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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT
VOLUME ONE (OF TWO)
By
JEFFERSON DAVIS
PREFACE.
The object of this work has been from historical data to show that the
Southern States had rightfully the power to withdraw from a Union into
which they had, as sovereign communities, voluntarily entered; that the
denial of that right was a violation of the letter and spirit of the
compact between the States; and that the war waged by the Federal
Government against the seceding States was in disregard of the
limitations of the Constitution, and destructive of the principles of
the Declaration of Independence.
The author, from his official position, may claim to have known much of
the motives and acts of his countrymen immediately before and during the
war of 1861-'65, and he has sought to furnish material far the future
historian, who, when the passions and prejudices of the day shall have
given place to reason and sober thought, may, better than a
contemporary, investigate the causes, conduct, and results of the war.
The incentive to undertake the work now offered to the public was the
desire to correct misapprehensions created by industriously circulated
misrepresentations as to the acts and purposes of the people and the
General Government of the Confederate States. By the reiteration of such
unappropriate terms as "rebellion" and "treason," and the asseveration
that the South was levying war against the United States, those ignorant
of the nature of the Union, and of the reserved powers of the States,
have been led to believe that the Confederate States were in the
condition of revolted provinces, and that the United States were forced
to resort to arms for the preservation of their existence. To those who
knew that the Union was formed for specific enumerated purposes, and
that the States had never surrendered their sovereignty it was a
palpable absurdity to apply to them, or to their citizens when obeying
their mandates, the terms "rebellion" and "treason"; and, further, it is
shown in the following pages that the Confederate States, so far from
making war or seeking to destroy the United States, as soon as they had
an official organ, strove earnestly, by peaceful recognition, to
equitably adjust all questions growing out of the separation from their
late associates.
Another great perversion of truth has been the arraignment of the men
who participated in the formation of the Confederacy and who bore arms
in its defense, as the instigators of a controversy leading to disunion.
Sectional issues appear conspicuously in the debates of the Convention
which framed the Federal Constitution, and its many compromises were
designed to secure an equilibrium between the sections, and to preserve
the interests as well as the liberties of the several States. African
servitude at that time was not confined to a section, but was
numerically greater in the South than in the North, with a tendency to
its continuance in the former and cessation in the latter. It therefore
thus early presents itself as a disturbing element, and the provisions
of the Constitution, which were known to be necessary for its adoption,
bound all the States to recognize and protect that species of property.
When at a subsequent period there arose in the Northern States an
antislavery agitation, it was a harmless and scarcely noticed movement
until political demagogues seized upon it as a means to acquire power.
Had it been left to pseudo-philanthropists and fanatics, most zealous
where least informed, it never could have shaken the foundations of the
Union and have incited one section to carry fire and sword into the
other. That the agitation was political in its character, and was
clearly developed as early as 1803, it is believed has been established
in these pages. To preserve a sectional equilibrium and to maintain the
equality of the States was the effort on one side, to acquire empire was
the manifest purpose on the other. This struggle began before the men of
the Confederacy were born; how it arose and how it progressed it has
been attempted briefly to show. Its last stage was on the question of
territorial governments; and, if in this work it has not been
demonstrated that the position of the South was justified by the
Constitution and the equal rights of the people of all the States, it
must be because the author has failed to present the subject with a
sufficient degree of force and clearness.
In describing the events of the war, space has not permitted, and the
loss of both books and papers has prevented, the notice of very many
entitled to consideration, as well for the humanity as the gallantry of
our men in the unequal combats they fought. These numerous omissions, it
is satisfactory to know, the official reports made at the time and the
subsequent contributions which have been and are being published by the
actors, will supply more fully and graphically than could have been done
in this work.
Usurpations of the Federal Government have been presented, not in a
spirit of hostility, but as a warning to the people against the dangers
by which their liberties are beset. When the war ceased, the pretext on
which it had been waged could no longer be alleged. The emancipation
proclamation of Mr. Lincoln, which, when it was issued, he humorously
admitted to be a nullity, had acquired validity by the action of the
highest authority known to our institutions--the people assembled in
their several State Conventions. The soldiers of the Confederacy had
laid down their arms, had in good faith pledged themselves to abstain
from further hostile operations, and had peacefully dispersed to their
homes; there could not, then, have been further dread of them by the
Government of the United States. The plea of necessity could, therefore,
no longer exist for hostile demonstration against the people and States
of the deceased Confederacy. Did vengeance, which stops at the grave,
subside? Did real peace and the restoration of the States to their
former rights and positions follow, as was promised on the restoration
of the Union? Let the recital of the invasion of the reserved powers of
the States, or the people, and the perversion of the republican form of
government guaranteed to each State by the Constitution, answer the
question. For the deplorable fact of the war, for the cruel manner in
which it was waged, for the sad physical and yet sadder moral results it
produced, the reader of these pages, I hope, will admit that the South,
in the forum of conscience, stands fully acquitted.
Much of the past is irremediable; the best hope for a restoration in the
future to the pristine purity and fraternity of the Union, rests on the
opinions and character of the men who are to succeed this generation:
that they maybe suited to that blessed work, one, whose public course is
ended, invokes them to draw their creed from the fountains of our
political history, rather than from the lower stream, polluted as it has
been by self-seeking place-hunters and by sectional strife.
THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS.
Introduction
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
African Servitude.--A Retrospect.--Early Legislation with Regard to the
Slave-Trade.--The Southern States foremost in prohibiting it.--A Common
Error corrected.--The Ethical Question never at Issue in Sectional
Controversies.--The Acquisition of Louisiana.--The Missouri
Compromise.--The Balance of Power.--Note.--The Indiana Case.
CHAPTER II.
The Session of 1849-'50.--The Compromise Measures.--Virtual Abrogation
of the Missouri Compromise.--The Admission of California.--The Fugitive
Slave Law.--Death of Mr. Calhoun.--Anecdote of Mr. Clay.
CHAPTER III.
Reëlection to the Senate.--Political Controversies in
Mississippi.--Action of the Democratic State Convention.--Defeat of the
State-Rights Party.--Withdrawal of General Quitman and Nomination of the
Author as Candidate for the Office of Governor.--The Canvass and its
Result.--Retirement to Private Life.
CHAPTER IV.
The Author enters the Cabinet.--Administration of the War
Department.--Surveys for a Pacific Railway.--Extension of the
Capitol.--New Regiments organized.--Colonel Samuel Cooper,
Adjutant-General.--A Bit of Civil-Service Reform.--Reëlection to the
Senate.--Continuity of the Pierce Cabinet.--Character of Franklin
Pierce.
CHAPTER V.
The Territorial Question.--An Incident at the White House.--The Kansas
and Nebraska Bill.--The Missouri Compromise abrogated in 1850, not in
1854.--Origin of "Squatter Sovereignty."--Sectional Rivalry and its
Consequences.--The Emigrant Aid Societies.--"The Bible and Sharpe's
Rifles."--False Pretensions as to Principle.--The Strife in Kansas.--A
Retrospect.--The Original Equilibrium of Power and its Overthrow.--
Usurpations of the Federal Government.--The Protective Tariff.--
Origin and Progress of Abolitionism.--Who were the Friends of
the Union?--An Illustration of Political Morality.
CHAPTER VI.
Agitation continued.--Political Parties: their Origin, Changes, and
Modifications.--Some Account of the "Popular Sovereignty," or
"Non-Intervention," Theory.--Rupture of the Democratic Party.--The John
Brown Raid.--Resolutions introduced by the Author into the Senate on the
Relations of the States, the Federal Government, and the Territories;
their Discussion and Adoption.
CHAPTER VII.
A Retrospect.--Growth of Sectional Rivalry.--The Generosity of
Virginia.--Unequal Accessions of Territory.--The Tariff and its
Effects.--The Republican Convention of 1860, its Resolutions and its
Nominations.--The Democratic Convention at Charleston, its Divisions and
Disruption.--The Nominations at Baltimore.--The "Constitutional-Union"
Party and its Nominees.--An Effort in Behalf of Agreement declined by
Mr. Douglas.--The Election of Lincoln and Hamlin.--Proceedings in the
South.--Evidences of Calmness and Deliberation.--Mr. Buchanan's
Conservatism and the weakness of his Position.--Republican Taunts.--The
"New York Tribune," etc.
CHAPTER VIII.
Conference with the Governor of Mississippi.--The Author censured as
"too slow."--Summons to Washington.--Interview with the President.--His
Message.--Movements in Congress.--The Triumphant Majority.--The
Crittenden Proposition.--Speech of the Author on Mr. Green's
Resolution.--The Committee of Thirteen.--Failure to agree.--The
"Republicans" responsible for the Failure.--Proceedings in the House of
Representatives.--Futility of Efforts for an Adjustment.--The Old Year
closes in Clouds.
CHAPTER IX.
Preparations for Withdrawal from the Union.--Northern Precedents.--New
England Secessionists.--Cabot, Pickering, Quincy, etc.--On the
Acquisition of Louisiana.--The Hartford Convention.--The Massachusetts
Legislature on the Annexation of Texas, etc., etc. 70
CHAPTER X.
False Statements of the Grounds for Separation.--Slavery not the Cause,
but an Incident.--The Southern People not "Propagandists" of
Slavery.--Early Accord among the States with regard to African
Servitude.--Statement of the Supreme Court.--Guarantees of the
Constitution.--Disregard of Oaths.--Fugitives from Service and the
"Personal Liberty Laws."--Equality in the Territories the Paramount
Question.--The Dred Scott Case.--Disregard of the Decision of the
Supreme Court.--Culmination of Wrongs.--Despair of their
Redress.--Triumph of Sectionalism.
PART II.
_THE CONSTITUTION._
CHAPTER I.
The Original Confederation.--"Articles of Confederation and Perpetual
Union."--Their Inadequacy ascertained.--Commercial Difficulties.--The
Conference at Annapolis.--Recommendation of a General Convention.--
Resolution of Congress.--Action of the Several States.--Conclusions
drawn therefrom.
CHAPTER II.
The Convention of 1787.--Diversity of Opinion.--Luther Martin's Account
of the Three Parties.--The Question of Representation.--Compromise
effected.--Mr. Randolph's Resolutions.--The Word "National"
condemned.--Plan of Government framed.--Difficulty with Regard to
Ratification, and its Solution.--Provision for Secession from the
Union.--Views of Mr. Gerry and Mr. Madison.--False Interpretations.--
Close of the Convention.
CHAPTER III.
Ratification of the Constitution by the States.--Organization of the New
Government.--Accession of North Carolina and Rhode Island.--
Correspondence between General Washington and the Governor of Rhode
Island.
CHAPTER IV.
The Constitution not adopted by one People "in the Aggregate."--A Great
Fallacy exposed.--Mistake of Judge Story.--Colonial Relations.--The
United Colonies of New England.--Other Associations.--Independence of
Communities traced from Germany to Great Britain, and from Great Britain
to America.--Mr. Everett's "Provincial People."--Origin and Continuance
of the Title "United States."--No such Political Community as the
"People of the United States."
CHAPTER V.
The Preamble to the Constitution.--"We, the People."
CHAPTER VI.
The Preamble to the Constitution--subject continued.--Growth of the
Federal Government and Accretions of Power.--Revival of Old
Errors.--Mistakes and Misstatements.--Webster, Story, and Everett.--Who
"ordained and established" the Constitution?
CHAPTER VII.
Verbal Cavils and Criticisms.--"Compact," "Confederacy," "Accession,"
etc.--The "New Vocabulary."--The Federal Constitution a Compact, and the
States acceded to it.--Evidence of the Constitution itself and of
Contemporary Records.
CHAPTER VIII.
Sovereignty
CHAPTER IX.
The same Subject continued.--The Tenth Amendment.--Fallacies
exposed.--"Constitution," "Government," and "People" distinguished from
each other.--Theories refuted by Facts.--Characteristics of
Sovereignty.--Sovereignty identified.--Never thrown away.
CHAPTER X.
A Recapitulation.--Remarkable Propositions of Mr. Gouverneur Morris in
the Convention of 1787, and their Fate.--Further Testimony.--Hamilton,
Madison, Washington, Marshall, etc.--Later Theories.--Mr. Webster: his
Views at Various Periods.--Speech at Capon Springs.--State Rights not a
Sectional Theory.
CHAPTER XI.
The Right of Secession.--The Law of Unlimited Partnerships.--The
"Perpetual Union" of the Articles of Confederation and the "More Perfect
Union" of the Constitution.--The Important Powers conferred upon the
Federal Government and the Fundamental Principles of the Compact the
same in both Systems.--The Right to resume Grants, when failing to
fulfill their Purposes, expressly and distinctly asserted in the
Adoption of the Constitution.
CHAPTER XII.
Coercion the Alternative to Secession.--Repudiation of it by the
Constitution and the Fathers of the Constitutional Era.--Difference
between Mr. Webster and Mr. Hamilton.
CHAPTER XIII.
Some Objections considered.--The New States.--Acquired
Territory.--Allegiance, false and true.--Difference between
Nullification and Secession.--Secession a Peaceable Remedy.--No Appeal
to Arms.--Two Conditions noted.
CHAPTER XIV.
Early Foreshadowings.--Opinions of Mr. Madison and Mr. Rufus
King.--Safeguards provided.--Their Failure.--State Interposition.--The
Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions.--Their Endorsement by the People in
the Presidential Elections of 1800 and Ensuing Terms.--South Carolina
and Mr. Calhoun.--The Compromise of 1833.--Action of Massachusetts in
1843-'45.--Opinions of John Quincy Adams.--Necessity for Secession.
CHAPTER XV.
A Bond of Union necessary after the Declaration of
Independence.--Articles of Confederation.--The Constitution of the
United States.--The Same Principle for obtaining Grants of Power in
both.--The Constitution an Instrument enumerating the Powers
delegated.--The Power of Amendment merely a Power to amend the Delegated
Grants.--A Smaller Power was required for Amendment than for a
Grant.--The Power of Amendment is confined to Grants of the
Constitution.--Limitations on the Power of Amendment.
PART III.
_SECESSION AND CONFEDERATION._
CHAPTER I.
Opening of the New Year.--The People in Advance of their
Representatives.--Conciliatory Conduct of Southern Members of
Congress.--Sensational Fictions.--Misstatements of the Count of
Paris.--Obligations of a Senator.--The Southern Forts and
Arsenals.--Pensacola Bay and Fort Pickens.--The Alleged "Caucus" and its
Resolutions.--Personal Motives and Feelings.--The Presidency not a
Desirable Office.--Letter from the Hon. C. C. Clay.
CHAPTER II.
Tenure of Public Property ceded by the States.--Sovereignty and Eminent
Domain.--Principles asserted by Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, and
other States.--The Charleston Forts.--South Carolina sends Commissioners
to Washington.--Sudden Movement of Major Anderson.--Correspondence of
the Commissioners with the President.--Interviews of the Author with Mr.
Buchanan.--Major Anderson.--The Star of the West.--The President's
Special Message.--Speech of the Author in the Senate.--Further
Proceedings and Correspondence relative to Fort Sumter.--Mr. Buchanan's
Rectitude in Purpose and Vacillation in Action.
CHAPTER III.
Secession of Mississippi and Other States.--Withdrawal of
Senators.--Address of the Author on taking Leave of the Senate.--Answer
to Certain Objections.
CHAPTER IV.
Threats of Arrest.--Departure from Washington.--Indications of Public
Anxiety.--"Will there be war?"--Organization of the "Army of
Mississippi."--Lack of Preparations for Defense in the South.--Evidences
of the Good Faith and Peaceable Purposes of the Southern People.
CHAPTER V.
Meeting of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States.--Adoption
of a Provisional Constitution.--Election of President and
Vice-President.--Notification to the Author of his Election.--His Views
with Regard to it.--Journey to Montgomery.--Interview with Judge
Sharkey.--False Reports of Speeches on the Way.--Inaugural
Address.--Editor's Note.
CHAPTER VI.
The Confederate Cabinet.
CHAPTER VII.
Early Acts of the Confederate Congress.--Laws of the United States
continued in Force.--Officers of Customs and Revenue continued in
Office.--Commission to the United States.--Navigation of the
Mississippi.--Restrictions on the Coasting-Trade removed.--Appointment
of Commissioners to Washington.
CHAPTER VIII.
The Peace Conference.--Demand for "a Little Bloodletting."--Plan
proposed by the Conference.--Its Contemptuous Reception and Treatment in
the United States Congress.--Failure of Last Efforts at Reconciliation
and Reunion.--Note.--Speech of General Lane, of Oregon.
CHAPTER IX.
Northern Protests against Coercion.--The "New York Tribune," Albany
"Argus," and "New York Herald."--Great Public Meeting in New
York.--Speeches of Mr. Thayer, ex-Governor Seymour, ex-Chancellor
Walworth, and Others.--The Press in February, 1861.--Mr. Lincoln's
Inaugural.--The Marvelous Change or Suppression of Conservative
Sentiment.--Historic Precedents.
CHAPTER X.
Temper of the Southern People indicated by the Action of the Confederate
Congress.--The Permanent Constitution.--Modeled after the Federal
Constitution.--Variations and Special Provisions.--Provisions with
Regard to Slavery and the Slave-Trade.--A False Assertion
refuted.--Excellence of the Constitution.--Admissions of Hostile or
Impartial Criticism.
CHAPTER XI.
The Commission to Washington City.--Arrival of Mr. Crawford.--Mr.
Buchanan's Alarm.--Note of the Commissioners to the New
Administration.--Mediation of Justices Nelson and Campbell.--The
Difficulty about Forts Sumter and Pickens.--Mr. Secretary Seward's
Assurances.--Duplicity of the Government at Washington.--Mr. Fox's Visit
to Charleston.--Secret Preparations for Coercive Measures.--Visit of Mr.
Lamon.--Renewed Assurances of Good Faith.--Notification to Governor
Pickens.--Developments of Secret History.--Systematic and Complicated
Perfidy exposed.
CHAPTER XII.
Protests against the Conduct of the Government of the United
States.--Senator Douglas's Proposition to evacuate the Forts, and
Extracts from his Speech in Support of it.--General Scott's
Advice.--Manly Letter of Major Anderson, protesting against the Action
of the Federal Government.--Misstatements of the Count of
Paris.--Correspondence relative to Proposed Evacuation of the Fort.--A
Crisis.
CHAPTER XIII.
A Pause and a Review.--Attitude of the Two Parties.--Sophistry exposed
and Shams torn away.--Forbearance of the Confederate Government.--Who
was the Aggressor?--Major Anderson's View, and that of a Naval
Officer.--Mr. Horace Greeley on the Fort Sumter Case.--The Bombardment
and Surrender.--Gallant Action of ex-Senator Wigfall.--Mr. Lincoln's
Statement of the Case.
PART IV.
_THE WAR._
CHAPTER I.
Failure of the Peace Congress.--Treatment of the Commissioners.--Their
Withdrawal.--Notice of an Armed Expedition.--Action of the Confederate
Government.--Bombardment and Surrender of Fort Sumter.--Its Reduction
required by the Exigency of the Case.--Disguise thrown off.--President
Lincoln's Call for Seventy-five Thousand Men.--His Fiction of
"Combinations."--Palpable Violation of the Constitution.--Action of
Virginia.--Of Citizens of Baltimore.--The Charge of Precipitation
against South Carolina.--Action of the Confederate Government.--The
Universal Feeling.
CHAPTER II.
The Supply of Arms; of Men.--Love of the Union.--Secessionists
few.--Efforts to prevent the Final Step.--Views of the People.--Effect
on their Agriculture.--Aid from African Servitude.--Answer to the
Clamors on the Horrors of Slavery.--Appointment of a Commissary-
General.--His Character and Capacity.--Organization, Instruction,
and Equipment of the Army.--Action of Congress.--The Law.--Its
Signification.--The Hope of a Peaceful Solution early entertained;
rapidly diminished.--Further Action of Congress.--Policy of the
Government for Peace.--Position of Officers of United States
Army.--The Army of the States, not of the Government.--The Confederate
Law observed by the Government.--Officers retiring from United States
Army.--Organization of Bureaus.
CHAPTER III.
Commissioners to purchase Arms and Ammunition.--My Letter to Captain
Semmes.--Resignations of Officers of United States Navy.--Our
Destitution of Accessories for the Supply of Naval Vessels.--Secretary
Mallory.--Food-Supplies.--The Commissariat Department.--The
Quartermaster's Department.--The Disappearance of Delusions.--The Supply
of Powder.--Saltpeter.--Sulphur.--Artificial Niter-Beds.--Services of
General G. W. Rains.--Destruction at Harper's Ferry of Machinery.--The
Master Armorer.--Machinery secured.--Want of Skillful Employees.--
Difficulties encountered by Every Department of the Executive Branch
of the Government.
CHAPTER IV.
The Proclamation for Seventy-five Thousand Men by President Lincoln
further examined.--The Reasons presented by him to Mankind for the
Justification of his Conduct shown to be Mere Fictions, having no
Relation to the Question.--What is the Value of Constitutional Liberty,
of Bills of Rights, of Limitations of Powers, if they may be
transgressed at Pleasure?--Secession of South Carolina.--Proclamation of
Blockade.--Session of Congress at Montgomery.--Extracts from the
President's Message.--Acts of Congress.--Spirit of the People.--
Secession of Border States.--Destruction of United States Property by
Order of President Lincoln.
CHAPTER V.
Maryland first approached by Northern Invasion.--Denies to United States
Troops the Right of Way across her Domain.--Mission of Judge
Handy.--Views of Governor Hicks.--His Proclamation.--Arrival of
Massachusetts Troops at Baltimore.--Passage through the City
disputed.--Activity of the Police.--Burning of Bridges.--Letter of
President Lincoln to the Governor.--Visited by Citizens.--Action of the
State Legislature.--Occupation of the Relay House.--The City Arms
surrendered.--City in Possession of United States Troops.--Remonstrances
of the City to the Passage of Troops disregarded.--Citizens arrested;
also, Members of the Legislature.--Accumulation of Northern Forces at
Washington.--Invasion of West Virginia by a Force under
McClellan.--Attack at Philippi; at Laurel Hill.--Death of General
Garnett.
CHAPTER VI.
Removal of the Seat of Government to Richmond.--Message to Congress at
Richmond.--Confederate Forces in Virginia.--Forces of the Enemy.--Letter
to General Johnston.--Combat at Bethel Church.--Affair at
Romney.--Movements of McDowell.--Battle of Manassas.
CHAPTER VII.
