Mr. Buchanan came into power with the prestige of experience; he was
known to have been long in public life; he had been a senator, a
secretary, a diplomatist, and almost everything else which is supposed
to fit a man for the practical conduct of affairs.
This presumed fitness for office greatly assisted his chances in the
Presidential campaign; and it assisted him especially with those timid
and conservative minds, of which there are many, apt to conceive that a
familiarity with the business and details of government is the same as
statesmanship, and to confound the skill and facility acquired by mere
routine with a genuine ability in execution. Had these men, however,
looked more closely into Mr. Buchanan's official career, they would have
found causes for suspecting the validity of their judgment, in the very
length and variety of his services. They would have discovered, that,
long as these had been and various as they had been, they were quite
undistinguished by any peculiar evidences of capacity or aptitude.
He had been, senator, secretary, and diplomatist, it is true; but in no
one of these positions had he achieved any remarkable successes. The
occasion could not be indicated on which he had risen above the average
level of respectability as a public man. There were no salient points in
his course,--no splendid developments of mastery,--no great reports, or
speeches, or measures, to cause him to be remembered,--and no leading
thoughts or acts, to awaken a high and general feeling of admiration on
the part of his countrymen. He was never such a senator as Webster
was, nor such a secretary as Clay, nor such a diplomatist as Marey.
Throughout his protracted official existence, he followed in the wake
of his party submissively, doing its appointed work with patience, and
vindicating its declared policy with skill, but never emerging as a
distinct and prominent figure. He never exhibited any peculiar largeness
of mind or loftiness of character; and though he spoke well and wrote
well, and played the part of a cool and wary manager, he was scarcely
considered a commanding spirit among his fellows. Amid that array of
luminaries, indeed, which adorned the Senate, where his chief reputation
was made,--among such men as Calhoun, Clay, Webster, Benton, and
Wright,--he shone with a diminished lustre.
Now, forty years of action, in the most conspicuous spheres,
unillustrated by a single incident which mankind has, or will have,
reason to cite and applaud, were not astonishing evidence of fitness for
the chief magistracy; and the event has shown, that Mr. Buchanan was to
be regarded as an old politician rather than a practised statesman, that
the most serviceable soldier in the ranks may prove to be an indifferent
general in command,--and that the experience, for which he was vaunted
and trusted, was not that ripening discipline of the mind and heart,
-------"which doth attain
To something of prophetic strain,"--
but that other unlearning use and wont, which
----"chews on wisdom past,
And totters on in blunders to the last."
His administration has been a series of blunders, and worse; it
has evinced no mastery; on the other hand, it may be arraigned for
inconsistencies the most palpable, for proceedings the most awkward, for
a general impotence which places it on a level with that of Tyler or
Pierce, and for signal offences against the national sense of decorum
and duty.
It is scarcely a year since Mr. Buchanan assumed the reins at
Washington. He assumed them under circumstances by which he and his
party and the whole country had been taught a great lesson of
political duty. The infamous mismanagement of Kansas, by his immediate
predecessor, had just shattered the most powerful of our party
organizations, and caused a mighty uprising of the masses of the North
in defence of menaced freedom. His election was carried amid the
extremest hazards, and with the utmost difficulty. Two months more of
such ardent debate and such popular enlightenment as were then going
forward would have resulted in his defeat. As it was, nearly every
Northern State--no matter how firm its previous adherence to the
Democratic party--was aroused to a strenuous opposition. Nearly every
Northern State pronounced by a stupendous majority against him and
against his cause. Nothing but a systematic disguise of the true
questions at issue by his own party, and a gratuitous complication of
the canvass by means of a foolish third party, saved his followers from
the most complete and shameful rout that had been given for many years
to any political array. Men of every class, of every shade of faith,
joined in that hearty protest against the spirit which animated the
Democratic administration, and joined in it, that they might utter the
severest rebuke in their power, of its meanness and perfidy.
Mr. Buchanan ought to have read the warning which was thus blazed across
the political skies, like the hand-writing upon the wall. He ought to
have discerned in this general movement the signs of a deep, earnest,
and irrepressible conviction on the part of the North. It is no slight
cause which can start such general and enthusiastic expressions of
popular feeling; they cannot be manufactured; they are not the work of
mere party excitement; there is nothing spurious and nothing hollow in
them; but they well up from the deep heart of nations, showing that a
chord of sympathy has been touched, with which it is fatal to tamper or
to sport. Call it fanaticism, if you will; call it delusion; call it
anything; but recollect also that it is out of such feelings that
revolutions are born, and by them that awful national crises are
determined.
But Mr. Buchanan has not profited, as we shall see, by the monition. His
initial act, the choice of a cabinet, in which the only man of national
reputation was superannuated, and the others were of little note, gave
small hope that he would do so; and his subsequent mistakes might have
been augured from the calibre of the counsellors by whom he chose to
be surrounded.--But let the men pass, since our object is to discuss
measures.
The questions with which the President and his cabinet have had to deal,
without following them in the order either of time or importance, may
be classified as the Mormon question, the Financial question, the
Filibuster question, and the Kansas question. All these required, for
a proper adjustment of them, firmness rather than ability,--a clear
perception of the principles of right, rather than abstruse policy,--and
vigor of execution, rather than profound diplomatic skill. Yet we do not
perceive that our government has displayed, in regard to the treatment
of any of these questions, either firmness or ability. It has employed
policy enough and diplomacy enough, but the policy has been incoherent
and the diplomacy shallow. At the end of the first year of its rule, the
most striking result of its general management is the open defection of
many of its most powerful friends, and the increased earnestness and
energy of all its foes.
