FACE TO FACE
To understand the meaning of secession and the Civil War which followed
it, we must fathom the thoughts and feelings of the opposing parties.
Let us suppose two representative spokesmen to state their case in turn.
Let the Secessionist speak first. The Secessionists were not at first a
majority of the people of the Southern States, but it was their view
which prevailed. What that view was we know certainly and from abundant
evidence,--the formal acts of secession, the speeches of the leaders in
Congress and at home, the histories since written by the President and
Vice-President of the Confederacy, and countless similar sources. This,
substantially, was the Secessionist's position:--
"This Union is a partnership of States, of which the formal bond is the
Constitution; the vital principle is the enjoyment by each section and
community of its rights; and the animating spirit is the mutual respect
and good-will of all members of the Union. The Northern people have
violated the provisions of the Constitution; they have infringed the
essential rights of the Southern communities, and threatened to invade
them still further; and they have displaced the spirit of mutual
good-will by alienation, suspicion, and hostility. The formal bond of
the Union being thus impaired, and its vital spirit lost, we propose
explicitly and finally to dissolve this partnership of States, and
reorganize our Southern communities in a new Confederacy.
"We charge you of the North with explicit violation of the Constitution
in the matters of the territories, the Supreme Court and the fugitive
slaves.
"You deny our right to carry a part of our property,--our unquestioned
property under the Constitution,--into the territories which belong
equally to the whole nation, and which have been acquired by our
treasure and our blood not less than by yours. You prevent slave-holders
from participating in the colonization of this domain, and thus
determine in advance that its future States shall exclude our
institutions. You thus unfairly build up a political preponderance,
which you use for the discouragement and injury of our industrial
system.
"Against this wrong we have appealed to the Supreme Court, and secured
its express affirmation of the right to carry slave property, equally
with any other property, into the territories. This solemn decree of the
highest judicial authority you set at naught and defy. You say you will
reorganize the court and reverse the decision. You do not even wait for
that; you assume in party convention to reverse the mandate of the
Supreme Court. You not only contradict its declaration that slavery in
the territories is protected by the Constitution; you go farther, and
affirm that Congress has no authority to protect it there.
"The Constitution affirms that fugitives from labor must be returned to
their masters. A Federal statute provides for such return. That statute
is not only decried by your orators and resisted by your mobs; it is
contravened and practically nullified by statutes in all the free
States.
"These specific wrongs against us are inspired by a disposition which in
itself dissolves the bond of friendship between you and us,--a spirit of
open and avowed hostility to our social and industrial system. The Union
as our fathers established it, and as alone it has any value, is not a
thing of mere legalities,--it must be a true union of hearts and hands,
a spirit of mutual confidence and respect among the various communities
of one people. But for many years our most characteristic Southern
institution has been widely and loudly denounced among you as wicked and
inhuman. It has been proclaimed as 'the sum of all villainies.' We have
been held up to the reprobation of the world as tyrants and
man-stealers. Those at the North who disapproved of such abuse have
failed to silence or repress it. This denunciation has spread until
apparently it has won the preponderating sentiment of the North. A
national household in which we are thus branded as sinners and criminals
is no longer a home for us.
"This hostility has borne its natural fruit in open attack. A peaceful
Virginia village has been assailed by armed men, its citizens shot down
while defending their homes, and the summons given for servile
insurrection with all its horrors. The leader in this crime, justly
condemned and executed under Virginia's laws, has been widely honored
throughout the North as a hero and martyr. By the light of that applause
we must interpret the real feeling of the North, and its probable future
course toward us.
"The Presidential election has now been won by a party whose avowed
principle is the restriction of slavery, while its animating spirit is
active hostility to slavery. We cannot trust the Republican party in its
profession of respect for the Constitution. Even in its formal
declaration it ignores a Supreme Court decision, and advances a
revolutionary doctrine as to slavery in the territories. Its elected
candidate has declared that 'this government cannot endure permanently
half slave and half free.' The party's only reason for being is
opposition to slavery, and there is every probability that this
opposition will, with growing power and opportunity, be directed against
the system as it now exists in our Southern States.
"The spirit of the American Union is dissolved already, when its chief
magistrate has been elected by the votes of one section and by a party
animated solely by hostility to the industrial and social system of the
other section. The formal bond of the Union can hereafter be only an
instrument to harass and destroy our liberties. We therefore propose
that that bond be at once and finally cancelled. It is and has been from
the beginning the right of any State to withdraw from the national
partnership at its own pleasure. We call on our brethren of the South to
take prompt action for the deliberate, legal and solemn withdrawal of
their States from the Union, and their organization in a new
Confederacy."
So in effect spoke the leading spirits of the Gulf and Cotton States as
soon as Lincoln was elected in November, 1860. Less promptly, coming
only gradually into unison, but with growing clearness and emphasis,
spoke the dominant spirit of the North in the months between Lincoln's
election and inauguration. This in substance was the Northern reply to
the Secessionist:--
"We deny that we have violated the Constitution, that we have wronged
you, or that we intend to wrong you. We have taken no advantage of you
beyond the legitimate victories of political controversy. We are loyal
to the Constitution, and to that which is deeper and higher than the
Constitution,--the spirit of American nationality.
"Taking up your specific charges,--the status of slavery in the various
territories has been debated and battled in Congress and among the
people for seventy years, and as now one decision and now another has
been reached it has been accepted by all until peaceably changed. For
six years past it has been the cardinal question in national politics.
Within that period three views have been urged,--that slavery goes by
natural and constitutional right into all the territories, that the
matter is to be settled in each territory by the local population, and
that slavery should be excluded by national authority from all the
territories. For this last view we have argued, pleaded, waited, until
at last the supreme tribunal of all--the American people in a national
election--has given judgment in our favor.