Conference with the Generals after the Battle.--Order to pursue the
Enemy.--Evidences of a Thorough Rout.--"Sweet to die for such a
Cause."--Movements of the Next Day.--What more it was practicable to
do.--Charge against the President of preventing the Capture of
Washington.--The Failure to pursue.--Reflection on the President.--
General Beauregard's Report.--Endorsement upon it.--Strength
of the Opposing Forces.--Extracts relating to the Battle, from the
Narrative of General Early.--Resolutions of Congress.--Efforts to
increase the Efficiency of the Army.
CHAPTER VIII.
The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-'99.--Their Influence on Political
Affairs.--Kentucky declares for Neutrality.--Correspondence of Governor
Magoffin with the President of the United States and the President of
the Confederate States.--Occupation of Columbus, Kentucky, by
Major-General Polk.--His Correspondence with the Kentucky
Commissioners.--President Lincoln's View of Neutrality.--Acts of the
United States Government.--Refugees.--Their Motives of Expatriation.--
Address of ex-Vice-President Breckinridge to the People of the
State.--The Occupation of Columbus secured.--The Purpose of the
United States Government.--Battle of Belmont.--Albert Sidney Johnston
commands the Department.--State of Affairs.--Line of Defense.-Efforts to
obtain Arms; also Troops.
CHAPTER IX.
The Coercion of Missouri.--Answers of the Governors of States to
President Lincoln's Requisition for Troops.--Restoration of Forts
Caswell and Johnson to the United States Government.--Condition of
Missouri similar to that of Kentucky.--Hostilities, how initiated in
Missouri.--Agreement between Generals Price and Harney.--Its Favorable
Effects.--General Harney relieved of Command by the United States
Government because of his Pacific Policy.--Removal of Public Arms from
Missouri.--Searches for and Seizure of Arms.--Missouri on the Side of
Peace.--Address of General Price to the People.--Proclamation of
Governor Jackson.--Humiliating Concessions of the Governor to the United
States Government, for the sake of Peace.--Demands of the Federal
Officers.--Revolutionary Principles attempted to be enforced by the
United States Government.--The Action at Booneville.--The Patriot Army
of Militia.--Further Rout of the Enemy.--Heroism and Self-sacrifice of
the People.--Complaints and Embarrassments--Zeal: its effects.--Action
of Congress.--Battle of Springfield.--General Price.--Battle at
Lexington.--Bales of Hemp.--Other Combats.
CHAPTER X.
Brigadier-General Henry A. Wise takes command in Western Virginia.--His
Movements.--Advance of General John B. Floyd.--Defeats the
Enemy.--Attacked by Rosecrans.--Controversy between Wise and
Floyd.--General R. E. Lee takes the Command in West Virginia.--Movement
on Cheat Mountain.--Its Failure.--Further Operations.--Winter
Quarters.--Lee sent to South Carolina.
CHAPTER XI.
The Issue.--The American Idea of Government.--Who was responsible for
the War?--Situation of Virginia.--Concentration of the Enemy against
Richmond.--Our Difficulty.--Unjust Criticisms.--The Facts set
forth.--Organization of the Army.--Conference at Fairfax
Court-House.--Inaction of the Army.--Capture of Romney.--Troops ordered
to retire to the Valley.--Discipline.--General Johnston regards his
Position as unsafe.--The First Policy.--Retreat of General
Johnston.--The Plans of the Enemy.--Our Strength magnified by the
Enemy.--Stores destroyed.--The Trent Affair.
CHAPTER XII.
Supply of Arms at the Beginning of the War; of Powder; of Batteries; of
other Articles.--Contents of Arsenals.--Other Stores, Mills, etc.--First
Efforts to obtain Powder, Niter, and Sulphur.--Construction of Mills
commenced.--Efforts to supply Arms, Machinery, Field-Artillery,
Ammunition, Equipment, and Saltpeter.--Results in 1862.--Government
Powder-Mills; how organized.--Success.--Efforts to obtain
Lead.--Smelting-Works.--Troops, how armed.--Winter of 1862.--Supplies.--
Niter and Mining Bureau.--Equipment of First Armies.--Receipts by
Blockade-Runners.--Arsenal at Richmond.--Armories at Richmond and
Fayetteville.--A Central Laboratory built at Macon.--Statement of
General Gorgas.--Northern Charge against General Floyd answered.--
Charge of Slowness against the President answered.--Quantities of
Arms purchased that could not be shipped in 1861.--Letter of Mr. Huse.
CHAPTER XIII.
Extracts from my Inaugural.--Our Financial System: Receipts and
Expenditures of the First Year.--Resources, Loans, and Taxes.--Loans
authorized.--Notes and Bonds.--Funding Notes.--Treasury Notes guaranteed
by the States.--Measure to reduce the Currency.--Operation of the
General System.--Currency fundable.--Taxation.--Popular
Aversion.--Compulsory Reduction of the Currency.--Tax Law.--Successful
Result.--Financial Condition of the Government at its Close.--Sources
whence Revenue was derived.--Total Public Debt.--System of Direct Taxes
and Revenue.--The Tariff.--War-Tax of Fifty Cents on a Hundred
Dollars.--Property subject to it.--Every Resource of the Country to be
reached.--Tax paid by the States mostly.--Obstacle to the taking of the
Census.--The Foreign Debt.--Terms of the Contract.--Premium.--False
charge against me of Repudiation.--Facts stated.
CHAPTER XIV.
Military Laws and Measures.--Agricultural Products
diminished.--Manufactures flourishing.--The Call for Volunteers.--The
Term of Three Years.--Improved Discipline.--The Law assailed.--Important
Constitutional Question raised.--Its Discussion at Length.--Power of the
Government over its own Armies and the Militia.--Object of
Confederations.--The War-Powers granted.--Two Modes of raising Armies in
the Confederate States.--Is the Law necessary and proper?--Congress is
the Judge under the Grant of Specific Power.--What is meant by
Militia.--Whole Military Strength divided into Two Classes.--Powers of
Congress.--Objections answered.--Good Effects of the Law.--The
Limitations enlarged.--Results of the Operations of these Laws.--Act for
the Employment of Slaves.--Message to Congress.--"Died of a
Theory."--Act to use Slaves as Soldiers passed.--Not Time to put it in
Operation.
APPENDIXES.
[Transcriber's Note: There is no Appendix A.]
APPENDIX B.
Speech of the Author on the Oregon Question
APPENDIX C.
Extracts from Speeches of the Author on the Resolutions of Compromise
proposed by Mr. Clay
On the Reception of a Memorial from Inhabitants of Pennsylvania and
Delaware, praying that Congress would adopt Measures for an Immediate
and Peaceful Dissolution of the Union
On the Resolutions of Mr. Clay relative to Slavery in the Territories
APPENDIX D.
Speech of the Author on the Message of the President of the United
States, transmitting to Congress the "Lecompton Constitution" of Kansas
APPENDIX E.
Address of the Author to Citizens of Portland, Maine
Address of the Author at a Public Meeting in Faneuil Hall, Boston; with
the Introductory Remarks by Caleb Cushing
APPENDIX F.
Speech of the Author in the Senate, on the Resolutions relative to the
Relations of the States, the Federal Government, and the Territories
APPENDIX G.
Correspondence between the Commissioners of South Carolina and the
President of the United States (Mr. Buchanan), relative to the Forts in
the Harbor of Charleston
APPENDIX H.
Speech of the Author on a Motion to print the Special Message of the
President of the United States of January 9, 1861
APPENDIX I.
Correspondence and Extracts from Correspondence relative to Fort Sumter,
from the Affair of the Star of the West, January 9, 1861, to the
Withdrawal of the Envoy of South Carolina from Washington, February 8,
1861
APPENDIX K.
The Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States, adopted February
8, 1861
The Constitution of the United States and the Permanent Constitution of
the Confederate States, in Parallel Columns
APPENDIX L.
Correspondence between the Confederate Commissioners, Mr. Secretary
Seward, and Judge Campbell
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Jefferson Davis, aged Thirty-two
J. C. Calhoun
Briarfield, Early Residence of Mr. Davis
The First Confederate Cabinet
Alexander H. Stephens
General P. G. T. Beauregard
Members of President's Staff
General A. S. Johnston
General Robert E. Lee
Battle of Manassas (Map)
INTRODUCTION.
A duty to my countrymen; to the memory of those who died in defense of a
cause consecrated by inheritance, as well as sustained by conviction;
and to those who, perhaps less fortunate, staked all, and lost all, save
life and honor, in its behalf, has impelled me to attempt the
vindication of their cause and conduct. For this purpose I have decided
to present an historical sketch of the events which preceded and
attended the struggle of the Southern States to maintain their existence
and their rights as sovereign communities--the creators, not the
creatures, of the General Government.
The social problem of maintaining the just relation between
constitution, government, and people, has been found so difficult, that
human history is a record of unsuccessful efforts to establish it. A
government, to afford the needful protection and exercise proper care
for the welfare of a people, must have homogeneity in its constituents.
It is this necessity which has divided the human race into separate
nations, and finally has defeated the grandest efforts which conquerors
have made to give unlimited extent to their domain. When our fathers
dissolved their connection with Great Britain, by declaring themselves
free and independent States, they constituted thirteen separate
communities, and were careful to assert and preserve, each for itself,
its sovereignty and jurisdiction.
At a time when the minds of men are straying far from the lessons our
fathers taught, it seems proper and well to recur to the original
principles on which the system of government they devised was founded.
The eternal truths which they announced, the rights which they declared
"_unalienable_," are the foundation-stones on which rests the
vindication of the Confederate cause.
He must have been a careless reader of our political history who has not
observed that, whether under the style of "United Colonies" or "United
States," which was adopted after the Declaration of Independence,
whether under the articles of Confederation or the compact of Union,
there everywhere appears the distinct assertion of State sovereignty,
and nowhere the slightest suggestion of any purpose on the part of the
States to consolidate themselves into one body. Will any candid,
well-informed man assert that, at any time between 1776 and 1790, a
proposition to surrender the sovereignty of the States and merge them in
a central government would have had the least possible chance of
adoption? Can any historical fact be more demonstrable than that the
States did, both in the Confederation and in the Union, retain their
sovereignty and independence as distinct communities, voluntarily
consenting to federation, but never becoming the fractional parts of a
nation? That such opinions should find adherents in our day, may be
attributable to the natural law of aggregation; surely not to a
conscientious regard for the terms of the compact for union by the
States.
In all free governments the constitution or organic law is supreme over
the government, and in our Federal Union this was most distinctly marked
by limitations and prohibitions against all which was beyond the
expressed grants of power to the General Government. In the foreground,
therefore, I take the position that those who resisted violations of the
compact were the true friends, and those who maintained the usurpation
of undelegated powers were the real enemies of the constitutional Union.
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
African Servitude.--A Retrospect.--Early Legislation with Regard
to the Slave-Trade.--The Southern States foremost in prohibiting
it.--A Common Error corrected.--The Ethical Question never at
Issue in Sectional Controversies.--The Acquisition of
Louisiana.--The Missouri Compromise.--The Balance of
Power.--Note.--The Indiana Case.
Inasmuch as questions growing out of the institution of negro servitude,
or connected with it, will occupy a conspicuous place in what is to
follow, it is important that the reader should have, in the very outset,
a right understanding of the true nature and character of those
questions. No subject has been more generally misunderstood or more
persistently misrepresented. The institution itself has ceased to exist
in the United States; the generation, comprising all who took part in
the controversies to which it gave rise, or for which it afforded a
pretext, is passing away; and the misconceptions which have prevailed in
our own country, and still more among foreigners remote from the field
of contention, are likely to be perpetuated in the mind of posterity,
unless corrected before they become crystallized by tacit acquiescence.
It is well known that, at the time of the adoption of the Federal
Constitution, African servitude existed in all the States that were
parties to that compact, unless with the single exception of
Massachusetts, in which it had, perhaps, very recently ceased to exist.
The slaves, however, were numerous in the Southern, and very few in the
Northern, States. This diversity was occasioned by differences of
climate, soil, and industrial interests--not in any degree by moral
considerations, which at that period were not recognized, as an element
in the question. It was simply because negro labor was more profitable
in the South than in the North that the importation of negro slaves had
been, and continued to be, chiefly directed to the Southern ports.[1]
For the same reason slavery was abolished by the States of the Northern
section (though it existed in several of them for more than fifty years
after the adoption of the Constitution), while the importation of slaves
into the South continued to be carried on by Northern merchants and
Northern ships, without interference in the traffic from any quarter,
until it was prohibited by the spontaneous action of the Southern States
themselves.
The Constitution expressly forbade any interference by Congress with the
slave-trade--or, to use its own language, with the "migration or
importation of such persons" as any of the States should think proper to
admit--"prior to the year 1808." During the intervening period of more
than twenty years, the matter was exclusively under the control of the
respective States. Nevertheless, every Southern State, without
exception, either had already enacted, or proceeded to enact, laws
forbidding the importation of slaves.[2] Virginia was the first of all
the States, North or South, to prohibit it, and Georgia was the first to
incorporate such a prohibition in her organic Constitution.
Two petitions for the abolition of slavery and the slave-trade were
presented February 11 and 12, 1790, to the very first Congress convened
under the Constitution.[3] After full discussion in the House of
Representatives, it was determined, with regard to the first-mentioned
subject, "that Congress have no authority to interfere in the
emancipation of slaves, or in the treatment of them within any of the
States"; and, with regard to the other, that no authority existed to
prohibit the migration or importation of such persons as the States
might think proper to admit--"prior to the year 1808." So distinct and
final was this statement of the limitations of the authority of Congress
considered to be that, when a similar petition was presented two or
three years afterward, the Clerk of the House was instructed to return
it to the petitioner.[4]
In 1807, Congress, availing itself of the very earliest moment at which
the constitutional restriction ceased to be operative, passed an act
prohibiting the importation of slaves into any part of the United States
from and after the first day of January, 1808. This act was passed with
great unanimity. In the House of Representatives there were one hundred
and thirteen (113) yeas to five (5) nays; and it is a significant fact,
as showing the absence of any sectional division of sentiment at that
period, that the five dissentients were divided as equally as possible
between the two sections: two of them were from Northern and three from
Southern States.[5]
The slave-trade had thus been finally abolished some months before the
birth of the author of these pages, and has never since had legal
existence in any of the United States. The question of the maintenance
or extinction of the system of negro servitude, already existing in any
State, was one exclusively belonging to such State. It is obvious,
therefore, that no subsequent question, legitimately arising in Federal
legislation, could properly have any reference to the merits or the
policy of the institution itself. A few zealots in the North afterward
created much agitation by demands for the abolition of slavery within
the States by Federal intervention, and by their activity and
perseverance finally became a recognized party, which, holding the
balance of power between the two contending organizations in that
section, gradually obtained the control of one, and to no small degree
corrupted the other. The dominant idea, however, at least of the
absorbed party, was sectional aggrandizement, looking to absolute
control, and theirs is the responsibility for the war that resulted.
No moral nor sentimental considerations were really involved in either
the earlier or later controversies which so long agitated and finally
ruptured the Union. They were simply struggles between different
sections, with diverse institutions and interests.
It is absolutely requisite, in order to a right understanding of the
history of the country, to bear these truths clearly in mind. The
phraseology of the period referred to will otherwise be essentially
deceptive. The antithetical employment of such terms as _freedom_ and
_slavery_, or "anti-slavery" and "pro-slavery," with reference to the
principles and purposes of contending parties or rival sections, has had
immense influence in misleading the opinions and sympathies of the
world. The idea of freedom is captivating, that of slavery repellent to
the moral sense of mankind in general. It is easy, therefore, to
understand the effect of applying the one set of terms to one party, the
other to another, in a contest which had no just application whatever to
the essential merits of freedom or slavery. Southern statesmen may
perhaps have been too indifferent to this consideration--in their ardent
pursuit of principles, overlooking the effects of phrases.
This is especially true with regard to that familiar but most fallacious
expression, "the extension of slavery." To the reader unfamiliar with
the subject, or viewing it only on the surface, it would perhaps never
occur that, as used in the great controversies respecting the
Territories of the United States, it does not, never did, and never
could, imply the addition of a single slave to the number already
existing. The question was merely whether the slaveholder should be
permitted to go, with his slaves, into territory (the common property of
all) into which the non-slaveholder could go with _his_ property of any
sort. There was no proposal nor desire on the part of the Southern
States to reopen the slave-trade, which they had been foremost in
suppressing, or to add to the number of slaves. It was a question of the
distribution, or dispersion, of the slaves, rather than of the
"extension of slavery." Removal is not extension. Indeed, if
emancipation was the end to be desired, the dispersion of the negroes
over a wider area among additional Territories, eventually to become
States, and in climates unfavorable to slave-labor, instead of
hindering, would have promoted this object by diminishing the
difficulties in the way of ultimate emancipation.
The distinction here defined between the distribution, or dispersion, of
slaves and the extension of slavery--two things altogether different,
although so generally confounded--was early and clearly drawn under
circumstances and in a connection which justify a fuller notice.
Virginia, it is well known, in the year 1784, ceded to the United
States--then united only by the original Articles of Confederation--her
vast possessions northwest of the Ohio, from which the great States of
Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota,
have since been formed. In 1787--before the adoption of the Federal
Constitution--the celebrated "Ordinance" for the government of this
Northwestern Territory was adopted by the Congress, with the full
consent, and indeed at the express instance, of Virginia. This Ordinance
included six definite "Articles of compact between the original States
and the people and States in the said Territory," which were to "for
ever remain unalterable unless by common consent." The sixth of these
articles ordains that "there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude in the said Territory, otherwise than in the punishment of
crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."
In December, 1805, a petition of the Legislative Council and House of
Representatives of the Indiana Territory--then comprising all the area
now occupied by the States of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and
Wisconsin--was presented to Congress. It appears from the proceedings of
the House of Representatives that several petitions of the same purport
from inhabitants of the Territory, accompanied by a letter from William
Henry Harrison, the Governor (afterward President of the United States),
had been under consideration nearly two years earlier. The prayer of
these petitions was for a _suspension_ of the sixth article of the
Ordinance, so as to permit the introduction of slaves into the
Territory. The whole subject was referred to a select committee of seven
members, consisting of representatives from Virginia, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Kentucky, and New York, and the delegate
from the Indiana Territory.
On the 14th of the ensuing February (1806), this committee made a report
favorable to the prayer of the petitioners, and recommending a
suspension of the prohibitory article for ten years. In their report the
committee, after stating their opinion that a qualified suspension of
the article in question would be beneficial to the people of the Indiana
Territory, proceeded to say:
"The suspension of this article is an object almost universally
desired in that Territory. It appears to your committee to be a
question entirely different from that between slavery and
freedom, inasmuch as it would merely occasion the removal of
persons, already slaves, from one part of the country to
another. The good effects of this suspension, in the present
instance, would be to accelerate the population of that
Territory, hitherto retarded by the operation of that article of
compact; as slaveholders emigrating into the Western country
might then indulge any preference which they might feel for a
settlement in the Indiana Territory, instead of seeking, as they
are now compelled to do, settlements in other States or
countries permitting the introduction of slaves. The condition
of the slaves themselves would be much ameliorated by it, as it
is evident, from experience, that the more they are separated
and diffused the more care and attention are bestowed on them by
their masters, each proprietor having it in his power to
increase their comforts and conveniences in proportion to the
smallness of their numbers."
These were the dispassionate utterances of representatives of every part
of the Union--men contemporary with the origin of the Constitution,
speaking before any sectional division had arisen in connection with the
subject. It is remarkable that the very same opinions which they express
and arguments which they adduce had, fifty years afterward, come to be
denounced and repudiated by one half of the Union as partisan and
sectional when propounded by the other half.
No final action seems to have been taken on the subject before the
adjournment of Congress, but it was brought forward at the next session
in a more imposing form. On the 20th of January, 1807, the Speaker laid
before the House of Representatives a letter from Governor Harrison,
inclosing certain resolutions formally and _unanimously_ adopted by the
Legislative Council and House of Representatives of the Indiana
Territory, in favor of the suspension of the sixth article of the
Ordinance and the introduction of slaves into the Territory, which they
say would "meet the approbation of at least nine tenths of the good
citizens of the same." Among the resolutions were the following:
"_Resolved unanimously_, That the abstract question of liberty
and slavery is not considered as involved in a suspension of the
said article, inasmuch as the number of slaves in the United
States _would not be augmented_ by this measure.
"_Resolved unanimously_, That the suspension of the said article
would be equally advantageous to the Territory, to the States
from whence the negroes would be brought, and to the negroes
themselves....
"The States which are overburdened with negroes would be
benefited by their citizens having an opportunity of disposing
of the negroes which they can not comfortably support, or of
removing with them to a country abounding with all the
necessaries of life; and the negro himself would exchange a
scanty pittance of the coarsest food for a plentiful and
nourishing diet, and a situation which admits not the most
distant prospect of emancipation for one which presents no
considerable obstacle to his wishes."
These resolutions were submitted to a committee drawn, like the former,
from different sections of the country, which again reported favorably,
reiterating in substance the reasons given by the former committee.
Their report was sustained by the House, and a resolution to suspend the
prohibitory article was adopted. The proposition failed, however, in the
Senate, and there the matter seems to have been dropped. The proceedings
constitute a significant and instructive episode in the political
history of the country.
The allusion which has been made to the Ordinance of 1787, renders it
proper to notice, very briefly, the argument put forward during the
discussion of the Missouri question, and often repeated since, that the
Ordinance afforded a precedent in support of the claim of a power in
Congress to determine the question of the admission of slaves into the
Territories, and in justification of the prohibitory clause applied in
1820 to a portion of the Louisiana Territory.
The difference between the Congress of the Confederation and that of the
Federal Constitution is so broad that the action of the former can, in
no just sense, be taken as a precedent for the latter. The Congress of
the Confederation represented the States in their sovereignty, each
delegation having one vote, so that all the States were of equal weight
in the decision of any question. It had legislative, executive, and in
some degree judicial powers, thus combining all departments of
government in itself. During its recess a committee known as the
Committee of the States exercised the powers of the Congress, which was
in spirit, if not in fact, an assemblage of the States.
On the other hand, the Congress of the Constitution is only the
legislative department of the General Government, with powers strictly
defined and expressly limited to those delegated by the States. It is
further held in check by an executive and a judiciary, and consists of
two branches, each having peculiar and specified functions.
If, then, it be admitted--which is at least very questionable--that the
Congress of the Confederation had rightfully the power to exclude slave
property from the territory northwest of the Ohio River, that power must
have been derived from its character as an assemblage of the sovereign
States; not from the Articles of Confederation, in which no indication
of the grant of authority to exercise such a function can be found. The
Congress of the Constitution is expressly prohibited from the assumption
of any power not distinctly and specifically delegated to it as the
legislative branch of an organized government. What was questionable in
the former case, therefore, becomes clearly inadmissible in the latter.
