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[286] that threatened its dissolution. The Southern people elected Union legislatures and sent Union men to Congress. The States of the South where slavery was most firmly set, were as staunchly Union as those which had most vehemently denounced them and their domestic institutions. The inaugural of President Pierce pleased all Conservatives throughout the Union, and sectional agitation being now removed from Congress, the administration concerned itself with affairs entirely national. But the agitation ceasing in Congress, was pressed locally to influence elections in the States. Congressional candidates were required to avow their positions on slavery. Legislatures were elected hostile to the fugitive slave law. Personal liberty bills were enacted and enforced. Municipal governments were constituted with reference to the slavery question. A social and religious horror was excited concerning the arrest now and then of an unfortunate bondsman. Mr. Greeley names only twenty-eight cases of slaves sent back into servitude, although he says in the ‘American Conflict’ that the arrests were more in one year after the passage of the Compromise Acts that in all the previous sixty years. In explanation it may be stated that though the escapes had been many, the arrests for sixty years had been few, and they were not surprisingly increased even after the passage of the fugitive slave law. Two malign stars came into conjunction when the nullification of the fugitive slave act by the personal liberty bills of States, and intervention by congressional action with the institutions of Kansas, united in steadily increasing disunion influences from 1853 to the sequence of the Confederacy. Kansas and Nebraska were a part of the immense Louisiana purchase from France. It contained in 1853 a small white population, whose plea for territorial government was the necessary protection from the adjacent
Atlanta, Ga. 1899.
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