USA > Louisiana > The province and the states, a history of the province of Louisiana under France and Spain, and of the territories and states of the United States formed therefrom, Vol. IV > Part 9
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Viewed to-day this looks like a very small cause on which to defeat a great reform. As in all important questions, however, we must test this conduct by the standards of the time and the place. The Missouri of that day, most of whose residents came from the slave states, had a strong prejudice against the black man, not altogether because he was a slave, but because he was black. Irrespective of his status his color was a brand of degra- dation. One clause of Missouri's constitution of 1820 required the legislature to shut out negroes and mulattoes from the state, and although congress compelled her to nullify this mandate, the existence of the mandate was an eloquent expression of the state's hostility to the idea of negro equality, which seemed to be involved in the affiliation of Tappan, New York's abolitionist, with black men. Before we condemn the Missouri of 1820 and. 1828 for holding this feeling toward the negro let us consider the attitude taken by the entire ex-slave region to-day regarding the Booker T. Washington-White House episode of 1902. Moreover, a little of the same sort of negrophobia has been exhibited rather conspicuously in recent years by many communities which never held any slaves, and in which the black element is relatively insig- nificant in number.
HIad the emancipation idea of Benton, Barton and their asso-
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ciates been carried out at that time it would have been a work of immeasurable value to Missouri, and might have had a powerful influence on the rest of the border slave states, in some of which, especially Kentucky and Virginia, there was much sentiment in favor of manumission and colonization. Several things, how- ever took place in the next few years which intensified the feeling in Missouri and the rest of its section against the negro, and pre- vented all possibility of a peaceable freeing of the slave. One of these was the establishment of the Liberator in Boston at the beginning of 1831, in which William Lloyd Garrison advocated immediate, unconditional and uncompensated emancipation. Another was the rising, a few months later, of Nat Turner, the negro, in Virginia, in which he and his fellow slaves murdered sixty-one whites before they were subdued. Still another was the formation of the New England Anti-slavery society in 1832, that of the American Anti-slavery society, a national organization, in 1833, and the establishment of affiliated associations in many of . the State of the North and West in the next few years. Garrison was accused, though unjustly, by the south of inciting the Nat Turner revolt. Attempts were made in some of the Southern states to exclude anti-slavery literature from the mails. A long fight was precipitated in congress to suppress petitions directed against the south's peculiar institution. In all the states below Mason and Dixon's line the name abolitionist began to carry with it as much opprobrium as the term anarchist did throughout the whole country just after the assassination of President Mckinley.
This feeling found emphatic expression in Missouri. One of the charges which the citizens of Jackson county brought against Joseph Smith's followers in 1833 was that "they had been tamper- ing with our slaves," and had been "inviting free negroes and mulattoes from other states to become Mormons and settle among us." This accusation, even if it stood alone, would have gone far toward bringing that edict of expulsion which was pronounced against the Mormons a little later in that year.
When also in 1833, Elisha P. Lovejoy started his anti-slavery crusade in St. Louis in his newspaper, the Observer, he tempted fate. Lovejoy was a man of courage, ability and high character. IIe had the future on his side, as many persons in St. Louis and the rest of Missouri must have seen at the time. His work, how- ever, carried peril to himself without advancing his cause in Mis- souri, though it unquestionably aided the cause ultimately in the Northern states in general. Compared with the burning utter-
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ances of Phillips on the platform, of Weld with voice and pen, and of most of the other abolition agitators of a later day, Love- joy's expressions were mild. They were innocent, too, con- trasted with the fiery assaults on slavery which were being made at that time by Garrison's Liberator and by the Emancipator, con- trolled by Arthur Tappan. But Lovejoy's propaganda was being carried on in a state in which slavery was a vested interest, although it was small compared with the state's aggregate inter- ests. Missourians who were opposed to slavery in the abstract then and afterward, among them being Hamilton R. Gamble, the Unionist Provisional governor thirty years later, during the civil war, attempted to dissuade him from his course, but in vain. At last, in 1836, a mob attacked Lovejoy's office, he was driven out of St. Louis, and he went to Alton, where he was murdered a year later.
