434 The Dred Scott case - [1857 had been entered into by Great Britain and the United States, a treaty known in the United States as the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, because negotiated by John M. Clayton, President Taylor's Secretary of State, and Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer, the British Minister. In 1854 trade had obtained the advantage of a reciprocity treaty with Great Britain, by which important rights were given and taken in respect of commerce with the British possessions in North America and the fisheries of New England and Nova Scotia ; as well as of a treaty with Japan, negotiated by Commodore Perry, which secured a beginning, at any rate, of commercial intercourse between that country and the United States. But no growth of population or facilitation of trade could keep pace with the artificial work of speculation. The bubbles of fatuous enterprise were pricked, and a crisis of wholesale loss, panic, and depression occurred in spite of every token of trade and profit to come. Congress did what it could to relieve the distress. It was feared that the high tariff rates then prevailing were drawing too much of the money needed by the banks into the Treasury of the United States; and a modification of the tariff laws was promptly effected, in the short session of Congress which followed the elections of 1856. Party interests no longer centred in financial questions: slavery had drawn passion off, and the congressional leaders co-operated with singular temperateness and sobriety in a modification of the law. Many of the raw materials of manufacture were put on the free list, and the duty on protected articles was reduced to twenty-four per cent. That was all that the government could do. The crisis could not be prevented. Throughout the year trade and industry were at a hopeless standstill : the autumn brought no revival. There was nothing for it but to wait for a slow and painful recuperation. Even in the presence of almost universal pecuniary distress or anxiety, politics seemed inevitably to take precedence of every private concern. President Buchanan's inauguration occurred in the very midst of the troubled times in Kansas, when the struggle there still hung in a doubtful balance; and he had been in office but a few days when the Supreme Court of the United States pronounced a decision which added a new and deeply significant element both to the importance and to the excitement of the contest in the unhappy Territory. This was its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Dred Scott was a negro slave whose master, an army surgeon, had carried him for a brief period of residence first into the State of Illinois, where slavery was illegal, and then to a military post situated in the public domain further to the westward from which slavery had been excluded by the Compromise legislation of 1820; afterwards returning with him to Missouri, his home. The negro claimed that his residence in the free State of Illinois had operated to destroy his master's right over him; and the case instituted in his behalf before the Courts had come at this critical 1857-60] Results of the decision 435 juncture, by appeal, to the Supreme Court. That tribunal held that the lower Court had had no jurisdiction: that Dred Scott, at any rate after his return with his master to Missouri, was a slave, and not a citizen, and had no standing in the Courts. That was the only point it was necessary to decide, and might have ended the matter. But a majority of the judges persuaded themselves that they should go further and expound the whole question of the status of slavery in the Territories of the United States, though they must in doing so, in the opinion of every discriminating lawyer, be speaking obiter. Chief Justice Taney, speaking for a majority of his colleagues, declared it the opinion of the Court that it was not within the constitutional power of Congress to forbid citizens of any of the States to carry their property, no matter of what sort, into the public domain, or even to authorise the regularly constituted legislature of an organised Territory to forbid this, though it were property in slaves that only States could regulate that matter. If this were law, the Missouri Compromise had been invalid from the first; even "popular sovereignty," to which Douglas looked for the settlement of the question, could do no authoritative thing until it spoke its purpose in a State constitution. The Free-Soilers were beyond their right at every point. To the Republicans the decision could seem nothing less than a stinging blow in the face. They were made to feel the smart of being stigmatised as disloyal to the Constitution. No doubt the judges had thought to quiet opinion and sustain the legislation of 1854; but instead they infinitely exasperated it. Their judgment gave the last touch of dramatic interest to the struggle in Kansas, now nearing its turningpoint and culmination. In October, 1857, the Free-Soil settlers of Kansas got control of the territorial legislature at the polls; but not before the pro-slavery men, hitherto in power, had made a last