pretension of regulating our foreign trade, under the delusive name of
retaliatory orders in council--a pretension by which she undertook to
proclaim to American enterprise, "thus far shalt thou go, and no
further"--orders which she refused to revoke after the alleged cause of
their enactment had ceased; because she persisted in the practice of
impressing American seamen; because she had instigated the Indians to
commit hostilities against us; and because she refused indemnity for her
past injuries upon our commerce. I throw out of the question other
wrongs. So undeniable were the causes of the war, so powerfully did they
address themselves to the feelings of the whole American people, that
when the bill was pending before this House, gentlemen in the
opposition, although provoked to debate, would not, or could not, utter
one syllable against it. It is true, they wrapped themselves up in
sullen silence, pretending they did not choose to debate such a question
in secret session. While speaking of the proceedings on that occasion I
beg to be permitted to advert to another fact which transpired--an
important fact, material for the nation to know, and which I have often
regretted had not been spread upon our journals. My honorable colleague
(Mr. McKee) moved, in committee of the whole, to comprehend France in
the war; and when the question was taken upon the proposition, there
appeared but ten votes in support of it, of whom seven belonged to this
side of the house, and three only to the other. * * *
It is not to the British principle (of allegiance), objectionable as it
is, that we are alone to look; it is to her practice, no matter what
guise she puts on. It is in vain to assert the inviolability of the
obligation of allegiance. It is in vain to set up the plea of necessity,
and to allege that she cannot exist without the impressment of HER
seamen. The naked truth is, she comes, by her press-gangs, on board of
our vessels, seizes OUR native as well as naturalized seamen, and drags
them into her service. It is the case, then, of the assertion of an
erroneous principle, and of a practice not conformable to the asserted
principle--a principle which, if it were theoretically right, must be
forever practically wrong--a practice which can obtain countenance from
no principle whatever, and to submit to which, on our part, would betray
the most abject degradation. We are told, by gentlemen in the
opposition, that government has not done all that was incumbent on it to
do, to avoid just cause of complaint on the part of Great Britain; that
in particular the certificates of protection, authorized by the act of
1796, are fraudulently used. Sir, government has done too much in
granting those paper protections. I can never think of them without
being shocked. They resemble the passes which the master grants to his
negro slave: "Let the bearer, Mungo, pass and repass without
molestation." What do they imply? That Great Britain has a right to
seize all who are not provided with them. From their very nature, they
must be liable to abuse on both sides. If Great Britain desires a mark,
by which she can know her own subjects, let her give them an ear-mark.
The colors that float from the mast-head should be the credentials of
our seamen. There is no safety to us, and the gentlemen have shown it,
but in the rule that all who sail under the flag (not being enemies),
are protected by the flag. It is impossible that this country should
ever abandon the gallant tars who have won for us such splendid
trophies. Let me suppose that the genius of Columbia should visit one of
them in his oppressor's prison, and attempt to reconcile him to his
forlorn and wretched condition. She would say to him, in the language of
gentlemen on the other side: "Great Britain intends you no harm; she did
not mean to impress you, but one of her own subjects; having taken you
by mistake, I will remonstrate, and try to prevail upon her, by
peaceable means, to release you; but I cannot, my son, fight for you."
If he did not consider this mere mockery, the poor tar would address her
judgment and say: "You owe me, my country, protection; I owe you, in
return, obedience. I am no British subject; I am a native of old
Massachusetts, where lived my aged father, my wife, my children. I have
faithfully discharged my duty. Will you refuse to do yours?" Appealing
to her passions, he would continue: "I lost this eye in fighting under
Truxton, with the Insurgence; I got this scar before Tripoli; I broke
this leg on board the Constitution, when the Guerriere struck." * * * I
will not imagine the dreadful catastrophe to which he would be driven by
an abandonment of him to his oppressor. It will not be, it cannot be,
that his country will refuse him protection. * * *
An honorable peace is attainable only by an efficient war. My plan would
be to call out the ample resources of the country, give them a judicious
direction, prosecute the war with the utmost vigor, strike wherever we
can reach the enemy, at sea or on land, and negotiate the terms of a
peace at Quebec or at Halifax. We are told that England is a proud and
lofty nation, which, disdaining to wait for danger, meets it half way.
