Dean Swift, in a letter to Lord Bolingbroke, says that he does not
"remember to have ever heard or seen one great genius who had long
success in the ministry; and recollecting a great many in my memory and
acquaintance, those who had the smoothest time were, at best, men of
middling degree in understanding." However true this may be in the
main,--and it undoubtedly is true that in ordinary times the speculative
and innovating temper of an original mind is less safe than the patience
of routine and persistence in precedent of a common-place one,--there
are critical occasions to which intellect of the highest quality,
character of the finest fibre, and a judgment that is inspired rather
than confused by new and dangerous combinations of circumstances, are
alone equal. Tactics and an acquaintance with the highest military
authorities were adequate enough till they were confronted with General
Bonaparte and the new order of things. If a great man struggling with
the storms of fate be the sublimest spectacle, a mediocre man in the
same position is surely the most pitiful. Deserted by his presence
of mind, which, indeed, had never been anything but an absence of
danger,--baffled by the inapplicability of his habitual principles of
conduct, (if that may be called a principle, which, like the act of
walking, is merely an unconscious application of the laws of gravity,)
--helpless, irresolute, incapable of conceiving the flower Safety in
the nettle Danger, much more of plucking it thence,--surely here, if
anywhere, is an object of compassion. When such a one is a despot who
has wrought his own destruction by obstinacy in a traditional evil
policy, like Francis II. of Naples, our commiseration is outweighed by
satisfaction that the ruin of the man is the safety of the state. But
when the victim is a so-called statesman, who has malversated the
highest trusts for selfish ends, who has abused constitutional forms
to the destruction of the spirit that gave them life and validity, who
could see nothing nobler in the tenure of high office than the means it
seemed to offer of prolonging it, who knows no art to conjure the spirit
of anarchy he has evoked but the shifts and evasions of a second-rate
attorney, and who has contrived to involve his country in the confusion
of principle and vacillation of judgment which have left him without
a party and without a friend,--for such a man we have no feeling but
contemptuous reprobation. Pan-urge in danger of shipwreck is but a
faint type of Mr. Buchanan in face of the present crisis; and that poor
fellow's craven abjuration of his "_former_ friend," Friar John, is
magnanimity itself, compared with his almost-ex-Excellency's treatment
of the Free States in his last Message to Congress. There are times
when mediocrity is a dangerous quality, and a man may drown himself as
effectually in milk-and-water as in Malmsey.
The question, whether we are a Government or an Indian Council, we do
not propose to discuss here; whether there be a right of secession
tempered by a right of coercion, like a despotism by assassination, and
whether it be expedient to put the latter in practice, we shall
not consider: for it is not always the part of wisdom to attempt a
settlement of what the progress of events will soon settle for us. Mr.
Buchanan seems to have no opinion, or, if he has one, it is a halting
between two, a bat-like cross of sparrow and mouse that gives timidity
its choice between flight and skulking. Nothing shocks our sense of the
fitness of things more than a fine occasion to which the man is wanting.
Fate gets her hook ready, but the eye is not there to clinch with it,
and so all goes at loose ends. Mr. Buchanan had one more chance offered
him of showing himself a common-place man, and he has done it full
justice. Even if they could have done nothing for the country, a few
manly sentences might have made a pleasing exception in his political
history, and rescued for him the fag-end of a reputation.
Mr. Buchanan, by his training in a system of politics without a parallel
for intrigue, personality, and partisanship, would have unfitted himself
for taking a statesmanlike view of anything, even if he had ever been
capable of it. His nature has been subdued to what it worked in. We
could not have expected from him a Message around which the spirit, the
intelligence, and the character of the country would have rallied. But
he might have saved himself from the evil fame of being the first of our
Presidents who could never forget himself into a feeling of the
dignity of the place he occupied. He has always seemed to consider the
Presidency as a retaining-fee paid him by the slavery-propagandists,
and his Message to the present Congress looks like the last juiceless
squeeze of the orange which the South is tossing contemptuously away.
Mr. Buchanan admits as real the assumed wrongs of the South Carolina
revolutionists, and even, if we understand him, allows that they are
great enough to justify revolution. But he advises the secessionists to
pause and try what can be done by negotiation. He sees in the internal
history of the country only a series of injuries inflicted by the
Free upon the Slave States; yet he affirms, that, so far as Federal
legislation is concerned, the rights of the South have never been
assailed, except in the single instance of the Missouri Compromise,
which gave to Slavery the unqualified possession of territory which the
Free States might till then have disputed. Yet that bargain, a losing
one as it was on the part of the Free States, having been annulled, can
hardly be reckoned a present grievance. South Carolina had quite as long
a list of intolerable oppressions to resent in 1832 as now, and not one
of them, as a ground of complaint, could be compared with the refusal
to pay the French-Spoliation claims of Massachusetts. The secession
movement then, as now, had its origin in the ambition of disappointed
politicians. If its present leaders are more numerous, none of them are
so able as Mr. Calhoun; and if it has now any other object than it had
then, it is to win by intimidation advantages that shall more than
compensate for its loss in the elections.
