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James G. Birney, a Kentuckian who had long worked valiantly against slavery in Alabama and in his native State, was driven to move his antislavery paper across the Ohio to Cincinnati. Even there, his office was sacked, and his life sought, by a bloodthirsty proslavery mob, largely from Kentucky, while respectable Cincinnati citizens merely advised him to seek safety in silence.

This was in 1836. The year before, a Boston mob, "in broadcloth and silk hats," had broken up one of Garrison's meetings, gutted his printing office, and dragged Garrison himself through the streets by a rope around his bodyuntil he was rescued and protected by the mayor by being jailed! And in Alton, Illinois, the year after (1837), mobs twice sacked the office of Elijah Lovejoy, an Abolitionist editor, and finally murdered Lovejoy when he tried to defend his property from a third assault.

Attacks

free press

A free press was the particular object of attack; and for many years practically every Abolitionist paper in cities large or small ran danger of such destruction. Scores of cases might be given. In the little upon a frontier village of St. Cloud, Minnesota, a proslavery mob sacked the printing office of Mrs. Jane G. Swisshelm, and threw her press into the Mississippi. There was this difference in the matter, however, between North and South. In the South, discussion was absolutely strangled. In the North, Lovejoy was the only martyr to suffer death; and resolute men and women found it possible to continue the discussion, and eventually to win a hearing. At St. Cloud, a mass meeting, excited not in behalf of Abolitionism, but by the attack upon free speech, promptly subscribed money to replace the press, no small thing in a petty frontier village of workingmen. By contrast, respectable people and large property interests showed a curious cowardice in these conflicts. Alton, in a measure, was dependent upon trade from the Missouri side of the Mississippi. Cincinnati's prosperity, in like fashion, was supposed to depend upon Kentucky trade. In both towns the cry arose that antislavery publi

cations alienated the Slave State visitors and customers, and "hurt business"; and, before this direful threat, mayors, ministers, bankers, and every newspaper in both cities were whipped into submission, quite in the fashion of later times.

Mob attacks upon free speech were ominous to all men who really cared for their own rights, and they summoned to the antislavery cause many who had never been moved by wrong to the Negro; but still more significant were demands by the South that the National government and the Northern States should by law stifle discussion.

And the mails

In 1835, in response to vehement appeals from Southern legislatures, President Jackson recommended Congress to pass laws that would exclude "incendiary publications" from the mails. "But," cried antislavery men and many others never before so counted "Who is to judge what is incendiary? On such a charge, the Bible or the Constitution might be excluded." After a sharp struggle, the bill failed to pass, but there followed an even more arrogant attempt to destroy the ancient right of petition. Since 1820, petitions had poured upon Congress in ever increasing bulk for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. In the ordinary course, such a petition was referred to an appropriate committee, and if ever reported upon, it was rejected. But in 1836, the sensitive Southern

And the right of petition

members secured a "gag resolution" which each new Congress for eight years incorporated in its standing rules, so that all petitions concerning slavery should be "laid on the table" without being discussed or printed or read.

"

The Old

The Slave Power thought exultantly that it had choked off discussion. Instead, it had merely identified the antislavery movement with a traditional right of Man the English-speaking people. The "Old Man Eloquent," John Quincy Adams, now Representative from a Massachusetts district and formerly indifferent to slavery, crowned his long public life with its chief glory by standing forth as the unconquerable champion of the

Eloquent "

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489

right of petition, which, he insisted, meant that his constituents and others had not merely the right to send petitions to the Congressional waste-paper basket, but the right to have their petitions read and considered. Tireless, skillful, indomitable, unruffled by tirades of abuse, quick to take advantage of all parliamentary openings, Adams wore out his opponents and roused the country; and in 1844 the gag rule was abandoned.

Rise of

ists

Thus while Garrisonian Abolitionists were trying to persuade the North that slavery was a moral wrong to the Negro, the folly of the Slave Power called into being a new Abolitionist party which thought political of slavery first and foremost as dangerous to AbolitionNorthern rights. This party went into politics to limit slavery by all constitutional means in the hope of sometime ending it. The "political Abolitionists" were strongest in the Middle and North Central States; and among their leading representatives were Birney and the young Democratic lawyer, Salmon P. Chase. Says Professor Hart, the biographer of the latter:

.. Chase was

"Like thousands of other antislavery men aroused, not by the wrongs of the slave, but by the dangers to free White men. He did not hear the cries of the Covington whipping post across the river [the Ohio], but he could not mistake the shouts of the mob which destroyed Birney's property and sought his life; and his earliest act as an antislavery man was to stand for the everyday right of a fellow resident of Cincinnati to express his mind."

Texas wins independ

ence

CHAPTER XXIX

SLAVERY AND EXPANSION

IN 1825 Mexico became independent of Spain (page 407) and decreed gradual emancipation of all slaves. In 1835 Santa Anna made himself dictator of the country. Texas was one of the States of Mexico. Its settlers were mainly from the Southwestern States of our Union. They held slaves, and until Santa Anna's usurpation, they had had a large amount of self-government. Fearing the loss of these political rights and perhaps also the ruin of slavery, they now seceded from Mexico, organized an independent state, and chose for their president "Sam" Houston, a famous Indian fighter and an old friend of Andrew Jackson.

In March of 1836, a Mexican army “invaded" Texas, and routed several small forces that ventured to stand against them. One body of 183 Texans in the Alamo (a fortified Mission) held out gallantly for thirteen days which so incensed Santa Anna that he massacred every prisoner. April 21, the Mexicans met the main body of Texan frontiersmen under Houston at San Jacinto. The Texans charged six times their number with the vengeful cry, "Remember the Alamo," and won a complete victory. The independence of Texas was promptly recognized by the United States. Mexico, however, did not give up her claims.

The Texans hoped to be annexed to the United States. Indeed, many of them had gone to the country years before with that express plan - as other Americans still earlier had gone into West Florida. War between annexation the United States and the proud and sensitive Mexicans would almost certainly follow; but our South, too,

The question of

ANNEXATION OF TEXAS

491

clamored for the annexation. Texas was an immense territory, and was expected to make at least five slave States. The West, also, was eager for more territory, and had few scruples against fighting Mexico to get it; but in the Northwest there was some opposition to extending the area of slavery, and New England opposed annexation fiercely.

In 1844 President Tyler negotiated with Texas an annexation treaty, but the Whig Senate rejected it by a decisive vote. Shortly before, John Quincy Adams and twenty-one other Northern members of Congress had united in a letter to their constituents advising New England to secede from the Union if Tyler's "nefarious" scheme went through. The Massachusetts legislature responded with resolutions declaring their State "determined . . . to submit to undelegated powers in no body of men on earth" [an echo of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1799], and asserting that the movement to annex Texas, "unless arrested on the threshold, may tend to drive these States into a dissolution of the Union." On the other side, "fire-eating" Southerners were shouting, "Texas or disunion!" The Slave Power now raised the cry that England would get Texas if we did not, and it played artfully on the sentiment for expansion. Calhoun warned the slave States of the Southwest that And the England was trying to persuade Texas to abolish demand for slavery; and the Northwest was won over by the Oregon shrewd device of combining with the demand for Texas a demand for "all of Oregon."

Oregon was a vast territory bounded then by the 42d parallel on the South (page 406) and by the line of 54° 40′ on the North (page 409). The agreement with England for "joint occupation" was still in force (page 407); but of late thousands of emigrants had been setting forth from Missouri with the boast that they would secure and hold the country for the United States. Twice England had proposed a division of the region; but the plan had been rejected by our government.

In the spring of 1844, Clay and Van Buren were the leading candidates for the Whig and Democratic nominations