THE COMPROMISES OF THE CONSTITUTION IN REGARD TO SLAVERY. -- A
DIVIDED HOUSE. -- THE BROKEN COMPACT. -- THE RIGHT OF REVOLUTION.
For a period the broad provisions of the Constitution of the United
States, as expounded by the wise and broad decisions of the Supreme
Court, had proved to be equal to every emergency. The thirteen feeble
colonies had grown to be a great Republic, and no external obstacle
threatened its majestic progress; foreign wars had been waged and vast
territories had been annexed, but every strain on the Constitution
only served to make it stronger. Yet there was a canker in a vital
part which nothing could heal, which from day to day became more
malignant, and which those who looked beneath the surface could
perceive was surely leading, and at no distant day, to dissolution or
war, or perhaps to both. The canker was the existence of negro
slavery.
In colonial days, kings, lords spiritual and temporal, and commons,
all united in favoring the slave trade. In Massachusetts the Puritan
minister might be seen on the Sabbath going to meeting in family
procession, with his negro slave bringing up the rear. Boston was
largely engaged in building ships and manufacturing rum, and a portion
of the ships and much of the rum were sent to Africa, the rum to buy
slaves, and the ships to bring them to a market in America. Newport
was more largely, and until a more recent time, engaged in the same
traffic.
In Maryland, even the Friends were sometimes owners of slaves; and it
is charged, and apparently with reason, that Wenlock Christison, the
Quaker preacher, after being driven from Massachusetts by persecution
and coming to Maryland by way of Barbadoes, sent or brought in with
him a number of slaves, who cultivated his plantation until his death.
In Georgia, the Calvinist Whitefield blessed God for his negro
plantation, which was generously given to him to establish his
"Bethesda" as a refuge for orphan children.
In the Dred Scott case, Chief Justice Taney truly described the
opinion, which he deplored, prevailing at the time of the adoption of
the Constitution, as being that the colored man had no rights which
the white man was bound to respect.[3]
[Footnote 3: Judge Taney's utterance on this subject has been
frequently and grossly misrepresented. In Appendix II. will be found
what he really did say.]
The Constitution had endeavored to settle the question of slavery by a
compromise. As the difficulty in regard to it arose far more from
political than moral grounds, so in the settlement the former were
almost exclusively considered. It was, however, the best that could be
made at that time. It is certain that without such a compromise the
Constitution would not have been adopted. The existence of slavery in
a State was left in the discretion of the State itself. If a slave
escaped to another State, he was to be returned to his master. Laws
were passed by Congress to carry out this provision, and the Supreme
Court decided that they were constitutional.
For a long time the best people at the North stood firmly by the
compromise. It was a national compact, and must be respected. But
ideas, and especially moral ideas, cannot be forever fettered by a
compact, no matter how solemn may be its sanctions. The change of
opinion at the North was first slow, then rapid, and then so powerful
as to overwhelm all opposition. John Brown, who was executed for
raising a negro insurrection in Virginia, in which men were wounded
and killed, was reverenced by many at the North as a hero, a martyr
and a saint. It had long been a fixed fact that no fugitive slave
could by process of law be returned from the North into slavery. With
the advent to power of the Republican party--a party based on
opposition to slavery--another breach in the outworks of the
Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, had been made.
Sooner or later the same hands would capture the citadel. Sooner or
later it was plain that slavery was doomed.
In the memorable Senatorial campaign in Illinois between Stephen A.
Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, the latter, in his speech before the
Republican State Convention at Springfield, June 17, 1858, struck the
keynote of his party by the bold declaration on the subject of slavery
which he then made and never recalled.
This utterance was the more remarkable because on the previous day the
convention had passed unanimously a resolution declaring that Mr.
Lincoln was their first and only choice for United States Senator, to
fill the vacancy about to be created by the expiration of Mr.
Douglas's term of office, but the convention had done nothing which
called for the advanced ground on which Mr. Lincoln planted himself in
that speech. It was carefully prepared.
The narrative of Colonel Lamon in his biography of Lincoln is
intensely interesting and dramatic.[4]
[Footnote 4: Lamon's Life of Lincoln, p. 808.]
