required to yield, and the more she was upbraided as the aggressor.

The Southerners were always an open-hearted, out spoken, fearless, generous race of men; a trifle haughty, it may be, but never jealous; impetuous in temper, but cool in judgment; exacting as to personal courtesies, but magnanimous in granting great advantages; devoted to their homes, their families and their country. Such were the men who, in 1820, had to confront a question involving the peace of their country, the safety of their homes and families, and their own political rights of equality in the Union, and self-government in the State.

Did they decide it aright?

From the day that 14 Southern Senators and at least half of the Southern Representatives cast their votes for the Act of 1820, the principle of the equal rights of the States was yielded up; also, the principle that Congress had no powers to take away any right from the people, save as those powers had been delegated to it by the Constitution which the people of the States had accepted as the bond of their Union.

The Ordinance of 1787 was quoted as furnishing an example of the powers of Congress in this respect. The cases were not parallel at all. In the one instance, Virginia, as a sovereign State, chose to acquiesce in an act which no one but herself had any right to dispute. She had the supreme right over her own territory; if she chose to ignore the fact that the Congress of the Confederacy had passed an ordinance in contravention of her deed of cession, if she still chose to continue to ignore this fact, and furthermore chose to ratify the articles of that ordinance, thus rendering them in part her own act, as she did previous to the passage of the same ordinance by the new Congress of 1789 under the new Constitution, she had the perfect right to do so, and it was nobody's business even to ask her motives.

But had Virginia chosen to object, there is no ques

tion that she would have had the right to object to her territory being used in a way totally at variance with the conditions under which she had made her cession of it.

In the other case, the people of one-half of the States were virtually excluded by a mere Congressional Act from occupation of territory to which they had the same right as those of the other half who were thus given sole possession of it. Congress, a party who did not own the land, took from a portion of those who did own it their rightful share, to bestow upon others, without any manner of right to do so. Congress deprived the whole Southern people of the right to which they were undoubtedly entitled under the bond of the Union of the States, to enter and settle the Territories, and to be protected therein in their lives, liberty, and property. Their slaves were their property. Had Congress the right, even by the largest majority, to thus deprive the Southern people of land and of political equality?

Whence did they derive such right which they claimed and exercised in the passage of the Missouri Compromise Act of 1820?

CHAPTER V.

1836-Abolition Agitation of 1836-John Quincy Adams.

The hydra-headed, many-sided question of slavery had been pretty well kept in abeyance, after the Missouri difficulty was settled, until 1832, when it was again brought before the American people by the formation of the first Abolition Society, called the "New England Anti-Slavery Society." Others of the same sort followed in rapid succession. They at once put forth a full "declaration of their sentiments," which were, that "all slaves should be instantly set free without compensation to their owners,' and that they should be "ultimately elevated to an equality with the whites in civil and religious privileges." It was declared in one of their earliest manifestoes that "the sword now drawn will not be sheathed until victory is ours, until the slave, fearless and free, shall till the land of his thraldom enriched with the blood of his master.''3

In December, 1835, these societies numbered three hundred and fifty, and had a membership of one hundred thousand. They sent out their agents, employing both pulpit and press to stir up insurrections among the slaves of the South. The mails were flooded with the most incendiary publications and the grossest pictorial misrepresentations of the Southern people, of which one will suffice as an illustration. A planter carried out in a palanquin, being fanned by several slaves, and looking on at a number of half-naked negroes being lashed as they worked, by overseers.

These societies were composed mainly of women,

1 App. to Cong. Globe, 24th Cong., Sess. 1, p. 565. 2 Idem, p. 566.

* Idem, p. 568. Italics the author's.

children, visionary enthusiasts, needy individuals, and the men who received pay from some quarter for getting up the agitation. There were impecunious editors who were glad to turn a few pennies by libelous prints and slanders on the South; there were long-haired preachers with small congregations, glad to add to their own importance and to eke out their slender salaries by an addition thereto for preaching against a people whom they had never known, and against a sin which had never once been denounced by their Savior; though the slavery of His day was far more reprehensible than the African slavery of the Southern States-as the one civilized barbarians, whilst the other enslaved men of the highest civilization and culture known in the world.

How many foreign emissaries in the pay of English Abolitionists were on the roll is not known, but the Abolitionists were entitled the "English Abolition" party. The Americans had, however, made a great advance over their English predecessors. Great Britain had paid her citizens in Jamaica a large sum for their slaves when she emancipated them; whereas our American brothers proposed that our slaves should slaughter their masters and then take possession of their lands. Doubtless, it seemed to the Abolition leaders that it would be an easier thing to take away the lands of the South from the negroes if they could only get rid of their masters, than it would be to take them from that grand Anglo-Saxon race who owned both land and negroes. And that to take these lands was the declared purpose of at least one of the most prominent Abolition leaders, will be presently shown.

How far England may have interested herself at this time to "irritate the South and conciliate the North," in order to bring about that separation between the sections which she so ardently desired, and which was a part of her program in 1809-1812, has never been fully revealed, so far as the author can learn, but the suspicion and evidence of it were so strong as to add to the intense

dislike of the Abolition party, and their avowed sentiments, by the Northern people; which dislike was prevalent among the better part of them for years.

In law, motive is regarded as strong presumptive evidence, and England's motive at this time is plain and clear. She was very desirous to acquire for herself the fine Texas sea-ports, the possession of which would give her control of the Gulf of Mexico. To do this she must of course prevent the acquisition of Texas by the United States, and she could further this purpose in no way so likely to reach the end desired as by fomenting discord between the sections on the question of the abolition of slavery, and thus induce the North to oppose the annexation of that country. Any one who will read the speeches of that day in the British Parliament, or those of the President of her great Abolition society, will find abundant evidence as to her motive in this matter.'

The American nation at large resented this proposed interference in their affairs as presumptuous in the extreme, even though only in speech, and one of the terms of reproach hurled against Mr. Adams in 1836, was, that he was in league with the English Abolition party.

George Thomson, the English Abolition lecturer, expelled from England for his crimes, was repeatedly mobbed by the people of the Northern States, was burned in effigy, and escaped narrowly with his life on several occasions.2

1 See Annals of Congress for extracts from said speeches.

2 When in Washington, in 1854, Hon. Gerrit Smith, Whig member from New York, called to see me. A large, fine-looking man, with black, piercing, restless eyes, vivacious expression and genial manners, he seemed withal a visionary and an enthusiast. We had a very pleasant talk, and then I said: "How in the world did such a clever man as you (clever in the Southern sense) ever come to be an Abolitionist?" He laughed, and said: "I will tell you. In 1825 I was a young man practicing law in Utica (I think he said Utica). My office door was open, and a man walked in and said to me: 'You talk about the efféte monarchies of Europe, but this, your boasted land of freedom, is the first place I ever was in where a man could not speak his sentiments freely in favor of liberty. I have been to New York, and they