milder laws. The shoemakers of Philadelphia, organized in 1794, conducted a strike in 1799 and held together until indicted seven years later for conspiracy. During the 20s and 30s, local labor unions sprang up in all industrial centers, and they led almost immediately to city federations of the several crafts. As the thousands who were dependent upon their daily labor for their livelihood, mounted into the millions and industries spread across the continent, the local unions of craftsmen grew into national craft organizations bound together by the newspapers, the telegraph, and the railways. Before 1860, there were several such national trade unions, including the plumbers, printers, mule spinners, iron molders, and stone cutters. All over the north, labor leaders arose, men unknown to general history, but forceful and resourceful characters who forged links, bindings scattered and individual workers into a common brotherhood. An attempt was even made in 1834 to federate all the crafts into a permanent national organization. But it perished within three years through lack of support. Half a century had to elapse before the American Federation of Labor was to accomplish this task. All the manifestations of the modern labor movement had appeared, in germ at least, by the time the mid-century was reached. Unions, labor leaders, strikes, a labor press, a labor political program, and a labor political party. In every great city industrial disputes were a common occurrence. The papers recorded about 400 in two years, 1853 to 1854, local affairs, but forecasting economic struggles in a larger field. The labor press seems to have begun with the founding of the Mechanics Free Press in Philadelphia in 1828 and the establishment of the New York Working Man's Advocate shortly afterward. These semi-political papers were in later years followed by regular trade papers designed to well together and advance the interests of particular crafts. Edited by able leaders, these little sheets with limited circulation wielded an enormous influence in the ranks of the workers. Labor and politics. As for the political program of labor, the main planks were clear and specific. The abolition of imprisonment for debt, manhood suffrage in states where property qualifications still prevailed, free and universal education, laws protecting the safety and health of workers in mills and factories, abolition of lotteries, repeal of laws requiring militia service, and free land in the West. Into the labor papers and platforms there sometimes crept a note of hostility to the masters of industry, a sign of bitterness that excited little alarm while cheap land in the West was open to the discontented. The Philadelphia Workman, in issuing a call for a local convention, invited all those of our fellow citizens who live by their own labor and none other. In New Castle County, Delaware, the association of working people complained in 1830. The poor have no laws, the laws are made by the rich and of course for the rich. Here and there an extremist went to the length of advocating an equal division of wealth among all the people, the crudest kind of communism. Agitation of this character produced in labor circles profound distrust of both wigs and Democrats who talked principally about tariffs and banks. It resulted in attempts to found independent labor parties. In Philadelphia, Albany, New York City, and New England, labor candidates were put up for elections in the early thirties and in a few cases were victorious at the polls. The balance of power has at length got into the hands of the working people, where it properly belongs, triumphantly exclaimed the mechanics-free press of Philadelphia in 1829. But the triumph was illusory. Desensions appeared in the labor ranks. The old party leaders, particularly of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party organization in New York City, offered concessions to labor in return for votes. Newspapers unsparingly denounced trade union politicians as demagogues, levelers, and rag tag and bob tail, and some of them, deeming labor unrest the sour fruit of manhood suffrage, suggested disfranchisement as a remedy. Under the influence of concession and attacks, the political fever quickly died away, and the end of the decade left no remnant of the labor political parties. Labor leaders turned to a task which seemed more substantial and practical, that of organizing working men into craft unions for the definite purpose of raising wages and reducing hours. End of Section 1. Section 2 of History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, Part 5. Sectional Conflict and Reconstruction. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Katie Gibbany, Arkansas, January 2008. History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, Part 5. Sectional Conflict and Reconstruction. Chapter 8. The Rise of the Industrial System Continued The Industrial Revolution and National Politics Southern Plans for Union with the West It was long the design of southern statesmen, like Calhoun, to hold the West and the South together in one political party. The theory on which they based their hope was simple. Both sections were agricultural, the producers of raw materials and the buyers of manufactured goods. The planters were heavy purchasers of western bacon, pork, mules, and grain. The Mississippi River and its tributaries formed the natural channel for the transportation of heavy produce southward to the plantations and outward to Europe. Therefore ran their political reasoning. The interests of the two sections were one. By standing together in favor of low tariffs, they could buy their manufacturers cheaply in Europe and pay for them in cotton, tobacco, and grain. The union of the two sections under Jackson's management seemed perfect. The East Forms Ties with the West Eastern leaders were not blind to the ambitions of southern statesmen. On the contrary, they also recognized the importance of forming strong ties with the agrarian West and drawing the produce of the Ohio Valley to Philadelphia and New York. The canals and railways where the physical signs of this economic union and the results, commercial and political, were soon evident. By the middle of the century southern economists noted the change, one of them, DeBow, lamenting that the great cities of the North have severally penetrated the interior with artificial lines until they have taken from the open and untaxed current of the Mississippi the commerce produced on its borders. To this writer it was an astounding thing to behold the number of steamers that now descend the Upper Mississippi River, loaded to the guards with produce, as far as the mouth of the Illinois River, and then turn up that stream with their cargoes to be shipped to New York via Chicago. The Illinois Canal has not only swept the whole produce along the line of the Illinois River to the east, but it is drawing the products of the Upper Mississippi through the same channel, thus depriving New Orleans and St. Louis of a rich portion of their former trade. If to any shippers the broad current of the Great River sweeping down to New Orleans offered easier means of physical communication to the sea than the canals and railways, the difference could be overcome by the credit which eastern bankers were able to extend the grain and produce buyers in the first instance and threw them to the farmers on the soil. The acute Southern Observer just quoted, de Beau, admitted with evident regret in 1852 that, last autumn the rich regions of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, were flooded with the local banknotes of the eastern states advanced by the New York houses on produce to be shipped by way of the canals in the spring. These moneyed facilities enable the packer, miller and speculator to hold on to their produce until the opening of navigation in the spring and they are no longer obliged, as formerly, to hurry off their shipments during the winter by the way of New Orleans in order to realize funds by drafts on their shipments. The banking facilities at the east are doing as much to draw trade from us as the canals and railways which eastern capital is constructing. Thus canals, railways and financial credit were swiftly forging bonds of union between the old home of Jacksonian democracy in the west and the older home of federalism in the east. The nationalism to which Webster paid eloquent tribute became more and more real with the passing of time. The self-sufficiency of the pioneer was broken down as he began to watch the produce markets of New York and Philadelphia where the prices of corn and hogs fixed his earnings for the year. The West and Manufacturers In addition to the commercial bonds between the east and the west there was growing up a common interest in manufacturers. As skilled white labor increased in the Ohio Valley the industries springing up in the new cities made western life more like that of the industrial east than like that of the planting south. Moreover the western states produced some important raw materials for American factories which called for protection against foreign competition notably wool, hemp and flax. As the south had little or no foreign competition in cotton and tobacco the east could not offer protection for her raw materials in exchange for protection for industries. With the west however it became possible to establish reciprocity in tariffs that is for example to trade a high rate on wool for a high rate on textiles or iron. The south dependent on the north. While east and west were drawing together the distinctions between north and south were becoming more marked. The latter having few industries and producing little save raw materials was being forced into the position of a dependent section. As a result of the protective tariff southern planters were compelled to turn more and more to northern mills for their cloth, shoes, hats, hose, plows and machinery. Nearly all the goods which they bought in Europe in exchange for their produce came overseas to northern ports whence trans shipments were made by rail and water to southern points of distribution. Their rice, cotton and tobacco in as far as they were not carried to Europe in British bottoms were transported by northern masters. In these ways a large part of the financial operations connected with the sale of southern produce and the purchase of goods in exchange passed into the hands of northern merchants and bankers who naturally made profits from their transactions. Finally southern planters who wanted to buy more land and more slaves on credit borrowed heavily in the north where huge accumulations made the rates of interest lower than the smaller banks in the south could afford. The south reckons the cost of economic