"You cite the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court as establishing
slavery in the territories. But you wrest from that decision a force
which it does not legally carry. The best lawyers are with us as to
this. The court at the outset dismissed the case for want of
jurisdiction, because Dred Scott, being a negro, could not be an
American citizen, and therefore had no standing before the court. This
being said, the court by its own decision could go no farther with the
case. When a majority of the judges went on to discuss the status of
slavery in the territories,--as it might have come up if they had gone
on to try the case on its merits--they were uttering a mere _obiter
dictum_,--a personal opinion carrying no judicial authority. The attempt
to make these side-remarks a decisive pronouncement on the supreme
political question of the time is beyond law or reason. It is
preposterous that the court's incidental opinion, on a case which it had
disclaimed the power to try, should invalidate that exclusion of slavery
by national authority which had been affirmed by the great acts of 1787
and 1820, and had been exercised for seventy years.
"As to fugitive slaves, the Personal Liberty laws are designed to
safeguard by the State's authority its free black citizens from the
kidnapping which the Federal statute, with its refusal of a jury trial,
renders easy. If they sometimes make difficulty in the rendition of
actual fugitives,--you must not expect a whole-hearted acceptance of the
rôle of slave-catchers by the Northern people. You have the Federal
statute, and may take what you can under it,--but if under the bond
Shylock gets only his pound of flesh, there is no help for him.
"Come now to your broader complaint, that the spirit of the Union has
been sacrificed by Northern hostility toward your peculiar institution.
True, you have had to put up with harsh words, but we have had to put up
with a harsh fact. You have had to tolerate criticism, but we have had
to tolerate slavery under our national flag. It is an institution
abhorrent to our sense of right. We believe it contrary to the law of
God and the spirit of humanity. We consider it unjust in its essential
principle, and full of crying abuses in its actual administration. Its
existence in one section of the Union is a reproach to us among the
nations of the earth, and a blot on the flag. Yet we so thoroughly
recognize that our national principle allows each State to shape its own
institutions that we have not attempted and shall not attempt to hinder
you from cherishing slavery among yourselves as long as you please. If,
for the vast and vital interests bound up with the unity of this nation,
we can tolerate the presence within it of a system we so disapprove,
cannot you on your part tolerate the inevitable criticism which it calls
out among us?
"If mutual grievances are to be rehearsed, we have our full share. What
has become of the constitutional provision which guarantees to the
citizens of every State their rights in all the States? When black
seamen, citizens of our commonwealths, enter South Carolina ports, they
are thrown into jail or sold into slavery. If we send a lawyer and
statesman to remonstrate, he is driven out. Our newspapers are excluded
from your mails. You have extinguished free speech among your own
citizens. If the Republican party is sectional, it is because any man
who supports it, south of the Ohio, is liable to abuse and exile. You
have shaped our national policy in lines of dishonor. With your
Northern allies you have forced war on a weak neighbor and despoiled her
of territory. You have poured thousands of fraudulent voters into
Kansas, have supported their usurping government by Federal judges and
troops, and have tolerated the ruffians who harried peaceful settlers.
One of your congressional leaders has answered a senator's arguments by
beating him into insensibility, and you have honored and reëlected the
assailant. And now, when we have fairly won the day in a national
election, and for purposes peaceful, constitutional, and
beneficent,--you propose to break up the nation, and reorganize your
part of it expressly for the maintenance and promotion of slavery.
"With such complaints on your part, and such complaints on ours, what is
the manly, the patriotic, the sufficient recourse? That which we offer
is that you and we, the whole American people, go forward loyally and
patiently with the familiar duties of American citizens. Let Time and
Providence arbitrate our controversies. Let us trust the institutions
under which for seventy years our nation has grown great; let us, now
and hereafter, acquiesce in that deliberate voice of the people which
our fathers established as the sovereign authority. For thirty years you
have had in the Presidency either a Southerner or a Northern man with
Southern principles,--and we acquiesced. Now we have chosen a genuine
Northerner,--will not you acquiesce? Four years ago the Presidential
contest was held on the same lines as this year; you won, and we
cheerfully submitted,--now we have won, will not you loyally submit? We
disclaim any attack on your domestic institutions. The invasion by John
Brown was repudiated by practically the entire North. Honor for a brave,
misguided man meant no approval of his criminal act. For the advance of
our distinctive principles,--inimical, we own, to your system of slave
labor,--we look only to the gradual conversion of individual opinion,
and to the ultimate acceptance by your own people of the principles of
universal liberty. We believe that civilization and Christianity must
steadily work to establish freedom for all men. On that ground, and in
that sense, do we believe that 'this government cannot permanently
endure half slave and half free.' Pending that advance, we propose only
to exclude slavery from the common domain; to tolerate slavery as
sectional, while upholding freedom as national. If you are still
dissatisfied, yet is it not better to bear the evils that we have than
fly to others that we know not of? Nay, do we not too well know, and
surely if dimly foresee, the terrific evils which must attend the
attempted disruption of this nation?
"A nation it is, and not a partnership. A nation, one and inseparable,
we propose that it shall continue. We deny that the founders and fathers
ever contemplated a mere temporary alliance dissoluble at the caprice of
any member. To the Union, established under the Constitution, just as
earnestly as to the cause of independence, they virtually pledged 'their
lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.' With every year the
nation has knitted its texture closer, as its benefits increased and its
associations grew. A nation is something other than a pleasure party, or
a mutual admiration society,--it includes a principle of rightful
authority and necessary submission. The harmony vital to national unity
is not merely a mutual complacence of the members,--at its root is a
habitual, disciplined obedience to the central authority, which in a
democracy is the orderly expressed will of the majority. You cannot
leave us and we cannot let you go. And if you attempt to break the bond,
it is at your peril."