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he had any very definite or practical substitute to offer in its place. In 1824 he was appointed federal judge for the West District of Florida (National Intelligencer, February 26, 1825). The probable year of his death is given as 1827 in Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography, VI. 606. He appears to have been interested in science as well as government. Charles Moore has thrown some light on an earlier phase of Woodward's career in a slight sketch entitled Governor, Judge, and Priest: Detroit, 1805-1815. A paper read before the Witenagemote on Friday evening, October the Second, 1891 (New York, pp. 24).

2. The first Secretary of the Interior, Thomas Ewing, in his Report of December 3, 1849, wrote:

The department is named in the title "A Home Department "; but the body of the act provided that it shall be called "The Department of the Interior". The title of the act, being the part last adopted in the process of enactment, is believed to express the intention of Congress as to the

name. .

Secretary Alexander H. H. Stuart suggested in his Report of December 2, 1850, that Congress remove the ambiguity. But nothing was done until the revision of the statutes in 1873, when the department was properly entitled and characterized for the first time as an "Executive" department. In respect to the incongruity between the title and the text of the act of 1849, I venture to quote from a personal letter on the point sent to me under date of April 13, 1910, by Mr. Middleton Beaman, librarian of the Law Library of Congress and the Supreme Court:

So far as I know, the title of the act of 1849 is the only instance in which the title "Home Department" is used in legislation. Examination of the indexes of the Statutes at Large from 1849 to 1873 discloses numerous instances of reference to this department as the "Interior Department ". . . . The title of the original act cannot govern the usage, as the body of the act expressly declared that the department should be called "The Department of the Interior". By well settled rules of statutory construction the title of an act can have no weight except where the provisions of the act itself are ambiguous. I therefore am of opinion that the official designation has always been "The Department of the Interior".

3. Growth of the National Domain. The extent of the land acquisitions that were made to the United States in Polk's administration will be easily understood by the following table:

1781-1802: Cessions by the States....

1803 Louisiana Purchase

:

1805: Oregon

1812: West Florida

1819: Florida

819,815 square miles.
877,268
225,948

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(Taken from Professor T. N. Carver's article, "History of American Agriculture", in L. H. Bailey's Cyclopaedia of American Agriculture, IV. 50.)

It should be noted that none of the land in Texas belonged to the public domain and that much of the land in Colorado and New Mexico had been granted to private individuals before these regions came under the jurisdiction of the United States.

THE FIGHT FOR THE NORTHWEST, 1860'

THE powers of government were all in the hands of the Democrats in 1858-1860; that is, the presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court were overwhelmingly Democratic; only in the national House of Representatives was there an opposing force which could interpose a veto upon the conservative or reactionary movements in the national life, and this opposing force was not always sure of a majority even there.

The backbone of the Democracy was the South and the backbone of the South was slavery, the greatest single economic interest in the country. In the South there was no longer a conflict of opinion about "the institution ", and all the cultural forces of all the states south of the Potomac and the Ohio, the churches, the schools, and the periodicals, were united in the demand that slavery should not only be let alone but declared to be morally right and socially desirable. Almost every senator, representative, and judge of the federal courts who lived south of Mason and Dixon's line was himself a plantation owner whose income from private sources was two or three times as great as that derived from political or judicial services. Not only so; every governor, two-thirds of the legislators and members of the state judiciaries, high and low, were in the same way intimately bound up with "the interests" and there was nowhere in the South a protest against this government of the people by a privileged class-a class which had governed the nation as well since 1844 and, according to Mr. Rhodes, could have been expected to continue to govern for a decade to come.1a

The power of the South in the administration of the nation had depended on the alliance with the West which had continued in one form or another since the advent of Andrew Jackson. The West was, to 1850, peculiarly the child of the South. The local institutions of most of the states north of the Ohio were Southern, and the prominent families as well as a majority of the people were of Southern origin. The rivers were their highways and the rivers ran southward.

1

Paper read at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Indianapolis, December 30, 1910.

1a James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States, I. 422.

Though the Ordinance of 1787 forbade slavery in the Northwest many hundreds, even thousands, of slaves were owned and worked in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa far into the nineteenth century. One of Indiana's senators was the master of a slave-plantation in Kentucky; Senator Douglas owned in his wife's name a hundred negroes in Mississippi; both of Iowa's senators to 1855, Jones and Dodge, had been owners of slaves in Iowa to about 1840; while Henry Dodge, senator from Wisconsin, had also been a master of slaves. Cass, who represented the Northwest in the Cabinet, had held for many years that slavery could be lawfully carried into the territories. These were the most popular, the representative, men in their section before the appearance of Abraham Lincoln.