dependence. As southern dependence upon northern capital became more and more marked southern leaders began to chafe at what they regarded as restraints laid upon their enterprise. In a word they came to look upon the planter as a tribute bearer to the manufacturer and financier. The south, expostulated Debeau, stands in the attitude of feeding a vast population of northern merchants, ship owners, capitalists and others who, without claims on her progeny, drink up the lifeblood of her trade. Where goes the value of our labor but to those who, taking advantage of our folly, ship for us, buy for us, sell to us and, after turning our own capital to their profitable account, return laden with our money to enjoy their easily earned opulence at home. Southern statisticians, not satisfied with generalities, attempted to figure out how great was this tribute in dollars and cents. They estimated that the planters annually, lent to northern merchants the full value of their experts, a hundred millions or more, to be used in the manipulation of foreign imports. They calculated that no less than forty millions, all told, had been paid to ship owners in profits. They reckoned that, if the south were to work up her own cotton, she would realize from seventy to one hundred millions a year that otherwise went north. Finally, to cap the climax, they regretted that planters spent some fifteen millions a year pleasure-seeking in the alluring cities and summer resorts of the north. Southern Opposition to Northern Policies Proceeding from these premises, southern leaders drew the logical conclusion that the entire program of economic measures demanded in the north was without exception adverse to southern interests and, by a similar chain of reasoning, injurious to the corn and wheat producers of the west. Cheap labor afforded by free immigration, a protective tariff raising prices of black manufacturers for the tiller of the soil, ship subsidies increasing the tonnage of carrying trade in northern hands, internal improvements forging new economic bonds between the east and the west, a national banking system giving strict national control over the currency as a safeguard against paper inflation. All these devices were regarded in the south as contrary to the planting interest. They were constantly compared with the restrictive measures by which Great Britain, more than half a century before, had sought to bind American interests. As oppression justified a war for independence once, statesmen argued, so it can justify it again. It is curious as it is melancholy and distressing, came a broad hint from South Carolina, to see how striking is the analogy between the colonial vassalage to which the manufacturing states have produced the planting states, and that which formerly bound the Anglo-American colonies to the British Empire, England said to her American colonies, you shall not trade with the rest of the world for such manufacturers as are produced in the mother country. The manufacturing states say to their southern colonies, you shall not trade with the rest of the world for such manufacturers as we produce. The conclusion was inexorable. Either the south must control the national government and its economic measures, or it must declare, as America had done four score years before, its political and economic independence. As northern mills multiplied, as railways spun their mighty web over the face of the north, and as accumulated capital rose into the hundreds of millions, the conviction of the planters and their statesmen deepened into desperation. Efforts to start southern industries fail. A few of them, seeing the predominance of the north, made determined efforts to introduce manufacturers into the south. To the leaders who were averse to succession and nullification, this seemed the only remedy for the growing disparity in the power of the two sections. Societies for the encouragement of mechanical industries were formed, the investment of capital was sought, and indeed a few mills were built on southern soil. The results were meager. The natural resources, coal and water power, were abundant, but the enterprise for direction and the skilled labor were wanting. The stream of European immigration flowed north and west, not south. The Irish or German laborer, even if he finally made his home in a city, had before him, while in the north, the alternative of a homestead on western land. To him slavery was a strange, if not a repelling institution. He did not take to it kindly, nor care to fix his home where it flourished. While slavery lasted, the economy of the south was inevitably agricultural. While agriculture predominated, leadership with equal necessity fell to the planting interest. While the planting interest ruled political opposition to northern economy was destined to grow in strength. The southern theory of sectionalism. In the opinion of the statesmen, who frankly represented the planting interest, the industrial system was its deadly enemy. Their entire philosophy of American politics was summed up in a single paragraph by McDuffie, a spokesman for South Carolina. Owing to the federative character of our government, the great geographical extent of our territory, and the diversity of the pursuits of our citizens in different parts of the Union, it is so happened that two great interests have sprung up, standing directly opposed to each other. One of these consists of those manufacturers, which the northern and middle states are capable of producing, but which, owing to the high price of labor and the high profits of capital in those states, cannot hold competition with foreign manufacturers without the aid of bounties directly or indirectly given, either by the general government or by the state governments. The other of these interests consists of the great agricultural staples of the southern states, which can find a market only in foreign countries, and which can be advantageously sold only in exchange for foreign manufacturers, which come in competition with those of the northern and middle states. These interests then stand diametrically and irreconcilably opposed to each other. The interest, the pecuniary interest of the northern manufacturer, is directly promoted at every increase of the taxes imposed upon southern commerce. And it is unnecessary to add that the interest of the southern planter is promoted by every diminution of taxes imposed upon the productions of their industry, if, under these circumstances, the manufacturers were clothed with the power of imposing taxes at their pleasure upon the foreign imports of the planter, no doubt would exist in the mind of any man that it would have all the characteristics of an absolute and unqualified despotism. The economic soundness of this reasoning, a subject of interesting speculation for the economist, is of little concern to the historian. The historical point is that this opinion was widely held in the south, and with the progress of time became the prevailing doctrine of the planting statesmen. Their antagonism was deepened because they also became convinced, on what grounds it is not necessary to inquire, that the leaders of the industrial interest, thus opposed to planting, formed a consolidated aristocracy of wealth bent upon the pursuit and attainment of political power at Washington. By the aid of various associated interests, continued MacDuffie, the manufacturing capitalists have obtained a complete and permanent control over the legislation of Congress on this subject, the tariff. Men confederated together upon selfish and interested principles, whether in pursuit of the offices or the bounties of the government, are ever more active and vigilant than the great majority who act from disinterested and patriotic impulses. Have we not witnessed it on this floor, sir, who ever knew the tariff men to divide on any question affecting their confederated interests? The watchword is, stick together, right or wrong, upon every question affecting the common cause. Such, sir, is the concert and vigilance and such the combinations by which the manufacturing party, acting upon the interests of some and the prejudices of others, have obtained a decided and permanent control over public opinion in all the tariff states. Thus, as the southern statesmen would have it, the north, in matters affecting national policies, was ruled by a confederated interest which menaced the planting interest. As the former grew in magnitude and attached to itself the free farmers of the West through channels of trade and credit, it followed as night the day that in time the planters would be overshadowed and at length overborn in the struggle of giants. Whether the theory was sound or not, southern statesmen believed it and acted upon it. References. M. Beard, short history of the American labor movement. E. L. Bogart, economic history of the United States. J. R. Commons, history of labor in the United States, two volumes. E. R. Johnson, American Railway Transportation, C. D. Wright, Industrial Evolution of the United States. Questions. One, what signs pointed to a complete Democratic triumph in 1852? Two, what is the explanation of the extraordinary industrial progress of America? Three, compare the planting system with the factory system. Four, in what sections did industry flourish before the civil war? Why? Five, show why transportation is so vital to modern industry and agriculture. Six, explain how it was possible to secure so many people to labor in American industries. Seven, trace the steps in the rise of organized labor before 1860. Eight, what political and economic reforms did labor demand? Nine, why did the East and the South seek closer ties with the West? Ten, describe the economic forces which were drawing the East and the West together. Eleven, in what way was the South economically dependent upon the North? Twelve, state the national policies generally favored in the North and condemned in the South. Thirteen, show how economic conditions in the South were unfavorable to industry. Fourteen, give the Southern explanation of the antagonism between the North and the South. Research topics, the inventions, a sign one to each student, satisfactory accounts are to be found in any good encyclopedia, especially the Britannica. River and Lake Commerce, calendar, economic history of the United States. Pages 313 through 326. Railways and canals, calendar, pages 326 through 344, 359 through 387. Coleman, industrial history of the United States. Pages 216 through 225. The growth of industry. 