The following is an extract from Theodore Roosevelt’s
biography of Thomas H.
Benton in Houghton, Mifflin,
& Co.’s American Statesmen Series, published
in 1887:
“Owing to a variety of causes, the
Abolitionists have received an immense amount of
hysterical praise which they do not deserve, and have
been credited with deeds done by other men whom, in
reality, they hampered and opposed rather than aided.
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. Such
were the remote results of their conduct; the immediate
evils they produced have already been alluded to.
They bore considerable resemblance—except
that after all they really did have a principle
to contend for—to the political Prohibitionists
of the present day, who go into the third party
organization, and are, not even excepting the saloon-keepers
themselves, the most efficient allies on whom intemperance
and the liquor traffic can count.
“Anti-Slavery men like Giddings,
who supported Clay, were doing a thousandfold more
effective work for the cause they had at heart than
all the voters who supported Birney; or, to speak more
accurately, they were doing all they could to advance
the cause, while the others were doing all they
could to hold it back. Lincoln in 1860 occupied
more nearly the ground held by Clay than that held
by Birney; and the men who supported the latter in
1844 were the prototypes of those who worked to
oppose Lincoln in 1860, and only worked less hard
because they had less chance. The ultra Abolitionists
discarded expediency, and claimed to act for abstract
right on principle, no matter what the results might