The difficulty with the Mormons originated, before the accession of the
present administration, in a hasty and improper extension of the Federal
authority over a people whose customs and religious opinions were
utterly incompatible with those of our own people. The inhabitants of
Utah were averse from the outset to the kind of government provided for
them at Washington. Having adopted a form of society more like that of
Congo and Dahomey than of the United States, and having accepted too
literally the prevalent dogma, that every community has the right to
form its own institutions for itself,--they preferred the polygamy
of barbarism to the monogamy of civilization, and the rod of the
priest-prophet Brigham or the seal of Elder Pratt to the sceptre
of Governor Steptoe or the sword of Colonel Johnston. Under these
circumstances, the duty of the government of the United States was to
relinquish its pretensions to supremacy over a nation opposed to its
rule, or to maintain that supremacy, if it were necessary, with a strong
and unflinching hand. Mr. Buchanan, on his own principles of popular
sovereignty, as far as we can understand them, ought, logically, to have
adopted the former course, but (as the interests of Slavery were not
involved) he elected to pursue the latter; and he has pursued it with an
impotence which has cost the nation already many millions of
dollars, and which has involved the "army of Utah" in inextricable
embarrassments, allowing them to be shut up in the snows of the
mountains before they could strike a blow or reach the first object of
their expedition. Not very well appointed in the beginning, this little
force was despatched to the Plains when it was too late in the season; a
part of it was needlessly delayed in assisting to choke down freedom in
Kansas; and when it attained the hills which guard the passages to the
valley of the Salt Lake, it found the canons obstructed by snow, and
the roads impassable. The supplies required for its subsistence were
scattered in useless profusion from Leavenworth to Fort Laramie, and
assistance and action were alike hopeless until the arrival of the
spring.[A]
[Footnote: A: More recently the energy and wisdom of Col. Johnston
have repaired some of the mischief produced by the dilatoriness of his
superiors.]
The same feebleness, which left the poor soldier to perish in the
desert, has brought an overflowing treasury nearly to default. Mr.
Buchanan, in his Message, discussed the existing financial crisis with
much sounding phrase and very decided emphasis. He rebuked the action of
the banks, which had presumed to issue notes to the amount of more than
three times that of their specie, in a tone of lofty and indignant
virtue. He commended them to the strictest vigilance and to the
exemplary discipline of the State legislatures, while descanting at
large upon the safety, the economy, the beauty, and the glory of a sound
hard-money currency. When he entered upon his office, he found the
Treasury replete with eagles and dimes; it was so flush, that, in the
joy of his heart, he ordered the debts of the United States to be
redeemed at a premium of sixteen _per cent_.; and he and his followers
were disposed to jubilate over the singular spectacle, that, while all
other institutions were failing, the Treasury of the United States was
firm and resplendent in its large possession of gold. It was deemed a
rare wisdom and success, indeed, which could utter a note of triumph in
the midst of so universal a cry of despair; it was deemed a rare piece
of liberality, that the government should come to the aid of society in
an hour of such dark distress. The stocks of the United States, which
had been originally sold at a small advance, were bought back on a very
large advance; the usurers and the stock-jobbers received sixteen _per
cent_. for what they had bought at a premium of but two or three _per
cent_.; and an unparalleled glory shone around the easy vomitories of
the Treasury. The foresight and the sagacity of the proceeding were
marvellous! In less than a quarter by the moon, the coffers of the
government were empty,--the very clerks in its employ went about the
streets borrowing money to pay their board-bills,--and the grand-master
of the vaults, Mr. Cobb, counting his fingers in despair over the vacant
prospect, was compelled, in the extremity of his distress, to fill
his limp sacks with paper. Of the nineteen millions of gold which in
September distended the public purse, little or nothing remained in
December, while in its place were paper bills,--founded, not upon a
basis of one-third specie, but upon a basis of--_We promise to pay_! It
was a sad application of the high-sounding doctrines of the Message,--a
dreadful descent for a pure hard-money government,--and a lamentable
conversion of the pompous swagger of October into the shivering collapse
of January!
It may be said, that, by this pre-purchase of its own stocks, running at
an interest of six _per cent_., the government has saved the amount of
interest which would else have accrued between the time of the purchase
and the time of ultimate redemption. And this is true to some
extent,--and it would show an admirable economy, if the Treasury had had
no other use for its money. A government, like an individual, having a
large balance of superfluous cash on hand, can do no better with it than
to pay off its debts; but to do this, when there was every prospect of a
Mormon war to raise the expenditure, little prospect of retrenchment
in any branch of service, and a daily diminishing revenue at all
points,--it was purely a piece of folly, a want of ordinary forecast, to
get rid of the cash in hand. Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Cobb were guilty of
this folly, and, for the sake of the poor _éclat_ of coming to the
relief of the money-market, (which was no great relief, after all,) they
sacrificed the hard-money pretensions of the government, and sunk its
character to the level of that of the needy "kiteflier" in Wall Street.
Their true course, in the existing condition and aspect of affairs, was
to retain their capital, and to institute a most rigid economy, a most
searching reduction, in every branch of the public service. We have,
however, yet to learn whether any such economy and reduction have been
effected.
All this was simply weakness; but in turning from the conduct of
the Finances by the administration, to consider its management of
Filibusterism, we pass from the consideration of acts of mere debility
to the consideration of acts which have a color of duplicity in them.
On the Filibusters, as on the Finances, the First Annual Message of the
President was outspoken and forcible. It characterized the past and
proposed doings of William Walker and his crew, as the common sense
and common conscience of the world had already characterised them, as
nothing short of piracy and murder. Recognizing the obligations of
fraternity and peace as the rule of right in international relations, it
pledged the utmost vigilance and energy of the Federal powers against
every semblance of freebootery. In pursuance of this promise, orders
were issued to the various civil and naval authorities, (orders not very
clear, it is true, but clear enough to bear but one meaning in honest
and simple minds,) to the effect that they should maintain a sharp
watch, and execute a summary arrest of every person suspected of or
discovered in unlawful enterprises. The authorities on land, to whom it
was easy to hold secret communication with Washington, were found to
have very blind eyes and very slippery hands. General Walker and his
confederates were taken at New Orleans, but they passed through
the courts far more rapidly than goods are apt to pass through the
custom-houses. Under a merely nominal recognizance, he sailed away with
flying colors, and amid the plaudits of an admiring crowd, among whom,
it is to be presumed, the authorities took care to be only not too
conspicuous.