1815 through 1840. Calendar, pages 459 through 471. From 1850 to 1860. Calendar, pages 471 through 486. Early labor conditions. Calendar, pages 701 through 718. Early immigration. Calendar, pages 719 through 732. Clay's home market theory of the tariff. Calendar, pages 498 through 503. The New England view of the tariff. Calendar, pages 503 through 514. End of section two. Section three of history of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard. Part five, sectional conflict and reconstruction. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard. Part five, sectional conflict and reconstruction. Chapter 14, the planting system and national politics. James Madison, the father of the federal constitution, after he had watched for many days the Battle Royale in the National Convention of 1787, exclaimed that the contest was not between the large and small states, but between the commercial north and the planting south. From the inauguration of Washington to the election of Lincoln, the sectional conflict, discerned by this penetrating thinker, exercised profound influence on the course of American politics. It was latent during the era of good feeling when the Jeffersonian Republicans adopted federalist policies. It flamed up again in the contest between the Democrats and Whigs. Finally it raged in the angry political quarrel which culminated in the Civil War. Slavery, North and South. The decline of slavery in the North. At the time of the adoption of the Constitution, slavery was lawful in all the northern states except Massachusetts. There were almost as many bondmen in New York as in Georgia. New Jersey had more than Delaware or Tennessee, indeed nearly as many as both combined. All told, however, there were only about 40,000 in the North as against nearly 700,000 in the South. Moreover, most of the northern slaves were domestic servants, not laborers necessary to keep mills going or fields under cultivation. There was in the North a steadily growing moral sentiment against the system. Massachusetts abandoned it in 1780. In the same year Pennsylvania provided for gradual emancipation. New Hampshire, where there had been only a handful, Connecticut with a few thousand domestics, and New Jersey early followed these examples. New York in 1799 declared that all children born of slaves after July 4 of that year should be free, though held for a term as apprentices. And in 1827 it swept away the last vestiges of slavery. So with the passing of the generation that had framed the Constitution, chattel servitude disappeared in the commercial states, leaving behind only such discriminations as disenfranchisement or high property qualifications on colored voters. The growth of northern sentiment against slavery. In both sections of the country there early existed, among those more or less philosophically inclined, a strong opposition to slavery on moral as well as economic grounds. In the Constitutional Convention of 1787 Governor Morris had vigorously condemned it and proposed that the whole country should bear the cost of abolishing it. About the same time a society for promoting the abolition of slavery under the presidency of Benjamin Franklin laid before Congress a petition that serious attention be given to the emancipation of those unhappy men who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage. When Congress, acting on the recommendations of President Jefferson, provided for the abolition of the foreign slave trade on January 1, 1808, several northern members joined with southern members in condemning the system as well as the trade. Later colonialization societies were formed to encourage the emancipation of slaves and to return to Africa. James Madison was President and Henry Clay Vice President of such an organization. The anti-slavery sentiment of which these were the signs was nevertheless confined to narrow circles and bore no trace of bitterness. We consider slavery your calamity, not your crime, wrote a distinguished Boston clergyman to his southern brethren, and we will share with you the burden of putting an end to it. We will consent that the public land shall be appropriated to this object. I deprecate everything which sows discord and exasperating sectional animosities. Uncompromising Abolition In a little while the spirit of generosity was gone. Just as Jacksonian democracy rose to power there appeared a new kind of anti-slavery doctrine, the dogmatism of the abolition agitator. For mild speculation on the evils of the system was substituted an imperious and belligerent demand for instant emancipation. If a date must be fixed for its appearance the year 1831 may be taken when William Lloyd Garrison founded in Boston his anti-slavery paper The Liberator. With singleness of purpose and utter contempt for all opposing opinions and arguments he pursued his course of passionate denunciation. He apologized for having ever assented to the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition. He chose for his motto immediate and unconditional emancipation. He promised his readers that he would be harsh as truth and uncompromising as justice, that he would not think or speak or write with moderation. Then he flung out his defiant call, I am an earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard, much is the vow I take, so help me God. Though Garrison complained that the apathy of the people is enough to make every statute leap from its pedestal he soon learned how alive the masses were to the meaning of his propaganda. Abolition orders were stoned in the street and hissed from the platform. Their meeting-places were often attacked and sometimes burned to the ground. Garrison himself was assaulted in the streets of Boston finding refuge from the angry mob behind prison bars. Lovejoy, a publisher in Alton, Illinois, for his willingness to give abolition a fair hearing, was brutally murdered. His printing-press was broken to pieces as a warning to all those who disturbed the nation's peace of mind. The South, doubly frightened by a slave revolt in 1831, which ended in the murder of a number of men, women, and children, closed all discussion of slavery in that section. Now, exclaimed Calhoun, it is a question which admits of neither concession nor compromise. As the opposition hardened, the anti-slavery agitation gathered in force and intensity. Whittier blew his blast from the New England Hills. No slave-hunt in our borders, no pirate on our strand, no fetters in the Bay State, no slave upon our land. Lowell, looking upon the espousal of a great cause as the noblest aim of his art, ridiculed and excoriated bondage in the South. Those abolitionists, not gifted as speakers or writers, signed petitions against slavery and poured them in upon Congress. The flood of them was so continuous that the House of Representatives, forgetting its traditions, adopted in 1836 a gag rule, which prevented the reading of appeals and consigned them to the wastebasket. Not until the Whigs were in power nearly ten years later was John Quincy Adams Abel, after a relentless campaign, to carry a motion rescinding the rule. How deep was the impression made upon the country by this agitation for immediate and unconditional emancipation cannot be measured? If the popular vote for those candidates who opposed not only slavery but also its extension to the territories, be taken as a standard, it was slight indeed. In 1844 the Free Soil candidate, Bernie, polled sixty-two thousand votes out of over a million and a half. The Free Soil vote of the next campaign went beyond a quarter of a million, but the increase was due to the strength of the leader, Martin Van Buren, four years afterward it receded to one hundred and fifty-six thousand. Affording all the outward signs for the belief that the pleas of the abolitionists found no widespread response among the people. Yet the agitation undoubtedly ran deeper than the ballot box. Young statesmen of the North, in whose hands the destiny of frightful years was to lie, found their indifference to slavery broken and their consciences stirred by the unending appeal and the tireless reiteration. Charles Sumner afterward boasted that he read the liberator two years before Wendell Phillips, the young Boston lawyer who cast aside his profession to take up the dangerous cause. Early Southern opposition to slavery. In the South the sentiment against slavery was strong. It led some to believe that it would also come to an end there in due time. Washington disliked it and directed in his will that his own slave should be set free after the death of his wife. Jefferson, looking into the future, condemned the system by which he also lived, saying, Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that their liberties are the gift of God? Are they not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Nor did Southern men confine their sentiments to expressions of academic opinion. They accepted in 1787 the ordinance which excluded slavery from the Northwest Territory forever and also the Missouri Compromise which shut it out of a vast section of the Louisiana Territory. The Revolution in the Slave System. Among the representatives of South Carolina and Georgia, however, the anti-slavery views of Washington and Jefferson were by no means approved, and the drift of Southern economy was decidedly in favor of extending and perpetuating rather than abolishing the system of chattel servitude. The invention of the cotton gin and textile machinery created a market for cotton which the planters, with all their skill and energy, could hardly supply. Almost every available acre was brought under cotton culture as the small farmers were driven steadily from the seaboard into the uplands or to the Northwest. The demand for slaves to till the swiftly expanding fields was enormous. The number of bondsmen rose from seven hundred thousand in Washington's day to more than three millions in 1850. At the same time slavery itself was transformed. Instead of the homestead where the same family of masters kept the same families of slaves from generation to generation came the plantation system of the far South and Southwest where masters were ever moving and ever extending their holdings of land and slaves. This in turn reacted on the older South where the raising of slaves for the market became a regular and highly profitable business. Slavery defended as a positive good. As the abolition agitation increased and the planting system expanded, apologies for slavery became fainter and fainter in the South. Then apologies were superseded by claims that slavery was a beneficial scheme of labor control. Calhoun in a famous speech in the Senate in 1837 sounded the new note by declaring slavery instead of an evil a good, a positive good. His reasoning was as follows. In every civilized society one portion of the community must live on the labor of another. Learning, science and the arts are built upon leisure. The African slave, kindly treated by his master and mistress, and looked after