After 1840, the
professed Abolitionists formed a small and comparatively
unimportant portion of the forces that were working towards the
restriction and ultimate destruction of slavery; and much of what
they did was positively harmful to the cause for which they were
fighting. Those of their number who considered the Constitution as
a league with death and hell, and who, therefore, advocated a
dissolution of the Union, acted as rationally as would
anti-polygamists nowadays if, to show their disapproval of
Mormonism, they should advocate that Utah should be allowed to
form a separate nation. The only hope of ultimately suppressing
slavery lay in the preservation of the Union, and every
Abolitionist who argued or signed a petition for the dissolution
was doing as much to perpetuate the evil he complained of, as if
he had been a slaveholder. The Liberty party, in running Birney,
simply committed a political crime, evil in almost all its
consequences. They in no sense paved the way for the Republican
party, or helped forward the Anti-Slavery cause, or hurt the
existing organizations. Their effect on the Democracy was _nil_;
and all they were able to accomplish with the Whigs was to make
them put forward for the ensuing election a slaveholder from
Louisiana, with whom they were successful.
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