attempt to fix slavery upon the future State. They had hastened before the autumn elections came on to assemble a convention and frame a constitution (September, 1857), and to see that their application for admission to the Union was at Washington in due form before the Free-Soil men could intervene and undo their work. President Buchanan decided to sustain them, judging at least the formal right of application to be really theirs. But Congress would not go with him. It was Democratic in both houses; but Douglas remembered his principles with manly consistency. It was known before Congress acted that a majority of the voters of the Territory did not in fact desire a pro-slavery State constitution; and he would not force a constitution upon a majority. There were members enough in his immediate following to control the action of the Houses, and Kansas was refused admission to the Union-pending the further contest of parties. President Buchanan's Administration inevitably incurred the suspicion, throughout all this trying business, of being conducted in the 436 Election campaign in Illinois [1858 Southern interest; and in the excitement of the time the President was suspected of things of which he was quite incapable. It was charged and believed that the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case had been a thing concerted between the President and the Chief Justice, though the President's character made such a calumny inexcusable. He was a man of unsullied integrity, and punctilious in the performance of what he considered to be his duty. He was past the prime of life, had never possessed great courage or any notable gifts of initiative, and of course suffered himself to be guided by the men whom he regarded, and had good reason to regard, as the real leaders of the Democratic party. Only two States in the North had voted for him, and only two in the North-west: the Democratic party, which had chosen him President, was, happily or unhappily, in fact a party chiefly manned and guided from the South. He had called Southern men of influence into his Cabinet in whose character and capacity he justly and implicitly believed. He took their advice because he believed it to be honest and authoritative. But the country grew infinitely restive and uneasy to see one section rule. It was Mr Buchanan's chief fault, if fault it was, not that he yielded to improper influences, as his opponents unjustly believed, but that he did not judge and act for himself. He was weak ; and weakness was under the circumstances fatal. The year 1858 brought abundant signs of a great reaction, and it soon became only too plain that the Democratic party was driving the bulk of the country into opposition. It was the year of a general election. As the autumn approached, those who watched affairs found the critical issues of the time more and more sharply fixed and determined in their thought, and their convictions grew more and more vivid and definite. Nothing conduced more to this result than a notable debate reported from Illinois. The Republicans of Illinois had made a determined effort to keep Douglas from re-election to the Senate. They had announced that, should they succeed in obtaining a majority in the State legislature, they meant to send Abraham Lincoln to the Senate in Douglas' stead; and the autumn campaign in Illinois became for ever memorable because in its course Douglas and Lincoln went about the State together and argued their claims for support face to face, upon city platforms and upon country platforms, in the presence of the voters. The striking individuality of the two men gave singular piquancy to the contest as well as their power of straightforward, unmistakeable definiteness of speech. Douglas was a national character, one of the acknowledged leaders of a great party; Lincoln was a comparatively unknown man, a shrewd lawyer and local politician. His long, gaunt, ungainly figure, his slouching gait, his homely turns of phrase marked him a frontiersman. His big, bony hands had wrought at the hard tasks of the forest and the farm. But his rough exterior did not repel the plain people to whom he spoke, alongside the more adroit and 1858] Douglas and Lincoln 437 finished Douglas; and no one could hear his speech and think him common. He had taken his own way of learning to the bar. The passion for letters had been strong upon him since a boy, and his selftraining had with unerring instinct followed a fine plan of mastery. By reasoning upon the principles of the law, as they came to him out of a few text-books, by poring upon books of mathematics, by reading up and down through such books of history or adventure as fell in his way in search of the experience of other men, by constant intimacy of talk and play of argument with men of every kind to whom he had access, he had made himself a master of brief and careful statement, of persuasion, and of oral debate: thoughtful, observant, steering in what he said by an unfluctuating compass of logical precision, and above all lucid, full of homely wit and anecdote such as was fit to illuminate practical subjects, and uttering phrases which found