The years between 1820 and 1830 were the most pitiable through which
this country has ever passed. The conscience of the North was pledged to
the Missouri Compromise, and that Compromise neither slumbered nor
slept. In New England, where the old theocratical oligarchy of the
colonies had survived the Revolution and kept under its own waterlocks
the new flood of trade, the conservatism of politics reinforced the
conservatism of religion; and as if these two inquisitions were not
enough to stifle the soul of man, the conservatism of business
self-interest was superimposed. The history of the conflicts which
followed has been written by the radicals, who negligently charge up to
self-interest all the resistance which establishments offer to change.
But it was not solely self-interest, it was conscience that backed the
Missouri Compromise, nowhere else, naturally, so strongly as in New
England. It was conscience that made cowards of us all. The white-lipped
generation of Edward Everett were victims, one might even say martyrs,
to conscience. They suffered the most terrible martyrdom that can fall
to man, a martyrdom which injured their immortal volition and dried up
the springs of life. If it were not that our poets have too seldom
deigned to dip into real life, I do not know what more awful subject for
a poem could have been found than that of the New England judge
enforcing the fugitive slave law. For lack of such a poem the heroism of
these men has been forgotten, the losing heroism of conservatism. It was
this spiritual power of a committed conscience which met the new forces
as they arose, and it deserves a better name than these new forces
afterward gave it. In 1830 the social fruits of these heavy conditions
could be seen in the life of the people. Free speech was lost.

"I know no country," says Tocqueville, who was here in 1831, "in which
there is so little independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in
America." Tocqueville recurs to the point again and again. He cannot