right, and therefore the duty, in the governing power, of protecting
itself from destruction and its property from pillage. But for Mr.
Buchanan's acquiescence, the doctrine of the right of secession would
never for a moment have bewildered the popular mind. It is simply
mob-law under a plausible name. Such a claim might have been fairly
enough urged under the old Confederation; though even then it would
have been summarily dealt with, in the case of a Tory colony, if the
necessity had arisen. But the very fact that we have a National
Constitution, and legal methods for testing, preventing, or punishing
any infringement of its provisions, demonstrates the absurdity of any
such assumption of right now. When the States surrendered their power
to make war, did they make the single exception of the United States,
and reserve the privilege of declaring war against them at any moment?
If we are a congeries of mediaeval Italian republics, why should the
General Government have expended immense sums in fortifying points
whose strategic position is of continental rather than local
consequence? Florida, after having cost us nobody knows how many
millions of dollars and thousands of lives to render the holding of
slaves possible to her, coolly proposes to withdraw herself from the
Union and take with her one of the keys of the Mexican Gulf, on the
plea that her slave-property is rendered insecure by the Union.
Louisiana, which we bought and paid for to secure the mouth of the
Mississippi, claims the right to make her soil French or Spanish, and
to cork up the river again, whenever the whim may take her. The United
States are not a German Confederation, but a unitary and indivisible
nation, with a national life to protect, a national power to maintain,
and national rights to defend against any and every assailant, at all
hazards. Our national existence is all that gives value to American
citizenship. Without the respect which nothing but our consolidated
character could inspire, we might as well be citizens of the
toy-republic of San Marino, for all the protection it would afford us.
If our claim to a national existence was worth a seven years' war to
establish, it is worth maintaining at any cost; and it is daily
becoming more apparent that the people, so soon as they find that
secession means anything serious, will not allow themselves to be
juggled out of their rights, as members of one of the great powers of
the earth, by a mere quibble of Constitutional interpretation.
We have been so much accustomed to the Buncombe style of oratory, to
hearing men offer the pledge of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor
on the most trivial occasions, that we are apt to allow a great
latitude in such matters, and only smile to think how small an advance
any intelligent pawnbroker would be likely to make on securities of
this description. The sporadic eloquence that breaks out over the
country on the eve of election, and becomes a chronic disease in the
two houses of Congress, has so accustomed us to dissociate words and
things, and to look upon strong language as an evidence of weak
purpose, that we attach no meaning whatever to declamation. Our
Southern brethren have been especially given to these orgies of
loquacity, and have so often solemnly assured us of their own courage,
and of the warlike propensities, power, wealth, and general superiority
of that part of the universe which is so happy as to be represented by
them, that, whatever other useful impression they have made, they
insure our never forgetting the proverb about the woman who talks of
her virtue. South Carolina, in particular, if she has hitherto failed
in the application of her enterprise to manufacturing purposes of a
more practical kind, has always been able to match every yard of
printed cotton from the North with a yard of printed fustian, the
product of her own domestic industry. We have thought no harm of this,
so long as no Act of Congress required the reading of the
"Congressional Globe." We submitted to the general dispensation of
long-windedness and short-meaningness as to any other providental
visitation, endeavoring only to hold fast our faith in the divine
government of the world in the midst of so much that was past
understanding. But we lost sight of the metaphysical truth, that,
though men may fail to convince others by a never so incessant
repetition of sonorous nonsense, they nevertheless gradually persuade
themselves, and impregnate their own minds and characters with a belief
in fallacies that have been uncontradicted only because not worth
contradiction. Thus our Southern politicians, by dint of continued
reiteration, have persuaded themselves to accept their own flimsy
assumptions for valid statistics, and at last actually believe
themselves to be the enlightened gentlemen, and the people of the Free
States the peddlers and sneaks they have so long been in the habit of
fancying. They have argued themselves into a kind of vague faith that
the wealth and power of the Republic are south of Mason and Dixon's
line; and the Northern people have been slow in arriving at the
conclusion that treasonable talk would lead to treasonable action,
because they could not conceive that anybody should be so foolish as to
think of rearing an independent frame of government on so visionary a
basis. Moreover, the so often recurring necessity, incident to our
system, of obtaining a favorable verdict from the people has fostered
in our public men the talents and habits of jury-lawyers at the expense
of statesmanlike qualities; and the people have been so long wonted to
look upon the utterances of popular leaders as intended for immediate
effect and having no reference to principles, that there is scarcely a
prominent man in the country so independent in position and so clear of
any suspicion of personal or party motives that they can put entire
faith in what he says, and accept him either as the leader or the
exponent of their thoughts and wishes. They have hardly been able to
judge with certainty from the debates in Congress whether secession
were a real danger, or only one of those political feints of which they
have had such frequent experience.
