198. All the conditions of life were changing so rapidly that it was natural that the minds of men should change with them or become unsettled. This was the era of new sects, of communities, of fantastic proposals of every kind, of transcendentalism in literature, religion, and politics. Not the most The Mormons. fantastic or benevolent, but certainly the most successful, of these was the sect of Mormons or Latter-day Saints. They settled in Utah in 1847, calling their capital Salt Lake City, and spreading thence through the neighbouring Territories. They became a menace to the American system; their numbers were so great that it was against American instincts to deprive them of self-government; while their polygamy and total submission to their hierarchy made it impossible to erect them into a state having complete control of marriage and divorce. The difficulty was lessened by their renunciation of polygamy in 1890 (see Mormons).
199. The material development of the United States since 1830 had been extraordinary, but every year made it more The South. evident that the South was not sharing in it. It is plain now that the fault was in the labour system of the South: her only labourers were slaves, and a slave who was fit for anything better than field labour was prima facie a dangerous man. The divergence had as yet gone only far enough to awaken intelligent men in the South to its existence, and to stir them to efforts as hopeless as they were earnest, to find some artificial stimulus for Southern industries. In the next ten years the process was to show its effects on the national field.
J.—Tendencies to Disunion, 1850-1861.
200. The Abolitionists had never ceased to din the iniquity of slavery into the ears of the American people. Calhoun, Slavery and the Sections. Webster and Clay, with nearly all the other political leaders of 1850, had united in deploring the wickedness of these fanatics, who were persistently stirring up a question which was steadily widening the distance between the sections. They mistook the symptom for the disease. Slavery itself had put the South out of harmony with its surroundings. Even in 1850, though they hardly yet knew it, the two sections had drifted so far apart that they were practically two different countries.
201. The South remained much as in 1790; while other parts The “Slave Power.” of the country had developed, it had stood still. The remnants of colonial feeling, of class influence, which advancing democracy had wiped out elsewhere, retained all their force here, aggravated by the effects of an essentially aristocratic system of employment. The ruling class had to maintain a military control over the labouring class, and a class influence over the poorer whites. It had even secured in the Constitution provision for its political power in the representation given to three-fifths of the slaves. The twenty additional members of the House of Representatives were not simply a gain to the South; they were still more a gain to the “black districts,” where whites were few, and the slave-holder controlled the district. Slave-owners and slave-holders together, there were but 350,000 of them; but they had common interests, the intelligence to see them, and the courage to contend for them. The first step of a rising man was to buy slaves; and this was enough to enrol him in the dominant class. From it were drawn the representatives and senators in Congress, the governors, and all the holders of offices over which the “slave power,” as it came to be called, had control. Not only was the South inert; its ruling class, its ablest and best men, united in defence of tendencies hostile to those of the rest of the country.
202. Immigration into the United States was not an important factor in its development until about 1847. The Immigration. immigrants, so late as 1820, numbered but 8000 per annum; their number did not touch 100,000 until 1842, and then it fell for a year or two almost to half that number. In 1847 it rose again to 235,000, in 1849 to 300,000, and in 1880 to 428,000; all told, more than two and a quarter million persons from abroad settled in the United States between 1847 and 1854. Leaving out the dregs of the immigration, which settled down in the seaboard cities, its best part was a powerful nationalizing force. It had not come to any particular state, but to the United States; it had none of the traditional prejudices in favour of a state, but a strong feeling for the whole country; and the new feelings which it brought in must have had their weight not only on the gross mass of the people, but on the views of former leaders. And all the influences of this enormous immigration were confined to the North and West. The immigration avoided slave soil as if by instinct. So late as 1880 the census reported that the Southern states, except Florida, Louisiana and Texas, are “practically without any foreign element”; but it was only in 1850-1860 that this differentiating circumstance began to show itself plainly. And, as the sections began to differ further in aims and policy, the North began to gain heavily in ability to ensure its success.
203. Texas was the last slave state ever admitted; and, as it refused to be divided, the South had no further increase The Sections in Congress. of numbers in the Senate. Until 1850 the admission of a free state had been so promptly balanced by the admission of a slave state that the senators of the two sections had remained about equal in number; in 1860 the free states had 36 senators and the slave states only 30. As the representation in the House had changed from 35 free state and 30 slave state members in 1790 to 147 free state and 90 slave state in 1860, and as the number of presidential electors is the sum of the numbers of senators and representatives, political power had passed away from the South in 1850. If at any time the free states should unite they could control the House of Representatives and the Senate, elect the president and vice-president, dictate the appointment of judges and other Federal officers, and make the laws what they pleased. If pressed to it, they could even control the interpretation of the laws by the Supreme Court. No Federal judge could be removed except by impeachment, but an act of Congress could at any time increase the number of judges to any extent, and the appointment of the additional judges could reverse the opinion of the court.
204. In circumstances so critical a cautious quiescence and avoidance of public attention was the only safe course for the Tendencies to Disunion. “slave power,” but that course had become impossible. The numbers interested had become too large to be subject to complete discipline; all could not be held in cautious reserve; and, when an advanced proposal came from any quarter of the slave-holding lines, the whole army was shortly forced up to the advanced position. Every movement of the mass was necessarily aggressive; and aggression meant final collision. If collision came it must be on some question of the rights of the states; and on such a question the whole South would move as one man.
205. The Protestant churches of the United States had reflected in their organization the spirit of the political Sectarian Division. institutions under which they lived. Acting as purely voluntary associations, they had been organized into governments by delegates, much like the “conventions” which had been evolved in the political parties. The omnipresent slavery question intruded into these bodies, and split them. The Methodist Episcopal Church was thus divided into a Northern and a Southern branch in 1844, and the equally powerful Baptist Church met the same fate in the following year. Two of the four great Protestant bodies were thus no longer national; it was only by the most careful management that the integrity of the Presbyterian Church was maintained until 1861, when it also yielded; and only the Episcopal and Roman Catholic Churches retained their national character.
206. The political parties showed the same tendency. Each began to shrivel up in one section or the other. The Party Changes. notion of “squatter sovereignty,” attractive at first to the Western democracy, and not repudiated by the South, enabled the Democratic party to pass the crisis of 1850 without losing much of its Northern vote, while Southern Whigs began to drift in, making the party continually
