Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/225

 Slavery Question in Oregon. 201 ourselves avowedly with tliem. Senator Douglas's new sedi- tion law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all dec- larations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits or in private." This may appear excessive, but it is not, for the reason that suppression is the very essence of slavery; without suppression there is no slavery. There must be suppression of the freedom of the slave and there must be suppression of any right in others to object. Of course this is an impossible task, but the demagogues and doughfaces of the North essayed it by displaying, in season and out of season, the spectre of disunion. Such conjuring became so common that persons known to have anti-slavery sympathies, though silent upon the subject, lost caste in their party and were set aside to make sure of giving no offense to the Southern brethren. By such means the two old parties were driven more and more into the embrace and service of the consolidated slave- holding interests, and through them the federal patronage was distributed to apologists and devotees of the institution. At the beginning chattel slavery was not a national idea or purpose. The authors of the Declaration and the Constitution were not solicitous to preserve it, but to prevent its extension and cut off its supplies from abroad, and would have gone further, but were compelled by the price of the Union to leave it as a local institution to be dealt with by the States wherein it existed. In such a disposition of the perplexing subject, slaveholders and non-slaveholders, the North and the South co-operated, for such was the national purpose and such were national men, as Mr. Lincoln abundantly proved in his Cooper Insti- tute speech from which we have quoted. But under the pro- slavery regime, to be national, a man or party must not antagonize the growing demands of that interest. No others might be given control of the national administration. The AVhig party leaders. Clay, Webster, Seward, Greeley and others of like sympathy, yielded very grudgingly to the trend of events, but being devoted in every fibre to the Union,