AMERICAN NATIONALIZATION, AND HOW IT MADE THE BOND OF UNION STRONGER AND
STRONGER
Greece was going down in her contest with Macedon when she gave the world
to come the Achaean league, the first historical example of full-grown
federation. As Freeman says of such a federal government: "Its perfect
form is a late growth of a very high state of political culture."[27] This
historian thus summarizes its essentials:
"Two requisites seem necessary to constitute federal government in
this its most perfect form. On the one hand, each of the members of
the union must be wholly independent in those matters which concern
each member only. On the other hand, all must be subject to a common
power in those matters which concern the whole body of members
collectively."[28]
No author has yet shown a better-considered and more accurate appreciation
of the benefits to different communities of federal union. But the
islander could not conceive--even at the centre of the British empire
spread over the world--the advanced phase of Anglo-Saxon federation in
America and Australia, which for want of a better name we may call, using
a grand word of our fathers, continental federation.
And Americans of every generation have misunderstood the true nature of
our union, and especially how it was made and how it could be unmade. The
fathers were as much mistaken as to the real authorship of the
declaration of independence, the articles of confederation, and the
federal constitution, as Burke and many people of his time were as to the
true causes of the French revolution, or as the brothers were as to those
of their war. In all that the fathers did they were sure that they acted
as agents solely of their respective colonies or States, which they
believed to be independent and sovereign. Therefore they maintained that
the authorship of the three great documents just mentioned was that of the
separate States, when in truth it was that of the union. When the latter,
which had been long forming its rudiments, came into something like
consciousness, it at once spurred our fathers to make the declaration of
independence. The declaration corresponds to the later ordinances of
secession. And this union, gathering strength, led our fathers to make the
old confederation; and its articles and the belonging government are
closely paralleled by the constitution of the Confederate States and its
belonging government. As southern nationalization brought forth the
southern confederacy, so it was American nationalization that caused
secession from England, the declaration of independence, and the
confederation which won the Revolutionary war. To summarize the foregoing:
Southern nationalization evolved the southern union, and American
nationalization evolved the American union. The fathers, with the usual
undiscernment of contemporaries, by a most natural _hysteron proteron_
conceived the latter union to be the work, product, and result of the
constitution. In the intersectional contention, the south accepted the
mistakes of the fathers and rested her cause upon them, and the north,
instead of correcting them, substituted a huge and glaring mistake of her
own. Advocating the maintenance of the constitution over all the States,
she sought to refute the doctrine of State sovereignty urged by the south
with the arguments of those who had opposed the adoption of the federal
constitution. Patrick Henry and Nathan Dane--we omit the others--argued
that the constitution, if ratified, would really wipe out State lines and
make the central government supreme in authority over the States, and
actually sovereign. Could the people of the thirteen States have been made
to believe this, they would have unanimously rejected the instrument.
Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and many others competent to advise, stood
in solid phalanx on the other side, and the people were convinced by them
that adoption would have no such effect. They decided that the arguments
were not good, and the constitution was ratified. But the discredited
arguments were afterwards, by a very queer psychological process, taken up
by Story, Webster, and a great host, and paraded as unanswerable
refutation of the doctrine of State sovereignty, and demonstration that by
the constitution the United States had acquired absolute supremacy over
the different States.[29] At a later place we will try to show you how
Webster's glory outshines that of every other actor, except Lincoln, in
the great struggle between north and south. But here we must emphasize
how, when supporting the fallacies of Patrick Henry and Nathan Dane, he
met the one real and signal defeat of his life, to which the drubbing he
received from Binney in the Girard College case was a small affair--a
defeat none the less signal because at the time, and long afterwards, it
was and still is crowned as a glorious victory by thousands upon
thousands.
The force-bill had just been introduced into the senate of the United
States. It provided for the collection of the revenue in defiance of the
nullification ordinance of South Carolina. The next day, January 22, 1833,
Calhoun offered in that body his famous resolutions, embodying his
doctrine of nullification, under which he justified the ordinance just
mentioned. The 16th of the next month, Webster discussed the two cardinal
ones of these resolutions at length. As he summarized them, they affirmed:
"1. That the political system under which we live, and under which
congress is now assembled, is a compact, to which the people of the
several States, as separate and sovereign communities, are the
parties.
