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THE GRINNELL EXPEDITION.

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with the senate, and probably with both parties in it equally.

Let us not, however, overlook one event which stands in pleasant contrast to the present staple of this history, the expedition fitted out at his own expense by Henry Grinnell, of New York, which started in May, 1850, under Lieut. de Haven, in search of Sir John Franklin.

LECTURE VII.

FROM THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW TO THE JUDGMENT IN THE DRED SCOTT CASE (1850-6)—RESISTANCE TO THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW FILIBUSTERING-REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

COMPROMISE -KANSAS

MONT'S CANDIDATESHIP.

(Fillmore, to 1853; Pierce, from 1853.)

-FRE

I HAVE said that the Fugitive Slave Law simply carried out a provision of the Constitution. Yet I believe that no single event contributed so much to produce that reaction of moral feeling in the North, which terminated in the triumph of the Republican party ten years later. How did this take place?

In the first place, then, it was the first Southern victory, which was at once palpable to the whole North. So long as the battle was waged in Missouri, or Texas, or Oregon, it was only known by hearsay to the most settled, orderly, stay-at-home portion of the North. To these men it now came home. The provisions of the Constitution on the subject might have seemed almost obsolete, so seldom did they see them attempted to be put in force. But there was no mistake about the vitality of the new law. Whether the principle of the recapture of fugitives were in the Constitution or not, clearly the South had won the use of some machinery for the purpose which the Fathers of the Republic

EFFECTS OF THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW. 237

had not deemed necessary, which was only now set to work. Every Southern slave-owner or slave-owner's agent who came North to hunt for a fugitive, every warrant of court for the apprehension of such, was a witness to Southern triumph.

For

Observe, moreover, that the law was not only a victory of the slave-power, but an insult to the lukewarmness of the North in the cause of freedom. there can be no greater delusion than to suppose that evasions of slaves were frequent. As a French writer, M. Reclus, observes, in summer, when the Ohio is nothing more than a thread of water meandering through the gravel, the whole neighbouring slavepopulation of Kentucky and Virginia might easily escape to the land of promise-if the soil of the free states were such a land. It was not the river, not the law, not the federal authority which barred them out from freedom,—it was the selfishness, the hostility of the occupants of the opposite shore. The grievance of the South was one of nearly three-quarters of a century's standing (since it dated from the Confederation); yet it was in effect so trifling, that slavery had subsisted, grown, thriven, multiplied fourfold. And yet it was for this petty grievance, this tiny leakage from the vessel of slavery,-most complained of by those who suffered least from it, the representatives of South Carolina and the Southern slave-states, not bordering by any part of their frontier on free territory,—that the South chose to do violence to the known traditional feelings of the North, by setting the

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WHY THE NEW LAW

whole machinery of the Central Government at work to catch a few runaways.

Again, the nature of the institution on behalf of which this Southern victory was won, came home for the first time now to many of the optimists of the North. They believed in the talk about slavery as a patriarchal system, in which generation after generation of black men grew up on the same estate, never parted with by their benevolent masters. They now had to realise the unwelcome fact that slavery really meant kidnapping, that it took hold of the man against his will, tore him from his home, from his wife and family, for the sole profit of his master; they had to realise the fact that this kidnapping was so profitable, that it paid a slave-owner to come or send to a distance of hundreds of miles, in order to catch a slave.

Again, unluckily for the South, it was in the very nature of things that this ugly fact of kidnapping should be realised almost invariably in the most distressing cases. If there had slunk away to the North some idle black vagabond, only hating slavery on account of the toil which it imposes, only seeking freedom for the sake of doing nothing,-if there had come thither some reckless black savage, a fugitive not so much from slavery as from well-deserved punishment, and for whom freedom would mean but the gratification of every lust and passion not directly checked by the law —these were not the persons whom it would be worth while to bring back to slavery; or if they had been, from their homeless, vagrant habits, they would be the

IRRITATED THE NORTH.

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most costly to track and identify. No, the slavecatcher's most precious and easiest prizes would be invariably the steady, the industrious, the gentle, the intelligent, the truly manly among the fugitives. If there were anywhere, in town or country, a coloured man or woman, or, still better, a household, noted among their white neighbours for thrift and sobriety and decency of demeanour, these would be the very ones whom common respect itself, more even than common rumour, would point out to his myrmidons. If there were anywhere a coloured artizan skilful enough to compete successfully with his white fellows, this would be the very man whom jealousy would too often denounce. Thus, wherever the blows of the Fugitive Slave Law might fall, they would make a void, they would leave a sore.

And for whom, after all, was the victory won, and all its miseries inflicted on the coloured race, all its shame on the whites of the North? For the sake of a minority of the nation, ever diminishing in ratio proportionately to the majority. At the census of 1820, as we have seen, the population of the free states was already half a million in excess of the slave. At the census of 1850 it was nearly four millions ahead(13,434,922 against 9,612,769)-although spread upon a comparatively far smaller area, the population per square mile in the free states being twice as dense as in the slave. Three free states,-New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, now headed the census,-the first cotton-growing state, Tennessee, ranking only ninth, and restless

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