But the authorities on the sea, who could not so readily get a cue from
Wellington, with the directness, in construing orders, which is the
habit of the military mind, took their instructions at the word.
Commanded to intercept all marauders and pirates, they kept a look-out
for Walker. He eluded the guns of Captain Chatard, but Commodore
Paulding seized him in the very act of invading a friendly soil.
Hoisting him on board of a war-ship, he returned him in pressing haste
to the President. Commodore Paulding, who had read the Message, and read
the instructions of Secretary Cass, doubtless supposed that black meant
black, and white, white. Perhaps, also, in the unsophisticated pride
with which he contemplated the promptitude and decision of his action,
in saving an innocent people from a sanguinary ruffian, and in
maintaining the honor of his country unsullied, dim visions crossed his
mind of a letter of thanks from the President, and of the vote of a
sword by Congress. Alas for such hopes! Commodore Paulding was clearly
not a politician; he did not know that black meant white and white meant
black,--nor that the present of a filibuster, which he sent to the
President, was the present of something worse than an elephant. It
was the present of a herd of elephants,--of a sea of troubles. Mr.
Buchanan's fine denunciations of freebooters had only been fine words
for the public ear; secretly he cherished a _penchant_ for freebooters,
or rather for the friends of freebooters; and, under those
circumstances, to be presented, by his own agent, with the very chief
of the freebooters, as a criminal and a scamp, was the most unheard-of
simplicity of understanding, and the most astounding literalness of
obedience, in any subordinate. What to do was the question. He had
menaced Chatard with a cashiering for allowing Walker to escape; and
here was Paulding, who did not allow him to escape,--so he menaced
Paulding likewise; and by way of capping the climax of absurdities, he
set Walker himself at large, to go about the country clamoring to be
sent back, at the expense of the government, to the scenes of his late
innocent occupations and virtuous designs, whence he had been ruthlessly
torn by an over-officious sailor.
The history of the farce is both argument and comment. Walker was either
a citizen of the United States, levying war upon a friendly foreign
state, and as such amenable to the penalties of our neutrality laws,--or
he was a citizen of Nicaragua, as he pretended to be, abusing our
protection to organize warlike enterprises against his fellow-citizens,
and as such also amenable to our neutrality laws. In either capacity,
and however taken, he should have been severely dealt with by the
President. But, unfortunately, Mr. Buchanan, not left to his own
instincts of right, is surrounded by assistants who have other than
great public motives for their conduct. Walker's schemes were not
individual schemes, were not simple projects of piracy and plunder,
got up on his own responsibility and for his own ends. Connected with
important collateral issues, they received the sympathy and support of
others more potent than himself. He was, in a word, the instrument
of the propagandist slave-holders, the fear of whom is ever before a
President's eyes. As the old barbarian Arbogastes used to say to the
later Roman emperors, whom he helped to elevate, "The power which made
you is the power which can break you," so these modern masters of the
throne dictate and guide its policy. Mr. Buchanan was their man as much
as Walker was, and, however grand his speeches before the public, he
must do their bidding when things came to the trial.
But this allusion brings us, by an obvious transition, to the last and
most important question submitted to the administration,--the question
of Kansas,--in the management of which, we think, it will be found that
all the before-noted deficiencies of the government have been combined
with a criminal disregard of settled principles and almost universal
convictions. In reference to Kansas, as in reference to the other
topics, the President began with fair and seductive promises. He did
not, it is true, either in his Message or anywhere else, that we know
of, narrate the actual history of the long contest which has divided
that Territory, but he did hold up for the future the brightest hopes
of an honest and equitable adjustment of all the past difficulties. He
selected and commissioned Robert J. Walker, as Governor, for the express
purpose of "pacifying Kansas." Pretending to overlook the past causes
of trouble, he announced that everything would now be set right by new
elections, in which the whole people should have full opportunity
of declaring their will. Mr. Walker went to Kansas with a full
determination to carry out this amiable promise of the President. Both
he and his secretary, Mr. Stanton, labored strenuously to convince
the people of the Territory of his honest purposes, and, by dint of
persuasions, pledges, assurances, and oaths, at length succeeded in
procuring a pretty general exercise of the franchise. The result was a
signal overthrow of the minority which had so long ruled by fraud and
violence; and the sincerity of the President is tested by the fact,
avouched by both Walker and Stanton, that, from the moment of the
success of the Free-State party, he was wroth towards his servants.
Stanton was removed and Walker compelled to resign, though their only
offence was a laborious prosecution of the President's own policy. Ever
since then, he has strained every nerve, and at this moment is straining
every nerve, to defeat the well-known legally demonstrated wish of the
majority. In the face of his own plighted word, and of the emphatic
assurances of his agents, sanctioned by himself, he insists upon
imposing on them officers whom they detest and an instrument of
government which they spurn. These people of Kansas,--who were to
be "pacified,"--to be conciliated,--to be guarantied a just
administration,--are denounced in the most virulent and abusive terms as
refractory, and are threatened with the coercion of a military force,
because they are unwilling to submit to outrage!
The excuse offered by the President for this perfidious course is
the Lecompton Constitution, which he professes to consider a legal
instrument, framed by a legal Convention, and approved by a legal
election of the people,--and which is therefore not to be set aside
except by the same sovereign power by which it was created. It would be
a good excuse, if it were not a transparent and monstrous quibble from
beginning to end. The Lecompton Constitution has no one element of
legality in it; from the _Whereas_, to the signatures, it is an
imposture;--for neither had the Legislature, that called the Convention
in which it was made, lawful authority to do so,--nor was that
Convention lawfully constituted,--nor was the alleged adoption of it by
the people more than a trick.