In 1832, General Jackson bluntly called the South Carolina doctrines
treason, and the country sustained him. That they are not characterized
in the same way now does not prove any difference in the thing, but only
in the times and the men. They are none the less treason because
James Buchanan is less than Andrew Jackson, but they are all the more
dangerous.
It has been the misfortune of the United States that the conduct of
their public affairs has passed more and more exclusively into the hands
of men who have looked on politics as a game to be played rather than
as a trust to be administered, and whose capital, whether of personal
consideration or of livelihood, has been staked on a turn of the cards.
A general skepticism has thus been induced, exceedingly dangerous
in times like these. The fatal doctrine of rotation in office has
transferred the loyalty of the numberless servants of the Government,
and of those dependent on or influenced by them, from the nation to
a party. For thousands of families every change in the National
Administration is as disastrous as revolution, and the Government has
thus lost that influence which the idea of permanence and stability
would exercise in a crisis like the present. At the present moment, the
whole body of office-holders at the South is changed from a conservative
to a disturbing element by a sense of the insecurity of their tenure.
Their allegiance having always been to the party in power at Washington,
and not to the Government of the Nation, they find it easy to transfer
it to the dominant faction at home.
The subservience on the question of Slavery, which has hitherto
characterized both the great parties of the country, has strengthened
the hands of the extremists at the South, and has enabled them to get
the control of public opinion there by fostering false notions of
Southern superiority and Northern want of principle. We have done so
much to make them believe in their importance to us, and given them so
little occasion even to suspect our importance to them, that we have
taught them to regard themselves as the natural rulers of the country,
and to look upon the Union as a favor granted to our weakness, whose
withdrawal would be our ruin. Accordingly, they have grown more and more
exacting, till at length the hack politicians of the Free States have
become so imbued with the notion of yielding, and so incapable of
believing in any principle of action higher than temporary expedients
to carry an election, or any object nobler than the mere possession of
office for its own sake, that Mr. Buchanan gravely proposes that the
Republican party should pacify South Carolina by surrendering the very
creed that called it into existence and holds it together, the only
fruit of its victory that made victory worth having. Worse than this,
when the Free States by overwhelming majorities have just expressed
their conviction, that slavery, as he creature of local law, can claim
no legitimate extension beyond the limits of that law, he asks their
consent to denationalize freedom and to nationalize slavery by an
amendment of the Federal Constitution, that shall make the local law of
the Slave States paramount throughout the Union. Mr. Buchanan would stay
the yellow fever by abolishing the quarantine hospital and planting a
good virulent case or two in every village in the land.
We do not underestimate the gravity of the present crisis, and we agree
that nothing should be done to exasperate it; but if the people of the
Free States have been taught anything by the repeated lessons of bitter
experience, it has been that submission is not the seed of conciliation,
but of contempt and encroachment. The wolf never goes for mutton to the
mastiff. It is quite time that it should be understood that freedom is
also an institution deserving some attention in a Model Republic, that
a decline in stocks is more tolerable and more transient than one in
public spirit, and that material prosperity was never known to abide
long in a country that had lost its political morality. The fault of the
Free States in the eyes of the South is not one that can be atoned for
by any yielding of special points here and there. Their offence is that
they are free, and that their habits and prepossessions are those of
Freedom. Their crime is the census of 1860. Their increase in numbers,
wealth, and power is a standing aggression. It would not be enough to
please the Southern States that we should stop asking them to abolish
slavery,--what they demand of us is nothing less than that we should
abolish the spirit of the age. Our very thoughts are a menace. It is not
the North, but the South, that forever agitates the question of Slavery.
The seeming prosperity of the cotton-growing States is based on a great
mistake and a great wrong; and it is no wonder that they are irritable
and scent accusation in the very air. It is the stars in their courses
that fight against their system, and there are those who propose to make
everything comfortable by Act of Congress.
It is almost incredible to what a pitch of absurdity the Slave-holding
party have been brought by the weak habit of concession which has been
the vice of the Free States. Senator Green of Missouri, whose own State
is rapidly gravitating toward free institutions, gravely proposes an
armed police along the whole Slave frontier for the arrest of fugitives.
