Ohio’s War: The Civil War in Documents

In 1860, Ohio was among the most influential states in the nation. As the third-most-populous state and the largest in the middle west, it embraced those elements that were in concert-but also at odds-in American society during the Civil War era. Ohio’s War uses documents from that vibrant and tumultuous time to reveal how Ohio’s soldiers and civilians experienced the Civil War. It examines Ohio’s role in the sectional crises of the 1850s, its contribution to the Union war effort, and the war’s impact on the state itself. In doing so, it provides insights into the war’s meaning for northern society.

Ohio’s War introduces some of those soldiers who left their farms, shops, and forges to fight for the Union. It documents the stories of Ohio’s women, who sustained households, organized relief efforts, and supported political candidates. It conveys the struggles and successes of free blacks and former slaves who claimed freedom in Ohio and the distinct wartime experiences of its immigrants. It also includes the voices of Ohioans who differed over emancipation, freedom of speech, the writ of habeas corpus, the draft, and the war’s legacy for American society.

From Ohio’s large cities to its farms and hamlets, as the documents in this volume show, the war changed minds and altered lives but left some beliefs and values untouched. Ohio’s War is a documentary history not only of the people of one state, but also of a region and a nation during the pivotal epoch of American history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Jun 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9780821443927

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Introduction

PEOPLE WHO MADE their homes in Ohio when the Civil War began in 1861 lived close to the center of the nation. In 1860, the population center of the country—the point that divided the population equally between north and south, as well as between east and west—was in Pike County, Ohio, twenty miles southeast of Chillicothe. That center point moved slightly to the south and west over the next twenty years, but remained in Ohio, northeast of Cincinnati.¹ Ohio at midcentury ranked third in population and wealth in the nation and was the largest and oldest state in the middle west—a region that was tied culturally, politically, and economically to the northeast and south. In the early nineteenth century, settlers from New England had moved into the Western Reserve in northeastern Ohio, while Pennsylvanians settled in eastern Ohio and Virginians crossed the Ohio River into south-central Ohio. These groups formed the main lines of migration into the state, but settlement patterns were more complex, as people from Kentucky, North Carolina, New York, and New Jersey also moved to Ohio in significant numbers. In many places, including Cincinnati, people who hailed from many different areas of the United States lived together and contributed to the diverse composition of the state.²

Ohio owed much of its growth in the nineteenth century to its fortunate geography, which offered access to the two great inland waterways—the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. After the development of canals, Ohioans could transport their products—corn, pork, wheat, wool, iron, lumber, reapers, candles, soap—to Lake Erie and the Ohio River and participate in the market economy. It was the railroad, however, that transformed Ohio’s economy. By 1860, Ohio led the nation in railroad track mileage. The railroad spurred growth in industries like iron mining and gave more Ohioans access to markets. This allowed some to move into the emergent American middle class and to acquire status items like pianos and sewing machines. Ohio’s social progress could be measured by its colleges; it had more than any other state in the nation.³ The state was also an important market for publishing, not only in the printing and selling of books, but also in the production and distribution of periodicals, pamphlets, newspapers, and sheet music. Throughout the antebellum era, Cincinnati—the Queen City—was the largest of all western cities, just edging out St. Louis in population in 1860.⁴