2. That these sovereign parties have a right to judge, each for
itself, of any alleged violation of the constitution by congress; and
in case of such violation, to choose, each for itself, its own mode
and measure of redress."
He had not long before contemplated making an address to the public in
answer to Calhoun's pro-nullification letter to Governor Hamilton in the
form of a letter from himself to Kent; and it cannot be doubted that he
had got himself ready for this; nor can it be doubted that in the
twenty-five days' interim he had not only worked over and adapted the
unused materials of the address mentioned, but he had most diligently made
special preparation for his speech--in short, it may be assumed that he
had bestowed upon the subject of the resolutions the most searching
examination and profound meditation of which, with his superhuman powers,
he was capable. In spite of all his conscientious labors, as I am now
especially concerned to impress upon you, he injured and set back the
cause of the union by defending it with answerable arguments--nay, rather,
with arguments helping the other side.
At the outset he severely and sternly rebukes two terms of Calhoun's, one
being the use of _constitutional compact_ for _constitution_, and the
other being _the accession of a State to the constitution_. These terms
are utterly impermissible, and are to be scouted. If we accept them, _we
must acquiesce in the monstrous conclusions which the author of the
resolutions draws from them_. That is really what Webster says. Note the
confident positiveness of his pertinent language, some of which we
subjoin:
"It is easy, quite easy, to see why the honorable gentleman has used
it [constitutional compact] in these resolutions. He cannot open the
book, and look upon our written frame of government, without seeing
that it is called a _constitution_. This may well be appalling to him.
It threatens his whole doctrine of compact, and its darling
derivatives, nullification and secession, with instant confutation.
Because, if he admits our instrument of government to be a
_constitution_, then, for that very reason, it is not a compact
between sovereigns; a constitution of government and a compact between
sovereign powers being things essentially unlike in their very
natures, and incapable of ever being the same.
We know no more of a constitutional compact between sovereign powers
than we know of a _constitutional_ indenture of copartnership, a
_constitutional_ bill of exchange. But we know what the _constitution_
is; we know what the bond of our union and the security of our
liberties is; and we mean to maintain and to defend it, in its plain
sense and unsophisticated meaning."
This is enough of the exorcism of that malignant spirit, constitutional
compact. Now as to the other malignant spirit. Webster says:
"The first resolution declares that the people of the several States
'_acceded_' to the constitution, or to the constitutional compact, as
it is called. This word 'accede,' not found either in the constitution
itself, or in the ratification of it by any one of the States, has
been chosen for use here, doubtless, not without a well-considered
purpose.
The natural converse of _accession_ is _secession_; and, therefore,
when it is stated that the people of the States acceded to the union,
it may be more plausibly argued that they may secede from it. _If in
adopting the constitution, nothing was done but acceding to a compact,
nothing would seem necessary to break it up, but to secede from the
same compact._ But the term is wholly out of place.... The people of
the United States have used no such form of expression in establishing
the present government. They do not say that they _accede_ to a
league, but they declare that they _ordain and establish_ a
constitution. Such are the very words of the instrument itself; and in
all the States, without exception, the language used by their
conventions was, that they '_ratified_ the constitution;' some of them
employing the additional words 'assented to' and 'adopted,' but all of
them 'ratifying.'"
Note that I have italicized in the quotation certain admissions of
Webster, which, in case his premises should be disproved, concede the
cause to his adversary. And we will now tell you how Calhoun did disprove
those premises.
He showed that Webster himself had in a senate speech called the
constitution a _constitutional compact_; and that President Washington, in
his official announcement to congress, described North Carolina as
_acceding_ to the union by the ratification she had at last made of the
constitution.
As to these two points Calhoun further sustained himself with
unquestionable authority and also argument inconfutable by one who, like
Webster, did not find the true _ratio decidendi_, that is, the effect of
evolution to bring forth the nation.