A Territory is an inchoate and dependent community, which can be erected
into a State only in two ways: first, formally, by an enabling act of
Congress, giving permission to the inhabitants to set up for themselves;
and second, informally, by a spontaneous and general movement of the
people, which Congress must afterwards legitimate. In either case, the
consent of Congress, first or last, is necessary to the validity of the
proceeding. But a Territorial Legislature, which is the mere creature of
Congress, having no powers but what are strictly conveyed to it in the
Organic Act instituting the Territorial government, cannot originate
a movement to supersede itself, and also to abrogate the authority
of Congress. The attempt to do so, as declared by General Jackson's
cabinet, in the case of Arkansas, would be, not simply null and void,
but unlawful, rebellious; and the President would be obliged to suppress
it, if called upon, by force of arms. The Organic Act is the supreme law
of the Territory, which can be altered or revoked only by the authority
from which it emanated; and every measure commenced or prosecuted with a
design to annul that law, to subvert the Territorial government, or
to put in force in its place a new government, without the consent of
Congress, is a flagrant usurpation.
Now the Lecompton Convention was called not merely without the consent
of Congress, but against its consent; it was called by and under the
arrangements of the Territorial Legislature; it was not the spontaneous
act of the people, a large majority of whom condemned the movement
and refused to participate in it; and thus, in its inception, it was
unlawful. It was neither regularly nor irregularly proper;--the supreme
legislature had not acknowledged it; the masses of society had not
acknowledged it; and the entire project possessed no other character
than that of a factious scheme for perpetuating the power of a few
pro-slavery demagogues.
But, if we grant the right of the Territorial Legislature to originate
such a movement, the manner in which it was carried into effect would
still brand it with the marks of illegality. A census and registry of
voters had been provided for in the law authorizing the Convention, as
the basis of an apportionment of the delegates, and that provision was
not complied with. In nineteen out of the thirty-eight counties no
registry was made, and in the others it was imperfectly made. "In some
of the counties," according to the evidence of Mr. Stanton, then acting
Governor, "the officers were probably deterred and discouraged by the
people from their duty of taking the census," (although he adds that he
does not know that such was the fact,) "while in others the officers
utterly refused to do their duty." "I know," he says, "that the people
of some of those counties ardently desired to be represented in the
Convention, for they afterwards, under the statements of Governor Walker
and myself, that they would probably be admitted, elected delegates and
sent them up to the Convention; but they were not admitted to seats."
In consequence of this failure or refusal to do their duty, only
the geographical half or the numerical fourth of the Territory was
represented in the Convention. Nor is it any excuse for the defaulting
officers, even if it had been true, that some of the people opposed the
execution of their duty. They professed to be acting under law; their
functions were plainly prescribed to them; and they were bound to make
the census and registry, whatever the disposition of the people. In a
land of laws, it is the law, and not any mere prevailing sentiment,
which prescribes and limits official duty. There is, however, no
evidence that the discharge of their task was rendered impossible by the
popular opposition, while there is evidence that they were very willing
to neglect it, and very willing to allow any obstacle, no matter how
trivial, to obstruct their performance of it. They were, in truth, as
everybody knows, the simple tools of the faction which started this
Convention movement, and not at all desirous to secure a fair and
adequate representation of the inhabitants.
That many of the people should be careless of the registration, and even
unfriendly to it, is natural, because they disapproved the plan, and
were hostile to the ends of the Convention. They doubted the authority
by which it had been summoned; they doubted both the validity and the
probable fairness of an election under such authority; and, moreover,
they were indifferent as to its proceedings, because they had been
assured that they would be called upon to pronounce _pro_ or _con_ upon
its results. The Convention, as actually constituted when assembled,
consisted of sixty delegates, representing about 1,800 voters, in an
electoral body of 12,000 in all,--or one delegate to thirty voters! A
convention so composed ought to have been ashamed of the very pretence
of acting in the name of the whole people. It would have been ashamed of
it, if it had contained men sincerely anxious to reflect the will of the
great body of the citizens. It would have been as much ashamed of it,
as any honest man would be to pass himself off as the agent of a person
whom he had never known, or who openly derided and despised him. But
this precious body--each man of whom represented thirty men besides
himself, in a voting population of 12,000--was not sensible to such
considerations. By a miserable chicane, it had got into a position to do
mischief, and it proceeded to do it, with as much alacrity and headlong
zeal as rogues are apt to exhibit when the prize is great and the
opportunity short. An election for the Legislature, held subsequently to
that for the Convention, showing a public opinion decidedly adverse to
it, the sole study of its members thenceforth seemed to be, how they
could most adroitly and effectively nullify the ascendency of the
majority. For this end alone they consulted, and caballed, and
calculated, and junketed; and the Lecompton Constitution, with the
Schedule annexed, was the worthy fruit of their labors.