Ohio’s economic and material progress was uneven and in some places nonexistent. Although Ohio was the fastest-growing state in the middle west during the first half of the nineteenth century, in the 1850s its population growth was just over half of what it had been only a decade before. While people continued to move to Ohio, many others left the state. Alexis de Tocqueville had observed the beginning of this process in the early 1830s. I have spoken about emigration from the older states, but what should one say about that from the new? he asked rhetorically in Democracy in America. Ohio was founded fifty years ago, most of its inhabitants were not born there, its capital is not thirty years old, and an immense stretch of unclaimed wilderness still covers its territory; nevertheless, the population of Ohio has already started to move west; most of those who come down to the fertile prairies of Illinois were inhabitants of Ohio. The French observer attributed this to restlessness. To start with, emigration was a necessity for them; now it is sort of a gamble, and they enjoy the sensations as much as the profit.⁵ The migration that Tocqueville had observed continued, resulting in a depopulation of some of the state’s rural areas, though not of the newly settled northwestern counties. While Ohio’s cities continued to grow, many farmers decided to leave the state for cheaper land and better agricultural prospects in other middle western states, accounting for large percentages of the population in those states. The president of the Ohio Board of Agriculture noted the problem in 1857, writing, Those who have left us for more western homes, constitute a portion of our most intelligent, industrious and enterprising population.⁶ But agricultural Ohio also lost population to the state’s own cities. Observers commented on the lack of farm laborers in the 1850s and complained that many farmers’ sons moved to the cities to seek their fortunes. Cleveland, Toledo, and Cincinnati witnessed tremendous population and economic growth from the railroads that supplanted canals and reoriented trade along an east-west axis, but so too did smaller cities like Dayton, Sandusky, Zanesville, and Portsmouth.⁷

European immigration indelibly marked Ohio’s ethnic, cultural, and political landscape in these urban areas and in the countryside as well. The arrival of newcomers convinced many people that the state was undergoing rapid—and not entirely welcomed—change. Germans composed the largest group of immigrants in antebellum Ohio. A diverse group, these immigrants hailed from all of the German states; they were Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish, represented different classes, and had varied motives for moving to Ohio. Some, like the separatists who arrived in Tuscarawas County and established Zoar in 1817, sought freedom to worship, while others left Germany after the failed revolutions of 1848. Irish, Welsh, and English immigrants also moved to Ohio, providing needed labor for the state’s internal improvement projects and mining industries. At times, the state’s various ethnic interests collided. In the 1853 Christmas Riot in Cincinnati, a group of Protestant Germans objected to the visit of the papal nuncio, and fighting broke out between the protesters and the municipal police, largely Irishmen. Two years later, when Cincinnati residents who were opposed to the increasing immigrant population destroyed ballot boxes in German neighborhoods during a municipal election, another riot ensued, this time involving nativists and German immigrants.

Issues of race dominated Ohio’s antebellum history. Ohioans’ ideas pertaining to freedom and citizenship were defined in opposition to slavery and sustained by a commitment to white supremacy. The institution of slavery shaped the state and its people.⁸ The Ordinance of 1787 mandated that the territory north of the Ohio River would be the province of free labor. Yet the national debates that swirled over slavery’s existence, its expansion into the territories, and its benefit to Southerners’ political power were deeply—at times painfully—felt in Ohio.⁹ When the state drafted its first constitution in 1803, it outlawed slavery and the extended indentures of blacks. It also barred blacks and women from voting. Legislation passed in 1803 declared that the state militia would be filled by white males, in effect prohibiting black military service. Additional state legislation, known as the Black Laws, circumscribed black rights. These laws mandated that blacks moving into Ohio had two years to prove they were free, register with local officials, pay a fee, and provide a bond from a property holder against the prospect that they would become a burden on local communities. Blacks in Ohio were not entitled to public education and could not testify in court against whites. Those harboring fugitives could be fined up to fifty dollars. For almost half a century, until their repeal in 1849, these laws provided legal limits on black rights, although their enforcement depended largely on local communities.¹⁰

The black population during the same period increased dramatically. In 1800, 337 African Americans lived in the state. Fifty years later Ohio was home to 25,279 black residents—the third-largest black population of any northern state. Blacks made up about 1 percent of the total state population, with just over half born outside the state. Cincinnati was home to 13 percent of the state’s black population.¹¹ At midcentury, blacks made up almost 3 percent of that city’s population. For blacks, Ohio offered more than legal freedom. The state offered numerous advantages, including economic opportunities and communities where black children could gain an education, either through private institutions or local provisions. By midcentury a quarter of Ohio’s black children attended school, exceeding the percentage of attendeesin many northern states and surpassing that of white children in some southern states. The percentage of black children attending school, however, was significantly less than that of white children in Ohio.¹² African Americans’ access to education varied throughout the state, as did their opportunities to work and prosper. Yet within a culture of white supremacy and extralegal repression, African Americans in Ohio formed communities that withstood challenges from without and within.¹³