Events have been gradually convincing them that the peril was actual
and near. They begin to see how unwise, if nothing worse, has been the
weak policy of the Executive in allowing men to play at Revolution till
they learn to think the coarse reality as easy and pretty as the
vaudeville they have been acting. They are fast coming to the
conclusion that the list of grievances put forward by the secessionists
is a sham and a pretence, the veil of a long-matured plot against
republican institutions. And it is time the traitors of the South
should know that the Free States are becoming every day more united in
sentiment and more earnest in resolve, and that, so soon as they are
thoroughly satisfied that secession is something more than empty
bluster, a public spirit will be aroused that will be content with no
half-measures, and which no Executive, however unwilling, can resist.
The country is weary of being cheated with plays upon words. The United
States are a nation, and not a mass-meeting; theirs is a government,
and not a caucus,--a government that was meant to be capable, and is
capable, of something more than the helpless _please don't_ of a
village constable; they have executive and administrative officers that
are not mere puppet-figures to go through the motions of an objectless
activity, but arms and hands that become supple to do the will of the
people so soon as that will becomes conscious and defines its purpose.
It is time that we turned up our definitions in some more trustworthy
dictionary than that of avowed disunionists and their more dangerous
because more timid and cunning accomplices. Rebellion smells no sweeter
because it is called Secession, nor does Order lose its divine
precedence in human affairs because a knave may nickname it Coercion.
Secession means chaos, and Coercion the exercise of legitimate
authority. You cannot dignify the one nor degrade the other by any
verbal charlatanism. The best testimony to the virtue of coercion is
the fact that no wrongdoer ever thought well of it. The thief in jail,
the mob-leader in the hands of the police, and the murderer on the drop
will be unanimous in favor of this new heresy of the unconstitutionality
of constitutions, with its Newgate Calendar of confessors, martyrs, and
saints. Falstaff's famous regiment would have volunteered to a man for
its propagation or its defence. Henceforth let every unsuccessful
litigant have the right to pronounce the verdict of a jury sectional,
and to quash all proceedings and retain the property in controversy by
seceding from the court-room. Let the planting of hemp be made penal,
because it squints toward coercion. Why, the first great secessionist
would doubtless have preferred to divide heaven peaceably, would have
been willing to send commissioners, must have thought Michael's
proceedings injudicious, and could probably even now demonstrate the
illegality of hell-fire to any five-year-old imp of average education
and intelligence. What a fine world we should have, if we could only
come quietly together in convention, and declare by unanimous
resolution, or even by a two-thirds vote, that edge-tools should
hereafter cut everybody's fingers but his that played with them; that,
when two men ride on one horse, the hindmost shall always sit in front;
and that, when a man tries to thrust his partner out of bed and gets
kicked out himself, he shall be deemed to have established his title to
an equitable division, and the bed shall be thenceforth his as of
right, without detriment to the other's privilege in the floor!
If secession be a right, then the moment of its exercise is wholly
optional with those possessing it. Suppose, on the eve of a war with
England, Michigan should vote herself out of the Union and declare
herself annexed to Canada, what kind of a reception would her
commissioners be likely to meet in Washington, and what scruples should
we feel about coercion? Or, to take a case precisely parallel to that
of South Carolina, suppose that Utah, after getting herself admitted to
the Union, should resume her sovereignty, as it is pleasantly called,
and block our path to the Pacific, under the pretence that she did not
consider her institutions safe while the other States entertained such
unscriptural prejudices against her special weakness in the patriarchal
line. Is the only result of our admitting a Territory on Monday to be
the giving it a right to steal itself and go out again on Tuesday? Or
do only the original thirteen States possess this precious privilege of
suicide? We shall need something like a Fugitive Slave Law for runaway
republics, and must get a provision inserted in our treaties with
foreign powers, that they shall help us catch any delinquent who may
take refuge with them, as South Carolina has been trying to do with
England and France. It does not matter to the argument, except so far
as the good taste of the proceeding is concerned, at what particular
time a State may make her territory foreign, thus opening one gate of
our national defences and offering a bridge to invasion. The danger of
the thing is in her making her territory foreign under any
circumstances; and it is a danger which the government must prevent, if
only for self-preservation. Within the limits of the constitution two
sovereignties cannot exist; and yet what practical odds does it make,
if a State may become sovereign by simply declaring herself so? The
legitimate consequence of secession is, not that a State becomes
sovereign, but that, so far as the general government is concerned, she
has outlawed herself, nullified her own existence as a State, and
become an aggregate of riotous men who resist the execution of the
laws.