The rest of Calhoun's answer will be considered a little later. But what
of it has already been given covers the essentials of the controversy. In
supporting his proposition that the States were sovereign when they made
the constitution, and kept their entire sovereignty intact afterwards, he
was too strong for his antagonist. And yet had his knowledge of the facts
been fuller, how much better he could have done. He could have quoted from
all the great men who made the constitution and secured its ratification
language, in which _accede_ is used again and again in the same sense as
it is in his resolutions.
Likewise, he could have quoted language in which they designated the
constitution as a compact or something synonymous. Madison--to mention
only one of many instances--advocating ratification in the Virginia
convention, called the constitution "a government of _a federal nature_,
consisting of _many coequal sovereignties_." What an effective _argumentum
ad hominem_ could Calhoun have found in the provision of the constitution
of the State of Webster, to wit: that Massachusetts is free, sovereign,
and independent, retaining every power which she has not expressly
delegated to the United States.[30]
Webster also made blunders in construing the context of the constitution,
as well as the clauses specially involved, in contrasting the constitution
with the articles of confederation, and in his reading of our
constitutional history. These blunders were exhaustively, ably,
relentlessly exposed.
We who are trained either in forensic or parliamentary debate well know
the conquering and demolishing reply. Although, as we have just shown,
Calhoun's reply could have been far more effective than it really was,
still its success and triumph were so evident that when he closed, John
Randolph, who had heard it, wanted a hat obstructing his sight removed, so
that, as he said, he might see "Webster die, muscle by muscle."
Master the question at issue, and read the two speeches as impartially as
you strive to read the discussion of AEschines and Demosthenes, and if you
are qualified to judge of debate between intellectual giants you must
admit that Webster was driven from every inch of ground chosen by him as
his very strongest, and which he confidently believed that he could hold
against the world.
Yet the union men, who were hosts in the north and numerous even in the
south at that time, accepted Webster's speech as the bible of their
political faith, and as its reward ennobled him with the pre-eminent title
of Expounder of the Constitution. They ignored, or they never learned of,
the pulverizing refutation. But the State-rights men and the south
generally understood. Webster also understood. He did not make any real
rejoinder. And his subsequent utterances are in harmony with the
State-rights doctrine to which Calhoun seems to have converted him.[31] I
fancy that with that rare humor which was one of his shining gifts, he
dubbed himself in his secret meditations, "Expounder because not
expounding." Later I shall tell you how Webster builded better than he
knew, and that there was, after all, in the speech that which fully
justifies the worship it received from the union men.
But there is something else pertinent to be learned here. That the north
generally found out only what Webster said in the debate for his side, and
never even heard of what was said on the other, and that the south became
at once familiar with both speeches, proves that each section had already
formed its own belonging and independent public, and that the southern
public kept attentive watch upon all affairs of fact or opinion
interesting the other, while the northern public knew hardly anything at
all of the south. A large percentage of the southern leaders had studied
in northern schools and colleges. In this and many other ways they had
been instructed as to the north. Such instruction contributed very greatly
to southern supremacy in the federal government until the election of
Lincoln. We can now see that the powers in charge, as a part of their
work, made the great northern public, which, as Lincoln observed, was to
be the savior of the union, stop its ears to all anti-union sentiments or
arguments. How else can you understand it that the ante-bellum notices of
Webster, the memoir by Everett, the different utterances of Choate, and
many, many other sketches, are so utterly dumb as to Calhoun's great
reply? And is not the same dumbness of Curtis, Von Holst, and McMaster,
writing after the war, due to the survival in the north of the old
constraint? a constraint so powerful that, while Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, in
1883, did concede just a little to Calhoun, he stopped far short of the
full justice that I believe he would now render were he to traverse the
ground again.
We must now go beyond what we have already hinted, and show you plainly
how both the union men and the State-rights men assumed untenable
premises, and how the south, maintaining a cause foredoomed, vanquished in
the forum of discussion her adversary, maintaining the side which fate had
decreed must win. In no other way can the reader be better made to
understand the incalculable potency of the forces which preserved the
American union after its orators and advocates had all been discomfited;
and in no other way can he better learn what principles are to be invoked
if he would grasp the real essence of the union.