But there is yet another material distinction to be observed. The
States, owners of what was called the Northwestern Territory, were
component members of the Congress which adopted the Ordinance for its
government, and gave thereto their full and free consent. The Ordinance
may, therefore, be regarded as virtually a treaty between the States
which ceded and those which received that extensive domain. In the other
case, Missouri and the whole region affected by the Missouri Compromise,
were parts of the territory acquired from France under the name of
Louisiana; and, as it requires two parties to make or amend a treaty,
France and the Government of the United States should have coöperated in
any amendment of the treaty by which Louisiana had been acquired, and
which guaranteed to the inhabitants of the ceded territory "all the
rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens of the United States,"
and "the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and the religion
they profess."--("State Papers," vol. ii, "Foreign Relations," p. 507.)
For all the reasons thus stated, it seems to me conclusive that the
action of the Congress of the Confederation in 1787 could not constitute
a precedent to justify the action of the Congress of the United States
in 1820, and that the prohibitory clause of the Missouri Compromise was
without constitutional authority, in violation of the rights of a part
of the joint owners of the territory, and in disregard of the
obligations of the treaty with France.
The basis of sectional controversy was the question of the balance of
political power. In its earlier manifestations this was undisguised. The
purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, and the
subsequent admission of a portion of that Territory into the Union as a
State, afforded one of the earliest occasions for the manifestation of
sectional jealousy, and gave rise to the first threats, or warnings
(which proceeded from New England), of a dissolution of the Union. Yet,
although negro slavery existed in Louisiana, no pretext was made of that
as an objection to the acquisition. The ground of opposition is frankly
stated in a letter of that period from one Massachusetts statesman to
another--"that the influence of _our_ part of the Union must be
diminished by the acquisition of more weight at the other extremity."[6]
Some years afterward (in 1819-'20) occurred the memorable contest with
regard to the admission into the Union of Missouri, the second State
carved out of the Louisiana Territory. The controversy arose out of a
proposition to attach to the admission of the new State a proviso
prohibiting slavery or involuntary servitude therein. The vehement
discussion that ensued was continued into the first session of a
different Congress from that in which it originated, and agitated the
whole country during the interval between the two. It was the first
question that ever seriously threatened the stability of the Union, and
the first in which the sentiment of opposition to slavery in the
abstract was introduced as an adjunct of sectional controversy. It was
clearly shown in debate that such considerations were altogether
irrelevant; that the number of existing slaves would not be affected by
their removal from the older States to Missouri; and, moreover, that the
proposed restriction would be contrary to the spirit, if not to the
letter, of the Constitution.[7] Notwithstanding all this, the
restriction was adopted, by a vote almost strictly sectional, in the
House of Representatives. It failed in the Senate through the firm
resistance of the Southern, aided by a few patriotic and conservative
Northern, members of that body. The admission of the new State, without
any restriction, was finally accomplished by the addition to the bill of
a section for ever prohibiting slavery in all that portion of the
Louisiana Territory lying north of thirty-six degrees and thirty
minutes, north latitude, except Missouri--by implication leaving the
portion south of that line open to settlement either with or without
slaves.
This provision, as an offset to the admission of the new State without
restriction, constituted the celebrated Missouri Compromise. It was
reluctantly accepted by a small majority of the Southern members. Nearly
half of them voted against it, under the conviction that it was
unauthorized by the Constitution, and that Missouri was entitled to
determine the question for herself, as a matter of right, not of bargain
or concession. Among those who thus thought and voted were some of the
wisest statesmen and purest patriots of that period.[8]
This brief retrospect may have sufficed to show that the question of the
right or wrong of the institution of slavery was in no wise involved in
the earlier sectional controversies. Nor was it otherwise in those of a
later period, in which it was the lot of the author of these memoirs to
bear a part. They were essentially struggles for sectional equality or
ascendancy--for the maintenance or the destruction of that balance of
power or equipoise between North and South, which was early recognized
as a cardinal principle in our Federal system. It does not follow that
both parties to this contest were wholly right or wholly wrong in their
claims. The determination of the question of right or wrong must be left
to the candid inquirer after examination of the evidence. The object of
these preliminary investigations has been to clear the subject of the
obscurity produced by irrelevant issues and the glamour of ethical
illusions.
[Footnote 1: It will be remembered that, during her colonial condition,
Virginia made strenuous efforts to prevent the importation of Africans,
and was overruled by the Crown; also, that Georgia, under Oglethorpe,
did prohibit the introduction of African slaves until 1752, when the
proprietors surrendered the charter, and the colony became a part of the
royal government, and enjoyed the same privileges as the other
colonies.]
[Footnote 2: South Carolina subsequently (in 1803) repealed her law
forbidding the importation of slaves. The reason assigned for this
action was the impossibility of enforcing the law without the aid of the
Federal Government, to which entire control of the revenues, revenue
police, and naval forces of the country had been surrendered by the
States. "The geographical situation of our country," said Mr. Lowndes,
of South Carolina, in the House of Representatives on February 14, 1804,
"is not unknown. With navigable rivers running into the heart of it, it
was impossible, with our means, to prevent our Eastern brethren ...
engaged in this trade, from introducing them [the negroes] into the
country. The law was completely evaded.... Under these circumstances,
sir, it appears to me to have been the duty of the Legislature to repeal
the law, and remove from the eyes of the people the spectacle of its
authority being daily violated."
The effect of the repeal was to permit the importation of negroes into
South Carolina during the interval from 1803 to 1808. It in probable
that an extensive _contraband_ trade was carried on by the New England
slavers with other ports, on account of the lack of means to enforce the
laws of the Southern States forbidding it.]
[Footnote 3: One from the Society of Friends assembled at Philadelphia
and New York, the other from the Pennsylvania society of various
religious denominations combined for the abolition of slavery.
For report of the debate, see Benton's "Abridgment," vol. i, pp.
201-207, _et seq._]
[Footnote 4: See Benton's "Abridgment," vol. i, p. 397.]
[Footnote 5: One was from New Hampshire, one from Vermont, two from
Virginia, and one from South Carolina.--(Benton's "Abridgment," vol.
iii, p. 519.)
No division on the final vote in the Senate.]
[Footnote 6: Cabot to Pickering, who was then Senator from
Massachusetts.--(See "Life and Letters of George Cabot," by H. C. Lodge,
p. 334.)]
[Footnote 7: The true issue was well stated by the Hon. Samuel A. Foot,
a representative from Connecticut, in an incidental reference to it in
debate on another subject, a few weeks after the final settlement of the
Missouri case. He said: "The Missouri question did not involve the
question of freedom or slavery, but merely _whether slaves now in the
country might be permitted to reside in the proposed new State; and
whether Congress or Missouri possessed the power to decide_."]
[Footnote 8: The votes on the proposed _restriction_, which eventually
failed of adoption, and on the _compromise_, which was finally adopted,
are often confounded. The advocacy of the former measure was exclusively
sectional, no Southern member voting for it in either House. On the
adoption of the compromise line of thirty-six degrees and thirty
minutes, the vote in the Senate was 34 yeas to 10 nays. The Senate
consisted of forty-four members from twenty-two States, equally divided
between the two sections--Delaware being classed as a Southern State.
Among the yeas were all the Northern votes, except two from
Indiana--being 20--and 14 Southern. The nays consisted of 2 from the
North, and 8 from the South.
In the House of Representatives, the vote was 134 yeas to 42 nays. Of
the yeas, 95 were Northern, 39 Southern; of the nays, 5 Northern, and 37
Southern.
Among the nays in the Senate were Messrs. James Barbour and James
Pleasants, of Virginia; Nathaniel Macon, of North Carolina; John
Gaillard and William Smith, of South Carolina. In the House, Philip P.
Barbour, John Randolph, John Tyler, and William S. Archer, of Virginia;
Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina (one of the authors of the
Constitution); Thomas W. Cobb, of Georgia; and others of more or less
note.
(See speech of the Hon. D. L. Yulee, of Florida, in the United States
Senate, on the admission of California, August 6, 1850, for a careful
and correct account of the compromise. That given in the second chapter
of Benton's "Thirty Years' View" is singularly inaccurate; that of
Horace Greeley, in his "American Conflict," still more so.)]
CHAPTER II.
The Session of 1849-'50.--The Compromise Measures.--Virtual
Abrogation of the Missouri Compromise.--The Admission of
California.--The Fugitive Slave Law.--Death of Mr.
Calhoun.--Anecdote of Mr. Clay.
The first session of the Thirty-first Congress (1849-'50) was a
memorable one. The recent acquisition from Mexico of New Mexico and
California required legislation by Congress. In the Senate the bills
reported by the Committee on Territories were referred to a select
committee, of which Mr. Clay, the distinguished Senator from Kentucky,
was chairman. From this committee emanated the bills which, taken
together, are known as the compromise measures of 1850.
With some others, I advocated the division of the newly acquired
territory by an extension to the Pacific Ocean of the Missouri
Compromise line of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes north latitude.
This was not because of any inherent merit or fitness in that line, but
because it had been accepted by the country as a settlement of the
sectional question which, thirty years before, had threatened a rupture
of the Union, and it had acquired in the public mind a prescriptive
respect which it seemed unwise to disregard. A majority, however,
decided otherwise, and the line of political conciliation was then
obliterated, as far as it lay in the power of Congress to do so. An
analysis of the vote will show that this result was effected almost
exclusively by the representatives of the North, and that the South was
not responsible for an action which proved to be the opening of
Pandora's box.[9]
However objectionable it may have been in 1820 to adopt that political
line as expressing a geographical definition of different sectional
interests, and however it may be condemned as the assumption by Congress
of a function not delegated to it, it is to be remembered that the act
had received such recognition and _quasi_-ratification by the people of
the States as to give it a value which it did not originally possess.
Pacification had been the fruit borne by the tree, and it should not
have been recklessly hewed down and cast into the fire. The frequent
assertion then made was that all discrimination was unjust, and that the
popular will should be left untrammeled in the formation of new States.
This theory was good enough in itself, and as an abstract proposition
could not be gainsaid; but its practical operation has but poorly
sustained the expectations of its advocates, as will be seen when we
come to consider the events that occurred a few years later in Kansas
and elsewhere. Retrospectively viewed under the mellowing light of time,
and with the calm consideration we can usually give to the irremediable
past, the compromise legislation of 1850 bears the impress of that
sectional spirit so widely at variance with the general purposes of the
Union, and so destructive of the harmony and mutual benefit which the
Constitution was intended to secure.
The refusal to divide the territory acquired from Mexico by an extension
of the line of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific was a consequence
of the purpose to admit California as a State of the Union before it had
acquired the requisite population, and while it was mainly under the
control of a military organization sent from New York during the war
with Mexico and disbanded in California upon the restoration of peace.
The inconsistency of the argument against the extension of the line was
exhibited in the division of the Territory of Texas by that parallel,
and payment to the State of money to secure her consent to the partition
of her domain. In the case of Texas, the North had everything to gain
and nothing to lose by the application of the practice of geographical
compromise on an arbitrary line. In the case of California, the
conditions were reversed; the South might have been the gainer and the
North the loser by a recognition of the same rule.
The compensation which it was alleged that the South received was a more
effective law for the rendition of fugitives from service or labor. But
it is to be remarked that this law provided for the execution by the
General Government of obligations which had been imposed by the Federal
compact upon the several States of the Union. The benefit to be derived
from a fulfillment of that law would be small in comparison with the
evil to result from the plausible pretext that the States had thus been
relieved from a duty which they had assumed in the adoption of the
compact of union. Whatever tended to lead the people of any of the
States to feel that they could be relieved from their constitutional
obligations by transferring them to the General Government, or that they
might thus or otherwise evade or resist them, could not fail to be like
the tares which the enemy sowed amid the wheat. The union of States,
formed to secure the permanent welfare of posterity and to promote
harmony among the constituent States, could not, without changing its
character, survive such alienation as rendered its parts hostile to the
security, prosperity, and happiness of one another.
It was reasonably argued that, as the Legislatures of fourteen of the
States had enacted what were termed "personal liberty laws," which
forbade the coöperation of State officials in the rendition of fugitives
from service and labor, it became necessary that the General Government
should provide the requisite machinery for the execution of the law. The
result proved what might have been anticipated--that those communities
which had repudiated their constitutional obligations, which had
nullified a previous law of Congress for the execution of a provision of
the Constitution, and had murdered men who came peacefully to recover
their property, would evade or obstruct, so as to render practically
worthless, _any_ law that could be enacted for that purpose. In the
exceptional cases in which it might be executed, the event would be
attended with such conflict between the State and Federal authorities as
to produce consequent evils greater than those it was intended to
correct.
It was during the progress of these memorable controversies that the
South lost its most trusted leader, and the Senate its greatest and
purest statesman. He was taken from us--
"Like a summer-dried fountain,
When our need was the sorest;"--
when his intellectual power, his administrative talent, his love of
peace, and his devotion to the Constitution, might have averted
collision; or, failing in that, he might have been to the South the
Palinurus to steer the bark in safety over the perilous sea. Truly did
Mr. Webster--his personal friend, although his greatest political
rival--say of him in his obituary address, "There was nothing groveling,
or low, or meanly selfish, that came near the head or the heart of Mr.
Calhoun." His prophetic warnings speak from the grave with the wisdom of
inspiration. Would that they could have been appreciated by his
countrymen while he yet lived!
Note.--While the compromise measures of 1850 were pending, and
the excitement concerning them was at its highest, I one day
overtook Mr. Clay, of Kentucky, and Mr. Berrien, of Georgia, in
the Capitol grounds. They were in earnest conversation. It was
the 7th of March--the day on which Mr. Webster had delivered his
great speech. Mr. Clay, addressing me in the friendly manner
which he had always employed since I was a schoolboy in
Lexington, asked me what I thought of the speech. I liked it
better than he did. He then suggested that I should "join the
compromise men," saying that it was a measure which he thought
would probably give peace to the country for thirty years--the
period that had elapsed since the adoption of the compromise of
1820. Then, turning to Mr. Berrien, he said, "You and I will be
under ground before that time, but our young friend here may
have trouble to meet." I somewhat impatiently declared my
unwillingness to transfer to posterity a trial which they would
be relatively less able to meet than we were, and passed on my
way.
[Footnote 9: The vote in the Senate on the proposition to continue the
line of the Missouri Compromise through the newly acquired territory to
the Pacific was twenty-four yeas, to thirty-two nays. Reckoning Delaware
and Missouri as Southern States, the vote of the two sections was
exactly equal. The yeas were _all_ cast by Southern Senators; the nays
were all Northern, except two from Delaware, one from Missouri, and one
from Kentucky.]
CHAPTER III.
Reëlection to the Senate.--Political Controversies in
Mississippi.--Action of the Democratic State Convention.--Defeat
of the State-Rights Party.--Withdrawal of General Quitman and
Nomination of the Author as Candidate for the Office of
Governor.--The Canvass and its Result.--Retirement to Private
Life.
I had been reëlected by the Legislature of Mississippi as my own
successor, and entered upon a new term of service in the Senate on March
4, 1851.
On my return to Mississippi in 1851, the subject chiefly agitating the
public mind was that of the "compromise" measures of the previous year.
Consequent upon these was a proposition for a convention of delegates,
from the people of the Southern States respectively, to consider what
steps ought to be taken for their future peace and safety, and the
preservation of their constitutional rights. There was diversity of
opinion with regard to the merits of the measures referred to, but the
disagreement no longer followed the usual lines of party division. They
who saw in those measures the forerunner of disaster to the South had no
settled policy beyond a convention, the object of which should be to
devise new and more effectual guarantees against the perils of
usurpation. They were unjustly charged with a desire to destroy the
Union--a feeling entertained by few, very few, if by any, in
Mississippi, and avowed by none.
There were many, however, who held that the principles of the
Declaration of Independence, and the purposes for which the Union was
formed, were of higher value than the mere Union itself. Independence
existed before the compact of union between the States; and, if that
compact should be broken in part, and therefore destroyed in whole, it
was hoped that the liberties of the people in the States might still be
preserved. Those who were most devoted to the Union of the Constitution
might, consequently, be expected to resist most sternly any usurpation
of undelegated power, the effect of which would be to warp the Federal
Government from its proper character, and, by sapping the foundation, to
destroy the Union of the States.
My recent reëlection to the United States Senate had conferred upon me
for six years longer the office which I preferred to all others. I could
not, therefore, be suspected of desiring a nomination for any other
office from the Democratic Convention, the meeting of which was then
drawing near. Having, as a Senator of the State, freely participated in
debate on the measures which were now exciting so much interest in the
public mind, it was very proper that I should visit the people in
different parts of the State and render an account of my stewardship.
My devotion to the Union of our fathers had been so often and so
publicly declared; I had, on the floor of the Senate, so defiantly
challenged any question of my fidelity to it; my services, civil and
military, had now extended through so long a period, and were so
generally known--that I felt quite assured that no whisperings of envy
or ill will could lead the people of Mississippi to believe that I had
dishonored their trust by using the power they had conferred on me to
destroy the Government to which I was accredited. Then, as afterward, I
regarded the separation of the States as a great, though not the
greatest, evil.
I returned from my tour among the people at the time appointed for the
meeting of the nominating convention of the Democratic (or State-Rights)
party. During the previous year the Governor, General John A. Quitman,
had been compelled to resign his office to answer an indictment against
him for complicity with the "filibustering" expeditions against Cuba.
The charges were not sustained; many of the Democratic party of
Mississippi, myself included, recognized a consequent obligation to
renominate him for the office of which he had been deprived. When,
however, the delegates met in party convention, the committee appointed
to select candidates, on comparison of opinions, concluded that, in view
of the effort to fix upon the party the imputation of a purpose of
disunion, some of the antecedents of General Quitman might endanger
success. A proposition was therefore made, in the committee on
nominations, that I should be invited to become a candidate, and that,
if General Quitman would withdraw, my acceptance of the nomination and
the resignation of my place in the United States Senate, which it was
known would result, was to be followed by the appointment by the
Governor of General Quitman to the vacated place in the Senate. I
offered no objection to this arrangement, but left it to General Quitman
to decide. He claimed the nomination for the governorship, or nothing,
and was so nominated.
To promote the success of the Democratic nominees, I engaged actively in
the canvass, and continued in the field until stricken down by disease.
This occurred just before the election of delegates to a State
Convention, for which provision had been made by the Legislature, and
the canvass for which, conducted in the main upon party lines, was in
progress simultaneously with that for the ordinary State officers. The
Democratic majority in the State when the canvass began was estimated at
eight thousand. At this election, in September, for delegates to the
State Convention, we were beaten by about seven thousand five hundred
votes. Seeing in this result the foreshadowing of almost inevitable
defeat, General Quitman withdrew from the canvass as a candidate, and
the Executive Committee of the party (empowered to fill vacancies)
called on me to take his place. My health did not permit me to leave
home at that time, and only about six weeks remained before the election
was to take place; but, being assured that I was not expected to take
any active part, and that the party asked only the use of my name, I
consented to be announced, and immediately resigned from the United
States Senate. Nevertheless, I soon afterward took the field in person,
and worked earnestly until the day of election. I was defeated, but the
majority of more than seven thousand votes, that had been cast a short
time before against the party with which I was associated, was reduced
to less than one thousand.[10]
In this canvass, both before and after I became a candidate, no argument
or appeal of mine was directed against the perpetuation of the Union.
Believing, however, that the signs of the time portended danger to the
South from the usurpation by the General Government of undelegated
powers, I counseled that Mississippi should enter into the proposed
meeting of the people of the Southern States, to consider what could and
should be done to insure our future safety, frankly stating my
conviction that, unless such action were taken then, sectional rivalry
would engender greater evils in the future, and that, if the controversy
was postponed, "the last opportunity for a peaceful solution would be
lost, then the issue would have to be settled by blood."
[Footnote 10: The following letter, written in 1853 to the Hon. William
J. Brown, of Indiana, formerly a member of Congress from that State, and
subsequently published, relates to the events of this period, and
affords nearly contemporaneous evidence in confirmation of the
statements of the text:
"Washington D.C., _May 7, 1853_.
"My dear Sir: I received the 'Sentinel' containing your defense of me
against the fate accusation of disunionism, and, before I had returned
to you the thanks to which you are entitled, I received this day the St.
Joseph 'Valley Register,' marked by you, to call my attention to an
article in answer to your defense, which was just in all things, save
your too complimentary terms.
"I wish I had the letter quoted from, that you might publish the whole
of that which is garbled to answer a purpose. In a part of the letter
not published, I put such a damper on the attempt to fix on me the
desire to break up our Union, and presented other points in a form so
little acceptable to the unfriendly inquirers, that the publication of
the letter had to be drawn out of them.
"At the risk of being wearisome, but encouraged by your marked
friendship, I will give you a statement in the case. The meeting of
October, 1849, was a convention of delegates equally representing the
Whig and Democratic parties in Mississippi. The resolutions were
decisive as to equality of right in the South with the North to the
Territories acquired from Mexico, and proposed a convention of the
Southern States. I was not a member, but on invitation addressed the
Convention. The succeeding Legislature instructed me, as a Senator, to
assert this equality, and, under the existing circumstances, to resist
by all constitutional means the admission of California as a State. At a
called session of the Legislature in 1850, a self-constituted committee
called on me, by letter, for my views. They were men who had enacted or
approved the resolutions of the Convention of 1849, and instructed me,
as members of the Legislature, in regular session, in the early part of
the year 1850. To them I replied that I adhered to the policy they had
indicated and instructed me in their official character to pursue.
"I pointed out the mode in which their policy could, in my opinion, be
executed without bloodshed or disastrous convulsion, but in terms of
bitter scorn alluded to such as would insult me with a desire to destroy
the Union, for which my whole life proved me to be a devotee.
"Pardon the egotism, in consideration of the occasion, when I say to you
that my father and my uncles fought through the Revolution of 1776,
giving their youth, their blood, and their little patrimony to the
constitutional freedom which I claim as my inheritance. Three of my
brothers fought in the war of 1812. Two of them were comrades of the
Hero of the Hermitage, and received his commendation for gallantry at
New Orleans. At sixteen years of age I was given to the service of my
country; for twelve years of my life I have borne its arms and served
it, zealously, if not well. As I feel the infirmities, which suffering
more than age has brought upon me, it would be a bitter reflection,
indeed, if I was forced to conclude that my countrymen would hold all
this light when weighed against the empty panegyric which a time-serving
politician can bestow upon the Union, for which he never made a
sacrifice.