Already the main employment of our navy is in striving to keep Africans
out, and now the whole army is to mount guard to keep them in. This is
but a trifle to the demands that will be made upon us, if we yield now
under the threats of a mob,--for men acting under passion or terror, or
both, are a mob, no matter what their numbers and intelligence.
A dissolution of the Union would be a terrible thing, but not so
terrible as an acquiescence in the theory that Property is the only
interest that binds men together in society, and that its protection
is the highest object of human government. Nothing could well be more
solemn than the thought of a disruption of our great and prosperous
Republic. Even if peaceful, the derangement consequent upon it would
cause incalculable suffering and disaster. Already the mere threat
of it, assisted by the efforts of interested persons, has caused a
commercial panic. But would it be wisdom in the Free States to put
themselves at the mercy of such a panic whenever the whim took South
Carolina to be discontented? That would be the inevitable result of a
craven spirit now. Let the Republican party be mild and forbearing,--for
the opportunity to be so is the best reward of victory, and taunts and
recriminations belong to boys; but, above all, let them be manly. The
moral taint of once submitting to be bullied is a scrofula that will
never out of the character.
We do not believe that the danger is so great as it appears. Rumor is
like one of those multiplying-mirrors that make a mob of shadows out
of one real object. The interests of three-fifths of the Slave-holding
States are diametrically opposed to secession; so are those of
five-sixths of the people of the seceding States, if they did but know
it. The difficulties in the way of organizing a new form of government
are great, almost insuperable; the expenses enormous. As the public
burdens grow heavier, the lesson of resistance and rebellion will find
its aptest scholars in the non-slave-owning majority who will be paying
taxes for the support of the very institution that has made and keeps
them poor. Men are not long in arriving at just notions of the value of
what they pay for, especially when it is for other people. Taxes are a
price that people are slowest to pay for a cat in a bag. If matters are
allowed to take their own course for a little longer, the inevitable
reaction is sure to set in. The Hartford Convention gave more uneasiness
to the Government and the country than the present movement in the
South, but the result of it was the ruin of the Federal Party, and not
of the Federal Union.
Even if the secessionists could accomplish their schemes, who would
be the losers? Not the Free States, certainly, with their variety of
resources and industry. The laws of trade cannot be changed, and the
same causes which have built up their agriculture, commerce, and
manufactures will not cease to be operative. The real wealth
and strength of states, other things being equal, depends upon
homogeneousness of population and variety of occupation, with a common
interest and common habits of thought. The cotton-growing States, with
their single staple, are at the mercy of chance. India, Australia, nay,
Africa herself, may cut the thread of their prosperity. Their population
consists of two hostile races, and their bone and muscle, instead
of being the partners, are the unwilling tools of their capital
and intellect. The logical consequence of this political theory is
despotism, which the necessity of coercing the subject race will make a
military one. Already South Carolina is discussing a standing army. If
history is not a lying gossip, the result of the system of labor will be
Jamaica, and that of the system of polity, Mexico. Instead of a stable
government, they will have a whirligig of _pronunciamientos_, or
stability will be purchased at a cost that will make it intolerable.
They have succeeded in establishing among themselves a fatal unanimity
on the question of Slavery,--fatal because it makes the office of spy
and informer honorable, makes the caprice of a mob the arbiter of
thought, speech, and action, and debases public opinion to a muddy
mixture of fear and prejudice. In peace, the majority of their
population will be always looked on as conspirators; in war, they would
become rebels.
It is time that the South should learn, if they do not begin to suspect
it already, that the difficulty of the Slavery question is slavery
itself,--nothing more, nothing less. It is time that the North should
learn that it has nothing left to compromise but the rest of its
self-respect. Nothing will satisfy the extremists at the South short of
a reduction of the Free States to a mere police for the protection of an
institution whose danger increases at an equal pace with its wealth.
It was the deliberate intention of Mr. Calhoun that the compact should
be broken the moment the absolute control of Government passed out of
the hands of the slaveholding clique. He was willing to wait till we
had stolen Texas and paid a hundred millions for Cuba; but if the game
seemed to be up, then secede at once. In a hasty moment, he started his
revolution, when there was a stronger man than he to confront him. South
Carolina was to all appearance as united then as now. But a few months
brought a reaction, and no one was more relieved than Mr. Calhoun that
matters stopped where they did. Whether the stirrers of the present
excitement, which finds vacillation in the Executive and connivance
In the Cabinet, will be wise enough to let it go out in the same way,
remains to be seen; but the greatest danger of disunion, would spring
from a want of self-possession and spirit in the Free States.