in his old age, is better off than the free laborers of Europe. And under the slave system conflicts between capital and labor are avoided. The advantages of slavery in this respect, he concluded, will become more and more manifest if left undisturbed by interference from without, as the country advances in wealth and numbers. Slave Owners Dominate Politics The new doctrine of Calhoun was eagerly seized by the planters as they came more and more to overshadow the small farmers of the South, and as they beheld the menace of abolition growing upon the horizon. It formed, as they viewed matters, a moral defense for their labor system. Sound. Logical. Invincible. It warranted them in drawing together for the protection of an institution so necessary, so inevitable, so beneficent. Though in 1850 the slave owners were only about three hundred and fifty thousand in a national population of nearly twenty million whites, they had an influence all out of proportion to their numbers. They were knit together by the bonds of a common interest. They had leisure and wealth. They could travel and attend conferences and conventions. Throughout the South and largely in the North they had the press, the schools, and the pulpits on their side. They formed, as it were, a mighty union for the protection and advancement of their common cause. Aided by those mechanics and farmers of the North who stuck by Jacksonian democracy through thick and thin, the planters became a power in the federal government. We nominate presidents exultantly boasted a Richmond newspaper. The North elects them. This jubilant Southern claim was conceded by William H. Seward, a Republican senator from New York, in a speech describing the power of slavery in the national government. A party, he said, is in one sense a joint-stock association in which those who contribute the most direct the action and management of the concern. The slaveholders, contributing in an overwhelming proportion to the strength of the Democratic Party, necessarily dictate and prescribe its policy. He went on, the slaveholding class has become the governing power in each of the slaveholding states, and it practically chooses thirty of the sixty-two members of the Senate, ninety of the two hundred and thirty-three members of the House of Representatives, and one hundred and five of the two hundred and ninety-five electors of President and Vice President of the United States. Then he considered the slave power in the Supreme Court. That tribunal, he exclaimed, consists of a chief justice and eight associate justices. Of these five were called from slave states and four from free states. The opinions and bias of each of them were carefully considered by the President and Senate when he was appointed. Not one of them was found wanting in soundness of politics according to the slave holders' exposition of the Constitution. Such was the northern view of the planting interest that, from the arena of national politics, challenged the whole country in eighteen sixty. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, Part Five. Sectional Conflict and Reconstruction. Chapter Fourteen. The planting system and national politics continued. Slavery and National Politics. National Aspects of Slavery. It may be asked why it was that slavery, founded originally on state law and subject to state government, was drawn into the current of national affairs. The answer is simple. There were, in the first place, constitutional reasons. The Congress of the United States had to make all needful rules for the government of the territories, the District of Columbia, the forts, and other property under national authority, so it was compelled to determine whether slavery should exist in the places subject to its jurisdiction. Upon Congress was also conferred the power of admitting new states. Whenever a territory asked for admission, the issue could be raised as to whether slavery should be sanctioned or excluded. Under the Constitution, provision was made for the return of runaway slaves. Congress had the power to enforce this clause by appropriate legislation. Since the control of the post office was vested in the federal government, it had to face the problem raised by the transmission of abolition literature through the males. Finally, citizens had the right of petition. It inheres in all free government, and it is expressly guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. It was therefore legal for abolitionists to present to Congress their petitions, even if they asked for something which it had no right to grant. It was thus impossible, constitutionally, to draw a cordon around the slavery issue and confine the discussion of it to state politics. There were in the second place economic reasons why slavery was inevitably drawn into the national sphere. It was the basis of the planting system which had direct commercial relations with the North and European countries. It was affected by federal laws respecting tariffs, bounties, ship subsidies, banking, and kindred matters. The planters of the South, almost without exception, looked upon the protective tariff as a tribute laid upon them for the benefit of Northern industries. As heavy borrowers of money in the North, they were generally in favor of easy money, if not paper currency, as an aid in the repayment of their debts. This threw most of them into opposition to the Whig program for a United States bank. All financial aids to American shipping, they stoutly resisted, preferring to rely upon the cheaper service rendered by English shippers. International improvements, those substantial ties that were binding the West to the East and turning the traffic from New Orleans to Philadelphia and New York, they viewed with alarm. Free homesteads from the public lands, which tended to overbalance the South by building free states, became to them a measure dangerous to their interests. Thus, national economic policies, which could not by any twist or turn be confined to state control, drew the slave system and its defenders into the political conflict that centered at Washington. Slavery and the Territories, the Missouri Compromise, 1820. Though men continually talked about taking slavery out of politics, it could not be done. By 1818 slavery had become so entrenched and the anti-slavery movement so strong that Missouri's quest for admission brought out both houses of Congress into a deadlock that was broken only by compromise. The South, having half the senators, could prevent the admission of Missouri stripped of slavery, and the North, powerful in the House of Representatives, could keep Missouri without slavery out of the Union indefinitely. An adjustment of pretensions was the last resort. Maine, separated from the parent state of Massachusetts, was brought into the Union with freedom and Missouri with bondage. At the same time it was agreed that the remainder of the vast Louisiana Territory north of the parallel of 36 degrees, 30 minutes, should be like the old Northwest, forever free, while the southern portion was left to slavery. In reality this was an immense gain for liberty. The area dedicated to free farmers was many times greater than that left to the planters. The principle was once more asserted that Congress had full power to prevent slavery in the territories. The territorial question reopened by the Wilmot Proviso. To the southern leaders, the annexation of Texas and the conquest of Mexico meant renewed security to the planting interests against the increasing wealth and population of the North. Texas, it was said, could be divided into four slave states. The new territories secured by the Treaty of Peace with Mexico contained the promise of at least three more. Thus, as each new free soil state knocked for admission into the Union, the South could demand, as the price of its consent, a new slave state. No wonder southern statesmen saw, in the annexation of Texas and the conquest of Mexico, slavery and King Cotton triumphant, secure for all time against adverse legislation. Northern leaders were equally convinced that the Southern prophecy was true. Abolitionists and moderate opponents of slavery alike were in despair. Texas, they lamented, would fasten slavery upon the country for evermore. No living man, cried one, will see the end of slavery in the United States. It so happened, however, that the events which it was thought would secure slavery let loose a storm against it. A sign appeared first on August 6, 1846, only a few months after war was declared on Mexico. On that day David Wilmot, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution to the effect that, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico, slavery should be forever excluded from every part of it. The Wilmot, Proviso, as the resolution was popularly called, though defeated on that occasion, was a challenge to the South. The South answered the challenge. Speaking in the House of Representative Robert Tombs of Georgia boldly declared, in the presence of the living God, if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, I am for disunion. South Carolina announced that the day for talk had passed and the time had come to join her sister states in resisting the application of the Wilmot, Proviso, at any and all hazards. A conference assembled at Jackson, Mississippi in the autumn of 1849 called a general convention of southern states to meet at Nashville the following summer. The avowed purpose was to arrest the course of aggression and, if that was not possible, to provide in the last resort for their separate welfare by the formation of a compact and union that will afford protection to their liberties and rights. States that had spurned South Carolina's plea for nullification in 1832 responded to this new appeal with alacrity and augury of the secession to come. The Great Debate of 1850. The temper of the country was quite hot when Congress convened in December 1849. It was a memorable session, memorable for the great men who took part in the debates and memorable for the grand compromise of 1850 which it produced. In the Senate sat for the last time three heroic figures, Webster from the North, Calhoun from the South, and Clay from a border state. For nearly forty years these three had been leaders of men. All had grown old and gray in service. Calhoun was already broken in health and in a few months was to be born from the political arena forever. Clay and Webster had but two more years in their allotted span. Experience, learning, statecraft, all these things they now marshaled in a mighty effort to solve the slavery problem. On January 29th, 1850, Clay offered to the Senate a compromise granting concessions to both sides and a few days later in a powerful oration he made a passionate appeal