management of our affairs, and the central government has fortunately
had so little occasion for making itself felt at home and in the
domestic concerns of the States, that the idea of its relation to us as
a power, except for protection from without, has gradually become vague
and alien to our ordinary habits of thought. We have so long heard the
principle admitted, and seen it acted on with advantage to the general
weal, that the people are sovereign in their own affairs, that we must
recover our presence of mind before we see the fallacy of the
assumption, that the people, or a bare majority of them, in a single
State, can exercise their right of sovereignty as against the will of
the nation legitimately expressed. When such a contingency arises, it
is for a moment difficult to get rid of our habitual associations, and
to feel that we are not a mere partnership, dissolvable whether by
mutual consent or on the demand of one or more of its members, but a
nation, which can never abdicate its right, and can never surrender it
while virtue enough is left in the people to make it worth retaining.
It would seem to be the will of God that from time to time the manhood
of nations, like that of individuals, should be tried by great dangers
or by great opportunities. If the manhood be there, it makes the great
opportunity out of the great danger; if it be not there, then the great
danger out of the great opportunity. The occasion is offered us now of
trying whether a conscious nationality and a timely concentration of
the popular will for its maintenance be possible in a democracy, or
whether it is only despotisms that are capable of the sudden and
selfish energy of protecting themselves from destruction.
The Republican party has thus far borne itself with firmness and
moderation, and the great body of the Democratic party in the Free
States is gradually being forced into an alliance with it. Let us not
be misled by any sophisms about conciliation and compromise.
Discontented citizens may be conciliated and compromised with, but
never open rebels with arms in their hands. If there be any concessions
which justice may demand on the one hand and honor make on the other,
let us try if we can adjust them with the Border Slave States; but a
government has already signed its own death-warrant, when it consents
to make terms with law-breakers. First re-establish the supremacy of
order, and then it will be time to discuss terms; but do not call it a
compromise, when you give up your purse with a pistol at your head.
This is no time for sentimentalisms about the empty chair at the
national hearth; all the chairs would be empty soon enough, if one of
the children is to amuse itself with setting the house on fire,
whenever it can find a match. Since the election of Mr. Lincoln, not
one of the arguments has lost its force, not a cipher of the statistics
has been proved mistaken, on which the judgment of the people was made
up. Nobody proposes, or has proposed, to interfere with any existing
rights of property; the majority have not assumed to decide upon any
question of the righteousness or policy of certain social arrangements
existing in any part of the Confederacy; they have not undertaken to
constitute themselves the conscience of their neighbors; they have
simply endeavored to do their duty to their own posterity, and to
protect them from a system which, as ample experience has shown, and
that of our present difficulty were enough to show, fosters a sense of
irresponsibleness to all obligation in the governing class, and in the
governed an ignorance and a prejudice which may be misled at any moment
to the peril of the whole country.