Some Ohioans—white and black—worked assiduously to preserve the legal rights and protections of African Americans in the state and to oppose the institution of slavery. These efforts were part of a larger constellation of Protestant evangelical reform impulses that emerged from the religious revivals of the 1820s. With its emphasis on the free will of an individual and the ability of a individuals to improve themselves and reform society, Protestant evangelicalism encouraged people to work toward a Christian republic. Thousands of Ohioans responded by addressing the problems they believed existed in their rapidly changing communities. Advocates for women’s rights, public education, mental health reform, utopian socialism, and nativism were active throughout the state, but it was the temperance movement that gained the greatest following. By the 1840s, chapters of the Sons of Temperance and the Daughters of Temperance existed in the state. In 1851, at the state constitutional convention, temperance supporters demanded the legislature discontinue licensing taverns. The measure failed, but it indicated the influence of temperance within Ohio communities.¹⁴

The reform culture also inspired abolition. Opposition to slavery existed before the 1820s: the American Colonization Society, for example, was founded in 1816 and favored the gradual emancipation and the relocation of free blacks to Africa. Colonization appealed to those who were uncomfortable with slavery by employing ideals of Christian uplift and white supremacy, two ideas that flowed together in the minds of so many white Americans.¹⁵ It also provided the seedbed for more radical calls to end slavery. Charles Backus Storrs, a member of the American Colonization Society, became president of Western Reserve College. There, Storrs led the faculty and students to abandon gradualist arguments for colonization in favor of immediate emancipation. The Western Reserve itself was closely associated with abolition, although there were abolitionist networks throughout the state. As abolitionist Albert Gallatin Riddle later recalled, the area was "the home of the various isms, the vagaries, mental ailments, many called them, of a people noted throughout the land for this distinctive feature, so that whoever had a hobby [horse] elsewhere rejected, rode it straightway to the Reserve, where it was quite certain of hospitable pasturage and shelter."¹⁶

The confluence of reforms, or isms, was dramatically evident in the rise of Oberlin College. Founded in 1833 by a Presbyterian minister and a missionary, the institution admitted men and women, many of whom were committed to abolition. Even so, when abolitionists from Lane Seminary in Cincinnati revolted against their own administration and agreed to come to fledgling Oberlin, their demand that black students be admitted met with opposition from students, faculty, and trustees. As the division in the community of committed reformers demonstrated, support for abolition was not equivalent to a demand for racial equality. The faculty at Oberlin agreed to educate white and black students together, but the distinction drawn in the debate exemplified a tension inherent in the abolition movement.¹⁷

Abolitionists comprised but a small minority of people in Ohio. Most white Ohioans were ambivalent about the institution of slavery and did not support abolitionists’ crusades in the antebellum era. Antiabolitionist violence and full-scale riots occurred throughout the state. In 1829, a race riot broke out in Cincinnati, prompting the exodus of many blacks from the city. In 1835, abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld wrote that in Geauga County a mob gathered with tin horns, sleigh bells, drums, etc., and ding dong’d like bedlam broke loose, valorously pelted the ladies with rotten eggs, and performed divers other feats, all strictly in keeping.¹⁸ In 1836, a mob in Cincinnati destroyed the press of abolitionist editor James G. Birney. Whites destroyed the homes of three black families in Dayton in 1841, setting them on fire as the residents fled. The same year, riots between blacks and whites in Cincinnati prompted city officials to declare martial law. They arrested three hundred blacks but few whites.¹⁹ By midcentury, issues of race fused with politics in Ohio, contributing to the tensions between the northern and southern states, heightening divisions within Ohio, and ultimately shaping Ohio’s war.