Nevertheless, the slave ingredient of Missouri's population was beginning to shrink at that time. The slaves numbered a little less than one out of every seven of the state's inhabitants at the end of the Spanish domination, and they increased somewhat faster than the free element along to 1830, owing to the heavy pre- ponderance of the emigration from the South and were slightly in excess of one out of six in 1830. The opening of the Erie canal in 1825, and the appearance of the railroads a few years later, increased, relatively as well as absolutely, the number of arrivals from New England, the old Middle states and the communities north of the Ohio, the proportion of the slaves in the state began to decline, and they had dropped to a little less than one out of ten of Missouri's aggregate population by 1860.
When confronted with the larger issues of national concern, Missouri proved that it could easily rise above the exigencies of the slavery interest. This was shown impressively on the ques- tion of Texas annexation, and, sixteen years later, on that of secession. A set of resolutions passed by the Missouri legisla- ture early in 1845, when the Texas bill was before congress, recited that the question of slavery ought to be left to the decision of that community when it should be admitted to the Union. Yet the people of Missouri, speaking through that declaration, took care to make it plain that "so essential do they regard the annex- ation of Texas to the interests of the state and of the United States that, rather than fail in the consummation of this object, they will consent to such just and reasonable compromises" as "may be indispensably necessary to secure the accomplishment of the measure and preserve the peace and harmony of the Union."
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THIE SLAVERY ISSUE IN MISSOURI.
In 1846, when the Wilmot slavery prohibition for the territory to be gained from Mexico came up Benton opposed it on the ground that such a restriction was unnecessary and a needless irritation to the country. Slavery, he contended, had been abol- ished in that territory by Mexican law, and could not be revived in it except by an act of congress, to which he was opposed, and which, moreover, had not the slightest chance to pass the house, whatever might be its fate in the senate. Here Benton probably diverged from the bulk of his party in his state. That majority was against the Wilmot exclusion amendment, because, as is likely, it preferred at that time to have slavery extended into the new acquisition.
Necessarily the discussion of slavery in congress which Wil- mot's measure precipitated had some effect on the voting in 1848, in Missouri as. well as in the rest of the country, though this influence is not discernible in the poll on state officers in Missouri. The Democrats carried the state for both governor and president, but their majority on the former was twice as large as it was on the latter. Austin A. King, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, had a lead of fourteen thousand nine hundred and fifty-three, although his Whig opponent was James S. Rollins, one of the ablest and most popular men in the state. The Democrats also elected the state's five members of congress.
Governor King, a Tennessean by birth, who settled in Missouri at an early age, was forty-seven years old at the time of his elec- tion for governor in 1848, and had previously served in the legis- lature and as circuit judge. During his four years as the state's chief executive he gave satisfaction to his party and his con- stituents in general. In the political division of 1861-65 he was a stalwart adherent of the national government, was elected to congress as a war Democrat in 1862, and died in St. Louis in 1870.
In the election for president in 1848, which took place a few months later than for governor, the margin for Lewis Cass, of Michigan, the Democratic candidate, was only seven thousand four hundred and six over Zachary Taylor, of Louisiana, the Whig nominee, who carried the country through a split in the Demo- cratic party in the decisive state of New York. General Taylor was a slaveholder, and also had won a brilliant record in the Mexican war which had greatly enlarged the nation's boundaries, two things which would naturally appeal to Missouri under the conditions of the time.
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Though the slavery issue did not figure prominently in the division in Missouri's vote on governor in that year it had a decisive influence on the course of affairs in the legislature, and affected the politics of the state during his whole term and for years afterward. This will be shown in the following chapter.
