inspiration of the individual man. But in the large view his was an incomparable influence in diffusing that temper of mingled courage and sweetness, the idealist's vision and the soldier's valor, which is the world's best help and hope. He spoke out against slavery whenever he saw that his word was needed; he vindicated the right of the Abolitionists to free speech, whether they spoke wisely or not; and in some of his poems, as the "Concord Ode," and "Boston Hymn," he thrillingly invoked the best of the Puritan and Revolutionary temper to right the wrongs of the present. It was said of him that he gave to the war for the Union, "not one son, but a thousand." But he also gave watchwords that will long outlast the issues of the war and our issues of to-day. The homely yet soaring idealism of the true American will always answer to the word, "Hitch your wagon to a star."

The group of writers who gave brilliancy to this period have already been cited as champions of freedom. Most effective in his advocacy was Whittier, who, in early days, took active part in politics as a Free Soiler, and afterward did greater service by the lyrics of freedom, which like his songs of labor and poems of home life and religion, went to the heart of the common people as no other American voice has done. One who reads Whittier to-day may be allowed to wish that he had known the sunny as well as the shady side of Southern life; and that, as in a later poem he softened his fierce criticism on Webster, so he had celebrated the virtues and graces of his white countrymen below the Potomac and the Ohio, as well as the wrongs of his black countrymen. Lowell, usually a scholarly poet, spoke to the common people nobly for peace and freedom in the Biglow Papers. In 1857 the Atlantic Monthly was started under his editorship, the organ at once of the highest literary ability of New England, and of pronounced anti-slavery

and Republican sentiment. After he gave up the editorship in 1862, he wrote at intervals of a few years the second series of Biglow Papers, and his "Commemoration Ode" was the noblest literary monument of the triumph of Union and freedom.

Longfellow's main vocation was away from the turmoils of the hour. He interpreted to America the art, the culture, the legends of Europe and the Middle Ages; he found the poetry in the early soil of America, as in "Hiawatha" and "Evangeline." He was not deaf to the wrongs of the slave, and gave to them some touching poems. But his finest contribution to the national idea was the apostrophe to the Union which crowns "The Building of the Ship." It was written in 1849, in the stress of the struggle over California, and it may well last as long as the nation lasts. The poem is an idyl of the ship-building folk and the sea; the consummation is the bridal of the captain and the builder's daughter, and the launching of the ship, christened "The Union "-emblem of the wife's and husband's voyage begun together on the sea of life; then,—

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
We know what Master laid thy keel,
What workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what forge and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!
Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
'Tis of the wave and not the rock;
'Tis but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale!

In spite of rock and tempest's roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,

Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee.
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,

Are all with thee,—are all with thee!

CHAPTER XVII

DRED SCOTT AND LECOMPTON

UNDER Buchanan's administration, 1857-61, three events befell which were like wedges riving farther and farther apart the national unity. They were the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court, the Lecompton constitution in Kansas, and John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry.

President Buchanan declared in his inaugural that the people of a Territory had a right to shape their institutions in their own way, but as to how far that right extended before they organized as a State, the United States Supreme Court was the proper arbiter. Two days after the inaugural, the Supreme Court announced its decision, in a case made up expressly to test the status of slavery in the Territories. Suit was brought before it to obtain freedom for Dred Scott, who being held as a slave in Missouri had been taken by his master to reside for a time in Illinois, and afterward at Fort Snelling in unorganized territory north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, and so free under the Missouri compromise. It was claimed that by being taken upon free soil, in State or Territory, he became free. The court, in an elaborate opinion delivered by Chief-Justice Taney, dismissed the case for want of jurisdiction, on the ground that no person of slave descent or African blood could be a citizen of the United States or be entitled to sue in its courts. The court affirmed that the sweeping language of the Declaration, that "all men are born free," had no application to negroes, because at that time they were generally regarded "as so

far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The case being thus thrown out of court, all further discussion of its merits was superfluousa mere obiter dictum, without legal force. Nevertheless, the court through its chief-justice went on to pronounce upon the plaintiff's claim and declare it baseless; on the ground that inasmuch as a slave was lawful property, and the Constitution decreed that no man should be deprived of his property without due process of law, therefore an act of Congress declaring in effect that when carried beyond a certain line a slave was lost to his master, was unconstitutional and void. Thus the court set aside as invalid the exclusion of slavery from the Territories by Congress. As to the effect of a slave's residence in a free State by his master's act, followed by a return to a slave State, the court held that this question belonged properly to the Missouri courts, which had decided against the slave's claim.

Two of the justices, McLean and Curtis (Northern Whigs), dissented emphatically from the decision. Justice Curtis pointed out, as to the alleged incapacity of the negro for citizenship at the era of the Constitution, that at that period free negroes had the right of suffrage in five of the thirteen States. As to the argument against depriving a man of his property, the contention of the Republicans was that slaves were property, not by the common usage of mankind, but only by local law, and that when a slaveholder moved into a Territory he did not carry with him that local law by which alone a man could be held as a chattel. But the authoritative voice of the highest court in the land had proclaimed these amazing propositions,-that the guarantee of freedom to the Northwest, which the nation had accepted for a third of a century, was invalid, and that no person with negro blood had any civil rights as a citizen of the United States.