Neither party represented the people in whose behalf it professed to speak. The abolitionists, whose petition for the dissolution of the Union we shall hereafter present, certainly did not represent the thought or desire of the great majority of the Northern people. In the same way the Southern disunionists who sought the disruption of the Union in order that slavery might "have free course to run and be glorified," did not represent the great body of Southern citizens, many of whom deprecated slavery and longed for its extinction by some safe process of gradual emancipation. But in both cases the extremists were accepted on the opposing side as representatives of the general thought; the extravagant opinions and demands of fanatical persons on the one side or the other were interpreted as the settled convictions of the great body of the people on the side thus misrepresented to its hurt.
Among the extremists on both sides the disruption of the Union was jauntily contemplated as a ready remedy for ills complained of.
As early as 1844 the Legislature of Massachusetts had resolved "That the project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested on the threshold, may tend to drive these states into a dissolution of the Union." Again, in 1845, the Legislature of Massachusetts passed and the governor of that state approved, a resolution asserting a right of nullification and declaring that the admission of Texas as a state in the Union "would have no binding force whatever on the people of Massachusetts." That resolution could mean nothing less than that Massachusetts would withdraw from the Union in the event of the admission of Texas, for otherwise laws enacted by virtue of the vote of Texas senators must have "binding force" upon the people of Massachusetts as upon those of all the other states.
There were other resolutions of similar purport adopted by the Legislature of Massachusetts that it is not necessary to set forth in a history which is not an indictment but merely an expository setting forth of facts by way of accounting for events.
On both sides disunion was constantly and freely threatened if either side could not have its way. A convention of Southerners held at Nashville, Tennessee, distinctly recommended the secession of the South and called for a Southern congress to consider and adopt that policy. About the same time Mr. Hale of New Hampshire introduced in the Senate (Feb. 1, 1850) a petition deliberately calling upon the national legislative body to adopt measures for the dissolution of the Union.
The petitioners were citizens of Pennsylvania and Delaware, but they constituted only a small fraction of the people of those states and unquestionably their proposal, if put to a vote in Pennsylvania and Delaware, would have been buried under a mountainous majority of adverse ballots. Yet the petitioners deliberately assumed to be and to speak for "the inhabitants" of those states, and their petition was undoubtedly accepted at the South as representing popular opinion in the region whence it came, if not indeed in the entire North. It was the mischief of such things that, while they were the work of a fanatical few, they managed to pass themselves off as utterances representative of public sentiment in the quarter from which they emanated.
The petition was as follows:
We, the undersigned, inhabitants of Pennsylvania and Delaware, believing that the Federal Constitution, in pledging the strength of the whole nation to support slavery, violates the Divine Law, makes war upon human rights, and is grossly inconsistent with republican principles; that its attempt to unite freedom and slavery in our body politic has brought upon the country great and manifold evils, and has fully proved that no such union can exist but by the sacrifice of freedom and the supremacy of slavery, respectfully ask you to devise and propose, without delay, some plan for the immediate, peaceful dissolution of the American Union.
Daniel Webster fitly exposed the character and significance of this petition by moving that it be prefaced with a preamble as follows:
Whereas, at the commencement of the session, you and each of you took your solemn oaths, in the presence of God and on the Holy Evangelists, that you would support the Constitution of the United States; now, therefore, we pray you to take immediate steps to break up the Union, and overthrow the Constitution of the United States as soon as you can.
So repulsive was this proposal of disunion that only three senators voted even to receive the petition embodying it and in the House a like refusal was made. But those three senators were Mr. Seward, of New York, Mr. Chase of Ohio, and Mr. Hale of New Hampshire—three great leaders of Northern thought who were destined soon to become three men of dominant influence in the new party of Free-soil and leaders in antagonism to the Southern claim to a share in the new territories.
There might have been a score of other votes for the petition which would have had far less significance. The votes of these three senators meant clearly that the Free-soil party looked upon disunion just as the extreme pro-slavery men of the South did, as a legitimate and always available remedy for existing ills or a prophylactic against evils anticipated.
As early as 1847 Mr. Calhoun had set forth the Southern contention with regard to the territories in a series of carefully worded resolutions which read as follows:
Resolved, that the territories of the United States belong to the several States composing this Union, and are held by them as their joint and common property.
Resolved, that Congress, as the joint agent and representative of the States of this Union, has no right to make any law, or do any act whatever, that shall directly, or by its effects, make any discrimination between the States of this Union, by which any of them shall be deprived of its full and equal right in any territory of the United States, acquired or to be acquired.
Resolved, that the enactment of any law which should, directly or by its effects, deprive the citizens of any of the States of this Union from emigrating, with their property, into any of the territories of the United States, would make such discrimination, and would, therefore, be a violation of the Constitution and the rights of the States from which such citizens emigrated, and in derogation of that perfect equality which belongs to them as members of this Union, and would tend directly to subvert the Union itself.
Resolved, that it is a fundamental principle of our political creed, that a people, in forming a Constitution, have the unconditional right to form and adopt the government which they may think best calculated to secure their liberty, prosperity, and happiness; and that, in conformity thereto, no other condition is imposed by the Federal Constitution on a State, in order to be admitted into this Union, except that its constitution shall be republican; and that the imposition of any other by Congress would be not only in violation of the Constitution, but in direct conflict with the principle on which our political system rests.
Here we have from the South a threat of disunion, a trifle more disguised, perhaps, than the threats that had come from the North, but not less positive. The resolutions were intended especially to cover the new territories which the country was then acquiring from Mexico by conquest and treaty, but they covered with equal effect all of that territory which had been added to the Union by the Louisiana Purchase, and the greater part of which had been set apart by the Missouri Compromise to be formed into free states. They were a challenge to the Missouri Compromise, and the assertion of a doctrine which afterwards greatly vexed the country and contributed in an important way to the bringing about of war. They constituted a plea for that repeal of the Missouri Compromise which was to come a very few years later.
This was the condition of things which Congress had to confront on its assembling in December, 1849. Disunion was everywhere in the air and on each side there was a party openly advocating it as the only remedy for existing and threatened ills. Both in the North and the South this party of disunion was in a hopeless minority, but by reason of its ceaseless and aggressive activity it had managed to make itself seem the authorized exponent of public opinion for each side.
The questions before the country were many, but they all related, directly or indirectly, to slavery. Should California