We emphasize the material and cardinal mistake of the union men, thus
phrased by Webster in the speech we have discussed: "Whether the
constitution be a compact between States in their sovereign capacities, is
a question which must be mainly argued from what is contained in the
instrument itself."
This was to abandon inexpugnable ground. That ground was the great body of
pertinent facts, known to all, which begun the making of the union before
the declaration of independence, and which, from that time on to the very
hour that Webster was speaking, had been making the union stronger and
more perfect. He ought to have contended that a nation grows; that it
cannot be made, or be at all modified, even by a constitution. Any
constitution is its creature, not its creator.
How weak he was when he invoked construction of the federal constitution
as the main umpire. That constitution had been always construed against
him. The three departments of the federal government had each uniformly
treated it as a compact between sovereign States; and they kept this up
until the brothers' war broke out. Mr. Stephens, in his great
compilation,[32] demonstrates this unanswerably. But the State-rights men
had a still greater strength than even this, if the question be conceded
to be one of construction. As the author of the Republic of Republics
shows by a mountain of proofs, the illustrious draftsmen of the
constitution and their contemporaries who finally got the constitution
adopted--all the people, high and low, who favored the cause--declared at
the time that the sovereignty of the States would remain unimpaired after
adoption.[33]
To sum up, the generation that drafted and adopted the constitution, and
all the succeeding ones who had lived under it, agreed that the States
were sovereign.
How could even Webster talk these facts out of existence? At every stage
of the intersectional debate the cause of the south supporting State
sovereignty became stronger. And there were great hosts at the north who
understood the record as the south did; and, while they hoped and prayed
that separation would never come, they conscientiously conceded State
sovereignty to the full. It seems to me to be the fact that, although the
federal soldiers cherished deep love for the union, a very great majority
of the more intelligent among them did not long keep at its height the
emotion excited by the attack on Fort Sumter, and soon settled back into
their former creed, holding, because of the reasons summarized above, the
States to be sovereign; and while they thought it supreme folly in the
south to set up the confederacy, they still believed that to do so was
but the exercise of an indubitable right of the States creating it. From
what I saw at the time, and the many proofs that appeared to accumulate
upon me afterwards, this explains the unprecedented panic with which the
federal army abandoned the field at the First Manassas. Consider just a
moment. The federal army, giving the confederates a complete surprise,
turns their position and drives them back in rout. The confederates make
an unexpected stand, fight for some hours, and at last, assuming the
offensive, win the field. The troops on each side practically all raw
volunteers, very much alike in race and character. But the federals had
much more than two to one engaged, as is demonstrated by the fact that the
confederates had only twenty-five regiments of infantry in action, and
they took prisoners from fifty-five. The more one who, like me, observed
much of the war, thinks it over, the more clearly he sees that the flight
from Manassas is not to be explained because of the superior courage and
stamina of the southern soldiers. I believe that the union men, observing
how brave and death-defying their brothers on the other side were in
facing disaster that seemed irretrievable and odds irresistible, at last
became convinced that these brothers, defending home and firesides, were
right, and that they themselves, invading an inviolably sovereign State,
were heinously wrong; and thus awakened conscience made cowards of all
these gallant men. And it is thoroughly established, I believe, that
everywhere in the first engagements of the war, the southern volunteers,
if they were commanded by a fighter, showed far more spirit and stomach
than their adversaries. In the amicable meetings, often occurring upon the
picket line, when we confederates would with good humor ask the union men
how it was that we won so many fights, it was a stereotyped reply of the
latter, "Why, you are fighting for your country and we only for $13 a
month." It was but natural that, by reason of what has been told in the
foregoing, the south unanimously, and a very large number at the north,
should believe any State could under its reserved powers rightfully secede
from the union whenever and for whatever cause it pleased.
We see now what the angry brothers did not see. The absolute sovereignty
of the States, and the right of secession both _de facto_ and _de jure_
could have been conceded, and at the same time the war for the union
justified. The unionists could well have said to the south:
"Your independence is too great a menace to our interests to be
tolerated, and the high duty of self-defence commands that we resist
to the death. The _status quo_ is better for us all. Now that you have
set up for yourself, we must tell you, sadly but firmly, that if you
do not come back voluntarily, we must resort to coercion,--not under
the constitution, for you have thrown that off, but under the law of
nations to which you have just subjected yourself."
