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Free Soil's Majority Rule

From: Bernhard1848@att.net

It will be remembered that Andrew Jackson had threatened military action against a Southern State which nullified federal law within its borders, yet the Free Soil majority described below was secure in its later nullification of federal law. By 1860, there was no doubt as to the future of the American South with European immigration surging into the territories and diluting Southern influence in the country's affairs. There was no good reason for the Southern States to remain in the federal union other than to be taxpayers with little or no representation, and purchasers of New England goods protected by high tariffs.

Bernhard Thuersam, Executive Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
Post Office Box 328
Wilmington, NC 28402
www.CFHI.net

The Free Soil's Majority Rule:

"Free-soil became the watchword and reply of the Northern masses, and coupled with the maxim of a "majority rule," began to grow into huge proportions, threatening not only slavery but all constitutional guarantees and limitations. In 1850...a law was passed to recover fugitive slaves, and that law was nullified everywhere in the Free Soil States with impunity and without redress. Both sections were arrayed...and the first battleground was Kansas. This ravishment of the frontier spawned that fanatic, as much sinned as against sinning, John Brown of Ossawattomie, who was the special protégé of Gerrit Smith, and the forerunner of civil war.

Three Free-Soil States had been added---Kansas, Oregon and Minnesota---during the administration of Mr. Buchanan, the population of the United States had increased to thirty-one and a half millions, and the white population of the States which seceded was about five millions only. The election (of 1860) was not the cause of the convulsion or the revolution. The causes had accumulated from 1819. The Southern States felt compelled to secede from a sense of safety. Slave property was not all that was involved; it was, indeed, as nothing when compared with what was involved in the issue of that election. The whole theory of the government was involved....Moral philosophy and constitutional law had fallen before steam and telegraphs and railroads and territorial acquisitions and unprecedented immigration. Free Soil was a majority, and a majority brooked no limitations to its will. Nothing would be any safer than slavery would be.

Virginia made the appeal for peace in vain. Her call was not met by the States, and its failure emboldened the Northern majority to insist upon their extreme measures. The fact was, the time was already lost for preventing war. There was no compromising the question of slavery (with abolitionists), and its violent abolition would necessarily destroy all the constitutional moorings of the country. Thousands in the slaveholding States would never have risked one drop of blood for the inglorious privilege of being masters to slaves; but they dreaded the thought of being dwarfed in the Union, and being made slaves themselves by a host of new-comers to the continent, who were not imbued by the spirit of our fathers, or the spirit and understanding of our institutions.

Just as (the committee reports of the Convention of Virginia) were made, the proclamations of the President of the United States was hurled like a thunderbolt in our midst: instantly all differences ceased, and the resolution of secession was adopted at once, with but few dissentients, who retired from the body. It was known that the government at Washington had ordered and commenced the preparation of Fortress Monroe at Old Point comfort for the purpose of invasion, and there were daily rumors of other preparations of the President and Congress for aggression."

(Seven Decades of the Union: Illustrated by a Memoir of John Tyler, Henry A. Wise, J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1876, pp. 241-249)

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