Whigs. It is not to be expected that where towns are few and large plantations are numerous the seeds of democracy will find as favorable soil as in New England townships. Moreover, the Whig platform of protection to internal industries and of subsidies to internal improvements suited to perfection a State where each large plantation had invested much capital in the planting and manufacture of sugar and demanded protection, and where the numerous waterways needed the aid of the Federal government for their improvement.

But in the early forties the great mass of immigrants who had poured into the northern part of the State, where small farms contrasted with the plantations of the southern section, cared nothing for the theories of the Whigs, and their democratic sentiments were echoed by the foreign immigrants who took up their residence in New Orleans. Moreover, the Whigs began to lose popularity because of a new issue which had arisen like a storm cloud upon the horizon, and now began to overshadow ominously the question of protection to manufactures and internal improvements. This issue was the extension of slavery, violently opposed by the northern Whigs and strongly favored by the southern Democrats. Furthermore, the admission of Texas into the Union, which was already a national question, placed the Whigs of Louisiana in a quandary. As slave-owners themselves, they could not oppose the extension of slavery by the acquisition of Texas, but they feared the possible rivalry of Texas as a producer of Louisiana staples. In any case, in 1844 the State was carried for Polk and annexation by the political genius of John Slidell, who became the undisputed leader of the Democratic party, and who has never been equalled in Louisiana for skill in political strategy and for success in inspiring the blind devotion of political adherents. It is true that in 1848, in the national mix-up of politics, Louisiana, with five other Southern States, voted for Zachary Taylor, a Whig, but a resident of Louisiana and a slave-owner, in preference to Lewis Cass, the Demo

cratic candidate, whose doctrine on the slavery question did not go far enough; but in all local affairs the Democrats held their own against the Whigs, and the spoils of office were theirs.

Many disgruntled Whigs went over to a new party which for a while exercised a great fascination over the minds of men in all sections of the country. The Know-Nothings, who derived their name from their invariable answer to all inquiries as to their platform that they "knew nothing in their principles contrary to the Constitution and the laws of the land," composed a gigantic secret society which appealed to many by its paraphernalia of signs, grips, and gradations of the initiated. Its principles seem to have included purification of elections, the exclusion of foreigners from public offices, and an insistence on the doctrine that the office must seek the man. We have the testimony of Charles Gayarré, the historian of Louisiana, who was an adherent of the new order, that not only the Whigs but the whole of Louisiana may truly be said to have rushed with enthusiastic precipitation into the arms of this seductive society. Soon, however, it began to be whispered about that the order was opposed to the Catholic religion and intended to proscribe all Catholics. The rumor was put to the test when, at a great convention in Philadelphia, a delegation of five Protestants and one Catholic presented themselves from Louisiana. The Catholic was refused admission, and resenting this discrimination against a State in which half the population was Catholic, all the delegates withdrew. In vain the leaders of the movement agreed to make a discrimination on this point in favor of Louisiana; the order was doomed. In Louisiana its adherents fell away rapidly, and its secrecy and its religious intolerance, so opposed to the American spirit, precipitated its ruin everywhere.2 In New Orleans, however, it did not die without a struggle. Such scenes of violence and intimida

This was Charles Gayarré himself. 'Gayarré, History of Louisiana, IV, 678.

tion occurred at an election for sheriff in 1853 that, though the Know-Nothings elected a sheriff named Hafty, he was removed from office by a formal act of legislature. The death-knell of Know-Nothingism had been sounded.

66

In Louisiana mutterings of the coming struggle between the States preceded actual hostilities by several years. As we read the messages of the governors of the State in the period before secession we catch more than one reflection of the deep unrest which filled the minds of Louisianians and of the defiant attitude which the utterances of the new or Black" Republican party had aroused. "The irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces," as Seward named it in 1858, had already been recognized as a reality by some of the wiser spirits of the time, and men had begun to take sides on the basis of the finer distinctions which the great controversy was bringing to light. A suspicion of heresy on the subject of the "peculiar institution" was sufficient to declare the ineligibility of any candidate for office; nay, more, orthodoxy began to depend upon the correct attitude toward the doctrine of "Squatter Sovereignty" and the extreme view held as to Federal protection of slavery in the territories. It was even maintained that Slidell, the great leader of the Democracy, whose orthodoxy had been beyond reproach, was not above suspicion in regard to the extreme claims of his party, and that, being by birth a Northerner, he was not in full sympathy with Louisianians, but upheld the doctrines of Stephen A. Douglas.1 Hence Pierre Soulé, a Frenchman by birth, but long a resident of Louisiana a Prince Rupert of oratory-headed a factional fight against Slidell.2