ONE

Ohio at the Center of the Nation

OHIO WAS AT the center of the conflicts that arose between Northern and Southern states and within national political parties over the extension of slavery into federal territories. Ohio’s geographic proximity to slave states, the diverse regional and ethnic backgrounds of its residents—many of whom had cultural and economic ties to the South—and the expansion of religious, cultural, and literary institutions meant that Ohioans had distinct views on the sectional tensions at midcentury. These conflicts arose over the question of whether the institution of slavery would be permitted in the federal territories and intensified with Northerners’ growing fears about the political power of the slaveholding states. When antislavery reformers and politicians, including Ohioan Salmon P. Chase, yoked the two issues together, a powerful movement of political antislavery emerged. The transformation of Ohio’s political landscape led to the political realignment that occurred between 1844 and 1856 and gave rise to the Republican Party. In the process, Ohioans shaped a new political order that struggled to incorporate the interests of the state’s diverse population in a political system that served the interests of Northern free labor.¹

The organization of the Liberty Party in Ohio in 1840, by antislavery reformers determined to abolish the institution through political action, helped destabilize a political system that had been anchored by Democrats’ and Whigs’ positions on economic issues. Democrats favored limited federal intervention in the economy, opposed banks, and generally suspected power that seemed increasingly concentrated in manufacturing and business interests at the expense of the individual. Whigs held that government had a role in promoting order and regulating society; they favored government intervention, including aid for internal improvements and centralized banking. Within Ohio, residents of manufacturing and trade centers who were connected, or wanted to be connected, to transportation routes tended to support Whigs. They were likely to recognize the benefits of a protective tariff and state-sponsored banks for economic growth. Areas with strong ties to New England and areas in which people supported reform movements, including the Western Reserve, also favored Whigs. In rural areas, as well as in urban areas with high concentrations of immigrants, people tended to support Democrats because they believed that banking threatened individual wealth and that tariffs benefited manufacturers and raised consumer prices. For both parties, but especially for Whigs, agitation over the issue of slavery exacerbated divisions within the state party. Whigs in southern Ohio lived and worked in proximity to blacks and to the slaveholding states, many in communities that accommodated—if not supported—the slave labor system of Ohio’s southern neighbors. Whigs in southern Ohio tended to be more conservative on issues pertaining to slavery and race than their northern Ohio counterparts. While most Ohioans, regardless of where they lived, believed in the racial inferiority of African Americans, Whigs in northern Ohio, though they were not uniformly abolitionists, believed that blacks within the state were entitled to some protection through state law. While some Democrats, especially those in northern Ohio, supported the repeal of the Black Laws, the party generally remained unified over the importance of protecting white labor from black immigration.²

When Whigs carried Ohio in the 1844 election but Democrat James K. Polk was elected president, neither party in Ohio was satisfied. State Democrats had split over the annexation of Texas and state banking issues; a large number had opposed Polk’s nomination altogether and had supported Martin Van Buren, who opposed the annexation, as the party nominee. Ohio Whigs resented the election of Polk, a Southern Democrat, to the presidency and their party’s lack of influence in national politics. Both parties blamed the Liberty Party, which had run a strong campaign by embracing moderation, calling for an end to federal support of slavery rather than for immediate emancipation. The election of 1844 proved a watershed year in state politics because it marked the rise of sectionalism in politics. Four years later, the potential of uniting antislavery forces became clear. Liberty Party founder Salmon P. Chase and Whig Joshua P. Giddings set aside former differences for the sake of Free Soil. At the Ohio Free Territory convention in Columbus on July 21, 1848, the Free Soil Party was formed, proclaiming, We wage no war against the Slave States. . . . We do not ask that Slavery be abolished by Congressional enactment in any State. But we do demand [that] Slavery shall not lay its foul hands upon us. We do demand that Slavery shall cease to control the action of the National government. We do demand that Slavery shall be excluded from the National Territory.³ The Free Soil Party nominated Martin Van Buren as its candidate for president.