It is monstrous in Mr. Buchanan to assume that a body so contrived and
so acting expressed in any sense the sovereign will of the people. But,
not to dwell upon this point, let us suppose that the Convention had
been summoned by a competent authority, that it had been fairly chosen
by its small constituency, and that its proceedings had been managed
with ordinary decorum,--would the Constitution it framed be valid, in
the face of a clear popular condemnation? We hold that it would not,
because, in our estimation, and in the estimation of every intelligent
American, the very essence of republicanism is "the consent of the
governed." It is the highest function of political sovereignty to devise
and ordain the organic law of society, the vital form of its being; and
the characteristic difference between the despotic or oligarchical and
the republican government is, that in the one case the function is
exercised by a monarch or a class, and in the other by the body of the
citizens. This distinctive feature of our politics, as opposed to
all others, regards the will of the people, directly or indirectly
expressed, as alone giving validity to law; our National Constitution,
and every one of our thirty-one State Constitutions, proceeds upon
that principle; every act of legislation in the Congress and the State
Assemblies supposes it; and every decision of every Court has that for
its basis. Constitutions have been adopted, undoubtedly, without a
distinct submission of them to the ratification of the people; but in
such cases there has been no serious agitation of the public mind, no
important conflict or division of opinion, rendering such ratification
necessary,--and, in the absence of dispute, the general assent of the
community to the action of its delegates might fairly be presumed. But
in no case, in which great and debatable questions were involved, has
any Convention dared to close its labors without providing for their
reference to the popular sanction; much less has there been any instance
in which a Convention has dared to make its own work final, in the
face of a known or apprehended repugnance of the constituency. The
politicians who should have proposed such a thing would have been
overwhelmed with unmeasured indignation and scorn. No sentiment more
livingly pervades our national mind, no sentiment is juster in itself,
than that they who are to live under the laws ought to decide on the
character of the laws,--that they whose persons, property, welfare,
happiness, life, are to be controlled by a Constitution of Government,
ought to participate in the formation of that government.
Conscious of this truth, and of its profound hold on the popular heart,
Mr. Buchanan instructed Governor Walker to see the Kansas Constitution
submitted to the people,--to protect them against fraud and violence in
voting upon it,--and to proclaim, in the event of any interference with
their rights, that the Constitution "would be and ought to be rejected
by Congress." Walker was voluble in proclamations to that end. The
trainers of the Constitution, aware of its invalidity without the
sanction of the people, provided for its submission to "approval"
or "disapproval," to "ratification" or "rejection"; and yet, by the
paltriest juggle in recorded history, devised, in the same breath, a
method of taking the vote, which completely nullified its own terms.
No man was allowed to "disapprove" it, no man was allowed to "reject"
it,--except in regard to a single section,--and before he could vote for
or against that, he was obliged to vote in favor of all the rest. If
there had been a hundred thousand voters in the Territory opposed to
the Constitution, and but one voter in its favor, the hundred thousand
voters could not have voted upon it at all, but the one voter
could,--and the vote of that one would have been construed into a
popular approval, while the will of all the others would have been
practically void. By this pitiful stratagem, it was supposed, the
double exigency of Mr. Buchanan's often repeated sentiments, and of
the pro-slavery cause, which dreaded a popular vote, was completely
satisfied; and the President of the United States, reckless of his
position and his fame, lent himself to the shameless and despicable
palter. He not only lent himself to it, but he has openly argued its
propriety, and is now making the adherence of his friends to such
baseness the test of their party fidelity. In the name of Democracy,--of
that sacred and sublime principle into which we, as a nation, have been
baptized,--which declares the inalienable rights of man,--and which,
as it makes the tour of the earth, hand and hand with Christianity, is
lifting the many from the dust, where for ages they have been trampled,
into political life and dignity,--he converts a paltry swindle into its
standard and creed, and prostitutes its glorious mission, as a redeeming
influence among men, into a ministry of slavery and outrage.
Mr. Buchanan knows--we believe better than any man in the country--that
the Lecompton Constitution is not the act of the people of Kansas. By
the election of the 4th of January--an election which was perfectly
valid, because it was held under the authority of a Territorial
Legislature superior to the Convention--it was solemnly and
unequivocally condemned. This of itself was enough to demonstrate that
fact. But all the Democratic Governors of the Territory--with the single
exception of Shannon, and the recently appointed acting Governor,
Denver, who is prudently silent--testify urgently to the same truth.
Reeder, Geary, and Walker, together with the late acting Governor,
Stanton, asseverate, in the most earnest and emphatic manner, that the
majority in Kansas is for making it a Free State,--that the minority
which has ruled is a factious minority, and that they have obtained and
perpetuated their ascendency by a most unblushing series of crimes and
frauds. Yet, in the teeth of this evidence,--of repeated elections,--of
his own witnesses turning against him,--the President adheres to the
infamous plans of the pro-slavery leaders; and, if not arrested by the
rebukes of the North, he will insist on imposing their odious measures
upon their long-suffering victims.
Looking at the administration of Mr. Buchanan simply from the point of
view of an enlightened statesmanship, we find nothing in it that is not
contemptible; but when we regard it as the accredited exponent of the
moral sense of a majority of our people, it is saved from contempt,
indeed, but saved only because contempt is merged in a deeper feeling
of humiliation and apprehension. Unparalleled as the outrages in Kansas
have been, we regard them as insignificant in comparison with the
deadlier fact that the Chief Magistrate of the Republic should strive to
defend them by the small wiles of a village attorney,--that, when the
honor of a nation and the principle of self-government are at stake, he
should show himself unconscious of a higher judicature or a nobler
style of pleading than those which would serve for a case of petty
larceny,--and that he should be abetted by more than half the national
representatives, while he brings down a case of public conscience to the
moral level of those who are content with the maculate safety which they
owe to a flaw in an indictment, or with the dingy innocence which is
certified to by the disagreement of a jury.
These things are the logical consequences of that profound national
demoralization which followed the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Bill
and alone made its execution possible,--a demoralization wilfully
brought about, for selfish ends, in that sad time which saw our greatest
advocates and our acutest politicians spending all their energy of mind
and subtlety of argument to persuade the people that there was no higher
law than that rule of custom and chicane woven of the split hairs of
immemorial sophistry, and whose strongest fibre is at the mercy of an
obstinate traverse juror,--no law higher than the decree of party,
ratified by a popular majority achieved by the waiters on Presidential
providence, through immigrant voters whom the gurgling oratory of
the whiskey-barrel is potent to convince, and whose sole notion of
jurisprudence is based upon experience of the comparative toughness
of Celtic skulls and blackthorn shillalahs. And such arguments were
listened to, such advocates commended for patriotism, in a land from
whose thirty thousand pulpits God and Christ are preached weekly to
hearers who profess belief in the Divine government of the world and the
irreversible verdicts of conscience!