"In the Senate I announced that, if any respectable man would call me a
disunionist, I would answer him in monosyllables.... But I have often
asserted the right, for which the battles of the Revolution were
fought--the right of a people to change their government whenever it was
found to be oppressive, and subversive of the objects for which
governments are instituted--and have contended for the independence and
sovereignty of the States, a part of the creed of which Jefferson was
the apostle, Madison the expounder, and Jackson the consistent defender.
"I have written freely, and more than I designed. Accept my thanks for
your friendly advocacy. Present me in terms of kind remembrance to your
family, and believe me, very sincerely yours,
"Jefferson Davis.
"Note.--No party in Mississippi ever advocated disunion. They differed
as to the mode of securing their rights in the Union, and on the power
of a State to secede--neither advocating the exercise of the power.
"J.D."
]
CHAPTER IV.
The Author enters the Cabinet.--Administration of the War
Department.--Surveys for a Pacific Railway.--Extension of the
Capitol.--New Regiments organized.--Colonel Samuel Cooper,
Adjutant-General.--A Bit of Civil-Service Reform.--Reëlection to
the Senate.--Continuity of the Pierce Cabinet.--Character of
Franklin Pierce.
Happy in the peaceful pursuits of a planter; busily engaged in cares for
servants, in the improvement of my land, in building, in rearing
live-stock, and the like occupations, the time passed pleasantly away
until my retirement was interrupted by an invitation to take a place in
the Cabinet of Mr. Pierce, who had been elected to the Presidency of the
United States in November, 1852. Although warmly attached to Mr. Pierce
personally, and entertaining the highest estimate of his character and
political principles, private and personal reasons led me to decline the
offer. This was followed by an invitation to attend the ceremony of his
inauguration, which took place on the 4th of March, 1853. While in
Washington, on this visit, I was induced by public considerations to
reconsider my determination and accept the office of Secretary of War.
The public records of that period will best show how the duties of that
office were performed.
While in the Senate, I had advocated the construction of a railway to
connect the valley of the Mississippi with the Pacific coast; and, when
an appropriation was made to determine the most eligible route for that
purpose, the Secretary of War was charged with its application. We had
then but little of that minute and accurate knowledge of the interior of
the continent which was requisite for a determination of the problem.
Several different parties were therefore organized to examine the
various routes supposed to be practicable within the northern and
southern limits of the United States. The arguments which I had used as
a Senator were "the military necessity for such means of transportation,
and the need of safe and rapid communication with the Pacific slope, to
secure its continuance as a part of the Union."
In the organization and equipment of these parties, and in the selection
of their officers, care was taken to provide for securing full and
accurate information upon every point involved in the determination of
the route. The only discrimination made was in the more prompt and
thorough equipment of the parties for the extreme northern line, and
this was only because that was supposed to be the most difficult of
execution of all the surveys.
In like manner, my advocacy while in the Senate of an extension of the
Capitol, by the construction of a new Senate-Chamber and Hall of
Representatives, may have caused the appropriation for that object to be
put under my charge as Secretary of War.
During my administration of the War Department, material changes were
made in the models of arms. Iron gun-carriages were introduced, and
experiments were made which led to the casting of heavy guns hollow,
instead of boring them after casting. Inquiries were made with regard to
gunpowder, which subsequently led to the use of a coarser grain for
artillery.
During the same period the army was increased by the addition of two
regiments of infantry and two of cavalry. The officers of these
regiments were chosen partly by selection from those already in service
in the regular army and partly by appointment from civil life. In making
the selections from the army, I was continually indebted to the
assistance of that pure-minded and accurately informed officer, Colonel
Samuel Cooper, the Adjutant-General, of whom it may be proper here to
say that, although his life had been spent in the army, and he, of
course, had the likes and dislikes inseparable from men who are brought
into close contact and occasional rivalry, I never found in his official
recommendations any indication of partiality or prejudice toward any
one.
When the first list was made out, to be submitted to the President, a
difficulty was found to exist, which had not occurred either to Colonel
Cooper or myself. This was, that the officers selected purely on their
military record did not constitute a roster conforming to that
distribution among the different States, which, for political
considerations, it was thought desirable to observe--that is to say, the
number of such officers of Southern birth was found to be
disproportionately great. Under instructions from the President, the
list was therefore revised and modified in accordance with this new
element of geographical distribution. This, as I am happy to remember,
was the only occasion in which the current of my official action, while
Secretary of War, was disturbed in any way by sectional or political
considerations.
Under former administrations of the War Office it had not been customary
to make removals or appointments upon political grounds, except in the
case of clerkships. To this usage I not only adhered, but extended it to
include the clerkships also. The Chief Clerk, who had been removed by my
predecessor, had peculiar qualifications for the place; and, although
known to me only officially, he was restored to the position. It will
probably be conceded by all who are well informed on the subject that
his restoration was a benefit to the public service.[11]
[The reader desirous for further information relative to the
administration of the War Department during this period may find it in
the various official reports and estimates of works of defense
prosecuted or recommended, arsenals of construction and depots of arms
maintained or suggested, and foundries employed, during the Presidency
of Mr. Pierce, 1853-'57.]
Having been again elected by the Legislature of Mississippi as Senator
to the United States, I passed from the Cabinet of Mr. Pierce, on the
last day of his term (March 4, 1857), to take my seat in the Senate.
The Administration of Franklin Pierce presents the only instance in our
history of the continuance of a Cabinet for four years without a single
change in its _personnel_. When it is remembered that there was much
dissimilarity if not incongruity of character among the members of that
Cabinet, some idea may be formed of the power over men possessed and
exercised by Mr. Pierce. Chivalrous, generous, amiable, true to his
friends and to his faith, frank and bold in the declaration of his
opinions, he never deceived any one. And, if treachery had ever come
near him, it would have stood abashed in the presence of his truth, his
manliness, and his confiding simplicity.
[Footnote 11: Soon after my entrance upon duty as secretary of War,
General Jesup, the Quartermaster-General, presented to me a list of
names from which to make selection of a clerk for his department.
Observing that he had attached certain figures to these names, I asked
whether the figures were intended to indicate the relative
qualifications, or preference in his estimation, of the several
applicants; and, upon his answer in the affirmative, without further
question, authorized him to appoint "No. 1" of his list. A day or two
afterward, certain Democratic members of Congress called on me and
politely inquired whether it was true that I had appointed a Whig to a
position in the War Office. "Certainly not," I answered. "We thought you
were not aware of it," said they, and proceeded to inform me that Mr.
----, the recent appointee to the clerkship just mentioned, was a Whig.
After listening patiently to this statement, I answered that it was they
who were deceived, not I. I had appointed a clerk. He had been appointed
neither as a Whig nor as a Democrat, but merely as the fittest candidate
for the place in the estimation of the chief of the bureau to which it
belonged. I further gave them to understand that the same principle of
selection would be followed in similar cases, so far as my authority
extended. After some further discussion of the question, the visitors
withdrew, dissatisfied with the result of the interview.
The Quartermaster-General, on hearing of this conversation, hastened to
inform me that it was all a mistake--that the appointee to the office
had been confounded with his father, who was a well-known Whig, but that
he (the son) was a Democrat. I assured the General that this was
altogether immaterial, adding that it was "a very pretty quarrel" as it
stood, and that I had no desire to effect a settlement of it on any
inferior issue. Thenceforward, however, I was but little troubled with
any pressure for political appointments in the department.]
CHAPTER V.
The Territorial Question.--An Incident at the White House.--The
Kansas and Nebraska Bill.--The Missouri Compromise abrogated in
1850, not in 1854.--Origin of "Squatter Sovereignty."--Sectional
Rivalry and its Consequences.--The Emigrant Aid Societies.--"The
Bible and Sharpe's Rifles."--False Pretensions as to
Principle.--The Strife in Kansas.--A Retrospect.--The Original
Equilibrium of Power and its Overthrow.--Usurpations of the
Federal Government.--The Protective Tariff.--Origin and Progress
of Abolitionism.--Who were the Friends of the Union?--An
Illustration of Political Morality.
The organization of the Territory of Kansas was the first question that
gave rise to exciting debate after my return to the Senate. The
celebrated Kansas-Nebraska Bill had become a law during the
Administration of Mr. Pierce. As this occupies a large space in the
political history of the period, it is proper to state some facts
connected with it, which were not public, but were known to me and to
others yet living.
The declaration, often repeated in 1850, that climate and the will of
the people concerned should determine their institutions when they
should form a Constitution, and as a State be admitted into the Union,
and that no legislation by Congress should be permitted to interfere
with the free exercise of that will when so expressed, was but the
announcement of the fact so firmly established in the Constitution, that
sovereignty resided alone in the States, and that Congress had only
delegated powers. It has been sometimes contended that, because the
Congress of the Confederation, by the Ordinance of 1787, prohibited
involuntary servitude in all the Northwestern Territory, the framers of
the Constitution must have recognized such power to exist in the
Congress of the United States. Hence the deduction that the prohibitory
clause of what is known as the Missouri Compromise was justified by the
precedent of the Ordinance of 1787. To make the action of the Congress
of the Confederation a precedent for the Congress of the United States
is to overlook the great distinction between the two.
The Congress of the Confederation represented the States in their
sovereignty, and, as such representatives, had legislative, executive,
and, in some degree, judicial power confided to it. Virtually, it was an
assemblage of the States. In certain cases a majority of nine States
were required to decide a question, but there is no express limitation,
or restriction, such as is to be found in the ninth and tenth amendments
to the Constitution of the United States. The General Government of the
Union is composed of three departments, of which the Congress is the
legislative branch, and which is checked by the revisory power of the
judiciary, and the veto power of the Executive, and, above all, is
expressly limited in legislation to powers expressly delegated by the
States. If, then, it be admitted, which is certainly questionable, that
the Congress of the Confederation had power to exclude slave property
northwest of the Ohio River, that power must have been derived from its
character as representing the States in their sovereignty, for no
indication of such a power is to be found in the Articles of
Confederation.
If it be assumed that the absence of a prohibition was equivalent to the
admission of the power in the Congress of the Confederation, the
assumption would avail nothing in the Congress under the Constitution,
where power is expressly limited to what had been delegated. More
briefly, it may be stated that the Congress of the Confederation could,
like the Legislature of a State, do what had not been prohibited; but
the Congress of the United States could only do what had been expressly
permitted. It is submitted whether this last position is not conclusive
against the possession of power by the United States Congress to
legislate slavery into or exclude it from Territories belonging to the
United States.
This subject, which had for more than a quarter of a century been one of
angry discussion and sectional strife, was revived, and found occasion
for renewed discussion in the organization of Territorial governments
for Kansas and Nebraska. The Committees on Territories of the two Houses
agreed to report a bill in accordance with that recognized principle,
provided they could first be assured that it would receive favorable
consideration from the President. This agreement was made on Saturday,
and the ensuing Monday was the day (and the only day for two weeks) on
which, according to the order of business established by the rules of
the House of Representatives, the bill could be introduced by the
Committee of that House.
On Sunday morning, the 22d of January, 1854, gentlemen of each Committee
called at my house, and Mr. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee,
fully explained the proposed bill, and stated their purpose to be,
through my aid, to obtain an interview on that day with the President,
to ascertain whether the bill would meet his approbation. The President
was known to be rigidly opposed to the reception of visits on Sunday for
the discussion of any political subject; but in this case it was urged
as necessary, in order to enable the Committee to make their report the
next day. I went with them to the Executive mansion, and, leaving them
in the reception-room, sought the President in his private apartments,
and explained to him the occasion of the visit. He thereupon met the
gentlemen, patiently listened to the reading of the bill and their
explanations of it, decided that it rested upon sound constitutional
principles, and recognized in it only a return to that rule which had
been infringed by the compromise of 1820, and the restoration of which
had been foreshadowed by the legislation of 1850. This bill was not,
therefore, as has been improperly asserted, a measure inspired by Mr.
Pierce or any of his Cabinet. Nor was it the first step taken toward the
repeal of the conditions or obligations expressed or implied by the
establishment, in 1820, of the politico-sectional line of thirty-six
degrees and thirty minutes. That compact had been virtually abrogated,
in 1850, by the refusal of the representatives of the North to apply it
to the territory then recently acquired from Mexico. In May, 1854, the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill was passed; its purpose was declared in the bill
itself to be to carry into practical operation the "propositions and
principles established by the compromise measures of 1850" The "Missouri
Compromise," therefore, was not repealed by that bill--its virtual
repeal by the legislation of 1850 was recognized as an existing fact,
and it was declared to be "inoperative and void."
It was added that the "true intent and meaning" of the act was "not to
legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it
therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and
regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to
the Constitution of the United States."
From the terms of this bill, as well as from the arguments that were
used in its behalf, it is evident that its purpose was to leave the
Territories equally open to the people of all the States, with every
species of property recognized by any of them; to permit climate and
soil to determine the current of immigration, and to secure to the
people themselves the right to form their own institutions according to
their own will, as soon as they should acquire the right of
self-government; that is to say, as soon as their numbers should entitle
them to organize themselves into a State, prepared to take its place as
an equal, sovereign member of the Federal Union. The claim, afterward
advanced by Mr. Douglas and others, that this declaration was intended
to assert the right of the first settlers of a Territory, in its
inchoate, rudimental, dependent, and transitional condition, to
determine the character of its institutions, constituted the doctrine
popularly known as "squatter sovereignty." Its assertion led to the
dissensions which ultimately resulted in a rupture of the Democratic
party.
Sectional rivalry, the deadly foe of the "domestic tranquillity" and the
"general welfare," which the compact of union was formed to insure, now
interfered, with gigantic efforts, to prevent that free migration which
had been promised, and to hinder the decision by climate and the
interests of the inhabitants of the institutions to be established by
these embryo States. Societies were formed in the North to supply money
and send emigrants into the new Territories; and a famous preacher,
addressing a body of those emigrants, charged them to carry with them to
Kansas "the Bible and Sharpe's rifles." The latter were of course to be
leveled against the bosoms of their Southern brethren who might migrate
to the same Territory, but the use to be made of the Bible in the same
fraternal enterprise was left unexplained by the reverend gentleman.
The war-cry employed to train the Northern mind for the deeds
contemplated by the agitators was "No extension of slavery!" Was this
sentiment real or feigned? The number of slaves (as has already been
clearly shown) would not have been increased by their transportation to
new territory. It could not be augmented by further importation, for the
law of the land made that piracy. Southern men were the leading authors
of that enactment, and the public opinion of their descendants, stronger
than the law, fully sustained it. The climate of Kansas and Nebraska was
altogether unsuited to the negro, and the soil was not adapted to those
productions for which negro labor could be profitably employed. If,
then, any negroes held to service or labor, as provided in the compact
of union, had been transported to those Territories, they would have
been such as were bound by personal attachment mutually existing between
master and servant, which would have rendered it impossible for the
former to consider the latter as property convertible into money. As
white laborers, adapted to the climate and its products, flowed into the
country, negro labor would have inevitably become a tax to those who
held it, and their emancipation would have followed that condition, as
it has in all the Northern States, old or new--Wisconsin furnishing the
last example.[12] It may, therefore, be reasonably concluded that the
"war-cry" was employed by the artful to inflame the minds of the less
informed and less discerning; that it was adopted in utter disregard of
the means by which negro emancipation might have been peaceably
accomplished in the Territories, and with the sole object of obtaining
sectional control and personal promotion by means of popular agitation.
The success attending this artifice was remarkable. To such an extent
was it made available, that Northern indignation was aroused on the
absurd accusation that the South had destroyed "that sacred instrument,
the compromise of 1820." The internecine war which raged in Kansas for
several years was substituted for the promised peace under the operation
of the natural laws regulating migration to new countries. For the
fratricide which dyed the virgin soil of Kansas with the blood of those
who should have stood shoulder to shoulder in subduing the wilderness;
for the frauds which corrupted the ballot-box and made the name of
election a misnomer--let the authors of "squatter sovereignty" and the
fomenters of sectional hatred answer to the posterity for whose peace
and happiness the fathers formed the Federal compact.
In these scenes of strife were trained the incendiaries who afterward
invaded Virginia under the leadership of John Brown; and at this time
germinated the sentiments which led men of high position to sustain,
with their influence and their money, this murderous incursion into the
South.[13]
Now was seen the lightning of that storm, the distant muttering of which
had been heard so long, and against which the wise and the patriotic had
given solemn warning, regarding it as the sign which portended a
dissolution of the Union.
Diversity of interests and of opinions among the States of the
Confederation had in the beginning presented great difficulties in the
way of the formation of a more perfect union. The compact was the result
of compromise between the States, at that time generally distinguished
as navigating and agricultural, afterward as Northern and Southern. When
the first census was taken, in 1790, there was but little numerical
difference in the population of these two sections, and (including
States about to be admitted) there was also an exact equality in the
number of States. Each section had, therefore, the power of
self-protection, and might feel secure against any danger of Federal
aggression. If the disturbance of that equilibrium had been the
consequence of natural causes, and the government of the whole had
continued to be administered strictly for the general welfare, there
would have been no ground for complaint of the result.
Under the old Confederation the Southern States had a large excess of
territory. The acquisition of Louisiana, of Florida, and of Texas,
afterward greatly increased this excess. The generosity and patriotism
of Virginia led her, before the adoption of the Constitution, to cede
the Northwest Territory to the United States. The "Missouri Compromise"
surrendered to the North all the newly acquired region not included in
the State of Missouri, and north of the parallel of thirty-six degrees
and a half. The northern part of Texas was in like manner given up by
the compromise of 1850; and the North, having obtained, by those
successive cessions, a majority in both Houses of Congress, took to
itself all the territory acquired from Mexico. Thus, by the action of
the General Government, the means were provided permanently to destroy
the original equilibrium between the sections.
Nor was this the only injury to which the South was subjected. Under the
power of Congress to levy duties on imports, tariff laws were enacted,
not merely "to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and
general welfare of the United States," as authorized by the
Constitution, but, positively and primarily, for the protection against
foreign competition of domestic manufactures. The effect of this was to
impose the main burden of taxation upon the Southern people, who were
consumers and not manufacturers, not only by the enhanced price of
imports, but indirectly by the consequent depreciation in the value of
exports, which were chiefly the products of Southern States. The
imposition of this grievance was unaccompanied by the consolation of
knowing that the tax thus borne was to be paid into the public Treasury,
for the increase of price accrued mainly to the benefit of the
manufacturer. Nor was this all: a reference to the annual appropriations
will show that the disbursements made were as unequal as the burdens
borne--the inequality in both operating in the same direction.
These causes all combined to direct immigration to the Northern section;
and with the increase of its preponderance appeared more and more
distinctly a tendency in the Federal Government to pervert functions
delegated to it, and to use them with sectional discrimination against
the minority.
The resistance to the admission of Missouri as a State, in 1820, was
evidently not owing to any moral or constitutional considerations, but
merely to political motives; and the compensation exacted for granting
what was simply a right, was the exclusion of the South from equality in
the enjoyment of territory which justly belonged equally to both, and
which was what the enemies of the South stigmatized as "slave
territory," when acquired.
The sectional policy then indicated brought to its support the passions
that spring from man's higher nature, but which, like all passions, if
misdirected and perverted, become hurtful and, it may be, destructive.
The year 1835 was marked by the public agitation for the abolition of
that African servitude which existed in the South, which antedated the
Union, and had existed in every one of the States that formed the
Confederation. By a great misconception of the powers belonging to the
General Government, and the responsibilities of citizens of the Northern
States, many of those citizens were, little by little, brought to the
conclusion that slavery was a sin for which _they_ were answerable, and
that it was the duty of the Federal Government to abate it. Though, at
the date above referred to, numerically so weak, when compared with
either of the political parties at the North, as to excite no
apprehension of their power for evil, the public demonstrations of the
Abolitionists were violently rebuked generally at the North. The party
was contemned on account of the character of its leaders, and the more
odious because chief among them was an Englishman, one Thompson, who was
supposed to be an emissary, whose mission was to prepare the way for a
dissolution of the Union. Let us hope that it was reverence for the
obligations of the Constitution as the soul of the Union that suggested
lurking danger, and rendered the supposed emissary for its destruction
so odious that he was driven from a Massachusetts hall where he
attempted to lecture. But bodies in motion will overcome bodies at rest,
and the unreflecting too often are led by captivating names far from the
principles they revere.
Thus, by the activity of the propagandists of abolitionism, and the
misuse of the sacred word Liberty, they recruited from the ardent
worshipers of that goddess such numbers as gave them in many Northern
States the balance of power between the two great political forces that
stood arrayed against each other; then and there they came to be courted
by both of the great parties, especially by the Whigs, who had become
the weaker party of the two. Fanaticism, to which is usually accorded
sincerity as an extenuation of its mischievous tenets, affords the best
excuse to be offered for the original abolitionists, but that can not be
conceded to the political associates who joined them for the purpose of
acquiring power; with them it was but hypocritical cant, intended to
deceive. Hence arose the declaration of the existence of an
"irrepressible conflict," because of the domestic institutions of
sovereign, self-governing States--institutions over which neither the
Federal Government nor the people outside of the limits of such States
had any control, and for which they could have no moral or legal
responsibility.
Those who are to come after us, and who will look without prejudice or
excitement at the record of events which have occurred in our day, will
not fail to wonder how men professing and proclaiming such a belief
should have so far imposed upon the credulity of the world as to be able
to arrogate to themselves the claim of being the special friends of a
Union contracted in order to insure "domestic tranquillity" among the
people of the States united; that _they_ were the advocates of peace, of
law, and of order, who, when taking an oath to support and maintain the
Constitution, did so with a mental reservation to violate one of the
provisions of that Constitution--one of the conditions of the
compact--without which the Union could never have been formed. The tone
of political morality which could make this possible was well indicated
by the toleration accorded in the Senate to the flippant,
inconsequential excuse for it given by one of its most eminent
exemplars--"Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this
thing?"--meaning thereby, not that it would be the part of a dog to
_violate_ his oath, but to _keep_ it in the matter referred to. (See
Appendix D.)
[Footnote 12: Extract from a speech of Mr. Davis, of Mississippi, in the
Senate of the United States, May 17, 1860: "There is a relation
belonging to this species of property, unlike that of the apprentice or
the hired man, which awakens whatever there is of kindness or of
nobility of soul in the heart of him who owns it; this can only be
alienated, obscured, or destroyed, by collecting this species of
property into such masses that the owner is not personally acquainted
with the individuals who compose it. In the relation, however, which can
exist in the Northwestern Territories, the mere domestic connection of
one, two, or at most half a dozen servants in a family, associating with
the children as they grow up, attending upon age as it declines, there
can be nothing against which either philanthropy or humanity can make an
appeal. Not even the emancipationist could raise his voice; for this is
the high-road and the open gate to the condition in which the masters
would, from interest, in a few years, desire the emancipation of every
one who may thus be taken to the northwestern frontier."]
