n the world, and that from thirty
to sixty thousand persons a year were taken from Africa to Cuba by
vessels from that single port. Such facts as these, and that the
laws of the Union for the suppression of the traffic were not only
a dead letter but that the slave masters and their allies sullenly
refused to take any steps whatever for the remedy of this organized
inhumanity, were capital arguments for the Republicans, which they
employed with telling effect. The refusal to admit Oregon as a
State without a constitutional provision excluding people of color,
the rejection of Kansas on her application with a Constitution
fairly adopted by her people, and the great speech of Sumner on
"The Barbarism of Slavery," which this last application called
forth, all served their purpose in the growth of anti-slavery
opinion. So did the attempt to divide California for the purpose
of introducing slavery into the southern portion; the veto of an
Act of the Territorial Legislature of Kansas abolishing slavery,
and of a similar act in Nebraska; the acts of several Southern
States permitting free colored persons to sell themselves as slaves
if they chose to do so in preference to expulsion from the land of
their birth and their homes; the decision of the courts of Virginia
that slaves had no social or civil rights, and no legal capacity
to choose between being emancipated or sold as slaves; the refusal
of the Government to give a passport to a colored physician of
Massachusetts, for the reason that such privileges were never
conferred upon persons of color; and the revolutionary sentiments
uttered by governors and legislatures of various Southern States,
some of which declared that the election of a Republican President
would be sufficient cause for withdrawal from the Union. That
these were important aids to the progress of freedom was shown by
the passage of laws in various Northern States for the protection
of personal liberty, forbidding the use of local jails for the
detention of persons claimed as fugitive slaves, and securing for
them the right of trial by jury and the benefit of the writ of
_habeas corpus_. This healthy reaction was still further shown in
wholesome judicial decisions in several Northern States affirming
the citizenship of negroes, and denying the right of transit of
slave-holders with their slaves over their soil.

The struggle for the Speakership in this Congress, which lasted
eight weeks, was also a f