Birney, Owen Lovejoy, and others,
was that the Constitution in so far as it recognised slavery (which it
did only by implication) was a compact with evil. They held that the
Fathers had been led into this compact unwittingly and without full
realisation of the responsibilities that they were assuming for the
perpetuation of a great wrong. They refused to accept the view that
later generations of American citizens were to be bound for an
indefinite period by this error of judgment on the part of the Fathers.
They proposed to get rid of slavery, as an institution incompatible with
the principles on which the Republic was founded. They pointed out that
under the Declaration of Independence all men had an equal right to
"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and that there was no
limitation of this claim to men of white race. If it was not going to be
possible to argue slavery out of existence, these men preferred to have
the Union dissolved rather than to bring upon States like Massachusetts
a share of the responsibility for the wrong done to mankind and to
justice under the laws of South Carolina.
The Whig party, whose great leader, Henry Clay, had closed his life in
1852, just at the time when Lincoln was becoming prominent in politics,
held that all citizens were bound by the compact entered into by their
ancestors, first under the Articles of Confederation of 1783, and later
under the Constitution of 1789.
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