About a dozen gentlemen, he says, were called to meet in the library
of the State House. After seating them at the round table, Mr. Lincoln
read his entire speech, dwelling slowly on that part which speaks of a
divided house, so that every man fully understood it. After he had
finished, he asked for the opinion of his friends. All but William H.
Herndon, the law partner of Mr. Lincoln, declared that the whole
speech was too far in advance of the times, and they especially
condemned that part which referred to a divided house. Mr. Herndon sat
still while they were giving their respective opinions; then he sprang
to his feet and said: "Lincoln, deliver it just as it reads. If it is
in advance of the times, let us--you and I, if no one else--lift the
people to the level of this speech now, higher hereafter. The speech
is true, wise and politic, and will succeed now, or in the future.
Nay, it will aid you, if it will not make you President of the United
States."...
"Mr. Lincoln sat still a short moment, rose from his chair, walked
backward and forward in the hall, stopped and said: 'Friends, I have
thought about this matter a great deal, have weighed the question well
from all corners, and am thoroughly convinced the time has come when
it should be uttered; and if it must be that I must go down because of
this speech, then let me go down linked to truth--die in the advocacy
of what is right and just. This nation cannot live on injustice. A
house divided against itself cannot stand, I say again and again.'"
The opening paragraph of the speech is as follows: "If we could first
know where we are and whither we are tending, we could then better
judge what to do and how to do it. We are now far on into the fifth
year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident
promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of
that policy that agitation has not only not ceased, but is constantly
augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have
been reached and passed. A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I believe this Government can not endure permanently half slave and
half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect
the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It
will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of
slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the
public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of
ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it
shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North
as well as South."
The blast of the trumpet gave no uncertain sound. The far-seeing
suggestion of Mr. Herndon came true to the letter. I believe this
speech made Abraham Lincoln President of the United States.
But the founders of the Constitution of the United States had built a
house which was divided against itself from the beginning. They had
framed a union of States which was part free and part slave, and that
union was intended to last forever. Here was an irreconcilable
conflict between the Constitution and the future President of the
United States.
When the Republican Convention assembled at Chicago in May, 1860, in
the heat of the contest, which soon became narrowed down to a choice
between Mr. Seward and Mr. Lincoln, the latter dispatched a friend to
Chicago with a message in writing, which was handed either to Judge
Davis or Judge Logan, both members of the convention, which runs as
follows: "Lincoln agrees with Seward in his irrepressible-conflict
idea, and in negro equality; but he is opposed to Seward's higher
law." But there was no substantial difference between the position of
the two: Lincoln's "divided house" and Seward's "higher law" placed
them really in the same attitude.
The seventh resolution in the Chicago platform condemned what it
described as the "new dogma that the Constitution, of its own force,
carries slavery into any or all of the Territories of the United
States." This resolution was a direct repudiation by a National
Convention of the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott
case.
On the 6th of November, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of
the United States. Of the actual votes cast there was a majority
against him of 930,170. Next came Mr. Douglas, who lost the support of
the Southern Democrats by his advocacy of the doctrine of "squatter
sovereignty," as it was called, which was in effect, although not in
form, as hostile to the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred
Scott case as the seventh resolution of the Chicago Convention itself.
Mr. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, the candidate of the Southern
Democracy, fell very far, and Mr. Bell, of Tennessee, the candidate of
the Union party, as it was called, a short-lived successor of the old
Whig party, fell still farther in the rear of the two Northern
candidates.
The great crisis had come at last. The Abolition party had become a
portion of the victorious Republican party. The South, politically,
was overwhelmed. Separated now from its only ally, the Northern
Democracy, it stood at last alone.
It matters not that Mr. Lincoln, after his election, in sincerity of
heart held out the olive branch to the nation, and that during his
term of office the South, so far as his influence could avail, would
have been comparatively safe from direct aggressions. Mr. Lincoln was
not known then as he is known now, and, moreover, his term of office
would be but four years.
What course, then, was left to the South if it was determined to
maintain its rights under the Constitution? What but the right of
self-defense?
The house of every man is his castle, and he may defend it to the
death against all aggressors. When a hostile hand is raised to strike
a blow, he who is assaulted need not wait until the blow falls, but on
the instant may protect himself as best he can. These are the rights
of self-defense known, approved and acted on by all freemen. And where
constitutional rights of a people are in jeopardy, a kindred right of
self-defense belongs to them. Although revolutionary in its character,
it is not the less a right.