Haughty as she is we triumphed over her once, and, if we do not listen
to the counsels of timidity and despair, we shall again prevail. In such
a cause, with the aid of Providence, we must come out crowned with
success; but, if we fail, let us fail like men, lash ourselves to our
gallant tars, and expire together in one common struggle, fighting for
FREE TRADE AND SEAMEN'S RIGHTS.
IV. -- THE RISE OF NATIONALITY.
In spite of execrable financial management, of the criminal blunders of
political army officers, and of consequent defeats on land, and quite
apart from brilliant sea-fights and the New Orleans victory, the war of
1812 was of incalculable benefit to the United States. It marks more
particularly the point at which the already established democracy began
to shade off into a real nationality.
The Democratic party began its career as a States-rights party.
Possession of national power had so far modified the practical operation
of its tenets that it had not hesitated to carry out a national policy,
and even wage a desperate war, in flat opposition to the will of one
section of the Union, comprising five of its most influential States;
and, when the Hartford Convention was suspected of a design to put the
New England opposition to the war into a forcible veto, there were many
indications that the dominant party was fully prepared to answer by a
forcible materialization of the national will. In the North and West, at
least, the old States-rights formulas never carried a real vitality
beyond the war of 1812. Men still spoke of "sovereign States," and
prided themselves on the difference between the "voluntary union of
States" and the effete despotisms of Europe; but the ghost of the
Hartford Convention had laid very many more dangerous ghosts in the
section in which it had appeared.
The theatre of the war, now filled with comfortable farms and populous
cities, was then less known than any of our Territories in 1896. There
were no roads, and the transportation of provisions for the troops, of
guns, ammunition, and stores for the lake navies, was one of the most
difficult of the problems which the National Government was called upon
to solve. It cannot be said that the solution was successfully reached,
for the blunders in transportation were among the most costly,
exasperating, and dangerous of the war. But the efforts to reach it
provided the impulse which soon after resulted in the settlement of
Western New York, the appearance of the germs of such flourishing cities
as Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, the opening up of the Southwest
Territory, between Tennessee and New Orleans, and the rapid admission of
the new States of Indiana, Illinois, Mississippi, and Missouri. But the
impulse did not stop here. The inconveniences and dangers arising from
the possession of a vast territory with utterly inadequate means of
communication had been brought so plainly to public view by the war that
the question of communication influenced politics in every direction. In
New York it took shape in the construction of the Erie Canal (finished
in 1825). In States farther west and south, the loaning of the public
credit to enterprises of the nature of the Erie Canal increased until
the panic of 1837 introduced "repudiation" into American politics. In
national politics, the necessity of a general system of canals and
roads, as a means of military defence, was at first admitted by all,
even by Calhoun, was gradually rejected by the stricter constructionists
of the Constitution, and finally became a tenet of the National
Republican party, headed by John Quincy Adams and Clay (1825-29), and of
its greater successor the Whig party, headed by Clay. This idea of
Internal Improvements at national expense, though suggested by Gallatin
and Clay in 1806-08, only became a political question when the war had
forced it upon public attention; and it has not yet entirely
disappeared.
The maintenance of such a system required money, and a high tariff of
duties on imports was a necessary concomitant to Internal Improvements.
The germ of this system was also a product of the war of 1812. Hamilton
had proposed it twenty years before; and the first American tariff act
had declared that its object was the encouragement of American
manufactures. But the system had never been effectively introduced until
the war and the blockade had forced American manufactures into
existence. Peace brought competition with British manufacturers, and the
American manufacturers began to call for protection. The tariff of 1816
contained the principle of Protection, but only carried it into practice
far enough to induce the manufacturers to rely on the dominant party for
more of it. This expectation, rather than the Federalist opposition to
the war, is the explanation of the immediate and rapid decline of the
Federal party in New England. Continued effort brought about the tariff
of 1824, which was more protective; the tariff of 1828, which was still
more protective; and the tariff of 1830, which reduced the protective
element to a system.