for a union of hearts through mutual sacrifices. Calhoun relentlessly demanded the full measure of justice for the South. Equal rights in the territories bought by common blood, the return of runaway slaves as required by the Constitution, the suppression of the abolitionists, and the restoration of the balance of power between the North and the South. Webster, in his notable 7th of March speech, condemned the Wilmot Proviso, advocated a strict enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, denounced the abolitionists, and made a final plea for the Constitution, Union, and Liberty. This was the address which called forth from Whittier the poem, Ichabod, deploring the fall of the mighty one whom he thought lost to all sense of faith and honor. The Terms of the Compromise of 1850 When the debates were closed, the results were totaled in a series of compromise measures, all of which were signed in September 1850 by the new President, Millard Fillmore, who had taken office two months before on the death of Zachary Taylor. By these acts the boundaries of Texas were adjusted and the territory of New Mexico created, subject to the provision that all or any part of it might be admitted to the Union with or without slavery as their Constitution may provide at the time of their admission. The territory of Utah was similarly organized with the same conditions as to slavery, thus repudiating the Wilmot Proviso without guaranteeing slavery to the planters. California was admitted as a free state under a Constitution in which the people of the territory had themselves prohibited slavery. The slave trade was abolished in the District of Columbia, but slavery itself existed as before at the capital of the nation. This concession to anti-slavery sentiment was more than offset by a new fugitive slave law, drastic in spirit and in letter. It placed the enforcement of its terms in the hands of federal officers appointed from Washington, and so removed it from the control of authorities locally elected. It provided that masters or their agents on filing claims in due form might summarily remove their escaped slaves without affording their alleged fugitives the right of trial by jury, the right to witness, the right to offer any testimony in evidence. Finally, to put teeth into the act, heavy penalties were prescribed for all who obstructed or assisted in obstructing the enforcement of the law. Such was the great compromise of 1850, the pro-slavery triumph in the election of 1852. The results of the election of 1852 seemed to show conclusively that the nation was weary of slavery agitation and wanted peace. Both parties, Whigs and Democrats, endorsed the fugitive slave law and approved the great compromise. The Democrats, with Franklin Pierce as their leader, swept the country against the war hero General Winfield Scott, on whom the Whigs had staked their hopes. Even Webster, broken with grief at his failure to receive the nomination, advised his friends to vote for Pierce and turned away from politics to meditate upon approaching death. The verdict of the voters would seem to indicate that for the time everybody, save a handful of disgruntled agitators, looked upon Clay's settlement as the last word. The people, especially the businessmen of the country, says Elson, were utterly weary of the agitation and they gave their suffrages to the party that promised them rest. The free soil party, condemning slavery as a sin against God and a crime against man and advocating freedom for the territories, failed to carry a single state. In fact, it polled fewer voters than it had four years earlier, 156,000 as against nearly three million, the combined vote of the Whigs and Democrats. It is not surprising, therefore, that President Pierce, surrounded in his cabinet by strong southern sympathizers, could promise to put an end to slavery agitation and to crush the abolition movement in the bud. Anti-slavery agitation continued. The promise was more difficult to fulfill than to utter. In fact, the vigorous execution of one measure included in the compromise the fugitive slave law only made matters worse. Designed as a security for the planters, it proved a powerful instrument in their undoing. Slavery five hundred miles away on a Louisiana plantation was so remote from the north that only the strongest imagination could maintain a constant rage against it. Slave catching, manhunting by federal officers on the streets of Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago, or Milwaukee, and in the hamlets and villages of the wide stretching farmlands of the north was another matter. It brought the most odious aspects of slavery home to thousands of men and women who would otherwise have been indifferent to the system. Law-abiding businessmen, mechanics, farmers, and women, when they saw peaceful Negroes who had resided in their neighborhoods for perhaps years, torn away by federal officers, and carried back to bondage, were transformed into enemies of the law. They helped slaves to escape, they snatched them away from officers who had captured them, they broke open jails, and carried fugitives off to Canada. Assistance to runaway slaves, always more or less common in the north, was by this time organized into a system. Regular routes, known as underground railroads, were laid out across the free states into Canada, and trusted friends of freedom maintained underground stations where fugitives were concealed in the daytime between their long night journeys. Funds were raised and secret agents sent into the south to help Negroes to flee. One Negro woman, Harriet Tubman, the Moses of her people, with headquarters at Philadelphia, is accredited with 19 invasions into slave territory and the emancipation of 300 Negroes. Those who worked at this business were in constant peril. One underground operator, Calvin Fairbank, spent nearly 20 years in prison for aiding fugitives from justice. Yet perils and prisons did not stay those determined men and women who, in obedience to their consciences, set themselves to this lawless work. From thrilling stories of adventure along the underground railways came some of the scenes and themes of the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, published two years after the compromise of 1850. Her stirring tell set forth the worst features of slavery in vivid word pictures that caught and held the attention of millions of readers. Though the book was unfair to the south and was denounced as a hideous distortion of the truth, it was quickly dramatized and played in every city and town throughout the north. Topsy, Little Eva, Uncle Tom, the fleeing slave, Eliza Harris, and the cruel slave-driver, Simon the Gree, with his baying bloodhounds, became living specters in many a home that sought to bar the door to the unpleasant and irritating business of slavery agitation. End of Section 4. Section 5 of History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, Part 5. Sectional Conflict and Reconstruction. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, Part 5. Sectional Conflict and Reconstruction. Chapter 14. The planting system and national politics concluded the drift of events toward the irrepressible conflict. Repeal of the Missouri Compromise. To practical men, after all, the rub-a-dub agitation of a few abolitionists, an occasional riot over fugitive slaves, and the vogue of a popular novel seemed of slight or transient importance. They could point with satisfaction to the election returns of 1852, but their very security was founded upon shifting sands. The magnificent triumph of the pro-slavery Democrats in 1852 brought a turn of affairs that destroyed the foundations under their feet. Emboldened by their own strength and the weakness of their opponents, they now dared to repeal the Missouri Compromise. The leader in this fateful enterprise was Stephen A. Douglas, Senator from Illinois, and the occasion for the deed was the demand for the organization of territorial government in the regions west of Iowa and Missouri. Douglas, like Clay and Webster before him, was consumed by a strong passion for the presidency, and to reach his goal it was necessary to win the support of the South. This he undoubtedly sought to do when he introduced, on January 4, 1854, a bill organizing the Nebraska Territory on the principle of the Compromise of 1850, namely that the people in the territory might themselves decide whether they would have slavery or not. Unwittingly, the avalanche was started. After a stormy debate, in which important amendments were forced on Douglas, the Kansas Nebraska bill became a law on May 30, 1854. The measure created two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, and provided that they, or territories organized out of them, would come into the union as states with or without slavery as their constitutions may prescribe at the time of their admission. Not content with this, the law went on to declare the Missouri Compromise null and void as being inconsistent with the principle of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in states and territories. Thus by a single blow the very heart of the Continent, dedicated to freedom by solemn agreement, was thrown open to slavery. A desperate struggle between slave-owners and the advocates of freedom was the outcome in Kansas. If Douglas fancied that the North would receive the overthrow of the Missouri Compromise in the same temper that it greeted Clay's settlement, he was rapidly disillusioned. A blast of rage, terrific in its fury, swept from Maine to Iowa. Stade Old Boston hanged him in effigy with an inscription, Stephen A. Douglas, author of the Infamous Nebraska Bill, the Benedict Arnold of 1854. City after city burned him in effigy until, as he himself said, he could travel from the Atlantic coast to Chicago in the light of the fires. Thousands of wigs and free soil Democrats deserted their parties which had sanctioned or at least tolerated the Kansas Nebraska Bill, declaring that the startling measure showed an evident resolve on the part of the planters to rule the whole country. A gauge of defiance was thrown down to the abolitionists. An issue was set even for the moderate and timid who had been unmoved by the agitation over slavery in the far south. That issue was whether slavery was to be confined within its existing boundaries or be allowed to spread without interference, thereby placing the free states in the minority and surrendering the federal government wholly to the slave power. The Rise of the Republican Party. Events of terrible significance, swiftly following, drove the country like a ship before a gale straight into civil war. The Kansas Nebraska Bill rent the old parties asunder and called into being the Republican Party. While that bill was