solutely necessary in the interest of the slave-holders.1 How fragile must have been the bonds which held the Union together, when Georgia, on this programme, received in the north as well as in the south, the honorable appellation of the Union state! To what an extent must the knowledge that the absolute sovereignty of the law is the fundamental condition of political existence have already disappeared, to permit people to look upon such declarations as an absolute guaranty of the compromise!

In the north, matters developed in an entirely analogous way. Webster, writing from Boston, on the 5th of November, informed the president, that a great revolution in public opinion had taken place there, since the adjournment of congress. He even assured him that no resistance was any longer to be feared in the case of the arrest of fugitive slaves." No small excitement, indeed, prevailed among the colored people who were personally in

1 "Fourth, that the state of Georgia, in the judgment of this convention, will and ought to resist, even (as a last resort) to a disruption of every tie which binds her to the Union, any future act of congress abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, without the consent and petition of the slave-holders thereof, or any act abolishing slavery in places within the slave-holding states, purchased by the United States for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, navy-yards, and other like purposes; or in (?) any act suppressing the slave-trade between slave-holding states; or in any refusal to admit as a state any territory applying, because of the existence of slavery therein; or in any act prohibiting the introduction of slaves into the territories of Utah and New Mexico; or in any act repealing or materially modifying the laws now in force for the recov ery of fugitive slaves."

2"On public subjects things are here becoming quiet. The excitement caused by the Fugitive Slave Law is fast subsiding, and it is thought that there is now no probability of any resistance, if a fugitive should be arrested. Thousands of young men have tendered their services to the marshal at a moment's warning. There is an evident and a vast change of public opinion in this quarter since the adjournment of congress." Priv. Corresp., II., p. 400.

danger; but an apparent apathy seemed to have taken possession of the rest of the population, an apathy which contrasted strangely with the excitement over the Fugitive Slave Law. But it was a debatable question, whether this condition of minds was to be regarded as the resignation of submission to the law, or whether the moral indignation of the north had really exhausted itself entirely, in fruitless speeches and newspaper articles. The organs of the more decided opponents of slavery claimed that this apparent indifference sprang rather from the firm conviction that the detested law was to remain a dead letter, in consequence of the unanimous resistance of the population of the northern states.2 This expectation proved to be altogether too great, although the slave hunters did their best to shake the north out of its moral torpor, one into which

1 The Washington Union writes: "A great excitement has sprung up among the blacks at the north, relative to the operation of the fugitive-slave bill, especially as it is well known that hundreds of owners of fugitives are now ow scouring the north in search of their property. Many owners know of the whereabout of their slaves, having met them in their travels, and are perfecting their arrangements for securing them." The N. Y. Tribune, Oct. 5, 1850.

2" The real secret of the seeming carelessness about this law is the perfect and fixed conviction that it never can be executed; that it will remain upon the statute book, a law only in letter and form. This conviction is a just one. The law cannot be executed. And we certainly know that we speak the deliberate judgment, and the deep and ineradicable feeling, of multitudes at the north-who have no sympathy whatever with Mr. Garrison and his followers, who have been a long time repelled from the anti-slavery cause by their connection with it-when we say that they would rather, a hundred times, see the Union dissolved than this law executed, sooner than have the streets of our cities made a hunting-ground for the slaver, and the villages on our northern hills laid open to the trader in human beings, that he may tear from them the men and the women who have made themselves homes there-the south might begin its secession to-morrow. In a Union for such robbery we will have no part." The Independent, Oct. 3, 1850, p. 162.

even those were in danger of falling who, during the struggle, would agree to no compact with their convictions and principles. The first cases in which the law was to be carried out, fully verified all that its most passionate opponents had prophecied of its unavoidable working.1 The case of Adam Gibson created great excitement. On the 21st of December, a negro of that name was arrested in the streets of Philadelphia, without a warrant, and, on the lying statement that he had stolen chickens, was carried in chains before a commissioner. The latter refused to wait for the arrival of important witnesses, and ordered Gibson to be carried directly to Maryland, although two unimpeachable citizens had sworn that the accused was not the slave, Emery Rice, they were looking for, but a free man. Without being allowed to take leave of even his wife and children, Gibson was transferred to Maryland and not, be it remarked, to go before a Maryland court: he was sent immediately to his presumed owner who was honorable enough to declare that the slave hunters had made a mistake in the person."