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CHAPTER XI
Break in the Democracy and Fall of Benton
O N January 15, 1849, Claiborne F. Jackson, of Howard county, from the committee on federal relations of the senate branch of Missouri's legislature, reported a series of resolutions to that body which marked an epoch in the state's politics, and which had much influence on the politics of the United States. With some alterations these were resolutions introduced two weeks carlier by Carty Wells, of Marion county, the author of which, it was understood, was Judge W. B. Napton, of the state supreme court. The resolutions, which were six in number, virtually denied the power of congress to legislate so as to affect slavery in the states, the District of Columbia or the territories; asserted the "right to prohibit slavery in any territory belongs exclusively to the people thereof, and can only be exercised by them in formning their constitutions for a state government or in their sovereign capacity as an independent state ;" declared that if congress should pass any act in conflict with this principle "Missouri will be found in hearty co-operation with the slaveholding states in such meas- ures as may be deemed necessary for our mutual protection against the encroachments of Northern fanaticism," and recited that "our Senators in Congress be instructed and our Representatives be requested to act in conformity to the foregoing resolutions."
All three of these persons were Democrats, all were men of character and standing, and Jackson, as governor of the state in 1861, who endeavored to take it with him over to the con- federacy, became a figure of national consequence.
Several causes incited the presentation of these resolutions. One of them was the honest belief on the part of many Democrats of Missouri and of some Whigs that congress had no right to
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interfere with slavery in the territories, and that the legal right to shut it out belonged to the people of the territories when forming their state constitutions. Another was the assumption, sincerely entertained by a considerable number of persons, among whom were a few Whigs, that the spirit of Wilmot's proviso which had found strong favor in the North, would after slavery had been finally and permanently excluded from the territories, inspire an attack upon it in the states in which it existed, which nobody at that time urged except the more radical of the corporals guard of abolitioni-ts, whose political branch gave Birney 63.000 votes in 1844 for president, and who composed a small element of the Free Soil party that gave 291,000 votes to Ex-President Van Buren in 1848, on a platform of exclusion of slavery from the territories. Still another cause was personal hostility to Benton by many members of his own party, whose term at that time was near its end, who was a candidate for another election, who was known to be anxious to preserve the territories to freedom, and therefore opposed to the spirit of these resolutions, and who, in his long period of autocratic sway in his party had aroused the jealousy of many of its ambitious men and incited the dislike of many who were not ambitious.
Benton's position on the slavery extension question was made clear two years before the fateful pronunciamento of 1849 was reported to the Missouri legislature. Calhoun, in February, 1847, presented a set of resolutions in the senate at Washington to the effect that slaves could be carried into a territory regardless of the action of congress or the territory's legislature, that the courts were bound to furnish the same measure of protection for them that they provided for all other sorts of property, and that they could not be interfered with except by the people of the territory when forming a state government, or afterward. This contention was soon adopted by the South. Calhoun's position of 1847 was, practically, sanctioned by the Jackson deliverance in Jefferson City in 1849.
Calhoun's resolutions were promptly denounced by Benton as being calculated to inflame the extremists on both sides, and as being disunionist in their tendency. Calhoun said he had expected Benton's support, as being a representative of a slave state, and added that he would know where to find Benton in the future. To this the intrepid Missourian retorted: "I shall be found in the right place, on the side of my country and the Union." Writing long afterward about this affair Benton impressively said: "This answer, given on that day, and on that spot, is one of the inci-
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dents of his life which Mr. Benton will wish posterity to remem- ber."
Every member of the Missouri legislature of 1849, in both branches of which the Democrats were largely in the majority, knew that the Jackson resolutions, as they were afterward pop- ularly called, would be offensive to Benton. Most of the mem- bers knew that Benton would refuse to be bound by them. Anxious to avert a rupture in their party many of Benton's Dem- ocratic friends opposed the reporting of the resolutions. Some voted against them. They passed both branches, however, by large majorities, most of the negative votes being cast by Whigs. A considerable number, though, who voted for the resolutions did not believe that they were disunionist in their tendency. Many who voted for them clung to the Union side in 1861. A few of them joined the Republican party.