[Footnote 13: See "Report of Senate Committee of Inquiry into the John
Brown Raid."]
CHAPTER VI.
Agitation continued.--Political Parties: their Origin, Changes,
and Modifications.--Some Account of the "Popular Sovereignty,"
or "Non-Intervention," Theory.--Rupture of the Democratic
Party.--The John Brown Raid.--Resolutions introduced by the
Author into the Senate on the Relations of the States, the
Federal Government, and the Territories; their Discussion and
Adoption.
The strife in Kansas and the agitation of the territorial question in
Congress and throughout the country continued during nearly the whole of
Mr. Buchanan's Administration, finally culminating in a disruption of
the Union. Meantime the changes, or modifications, which had occurred or
were occurring in the great political parties, were such as may require
a word of explanation to the reader not already familiar with their
history.
The _names_ adopted by political parties in the United States have not
always been strictly significant of their principles. The old Federal
party inclined to nationalism, or consolidation, rather than
federalization, of the States. On the other hand, the party originally
known as Republican, and afterward as Democratic, can scarcely claim to
have been distinctively or exclusively such in the primary sense of
these terms, inasmuch as no party has ever avowed opposition to the
general principles of government by the people. The fundamental idea of
the Democratic party was that of the sovereignty of the States and the
federal, or confederate, character of the Union. Other elements have
entered into its organization at different periods, but this has been
the vital, cardinal, and abiding principle on which its existence has
been perpetuated. The Whig, which succeeded the old Federal party,
though by no means identical with it, was, in the main, favorable to a
strong central government, therein antagonizing the transatlantic
traditions connected with its name. The "Know-Nothing," or "American,"
party, which sprang into existence on the decadence of the Whig
organization, based upon opposition to the alleged overgrowth of the
political influence of naturalized foreigners and of the Roman Catholic
Church, had but a brief duration, and after the Presidential election of
1856 declined as rapidly as it had arisen.
At the period to which this narrative has advanced, the "Free-Soil,"
which had now assumed the title of "Republican" party, had grown to a
magnitude which threatened speedily to obtain entire control of the
Government. Based, as has been shown, upon sectional rivalry and
opposition to the growth of the Southern equally with the Northern
States of the Union, it had absorbed within itself not only the
abolitionists, who were avowedly agitating for the destruction of the
system of negro servitude, but other diverse and heterogeneous elements
of opposition to the Democratic party. In the Presidential election of
1856, their candidates (Fremont and Dayton) had received 114 of a total
of 296 electoral votes, representing a popular vote of 1,341,264 in a
total of 4,053,967. The elections of the ensuing year (1857) exhibited a
diminution of the so-called "Republican" strength, and the Thirty-fifth
Congress, which convened in December of that year, was decidedly
Democratic in both branches. In the course of the next two years,
however, the Kansas agitation and another cause, to be presently
noticed, had so swollen the ranks of the so-called Republicans, that, in
the House of Representatives of the Thirty-sixth Congress, which met in
December, 1859, neither party had a decided majority, the balance of
power being held by a few members still adhering to the virtually
extinct Whig and "American," or Know-Nothing, organizations, and a still
smaller number whose position was doubtful or irregular. More than eight
weeks were spent in the election of a Speaker; and a so-called
"Republican" (Mr. Pennington, of New Jersey) was finally elected by a
majority of one vote. The Senate continued to be decidedly Democratic,
though with an increase of the so-called "Republican" minority.
The cause above alluded to, as contributing to the rapid growth of the
so-called Republican party after the elections of the year 1857, was the
dissension among the Democrats, occasioned by the introduction of the
doctrine called by its inventors and advocates "popular sovereignty," or
"non-intervention," but more generally and more accurately known as
"squatter sovereignty." Its character has already been concisely stated
in the preceding chapter. Its origin is generally attributed to General
Cass, who is supposed to have suggested it in some general expressions
of his celebrated "Nicholson letter," written in December, 1847. On the
16th and 17th of May, 1860, it became necessary for me in a debate, in
the Senate, to review that letter of Mr. Cass. From my remarks then
made, the following extract is taken:
"The Senator [Mr. Douglas] might have remembered, if he had
chosen to recollect so unimportant a thing, that I once had to
explain to him, ten years ago, the fact that I repudiated the
doctrine of that letter at the time it was published, and that
the Democracy of Mississippi had well-nigh crucified me for the
construction which I placed upon it. There were men mean enough
to suspect that the construction I gave to the Nicholson letter
was prompted by the confidence and affection I felt for General
Taylor. At a subsequent period, however, Mr. Cass thoroughly
reviewed it. He uttered (for him) very harsh language against
all who had doubted the true construction of his letter, and he
construed it just as I had done during the canvass of 1848. It
remains only to add that I supported Mr. Cass, not because of
the doctrine of the Nicholson letter, but in despite of it;
because I believed a Democratic President, with a Democratic
Cabinet and Democratic counselors in the two Houses of Congress,
and he as honest a man as I believed Mr. Cass to be, would be a
safer reliance than his opponent, who personally possessed my
confidence as much as any man living, but who was of, and must
draw his advisers from, a party the tenets of which I believed
to be opposed to the interests of the country, as they were to
all my political convictions.
"I little thought at that time that my advocacy of Mr. Cass upon
such grounds as these, or his support by the State of which I am
a citizen, would at any future day be quoted as an endorsement
of the opinions contained in the Nicholson letter, as those
opinions were afterward defined. But it is not only upon this
letter, but equally upon the resolutions of the Convention as
constructive of that letter, that the Senator rested his
argument. [I will here say to the Senator that, if at any time I
do him the least injustice, speaking as I do from such notes as
I could take while he progressed, I will thank him to correct
me.]
"But this letter entered into the canvass; there was a doubt
about its construction: there were men who asserted that they
had positive authority for saying that it meant that the people
of a Territory could only exclude slavery when the Territory
should form a Constitution and be admitted as a State. This
doubt continued to hang over the construction, and it was that
doubt alone which secured Mr. Cass the vote of Mississippi. If
the true construction had been certainly known, he would have
had no chance to get it."
Whatever meaning the generally discreet and conservative statesman, Mr.
Cass, may have intended to convey, it is not at all probable that he
foresaw the extent to which the suggestions would be carried and the
consequences that would result from it.
In the organization of a government for California in 1850, the theory
was more distinctly advanced, but it was not until after the passage of
the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, in 1854, that it was fully developed under the
plastic and constructive genius of the Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, of
Illinois. The leading part which that distinguished Senator had borne in
the authorship and advocacy of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which affirmed
the right of the people of the Territories "to form and regulate their
domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution
of the United States," had aroused against him a violent storm of
denunciation in the State which he represented and other Northern
States. He met it very manfully in some respects, defended his action
resolutely, but in so doing was led to make such concessions of
principle and to attach such an interpretation to the bill as would have
rendered it practically nugatory--a thing to keep the promise of peace
to the ear and break it to the hope.
The Constitution expressly confers upon Congress the power to admit new
States into the Union, and also to "dispose of and make all needful
rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property
belonging to the United States." Under these grants of power, the
uniform practice of the Government had been for Congress to lay off and
divide the common territory by convenient boundaries for the formation
of future States; to provide executive, legislative, and judicial
departments of government for such Territories during their temporary
and provisional period of pupilage; to delegate to these governments
such authority as might be expedient--subject always to the supervision
and controlling government of the Congress. Finally, at the proper time,
and on the attainment by the Territory of sufficient strength and
population for self-government, to receive it into the Union on a
footing of entire equality with the original States--sovereign and
self-governing. All this is no more inconsistent with the true
principles of "popular sovereignty," properly understood, than the
temporary subjection of a minor to parental control is inconsistent with
the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence, or the exceptional
discipline of a man-of-war or a military post with the principles of
republican freedom.
The usual process of transition from a territorial condition to that of
a State was, in the first place, by an act of Congress authorizing the
inhabitants to elect representatives for a convention to form a State
Constitution, which was then submitted to Congress for approval and
ratification. On such ratification the supervisory control of Congress
was withdrawn, and the new State authorized to assume its sovereignty,
and the inhabitants of the Territory became citizens of a State. In the
cases of Tennessee in 1796, and Arkansas and Michigan in 1836, the
failure of the inhabitants to obtain an "enabling act" of Congress,
before organizing themselves, very nearly caused the rejection of their
applications for admission as States, though they were eventually
granted on the ground that the subsequent approval and consent of
Congress could heal the prior irregularity. The entire control of
Congress over the whole subject of territorial government had never been
questioned in earlier times. Necessarily conjoined with the _power_ of
this protectorate, was of course the _duty_ of exercising it for the
safety of the persons and property of all citizens of the United States,
permanently or temporarily resident in any part of the domain belonging
to the States in common.
Logically carried out, the new theory of "popular sovereignty" would
apply to the first adventurous pioneers settling in the wilderness
before the organization of any Territorial government by Congress, as
well as afterward. If "sovereignty" is inherent in a thousand or five
thousand persons, there can be no valid ground for denying its existence
in a dozen, as soon as they pass beyond the limits of the State
governments. The advocates of this novel doctrine, however, if rightly
understood, generally disavowed any claim to its application prior to
the organization of a territorial government.
The Territorial Legislatures, to which Congress delegated a portion of
its power and duty to "make all needful rules and regulations respecting
the Territory," were the mere agents of Congress, exercising an
authority subject to Congressional supervision and control--an authority
conferred only for the sake of convenience, and liable at any time to be
revoked and annulled. Yet it is proposed to recognize in these
provisional, subordinate, and temporary legislative bodies, a power not
possessed by Congress itself. This is to claim that the creature is
endowed with an authority not possessed by the creator, or that the
stream has risen to an elevation above that of its source.
Furthermore, in contending for a power in the Territorial Legislatures
permanently to determine the fundamental, social, and political
institutions of the Territory, and thereby virtually to prescribe those
of the future State, the advocates of "popular sovereignty" were
investing those dependent and subsidiary bodies with powers far above
any exercised by the Legislatures of the fully organized and sovereign
States. The authority of the State Legislatures is limited, both by the
Federal Constitution and by the respective State Constitutions from
which it is derived. This latter limitation did not and could not exist
in the Territories.
Strange as it may seem, a theory founded on fallacies so flimsy and
leading to conclusions so paradoxical was advanced by eminent and
experienced politicians, and accepted by many persons, both in the North
and in the South--not so much, perhaps, from intelligent conviction as
under the delusive hope that it would afford a satisfactory settlement
of the "irrepressible conflict" which had been declared. The terms
"popular sovereignty" and "non-intervention" were plausible, specious,
and captivating to the public ear. Too many lost sight of the elementary
truth that political sovereignty does not reside in unorganized or
partially organized masses of individuals, but in the people of
regularly and permanently constituted States. As to the
"non-intervention" proposed, it meant merely the abnegation by Congress
of its duty to protect the inhabitants of the Territories subject to its
control.
The raid into Virginia under John Brown--already notorious as a
fanatical partisan leader in the Kansas troubles--occurred in October,
1859, a few weeks before the meeting of the Thirty-sixth Congress.
Insignificant in itself and in its immediate results, it afforded a
startling revelation of the extent to which sectional hatred and
political fanaticism had blinded the conscience of a class of persons in
certain States of the Union; forming a party steadily growing stronger
in numbers, as well as in activity. Sympathy with its purposes or
methods was earnestly disclaimed by the representatives of all parties
in Congress; but it was charged, on the other hand, that it was only the
natural outgrowth of doctrines and sentiments which for some years had
been freely avowed on the floors of both Houses. A committee of the
Senate made a long and laborious investigation of the facts, with no
very important or satisfactory results. In their final report, June 15,
1860, accompanying the evidence obtained and submitted, this Committee
said:
"It [the incursion] was simply the act of lawless ruffians,
under the sanction of no public or political authority,
distinguishable only from ordinary felonies by the ulterior ends
in contemplation by them, and by the fact that the money to
maintain the expedition, and the large armament they brought
with them, had been contributed and furnished by the citizens of
other States of the Union under circumstances that must continue
to jeopard the safety and peace of the Southern States, and
against which Congress has no power to legislate.
"If the several States [adds the Committee], whether from
motives of policy or a desire to preserve the peace of the
Union, if not from fraternal feeling, do not hold it incumbent
on them, after the experience of the country, to guard in future
by appropriate legislation against occurrences similar to the
one here inquired into, the Committee can find no guarantee
elsewhere for the security of peace between the States of the
Union."
On February 2, 1860, the author submitted, in the Senate of the United
States, a series of resolutions, afterward slightly modified to read as
follows
"1. _Resolved_, That, in the adoption of the Federal
Constitution, the States, adopting the same, acted severally as
free and independent sovereignties, delegating a portion of
their powers to be exercised by the Federal Government for the
increased security of each against dangers, _domestic_ as well
as foreign; and that any intermeddling by any one or more
States, or by a combination of their citizens, with the domestic
institutions of the others, on any pretext whatever, political,
moral, or religious, with the view to their disturbance or
subversion, is in violation of the Constitution, insulting to
the States so interfered with, endangers their domestic peace
and tranquillity--objects for which the Constitution was
formed--and, by necessary consequence, tends to weaken and
destroy the Union itself.
"2. _Resolved_, That negro slavery, as it exists in fifteen
States of this Union, composes an important portion of their
domestic institutions, inherited from our ancestors, and
existing at the adoption of the Constitution, by which it is
recognized as constituting an important element in the
apportionment of powers among the States, and that no change of
opinion or feeling on the part of the non-slaveholding States of
the Union in relation to this institution can justify them or
their citizens in open or covert attacks thereon, with a view to
its overthrow; and that all such attacks are in manifest
violation of the mutual and solemn pledge to protect and defend
each other, given by the States respectively, on entering into
the constitutional compact which formed the Union, and are a
manifest breach of faith and a violation of the most solemn
obligations.
"3. _Resolved_, That the Union of these States rests on the
equality of rights and privileges among its members, and that it
is especially the duty of the Senate, which represents the
States in their sovereign capacity, to resist all attempts to
discriminate either in relation to persons or property in the
Territories, which are the common possessions of the United
States, so as to give advantages to the citizens of one State
which are not equally assured to those of every other State.
"4. _Resolved_, That neither Congress nor a Territorial
Legislature, whether by direct legislation or legislation of an
indirect and unfriendly character, possesses power to annul or
impair the constitutional right of any citizen of the United
States to take his slave property into the common Territories,
and there hold and enjoy the same while the territorial
condition remains.
"5. _Resolved_, That if experience should at any time prove that
the judiciary and executive authority do not possess means to
insure adequate protection to constitutional rights in a
Territory, and if the Territorial government shall fail or
refuse to provide the necessary remedies for that purpose, it
will be the duty of Congress to supply such deficiency.[14]
"6. _Resolved_, That the inhabitants of a Territory of the
United States, when they rightfully form a Constitution to be
admitted as a State into the Union, may then, for the first
time, like the people of a State when forming a new
Constitution, decide for themselves whether slavery, as a
domestic institution, shall be maintained or prohibited within
their jurisdiction; and they shall be received into the Union
with or without slavery, as their Constitution may prescribe at
the time of their admission.
"7. _Resolved_, That the provision of the Constitution for the
rendition of fugitives from service or labor, 'without the
adoption of which the Union could not have been formed,' and
that the laws of 1793 and 1850, which were enacted to secure its
execution, and the main features of which, being similar, bear
the impress of nearly seventy years of sanction by the highest
judicial authority, should be honestly and faithfully observed
and maintained by all who enjoy the benefits of our compact of
union; and that all acts of individuals or of State Legislatures
to defeat the purpose or nullify the requirements of that
provision, and the laws made in pursuance of it, are hostile in
character, subversive of the Constitution, and revolutionary in
their effect."[15]
After a protracted and earnest debate, these resolutions were adopted
_seriatim_, on the 24th and 25th of May, by a decided majority of the
Senate (varying from thirty-three to thirty-six yeas against from two to
twenty-one nays), the Democrats, both Northern and Southern, sustaining
them unitedly, with the exception of one adverse vote (that of Mr. Pugh,
of Ohio) on the fourth and sixth resolutions. The Republicans all voted
against them or refrained from voting at all, except that Mr. Teneyck,
of New Jersey, voted for the fifth and seventh of the series. Mr.
Douglas, the leader if not the author of "popular sovereignty," was
absent on account of illness, and there were a few other absentees.
The conclusion of a speech, in reply to Mr. Douglas, a few days before
the vote was taken on these resolutions, is introduced here as the best
evidence of the position of the author at that period of excitement and
agitation:
Conclusion of Reply to Mr. Douglas, _May 17, 1860_.
"Mr. President: I briefly and reluctantly referred, because the
subject had been introduced, to the attitude of Mississippi on a
former occasion. I will now as briefly say that in 1851, and in
1860, Mississippi was, and is, ready to make every concession
which it becomes her to make to the welfare and the safety of
the Union. If, on a former occasion, she hoped too much from
fraternity, the responsibility for her disappointment rests upon
those who failed to fulfill her expectations. She still clings
to the Government as our fathers formed it. She is ready to-day
and to-morrow, as in her past and though brief yet brilliant
history, to maintain that Government in all its power, and to
vindicate its honor with all the means she possesses. I say
brilliant history; for it was in the very morning of her
existence that her sons, on the plains of New Orleans, were
announced, in general orders, to have been the admiration of one
army and the wonder of the other. That we had a division in
relation to the measures enacted in 1850, is true; that the
Southern rights men became the minority in the election which
resulted, is true; but no figure of speech could warrant the
Senator in speaking of them as subdued--as coming to him or
anybody else for quarter. I deemed it offensive when it was
uttered, and the scorn with which I repelled it at the instant,
time has only softened to contempt. Our flag was never borne
from the field. We had carried it in the face of defeat, with a
knowledge that defeat awaited it; but scarcely had the smoke of
the battle passed away which proclaimed another victor, before
the general voice admitted that the field again was ours. I have
not seen a sagacious, reflecting man, who was cognizant of the
events as they transpired at the time, who does not say that,
within two weeks after the election, our party was in a
majority; and the next election which occurred showed that we
possessed the State beyond controversy. How we have wielded that
power it is not for me to say. I trust others may see
forbearance in our conduct--that, with a determination to insist
upon our constitutional rights, then and now, there is an
unwavering desire to maintain the Government, and to uphold the
Democratic party.
"We believe now, as we have asserted on former occasions, that
the best hope for the perpetuity of our institutions depends
upon the coöperation, the harmony, the zealous action, of the
Democratic party. We cling to that party from conviction that
its principles and its aims are those of truth and the country,
as we cling to the Union for the fulfillment of the purposes for
which it was formed. Whenever we shall be taught that the
Democratic party is recreant to its principles; whenever we
shall learn that it can not be relied upon to maintain the great
measures which constitute its vitality--I for one shall be ready
to leave it. And so, when we declare our tenacious adherence to
the Union, it is the Union of the Constitution. If the compact
between the States is to be trampled into the dust; if anarchy
is to be substituted for the usurpation and consolidation which
threatened the Government at an earlier period; if the Union is
to become powerless for the purposes for which it was
established, and we are vainly to appeal to it for
protection--then, sir, conscious of the rectitude of our course,
the justice of our cause, self-reliant, yet humbly, confidingly
trusting in the arm that guided and protected our fathers, we
look beyond the confines of the Union for the maintenance of our
rights. An habitual reverence and cherished affection for the
Government will bind us to it longer than our interests would
suggest or require; but he is a poor student of the world's
history who does not understand that communities at last must
yield to the dictates of their interests. That the affection,
the mutual desire for the mutual good, which existed among our
fathers, may be weakened in succeeding generations by the denial
of right, and hostile demonstration, until the equality
guaranteed but not secured within the Union may be sought for
without it, must be evident to even a careless observer of our
race. It is time to be up and doing. There is yet time to remove
the causes of dissension and alienation which are now
distracting, and have for years past divided, the country.
"If the Senator correctly described me as having at a former
period, against my own preferences and opinions, acquiesced in
the decision of my party; if, when I had youth, when physical
vigor gave promise of many days, and the future was painted in
the colors of hope, I could thus surrender my own convictions,
my own prejudices, and coöperate with my political friends
according to their views of the best method of promoting the
public good--now, when the years of my future can not be many,
and experience has sobered the hopeful tints of youth's gilding;
when, approaching the evening of life, the shadows are reversed,
and the mind turns retrospectively, it is not to be supposed
that I would abandon lightly, or idly put on trial, the party to
which I have steadily adhered. It is rather to be assumed that
conservatism, which belongs to the timidity or caution of
increasing years, would lead me to cling to, to be supported by,
rather than to cast off, the organization with which I have been
so long connected. If I am driven to consider the necessity of
separating myself from those old and dear relations, of
discarding the accustomed support, under circumstances such as I
have described, might not my friends who differ from me pause
and inquire whether there is not something involved in it which
calls for their careful revision?
"I desire no divided flag for the Democratic party.
"Our principles are national; they belong to every State of the
Union; and, though elections may be lost by their assertion,
they constitute the only foundation on which we can maintain
power, on which we can again rise to the dignity the Democracy
once possessed. Does not the Senator from Illinois see in the
sectional character of the vote be received,[16] that his
opinions are not acceptable to every portion of the country? Is
not the fact that the resolutions adopted by seventeen States,
on which the greatest reliance must be placed for Democratic
support, are in opposition to the dogma to which he still
clings, a warning that, if he persists and succeeds in forcing
his theory upon the Democratic party, its days are numbered? We
ask only for the Constitution. We ask of the Democracy only from
time to time to declare, as current exigencies may indicate,
what the Constitution was intended to secure and provide. Our
flag bears no new device. Upon its folds our principles are
written in living light; all proclaiming the constitutional
Union, justice, equality, and fraternity of our ocean-bound
domain, for a limitless future."
[Footnote 14: The words, "within the limits of its constitutional
powers," were subsequently added to this resolution, on the suggestion
of Mr. Toombs, of Georgia, with the approval of the mover.]
[Footnote 15: The speech of the author, delivered on the 7th of May
ensuing, in exposition of these resolutions, will be found in Appendix
F.]
[Footnote 16: In the Democratic Convention, which had been recently held
in Charleston. (See the ensuing chapter.)]