We are told that coercion will be civil war; and so is a mob civil war,
till it is put down. In the present case, the only coercion called for
is the protection of the public property, and the collection of the
federal revenues. If it be necessary to send troops to do this, they
will not be sectional, as it is the fashion nowadays to call people who
insist on their own rights and the maintenance of the laws, but federal
troops, representing the will and power of the whole Confederacy. A
danger is always great so long as we are afraid of it; and mischief
like that now gathering head in South Carolina may soon become a
danger, if not swiftly dealt with. Mr. Buchanan seems altogether too
wholesale a disciple of the _laissez-faire_ doctrine, and has allowed
activity in mischief the same immunity from interference which is true
policy only in regard to enterprise wisely and profitably directed. He
has been naturally reluctant to employ force, but has overlooked the
difference between indecision and moderation, forgetting the lesson of
all experience, that firmness in the beginning saves the need of force
in the end, and that forcible measures applied too late may be made to
seem violent ones, and thus excite a mistaken sympathy with the
sufferers by their own misdoing. The feeling of the country has been
unmistakably expressed in regard to Major Anderson, and that not merely
because he showed prudence and courage, but because he was the first
man holding a position of trust who did his duty to the nation. Public
sentiment unmistakably demands that, in the case of Anarchy _vs._
America, the cause of the defendant shall not be suffered to go by
default. The proceedings in South Carolina, parodying the sublime
initiative of our own Revolution with a Declaration of Independence
that hangs the franchise of human nature on the kink of a hair, and
substitutes for the visionary right of all men to the pursuit of
happiness the more practical privilege of some men to pursue their own
negro,--these proceedings would be merely ludicrous, were it not for
the danger that the men engaged in them may so far commit themselves as
to find the inconsistency of a return to prudence too galling, and to
prefer the safety of their pride to that of their country.
[Illustration: _Major Anderson_]
It cannot be too distinctly stated or too often repeated that the
discontent of South Carolina is not one to be allayed by any
concessions which the Free States can make with dignity or even safety.
It is something more radical and of longer standing than distrust of
the motives or probable policy of the Republican party. It is neither
more nor less than a disbelief in the very principles on which our
government is founded. So long as they practically retained the
government of the country, and could use its power and patronage to
their own advantage, the plotters were willing to wait; but the moment
they lost that control, by the breaking up of the Democratic party, and
saw that their chance of ever regaining it was hopeless, they declared
openly the principles on which they have all along been secretly
acting. Denying the constitutionality of special protection to any
other species of property or branch of industry, and in 1832
threatening to break up the Union unless their theory of the
Constitution in this respect were admitted, they went into the late
Presidential contest with a claim for extraordinary protection to a
certain kind of property already the only one endowed with special
privileges and immunities. Defeated overwhelmingly before the people,
they now question the right of the majority to govern, except on their
terms, and threaten violence in the hope of extorting from the fears of
the Free States what they failed to obtain from their conscience and
settled convictions of duty. Their quarrel is not with the Republican
party, but with the theory of Democracy.
The South Carolina politicians have hitherto shown themselves adroit
managers, shrewd in detecting and profiting by the weaknesses of men;
but their experience has not been of a kind to give them practical
wisdom in that vastly more important part of government which depends
for success on common sense and business habits. The members of the
South Carolina Convention have probably less knowledge of political
economy than any single average Northern merchant whose success depends
on an intimate knowledge of the laws of trade and the world-wide
contingencies of profit and loss. Such a man would tell them, as the
result of invariable experience, that the prosperity of no community
was so precarious as that of one whose very existence was dependent on
a single agricultural product. What divinity hedges cotton, that
competition may not touch it,--that some disease, like that of the
potato and the vine, may not bring it to beggary in a single year, and
cure the overweening conceit of prosperity with the sharp medicine of
Ireland and Madeira? But these South Carolina economists are better at
vaporing than at calculation. They will find to their cost that the
figures of statistics have little mercy for the figures of speech,
which are so powerful in raising enthusiasm and so helpless in raising
money. The eating of one's own words, as they must do, sooner or later,
is neither agreeable nor nutritious; but it is better to do it before
there is nothing else left to eat. The secessionists are strong in
declamation, but they are weak in the multiplication-table and the
ledger. They have no notion of any sort of logical connection between
treason and taxes. It is all very fine signing Declarations of
Independence, and one may thus become a kind of panic-price hero for a
week or two, even rising to the effigial martyrdom of the illustrated
press; but these gentlemen seem to have forgotten that, if their
precious document should lead to anything serious, they have been
signing promises to pay for the State of South Carolina to an enormous
amount. It is probably far short of the truth to say that the taxes of
an autonomous palmetto republic would be three times what they are now.