Benton's colleague, Atchison, accepted the resolutions promptly, and promised to be bound by them. But Benton denounced them, declared that the disunion that Calhoun's manifesto of 1847 would bring "directly" Jackson's would bring "ultimately," and appealed from the legislature to the people of Missouri. He made a tre- mendous canvass of the state during the spring and summer of 1849. That campaign was memorable for the number of men then famous or who afterward became so who, participated in it. Among the Democrats who opposed Benton on the stump in 1849 were Atchison, Jackson, who reported the resolutions; Carty Wells,, who introduced them; James S. Green, Louis V. Bogy, Trusten Polk and Robert M. Stewart. Among the Democrats who took Benton's side then or in the subsequent contests were Francis P. Blair, Jr., Benjamin Gratz Brown, Richard A. Barrett, Bart Able, John D. Stephenson and Arnold Krekel.
Benton's term would not end until March 4, 1851, and the elec- tion of a senator by the legislature would not take place until the early part of that year. Some exciting things were to come up in congress before that time, and Benton was, as usual, to figure conspicuously in them.
Marshall's gold discovery in the raceway of Sutter's mill on the American fork of the Sacramento on January 24, 1848, incited an inrush from the four quarters of the globe which peopled Cali- fornia so quickly that it was knocking for admission as a state before the politicians in congress had organized it as a territory. On October 13, 1849, a convention at Monterey finished a consti- tution which the people of California ratified on November 13, and they immediately asked admission under it. As this constitution
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prohibited slavery the Southern members of congress opposed admission. There were thirty states at the time, fifteen free and fifteen slave. California would break the balance which the South had laboriously maintained along to that time, and give the free section a preponderance in the senate, which was bound, as the South saw, to grow with the admission of Oregon, Minnesota, and other communities in the Northwest which would soon be asking to be let in. This started a conflict in congress between the North and South which impelled Clay to come forward with the third and last of his political adjustments, the compromise of 1850.
The measures which collectively came under this designation were the admission of California as a free state, the enactment of a more drastic fugitive slave law than that then on the statute book, the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia but the existence of the institution there to remain undisturbed, the organization of the territories of New Mexico and Utah with- out applying the Wilmot proviso in them, and the payment of ten million dollars to Texas to induce her to abandon her claim to certain territory in New Mexico.
This contest was notable for the large number of historically great addresses (Calhoun's, which he was unable physically to deliver, and which was read to the senate by Mason, of Virginia; Webster's "seventh of March" speech; Seward's "higher-law- than-the-constitution" speech, and addresses by Benton, Chase Clay and others) which it called out. All these diverse measures passed congress after a long and exciting contest, by various com- binations and coalitions, and received the signature of President Fillmore, the vice president who went to the higher office on the death of Zachary Taylor, which occurred on July 9, 1850, shortly before the passage of the first of these bills.
Benton opposed several of the measures of the compromise of 1850. He was tetotally against the principle of that adjustment. There was no sense, he intimated, in inflicting punishment on Massachusetts, through a fugitive slave law, as compensation to South Carolina for allowing California to come into the Union as a free state. He would consider each of these questions as it arose, without regard to the connection which the politicians sought to establish between it and the other issues. And he would make no concession of any sort to Calhoun and the rest of what he called the disunionist cabal. He was also against Texas' claims to any of the territory of New Mexico, and he would resist that claim even if the army had to be used in defending New Mexico against it. California he would admit as a free
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state immediately, and let all the other issues be dealt with as they came up in due course. While Northern Whigs like Webster and Fillmore supported the compromise, this stalwart old Dem- ocratic paladin of freedom from a slave state denounced the adjustment, in principle and practical effects, during the time it was before congress and after its enactment, and made against it one of the strongest speeches called out by the whole contest.
