CHAPTER XIII

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill had greatly angered a majority
of the people of the North. The sudden rise of the Republican party in
protest against it, and the promise of Northern control of the Federal
Government, heartened them to the great struggle of 1856. But the
failure to win the populous States of Pennsylvania, Indiana, and
Illinois, and the solid front of the South, the compact pro-Southern
Senate, and the moral effect of the Dred Scott decision discouraged
them. Moreover, the Republican victories of 1854-55 proved misleading,
for in 1856 and 1858 the party failed to win a majority in the House of
Representatives. All that the ardent protestants and idealists could do
was to block extreme measures in Congress and enact laws in the
Republican States to harass the "enemy." Seward yielded the struggle to
the extent of indorsing popular sovereignty, which did indeed promise
more than any other line of procedure. Greeley, the enemy of Seward but
the arch-enemy of the South, actually proposed Douglas, the "squire of
slavery," for the Presidency in 1860. Chase seemed to be losing ground
in Ohio, where he had never had a majority on his own account. Business,
as we have already seen, had made peace with the South, and conservative
leaders of the East regarded slave-owners as in the same class morally
with bankers and railway directors.[10] The federal law against the
African slave trade could not be enforced. More than a hundred ships
sailed unmolested each year from New York Harbor to the African Coast to
bring back naked negroes for the cotton planters.

[Footnote 10: See Charles Francis Adams's letter to William Lloyd
Garrison in _The Liberator_, January 27, 1857.]

The outlook was so dark that New England leaders returned regretfully to
the proposition of John Quincy Adams of 1843, and recommended Northern
nullification and secession. Massachusetts had passed an act in 1855
which inflicted a penalty of five years of imprisonment upon any man who
aided in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law of the United States.
The Supreme Court of Wisconsin had declared the same law
unconstitutional in 1854; in 1857 the legislature indorsed this view,
and in 1859 it claimed the right of immediate secession in case the
State was overruled by the Federal Supreme Court, or in case any attempt
should be made to enforce the obnoxious a