pending in Congress, many northern wigs and Democrats had come to the conclusion that a new party, dedicated to freedom in the territories, must follow the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Several places claim to be the original home of the Republican Party, but historians generally yield it to Wisconsin. At Ripon in that state, a mass meeting of wigs and Democrats assembled in February 1854 and resolved to form a new party if the Kansas Nebraska Bill should pass. At a second meeting in a fusion committee representing wigs, free soilers and Democrats was formed and the name Republican, the name of Jefferson's old party, was selected. All over the country similar meetings were held and political committees were organized. When the presidential campaign of 1856 began, the Republicans entered the contest. After a preliminary conference in Pittsburgh in February, they held a convention in Philadelphia, at which was drawn up a platform opposing the extension of slavery to the territories. John C. Fremont, the distinguished explorer, was named for the presidency. The results of the election were astounding as compared with the free soil failure of the preceding election. Prominent men like Longfellow, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and George William Curtis went over to the new party and 1,341,264 votes were rolled up for free labor, free speech, free men, free Kansas, and Fremont. Nevertheless, the victory of the Democrats was decisive. Their candidate, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, was elected by a majority of 174 to 114 electoral votes. The Dred Scott decision, 1857. In his inaugural Buchanan vaguely hinted that in a forthcoming decision the Supreme Court would settle one of the vital questions of the day. This was a reference to the Dred Scott case then pending. Scott was a slave who had been taken by his master into the Upper Louisiana Territory where freedom had been established by the Missouri Compromise and then carried back into his old state of Missouri. He brought suit for his liberty on the ground that his residence in the free territory made him free. This raised the question whether the law of Congress prohibiting slavery north of 36 degrees, 30 minutes, was authorized by the Federal Constitution or not. The court might have avoided answering it by saying that even though Scott was free in the territory he became a slave again in Missouri by virtue of the law of that state. The court, however, faced the issue squarely. It held that Scott had not been free anywhere and that besides the Missouri Compromise violated the Constitution and was null and void. The decision was a triumph for the South. It meant that Congress, after all, had no power to abolish slavery in the territories. Under the decree of the highest court in the land that could be done only by an amendment to the Constitution which required a two-thirds vote in Congress and the approval of three-fourths of the states. Such an amendment was obviously impossible. The Southern states were too numerous but the Republicans were not daunted. We know, said Lincoln, the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions and we shall do what we can to have it overruled its. Legislatures of Northern states passed resolutions condemning the decision and the Republican platform of 1860 characterized the dogma that the Constitution carried slavery into the territories as a dangerous political heresy at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself with legislative and judicial precedent, revolutionary intendancy, and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country. The Panic of 1857. In the midst of the acrimonious dispute over the Dred Scott decision came one of the worst business panics which ever afflicted the country. In the spring and summer of 1857, fourteen railroad corporations, including the Erie, Michigan Central, and the Illinois Central, failed to meet their obligations. Banks and insurance companies, some of them the largest and strongest institutions in the north closed their doors. Stocks and bonds came down in a crash on the markets. Manufacturing was paralyzed. Tens of thousands of working people were thrown out of employment. Hunger meetings of idle men were held in the cities and banners bearing the inscription, We Want Bread, were flung out. In New York, working men threatened to invade the council chamber to demand work or bread and the frightened mayor called for the police and soldiers. For this distressing state of affairs many remedies were offered, none with more zeal and persistence than the proposal for a higher tariff to take the place of the law of March, 1857, a democratic measure making drastic reductions in the rates of duty. In the manufacturing districts of the north, the panic was ascribed to the democratic assault on business. So an old issue was again vigorously advanced, preparatory to the next presidential campaign. The Lincoln-Douglass Debates. The following year the interest of the whole country was drawn to a series of debates held in Illinois by Lincoln and Douglas, both candidates for the United States Senate. In the course of his campaign Lincoln had uttered his trenchant saying that a house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. At the same time he had accused Douglas, Buchanan, and the Supreme Court of acting in concert to make slavery national. This daring statement arrested the attention of Douglas, who was making his campaign on the doctrine of squatter sovereignty, that is, the right of the people of each territory to vote slavery up or down. After a few long-distance shots at each other the candidates agreed to meet face to face and discuss the issues of the day. Never had such crowds been seen at political meetings in Illinois. Farmers deserted their plows, smithed their forges, and housewives their baking to hear honest aid and the little giant. The results of the series of debates were momentous. Lincoln clearly defined his position. The south he admitted was entitled under the Constitution to a fair, fugitive slave law. He hoped that there might be no new slave states, but he did not see how Congress could exclude the people of a territory from admission as a state if they saw fit to adopt a Constitution legalizing the ownership of slaves. He favored the gradual abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the total exclusion of it from the territories of the United States by act of Congress. Moreover he drove Douglas into a hole by asking how he squared squatter sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision. How, in other words, the people of a territory could abolish slavery when the court had declared that Congress, the superior power, could not do it under the Constitution? To this baffling question Douglas lamely replied that the inhabitants of a territory, by unfriendly legislation, might make property and slaves insecure and thus destroy the institution. This answer to Lincoln's query alienated many southern Democrats who believed that the Dred Scott decision settled the question of slavery in the territories for all times. Douglas won the election to the Senate, lifted into national fame by the debates, beat him in the campaign for president two years later. John Brown's raid. To the abolitionists the line of argument pursued by Lincoln, including his proposal to leave slavery untouched in the states where it existed, was wholly unsatisfactory. One of them, a grim and resolute man, inflamed by a hatred for slavery in itself, turned from agitation to violence. These men are all talk, what is needed is action, action. So spoke John Brown of New York. During the sanguinary struggle in Kansas he hurried to the frontier, gun and dagger in hand, to help drive slave owners from the free soil of the West. There he committed deeds of such daring and cruelty that he was outlawed and a price put upon his head. Still he kept on the path of action. Aided by funds from his northern friends, he gathered a small band of his followers around him, saying to them, if God be for us, who can be against us? He went into Virginia in the autumn of 1859, hoping, as he explained, to effect a mighty conquest, even though it be like the last victory of Samson. He seized the government armory at Harper's Ferry, declared free the slaves whom he found, and called upon them to take up arms in defense of their liberty. This was a hope as forlorn as it was desperate. Armed forces came down upon him, and after a hard battle captured him. Tried for treason, Brown was condemned to death. The governor of Virginia turned a deaf ear to pleas for clemency based on the ground that the prisoner was simply a lunatic. This is a beautiful country, said the stern old Brown, glancing upward to the eternal hills on his way to the gallows, as calmly as if he were returning home from a long journey. So perished all such enemies of Virginia, all such enemies of the Union, all such foes of the human race, solemnly announced the executioner as he fulfilled the judgment of the law. The raid and its grim ending deeply moved the country. Abolitionists looked upon Brown as a martyr and told funeral bells on the day of his execution. Longfellow wrote in his diary, This will be a great day in our history, the date of a new revolution as much needed as the old one. Jefferson Davis saw in the affair the invasion of a state by a murderous gang of abolitionists bent on inciting slaves to murder helpless women and children, a crime for which the leader had met a felon's death. Lincoln spoke of the raid as absurd, the deed of an enthusiast who had brooded over the oppression of a people until he fancied himself commissioned by heaven to liberate them, an attempt which ended in little else than his own execution. To Republican leaders as a whole the event was very embarrassing. They were taunted by the Democrats with responsibility for the deed. Douglas declared his firm and deliberate conviction that the Harpers Ferry crime was the natural, logical, inevitable result of the doctrines and teachings of the Republican Party. So persistent were such attacks that the Republicans felt called upon in 1860 to denounce Brown's raid as among the gravest of crimes. The Democrats divided. When Democratic convention met at Charleston in the spring of 1860 a few months after Brown's execution it soon became clear that there was danger ahead. Between the extreme slavery advocates of the far south and the so called pro-slavery Democrats of the Douglas type there was a chasm which no appeals to party loyalty could bridge. As the spokesmen of the West Douglas knew that while the North was not abolitionist it was passionately set against an extension of slavery into the territories by act of