Naturally Benton's assault on the compromise of 1850 intensi- fied the hostility of the pro-slavery men in Missouri toward him, and probably turned a few additional votes against him in the legislature when, a few months later, the contest for senator began. This fight which retired Benton from the senate was the most exciting senatorial contest which Missouri ever had, the only one closely approaching it in dramatic features being the one, thirty years earlier, in which Benton was chosen the first time. Beginning on January 10, 1851, thirty-nine ballots were taken without a result. On the fortieth the end came, on this vote: Benton, 55; B. . F. Stringfellow, Anti-Benton Democrat, 18; Henry S. Geyer, Whig, 80; Geyer being elected.
B. F. Stringfellow was the more active of the two men of that name, brothers, who figured in the Kansas raids a few years later. Henry S. Geyer was the first and only avowed Whig who was ever elected to the senate from Missouri. Barton drifted into opposition to the Democracy during his service, but he was elected as a Democrat and was recognized as such during a large part of his service. Geyer was born in Maryland, settled in Missouri in 1815, served in the convention of 1820 which framed the state constitution, was in the legislature several terms, during part of which time he was speaker of the house, and he was fifty-three years of age at his election to the senate in 1851 to succeed Ben- ton. He was one of Missouri's most accomplished lawyers, was one of the counsel in the Dred Scott case of 1856-57, and died in 1859. As a senator, however, he added nothing to his reputation, and he was easily overshadowed in activity and industry by his colleague, Atchison.
The defeat of Benton had a larger aspect than that which was connected with the fortunes of any one man, however large he might be. Directly and immediately it meant the rupture of the Democratic party in Missouri, which had dominated the state from the beginning, except as the state's vote for Clay in 1824 for president could be said to be a divergence from that faith. In the chaos of pohties throughout the country in 1824, when four candidates- Clay, Crawford, Adams and Jackson -received elec-
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toral votes for president, Benton at the outset leaned toward Clay, but he soon went over to Jackson, and he remained in harmony with that chieftain from that time onward to Jackson's death. He was in harmony with the Jackson ideal of robust, unhesitating and uncompromising nationalism until his own death.
But that fight of 1849-51 in which Benton was overthrown was merely the Missouri extension of the conflict between the Calhoun and the Jackson elements of the Democracy, which raged through most of the slave states, but which was particularly fierce in the border tier, in which the Jacksonians had been largely in the preponderance in the beginning. In the commonwealths far- ther south the Calhoun faction gained the ascendency early, and maintained it until the Civil war, which, abolishing slavery and the doctrine of secession at the same time, wiped out the chief cause of the division.
The cleavage between the Calhounites and the Jacksonians did not coincide precisely with the division on slavery and seces- sion. Not all the former were friends of slavery, though they believed in the legality of its introduction into the territories. Nor did all of them favor disunion, though nearly all of them believed in it as an abstract right. All the Jacksonians were not opposed to slavery extension, though a majority were. All were not unionists, but the unionists among them were overwhelmingly in the preponderance. Benton, though unjustly, stigmatized all the Calhounites as disunionists.
In the Democratic national convention of 1844, when Ex-Presi- dent Van Buren was defeated for the nomination, the Calhoun element of the Democracy gained a distinctive victory over the Jackson end of the party. I contests in many of the slave states for nominations for each branch of congress and for state offi- cers the Calhoun idea immediately or ultimately won. Even in Mississippi in 1850, when Foote, the nominal unionist, defeated Jefferson Davis, the disunionist, Foote's majority in a total vote of over 55,000, was only 1,000, and Davis carried one branch of the legislature and Foote the other. Moreover, the issue, chiefly, was the advisability of disunion and not its legality.
One of the effects of this contest in the Democratic party, in which, in one of the states, Benton was a leading figure, was that it helped to force forward the slavery and disunion issues into thei; portentous phase, and thus hastened the civil war which abolished disunion and slavery. Another was that, in splitting the Democracy in the nation, it ended temporarily the dominance of the political school which had ruled the country
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since 1801, except during two short periods of interruption ; and sent a strong Democratic re-enforcement to that coalition with the Whigs and the Free Soilers which founded the new political organization in 1854-the party of Seward, Chase and Lincoln-which governed the country during the civil war, and which has been in control of it most of the time since then.
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