The two sections, North and South, had been very much alike until the
war called the principle of growth into activity. The slave system of
labor, which had fallen in the North and had survived and been made
still more profitable in the South by Whitney's invention of the cotton
gin in 1793, shut the South off from almost all share in the new life.
That section had a monopoly of the cotton culture, and the present
profit of slave labor blinded it to the ultimate consequences of it. The
slave was fit for rude agriculture alone; he could not be employed in
manufactures, or in any labor which required intelligence; and the
slave-owner, while he desired manufactures, did not dare to cultivate
the necessary intelligence in his own slaves. The South could therefore
find no profit in protection, and yet it could not with dignity admit
that its slave system precluded it from the advantages of protection, or
base its opposition to protection wholly on economic grounds. Its only
recourse was the constitutional ground of the lack of power of Congress
to pass a protective tariff, and this brought up again the question
which had evolved the Kentucky resolutions of 1798-9. Calhoun, with
pitiless logic, developed them into a scheme of constitutional
Nullification. Under his lead,
South Carolina, in 1832, declared through her State Convention that the
protective tariff acts were no law, nor binding on the State, its
officers or citizens. President Jackson, while he was ready and willing
to suppress any such rebellion by force, was not sorry to see his
adherents in Congress make use of it to overthrow protection; and a
"compromise tariff," to which the protectionists agreed, was passed in
1833. It reduced the duties by an annual percentage for ten years. The
nullifiers claimed this as a triumph, and formally repealed the
ordinance of nullification, as if it had accomplished its object. But,
in its real intent, it had failed wretchedly. It had asserted State
sovereignty through the State's proper voice of a convention. When the
time fixed for the execution of the ordinance arrived, Jackson's
intention of taking the State's sovereignty by the throat had become so
evident that an unofficial meeting of nullifiers suspended the ordinance
until the passage of the compromise tariff had made it unnecessary. For
the first time, the force of a State and the national force had
approached threateningly near collision, and no State ever tried it
again. When the tariff of 1842 reintroduced the principle of protection,
no one thought of taking the broken weapon of nullification from its
resting-place; and secession was finally attempted only as a sectional
movement, not as the expression of the will of a State, but as a
concerted revolution by a number of States. It seems certain that
nationality had attained force enough, even in 1833, to have put State
sovereignty forever under its feet; and that but for the cohesive
sectional force of slavery and its interests, the development of
nationality would have been undisputed for the future.
New conditions were increasing the growth of the North and West, and
their separation from the South in national life, even when
nullification was in its death struggle. The acquisition of Louisiana in
1803 had been followed in 1807 by Fulton's invention of the steamboat,
the most important factor in carrying immigration into the new
territories and opening them up to settlement. But the steamboat could
not quite bridge over the gap between the Alleghanies and the
Mississippi. Internal improvements, canals, and improved roads were not
quite the instrument that was needed. It was found at last in the
introduction of the railway into the United States in 1830-32. This
proved to be an agent which could solve every difficulty except its own.
It could bridge over every gap; it could make profit of its own, and
make profitable that which had before been unprofitable. It placed
immigrants where the steamboat, canal, and road could at last be of the
highest utility to them; it developed the great West with startling
rapidity; it increased the sale of government lands so rapidly that in a
few years the debt of the United States was paid off, and the surplus
became, for the first time, a source of political embarrassment. In a
few years further, aided by revolutionary troubles in Europe,
immigration became a great stream, which poured into and altered the
conditions of every part of the North and West. The stream was
altogether nationalizing in its nature. The immigrant came to the United
States, not to a particular State. To him, the country was greater than
any State; even that of his adoption. Labor conditions excluded the
South from this element of progress also. Not only were the railroads of
the South hampered in every point by the old difficulty of slave labor;
immigration and free labor shunned slave soil as if the plague were
there prevalent. Year after year the North and West became more national
in their prejudices and modes of thought and action; while the South
remained little changed, except by a natural reactionary drift toward a
more extreme colonialism. The natural result, in the next period was the
development of a quasi nationality in the South itself.