CHAPTER VII
A Retrospect.--Growth of Sectional Rivalry.--The Generosity of
Virginia.--Unequal Accessions of Territory.--The Tariff and its
Effects.--The Republican Convention of 1860, its Resolutions and
its Nominations.--The Democratic Convention at Charleston, its
Divisions and Disruption.--The Nominations at Baltimore.--The
"Constitutional-Union" Party and its Nominees.--An Effort in
Behalf of Agreement declined by Mr. Douglas.--The Election of
Lincoln and Hamlin.--Proceedings in the South.--Evidences of
Calmness and Deliberation.--Mr. Buchanan's Conservatism and the
weakness of his Position.--Republican Taunts.--The "New York
Tribune," etc.
When, at the close of the war of the Revolution, each of the thirteen
colonies that had been engaged in that contest was severally
acknowledged by the mother-country, Great Britain, to be a free and
independent State, the confederation of those States embraced an area so
extensive, with climate and products so various, that rivalries and
conflicts of interest soon began to be manifested. It required all the
power of wisdom and patriotism, animated by the affection engendered by
common sufferings and dangers, to keep these rivalries under restraint,
and to effect those compromises which it was fondly hoped would insure
the harmony and mutual good offices of each for the benefit of all. It
was in this spirit of patriotism and confidence in the continuance of
such abiding good will as would for all time preclude hostile
aggression, that Virginia ceded, for the use of the confederated States,
all that vast extent of territory lying north of the Ohio River, out of
which have since been formed five States and part of a sixth. The
addition of these States has accrued entirely to the preponderance of
the Northern section over that from which the donation proceeded, and to
the disturbance of that equilibrium which existed at the close of the
war of the Revolution.
It may not be out of place here to refer to the fact that the grievances
which led to that war were directly inflicted upon the Northern
colonies. Those of the South had no material cause of complaint; but,
actuated by sympathy for their Northern brethren, and a devotion to the
principles of civil liberty and community independence, which they had
inherited from their Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and which were set forth in
the Declaration of Independence, they made common cause with their
neighbors, and may, at least, claim to have done their full share in the
war that ensued.
By the exclusion of the South, in 1820, from all that part of the
Louisiana purchase lying north of the parallel of thirty-six degrees
thirty minutes, and not included in the State of Missouri, by the
extension of that line of exclusion to embrace the territory acquired
from Texas; and by the appropriation of _all_ the territory obtained
from Mexico under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, both north and south
of that line, it may be stated with approximate accuracy that the North
had monopolized to herself more than three fourths of all that had been
added to the domain of the United States since the Declaration of
Independence. This inequality, which began, as has been shown, in the
more generous than wise confidence of the South, was employed to obtain
for the North the lion's share of what was afterward added at the cost
of the public treasure and the blood of patriots. I do not care to
estimate the relative proportion contributed by each of the two
sections.
Nor was this the only cause that operated to disappoint the reasonable
hopes and to blight the fair prospects under which the original compact
was formed. The effects of discriminating duties upon imports have been
referred to in a former chapter--favoring the manufacturing region,
which was the North; burdening the exporting region, which was the
South; and so imposing upon the latter a double tax: one, by the
increased price of articles of consumption, which, so far as they were
of home production, went into the pockets of the manufacturer; the
other, by the diminished value of articles of export, which was so much
withheld from the pockets of the agriculturist. In like manner the power
of the majority section was employed to appropriate to itself an unequal
share of the public disbursements. These combined causes--the possession
of more territory, more money, and a wider field for the employment of
special labor--all served to attract immigration; and, with increasing
population, the greed grew by what it fed on.
This became distinctly manifest when the so-called "Republican"
Convention assembled in Chicago, on May 16, 1860, to nominate a
candidate for the Presidency. It was a purely sectional body. There were
a few delegates present, representing an insignificant minority in the
"border States," Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri;
but not one from any State south of the celebrated political line of
thirty-six degrees thirty minutes. It had been the invariable usage with
nominating conventions of all parties to select candidates for the
Presidency and Vice-Presidency, one from the North and the other from
the South; but this assemblage nominated Mr. Lincoln, of Illinois, for
the first office, and for the second, Mr. Hamlin, of Maine--both
Northerners. Mr. Lincoln, its nominee for the Presidency, had publicly
announced that the Union "could not permanently endure, half slave and
half free." The resolutions adopted contained some carefully worded
declarations, well adapted to deceive the credulous who were opposed to
hostile aggressions upon the rights of the States. In order to
accomplish this purpose, they were compelled to create a fictitious
issue, in denouncing what they 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"--a "dogma" which had never been held
or declared by anybody, and which had no existence outside of their own
assertion. There was enough in connection with the nomination to assure
the most fanatical foes of the Constitution that their ideas would be
the rule and guide of the party.
Meantime, the Democratic party had held a convention, composed as usual
of delegates from all the States. They met in Charleston, South
Carolina, on April 23d, but an unfortunate disagreement with regard to
the declaration of principles to be set forth rendered a nomination
impracticable. Both divisions of the Convention adjourned, and met again
in Baltimore in June. Then, having finally failed to come to an
agreement, they separated and made their respective nominations apart.
Mr. Douglas, of Illinois, was nominated by the friends of the doctrine
of "popular sovereignty," with Mr. Fitzpatrick, of Alabama, for the
Vice-Presidency. Both these gentlemen at that time were Senators from
their respective States. Mr. Fitzpatrick promptly declined the
nomination, and his place was filled with the name of Mr. Herschel V.
Johnson, a distinguished citizen of Georgia.
The Convention representing the conservative, or State-Rights, wing of
the Democratic-party (the President of which was the Hon. Caleb Cushing,
of Massachusetts), on the first ballot, unanimously made choice of John
C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, then Vice-President of the United States,
for the first office, and with like unanimity selected General Joseph
Lane, then a Senator from Oregon, for the second. The resolutions of
each of these two conventions denounced the action and policy of the
Abolition party, as subversive of the Constitution, and revolutionary in
their tendency.
Another convention was held in Baltimore about the same period[17] by
those who still adhered to the old Whig party, reënforced by the remains
of the "American" organization, and perhaps some others. This Convention
also consisted of delegates from all the States, and, repudiating all
geographical and sectional issues, and declaring it to be "both the part
of patriotism and of duty to recognize no political principle other than
the Constitution of the country, the Union of the States, and the
enforcement of the laws," pledged itself and its supporters "to
maintain, protect, and defend, separately and unitedly, those great
principles of public liberty and national safety against all enemies at
home and abroad." Its nominees were Messrs. John Bell, of Tennessee, and
Edward Everett, of Massachusetts, both of whom had long been
distinguished members of the Whig party.
The people of the United States now had four rival tickets presented to
them by as many contending parties, whose respective position and
principles on the great and absorbing question at issue may be briefly
recapitulated as follows:
1. The "Constitutional-Union" Party, as it was now termed, led by
Messrs. Bell and Everett, which ignored the territorial controversy
altogether, and contented itself, as above stated, with a simple
declaration of adherence to "the Constitution, the Union, and the
enforcement of the laws."
2. The party of "popular sovereignty," headed by Douglas and Johnson,
who affirmed the right of the people of the Territories, in their
territorial condition, to determine their own organic institutions,
independently of the control of Congress; denying the power or duty of
Congress to protect the persons or property of individuals or minorities
in such Territories against the action of majorities.
3. The State-Rights party, supporting Breckinridge and Lane, who held
that the Territories were open to citizens of all the States, with their
property, without any inequality or discrimination, and that it was the
duty of the General Government to protect both persons and property from
aggression in the Territories subject to its control. At the same time
they admitted and asserted the right of the people of a Territory, on
emerging from their territorial condition to that of a State, to
determine what should then be their domestic institutions, as well as
all other questions of personal or proprietary right, without
interference by Congress, and subject only to the limitations and
restrictions prescribed by the Constitution of the United States.
4. The so-called "Republicans," presenting the names of Lincoln and
Hamlin, who held, in the language of one of their leaders,[18] that
"slavery can exist only by virtue of municipal law"; that there was "no
law for it in the Territories, and no power to enact one"; and that
Congress was "bound to prohibit it in or exclude it from any and every
Federal Territory." In other words, they asserted the right and duty of
Congress to exclude the citizens of half the States of the Union from
the territory belonging in common to all, unless on condition of the
sacrifice or abandonment of their property recognized by the
Constitution--indeed, of the _only_ species of their property distinctly
and specifically recognized as such by that instrument.
On the vital question underlying the whole controversy--that is, whether
the Federal Government should be a Government of the whole for the
benefit of all its equal members, or (if it should continue to exist at
all) a sectional Government for the benefit of a part--the first three
of the parties above described were in substantial accord as against the
fourth. If they could or would have acted unitedly, they, could
certainly have carried the election, and averted the catastrophe which
followed. Nor were efforts wanting to effect such a union.
Mr. Bell, the Whig candidate, was a highly respectable and experienced
statesman, who had filled many important offices, both State and
Federal. He was not ambitious to the extent of coveting the Presidency,
and he was profoundly impressed by the danger which threatened the
country. Mr. Breckinridge had not anticipated, and it may safely be said
did not eagerly desire, the nomination. He was young enough to wait, and
patriotic enough to be willing to do so, if the weal of the country
required it. Thus much I may confidently assert of both those gentlemen;
for each of them authorized me to say that he was willing to withdraw,
if an arrangement could be effected by which the divided forces of the
friends of the Constitution could be concentrated upon some one more
generally acceptable than either of the three who had been presented to
the country. When I made this announcement to Mr. Douglas--with whom my
relations had always been such as to authorize the assurance that he
could not consider it as made in an unfriendly spirit--he replied that
the scheme proposed was impracticable, because his friends, mainly
Northern Democrats, if he were withdrawn, would join in the support of
Mr. Lincoln, rather than of any one that should supplant _him_
(Douglas); that he was in the hands of his friends, and was sure they
would not accept the proposition.
It needed but little knowledge of the _status_ of parties in the several
States to foresee a probable defeat if the conservatives were to
continue divided into three parts, and the aggressives were to be held
in solid column. But angry passions, which are always bad counselors,
had been aroused, and hopes were still cherished, which proved to be
illusory. The result was the election, by a minority, of a President
whose avowed principles were necessarily fatal to the harmony of the
Union.
Of 303 _electoral_ votes, Mr. Lincoln received 180, but of the _popular_
suffrage of 4,676,853 votes, which the electors represented, he obtained
only 1,866,352--something over a third of the votes. This discrepancy
was owing to the system of voting by "general ticket"--that is, casting
the State votes as a unit, whether unanimous or nearly equally divided.
Thus, in New York, the total popular vote was 675,156, of which 362,646
were cast for the so-called Republican (or Lincoln) electors, and
312,510 against them. Now York was entitled to 35 electoral votes.
Divided on the basis of the popular vote, 19 of these would have been
cast for Mr. Lincoln, and 16 against him. But under the "general ticket"
system the entire 35 votes were cast for the Republican candidates, thus
giving them not only the full strength of the majority in their favor,
but that of the great minority against them superadded. So of other
Northern States, in which the small majorities on one side operated with
the weight of entire unanimity, while the virtual unanimity in the
Southern States, on the other side, counted nothing more than a mere
majority would have done.
The manifestations which followed this result, in the Southern States,
did not proceed, as has been unjustly charged, from chagrin at their
defeat in the election, or from any personal hostility to the
President-elect, but from the fact that they recognized in him the
representative of a party professing principles destructive to "their
peace, their prosperity, and their domestic tranquillity." The
long-suppressed fire burst into frequent flame, but it was still
controlled by that love of the Union which the South had illustrated in
every battle-field, from Boston to New Orleans. Still it was hoped,
against hope, that some adjustment might be made to avert the calamities
of a practical application of the theory of an "irrepressible conflict."
Few, if any, then doubted the right of a State to withdraw its grants
delegated to the Federal Government, or, in other words, to secede from
the Union; but in the South this was generally regarded as the remedy of
last resort, to be applied only when ruin or dishonor was the
alternative. No rash or revolutionary action was taken by the Southern
States, but the measures adopted were considerate, and executed
advisedly and deliberately. The Presidential election occurred (as far
as the popular vote, which determined the result, was concerned) in
November, 1860. Most of the State Legislatures convened soon afterward
in regular session. In some cases special sessions were convoked for the
purpose of calling State Conventions--the recognized representatives of
the sovereign will of the people--to be elected expressly for the
purpose of taking such action as should be considered needful and proper
under the existing circumstances.
These conventions, as it was always held and understood, possessed all
the power of the people assembled in mass; and therefore it was conceded
that they, and they only, could take action for the withdrawal of a
State from the Union. The consent of the respective States to the
formation of the Union had been given through such conventions, and it
was only by the same authority that it could properly be revoked. The
time required for this deliberate and formal process precludes the idea
of hasty or passionate action, and none who admit the primary power of
the people to govern themselves can consistently deny its validity and
binding obligation upon every citizen of the several States. Not only
was there ample time for calm consideration among the people of the
South, but for due reflection by the General Government and the people
of the Northern States.
President Buchanan was in the last year of his administration. His
freedom from sectional asperity, his long life in the public service,
and his peace-loving and conciliatory character, were all guarantees
against his precipitating a conflict between the Federal Government and
any of the States; but the feeble power that he possessed in the closing
months of his term to mold the policy of the future was painfully
evident. Like all who had intelligently and impartially studied the
history of the formation of the Constitution, he held that the Federal
Government had no rightful power to coerce a State. Like the sages and
patriots who had preceded him in the high office that he filled, he
believed that "our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never by
cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it can not
live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish. Congress
may possess many means of preserving it by conciliation, but the sword
was not placed in their hand to preserve it by force."--(Message of
December 3, 1860.)
Ten years before, Mr. Calhoun addressing the Senate with all the
earnestness of his nature and with that sincere desire to avert the
danger of disunion which those who knew him best never doubted, had
asked the emphatic question, "How can the Union be saved?" He answered
his question thus:
"There is but one way by which it can be [saved] with any
certainty; and that is by a full and final settlement, on the
principles of justice, of all the questions at issue between the
sections. The South asks for justice--simple justice--and less
she ought not to take. She has no compromise to offer but the
Constitution, and no concession or surrender to make....
"Can this be done? Yes, easily! Not by the weaker party; for it
can of itself do nothing--not even protect itself--but by the
stronger.... But will the North agree to do this? It is for her
to answer this question. But, I will say, she can not refuse if
she has half the love of the Union which she professes to have,
nor without exposing herself to the charge that her love of
power and aggrandizement is far greater than her love of the
Union."
During the ten years that intervened between the date of this speech and
the message of Mr. Buchanan cited above, the progress of sectional
discord and the tendency of the stronger section to unconstitutional
aggression had been fearfully rapid. With very rare exceptions, there
were none in 1850 who claimed the right of the Federal Government to
apply coercion to a State. In 1860 men had grown to be familiar with
threats of driving the South into submission to any act that the
Government, in the hands of a Northern majority, might see fit to
perform. During the canvass of that year, demonstrations had been made
by _quasi_-military organizations in various parts of the North, which
looked unmistakably to purposes widely different from those enunciated
in the preamble to the Constitution, and to the employment of means not
authorized by the powers which the States had delegated to the Federal
Government.
Well-informed men still remembered that, in the Convention which framed
the Constitution, a proposition was made to authorize the employment of
force against a delinquent State, on which Mr. Madison remarked that
"the use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of
war than an infliction of punishment, and would probably be considered
by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which
it might have been bound." The Convention expressly refused to confer
the power proposed, and the clause was lost. While, therefore, in 1860,
many violent men, appealing to passion and the lust of power, were
inciting the multitude, and preparing Northern opinion to support a war
waged against the Southern States in the event of their secession, there
were others who took a different view of the case. Notable among such
was the "New York Tribune," which had been the organ of the
abolitionists, and which now declared that, "if the cotton States wished
to withdraw from the Union, they should be allowed to do so"; that "any
attempt to compel them to remain, by force, would be contrary to the
principles of the Declaration of Independence and to the fundamental
ideas upon which human liberty is based"; and that, "if the Declaration
of Independence justified the secession from the British Empire of three
millions of subjects in 1776, it was not seen why it would not justify
the secession of five millions of Southerners from the Union in 1861."
Again, it was said by the same journal that, "sooner than compromise
with the South and abandon the Chicago platform," they would "let the
Union slide." Taunting expressions were freely used--as, for example,
"If the Southern people wish to leave the Union, we will do our best to
forward their views."
All this, it must be admitted, was quite consistent with the
oft-repeated declaration that the Constitution was a "covenant with
hell," which stood as the caption of a leading abolitionist paper of
Boston. That signs of coming danger so visible, evidences of hostility
so unmistakable, disregard of constitutional obligations so wanton,
taunts and jeers so bitter and insulting, should serve to increase
excitement in the South, was a consequence flowing as much from reason
and patriotism as from sentiment. He must have been ignorant of human
nature who did not expect such a tree to bear fruits of discord and
division.
[Footnote 17: May 19, 1860.]
[Footnote 18: Horace Greeley, "The American Conflict," vol. i, p. 322.]
CHAPTER VIII.
Conference with the Governor of Mississippi.--The Author
censured as "too slow."--Summons to Washington.--Interview with
the President.--His Message.--Movements in Congress.--The
Triumphant Majority.--The Crittenden Proposition.--Speech of the
Author on Mr. Green's Resolution.--The Committee of
Thirteen.--Failure to agree.--The "Republicans" responsible for
the Failure.--Proceedings in the House of
Representatives.--Futility of Efforts for an Adjustment.--The
Old Year closes in Clouds.
In November, 1860, after the result of the Presidential election was
known, the Governor of Mississippi, having issued his proclamation
convoking a special session of the Legislature to consider the propriety
of calling a convention, invited the Senators and Representatives of the
State in Congress, to meet him for consultation as to the character of
the message he should send to the Legislature when assembled.
While holding, in common with my political associates, that the right of
a State to secede was unquestionable, I differed from most of them as to
the probability of our being permitted peaceably to exercise the right.
The knowledge acquired by the administration of the War Department for
four years, and by the chairmanship of the Military Committee of the
Senate at two different periods, still longer in combined duration, had
shown me the entire lack of preparation for war in the South. The
foundries and armories were in the Northern States, and there were
stored all the new and improved weapons of war. In the arsenals of the
Southern States were to be found only arms of the old and rejected
models. The South had no manufactories of powder, and no navy to protect
our harbors, no merchant-ships for foreign commerce. It was evident to
me, therefore, that, if we should be involved in war, the odds against
us would be far greater than what was due merely to our inferiority in
population. Believing that secession would be the precursor of war
between the States, I was consequently slower and more reluctant than
others, who entertained a different opinion, to resort to that remedy.
While engaged in the consultation with the Governor just referred to, a
telegraphic message was handed to me from two members of Mr. Buchanan's
Cabinet, urging me to proceed "immediately" to Washington. This dispatch
was laid before the Governor and the members of Congress from the State
who were in conference with him, and it was decided that I should comply
with the summons. I was afterward informed that my associates considered
me "too slow," and they were probably correct in the belief that I was
behind the general opinion of the people of the State as to the
propriety of prompt secession.[19]
On arrival at Washington, I found, as had been anticipated, that my
presence there was desired on account of the influence which it was
supposed I might exercise with the President (Mr. Buchanan) in relation
to his forthcoming message to Congress. On paying my respects to the
President, he told me that he had finished the rough draft of his
message, but that it was still open to revision and amendment, and that
he would like to read it to me. He did so, and very kindly accepted all
the modifications which I suggested. The message was, however, afterward
somewhat changed, and, with great deference to the wisdom and
statesmanship of its author, I must say that, in my judgment, the last
alterations were unfortunate--so much so that, when it was read in the
Senate, I was reluctantly constrained to criticise it. Compared,
however, with documents of the same class which have since been
addressed to the Congress of the United States, the reader of
Presidential messages must regret that it was not accepted by Mr.
Buchanan's successors as a model, and that his views of the Constitution
had not been adopted as a guide in the subsequent action of the Federal
Government.
The popular movement in the South was tending steadily and rapidly
toward the secession of those known as "planting States"; yet, when
Congress assembled on December 3, 1860 the representatives of the people
of all those States took their seats in the House, and they were all
represented in the Senate, except South Carolina, whose Senators had
tendered their resignation to the Governor immediately on the
announcement of the result of the Presidential election. Hopes were
still cherished that the Northern leaders would appreciate the impending
peril, would cease to treat the warnings, so often given, as idle
threats, would refrain from the bravado, so often and so unwisely
indulged, of ability "to whip the South" in thirty, sixty, or ninety
days, and would address themselves to the more manly purpose of devising
means to allay the indignation, and quiet the apprehensions, whether
well, founded or not, of their Southern brethren. But the debates of
that session manifest, on the contrary, the arrogance of a triumphant
party, and the determination to reap to the uttermost the full harvest
of a party victory.
Mr. Crittenden, of Kentucky, the oldest and one of the most honored
members of the Senate,[20] introduced into that body a joint resolution
proposing certain amendments to the Constitution--among them the
restoration and incorporation into the Constitution of the geographical
line of the Missouri Compromise, with other provisions, which it was
hoped might be accepted as the basis for an adjustment of the
difficulties rapidly hurrying the Union to disruption. But the earnest
appeals of that venerable statesman were unheeded by Senators of the
so-called Republican party. Action upon his proposition was postponed
from time to time, on one pretext or another, until the last day of the
session--when seven States had already withdrawn from the Union and
established a confederation of their own--and it was then defeated by a
majority of one vote.[21]
Meantime, among other propositions made in the Senate were two
introduced early in the session, which it may be proper specially to
mention. One of these was a resolution offered by Mr. Powell, of
Kentucky, which, after some modification by amendment, when finally
acted upon, had taken the following form:
"_Resolved_, That so much of the President's message as relates
to the present agitated and distracted condition of the country,
and the grievances between the slaveholding and the non-slave
holding States, be referred to a special committee of thirteen
members, and that said committee be instructed to inquire into
the present condition of the country, and report by bill or
otherwise."
The other was a resolution offered by Mr. Green, of Missouri, to the
following effect:
"_Resolved_, That the Committee on the Judiciary be instructed
to inquire into the propriety of providing by law for
establishing an armed police force at all necessary points along
the line separating the slaveholding States from the
non-slaveholding States, for the purpose of maintaining the
general peace between those States, of preventing the invasion
of one State by citizens of another, and also for the efficient
execution of the fugitive-slave laws."