The capacity of the English race for self-government is measured by
their regard as well for the forms as the essence of law. A race
conservative beyond all others of what is established, averse beyond all
others to the heroic remedy of forcible revolution, they have yet three
times in the space of a century and a half assumed the chances of
rebellion and the certain perils of civil war, rather than submit to
have Right infringed by Prerogative, and the scales of Justice made a
cheat by false weights that kept the shape but lacked the substance of
legitimate precedent. We are forced to think that there must be a bend
sinister in the escutcheon of the descendants of such men, when we find
them setting the form above the substance, and accepting as law that
which is deadly to the spirit while it is true to the letter of
legality. It is a spectacle portentous of moral lapse and social
disorganization, to see a statesman, who has had fifty years' experience
of American politics, quibbling in defence of Executive violence against
a free community, as if the conscience of the nation were no more august
a tribunal than a police justice sitting upon a paltry case of assault.
Yet more portentous is it to see a great people consenting that fraud
should be made national by the voice of a Congress in which the casting
vote may be bought by a tide-waitership, and then invested with the
solemnity of law by a Court whose members are selected, not for
uprightness of character or breadth of mind, but by the inverse test of
their capacity for cringing in subservience to party, and for narrowing
a judgment already slender as the line of personal interest, till it
becomes so threadlike as to bend at the touch, nay, at the breath, of
sectional rapacity. Have we, then, forgotten that the true prosperity of
a nation is moral, and not material? that its strength depends, not on
the width of its boundaries, nor the bulk of its census, but on its
magnanimity, its honor, its fidelity to conscience? There is a Fate
which spins and cuts the threads of national as of individual life, and
the case of God against the people of these United States is not to be
debated before any such petty tribunal as Mr. Buchanan and his advisers
seem to suppose. The sceptre which dropped successively from the grasp
of Egypt, Assyria, Carthage, Greece, Rome, fell from a hand palsied by
the moral degeneracy of the people; and the emasculate usurper or the
foreign barbarian snatched and squandered the heritage of civilization
which escheated for want of legitimate heirs of the old royal race,
whose divine right was the imperial brain, and who found their strength
in a national virtue which individualized itself in every citizen. The
wind that moans among the columns of the Parthenon, or rustles through
the weeds on the palaces of the Caesars, whimpers no truer prophecies
than that venal breath which, at a signal from the patron in the White
House, bends all one way the obsequious leaves of a partisan press,
ominous of popular decadence.
Do our leading politicians, and the prominent bankers and merchants who
sustain them, know what a dangerous lesson they are setting to a people
whose affairs are controlled by universal suffrage, when they affirm
that to be right which can by any false pretence be voted so? Does not
he who undermines national principle sap the foundations of individual
property also? If burglary may be committed on a commonwealth under
form of law, is there any logic that will protect a bank-vault or a
strong-box? When Mr. Buchanan, with a Jew broker at one elbow and a
Frenchman at the other, (strange representatives of American diplomacy!)
signed his name to the Ostend circular, was he not setting a
writing-lesson for American youth to copy, and one which the pirate hand
of Walker _did_ copy in ungainly letters of fire and blood in Nicaragua?
The vice of universal suffrage is the infinitesimal subdivision of
personal responsibility. The guilt of every national sin comes back to
the voter in a fraction the denominator of which is several millions.
It is idle to talk of the responsibility of officials to their
constituencies or to the people. The President of the United States,
during his four years of office, is less amenable to public opinion than
the Queen of England through her ministers; senators, with embassies in
prospect, laugh at instructions; representatives think they have made a
good bargain when they exchange the barren approval of constituencies
for the smile of one whom a lucky death, perhaps, has converted into
the Presidential Midas of the moment; and in a nation of adventurers,
success is too easily allowed to sanctify a speculation by which a man
sells his pitiful self for a better price than even a Jew could get for
the Saviour of the world. It cannot be too often repeated, that the only
responsibility which is of saving efficacy in a Democracy is that of
every individual man in it to his conscience and his God. As long
as any one of us holds the ballot in his hand, he is truly, what we
sometimes vaguely boast, a sovereign,--a constituent part of Destiny;
the infinite Future is his vassal; History holds her iron stylus as
his scribe; Lachesis awaits his word to close or to suspend her fatal
shears;--but the moment his vote is cast, he becomes the serf of
circumstance, at the mercy of the white-livered representative's
cowardice, or the venal one's itching palm. Our only safety, then, is
in the aggregate fidelity to personal rectitude, which may lessen the
chances of representative dishonesty, or, at the worst, constitute a
public opinion that shall make the whole country a penitentiary for
such treason, and turn the price of public honor to fairy-money, whose
withered leaves but mock the possessor with the futile memory of
self-degradation. Let every man remember, that, though he may be a
nothing in himself, yet every cipher gains the power of multiplying by
ten when it is placed on the _right side_ of whatever unit for the time
represents the cause of truth and justice. What we need is a thorough
awakening of the individual conscience; and if we once become aware how
the still and stealthy ashes of political apathy and moral insensibility
are slipping under our feet and hurrying us with them toward the
crater's irrevocable core, it may be that the effort of self-preservation
called forth by the danger will make us love the daring energy and the
dependence on our individual strength, that alone can keep us free and
worthy to be freemen.