To place such doings as this on the same level with the unjust application of other laws which can never be completely avoided, was a poor beginning. They were the legitimate consequences of the monstrous provisions of the law; and, moreover, the illegal handing over of a

1" Horace Mann claimed that of the first eight who fell victims to the law, four were free men. Congr. Globe, 1st Sess., 32d Congr., Append., p. 1077.

2 See the full account in the New York Tribune, Dec. 25, 1850, and in Jay, letter to Samuel A. Eliot, Misc. Writ., pp. 598–600. When the matter was discussed in the senate, Clemens of Alabama, claimed that Gibson was a slave who simply had not fallen into the hands of his rightful owner. Congr. Globe, 2d Sess., 31st Congr., App., p. 304. This presumably was merely a distortion of what was granted by the opposite side, that he was a freedman.

human being and his yet unborn children and his children's children, to slavery, was a wrong to which no other iniquity can be compared. Such cases could not be hushed up, and every attempt to prove that the north was bound morally and constitutionally to co-operate in the passage of a law which had such consequences must have aroused deep indignation at such a doctrine. The majority might take their stand on the ground of positive law as stubbornly as they liked; the enforcement of the law could not fail to shake their position, because—even leaving the constitutional obligation out of the question— they themselves denied it all ethical basis. Hence, to say nothing whatever of the going beyond the real intention of the legislature, by individuals, or of the determination of the north, based on moral and political reasons, the compromise of 1850 could not but gradually lose all moral foundation. As in the third decade of this century, the universal hunting of abolitionists deceived people as to the real condition of affairs, the attitude of the majority might now deceive them, for a while, but it could, in no wise, change this fact, because it was a direct consequence springing from the very nature of things.

The compromise party did not hide this truth from themselves entirely. They felt, at least, that the decision made in Washington was not the last word in the controversy. "Union meetings" were still the order of the day,1 and greater efforts than ever were made to form a Union Party. Hence, people looked upon the strengthening of the Union as the chief task of home politics in the near future; for the "conservative" elements of both national parties united, to the postponement of all differ

1 Spite of the victory already obtained, Webster, in the letter referred to above, speaks in an emphatically approving manner of the fact that there was an intention of holding such a meeting in Boston.

"UNION MEETINGS."

13

A merchants'

ences, on this ground for common action. meeting, held in Castle Garden, New York, appointed a committee of fifty members, a Union Safety Committee, which worked with great energy for the Union ticket, with Horatio Seymour at its head as candidate for governor. These rich gentlemen thought themselves entirely sure of victory,1 and the Whigs, without allowing their own courage to fail, granted that they had not worked in vain in the city. The Tribune assured the country districts, that the defection would not, by any means, come up to the expectations of the followers of King Cotton, and that the loss would be made up in part by adopted citizens who otherwise were wont to go with the Democrats. Washington Hunt, the Whig candidate for governor, was in fact elected, although by a majority of only 258 votes. In the legislature, on the other hand, the Whigs had an overwhelming majority, which was all the more important as it had now to elect a United States. D. S. Dickinson, the sincere and influential partisan of the south, was obliged to make place for Hamilton Fish, who, indeed, was neither a radical nor a man of national reputation, but who was a reliable opponent of the slavocracy. It was, therefore, clear that in the most powerful state of the Union the spirit of opposition was not by any means broken, and New York, evidently, did not stand alone. The opponents of slavery had no need to learn from the Union Party, that differences of opinion on other political questions did not prevent the formation

1 "Finding their views generally concurred in by the class with whom they associate — those who congregate in bank parlors, insurance offices, the heavy shippers, importers, most of the jobbers, etc.,— they think the city is to be carried with a rush by the cotton operators." The N. Y. Tribune, Nov. 2, 1850.

2 Eighty-eight Whigs, forty-four opposition, two Independents.