American Eloquence, Volume II | Page 3

bear the responsibility for all the
subsequent growth of slavery, and for all the difficulties in which it
involved the South and the country.
There were but two centres of population in Louisiana, New Orleans
and St. Louis. When the southern district, around New Orleans, applied

for admission as the slave State of Louisiana, there seems to have been
no surprise or opposition on this score; the Federalist opposition to the
admission is exactly represented by Quincy's speech in the first volume.
When the northern district, around St. Louis, applied for admission as
the slave State of Missouri, the inevitable consequences of the act of
1804 became evident for the first time, and all the Northern States
united to resist the admission. The North controlled the House of
Representatives, and the South the Senate; and, after a severe
parliamentary struggle, the two bodies united in the compromise of
1820. By its terms Missouri was admitted as a slave State, and slavery
was forever forbidden in the rest of Louisiana Territory, north of
latitude 36° 30' (the line of the southerly boundary of Missouri). The
instinct of this first struggle against slavery extension seems to have
been much the same as that of 1846-60 the realization that a permission
to introduce slavery by custom into the Territories meant the formation
of slave States exclusively, the restriction of the free States to the
district between the Mississippi and the Atlantic, and the final
conversion of the mass of the United States to a policy of enslavement
of labor. But, on the surface, it was so entirely a struggle for the
balance of power between the two sections, that it has not seemed
worth while to introduce any of the few reported speeches of the time.
The topic is more fully and fairly discussed in the subsequent debates
on the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
In 1830 William Lloyd Garrison, a Boston printer, opened the real
anti-slavery struggle. Up to this time the anti-slavery sentiment, North
and South, had been content with the notion of "gradual abolition,"
with the hope that the South would, in some yet unsuspected manner,
be brought to the Northern policy. This had been supplemented, to
some extent, by the colonization society for colonizing negroes on the
west coast of Africa; which had two aspects: at the South it was the
means of ridding the country of the free negro population; at the North
it was a means of mitigating, perhaps of gradually abolishing, slavery.
Garrison, through his newspaper, the Liberator, called for "immediate
abolition" of slavery, for the conversion of anti-slavery sentiment into
anti-slavery purpose. This was followed by the organization of his
adherents into the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, and the
active dissemination of the immediate abolition principle by tracts,

newspapers, and lecturers.
The anti-slavery struggle thus begun, never ceased until, in 1865, the
Liberator ceased to be published, with the final abolition of slavery. In
its inception and in all its development the movement was a distinct
product of the democratic spirit. It would not have been possible in
1790, or in 1810, or in 1820. The man came with the hour; and every
new mile of railroad or telegraph, every new district open to population,
every new influence toward the growth of democracy, broadened the
power as well as the field of the abolition movement. It was but the
deepening, the application to an enslaved race of laborers, of the work
which Jeffersonian democracy had done, to remove the infinitely less
grievous restraints upon the white laborer thirty year before. It could
never have been begun until individualism at the North had advanced
so far that there was a reserve force of mind--ready to reject all the
influences of heredity and custom upon thought. Outside of religion
there was no force so strong at the North as the reverence for the
Constitution; it was significant of the growth of individualism, as well
as of the anti-slavery sentiment, that Garrison could safely begin his
work with the declaration that the Constitution itself was "a league with
death and a covenant with hell."
The Garrisonian programme would undoubtedly have been considered
highly objectionable by the South, even under to comparatively
colorless slavery policy of 1790. Under the conditions to which cotton
culture had advanced in 1830, it seemed to the South nothing less than
a proposal to destroy, root and branch, the whole industry of that
section, and it was received with corresponding indignation.
Garrisonian abolitionists were taken and regarded as public enemies,
and rewards were even offered for their capture. The germ of
abolitionism in the Border States found a new and aggressive public
sentiment arrayed against it; and an attempt to introduce gradual
abolition in Virginia in 1832-33 was hopelessly defeated. The new
question was even carried into Congress.