Congress. That squatter sovereignty was the mildest kind of compromise acceptable to the farmers whose votes would determine the fate of the election. Southern leaders would not accept his opinion. Yancy, speaking for Alabama, refused to paltar with any plan not built upon the proposition that slavery was in itself right. He taunted the Northern Democrats with taking the view that slavery was wrong, but that they could not do anything about it. That, he said, was the fatal error, the cause of all discord, the source of black republicanism, as well as squatter sovereignty. The gauntlet was thus thrown down at the feet of the Northern delegates. You must not apologize for slavery, you must declare it right. You must advocate its extension. The challenge, so bluntly put, was bluntly answered. Gentlemen of the South responded a delicate from Ohio, you mistake us, you mistake us, we will not do it. For ten days the Charleston convention wrangled over the platform and balladed for the nomination of a candidate. Douglas, though in the lead, could not get the two-thirds vote required for victory. For more than fifty times the role of the convention was called without a decision. Then, in sheer desperation, the convention adjourned to meet later at Baltimore. When the delegates again assembled, their passions ran as high as ever. The division into two irreconcilable factions was unchanged. Uncompromising delegates from the South withdrew to Richmond, nominating John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky for president, and put forth a platform asserting the rights of slave owners in the territories and the duty of the federal government to protect them. The delegates who remained at Baltimore nominated Douglas and endorsed his doctrine of squatter sovereignty. The Constitutional Union Party. While the Democratic Party was being disrupted, a fragment of the former Whig Party, known as the Constitutional Unionists, held a convention at Baltimore and selected national candidates. John Bell from Tennessee and Edward Everett from Massachusetts. A melancholy interest attached to this assembly. It was mainly composed of ove men whose political views were those of Clay and Webster, cherished leaders now dead and gone. In their platform they sought to exercise the evil spirit of partisanship by inviting their fellow citizens to support the Constitution of the country, the Union of the States, and the enforcement of the laws. The party that campaigned on this grand sentiment only drew laughter from the Democrats and derision from the Republicans, and polled less than one-fourth the votes. The Republican Convention. With the Whigs definitely forced into a separate group, the Republican Convention at Chicago was fated to be sectional in character, although five states did send delegates. As the Democrats were split, the party that had led a forlorn hope four years before was on the high road to success at last. New and powerful recruits were found. The advocates of a high protective tariff and the friends of free homesteads for farmers and working men mingled with enthusiastic foes of slavery. While still firm in their opposition to slavery in the territories, the Republicans went on record in favor of a homestead law, granting free lands to settlers and approved customs duties designed to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country. The platform was greeted with cheers, which, according to the stenographic report of the Convention, became loud and prolonged as the protective tariff and homestead planks were read. Having skillfully drawn a platform to unite the North in opposition to slavery and the planting system, the Republicans were also adroit in their selection of a candidate. The tariff plank might carry Pennsylvania, a Democratic state, but Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were equally essential to success at the polls. The southern counties of these states were filled with settlers from Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, who even if they had no love for slavery were no friends of abolition. Moreover, remembering the old fight on the United States Bank in Andrew Jackson's day, they were suspicious of men from the East. Accordingly, they did not favor the candidacy of Seward, the leading Republican statesman and favorite son of New York. After much trading and discussion, the Convention came to the conclusion that Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was the most available candidate. He was of Southern origin, born in Kentucky in 1809, a fact that told heavily in the campaign in the Ohio Valley. He was a man of the soil, the son of poor frontier parents, a pioneer who in his youth had labored in the fields and forests, celebrated far and wide as Honest Abe, the rail splitter. It was well known that he disliked slavery, but was no abolitionist. He had come dangerously near to Seward's radicalism in his house divided against its self-speech, but he had never committed himself to the reckless doctrine that there was a higher law than the Constitution. Slavery in the South he tolerated as a bitter fact, slavery in the territories he opposed with all his strength. Of his sincerity they could be no doubt. He was a speaker and a writer of singular power, commanding by the use of simple and homely language the hearts and minds of those who heard him speak or read his printed words. He had gone far enough in his opposition to slavery, but not too far. He was the man of the hour. Amid lusty cheers from ten thousand throats Lincoln was nominated for the presidency by the Republicans. In the ensuing election he carried all the free states except New Jersey. References. P. E. Chadwick causes of the Civil War, American Nation series. W. E. Dodd statesmen of the Old South. E. Engle, Southern Sidelights, sympathetic account of the Old South. A. B. Hart, slavery and abolition, American Nation series. J. F. Rhodes, history of the United States, volumes one and two. T. C. Smith, parties and slavery, American Nation series. Questions. Number one, trace the decline of slavery in the North and explain it. Number two, describe the character of early opposition to slavery. Number three, what was the effect of abolition agitation? Number four, why did anti-slavery sentiment practically disappear in the South? Number five, on what grounds did Calhoun defend slavery? Number six, explain how slave owners became powerful in politics. Number seven, why was it impossible to keep the slavery issue out of national politics? Number eight, give the leading steps in the long controversy over slavery in the territories. Number nine, state the terms of the compromise of 1850 and explain its failure. Number ten, what were the startling events between 1850 and 1860? Number eleven, account for the rise of the Republican Party. What party had used the title before? Number twelve, how did the Dred Scott decision become a political issue? Number thirteen, what were some of the points brought out in the Lincoln Douglas debates? Number fourteen, describe the party division in 1860. Number fifteen, what were the main planks of the Republican platform? Research topics, the extension of cotton planting, calendar, economic history of the United States, pages 760 to 768. Abolition agitation, McMaster, history of the people of the United States, volume six, pages 271 to 298. Calhoun's defense of slavery, hardings, select orations, illustrating American history, pages 247 to 257. The compromise of 1850, Clay's speech in harding, select orations, pages 267 to 289, the compromise laws in McDonald, documentary source book of American history, pages 383 to 394, narrative account in McMaster, volume eight, pages one through 55, Elson, history of the United States, pages 540 to 548. The repeal of the Missouri compromise, McMaster, volume eight, pages 192 to 231. Elson, pages 571 to 582. The Dred Scott case, McMaster, volume eight, pages 278 to 282. Compare the opinion of Taney in the dissent of Curtis in McDonald, documentary source book, pages 405 to 420. Elson, pages 595 to 598. The Lincoln Douglas debates, analysis of original speeches in harding, select orations, pages 309 to 341. Elson, pages 598 to 604. Biographical studies, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, A. H. Stevens, Douglas, W. H. Seward, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. End of section five. Section six of history of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard. Part five, sectional conflict and reconstruction. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard. Part five, sectional conflict and reconstruction. Chapter 15. The Civil War and Reconstruction. Part one. The irrepressible conflict is about to be visited upon us through the Black Republican nominee and his fanatical, diabolical Republican party. Ran an appeal to the voters of South Carolina during the campaign of 1860. If that calamity comes to pass, responded the governor of the state, the answer should be a declaration of independence. In a few days the suspense was over. The news of Lincoln's election came speeding along the wires. Prepared for the event, the editor of the Charleston Mercury unfurled the flag of his state amid wild cheers from an excited throng in the streets. Then he seized his pen and wrote, the tea has been thrown overboard. The revolution of 1860 has been initiated. The issue was submitted to the voters in the choice of delegates to a state convention called to cast off the yoke of the Constitution. The Southern Confederacy. Secession. As arranged, the Convention of South Carolina assembled in December and without a dissenting voice passed the ordinance of secession withdrawing from the union. Bells were rung exultantly. The roar of cannon carried the news to outlying counties. Fireworks lighted up the heavens and champagne flowed. The crisis so long expected had come at last. Even the conservatives who had prayed that they might escape the dreadful crash greeted it with a sigh relief. South Carolina now sent forth an appeal to her sister's states. States that had in Jackson's day repudiated nullification as leading to the dissolution of the union. The answer that came this time was in a different vein. A month had hardly elapsed before five other states, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, had withdrawn from the union. In February, Texas followed. Virginia, hesitating until the bombardment of Fort Sumter forced a conclusion, seceded in April. But fifty-five of the one hundred and forty-three delegates dissented, foreshadowing the creation of the new state of West Virginia, which Congress admitted to the union in eighteen sixty-three. In May, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee announced their independence. Secession