The immediate result of Free Soilers’ activity in Ohio was to attract enough Whig voters that Democrats were able to carry the state in 1848. Democrats then formed an alliance with the Free Soilers, who held the balance of power in the state legislature, and rendered the Whig Party ineffectual. The Free Soil Party gained in the bargain, securing in the state legislature the repeal of the Black Laws and Salmon P. Chase’s election to the Senate.⁴ Sectionalism weakened both Whig and Democratic parties, especially with the passage of the Compromise of 1850. Engineered by Henry Clay, the compromise was intended to end sectional divisions over the status of the federal territories gained through the Mexican War. It provided for California’s admittance to the Union as a free state, organized the territories of Utah and New Mexico and left each open to slavery, prohibited the slave trade but not slavery in the nation’s capital, and included a fugitive slave law that required citizens to aid federal authorities in recapturing runaway slaves. Whigs, faced with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law during a Whig administration, appeared to have been manipulated by the Southern branch of their party. Democrats tried to downplay the entire compromise to avoid a split between Northern and Southern branches of their party. The political inertia that ensued damaged even the Free Soilers, who were unable to muster a committed following. Political observers perceived in the early 1850s a lack of public interest in politics. Voter participation decreased. Among a generally apathetic electorate, issues erupted and died away. Ethnocultural issues—temperance, increased naturalization periods for immigrants—did not gain a broad following. Benjamin Wade, typically a rabid partisan, was disheartened in the Western Reserve and bemoaned the dirty quagmire of politics. Another Ohio politician observed that Ohioans had a ‘don’t care a damn’ spirit.⁵

The debates that surrounded the status of Kansas changed everything. In 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, a Democrat, introduced the Kansas-Nebraska bill, which proposed organizing the federal territory west of Missouri through the doctrine of popular sovereignty: residents would determine whether Kansas and Nebraska would enter the Union as free or slave states. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, passed in May 1854, repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had banned slavery in the territories obtained from the Louisiana Purchase north of the latitude 36°30'. It also revitalized Ohio politics. Antislavery Democrats, former Whigs, and Free Soilers came together in a powerful anti-Nebraska movement that achieved victory in the 1854 state elections. The following year, nativists in the rapidly growing Know-Nothing organization joined with anti-Nebraska forces to organize Ohio’s Republican Party in July 1855. The party’s nominee for governor, Salmon P. Chase, was victorious in the October election, albeit by a small plurality. The success of Ohio Republicans startled the nation. Organized from a coalition of political groups in a single campaign, the party had captured the governorship and other state offices in the third most populous state in the Union. Republican success in Ohio underscored the potency of sectional politics and nativism in the state, uniting voters around vague fears that freedom was threatened, both by the Slave Power of the South and by the Catholicism of many immigrants.⁶ The fusion of the anti-Nebraskans and nativists was not without challenge, especially among conservatives in southern Ohio who remained suspicious of the Republican Party’s abolitionist constituency. In the 1856 presidential election, however, Republican John C. Frémont carried the state, largely through the support of northern Ohio, signaling to the nation Ohio’s leadership in the sectional realignment of American politics.⁷

Ohio Democrats, though internally divided, continued to mount an effective opposition to Republicans. Democrats maintained that they were the defenders of the Constitution and of people’s right to live and prosper without the interference of government or its agents. They depicted Republicans as radical on issues of race and charged that the party was dominated by abolitionists and their followers in the Western Reserve. They pointed to numerous Republican actions to sustain their arguments. Republicans in the Ohio judiciary ruled in 1856 that any slave entering Ohio automatically became free. Their cohorts in the General Assembly the following year passed legislation that made it a crime to bring a slave into the state. The legislature also passed laws that punished the kidnapping of a free black with hard labor in the state penitentiary and prohibited slave catchers from holding alleged fugitives in Ohio jails. Ohio Democrats challenged the passage of these laws, claiming they violated federal law, which only reinforced their stance as strict interpreters of the Constitution. When Democrats regained control of the Ohio legislature in 1858, they decriminalized the act of bringing a slave into the state and allowed alleged fugitives in the custody of federal officials to be held in state jails. It remained illegal to kidnap a black person without following the procedures of the federal law.⁸

