QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS. 1. If there had been such a bargain between Adams and Clay as Jackson charged, would it have been wrong? Why? Did you ever hear of a bargain like it in the political life of our time? 2. How did the Democrats of Jackson's time differ from the Jeffersonian Republicans? Would you have been a Whig or a Democrat in Jackson's time? Why? 3. Does the spoils system prevail in the government of your state, county, and city? If so, is anything being done to replace it with a merit system? What is meant by a merit system? 4. Calhoun favored a protective tariff in 1816. Why did he oppose it in 1832? Webster opposed protection in 1824 and favored it in 1832. Why did he change his mind? 5. If Congress passes an act contrary to the Constitution, what is the rightful remedy? Which side really gained more by the compromise tariff of 1833? 6. Was Jackson right or wrong in his attitude toward the Bank of the United States? Who was to blame for the panic of 1837? 7. What evidence can you find in Jackson's time that the country was really growing more democratic? 8. Why was it hopeless for the Indians to try to stop the westward march of the pioneers? 9. Look up the history of the public school system of your own state 10. Associate all the events you can with 1832. With 1837. CHAPTER XVII SLAVERY AND ANTISLAVERY The Early History of Slavery in Our Country. Slavery began in the English colonies in 1619, when a Dutch trader brought twenty negroes to Jamestown. For a long time the Slavery in number of slaves increased very slowly, and it was not until the the colonies eighteenth century that the African slave trade became an extensive business. At the close of Queen Anne's War in 1713 Great Britain was given a monopoly of the business of carrying slaves from Africa to the New World. Soon British and colonial ship-owners were making large profits out of the infamous business of buying or stealing negroes in Africa and selling them in America. Slaves were brought to all the English colonies though they were far more numerous in the South than in the North. Few men in the colonial period seem to have thought that slavery was wrong. The Quakers were almost alone in protesting against it. in the Con Slavery was recognized and even protected by the Constitution. This great law, by which the people created our government, said that three-fifths of the slaves should be added to Slavery the whole number of free persons in apportioning representa- recognized tives among the states according to their population; it pro- stitution vided that runaway slaves should be returned to their masters; and it forbade Congress to stop the foreign slave trade before 1808. Yet the men who made the Constitution seemed to feel that slavery was wrong, for they carefully avoided the word slaves and called them "all other persons" or "persons held to service or labor." That the North and the South were already beginning to feel differently about slavery is shown by the fact that two of the references to it in the Constitution were the result of compromises between those sections. Indeed, when our Revolutionary fathers declared that all men are created equal and endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they could not well help Slavery seeing how inconsistent these ideas were with their conduct in abolished in holding black men in bondage. During the generation follow the North The cottongin helped to fasten slavery on the South ing the Revolution all the states north of Mason and Dixon's line either abolished slavery or provided for gradually freeing the slaves within their borders. This action was not difficult in the North where slavery did not pay and where the number of slaves was small. But it was a much more serious matter in the South where nearly all industry was carried on with slave By permission of the Philadelphia Commercial Museum A Southern Planter's Home labor. Some southern men like Jefferson hated slavery and voted to exclude it from the Northwest Territory by the Ordinance of 1787. But they did not see how they could live among the mass of uncontrolled negroes in their own communities if the slaves were set free, and in the end most of them gave up the hope of getting rid of slavery in the southern states. After the invention of the cotton-gin slavery became more profitable than ever in the far South. When the new cotton lands in the Southwest were opened the demand for slave labor was very great. But Congress had prohibited the foreign slave trade in.1808, and no more negroes could lawfully be brought from Africa. Traders now began to pay good prices for the surplus slaves in the border states of Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky, and to sell them at a profit to the cotton planters farther south. In this way the cotton-gin tended to fasten slavery upon the slaveholding states that did not grow cotton as well as upon those that did. The people of the South began to defend slavery and to resent any suggestion that it was wrong and ought to be abolished. The Missouri Compromise. The first serious clash between the North and the South came over a question that was destined The sections to be a bone of contention between these two sections for the clash over next forty years. Should slavery be permitted to expand in the West? Very early in the history of the nation the Ohio slavery River had been made the boundary between free and slave territory. Slavery had been prohibited in the Northwest Territory in 1787, but it was permitted south of the Ohio, and by 1819 all the country between that river and the Gulf of Mexico had been made into slave states. We have seen already how new states were admitted into the Union in such a way that the slave states equaled the free states in number, thus keeping up a balance of power between the sections in the Senate. In 1819 the territory of Missouri asked to be made a state. While the House of Representatives was considering a bill for its admission into the Union a northern member moved Freedom and that no more slaves should be taken into Missouri and that all slavery contend for children born in the state after its admission should be free Missouri upon reaching the age of twenty-five years. In time this would have made Missouri a free state. This motion made the southern members very angry and led to a hot debate. In the end the house adopted the proposition to exclude slavery from Missouri but the Senate rejected it. Thus ended the matter for that session of Congress. The whole country was very much stirred up over the question of slavery in Missouri. Everywhere in the North the people condemned the extension of slavery into the western The territory. In the South the slave-owners declared that the Missouri Compromise Constitution gave them the right to settle in any territory of the United States with their slaves. In 1820 the house again voted to prohibit slavery in Missouri. It happened that just at this time Maine was asking to be made a state. A compromise was proposed in the Senate providing that Maine should. be admitted as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, but that slavery should be prohibited forever in all the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes north latitude. At last both houses agreed to this compromise and it became a law. The Missouri Compromise is one of the most important events in our history. The discussion of it awakened the North and the South to a consciousness of the growing difference Importance between them and began the long struggle between freedom of this and slavery which in the end almost destroyed the Union. No one saw the threatening danger more clearly or stated it more measure forcibly than the aged ex-president Thomas Jefferson. "This momentous question," he wrote, "like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the argy passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper." This continued to be done until slavery, the real cause of the irritation between the North and the South, was swept away in the fires of a great civil war. Life in the Slaveholding States.-A study of life in the South will help us to understand how slavery was steadily The great making that section more and more unlike the rest of the slaveholders country. We must realize what slavery was like in order to appreciate why so many people in the North wanted to keep it out of the western territory and why the abolitionists hated it and were eager to destroy it. We must not think that all the people of the South were slaveholders. In all that section there were only about eight thousand large planters owning |