The introduction of the railway had brought its own difficulties, though
these were not felt severely until after years. In the continent of
Europe, the governments carefully retained their powers of eminent
domain when the new system was introduced. The necessary land was loaned
to the railways for a term of years, at the expiration of which the
railway was to revert to the State; and railway troubles were
non-existent, or comparatively tractable. In the United States, as in
Great Britain, free right of incorporation was supplemented by what was
really a gift of the power of eminent domain. The necessary land became
the property of the corporations in fee, and it has been found almost
equally difficult to revoke the gift or to introduce a railway control.
Democracy took a new and extreme line of development under its alliance
with nationality. As the dominant party, about 1827-8, became divided
into two parties, the new parties felt the democratic influence as
neither of their predecessors had felt it. Nominations, which had been
made by cliques of legislators or Congressmen, began to be made by
popular delegate conventions about 1825. Before 1835, national, State,
and local conventions had been united into parties of the modern type.
With them came the pseudo-democratic idea of "rotation in office,"
introduced into national politics by President Jackson, in 1829, and
adopted by succeeding administrations. There were also some attempts to
do away with the electoral system, and to make the federal judiciary
elective, or to impose on it some other term of office than good
behavior; but these had neither success nor encouragement.
The financial errors of the war of 1812 had fairly compelled the
re-establishment of the Bank of the United States in 1816, with a
charter for twenty years, and the control of the deposits of national
revenue. Soon after Jackson's inauguration, the managers of the new
democratic party came into collision with the bank on the appointment of
a subordinate agent. It very soon became evident that the bank could not
exist in the new political atmosphere. It was driven into politics;
a new charter was vetoed in 1832; and after one of the bitterest
struggles of our history, the bank ceased to exist as a government
institution in 1836. The reason for its fall, however disguised by
attendant circumstances, was really its lack of harmony with the
national-democratic environment which had overtaken it. Benton's
speech presents a review of this bank struggle and of accompanying
political controversies.
The anti-slavery agitation, which began in 1830, was as evidently a
product of the new phase of democracy, but will fall more naturally
under the next period.
Webster's reply to Hayne has been taken as the best illustration of that
thoroughly national feeling which was impossible before the war of 1812,
and increasingly more common after it. It has been necessary to preface
it with Hayne's speech, in order to have a clear understanding of parts
of Webster's; but it has not been possible to omit Calhoun's speech, as
a defence of his scheme of nullification, and as an exemplification of
the reaction toward colonialism with which the South met the national
development. It has not seemed necessary to include other examples of
the orations called forth by the temporary political issues of the time.
ROBERT Y. HAYNE,
---OF SOUTH CAROLINA. (BORN 1791, DIED 1840.)
ON MR. FOOT'S RESOLUTION IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE, JAN. 21, 1830
MR. SPEAKER:
Mr. Hayne said, when he took occasion, two days ago, to throw out some
ideas with respect to the policy of the government in relation to the
public lands, nothing certainly could have been further from his
thoughts than that he should have been compelled again to throw himself
upon the indulgence of the Senate. Little did I expect, said Mr. H., to
be called upon to meet such an argument as was yesterday urged by the
gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Webster). Sir, I question no man's
opinions; I impeach no man's motives; I charged no party, or State, or
section of country with hostility to any other, but ventured, as I
thought, in a becoming spirit, to put forth my own sentiments in
relation to a great national question of public policy. Such was my
course. The gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Benton), it is true, had
charged upon the Eastern States an early and continued hostility toward
the West, and referred to a number of historical facts and documents in
support of that charge. Now, sir, how have these different arguments
been met? The honorable gentleman from Massachusetts, after deliberating
a whole night upon his course, comes into this chamber to vindicate New
England; and instead of making up his issue with the gentleman from
Missouri, on the charges which he had preferred, chooses to consider me
as the author of those charges, and losing sight entirely of that
gentleman, selects me as his adversary, and pours out all the vials of
his mighty wrath upon my devoted head. Nor is he willing to stop there.