The people as a whole did not favor slavery, but their dislike of the negro was so great that as late as 1862 Illinois voted by a hundred thousand majority to forbid the immigration of negroes, and for thirty years prior to the war no colored man was allowed to enter the bounds of the state except on condition of giving a bond of one thousand dollars as a guarantee of good behavior, and what constituted "good behavior" was to be decided by local authorities hostile to the new-comer. In Iowa and Indiana the same policy obtained. Everywhere the weight of opinion and the burden of social disapproval rested heavily upon the shoulders of the ex-slave who had by some good fortune escaped the shackles of bondage.5 Negroes were citizens without rights; they were not allowed to testify in court against a white man, nor to serve in the militia, nor to send their children to the public schools, nor to vote in any election, nor to contract a lawful marriage. Stephen A. Douglas boasted that he would not vote slavery "up or down"; the people of the Northwest agreed with him as to slavery but were more hostile to the freedmen than were the Southerners themselves.

During the decade following 1850 a great inpouring of population from the East gave the half-settled counties of northern Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa a new people who hated black folk less, who knew not the civilization of the old river counties, and who looked to the Old Bay State or upper New York as the sources of their ideals. Chicago was the centre of this New West-a fact of which Douglas had shown his appreciation by becoming a citizen of the magic city.

2 C. T. Hicok, The Negro in Ohio, ch. 11.; N. D. Harris, Negro Servitude in Illinois, chs, V., XIII.; Iowa Journal of History and Politics, II. 471-484; J. P. Dunn, jr., History of Indiana, chs. vi. and XII.

N. D. Harris, Negro Servitude in Illinois, p. 239.

Ibid., pp. 235, 237.

Laws of Iowa, 1850-1851. p. 244; Dunn, History of Indiana, pp. 406, 432, 441, 470; John Jones, The Black Laws of Illinois (Chicago, 1860), a pamphlet.

When in 1858 Douglas found his leadership of the Northwest challenged by Lincoln, this new element of the population in the three strategic states numbered about 1,500,000, of which 900,000 were in Illinois and Iowa. About 368,000 were foreign-born, mainly German and British. The great majority of these later settlers were either hostile to slavery or jealous of the overweening power of the South, and they ranged themselves almost unanimously, at least at the beginning of the conflict, on the side of the opposition.

The Old West, the river counties, the gentry who had been the mainstay of the pro-Southern Democracy which had made Benton and Cass and Douglas great, was now evenly matched. In view of this change and in support of the economic needs of the new situation Douglas, who had been a strong ally of the South, revamped the doctrine of Polk, Benton, and others' of his day that slavery in the territories was dependent upon the will of the majority of their own settlers. While many Southern leaders saw at first in this a decided concession to their demands, it soon proved a sad delusion and became a rock of offense because it was sure to give the anti-slavery men control; but the idea was popular with the old order in the Northwest and it won many thousands of the new-comers-the very men who should have become the bone and sinew of the party of opposition and of free labor.

This remarkable feat gave to Douglas a popular following in the Northwest which in 1860 numbered 660,000 votes as against 550,000 in all the Southern States, for the regular or conservative wing of the Democracy. That is, the majority of the voters in the party were for Douglas and called themselves progressives, while a minority of the party sustained by the administration were in control and called themselves conservatives. Thus Douglas was building in 1858 a party within a party which, failing to secure his election in 1860, would throw the contest into the national House of Representatives. This was so evident that Greeley, Seward, and Thurlow Weed advised the nomination of Douglas by the Republicans in 1860 or at any rate his endorsement by the leading anti-slavery journals. as the only means of breaking the hold of the Southern oligarchy upon the Northwest."

The meaning of the contest in the Northwest had been fully

Census of 1860, Population, p. xxix.

Diary of James K. Polk, IV. 136-137, 140-142; A. C. McLaughlin, Life of Cass, p. 237-the Nicholson Letter.

$ Democratic Press and Tribune (Chicago), September 15, 1858, quoting the Washington Union.

J. F. Newton, Lincoln and Herndon (1910), pp. 147-148, 215.

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