in 1820 there had been made no prohibition of slavery by the national
government.
Above the line of thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes, there thrust up a
portion of Texas which had no law at all, nor had it any until a very
recent day, being known under the title of "No Man's Land." Yet on to
the westward, toward free California, lay a vast but supposedly
valueless region where cotton surely would not grow, that rich country
now known as Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. This region,
late gained by war from Mexico, soon to be increased by purchase from
Mexico on the South, was still of indeterminate status, slavery not
being prohibited but permitted, by federal action, although most of this
territory had been free soil under the old laws of Mexico. Moreover, as
though sardonically to complicate all these much-mingled matters,
there thrust up to the northward, out of the permitted slavery region of
the South, the state of Missouri, quite above the fateful line of thirty-six
degrees, thirty minutes, where slavery was permitted both by federal
and state enactment.
Men spoke even then, openly or secretly, of disunion; but in full truth,
there had as yet been no actual union. In such confusion, what man
could call unwise a halting-time, a compromise? A country of tenures
so mixed, of theories so diverse, could scarcely have been called a land
of common government. It arrogated to itself, over all its dominion, the
title of a free republic, yet by its own mutual covenant of national law,
any owner of slaves in the southern states might pursue what he called
his property across the dividing line, and invoke, in any northern state,
the support of the state or national officers to assist him in taking back
his slaves. As a republic we called ourselves even then old and stable.
Yet was ever any country riper for misrule than ours? Forgetting now
what is buried, the old arguments all forgot, that most bloody and most
lamentable war all forgot, could any mind, any imagination, depict a
situation more rife with tumult, more ripe for war than this? And was it
not perforce an issue, of compromise or war; of compromise, or a union
never to be consummated?
Yet into this heterogeneous region, from all Europe, itself convulsed
with revolution, Europe just beginning to awaken to the doctrine of the
rights of humanity, there pressed westward ever increasing thousands
of new inhabitants--in that current year over a third of a million, the
largest immigration thus far known. Most of these immigrants settled in
the free country of the North, and as the railways were now so
hurriedly crowding westward, it was to be seen that the ancient strife
between North and South must grow and not lessen, for these
new-comers were bitterly opposed to slavery. Swiftly the idea national
was growing. The idea democratic, the idea of an actual
self-government--what, now, was to be its history?
North of the fated compromise line, west of the admitted slave state of
Missouri, lay other rich lands ripe for the plow, ready for Americans
who had never paid more than a dollar an acre for land, or for aliens
who had never been able to own any land at all. Kansas and Nebraska,
names conceived but not yet born,--what would they be? Would the
compromise of this last summer of 1850 hold the balances of power
even? Could it save this republic, still young and needy, for yet a time
in the cause of peace and growth? Many devoutly hoped it. Many
devoutly espoused the cause of compromise merely for the sake of
gaining time. As neither of the great political parties of the day filled its
ranks from either section, so in both sections there were many who
espoused, as many who denied, the right of men to own slaves. We
speak of slavery as the one great question of that day. It was not and
never has been the greatest. The question of democracy--that was even
then, and it is now, the greatest question.
Here on the deck of the steamer at the little city of Pittsburg, then
gateway of the West, there appeared men of purposes and beliefs as
mixed as this mixed country from which they came. Some were
pushing out into what now is known as Kansas, others going to take up
lands in Missouri. Some were to pass south to the slave country, others
north to the free lands; men of all sorts and conditions, many men, of
many minds, that was true, and all hurrying into new lands, new
problems, new dangers, new remedies. It was a great and splendid day,
a great and vital time, that threshold-time, when our western traffic
increased so rapidly and assuredly that
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