In the discussion of these two resolutions I find, in the proceedings of
the Senate on December 10th, as reported in the "Congressional Globe,"
some remarks of my own, the reproduction of which will serve to exhibit
my position at that period--a position which has since been often
misrepresented:
"Mr. President, if the political firmament seemed to me dark
before, there has been little in the discussion this morning to
cheer or illumine it. When the proposition of the Senator from
Kentucky was presented--not very hopeful of a good result--I was
yet willing to wait and see what developments it might produce.
This morning, for the first time, it has been considered; and
what of encouragement have we received? One Senator proposes, as
a cure for the public evil impending over us, to invest the
Federal Government with such physical power as properly belongs
to monarchy alone; another announces that his constituents cling
to the Federal Government, if its legislative favors and its
Treasury secure the works of improvement and the facilities
which they desire; while another rises to point out that the
evils of the land are of a party character. Sir, we have fallen
upon evil times indeed, if the great convulsion which now shakes
the body-politic to its center is to be dealt with by such
nostrums as these. Men must look more deeply, must rise to a
higher altitude; like patriots they must confront the danger
face to face, if they hope to relieve the evils which now
disturb the peace of the land, and threaten the destruction of
our political existence.
"First of all, we must inquire what is the cause of the evils
which beset us? The diagnosis of the disease must be stated
before we are prepared to prescribe. Is it the fault of our
legislation here? If so, then it devolves upon us to correct it,
and we have the power. Is it the defect of the Federal
organization, of the fundamental law of our Union? I hold that
it is not. Our fathers, learning wisdom from the experiments of
Rome and of Greece--the one a consolidated republic, and the
other strictly a confederacy--and taught by the lessons of our
own experiment under the Confederation, came together to form a
Constitution for 'a more perfect union,' and, in my judgment,
made the best government which has ever been instituted by man.
It only requires that it should be carried out in the spirit in
which it was made, that the circumstances under which it was
made should continue, and no evil can arise under this
Government for which it has not an appropriate remedy. Then it
is outside of the Government--elsewhere than to its Constitution
or to its administration--that we are to look. Men must not
creep in the dust of partisan strife and seek to make points
against opponents as the means of evading or meeting the issues
before us. The fault is not in the form of the Government, nor
does the evil spring from the manner in which it has been
administered. Where, then, is it? It is that our fathers formed
a Government for a Union of friendly States; and though under it
the people have been prosperous beyond comparison with any other
whose career is recorded in the history of man, still that Union
of friendly States has changed its character, and sectional
hostility has been substituted for the fraternity in which the
Government was founded.
"I do not intend here to enter into a statement of grievances; I
do not intend here to renew that war of crimination which for
years past has disturbed the country, and in which I have taken
a part perhaps more zealous than useful; but I call upon all men
who have in their hearts a love of the Union, and whose service
is not merely that of the lip, to look the question calmly but
fully in the face, that they may see the true cause of our
danger, which, from my examination, I believe to be that a
sectional hostility has been substituted for a general
fraternity, and thus the Government rendered powerless for the
ends for which it was instituted. The hearts of a portion of the
people have been perverted by that hostility, so that the powers
delegated by the compact of union are regarded not as means to
secure the welfare of all, but as instruments for the
destruction of a part--the minority section. How, then, have we
to provide a remedy? By strengthening this Government? By
instituting physical force to overawe the States, to coerce the
people living under them as members of sovereign communities to
pass under the yoke of the Federal Government? No, sir; I would
have this Union severed into thirty-three fragments sooner than
have that great evil befall constitutional liberty and
representative government. Our Government is an agency of
delegated and strictly limited powers. Its founders did not look
to its preservation by force; but the chain they wove to bind
these States together was one of love and mutual good offices.
They had broken the fetters of despotic power; they had
separated themselves from the mother-country upon the question
of community independence; and their sons will be degenerate
indeed if, clinging to the mere name and forms of free
government, they forge and rivet upon their posterity the
fetters which their ancestors broke....
"The remedy for these evils is to be found in the patriotism and
the affection of the people, if it exists; and, if it does not
exist, it is far better, instead of attempting to preserve a
forced and therefore fruitless Union, that we should peacefully
part and each pursue his separate course. It is not to this side
of the Chamber that we should look for propositions; it is not
here that we can ask for remedies. Complaints, with much
amplitude of specification, have gone forth from the members on
this side of the Chamber heretofore. It is not to be expected
that they will be renewed, for the people have taken the subject
into their own hands. States, in their sovereign capacity, have
now resolved to judge of the infractions of the Federal compact,
and of the mode and measure of redress. All we can usefully or
properly do is to send to the people, thus preparing to act for
themselves, evidence of error, if error there be; to transmit to
them the proofs of kind feeling, if it actuates the Northern
section, where they now believe there is only hostility. If we
are mistaken as to your feelings and purposes, give a
substantial proof, that here may begin that circle which hence
may spread out and cover the whole land with proofs of
fraternity, of a reaction in public sentiment, and the assurance
of a future career in conformity with the principles and
purposes of the Constitution. All else is idle. I would not give
the parchment on which the bill would be written that is to
secure our constitutional rights within the limits of a State,
where the people are all opposed to the execution of that law.
It is a truism in free governments that laws rest upon public
opinion, and fall powerless before its determined opposition.
"The time has passed, sir, when appeals might profitably be made
to sentiment. The time has come when men must of necessity
reason, assemble facts, and deal with current events. I may be
permitted in this to correct an error into which one of my
friends fell this morning, when he impressed on us the great
value of our Union as measured by the amount of time and money
and blood which were spent to form this Union. It cost very
little time, very little money, and no blood. It was one of the
most peaceful transactions that mark the pages of human history.
Our fathers fought the war of the Revolution to maintain the
rights asserted in their Declaration of Independence."
Mr. Powell: "The Senator from Mississippi will allow me to say
that I spoke of the Government, not of the Union. I said time
and money and blood had been required to form the Government."
Mr. Davis: "The Government is the machinery established by the
Constitution; it is the agency created by the States when they
formed the Union. Our fathers, I was proceeding to say, having
fought the war of the Revolution, and achieved their
independence--each State for itself, each State standing out an
integral part, each State separately recognized by the parent
Government of Great Britain--these States as independent
sovereignties entered into confederate alliance. After having
tried the Confederation and found it to be a failure, they, of
their own accord, came peacefully together, and in a brief
period made a Constitution, which was referred to each State and
voluntarily ratified by each State that entered the Union;
little time, little money, and no blood being expended to form
this Government, the machine for making the Union useful and
beneficial. Blood, much and precious, was expended to vindicate
and to establish community independence, and the great American
idea that all governments rest on the consent of the governed,
and that the people may at their will alter or abolish their
government, however or by whomsoever instituted.
"But our existing Government is not the less sacred to me
because it was not sealed with blood. I honor it the more
because it was the free-will offering of men who chose to live
together. It rooted in fraternity, and fraternity supported its
trunk and all its branches. Every bud and leaflet depends
entirely on the nurture it receives from fraternity as the root
of the tree. When that is destroyed, the trunk decays, and the
branches wither, and the leaves fall; and the shade it was
designed to give has passed away for ever. I cling not merely to
the name and form, but to the spirit and purpose of the Union
which our fathers made. It was for domestic tranquillity; not to
organize within one State lawless bands to commit raids upon
another. It was to provide for the common defense; not to
disband armies and navies, lest they should serve the protection
of one section of the country better than another. It was to
bring the forces of all the States together to achieve a common
object, upholding each the other in amity, and united to repel
exterior force. All the custom-house obstructions existing
between the States were destroyed; the power to regulate
commerce transferred to the General Government. Every barrier to
the freest intercourse was swept away. Under the Confederation
it had been secured as a right to each citizen to have free
transit over all the other States; and under the Union it was
designed to make this more perfect. Is it enjoyed? Is it not
denied? Do we not have mere speculative question of what is
property raised in defiance of the clear intent of the
Constitution, offending as well against its letter as against
its whole spirit? This must be reformed, or the Government our
fathers instituted is destroyed. I say, then, shall we cling to
the mere forms or idolize the name of Union, when its blessings
are lost, after its spirit has fled? Who would keep a flower,
which had lost its beauty and its fragrance, and in their stead
had formed a seed-vessel containing the deadliest poison? Or, to
drop the figure, who would consent to remain in alliance with
States which used the power thus acquired to invade his
tranquillity, to impair his defense, to destroy his peace and
security? Any community would be stronger standing in an
isolated position, and using its revenues to maintain its own
physical force, than if allied with those who would thus war
upon its prosperity and domestic peace; and reason, pride,
self-interest, and the apprehension of secret, constant danger
would impel to separation.
"I do not comprehend the policy of a Southern Senator who would
seek to change the whole form of our Government, and substitute
Federal force for State obligation and authority. Do we want a
new Government that is to overthrow the old? Do we wish to erect
a central Colossus, wielding at discretion the military arm, and
exercising military force over the people and the States? This
is not the Union to which we were invited; and so carefully was
this guarded that, when our fathers provided for using force to
put down insurrection, they required that the fact of the
insurrection should be communicated by the authorities of the
State before the President could interpose. When it was proposed
to give to Congress power to execute the laws against a
delinquent State, it was refused on the ground that that would
be making war on the States; and, though I know the good purpose
of my honorable friend from Missouri is only to give protection
to constitutional rights, I fear his proposition is to rear a
monster, which will break the feeble chain provided, and destroy
rights it was intended to guard. That military Government which
he is about to institute, by passing into hostile hands, becomes
a weapon for his destruction, not for his protection. All
dangers which we may be called upon to confront as independent
communities are light, in my estimation, compared with that
which would hang over us if this Federal Government had such
physical force; if its character was changed from a
representative agent of States to a central Government, with a
military power to be used at discretion against the States.
To-day it may be the idea that it will be used against some
State which nullifies the Constitution and the laws; some State
which passes laws to obstruct or repeal the laws of the United
States; some State which, in derogation of our rights of transit
under the Constitution, passes laws to punish a citizen found
there with property recognized by the Constitution of the United
States, but prohibited by the laws of that State.
"But how long might it be before that same military force would
be turned against the minority section which had sought its
protection; and that minority thus become mere subjugated
provinces under the great military government that it had thus
contributed to establish? The minority, incapable of aggression,
is, of necessity, always on the defensive, and often the victim
of the desertion of its followers and the faithlessness of its
allies. It therefore must maintain, not destroy, barriers.
"I do not know that I fully appreciate the purpose of my friend
from Missouri; whether, when he spoke of establishing military
posts along the borders of the States, and arming the Federal
Government with adequate physical power to enforce
constitutional rights (I suppose he meant obligations), he meant
to confer upon this Federal Government a power which it does not
now possess to coerce a State. If he did, then, in the language
of Mr. Madison, he is providing, not for a union of States, but
for the destruction of States; he is providing, under the name
of Union, to carry on a war against States; and I care not
whether it be against Massachusetts or Missouri, it is equally
objectionable to me; and I will resist it alike in the one case
and in the other, as subversive of the great principle on which
our Government rests; as a heresy to be confronted at its first
presentation, and put down there, lest it grow into proportions
which will render us powerless before it.
"The theory of our Constitution, Mr. President, is one of peace,
of equality of sovereign States. It was made by States and made
for States; and for greater assurance they passed an amendment,
doing that which was necessarily implied by the nature of the
instrument, as it was a mere instrument of grants. But, in the
abundance of caution, they declared that everything which had
not been delegated was reserved to the States, or to the
people--that is, to the State governments as instituted by the
people of each State, or to the people in their sovereign
capacity.
"I need not, then, go on to argue from the history and nature of
our Government that no power of coercion exists in it. It is
enough for me to demand the clause of the Constitution which
confers the power. If it is not there, the Government does not
possess it. That is the plain construction of the
Constitution--made plainer, if possible, by its amendment.
"This Union is dear to me as a Union of fraternal States. It
would lose its value if I had to regard it as a Union held
together by physical force. I would be happy to know that every
State now felt that fraternity which made this Union possible;
and, if that evidence could go out, if evidence satisfactory to
the people of the South could be given that that feeling existed
in the hearts of the Northern people, you might burn your
statute-books and we would cling to the Union still. But it is
because of their conviction that hostility, and not fraternity,
now exists in the hearts of the people, that they are looking to
their reserved rights and to their independent powers for their
own protection. If there be any good, then, which we can do, it
is by sending evidence to them of that which I fear does not
exist--the purpose of your constituents to fulfill in the spirit
of justice and fraternity all their constitutional obligations.
If you can submit to them that evidence, I feel confidence that,
with the assurance that aggression is henceforth to cease, will
terminate all the measures for defense. Upon you of the majority
section it depends to restore peace and perpetuate the Union of
equal States; upon us of the minority section rests the duty to
maintain our equality and community rights; and the means in one
case or the other must be such as each can control."
The resolution of Mr. Powell was eventually adopted on the 18th of
December, and on the 20th the Committee was appointed, consisting of
Messrs. Powell and Crittenden, of Kentucky; Hunter, of Virginia; Toombs,
of Georgia; Davis, of Mississippi; Douglas, of Illinois; Bigler, of
Pennsylvania; Rice, of Minnesota; Collamer, of Vermont; Seward, of New
York; Wade, of Ohio; Doolittle, of Wisconsin; and Grimes, of Iowa. The
first five of the list, as here enumerated, were Southern men; the next
three were Northern Democrats, or Conservatives; the last five, Northern
"Republicans," so called.
The supposition was that any measure agreed upon by the representatives
of the three principal divisions of public opinion would be approved by
the Senate and afterward ratified by the House of Representatives. The
Committee therefore determined that a majority of each of its three
divisions should be required in order to the adoption of any proposition
presented. The Southern members declared their readiness to accept any
terms that would secure the honor of the Southern States and guarantee
their future safety. The Northern Democrats and Mr. Crittenden generally
coöperated with the State-Rights Democrats of the South; but the
so-called "Republican" Senators of the North rejected every proposition
which it was hoped might satisfy the Southern people, and check the
progress of the secession movement. After fruitless efforts, continued
for some ten days, the Committee determined to report the journal of
their proceedings, and announce their inability to attain any
satisfactory conclusion. This report was made on the 31st of
December--the last day of that memorable and fateful year, 1860.
Subsequently, on the floor of the Senate, Mr. Douglas, who had been a
member of the Committee, called upon the opposite side to state what
they were willing to do. He referred to the fact that they had rejected
every proposition that promised pacification; stated that Toombs, of
Georgia, and Davis, of Mississippi, as members of the Committee, had
been willing to renew the Missouri Compromise, as a measure of
conciliation, but had met no responsive willingness on the part of their
associates of the opposition; and he pressed the point that, as they had
rejected every overture made by the friends of peace, it was now
incumbent upon _them_ to make a positive and affirmative declaration of
their purposes.
Mr. Seward, of New York, as we have seen, was a member of that
Committee--the man who, in 1858, had announced the "irrepressible
conflict," and who, in the same year, speaking of and for abolitionism,
had said: "It has driven you back in California and in Kansas; it will
invade your soil." He was to be the Secretary of State in the incoming
Administration, and was very generally regarded as the "power behind the
throne," greater than the throne itself. He was present in the Senate,
but made no response to Mr. Douglas's demand for a declaration of
policy.
Meantime the efforts for an adjustment made in the House of
Representatives had been equally fruitless. Conspicuous among these
efforts had been the appointment of a committee of thirty-three
members--one from each State of the Union--charged with a duty similar
to that imposed upon the Committee of Thirteen in the Senate, but they
had been alike unsuccessful in coming to any agreement. It is true that,
a few days afterward, they submitted a majority and two minority
reports, and that the report of the majority was ultimately adopted by
the House; but, even if this action had been unanimous, and had been
taken in due time, it would have been practically futile on account of
its absolute failure to provide or suggest any solution of the
territorial question, which was the vital point in controversy.
No wonder, then, that, under the shadow of the failure of every effort
in Congress to find any common ground on which the sections could be
restored to amity, the close of the year should have been darkened by a
cloud in the firmament, which had lost even the silver lining so long
seen, or thought to be seen, by the hopeful.
[Footnote 19: The following extract from a letter of the Hon. O. R.
Singleton, then a Representative of Mississippi in the United States
Congress, in regard to the subject treated, is herewith annexed:
"Canton, Mississippi, _July 14, 1877_.
"In 1860, about the time the ordinance of secession was passed
by the South Carolina Convention, and while Mississippi,
Alabama, and other Southern States were making active
preparations to follow her example, a conference of the
Mississippi delegation in Congress, Senators and
Representatives, was asked for by Governor J. J. Pettus, for
consultation as to the course Mississippi ought to take in the
premises.
"The meeting took place in the fall of 1860, at Jackson, the
capital; the whole delegation being present, with perhaps the
exception of one Representative.
"The main question for consideration was: 'Shall Mississippi, as
soon as her Convention can meet, pass an ordinance of secession,
thus placing herself by the side of South Carolina, regardless
of the action of other States; or shall she endeavor to hold
South Carolina in check, and delay action herself, until other
States can get ready, through their conventions, to unite with
them, and then, on a given day and at a given hour, by concert
of action, all the States willing to do so, secede in a body?'
"Upon the one side, it was argued that South Carolina could not
be induced to delay action a single moment beyond the meeting of
her Convention, and that our fate should be hers, and to delay
action would be to have her crushed by the Federal Government;
whereas, by the earliest action possible, we might be able to
avert this calamity. On the other side, it was contended that
delay might bring the Federal Government to consider the
emergency of the case, and perhaps a compromise could be
effected; but, if not, then the proposed concert of action would
at least give dignity to the movement, and present an undivided
Southern front.
"The debate lasted many hours, and Mr. Davis, with perhaps one
other gentleman in that conference, opposed immediate and
separate State action, declaring himself opposed to secession as
long as the hope of a peaceable remedy remained. He did not
believe we ought to precipitate the issue, as he felt certain
from his knowledge of the people, North and South, that, once
there was a clash of arms, the contest would be one of the most
sanguinary the world had ever witnessed.
"A majority of the meeting decided that no delay should be
interposed to separate State action, Mr. Davis being on the
other side; but, after the vote was taken and the question
decided, Mr. Davis declared he would stand by whatever action
the Convention representing the sovereignty of the State of
Mississippi might think proper to take.
"After the conference was ended, several of its members were
dissatisfied with the course of Mr. Davis, believing that he was
entirely opposed to secession, and was seeking to delay action
upon the part of Mississippi, with the hope that it might be
entirely averted.
"In some unimportant respects my memory may be at fault, and
possibly some of the inferences drawn may be incorrect; but
every material statement made, I am sure, is true, and if need,
can be, easily substantiated by other persons.
"Very respectfully, your obedient servant,"
(Signed) "O. R. Singleton."
]
[Footnote 20: Mr. Crittenden had been a life-long Whig. His first
entrance into the Senate was in 1817, and he was a member of that body
at various periods during the ensuing forty-four years. He was
Attorney-General in the Whig Cabinets of both General Harrison and Mr.
Fillmore, and supported the Bell and Everett ticket in 1860.]
[Footnote 21: The vote was nineteen yeas to twenty nays; total,
thirty-nine. As the consent of two thirds of each House is necessary to
propose an amendment for action by the States, twenty-six of the votes
cast in the Senate would have been necessary to sustain the proposition.
It actually failed, therefore, by _seven_ votes, instead of _one_.]
CHAPTER IX.
Preparations for withdrawal from the Union.--Northern
Precedents.--New England Secessionists.--Cabot, Pickering,
Quincy, etc.--On the Acquisition of Louisiana.--The Hartford
Convention.--The Massachusetts Legislature on the Annexation of
Texas, etc., etc.
The Convention of South Carolina had already (on the 20th of December,
1860) unanimously adopted an ordinance revoking her delegated powers and
withdrawing from the Union. Her representatives, on the following day,
retired from their seats in Congress. The people of the other planting
States had been only waiting in the lingering hope that some action
might be taken by Congress to avert the necessity for action similar to
that of South Carolina. In view of the failure of all overtures for
conciliation during the first month of the session, they were now making
their final preparations for secession. This was generally admitted to
be an unquestionable right appertaining to their sovereignty as States,
and the only _peaceable_ remedy that remained for the evils already felt
and the dangers apprehended.
In the prior history of the country, repeated instances are found of the
assertion of this right, and of a purpose entertained at various times
to put it in execution. Notably is this true of Massachusetts and other
New England States. The acquisition of Louisiana, in 1803, had created
much dissatisfaction in those States, for the reason, expressed by an
eminent citizen of Massachusetts,[22] that "the influence of our [the
Northeastern] part of the Union must be diminished by the acquisition of
more weight at the other extremity." The project of a separation was
freely discussed, with no intimation, in the records of the period, of
any idea among its advocates that it could be regarded as treasonable or
revolutionary.
Colonel Timothy Pickering, who had been an officer of the war of the
Revolution, afterward successively Postmaster-General, Secretary of War,
and Secretary of State, in the Cabinet of General Washington, and, still
later, long a representative of the State of Massachusetts in the Senate
of the United States, was one of the leading secessionists of his day.
Writing from Washington to a friend, on the 24th of December, 1803, he
says:
"I will not yet despair. I will rather anticipate a _new
confederacy_, exempt from the corrupt and corrupting influence
and oppression of the aristocratic democrats of the South. There
will be (and our children, at farthest, will see it) a
separation. The white and black population will mark the
boundary."[23]
In another letter, written a few weeks afterward (January 29, 1804),
speaking of what he regarded as wrongs and abuses perpetrated by the
then existing Administration, he thus expresses his views of the remedy
to be applied:
"The principles of our Revolution point to the remedy--_a
separation_. That this can be accomplished, and without spilling
one drop of blood, I have little doubt....
"I do not believe in the practicability of a long-continued
Union. A _Northern Confederacy_ would unite congenial characters
and present a fairer prospect of public happiness; while the
Southern States, having a similarity of habits, might be left to
'manage their own affairs in their own way.' If a separation
were to take place, our mutual wants would render a friendly and
commercial intercourse inevitable. The Southern States would
require the naval protection of the _Northern Union_, and the
products of the former would be important to the navigation and
commerce of the latter....
"It [the separation] must begin, in Massachusetts. The
proposition would be welcomed in Connecticut; and could we doubt
of New Hampshire? But New York must be associated; and how is
her concurrence to be obtained? She must be made the center of
the Confederacy. Vermont and New Jersey would follow of course,
and Rhode Island of necessity."[24]
Substituting South Carolina for Massachusetts; Virginia for New York;
Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, for New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode
Island; Kentucky for New Jersey, etc., etc., we find the suggestions of
1860-'61 only a reproduction of those thus outlined nearly sixty years
earlier.