When the Democratic convention met in Charleston in

1Soulé, who disliked Slidell, may have said this, but Senator Jonas says that there never was any truth in it; Slidell was always pro-southern.

* Soulé himself ended by becoming a Douglas man and a cooperationist, whether from conviction or from a desire to oppose Slidell does not seem clear. McCaleb says Soulé supported Douglas in 1856 and 1860: "Subsequently, to the surprise of his friends, he declared himself an opponent to the secession of Louisiana." The Louisiana Book, ed. by McCaleb, p. 137.

April, 1860, a strong opposition developed to the nomination of Douglas. On the question of the extension of slavery in the territories Douglas held the doctrine that the people of any territory in their territorial condition had the right to determine whether slavery should or should not exist there, and he denied the duty, or even the right, of Congress to protect persons or their property (slaves) in a territory against the will of a majority therein. This doctrine, that a territorial legislature was stronger than Congress itself and could determine the policy of a territory before it was ready to frame its constitution for statehood, was given full utterance by Douglas in his great debate with Lincoln in 1858, but it did not please the great majority of Southerners, who held that, according to the Dred Scott decision, Congress must protect slavery in a territory until the territory became a state.

In pushing his "Squatter Sovereignty" so far, Douglas lost, in a great measure, the adherence of the Southern States and forced them to choose a candidate who upheld their peculiar views. This candidate was John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky. The choice of Breckenridge produced a fatal schism; and, to make the situation still more desperate, some elements of the old Know-Nothing party and some new elements combined to nominate John Bell, of Tennessee, who conservatively held that the extreme views of Republicans and Democrats should be dropped and that the platform should be simply “The Constitution of the country, the union of the States, and the enforcement of the laws." Because of these Democratic divisions the Republicans carried their candidate, Abraham Lincoln, to victory on a platform which declared in favor of leaving alone the domestic institutions of the States and of keeping slavery out of the territories. The electoral vote for Lincoln was 180, and for all the other candidates 103; but the popular vote for the Democratic candidates was 2,823,741, while Lincoln received only 1,866,452. In Louisiana Breckenridge received 22,681 votes, Bell, 20,204, and Douglas,

7623 Slidell had organized his party so well that the State was carried for his candidate and Douglas was defeated; but it will be noted that the vote for Bell, representing the conservative view, was almost as large as the vote for Breckenridge.

In the meantime the messages of the governors of Louisiana to the General Assembly had shown evidence of the growing bitterness of feeling toward the North, and especially toward the Abolitionists. This party had indulged in unmeasured abuse of the South, and represented its whole industrial system as based upon sin and iniquity. It was a subject of special complaint on the part of the South that at least twenty Northern States had passed "personal liberty laws" intended to defeat the laws passed by Congress, in accordance with the Constitution, to secure the return of fugitive slaves. "Such acts," says Wilson," were as plainly attempts to nullify the constitutional action of Congress as if they had spoken the language of the South Carolina ordinance of 1832." Nor was this paying back the South in her own coin, for South Carolina at least maintained that her nullification ordinance was constitutional, while the North did not pretend to make any such claims for the "personal liberty" laws. Governor Chase openly declared that he would sustain by force, if necessary, the decision of the supreme court of Ohio against the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, even if it resulted in a collision between state and general government. Not at any time was nullification more rife in South Carolina than among Ohio Abolitionists.

Hence in 1856 we find Governor Hebert of Louisiana declaring in his valedictory message that "the wild spirit of fanaticism which has, for so many years, disturbed the peace of the country, has steadily increased in power and influence. It controls the councils of several states, nullifies the laws of Congress enacted for the protection of our property, and

Division and Reunion, p. 208.

'S. S. Cox, Three Decades of Federal Legislation, p. 63.