While we hold the moral aspect of the great question now before the
country to be cardinal, there are also some practical ones which the
Republican party ought never to lose sight of. To move a people among
whom the Anglo-Saxon element is predominant, we will not say, with Lord
Bacon, that we must convince their pockets, but we do believe that moral
must always go hand in hand with common sense. They will take up arms
for a principle, but they must have confidence in each other and in
their leaders. Conscience is a good tutor to tell a man on which side to
act, but she leaves the question of _How to act_ to every man's prudence
and judgment. An over-nice conscience has before now turned the stomach
of a great cause on the eve of action. Cromwell knew when to split hairs
and when skulls. The North has too generally allowed its strength to be
divided by personal preferences and by-questions, till it has almost
seemed as if a moral principle had less constringent force to hold
its followers together than the gravitation of private interest, the
Newtonian law of that system whereof the dollar is the central sun,
which has hitherto made the owners of slaves unitary, and given them the
power which springs from concentration and the success which is sure
to follow concert of action. We have spent our strength in quarrelling
about the character of men, when we should have been watchful only of
the character of measures. A scruple of conscience has no right to
outweigh a pound of duty, though it ought to make a ton of private
interest kick the beam. The great aim of the Republican party should
be to gain one victory for the Free States. One victory will make us a
unit, and is equal to a reinforcement of fifty thousand men. The genius
of success in politics or war is to know Opportunity at first sight.
There is no mistress so easily tired as Fortune. We must waste no more
time in investigating the motives of our recruits. Have we not faith
enough in our cause to believe that it will lift all to its own level of
patriotism and devotion? Let us, then, welcome all allies, from whatever
quarter, and not inquire into their past history as minutely as if we
were the assignees of the Recording Angel and could search his books at
pleasure. When Soult was operating in the South of France, the defection
of two German regiments crippled all his combinations and gave the
advantage to Wellington. Ought Wellington to have refused their aid? For
our own part, if Mr. Douglas be the best tactician, the best master of
political combination, we are willing to forget all past differences and
serve under him cheerfully, rather than lose the battle under a general
who has agreed with us all his life. When we remember, that, of the two
great cathedrals of Europe, one is dedicated to Saint Peter who denied
his Lord under temptation, and the other to Saint Paul who spent his
early manhood in persecuting true believers, and that both these patrons
of the Church, differing as they did in many points of doctrine, were
united in martyrdom for their belief, we cannot but think that there is
room even for repentant renegades in the camp of the faithful.
While we insist that Morals should govern the _motives_ of political
action, and that no party can be permanently strong which has not the
reserve of a great principle behind it, we affirm with no less strength
of conviction that the details of our National Housekeeping should be
managed by practical sense and worldly forethought. The policy of states
moves along the beaten highways of experience, and, where terrestrial
guide-posts are plenty, we need not ask our way of the stars. The
advantage of our opponents has been that they have always had some sharp
practical measure, some definite and immediate object, to oppose to our
voluminous propositions of abstract right. Again and again the whirlwind
of oratorical enthusiasm has roused and heaped up the threatening masses
of the Free States, and again and again we have seen them collapse like
a water-spout, into a crumbling heap of disintegrated bubbles, before
the compact bullet of political audacity. While our legislatures have
been resolving and re-resolving the principles of the Declaration of
Independence, our adversaries have pushed their trenches, parallel after
parallel, against the very citadel of our political equality. A
siege, if uninterrupted, is a mere matter of time, and must end in
capitulation. Our only safety is in assuming the offensive. Are we to be
terrified any longer by such Chinese devices of warfare as the cry of
Disunion,--a threat as hollow as the mask from which it issues, as
harmless as the periodical suicides of Mantalini, as insincere as
the spoiled child's refusal of his supper? We have no desire for a
dissolution of our confederacy, though it is not for us to fear it. We
will not allow it; we will not permit the Southern half of our dominion
to become a Hayti. But there is no danger; the law that binds our system
of confederate stars together is of stronger fibre than to be snapped by
the trembling finger of Toombs or cut by the bloodless sword of Davis;
the march of the Universe is not to be stayed because some gentleman in
Buncombe declares that his sweet-potato-patch shall not go along with
it. But we have no apprehension. The sweet attraction which knits the
sons of Virginia to the Treasury has lost none of its controlling force.
We must make up our minds to keep these deep-descended gentlemen in the
Union, and must convince them that we have a work to accomplish in it
and by means of it. If our Southern brethren have the curse of Canaan in
their pious keeping, if the responsibility lie upon them to avenge the
insults of Noah, on us devolves a more comprehensive obligation and the
vindication of an elder doom;--it is for us to assert and to secure the
claim of every son of Adam to the common inheritance ratified by the
sentence, "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread." We are
to establish no aristocracy of race or complexion, no caste which Nature
and Revelation alike refuse to recognize, but the indefeasible right of
man to the soil which he subdues, and the muscles with which he subdues
it. If this be a sectional creed, it is a sectionality which at least
includes three hundred and fifty-nine degrees of the circle of man's
political aspiration and physical activity, and we may well be easy
under the imputation.
But so rapid has been the downward course of our national politics under
the guidance of our oligarchical Democracy, that the question on which
we take issue, whatever it may once have been, is no longer a sectional
one, and concerns not the slavery of the negro, but that of the Northern
white man. Whatever doubt there may be about the physical degeneration
of the race, it is more than certain that the people of the Northern
States have no longer the moral stature of their illustrious ancestry;
that their puny souls could find room enough in but the gauntlet finger
of that armor of faith and constancy and self-devotion which fitted
closely to the limbs of those who laid so broad the foundations of our
polity as to make our recreancy possible and safe for us. It wellnigh
seems as if our type should suffer a slave-change,--as if the fair hair
and skin of those ancestral _non Angli sed angeli_ should crisp into
wool and darken to the swarthy livery of servility. No Northern man can
hold any office under the national government, however petty, without an
open recantation of those principles which he drew in with his mother's
milk,--those principles which, in the better days of the republic,
even a slaveholder could write down in the great charter of our
liberties,--those principles which now only the bells and cannon
are allowed to utter on the Fourth of July or the Seventeenth of
June,--bells that may next call out the citizen-soldiery to aid in the
rendition of a slave,--cannon whose brazen lips may next rebuke the
freedom whose praises they but yesterday so emptily thundered.