and the theories of the union. In severing their relations with the union, the seceding states denied every point in the northern theory of the Constitution. That theory, as everyone knows, was carefully formulated by Webster and elaborated by Lincoln. According to it, the union was older than the states. It was created before the Declaration of Independence for the purpose of common defense. The Articles of Confederation did but strengthen this national bond, and the Constitution sealed it forever. The federal government was not a creature of state governments. It was erected by the people and derived its powers directly from them. It is, said Webster, the people's Constitution, the people's government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people. The people of the United States have declared that this Constitution shall be the Supreme Law. When a state questions the lawfulness of any act of the federal government, it cannot nullify that act or withdraw from the union. It must abide by the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States. The union of these states is perpetual, ran Lincoln's simple argument in the first inaugural. The federal Constitution has no provision for its own termination. It can be destroyed only by some action not provided for in the instrument itself. Even if it is a compact among all the states, the consent of all must be necessary to its dissolution. Therefore, no state can lawfully get out of the union and acts of violence against the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary. This was the system which he believed himself bound to defend by his oath of office registered in heaven. All this reasoning southern statesmen utterly rejected. In their opinion, the thirteen original states won their independence as separate and sovereign powers. The Treaty of Peace with Great Britain named them all and acknowledged them to be free, sovereign, and independent states. The Articles of Confederation very explicitly declared that each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence. The Constitution was a league of nations formed by an alliance of thirteen separate powers, each one of which ratified the instrument before it was put into effect. They voluntarily entered the union under the Constitution and voluntarily they could leave it. Such was the constitutional doctrine of Hain, Calhoun, and Jefferson Davis. In seceding, the southern states had only to follow legal methods and the transaction would be correct in every particular. So conventions were summoned, elections were held, and sovereign assemblies of the people set aside the Constitution in the same manner as it had been ratified nearly four score years before. Thus said the southern people, the moral judgment was fulfilled and the letter of the law carried into effect. The Formation of the Confederacy. Acting on the call of Mississippi, a Congress of Delegates from the seceded states met at Montgomery, Alabama, and on February 8th, 1861 adopted a temporary plan of union. It selected, as provisional president, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, a man well fitted by experience and moderation for leadership, a graduate of West Point, who had rendered distinguished service on the field of battle in the Mexican War, in public office, and as a member of Congress. In March, a permanent Constitution of the Confederate states was drafted. It was quickly ratified by the states, elections were held in November, and the government under it went into effect the next year. This new Constitution in form was very much like the famous instrument drafted at Philadelphia in 1787. It provided for a President, a Senate, and a House of Representatives along almost identical lines. In the powers conferred upon them, however, there were striking differences. The right to appropriate money for internal improvements was expressly withheld. Bounties were not to be granted from the Treasury, nor import duties so late as to promote or foster any branch of industry. The dignity of the state, if any might be bold enough to question it, was safeguarded in the opening line by the declaration that each acted in its sovereign and independent character in forming the Southern Union. Financing the Confederacy No government ever set out upon its career with more perplexing tasks in front of it. The North had a monetary system, the South had to create one. The North had a scheme of taxation that produced large revenues from numerous sources. The South had to formulate and carry out a financial plan. Like the North, the Confederacy expected to secure a large revenue from customs duties, easily collected and little felt among the masses. To this expectation, the blockade of Southern ports inaugurated by Lincoln in April, 1861, soon put an end. Following the President set by Congress under the Articles of Confederation, the Southern Congress resorted to a direct property tax apportioned among the States, only to meet the failure that might have been foretold. The Confederacy also sold bonds, the first issue bringing into the Treasury nearly all the species available in the Southern Banks. This species, by unhappy management, was early sent abroad to pay for supplies, sapping the foundations of a sound currency system. Large amounts of bonds were sold overseas, commanding at first better terms than those of the North in the markets of London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Many an English lord and statesman buying with enthusiasm and confidence to lament within a few years the proofs of his folly. The difficulties of bringing through the blockade any supplies purchased by foreign bond issues, however, nullified the effect of foreign credit and forced the Confederacy back upon the device of paper money. In all, approximately one billion dollars streamed from the printing presses to fall in value at an alarming rate, reaching, in January 1863, the astounding figure of fifty dollars in paper money for one in gold. Every known device was used to prevent its depreciation without result. To the issues of the Confederate Congress were added untold millions poured out by States and by private banks. Human and material resources. When we measure strength for strength in those signs of power, men, money, and supplies, it is difficult to see how the South was able to embark on secession and war with such confidence in the outcome. In the Confederacy, at the final reckoning, there were eleven states in all to be pitted against twenty-two, a population of nine millions, nearly one-half servile to be pitted against twenty-two millions, a land without great industries to produce war supplies and without vast capital to furnish war finances, joined in battle with the nation already industrial and fortified by property worth eleven billion dollars. Even after the Confederate Congress authorized conscription in 1862, Southern manpower, measured in numbers, was wholly inadequate to uphold the independence which had been declared. How, therefore, could the Confederacy hope to sustain itself against such a combination of men, money, and materials as the North could marshal? Southern Expectations. The answer to this question is to be found in the ideas that prevailed among Southern leaders. First of all, they hoped in vain to carry the Confederacy up to the Ohio River and with the aid of Missouri to gain possession of the Mississippi Valley, the granary of the nation. In the second place, they reckoned upon a large and continuous trade with Great Britain, the exchange of cotton for war materials. They likewise expected to receive recognition and open aid from European powers that looked with satisfaction upon the breakup of the Great American Republic. In the third place, they believed that their control over several staples so essential to Northern industry would enable them to bring on an industrial crisis in the manufacturing states. I firmly believe, wrote Senator Hammond of South Carolina in 1860, that the slave-holding South is now the controlling power of the world, that no other power would face us in hostility. Cotton, rice, tobacco, and naval stores command the world and we have the sense to know it and are sufficiently teutonic to carry it out successfully. The North without us would be a motherless calf, bleeding about and die of mange and starvation. There were other grounds for confidence. Having seized all of the federal military and naval supplies in the South and having left the national government weak in armed power during their possession of the presidency, Southern leaders looked to a swift war, if it came at all, to put the finishing stroke to independence. The greasy mechanics of the North, it was repeatedly said, will not fight. As to disparity in numbers they drew historic parallels. Our fathers, a mere handful, overcame the enormous power of Great Britain. A saying of ex-president Tyler ran current to reassure the doubtful. Finally, and this point cannot be too strongly emphasized, the South expected to see a weakened and divided North. It knew that the abolitionists and the Southern sympathizers were ready to let the Confederate states go in peace, that Lincoln represented only a little more than one third the voters of the country, and that the vote for Douglas, Bell, and Breckenridge meant a decided opposition to the Republicans and their policies. Efforts at compromise. Republican leaders, on reviewing the same facts, were themselves uncertain as to the outcome of a civil war and made many efforts to avoid crisis. Thurlow Weed, an Albany journalist and politician who had done much to carry New York for Lincoln, proposed a plan for extending the Missouri Compromise Line to the Pacific. Jefferson Davis, warning his followers that a war, if it came, would be terrible, was prepared to accept the offer, but Lincoln, remembering his campaign pledges, stood firm as a rock against it. His followers in Congress took the same position with regard to a similar settlement suggested by Senator Crittenden of Kentucky. Though unwilling to surrender his solemn promises respecting slavery in the territories, Lincoln was prepared to give Southern leaders a strong guarantee that his administration would not interfere directly or indirectly with slavery in the states. Anxious to reassure the South on this point, the Republicans in Congress proposed to write into the Constitution a declaration that no amendment should ever be made authorizing the abolition of or interference with slavery in any state. The resolution, duly passed, was sent forth on March 4, 1861, with the approval of Lincoln. It was actually ratified by three states before the storm of war destroyed it. By the irony of fate, the Thirteenth Amendment was to abolish, not guarantee, slavery.