The man who of all southerners has given State sovereignty its most
learned and able defence--Sage, the author of "The Republic of
Republics"--says: "To coerce a state is unconstitutional; but it is
equally true that the precedent of coercing states is established, and
that it is defensible under the law of nations."[34]
To have received the confederate commissioners as representing an
independent nation, and made demand that the seceding States return to the
union, would have been a far stronger theory than that on which the war
was avowedly waged; for it would have taken from the south that
superiority in the argument which had given her great prestige in Europe,
and even in the north. And lastly, under the law of nations, the federal
government, after coercing the seceding States back, would have had--even
according to the theory of State rights as maintained in the
south--perfectly legitimate power to abolish slavery. The statement that
emancipation was "sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by
the constitution, upon military necessity," protests so much that one sees
that the highly conscientious man hesitated and doubted. And well may he
have doubted; for what warrant can be found in the constitution for
destroying that property which it solemnly engaged to defend and protect
as a condition precedent of its adoption?--that is, if the southern States
were still in the union and under the constitution, as was claimed by all
who justified the proclamation? But if the southern States had gone out of
the union, they had revoked their ratification and had thrown away all the
protection of slavery given by the constitution; and while the
constitution did not direct how the federal government should act in the
matter, the law of nations gave full and ample directions. Its authority
was not stinted nor hampered by any rights recognized in the constitution
as reserved to the States under it. The subsequent amendment, imposed as a
condition of reconstruction, shows that the people of the north seriously
questioned if slavery had been abolished by the proclamation and its
enforcement by the union armies.
But this, strong as it was, would not have been the true theory. The true
theory--the real fact--is that at the outbreak of the brothers' war, and
long before, the States had become more closely connected than the
Siamese Twins,--indissolubly united as integral parts of the same
organism, like the different trunks of the Banyan tree; and while the
southern nationalization was opposing the union forces with might and
main, it was really but an excrescence, with roots far more shallow than
those of the American union--a parasite like the mistletoe, growing upon
the American body politic, fated to die of itself if not destroyed by its
fell foe. For, as we have explained, the sole motor of this southern
nationalization--slavery--could no more maintain itself permanently
against free labor than the handloom could stand against the steam-loom,
or the draft-horse can much longer compete with artificial traction power.
Now let us rapidly set in array the stronger supports of this true theory.
We should start with the impulse to combine which adjacency always gives
to communities of the same origin; and external compression and joint
interest to those of diverse origin, as we see in the case of the Swiss.
How clearly does our great American sociologist trace the effect of this
impulse in ancient society. First a body of consanguinei grows into a
gens; after a while, neighboring gentes of the same stock-language form a
tribe; then neighboring tribes, as some of the Iroquois and Aztecs, form a
confederacy. At this point the development of the American Indians was
arrested by the coming of the whites. "A coalescence of tribes into a
nation had not occurred in any case in any part of America," says the
great authority.[35] But we can easily understand what would have occurred
had the Indians been left to themselves. They would have passed out of the
nomadic state into settlements of fixed abodes, local and geographical
political divisions evolving from the old gentes and tribes, the
contiguous ones often uniting. History furnishes many examples of
neighboring communities coalescing into nations. One of the most
remarkable of all is the environment which has constrained peoples of four
different languages to coalesce into the little Swiss nation. Turning away
from prehistoric times and also ancient history, let the student
re-enforce the case of the Swiss, just alluded to, with the modern
nation-making in Italy and Germany. These few of the many instances which
can be given show how and what sorts of adjacent communities are prone to
co-operate or combine for a common purpose, and how such combination
develops at last an irresistible proneness to national union. Drops of
liquid in proximity to one another on a plane may long maintain each their