But the present question is one altogether transcending all limits of
party and all theories of party policy. It is a question of national
existence; it is a question whether Americans shall govern America, or
whether a disappointed clique shall nullify all government now, and
render a stable government difficult hereafter; it is a question, not
whether we shall have civil war under certain contingencies, but
whether we shall prevent it under any. It is idle, and worse than idle,
to talk about Central Republics that can never be formed. We want
neither Central Republics nor Northern Republics, but our own Republic
and that of our fathers, destined one day to gather the whole continent
under a flag that shall be the most august in the world. Having once
known what it was to be members of a grand and peaceful constellation,
we shall not believe, without further proof, that the laws of our
gravitation are to be abolished, and we flung forth into chaos, a
hurlyburly of jostling and splintering stars, whenever Robert Toombs or
Robert Rhett, or any other Bob of the secession kite, may give a flirt
of self-importance. The first and greatest benefit of government is
that it keeps the peace, that it insures every man his right, and not
only that, but the permanence of it. In order to this, its first
requisite is stability; and this once firmly settled, the greater the
extent of conterminous territory that can be subjected to one system
and one language and inspired by one patriotism, the better. That there
should be some diversity of interests is perhaps an advantage, since
the necessity of legislating equitably for all gives legislation its
needful safeguards of caution and largeness of view. A single empire
embracing the whole world, and controlling, without extinguishing,
local organizations and nationalities, has been not only the dream of
conquerors, but the ideal of speculative philanthropists. Our own
dominion is of such extent and power, that it may, so far as this
continent is concerned, be looked upon as something like an approach to
the realization of such an ideal. But for slavery, it might have
succeeded in realizing it; and in spite of slavery, it may. One
language, one law, one citizenship over thousands of miles, and a
government on the whole so good that we seem to have forgotten what
government means,--these are things not to be spoken of with levity,
privileges not to be surrendered without a struggle. And yet while
Germany and Italy, taught by the bloody and bitter and servile
experience of centuries, are striving toward unity as the blessing
above all others desirable, we are to allow a Union, that for almost
eighty years has been the source and the safeguard of incalculable
advantages, to be shattered by the caprice of a rabble that has out-run
the intention of its leaders, while we are making up our minds what
coercion means! Ask the first constable, and he will tell you that it
is the force necessary for executing the laws. To avoid the danger of
what men who have seized upon forts, arsenals, and other property of
the United States, and continue to hold them by military force, may
choose to call civil war, we are allowing a state of things to gather
head which will make real civil war the occupation of the whole country
for years to come, and establish it as a permanent institution. There
is no such antipathy between the North and the South as men ambitious
of a consideration in the new republic, which their talents and
character have failed to secure them in the old, would fain call into
existence by asserting that it exists. The misunderstanding and dislike
between them is not so great as they were within living memory between
England and Scotland, as they are now between England and Ireland.
There is no difference of race, language, or religion. Yet, after a
dissatisfaction of near a century and two rebellions, there is no part
of the British dominion more loyal than Scotland, no British subjects
who would be more loath to part with the substantial advantages of
their imperial connection than the Scotch; and even in Ireland, after a
longer and more deadly feud, there is no sane man who would consent to
see his country irrevocably cut off from power and consideration to
obtain an independence which would be nothing but Donnybrook Fair
multiplied by every city, town, and village in the island. The same
considerations of policy and advantage which render the union of
Scotland and Ireland with England a necessity apply with even more
force to the several States of our Union. To let one, or two, or half a
dozen of them break away in a freak of anger or unjust suspicion, or,
still worse, from mistaken notions of sectional advantage, would be to
fail in our duty to ourselves and our country, would be a fatal
blindness to the lessons which immemorial history has been tracing on
the earth's surface, either with the beneficent furrow of the plough,
or, when that was unheeded, the fruitless gash of the cannon ball.
When we speak of coercion, we do not mean violence, but only the
assertion of constituted and acknowledged authority. Even if seceding
States could be conquered back again, they would not be worth the
conquest. We ask only for the assertion of a principle which shall give
the friends of order in the discontented quarters a hope to rally
round, and the assurance of the support they have a right to expect.
There is probably a majority, and certainly a powerful minority, in the
seceding States, who are loyal to the Union; and these should have that
support which the prestige of the General Government can alone give
them. It is not to the North nor to the Republican party that the
malcontents are called on to submit, but to the laws and to the benign
intentions of the Constitution, as they were understood by its framers.
What the country wants is a permanent settlement; and it has learned,
by repeated trial, that compromise is not a cement, but a wedge. The
Government did not hesitate to protect the doubtful right of property
of a Virginian in Anthony Burns by the exercise of coercion, and the
loyalty of Massachusetts was such that her own militia could be used to
enforce an obligation abhorrent, and, as there is reason to believe,
made purposely abhorrent, to her dearest convictions and most venerable
traditions; and yet the same Government tampers with armed treason, and
lets _I dare not_ wait upon _I would_, when it is a question of
protecting the acknowledged property of the Union, and of sustaining,
nay, preserving even, a gallant officer whose only fault is that he has
been too true to his flag. While we write, the newspapers bring us the
correspondence between Mr. Buchanan and the South Carolina "Commissioners;"
and surely never did a government stoop so low as ours has done, not
only in consenting to receive these ambassadors from Nowhere, but in
suggesting that a soldier deserves court-martial who has done all he
could to maintain himself in a forlorn hope, with rebellion in his
front and treachery in his rear. Our Revolutionary heroes had
old-fashioned notions about rebels, suitable to the straightforward
times in which they lived,--times when blood was as freely shed to
secure our national existence as milk-and-water is now to destroy it.