He goes on to assail the institutions and policy of the South, and calls
in question the principles and conduct of the State which I have the
honor to represent. When I find a gentleman of mature age and
experience, of acknowledged talents and profound sagacity, pursuing a
course like this, declining the contest offered from the West, and
making war upon the unoffending South, I must believe, I am bound to
believe, he has some object in view which he has not ventured to
disclose. Mr. President, why is this? Has the gentleman discovered in
former controversies with the gentleman from Missouri, that he is
overmatched by that senator? And does he hope for an easy victory over a
more feeble adversary? Has the gentleman's distempered fancy been
disturbed by gloomy forebodings of "new alliances to be formed," at
which he hinted? Has the ghost of the murdered coalition come back, like
the ghost of Banquo, to "sear the eyeballs" of the gentleman, and will
not down at his bidding? Are dark visions of broken hopes, and honors
lost forever, still floating before his heated imagination? Sir, if it
be his object to thrust me between the gentleman from Missouri and
himself, in order to rescue the East from the contest it has provoked
with the West, he shall not be gratified. Sir, I will not be dragged
into the defence of my friend from Missouri. The South shall not be
forced into a conflict not its own. The gentleman from Missouri is able
to fight his own battles. The gallant West needs no aid from the South
to repel any attack which may be made upon them from any quarter. Let
the gentleman from Massachusetts controvert the facts and arguments of
the gentleman from Missouri, if he can--and if he win the victory, let
him wear the honors; I shall not deprive him of his laurels. * * *
Sir, any one acquainted with the history of parties in this country will
recognize in the points now in dispute between the Senator from
Massachusetts and myself the very grounds which have, from the
beginning, divided the two great parties in this country, and which
(call these parties by what names you will, and amalgamate them as you
may) will divide them forever. The true distinction between those
parties is laid down in a celebrated manifesto issued by the convention
of the Federalists of Massachusetts, assembled in Boston, in February,
1824, on the occasion of organizing a party opposition to the reelection
of Governor Eustis. The gentleman will recognize this as "the canonical
book of political scripture"; and it instructs us that, when the
American colonies redeemed themselves from British bondage, and became
so many independent nations, they proposed to form a NATIONAL UNION (not
a Federal Union, sir, but a NATIONAL UNION).
Those who were in favor of a union of the States in this form became
known by the name of Federalists; those who wanted no union of the
States, or disliked the proposed form of union, became known by the name
of Anti-Federalists. By means which need not be enumerated, the
Anti-Federalists became (after the expiration of twelve years) our
national rulers, and for a period of sixteen years, until the close of
Mr. Madison's administration in 1817, continued to exercise the
exclusive direction of our public affairs. Here, sir, is the true
history of the origin, rise, and progress of the party of National
Republicans, who date back to the very origin of the Government, and who
then, as now, chose to consider the Constitution as having created not a
Federal, but a National, Union; who regarded "consolidation" as no evil,
and who doubtless consider it "a consummation to be wished" to build up
a great "central government," "one and indivisible." Sir, there have
existed, in every age and every country, two distinct orders of men--the
lovers of freedom and the devoted advocates of power.
The same great leading principles, modified only by the peculiarities of
manners, habits, and institutions, divided parties in the ancient
republics, animated the Whigs and Tories of Great Britain, distinguished
in our own times the Liberals and Ultras of France, and may be traced
even in the bloody struggles of unhappy Spain. Sir, when the gallant
Riego, who devoted himself and all that he possessed to the liberties of
his country, was dragged to the scaffold, followed by the tears and
lamentations of every lover of freedom throughout the world, he perished
amid the deafening cries of "Long live the absolute king!" The people
whom I represent, Mr. President, are the descendants of those who
brought with them to this country, as the most precious of their
possessions, "an ardent love of liberty"; and while that shall be
preserved, they will always be found manfully struggling against the
consolidation of the Government AS THE WORST OF EVILS. * * *