independent forms; but bring them into actual contact, and presto! all the
globules have coalesced into a single mass. After the belonging part of
the evolutionary science of sociology has been fully developed--which time
does not seem very far off--the subject will receive adequate
illustration. Then all of us will understand that, many years before
Alamance and Lexington, the colonies, in their defence of themselves
against the Indians and the French, in their intercommunication over
innumerable matters of joint interest, in the beneficent example of the
Iroquois confederacy and the advice of our fathers by the Iroquois, as
early as 1755, to form one of the colonies similar to their own,[36] and
in many other things that can be suggested, were steadily becoming one
people, and more and more predisposed to political union. We shall also
see, much more clearly than we do yet, that the Revolutionary war, by
keeping them some years under a general government, imparted new and
powerful impetus to the nationalizing forces, which were working none the
less surely because unobserved. Our lesson will be completely learned
when we recognize that about the time the war with the mother country
commenced the globules, that is, the separate colonies, had become
actually a quasi-political whole,--a stage of evolution so near to that of
full nationality that it is hard to distinguish the two. It seems to me
that the nation had come at least into rudimentary existence when the
declaration of independence was made. Surely from that time on something
wondrously like a _de facto_ national union of the old colonies grew
rapidly, and became stronger and stronger; and this to me is the
sufficient and only explanation of the seismic popular upheaval that
displaced the weaker government under the articles of confederation with
one endowed by the federal constitution with ample powers to administer
the affairs of the nation now beginning to stir with consciousness. And
yet so blind was everybody that in 1787 the delegates and their
constituents all believed the convention to be the organ of the States,
when in truth it was the organ of the new American nation. Prompted by a
self-preserving instinct, this nationality deftly kept itself hid. Had it
been disclosed, the federal constitution could not have been adopted; and
had a suspicion of it come a few years later, there would have been
successful secession. And so each State dreamed on its sweet dream of
dominion until the call to the stars and stripes rang through the north.
Then its people began darkly and dimly to discern the nationalization
which had united the States and become a hoop of adamant to hold the union
forever stanch. Of course to the south nothing appeared but the State
sovereignty of the fathers. Her illuded sight was far clearer and more
confident than the true vision of the north, and she magnified State
sovereignty which she thought she saw, and damned the American
nationality preached by the north as anti-State-rights, when at that very
time a nationality of her own had really put all the southern States at
its feet. It mattered not for the thick perception of the north and the
optical illusion of the south, the American nation was now full grown; and
by the result of the brothers' war it made good its claim to sovereignty.
The historian must accurately gauge the effect wrought by the wonderfully
successful career of the United States under the federal constitution in
its first years. War with France imminent, Pinckney's winged word,
"Millions for defence, but not a cent for tribute," the sword buckled on
again by the father of his country--and peace; the extension of our domain
from the Mississippi to the Pacific by the Louisiana purchase; the
victories won against the men who used to say scornfully that our fathers
could not stand the bayonet, and the still more surprising victories won
with an improvised navy against the mistress of the seas, in the war of
1812; the brilliant operations of Decatur against Algiers; the military
power of the Indians decisively and permanently outclassed, until soon our
women and children on the border were practically secure against the
tomahawk and scalping knife; and perhaps above all the world-wide
spaciousness, as it were, and the inexpressibly greater dignity and
splendor of the public arena, as compared with that of any single colony
or State, which was opened at once to every ambitious spirit--these are
some, only, of the feats and achievements which gave the United States
unquestioned authority at home and incomparable prestige around the world.
And on and on the American nation rushed, from one stage of growth into
and through another, until the result was that for some years before
secession State sovereignty, for all of the high airs it gave itself and
the imposing show of respect it extorted, had become merely a survival.