That same year, the Oberlin-Wellington rescue case highlighted disagreements in the state over issues of race and federalism. When Kentucky slave catchers removed an alleged fugitive from the town of Oberlin, opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law congregated at Wellington, where a mob forcibly retook the alleged fugitive. Thirty-seven of the Rescuers were indicted in federal court for violation of the Fugitive Slave Law. Two of the accused, including free black Charles Langston, applied to the Ohio Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus, pitting the state and federal governments against each other. Ultimately the state court refused to intervene, but the public outcry over the case highlighted the activism of antislavery forces and their attempts to use state sovereignty to oppose federal legislation on slavery. Public support for the court’s decision also revealed a significant vein of racial and political conservatism in the state, which would sustain the Democratic party.

The events of the 1850s that fired sectionalism throughout America exacerbated the conflicts already present in Ohio. The financial panic of 1857 prompted Democrats to appeal to their Jacksonian heritage, including policies of fiscal conservatism, and to blame Republican state leadership for the economic hardship. When Kansas applied for statehood with the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution, voted on by only a portion of Kansas residents, some northern Democrats broke with the Buchanan administration and joined the Republicans in opposition. Public reaction to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry on October 16, 1859, showed that Ohioans remained divided on slavery. While most Republicans opposed the extension of slavery in the territories, a small radical minority supported abolition, and an even smaller number called for violent action against the institution. By the end of the tumultuous 1850s, the state was pulled from within and without by abolitionist and states’ rights extremists, the struggles of an established national party and a powerful upstart political organization, and powerful economic and cultural bonds that stretched both eastward and southward. In the years that followed, Ohio fought to remain at the center of the nation.

ABIGAIL HOUSE FAVORS FREE SOIL IN THE WESTERN RESERVE

In 1817 Abigail Clark Fish arrived in Geauga County. She had moved with her husband from Connecticut, but within two years was widowed, remarried to Erastus House, and living in Ashtabula County. As she recounted in her memoirs, her life was marked by spiritual striving and her continual failings as a sinner. Her journey brought her to embrace Methodism as well as the reform movements that found strong support among New England natives in the Western Reserve. Abigail House supported temperance, colonization, and then political antislavery. Her writings also indicate an engagement with the women’s rights movement.

On November 7, 1860, seventy-year-old House gave her memoirs to the executor of her will, instructing that they be published posthumously with minimal editing. After her death in February 1861, her memoir was printed in the offices of the Ashtabula Sentinel, the paper of Joshua R. Giddings. The work included the poems A Colonization Song and On Hearing the Result of the Buffalo Convention, the latter celebrating Martin Van Buren’s nomination for president by the Free Soil Party. Though it is unclear whether A Colonization Song is her own work, the verses on the Buffalo Convention were printed above her name.

A Colonization Song

Will you be colonized on the African shores?

And your fears will sleep, and you will rouse them no more.

’Tis a land that with honey and milk doth abound,

Where the lash is not heard, and the scourge is not found.

If you stay in this land where the white man hath rule,

You will starve by his hand in both body and soul.

For a nuisance you are, in this land of your birth,

Held down by his hand, and crushed to the earth.

My religion is pure, and it came from above,

But I cannot consent the black negro to love.

It is true, there are judgments that hang o’er the land,

But they all turn aside when you follow the plan.

’Tis a land where Sun-beams will addle your brains,

And savage banditti rove over the plains.

You’re ignorant I know, in this land of your birth,

And religion though pure, cannot remove the curse.