Mr. Buchanan might have profited by the example of men who knew nothing
of the modern arts of Constitutional interpretation, but saw clearly
the distinction between right and wrong. When a party of the Shays
rebels came to the house of General Pomeroy, in Northampton, and asked
if he could accommodate them,--the old soldier, seeing the green sprigs
in their hats, the badges of their treason, shouted to his son, "Fetch
me my hanger, and I'll _accommodate_ the scoundrels!" General Jackson,
we suspect, would have accommodated rebel commissioners in the same
peremptory style.
While our Government, like Giles in the old rhyme, is wondering whether
it is a government or not, emissaries of treason are cunningly working
upon the fears and passions of the Border States, whose true interests
are infinitely more on the side of the Union than of slavery. They are
luring the ambitious with visionary promises of Southern grandeur and
prosperity, and deceiving the ignorant into the belief that the
principles and practice of the Free States were truly represented by
John Brown. All this might have been prevented, had Mr. Buchanan in his
Message thought of the interests of his country instead of those of his
party. It is not too late to check and neutralize it now. A decisively
national and patriotic policy is all that can prevent excited men from
involving themselves so deeply that they will find "returning as
tedious as go o'er," and be more afraid of cowardice than of
consequences.
Slavery is no longer the matter in debate, and we must beware of being
led off upon that side-issue. The matter now in hand is the
reestablishment of order, the reaffirmation of national unity, and the
settling once for all whether there can be such a thing as a government
without the right to use its power in self-defence. The Republican
party has done all it could lawfully do in limiting slavery once more
to the States in which it exists, and in relieving the Free States from
forced complicity with an odious system. They can be patient, as
Providence is often patient, till natural causes work that conviction
which conscience has been unable to effect. They believe that the
violent abolition of slavery, which would be sure to follow sooner or
later the disruption of our Confederacy, would not compensate for the
evil that would be entailed upon both races by the abolition of our
nationality and the bloody confusion that would follow it. More than
this, they believe that there can be no permanent settlement except in
the definite establishment of the principle, that this Government, like
all others, rests upon the everlasting foundations of just
Authority,--that that authority, once delegated by the people, becomes
a common stock of Power to be wielded for the common protection, and
from which no minority or majority of partners can withdraw its
contribution under any conditions,--that this power is what makes us a
nation, and implies a corresponding duty of submission, or, if that be
refused, then a necessary right of self-vindication. We are citizens,
when we make laws; we become subjects, when we attempt to break them
after they are made. Lynch-law maybe better than no law in new and
half-organized communities, but we cannot tolerate its application in
the affairs of government. The necessity of suppressing rebellion by
force may be a terrible one, but its consequences, whatever they may
be, do not weigh a feather in comparison with those that would follow
from admitting the principle that there is no social compact binding on
any body of men too numerous to be arrested by a United States marshal.
As we are writing these sentences, the news comes to us that South
Carolina has taken the initiative, and chosen the arbitrament of war.
She has done it because her position was desperate, and because she
hoped thereby to unite the Cotton States by a complicity in blood, as
they are already committed by a unanimity in bravado. Major Anderson
deserves more than ever the thanks of his country for his wise
forbearance. The foxes in Charleston, who have already lost their tails
in the trap of Secession, wished to throw upon him the responsibility
of that second blow which begins a quarrel, and the silence of his guns
has balked them. Nothing would have pleased them so much as to have one
of his thirty-two-pound shot give a taste of real war to the boys who
are playing soldier at Morris's Island. But he has shown the discretion
of a brave man. South Carolina will soon learn how much she has
undervalued the people of the Free States. Because they prefer law to
bowie-knives and revolvers, she has too lightly reckoned on their
caution and timidity. She will find that, though slow to kindle, they
are as slow to yield, and that they are willing to risk their lives for
the defence of law, though not for the breach of it. They are beginning
to question the value of a peace that is forced on them at the point of
the bayonet, and is to be obtained only by an abandonment of rights and
duties.