To speak of nothing else, there must be a military force kept
constantly on foot; and the ministers of King Cotton will find that the
charge made by a standing army on the finances of the new empire is
likely to be far more serious and damaging than can be compensated by
the glory of a great many such "spirited charges" as that by which
Colonel Pettigrew and his gallant rifles took Fort Pinckney, with its
garrison of one engineer officer and its armament of no guns. Soldiers
are the most costly of all toys or tools. The outgo for the army of the
Pope, never amounting to ten thousand effective men, in the cheapest
country in the world, has been half a million of dollars a month. Under
the present system, it needs no argument to show that the
non-slaveholding States, with a free population considerably more than
double that of the slaveholding States, and with much more generally
distributed wealth and opportunities of spending, pay far more than the
proportion predicable on mere preponderance in numbers of the expenses
of a government supported mainly by a tariff on importations. And it is
not the burden of this difference merely that the new Cotton Republic
must assume. They will need as large, probably a larger, army and navy
than that of the present Union; as numerous a diplomatic establishment;
a postal system whose large yearly deficit they must bear themselves;
and they must assume the main charges of the Indian Bureau. If they
adopt free trade, they will alienate the Border Slave States, and even
Louisiana; if a system of customs, they have cut themselves off from
the chief consumers of foreign goods. One of the calculations of the
Southern conspirators is to render the Free States tributary to their
new republic by adopting free trade and smuggling their imported goods
across the border. But this is all moonshine; for, even if smuggling
could not be prevented as easily as it now is from the British
Provinces, how long would it be before the North would adapt its tariff
to the new order of things? And thus thrown back upon direct taxation,
how many years would it take to open the eyes of the poorer classes of
Secessia to the hardship of their position and its causes? Their
ignorance has been trifled with by men who cover treasonable designs
with a pretence of local patriotism. Neither they nor their misleaders
have any true conception of the people of the Free States, of those
"white slaves" who in Massachusetts alone have a deposit in the Savings
Banks whose yearly interest would pay seven times over the four hundred
thousand dollars which South Carolina cannot raise.
But even if we leave other practical difficulties out of sight, what
chance of stability is there for a confederacy whose very foundation is
the principle that any member of it may withdraw at the first
discontent? If they could contrive to establish a free trade treaty
with their chief customer, England, would she consent to gratify
Louisiana with an exception in favor of sugar? Some of the leaders of
the secession movement have already become aware of this difficulty,
and accordingly propose the abolition of all State lines,--the first
step toward a military despotism; for, if our present system have one
advantage greater than another, it is the neutralization of numberless
individual ambitions by adequate opportunities of provincial
distinction. Even now the merits of the Napoleonic system are put
forward by some of the theorists of Alabama and Mississippi, who
doubtless have as good a stomach to be emperors as ever Bottom had to a
bottle of hay, when his head was temporarily transformed to the
likeness of theirs,--and who, were they subjects of the government that
looks so nice across the Atlantic, would, ere this, have been on their
way to Cayenne, a spot where such red-peppery temperaments would find
themselves at home.
The absurdities with which the telegraphic column of the newspapers has
been daily crowded, since the vagaries of South Carolina finally
settled down into unmistakable insanity, would give us but a poor
opinion of the general intelligence of the country, did we not know
that they were due to the necessities of "Our Own Correspondent." At
one time, it is Fort Sumter that is to be bombarded with floating
batteries mounted on rafts behind a rampart of cotton-bales; at
another, it is Mr. Barrett, Mayor of Washington, announcing his
intention that the President-elect shall be inaugurated, or Mr.
Buchanan declaring that he shall cheerfully assent to it. Indeed! and
who gave them any choice in the matter? Yesterday, it was General Scott
who would not abandon the flag which he had illustrated with the
devotion of a lifetime; to-day, it is General Harney or Commodore
Kearney who has concluded to be true to the country whose livery he has
worn and whose bread he has eaten for half a century; to-morrow, it
will be Ensign Stebbins who has been magnanimous enough not to throw up
his commission. What are we to make of the extraordinary confusion of
ideas which such things indicate? In what other country would it be
considered creditable to an officer that he merely did not turn traitor
at the first opportunity? There can be no doubt of the honor both of
the army and navy, and of their loyalty to their country. They will do
their duty, if we do ours in saving them a country to which they can be
loyal.