But only consent, though extorted by force,

What a blessing you’ll prove, on the African coast.

’Tis a land where sand-banks made hot from the skies,

Like clouds arise round you to dazzle your eyes.

Will you, will you, will you, will you be colonized?

On Hearing the Result of the Buffalo Convention

Hurrah for Van Buren, hurrah for free soil!

Hurrah for right principles for which we will toil!

Let us yet save our Nation from Slavery’s power;

No longer should freemen to Southerners cower.

Hurrah for Van Buren, hurrah all that can!

Hurrah for Van Buren, hurrah to a man!

Come up to the help of the people we cry:

To rescue from danger, methinks you will try.

Hurrah for Van Buren, come stand at your post!

Though Taylor and Cass men may think they’re a host!

Yet still we believe you may carry your point;

For true we discover them all out of joint.

Hurrah for Van Buren, and bless the glad day,

Also the Convention, and the Nominee!

We did shout when the news of it fell on our ear,

That the crisis to us, had come even this year.

Hurrah for Van Buren, again let us shout!

On the seventh of November, pray prove yourselves stout!

For a Nation divided we read cannot stand,

Therefore draw together and save our blest land.

Hurrah for Van Buren once more we do say!

For all have an interest, and enlist now we pray,

Arise to the battle that’s coming ere long,

Come up to the polls, be valiant and strong.

Hurrah for Van Buren, and for many more!

Which have stood at their posts, and yet they endure;

We cannot pass by them, without giving cheers,

So hurrah to all such as are not in the rear!

Now ladies we’ll give a hearty response,

For long have we sought to relieve from their bonds,

Those that are made of such material as we,

To give them their freedom how happy they’d be.

It is true we are helpless like the Slaves of the South,

Yet we feel to hurrah with the breath of our mouth,

Though anciently some staid, by the stuff it is said,

So let us submit to our husband and head.

Kind heaven forgive—though first in transgression,

We feel thy rebuke, and would fain make confession:

But we must be still if we cant count as much,

As that portion of South, that cannot be touched.

My dear Christian friends, a word and I’ll stop:

Our religion’s in danger, without civil prop,

Now take the alarm, though woman hath said,

Or else you may yet, have a nail drove in your head.

Memoirs of the Religious Experience and Life of Abigail House (Jefferson, Ohio, 1861), 250–51, 260–61.

AN OHIO DEMOCRAT OPPOSES THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT

When Senator Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska bill in Congress, opponents in Ohio called for a statewide meeting because "the question to be presented for consideration is one in which every free citizen, to whatever political party he may belong, has a direct personal interest, and in which the right and honor of every Northern and Western man is involved." The meeting was held on March 22, 1854, in Columbus. Newspaper accounts estimated that between 1,200 and 1,500 people attended. After calling the meeting to order, David K. Cartter of Stark County addressed those in attendance.

You place me in a peculiar position. I am accustomed to speak as a Democrat to Democrats. (Voices—You’re talking to them now.) Well, then, let me define my position. I did not come here as a Freesoiler, or as an Abolitionist; but, since I was born and bred among a people that were opposed to the desecration of free soil by human slavery, I am quite willing that the penny-a-liners shall report me as standing on that ground. So long as progress and development are inscribed upon the banner of the Democratic party, I will follow and defend it. . . . . I am here to act with free men to prevent an untold evil. The public mind has been shocked by the introduction in Congress of the bill to organize Nebraska and Kansas. . . . I have a plain, honest question to ask of those who defend this bill. If it is not designed to introduce slavery into the Territories, then why ask to repeal the clause forbidding slavery there? . . .

Again, look at those who insist upon the repeal of the prohibition. The South are invited—when did they do anything that had a tendency to weaken slavery? They tell us that the Missouri Compromise is unconstitutional; why, they don’t believe a word of that stuff themselves! The men who made the Constitution surely knew as much about it as the boys of the present day. God made us all and He knows more about His works than those who have