When we speak of the courage and power of the Free States, we do not
wish to be understood as descending to the vulgar level of meeting brag
with brag. We speak of them only as among the elements to be gravely
considered by the fanatics who may render it necessary for those who
value the continued existence of this Confederacy as it deserves to be
valued to kindle a back-fire, and to use the desperate means which God
has put into their hands to be employed in the last extremity of free
institutions. And when we use the term coercion, nothing is farther
from our thoughts than the carrying of blood and fire among those whom
we still consider our brethren of South Carolina. These civilized
communities of ours have interests too serious to be risked on a
childish wager of courage,--a quality that can always be bought cheaper
than day-labor on a railway-embankment. We wish to see the Government
strong enough for the maintenance of law, and for the protection, if
need be, of the unfortunate Governor Pickens from the anarchy he has
allowed himself to be made a tool of by evoking. Let the power of the
Union be used for any other purpose than that of shutting and barring
the door against the return of misguided men to their allegiance. At
the same time we think legitimate and responsible force prudently
exerted safer than the submission, without a struggle, to unlawful and
irresponsible violence.
Peace is the greatest of blessings, when it is won and kept by manhood
and wisdom; but it is a blessing that will not long be the housemate of
cowardice. It is God alone who is powerful enough to let His authority
slumber; it is only His laws that are strong enough to protect and
avenge themselves. Every human government is bound to make its laws so
far resemble His that they shall be uniform, certain, and
unquestionable in their operation; and this it can do only by a timely
show of power, and by an appeal to that authority which is of divine
right, inasmuch as its office is to maintain that order which is the
single attribute of the Infinite Reason that we can clearly apprehend
and of which we have hourly example.
THE PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION
1861
Had any one ventured to prophesy on the Fourth of March that the
immediate prospect of Civil War would be hailed by the people of the
Free States with a unanimous shout of enthusiasm, he would have been
thought a madman. Yet the prophecy would have been verified by what we
now see and hear in every city, town, and hamlet from Maine to Kansas.
With the advantage of three months' active connivance in the cabinet of
Mr. Buchanan, with an empty treasury at Washington, and that reluctance
to assume responsibility and to inaugurate a decided policy, the common
vice of our politicians, who endeavor to divine and to follow popular
sentiment rather than to lead it, it seemed as if Disunion were
inevitable, and the only open question were the line of separation. So
assured seemed the event that English journalists moralized gravely on
the inherent weakness of Democracy. While the leaders of the Southern
Rebellion did not dare to expose their treason to the risk of a popular
vote in any one of the seceding States, _The Saturday Review_, one
of the ablest of British journals, solemnly warned its countrymen to
learn by our example the dangers of an extended suffrage.
Meanwhile, the conduct of the people of the Free States, during all
these trying and perilous months, had proved, if it proved anything,
the essential conservatism of a population in which every grown man
has a direct interest in the stability of the national government.