the heart of what he talked of, sometimes phrases which struck his opponent like a blow, but fair, unmalicious, intellectual, not passionate. His definition of the matter to be settled between the parties was characteristic of him. A house divided against itself," he said, "cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure half slave and half free. I do not expect the house to fall, but I expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other." Douglas found him a very uncomfortable antagonist, who drove him to awkward admissions. Before their debate was over Douglas was no longer within reach of the presidency; and Abraham Lincoln had won the ear of the whole country. The Southern men could not vote for Douglas as the nominee and spokesman of their party. He had been forced under Lincoln's fire to admit that Congress could not empower a territorial legislature, its own creature, to do what, if the Dred Scott decision spoke true law, it was itself unable to do; that Southern settlers, therefore, could no more legalise slavery within a Territory than Northern settlers could exclude it: that "popular sovereignty " was no solution, after all. The Republicans did not obtain a majority in the Illinois legislature; Douglas went back to the Senate; but he went back weakened and with loss of authority. The elections of the autumn, taking the country as a whole, gave the Republicans success enough to show how near at hand a crisis was. They increased their numbers materially in both House and Senate, carried Buchanan's own State of Pennsylvania by a handsome majority, and made it very evident that opinion was swinging their way. In the House of Representatives, indeed, they were put in a position of virtual control for no coherent party had a working majority there. The "Douglas Democrats," who had refused to vote for the admission of Kansas with a pro-slavery constitution, were now hardly an integral part of the Democratic party; there was still a group of twenty-two Know-Nothings; and the Republicans held the balance of power. 438 Growth of anti-slavery forces [1858-9 And yet the President and his advisers were by no means daunted. It was after the elections that Buchanan sent his annual message to Congress; and in it he insisted that the United States ought to secure possession of Cuba, assume a protectorate over several of the nearer States of the dissolving Mexican republic, and establish definite rights of control over the Isthmus. He was still, as the Republicans read his motives, bent upon the acquisition of slave territory. The entrance of the Republican party upon the stage of politics had singularly quickened the pace of affairs. Its clear-cut, aggressive purposes seemed to give definiteness also to the Democratic programme. A sharp rigour pervaded the air. It startled conservative men to feel the movement as of revolution in the stir of opinion. Such debates as now marked the whole course of politics, such contests uncompromisingly provoked and ordered, gave plain threat of what all men dreaded, of disunion, — nothing less. The South explicitly threatened disunion, and yet disliked it as intensely and almost as unanimously as it resented the exclusion of slavery from the Territories. The North dreaded disunion infinitely; and yet dreaded the unchecked and general ascendancy of the slave-interest even more. Both sides pushed forward; but both with a great fear at their hearts. A sinister fate seemed riding at the front of affairs. The power which obviously grew was the power of the North; the power which waned and was obviously threatened with extinction was that of the South. In May, 1858, the free State of Minnesota entered the Union, under an enabling Act passed by the last Congress of President Pierce's administration; and in February, 1859, the free State of Oregon was admitted by the Congress which had refused to admit Kansas under a pro-slavery constitution. Until 1848, when the slavery question came finally to the top in politics, the sections had balanced one another in the Senate there were as many slave-holding States as free,- thirty senators from States which legalised, thirty from States which forbade, slavery. But now the balance was destroyed, as Calhoun had foreseen it would be there were still not more than thirty senators from slaveholding States, while there were thirty-six from free States. In the House the numbers stood at ninety to one hundred and forty-seven. For in the House population was represented; and the South, which had stood equal with the North in numbers at the making of the Constitution, had long since fallen far behind. Not only had the population of the North grown very much faster, but to the North had been added the great makeweight of the North-west, from the whole of which slavery was, in fact if not in law, excluded, and, if the Republicans triumphed, excluded for ever. The ways of compromise were abandoned, discredited: the one section or the other must now secure everything or lose everything. : As if the crisis were not already sharp enough, conspiracy was added to the open battle of politics. On the night of Sunday, October 17, |