e of the
more practical men, like Birney, Gerrit Smith, and the Tappans, who
believed in fighting through governmental machinery, in 1838 broke away
from the others and prepared to take a part in Federal politics. This
was the beginning of the Liberty party, which nominated Birney for the
presidency in 1840 and again in 1844. In 1848 it became merged in the
Free Soil party and ultimately in the Republican party.

[Footnote 1: Hart, 221, citing _Liberator_, V, 59.]

[Footnote 2: Hart, 216, citing Channing, _Works_, V. 57.]

With the forties came division in the Church--a sort of prelude to the
great events that were to thunder through the country within the next
two decades. Could the Church really countenance slavery? Could a bishop
hold a slave? These were to become burning questions. In 1844-5 the
Baptists of the North and East refused to approve the sending out of
missionaries who owned slaves, and the Southern Baptist Convention
resulted. In 1844, when James O. Andrew came into the possession of
slaves by his marriage to a widow who had these as a legacy from her
former husband, the Northern Methodists refused to grant that one of
their bishops might hold a slave, and the Methodist Episcopal Church,
South, was formally organized in Louisville the following year. The
Presbyterians and the Episcopalians, more aristocratic in tone, did not
divide.

The great events of the annexation of Texas, with the Mexican War that
resulted, the Compromise of 1850, with the Fugitive Slave Law, the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857
were all regarded in the North as successive steps in the campaign of
slavery, though now in the perspective they appear as vain efforts to
beat back a resistless tide. In the Mexican War it was freely urged by
the Mexicans that, should the American line break, their host would soon
find itself among the rich cities of the South, where perhaps it could
not only exact money, but free two million slaves as well, call to its
assistance the Indians, and even draw aid from the Abolitionists in the
North.[1] Nothing of all this was to be. Out of the academic shades
of Harvard, however, at last came a tongue of flame. In "The Present
Crisis" James Russell Lowell produced lines whose tremendous beat was
like a stern call of the whole country to duty:

[Footnote 1: Justin H. Smith: _The War with Mexico_, I, 107.]

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In