existed only in his fancy. But as we retrace the century and revisit its eventful scenes, we hear and see many such leaders of the flock as Wirt describes earnest, trustful, eloquent men, now forgotten, like the multitudes who gladly heard them. Not Congress alone; not Presidents and courts and Governors and Legislatures; not orators like Henry and Ames, Webster and Clay; not inventors like Fulton and Goodyear and Morse and Singer; not the poets and the historians and the journalists but also the rural preachers, the circuit-riders, the faithful priest, the voices crying in the wildernessthese moulded democracy in America. All these pass before us as we go back to the days of small things, the gray days of work and pioneering.

*

At the middle of the nineteenth century democracy in America was encumbered with more slaves than the entire population numbered on that April day when Washington became President. Scattered over the land were more than four hundred and thirty thousand free persons of color, everywhere unwelcome. Slave property in the border States was becoming insecure and the black code yearly more severe. The constitutions and laws of the Southern States were gradually making emancipation impossible. Few Northern people migrated to the South for permanent homes; fewer Southern people sought homes in the North. The Union consisted of two peoples, separated by a compromise boundary. They did not know one

California the Keystone of Power

another well. Far in the West lay one State whose composite people had recently made a constitution which contained both Northern and Southern elements. California was free soil, and the men who made its constitution and laws represented by birth nearly every State in the Union. Was this State, that broke the balance of power in the Union, indicative of the goal to which democ racy in America was tending? Free labor had made this State and won its admission, for it would not compete with slavery in the gold-mines.

CHAPTER XII

A PEOPLE WITHOUT A COUNTRY

EVERY nation in history, at some period of its career, has been an oppressor. The oppressed have not infrequently been as numerous as the oppressors, sometimes more numerous. Usually the relation between the two groups is that of master and slave, but the slave, being property, is protected by the law of things.* As a human being he has few rights, or none. As property he must have an owner, and be answerable, as assets. By law he may be real or personal property. Slave codes, in whatever nation, guard him as long as he is productive or profitable, but their dominant purpose is to prevent him from exercising the rights of man. He is denied every right except the right of things. He must be owned, but cannot own; he must be protected, but cannot protect himself; he must support the State, but cannot participate in its organization or control. He must be known, but cannot be taught. He has no rights; another has rights in him, to him, over him. Only by custom can a slave be called he or she. Property is impersonal.

*The principal authorities for this chapter are the colonial laws and the laws of the several States on the subject, from 1800 to 1850.

The False Tenets of Democracy

But man makes the law for man; property the law for property. In spite of the law of things, slaves have always tended to come under the law of persons. The affection of the master, or some great personal or public service done by the slave, might work emancipation. Or a person of the same race as the slave might not be a slave in another country. Thus inheriting a man's rights, his descendants would be freemen.

Democracy in America, during the first century of independence, exhibited the anomaly of being slavocracy. Its excuse was the common one of the heir-at-law; its real defence was the lust and the enjoyment of riches and power. In some form slavery existed in every colony, though it ceased first in those of the North, and chiefly on account of the climate. Had the sunny, semitropical climate of Florida and South Carolina extended over New England, the abolition of slavery would have been advocated farther north. Even our morality is much a matter of latitude.

*

Not until the eighteenth century was nearly past did the people of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey arrive at the conclusion that slavery was unprofitable. Then they provided for its gradual abolition. Their morality

* In Rhode Island, negroes born after 1784 were free; in Connecticut, after 1797 — slavery abolished, June 12, 1848. Slavery was abolished by the constitution of Vermont, 1777; of Massachusetts, 1780; of New Hampshire, 1783. Gradual abolition was effected, by statute, in Pennsylvania, 1780; New York, 1799; New Jersey, 1804. In New York, by act of 1817, slavery was abolished after July 4, 1827.

sustained them during this trial, just as the morality of people in States farther south sustained them, at the same time, in making their slave codes more severe and their laws permitting emancipation less liberal.

Until the adoption of the national Constitution the slave was not a political factor in American democracy. The "federal number," as the "threefifths" clause was called, combined economics and politics. Climate forbade African slavery in the Northern States, and it there ceased to be an economical before it became a political element. Had it not been abolished in the North it would hardly have gained importance as a federal factor. Men may outwit a constitution; they cannot resist climate. In the year when the Constitution went into operation there were nearly sixty thousand free persons of color* and nearly seven hundred thousand slaves in the country. A little more than one-twentieth of the slaves were in Northern States;‡ about three-fifths§ of the free persons of color were in the South, and of these fully three-fourths were in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. The right to emancipate a slave was incident to the right of property, but the exercise of the right involved questions of public policy. Was it public policy to encourage

1790-59,527.

+ 1790-697,681.

New Hampshire, 158; Rhode Island, 948; Connecticut, 2764; Pennsylvania, 3737; New Jersey, 11,423; New York, 21,324.

§ Kentucky, 114; Tennessee, 361; Georgia, 398; South Carolina, 1801; Delaware, 3899; North Carolina, 4975; Maryland, 8043; Virginia, 12,866.