When we look back upon the providential series of events which prepared
this continent for the experiment of Democracy,--when we think of those
forefathers for whom our mother England shed down from her august
breasts the nutriment of ordered liberty, not unmixed with her best
blood in the day of her trial,--when we remember the first two acts of
our drama, that cost one king his head and his son a throne, and that
third which cost another the fairest appanage of his crown and gave a
new Hero to mankind,--we cannot believe it possible that this great
scene, stretching from ocean to ocean, was prepared by the Almighty
only for such men as Mr. Buchanan and his peers to show their feats of
juggling on, even though the thimble-rig be on so colossal a scale that
the stake is a territory larger than Britain. We cannot believe that
this unhistoried continent,--this virgin leaf in the great diary of
man's conquest over the planet, on which our fathers wrote two words of
epic grandeur,--Plymouth and Bunker Hill,--is to bear for its colophon
the record of men who inherited greatness and left it pusillanimity,--a
republic, and made it anarchy,--freedom, and were content as serfs,--of
men who, born to the noblest estate of grand ideas and fair expectancies
the world had ever seen, bequeathed the sordid price of them in gold.
The change is sad 'twixt Now and Then: the Great Republic is without
influence in the councils of the world; to be an American, in Europe, is
to be the accomplice of filibusters and slave-traders; instead of men
and thought, as was hoped of us, we send to the Old World cotton, corn,
and tobacco, and are but as one of her outlying farms. Are we basely
content with our pecuniary good-fortune? Do we look on the tall column
of figures on the credit side of our national ledger as a sufficing
monument of our glory as a people? Are we of the North better off as
provinces of the Slave-holding States than as colonies of Great Britain?
Are we content with our share in the administration of national affairs,
because we are to have the ministry to Austria, and because the
newspapers promise that James Gordon Bennett shall be sent out of the
country to fill it?
We of the Free States are confessedly without our fair share of
influence in the administration of national affairs. Its foreign and
domestic policy are both directed by principles often hostile to our
interests, sometimes abhorrent to our sense of right and honor. Under
loud professions of Democracy, the powers of the central government and
of the Executive have increased till they have scarcely a match among
the despotisms of Europe, and more than justify the prophetic fears of
practical statesmen like Samuel Adams and foresighted politicians like
Jefferson. Unquestionably superior in numbers, and claiming an equal
preeminence in wealth, intelligence, and civilization, we have steadily
lost in political power and in the consideration which springs from it.
Is the preponderance of the South due to any natural superiority of an
Aristocracy over a Democracy? to any mental inferiority, to lack of
courage, of political ability, of continuity of purpose, on our own
part? We should be slow to find the cause in reasons like these; but we
_do_ find it in that moral disintegration, the necessary result of that
falsehood to our own sense of right forced upon us by the slave-system,
and which, beginning with our public men, has gradually spread to the
Press, the Pulpit, nay, worse than all, the Home, till it is hard to
find a private conscience that is not tainted with the contagious mange.
For what have we not seen within the last few years? We have seen the
nomination to office made dependent, not on the candidate's being large
enough to fill, but small enough to take it. Holding the purity of
elections as a first article of our creed, we have seen one-third of
the population of a Territory control the other two-thirds by false or
illegal votes; hereditary foes of a standing army, we have seen four
thousand troops stationed in Kansas to make forged ballots good by real
bullets; lovers of fair play, we have seen a cowardly rabble from the
Slave States protected by Federal bayonets while they committed robbery,
arson, and Sepoy atrocities against women, and the Democratic party
forced to swallow this nauseous mixture of force, fraud, and Executive
usurpation, under the name of Popular Sovereignty. We have seen Freedom
pronounced sectional and Slavery national by the highest tribunal of the
republic. We have seen the legislatures of Southern States passing acts
for the renewal and encouragement of the slave-trade. We have seen the
attempted assassination of a senator in his seat justified and applauded
by public meetings and the resolutions of State Assemblies. We have
seen a pirate, for the hanging of whom the conscious Earth would have
produced a tree, had none before existed, threaten the successor of
Washington with the exposure of his complicity, if he did not publicly
violate the faith he had publicly pledged.--But enough, and more than
enough.
It lies in the hands of the people of the Free States to rescue
themselves and the country by peaceable reform, ere it be too late, and
there be no remedy left but that dangerous one of revolution, toward
which Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem bent on driving them. But the
reform must be wide and deep, and its political objects must be attained
by household means. Our sense of private honor and integrity must be
quickened; our consciousness of responsibility to God and man for the
success of this experiment in practical Democracy, in order to which the
destiny of a hemisphere has been entrusted to us, must be roused and
exalted; we must learn to feel that the safety of universal suffrage
lies in the sensitiveness of the individual voter to every abuse of
delegated authority, every treachery to representative duty, as a
stain upon his own personal integrity; we must become convinced that
a government without conscience is the necessary result of a people
careless of their duties, and therefore unworthy of their rights.
Prosperity has deadened and bewildered us. It is time we remembered
that History does not concern herself about material wealth,--that the
life-blood of a nation is not that yellow tide which fluctuates in
the arteries of Trade,--that its true revenues are religion, justice,
sobriety, magnanimity, and the fair amenities of Art,--that it is only
by the soul that any people has achieved greatness and made lasting
conquests over the future. We believe there is virtue enough left in the
North and West to infuse health into our body politic; we believe that
America will reassume that moral influence among the nations which
she has allowed to fall into abeyance; and that our eagle, whose
morning-flight the world watched with hope and expectation, shall no
longer troop with unclean buzzards, but rouse himself and seek his eyrie
to brood new eaglets that in time shall share with him the lordship of
these Western heavens, and shall learn of him to shake the thunder from
their invincible wings.
* * * * *