Wendell Phillips, abolitionist as he was, in a speech made at New
Bedford on the 9th of April, 1861, three days before the bombardment
of Fort Sumter, fully recognized this right. He said: "Here are a
series of States girding the Gulf, who think that their peculiar
institutions require that they should have a separate government. They
have a right to decide that question without appealing to you or me. A
large body of the people, sufficient to make a nation, have come to
the conclusion that they will have a government of a certain form. Who
denies them the right? Standing with the principles of '76 behind us,
who can deny them the right? What is a matter of a few millions of
dollars or a few forts? It is a mere drop in the bucket of the great
national question. It is theirs just as much as ours. I maintain, on
the principles of '76, that Abraham Lincoln has no right to a soldier
in Fort Sumter."
And such was the honest belief of the people who united in
establishing the Southern Confederacy.
Wendell Phillips was not wrong in declaring the principles of '76 to
be kindred to those of '61. The men of '76 did not fight to get rid of
the petty tax of three pence a pound on tea, which was the only tax
left to quarrel about. They were determined to pay no taxes, large or
small, then or thereafter. Whether the tax was lawful or not was a
doubtful question, about which there was a wide difference of opinion,
but they did not care for that. Nothing would satisfy them but the
relinquishment of any claim of right to tax the colonies, and this
they could not obtain. They maintained that their rights were
violated. They were, moreover, embittered by a long series of disputes
with the mother country, and they wanted to be independent and to have
a country of their own. They thought they were strong enough to
maintain that position.
Neither were the Southern men of '61 fighting for money. And they too
were deeply embittered, not against a mother country, but against a
brother country. The Northern people had published invectives of the
most exasperating character broadcast against the South in their
speeches, sermons, newspapers and books. The abolitionists had
proceeded from words to deeds and were unwearied in tampering with the
slaves and carrying them off. The Southern people, on their part, were
not less violent in denunciation of the North. The slavery question
had divided the political parties throughout the nation, and on this
question the South was practically a unit. They could get no security
that the provisions of the Constitution would be kept either in letter
or in spirit, and this they demanded as their right.
The Southern men thought that they also were strong enough to wage
successfully a defensive war. Like the men of '76, they in great part
were of British stock; they lived in a thinly settled country, led
simple lives, were accustomed to the use of arms, and knew how to
protect themselves. Such men make good soldiers, and when their armies
were enrolled the ranks were filled with men of all classes, the rich
as well as the poor, the educated as well as the ignorant.
It is a mistake to suppose that they were inveigled into secession by
ambitious leaders. On the contrary, it is probable that they were not
as much under the influence of leaders as the men of '76, and that
there were fewer disaffected among them. At times the scales trembled
in the balance. There are always mistakes in war. It is an easy and
ungrateful task to point them out afterward. We can now see that grave
errors, both financial and military, were made, and that opportunities
were thrown away. How far these went to settle the contest, we can
never certainly know, but it does not need great boldness to assert
that the belief which the Southern people entertained that they were
strong enough to defend themselves, was not unreasonable.
The determination of the South to maintain slavery was undoubtedly the
main cause of secession, but another deep and underlying cause was the
firm belief of the Southern people in the doctrine of States' rights,
and their jealousy of any attack upon those rights. Devotion to their
State first of all, a conviction that paramount obligation--in case of
any conflict of allegiance--was due not to the Union but to the State,
had been part of the political creed of very many in the South ever
since the adoption of the Constitution. An ignoble love of slavery was
not the general and impelling motive. The slaveholders, who were
largely in the minority, acted as a privileged class always does act.
They were determined to maintain their privileges at all hazards. But
they, as well as the great mass of the people who had no personal
interest in slavery, fought the battles of the war with the passionate
earnestness of men who believed with an undoubting conviction that
they were the defenders not only of home rule and of their firesides,
but also of their constitutional rights.
And behind the money question, the constitutional question and the
moral question, there was still another of the gravest import. Was it
possible for two races nearly equal in number, but widely different in
character and civilization, to live together in a republic in peace
and equality of rights without mingling in blood? The answer of the
Southern man was, "It is not possible."