Thus did the American nation form, from a number of different neighboring,
cognate, and very closely-akin communities, under that complex of the
forces of growth and those of combination which imperceptibly and
resistlessly steers the social organism along the entire track of its
evolution. The nationalizing leaven was hidden by the powers in charge of
our national destiny in the colonial meal, and it had in time so
completely leavened the whole lump that Rhode Island, and North Carolina,
trying hard to stay out, and Texas desporting joyfully and proudly under
the lone star in her golden independence, could not break the invisible
leading strings, which pulled all three into the United States. Note how
Oregon and California, though largely settled from the south yet being
without slavery, in their extreme remoteness from the brothers' war
adhered to the union cause. And had the southern confederacy triumphed in
the war, the States in it would have staid out of the federal union only
the few years necessary for slavery to run its course. When there was no
more virgin soil for cotton, the southern nation, which was merely a
growth upon the American nation, would have collapsed of itself, as did
the State of Frankland; and that continental brotherhood which brought in
Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Texas, would have commandingly
reasserted itself. The more you contemplate the facts, the more it is seen
that this continental brotherhood was and is the most vigorous tap-root
and stock of nationality in all history. The providence which at first
gradually and surely mixed the colonies into one people, then into a
feeble and infirm political whole, rapidly hardening in consistency, and
lastly into an indissoluble union, and which was from the beginning more
and more developing us into a nation--this overruling evolution, and not
constitution or lawmaking organs, has been, is, and always will be the
ultimate and supreme authority, the opposeless lawgiver, the resistlessly
self-executing higher law in America, creating, altering, modifying or
abolishing man-made constitutions, laws, ordinances, and statutes, as
suits its own true democratic purpose, often inscrutable to
contemporaries.
The foregoing is the substance of the argument that must now take the
place of that made by Webster and the unionists after him, which was
convincingly confuted by the south. It proves the complete and immaculate
justice of the war for the union.
This view differs from the other, which we admitted above to be very
strong, mainly in refusing to concede that a State is sovereign and can
legitimately secede at will. But under it, it ought to be conceded that
the States in the southern confederacy were for the time actually out of
the American union by revolution. It is not possible to say they were in
rebellion; that is an offence of individuals standing by an authority
hastily improvised and manifestly sham. It was not by the action of
individuals, but it was by the action of States, veritable political
entities and quasi sovereigns, that the confederacy was organized. When
these States were coerced back, they could not invoke the protection to
their slaves given in a constitution which they had solemnly repudiated.
The United States could therefore deal with them as it had with the
Territories from which it excluded slavery. While of course adequate
protection of the freedmen against their former masters ought to have been
provided, it should at the same time have been made clear to the world
that slavery was abolished solely because events had demonstrated it to be
the only root and cause of dismemberment of the union. Such a familiar
example as the often-exercised power of a municipality to blow up a house,
without compensation therefor, to stop the progress of conflagration, and
many other seemingly arbitrary acts done by society in its
self-preservation, would have occurred to conscientious people
contemplating. And it would have been a long flight in morals above the
proclamation, merely to have justified emancipation on the ground that the
existence of slavery was a serious menace to the life of the nation.
One's logic may be often wrong, and yet his proposition has been rightly
given him by an instinct, as we so often see in the case of good women. O
this subliminal self of ours, how it bends us hither and thither, as the
solid hemisphere does the little human figure upon it, posing with a
seeming will of his own! Hence, and not from our argument-making faculty,
come not only our own most important principles of action, but also our
very strongest persuasive influence. And it is the subconscious mental
forces moving great masses of men and women all the same way--that is, the
national instincts--which are the all-conquering powers that the apostle
of a good cause arouses and sets in array. And while it is true that the
mere logic of Webster's anti-nullification speech is puerile, the after
world will more and more couple that speech with the reply to Hayne, and
keep the two at the top--above every effort of all other orators. In the
reply to Hayne, in 1830, he had magnified the union in a passage which
ever since has deservedly led all selections for American speech books.
And now, in 1833, when dismemberment actually makes menace of its ugly
self, the great wizard of speech that takes consciences and hearts
captive,[37] proclaimed to his countrymen that there could be no such
thing as lawful secession or nullification. The earnestness and the
emphasis with which he said this were supreme merits of the speech. And
thenceforth it was enough to the hosts of the north to remember that the
American, towering like a mountain above them all, had in his high place
solemnly declared that secession is necessarily revolution. And, to one
who is familiar with the hypnotizing effect of subconscious national
suggestion it is not strange that they scouted Calhoun's demolishing
reply, and treasured Webster's false logic as supreme and perfect
exposition of the constitution.