So abstinent are they by habit and principle from any abnormal
intervention with the machine of administration, so almost
superstitious in adherence to constitutional forms, as to be for a
moment staggered by the claim to a _right_ of secession set up by all
the Cotton States, admitted by the Border Slave States, which had the
effrontery to deliberate between their plain allegiance and their
supposed interest, and but feebly denied by the Administration then in
power. The usual panacea of palaver was tried; Congress did its best to
add to the general confusion of thought; and, as if that were not
enough, a Convention of Notables was called simultaneously to thresh
the straw of debate anew, and to convince thoughtful persons that men
do not grow wiser as they grow older. So in the two Congresses the
notables talked,--in the one those who ought to be shelved, in the
other those who were shelved already,--while those who were too
thoroughly shelved for a seat in either addressed Great Union Meetings
at home. Not a man of them but had a compromise in his pocket, adhesive
as Spalding's glue, warranted to stick the shattered Confederacy
together so firmly that, if it ever broke again, it must be in a new
place, which was a great consolation. If these gentlemen gave nothing
very valuable to the people of the Free States, they were giving the
Secessionists what was of inestimable value to them,--Time. The latter
went on seizing forts, navy-yards, and deposits of Federal money,
erecting batteries, and raising and arming men at their leisure; above
all, they acquired a prestige, and accustomed men's minds to the
thought of disunion, not only as possible, but actual. They began to
grow insolent, and, while compelling absolute submission to their
rebellious usurpation at home, decried any exercise of legitimate
authority on the part of the General Government as _Coercion_,--a new
term, by which it was sought to be established as a principle of
constitutional law, that it is always the Northern bull that has gored
the Southern ox.
During all this time, the Border Slave States, and especially Virginia,
were playing a part at once cowardly and selfish. They assumed the
right to stand neutral between the government and rebellion, to
contract a kind of morganatic marriage with Treason, by which they
could enjoy the pleasant sin without the tedious responsibility, and to
be traitors in everything but the vulgar contingency of hemp. Doubtless
the aim of the political managers in these States was to keep the North
amused with schemes of arbitration, reconstruction, and whatever other
fine words would serve the purpose of hiding the real issue, till the
new government of Secessia should have so far consolidated itself as to
be able to demand with some show of reason a recognition from foreign
powers, and to render it politic for the United States to consent to
peaceable separation. They counted on the self-interest of England and
the supineness of the North. As to the former, they were not wholly
without justification,--for nearly all the English discussions of the
"American Crisis" which we have seen have shown far more of the
shop-keeping spirit than of interest in the maintenance of free
institutions; but in regard to the latter they made the fatal mistake
of believing our Buchanans, Cushings, and Touceys to be representative
men. They were not aware how utterly the Democratic party had divorced
itself from the moral sense of the Free States, nor had they any
conception of the tremendous recoil of which the long-repressed
convictions, traditions, and instincts of a people are capable.
Never was a nation so in want of a leader; never was it more plain
that, without a head, the people "bluster abroad as beasts," with
plenty of the iron of purpose, but purpose without coherence, and with
no cunning smith of circumstance to edge it with plan and helve it with
direction. What the country was waiting for showed itself in the
universal thrill of satisfaction when Major Anderson took the
extraordinary responsibility of doing his duty. But such was the
general uncertainty, so doubtful seemed the loyalty of the Democratic
party as represented by its spokesmen at the North, so irresolute was
the tone of many Republican leaders and journals, that a powerful and
wealthy community of twenty millions of people gave a sigh of relief
when they had been permitted to install the Chief Magistrate of their
choice in their own National Capital. Even after the inauguration of
Mr. Lincoln, it was confidently announced that Jefferson Davis, the
Burr of the Southern conspiracy, would be in Washington before the
month was out; and so great was the Northern despondency that the
chances of such an event were seriously discussed. While the nation was
falling to pieces, there were newspapers and "distinguished statesmen"
of the party so lately and so long in power base enough to be willing
to make political capital out of the common danger, and to lose their
country, if they could only find their profit. There was even one man
found in Massachusetts, who, measuring the moral standard of his party
by his own, had the unhappy audacity to declare publicly that there
were friends enough of the South in his native State to prevent the
march of any troops thence to sustain that Constitution to which he had
sworn fealty in Heaven knows how many offices, the rewards of almost as
many turnings of his political coat. There was one journal in New York
which had the insolence to speak of _President_ Davis and _Mister_
Lincoln in the same paragraph. No wonder the "dirt-eaters" of the
Carolinas could be taught to despise a race among whom creatures might
be found to do that by choice which they themselves were driven to do
by misery.