Mr. Pickering seems to have had a correct and intelligent perception of
the altogether pacific character of the secession which he proposed, and
of the mutual advantages likely to accrue to both sections from a
peaceable separation. Writing in February, 1804, he explicitly disavows
the idea of hostile feeling or action toward the South, expressing
himself as follows:
"While thus contemplating the only means of maintaining our
ancient institutions in morals and religion, and our equal rights,
we wish no ill to the Southern States and those naturally connected
with them. The public debts might be equitably apportioned
between the new confederacies, and a separation somewhere
about the line above suggested would divide the different characters
of the existing Union. The manners of the Eastern portion
of the States would be sufficiently congenial to form a Union, and
their interests are alike intimately connected with agriculture and
commerce. A friendly and commercial intercourse would be maintained
with the States in the Southern Confederacy as at present.
Thus all the advantages which have been for a few years depending
on the general Union would be continued to its respective portions,
without the jealousies and enmities which now afflict both,
and which peculiarly embitter the condition of that of the North.
It is not unusual for two friends, when disagreeing about the mode
of conducting a common concern, to separate and manage, each in
his own way, his separate interest, and thereby preserve a useful
friendship, which without such separation would infallibly be
destroyed."[25]
Such were the views of an undoubted patriot who had participated in the
formation of the Union, and who had long been confidentially associated
with Washington in the administration of its Government, looking at the
subject from a Northern standpoint, within fifteen years after the
organization of that Government under the Constitution. Whether his
reasons for advocating a dissolution of the Union were valid and
sufficient, or not, is another question which it is not necessary to
discuss. His authority is cited only as showing the opinion prevailing
in the North at that day with regard to the _right_ of secession from
the Union, if deemed advisable by the ultimate and irreversible judgment
of the people of a sovereign State.
In 1811, on the bill for the admission of Louisiana as a State of the
Union, the Hon. Josiah Quincy, a member of Congress from Massachusetts,
said
"If this bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that it is
virtually a dissolution of this Union; that it will free the
States from their moral obligation; and as it will be the right
of all, so it will be the duty of some, definitely to prepare
for a separation--amicably if they can, violently if they must."
Mr. Poindexter, delegate from what was then the Mississippi Territory,
took exception to these expressions of Mr. Quincy, and called him to
order. The Speaker (Mr. Varnum, of Massachusetts) sustained Mr.
Poindexter, and decided that the suggestion of a dissolution of the
Union was out of order. An appeal was taken from this decision, _and it
was reversed_. Mr. Quincy proceeded to vindicate the propriety of his
position in a speech of some length, in the course of which he said:
"Is there a principle of public law better settled or more
conformable to the plainest suggestions of reason than that the
violation of a contract by one of the parties may be considered
as exempting the other from its obligations? Suppose, in private
life, thirteen form a partnership, and ten of them undertake to
admit a new partner without the concurrence of the other three;
would it not be at their option to abandon the partnership after
so palpable an infringement of their rights? How much more in
the political partnership, where the admission of new
associates, without previous authority, is so pregnant with
obvious dangers and evils!"
It is to be remembered that these men--Cabot, Pickering. Quincy, and
others--whose opinions and expressions have been cited, were not
Democrats, misled by extreme theories of State rights, but leaders and
expositors of the highest type of "Federalism, and of a strong central
Government." This fact gives their support of the right of secession the
greater significance.
The celebrated Hartford Convention assembled in December, 1814. It
consisted of delegates chosen by the Legislatures of Massachusetts,
Rhode Island, and Connecticut, with an irregular or imperfect
representation from the other two New England States, New Hampshire and
Vermont,[26] convened for the purpose of considering the grievances
complained of by those States in connection with the war with Great
Britain. They sat with closed doors, and the character of their
deliberations and discussions has not been authentically disclosed. It
was generally understood, however, that the chief subject of their
considerations was the question of the withdrawal of the States they
represented from the Union. The decision, as announced in their
published report, was adverse to the expediency of such a measure at
that time, and under the then existing conditions; but they proceeded to
indicate the circumstances in which a dissolution of the Union might
become expedient, and the mode in which it should be effected; and their
theoretical plan of separation corresponds very nearly with that
actually adopted by the Southern States nearly fifty years afterward.
They say:
"If the Union be destined to dissolution by reason of the
multiplied abuses of bad administration, it should, if possible,
be the work of peaceable times and deliberate consent. Some _new
form of confederacy_ should be substituted among those States
which shall intend to maintain a federal relation to each other.
Events may prove that the causes of our calamities are deep and
permanent. They may be found to proceed, not merely from the
blindness of prejudice, pride of opinion, violence of party
spirit, or the confusion of the times; but they may be traced to
implacable combinations of individuals or of States to
monopolize power and office, and to trample without remorse upon
the rights and interests of commercial sections of the Union.
Whenever it shall appear that the causes are radical and
permanent, a separation by equitable arrangement will be
preferable to an alliance by constraint among nominal friends,
but real enemies."
The omission of the single word "commercial," which does not affect the
principle involved, is the only modification necessary to adapt this
extract exactly to the condition of the Southern States in 1860-'61.
The obloquy which has attached to the members of the Hartford Convention
has resulted partly from a want of exact knowledge of their proceedings,
partly from the secrecy by which they were veiled, but mainly because it
was a recognized effort to paralyze the arm of the Federal Government
while engaged in a war arising from outrages committed upon American
seamen on the decks of American ships. The indignation felt was no doubt
aggravated by the fact that those ships belonged in a great extent to
the people who were now plotting against the war-measures of the
Government, and indirectly, if not directly, giving aid and comfort to
the public enemy. Time, which has mollified passion, and revealed many
things not then known, has largely modified the first judgment passed on
the proceedings and purposes of the Hartford Convention; and, but for
the circumstances of existing war which surrounded it, they might have
been viewed as political opinions merely, and have received
justification instead of censure.
Again, in 1844-'45 the measures taken for the annexation of Texas evoked
remonstrances, accompanied by threats of a dissolution of the Union from
the Northeastern States. The Legislature of Massachusetts, in 1844,
adopted a resolution, declaring, in behalf of that State, that "the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, faithful to the compact between the
people of the United States, according to the plain meaning and intent
in which it was understood by them, is sincerely anxious for its
preservation; but that it is determined, as it doubts not the other
States are, _to submit to undelegated powers in no body of men on
earth_"; and that "the project of the annexation of Texas, unless
arrested on the threshold, _may tend to drive these States into a
dissolution of the Union_."
Early in the next year (February 11, 1845), the same Legislature adopted
and communicated to Congress a series of resolutions on the same
subject, in one of which it was declared that, "as the powers of
legislation granted in the Constitution of the United States to Congress
do not embrace a case of the admission of a foreign state or foreign
territory, by legislation, into the Union, such an act of admission
would have _no binding force whatever on the people of Massachusetts_"--
language which must have meant that the admission of Texas would be a
justifiable ground for secession, unless it was intended to announce the
purpose of nullification.
It is evident, therefore, that the people of the South, in the crisis
which confronted them in 1860, had no lack either of precept or of
precedent for their instruction and guidance in the teaching and the
example of our brethren of the North and East. The only practical
difference was, that the North threatened and the South acted.
[Footnote 22: George Cabot, who had been United States Senator from
Massachusetts for several years during the Administration of
Washington.--(See "Life of Cabot," by Lodge, p. 334.)]
[Footnote 23: See "Life of Cabot," p. 491; letter of Pickering to
Higginson.]
[Footnote 24: Pickering to Cabot, "Life of Cabot," pp. 338-340.]
[Footnote 25: Letter to Theodore Lyman, "Life of Cabot," pp. 445, 446.]
[Footnote 26: Maine was not then a State.]
CHAPTER X.
False Statements of the Grounds for Separation.--Slavery not the
Cause, but an Incident.--The Southern People not "Propagandists"
of Slavery.--Early Accord among the States with regard to
African Servitude.--Statement of the Supreme Court.--Guarantees
of the Constitution.--Disregard of Oaths.--Fugitives from
Service and the "Personal Liberty Laws."--Equality in the
Territories the Paramount Question.--The Dred Scott
Case.--Disregard of the Decision of the Supreme
Court.--Culmination of Wrongs.--Despair of their
Redress.--Triumph of Sectionalism.
At the period to which this review of events has advanced, one State had
already withdrawn from the Union. Seven or eight others were preparing
to follow her example, and others yet were anxiously and doubtfully
contemplating the probably impending necessity of taking the same
action. The efforts of Southern men in Congress, aided by the
coöperation of the Northern friends of the Constitution, had failed, by
the stubborn refusal of a haughty majority, controlled by "radical"
purposes, to yield anything to the spirit of peace and conciliation.
This period, coinciding, as it happens, with the close of a calendar
year, affords a convenient point to pause for a brief recapitulation of
the causes which had led the Southern States into the attitude they then
held, and for a more full exposition of the constitutional questions
involved.
The reader of many of the treatises on these events, which have been put
forth as historical, if dependent upon such alone for information, might
naturally enough be led to the conclusion that the controversies which
arose between the States, and the war in which they culminated, were
caused by efforts on the one side to extend and perpetuate human
slavery, and on the other to resist it and establish human liberty. The
Southern States and Southern people have been sedulously represented as
"propagandists" of slavery, and the Northern as the defenders and
champions of universal freedom, and this view has been so arrogantly
assumed, so dogmatically asserted, and so persistently reiterated, that
its authors have, in many cases, perhaps, succeeded in bringing
themselves to believe it, as well as in impressing it widely upon the
world.
The attentive reader of the preceding chapters--especially if he has
compared their statements with contemporaneous records and other
original sources of information--will already have found evidence enough
to enable him to discern the falsehood of these representations, and to
perceive that, to whatever extent the question of slavery may have
served as an _occasion_, it was far from being the _cause_ of the
conflict.
I have not attempted, and shall not permit myself to be drawn into any
discussion of the merits or demerits of slavery as an ethical or even as
a political question. It would be foreign to my purpose, irrelevant to
my subject, and would only serve--as it has invariably served, in the
hands of its agitators--to "darken counsel" and divert attention from
the genuine issues involved.
As a mere historical fact, we have seen that African servitude among
us--confessedly the mildest and most humane of all institutions to which
the name "slavery" has ever been applied--existed in all the original
States, and that it was recognized and protected in the fourth article
of the Constitution. Subsequently, for climatic, industrial, and
economical--not moral or sentimental--reasons, it was abolished in the
Northern, while it continued to exist in the Southern States. Men
differed in their views as to the abstract question of its right or
wrong, but for two generations after the Revolution there was no
geographical line of demarkation for such differences. The African
slave-trade was carried on almost exclusively by New England merchants
and Northern ships. Mr. Jefferson--a Southern man, the founder of the
Democratic party, and the vindicator of State rights--was in theory a
consistent enemy to every form of slavery. The Southern States took the
lead in prohibiting the slave-trade, and, as we have seen, one of them
(Georgia) was the first State to incorporate such a prohibition in her
organic Constitution. Eleven years after the agitation on the Missouri
question, when the subject first took a sectional shape, the abolition
of slavery was proposed and earnestly debated in the Virginia
Legislature, and its advocates were so near the accomplishment of their
purpose, that a declaration in its favor was defeated only by a small
majority, and that on the ground of expediency. At a still later period,
abolitionist lecturers and teachers were mobbed, assaulted, and
threatened with tar and feathers in New York, Pennsylvania,
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and other States. One of them
(Lovejoy) was actually killed by a mob in Illinois as late as 1837.
These facts prove incontestably that the sectional hostility which
exhibited itself in 1820, on the application of Missouri for admission
into the Union, which again broke out on the proposition for the
annexation of Texas in 1844, and which reappeared after the Mexican war,
never again to be suppressed until its fell results had been fully
accomplished, was not the consequence of any difference on the abstract
question of slavery. It was the offspring of sectional rivalry and
political ambition. It would have manifested itself just as certainly if
slavery had existed in all the States, or if there had not been a negro
in America. No such pretension was made in 1803 or 1811, when the
Louisiana purchase, and afterward the admission into the Union of the
State of that name, elicited threats of disunion from the
representatives of New England. The complaint was not of slavery, but of
"the acquisition of more weight at the other extremity" of the Union. It
was not slavery that threatened a rupture in 1832, but the unjust and
unequal operation of a protective tariff.
It happened, however, on all these occasions, that the line of
demarkation of sectional interests coincided exactly or very nearly with
that dividing the States in which negro servitude existed from those in
which it had been abolished. It corresponded with the prediction of Mr.
Pickering, in 1803, that, in the separation certainly to come, "the
white and black population would mark the boundary"--a prediction made
without any reference to slavery as a source of dissension.
Of course, the diversity of institutions contributed, in some minor
degree, to the conflict of interests. There is an action and reaction of
cause and consequence, which limits and modifies any general statement
of a political truth. I am stating general principles--not defining
modifications and exceptions with the precision of a mathematical
proposition or a bill in chancery. The truth remains intact and
incontrovertible, that the existence of African servitude was in no wise
the cause of the conflict, but only an incident. In the later
controversies that arose, however, its effect in operating as a lever
upon the passions, prejudices, or sympathies of mankind, was so potent
that it has been spread, like a thick cloud, over the whole horizon of
historic truth.
As for the institution of negro servitude, it was a matter entirely
subject to the control of the States. No power was ever given to the
General Government to interfere with it, but an obligation was imposed
to protect it. Its existence and validity were distinctly recognized by
the Constitution in at least three places:
First, in that part of the second section of the first article which
prescribes that "representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned
among the several States which may be included within this Union,
according to their respective members, which shall be determined by
adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to
service for a term of years, and, excluding Indians not taxed, three
fifths of all other persons." "_Other_ persons" than "_free_ persons"
and those "bound to service for a term of years" must, of course, have
meant those permanently bound to service.
Secondly, it was recognized by the ninth section of the same article,
which provided that "the migration or importation of such persons as any
of the States now existing shall think proper to admit shall not be
prohibited by Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and
eight." This was a provision inserted for the protection of the
interests of the slave-trading New England States, forbidding any
prohibition of the trade by Congress for twenty years, and thus
virtually giving sanction to the legitimacy of the demand which that
trade was prosecuted to supply, and which was its only object.
Again, and in the third place, it was specially recognized, and an
obligation imposed upon every State, not only to refrain from
interfering with it in any other State, but in certain cases to aid in
its enforcement, by that clause, or paragraph, of the second section of
the fourth article which provides as follows:
"No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws
thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law
or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor,
but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such
service or labor may be due."
The President and Vice-President of the United States, every Senator and
Representative in Congress, the members of every State Legislature, and
"all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of
the several States," were required to take an oath (or affirmation) to
support the Constitution containing these provisions. It is easy to
understand how those who considered them in conflict with the "higher
law" of religion or morality might refuse to take such an oath or hold
such an office--as the members of some religious sects refuse to take
any oath at all or to bear arms in the service of their country--but it
is impossible to reconcile with the obligations of honor or honesty the
conduct of those who, having taken such an oath, made use of the powers
and opportunities of the offices held under its sanctions to nullify its
obligations and neutralize its guarantees. The halls of Congress
afforded the vantage-ground from which assaults were made upon these
guarantees. The Legislatures of various Northern States enacted laws to
hinder the execution of the provisions made for the rendition of
fugitives from service; State officials lent their aid to the work of
thwarting them; and city mobs assailed the officers engaged in the duty
of enforcing them.
With regard to the provision of the Constitution above quoted, for the
restoration of fugitives from service or labor, my own view was, and is,
that it was not a proper subject for legislation by the Federal
Congress, but that its enforcement should have been left to the
respective States, which, as parties to the compact of union, should
have been held accountable for its fulfillment. Such was actually the
case in the earlier and better days of the republic. No fugitive
slave-law existed, or was required, for two years after the organization
of the Federal Government, and, when one was then passed, it was merely
as an incidental appendage to an act regulating the mode of rendition of
fugitives from _justice_--not from service or labor.[27]
In 1850 a more elaborate law was enacted as part of the celebrated
compromise of that year. But the very fact that the Federal Government
had taken the matter into its own hands, and provided for its execution
by its own officers, afforded a sort of pretext to those States which
had now become hostile to this provision of the Constitution, not only
to stand aloof, but in some cases to adopt measures (generally known as
"personal liberty laws") directly in conflict with the execution of the
provisions of the Constitution.
The preamble to the Constitution declared the object of its founders to
be, "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic
tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general
welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our
posterity." Now, however (in 1860), the people of a portion of the
States had assumed an attitude of avowed hostility, not only to the
provisions of the Constitution itself, but to the "domestic
tranquillity" of the people of other States. Long before the formation
of the Constitution, one of the charges preferred in the Declaration of
Independence against the Government of Great Britain, as justifying the
separation of the colonies from that country, was that of having
"excited domestic insurrections among us." Now, the mails were burdened
with incendiary publications, secret emissaries had been sent, and in
one case an armed invasion of one of the States had taken place for the
very purpose of exciting "domestic insurrection."
It was not the passage of the "personal liberty laws," it was not the
circulation of incendiary documents, it was not the raid of John Brown,
it was not the operation of unjust and unequal tariff laws, nor all
combined, that constituted the intolerable grievance, but it was the
systematic and persistent struggle to deprive the Southern States of
equality in the Union--generally to discriminate in legislation against
the interests of their people; culminating in their exclusion from the
Territories, the common property of the States, as well as by the
infraction of their compact to promote domestic tranquillity.
The question with regard to the Territories has been discussed in the
foregoing chapters, and the argument need not be repeated. There was,
however, one feature of it which has not been specially noticed,
although it occupied a large share of public attention at the time, and
constituted an important element in the case. This was the action of the
Federal judiciary thereon, and the manner in which it was received.
In 1854 a case (the well-known "Dred Scott case") came before the
Supreme Court of the United States, involving the whole question of the
_status_ of the African race and the rights of citizens of the Southern
States to migrate to the Territories, temporarily or permanently, with
their slave property, on a footing of equality with the citizens of
other States with _their_ property of any sort. This question, as we
have seen, had already been the subject of long and energetic
discussion, without any satisfactory conclusion. All parties, however,
had united in declaring, that a decision by the Supreme Court of the
United States--the highest judicial tribunal in the land--would be
accepted as final. After long and patient consideration of the case, in
1857, the decision of the Court was pronounced in an elaborate and
exhaustive opinion, delivered by Chief-Justice Taney--a man eminent as a
lawyer, great as a statesman, and stainless in his moral
reputation--seven of the nine judges who composed the Court, concurring
in it. The salient points established by this decision were:
1. That persons of the African race were not, and could not be,
acknowledged as "part of the people," or citizens, under the
Constitution of the United States;
2. That Congress had no right to exclude citizens of the South
from taking their negro servants, as any other property, into
any part of the common territory, and that they were entitled to
claim its protection therein;
3. And, finally, as a consequence of the principle just above
stated, that the Missouri Compromise of 1820, in so far as it
prohibited the existence of African servitude north of a
designated line, was unconstitutional and void.[28] (It will be
remembered that it had already been declared "inoperative and
void" by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854.)
Instead of accepting the decision of this then august tribunal--the
ultimate authority in the interpretation of constitutional questions--as
conclusive of a controversy that had so long disturbed the peace and was
threatening the perpetuity of the Union, it was flouted, denounced, and
utterly disregarded by the Northern agitators, and served only to
stimulate the intensity of their sectional hostility.
What resource for justice--what assurance of tranquillity--what
guarantee of safety--now remained for the South? Still forbearing, still
hoping, still striving for peace and union, we waited until a sectional
President, nominated by a sectional convention, elected by a sectional
vote--and that the vote of a minority of the people--was about to be
inducted into office, under the warning of his own distinct announcement
that the Union could not permanently endure "half slave and half free";
meaning thereby that it could not continue to exist in the condition in
which it was formed and its Constitution adopted. The leader of his
party, who was to be the chief of his Cabinet, was the man who had first
proclaimed an "irrepressible conflict" between the North and the South,
and who had declared that abolitionism, having triumphed in the
Territories, would proceed to the invasion of the States. Even then the
Southern people did not finally despair until the temper of the
triumphant party had been tested in Congress and found adverse to any
terms of reconciliation consistent with the honor and safety of all
parties.
No alternative remained except to seek the security out of the Union
which they had vainly tried to obtain within it. The hope of our people
may be stated in a sentence. It was to escape from injury and strife in
the Union, to find prosperity and peace out of it. The mode and
principles of their action will next be presented.
[Footnote 27: "There was but little necessity in those times, nor long
after, for an act of Congress to authorize the recovery of fugitive
slaves. The laws of the free States and, still more, the force of public
opinion were the owners' best safeguards. Public opinion was against the
abduction of slaves; and, if any one was seduced from his owner, it was
done furtively and secretly, without show or force, and as any other
moral offense would be committed. State laws favored the owner, and to a
greater extent than the act of Congress did or could. In Pennsylvania
there was an act (it was passed in 1780, and only repealed in 1847)
discriminating between the traveler and sojourner and the permanent
resident, allowing the former to remain six months in the State before
his slaves would become subject to the emancipation laws; and, in the
case of a Federal officer, allowing as much more time as his duties
required him to remain. New York had the same act, only varying in time,
which was nine months. While these two acts were in force, and supported
by public opinion, the traveler and sojourner was safe with his slaves
in those States, and the same in the other free States. There was no
trouble about fugitive slaves in those times."--(Note to Benton's
"Abridgment of Debates," vol. i, p. 417.)]
[Footnote 28: The Supreme Court of the United States in stating (through
Chief-Justice Taney) their decision in the "Dred Scott case," in 1857,
say: "In that portion of the United States where the labor of the negro
race was found to be unsuited to the climate and unprofitable to the
master, but few slaves were held at the time of the Declaration of
Independence; and, when the Constitution was adopted, it had entirely
worn out in one of them, and measures had been taken for its gradual
abolition in several others. But this change had not been produced by
any change of opinion in relation to this race, but because it was
discovered from experience that slave-labor was unsuited to the climate
and productions of these States; for some of these States, when it had
ceased, or nearly ceased, to exist, were actively engaged in the
slave-trade; procuring cargoes on the coast of Africa, and transporting
them for sale to those parts of the Union where their labor was found to
be profitable and suited to the climate and productions. And this
traffic was openly carried on, and fortunes accumulated by it, without
reproach from the people of the States where they resided."
This statement, it must be remembered, does not proceed from any
partisan source, but is extracted from a judicial opinion pronounced by
the highest court in the country. In illustration of the truthfulness of
the latter part of it, may be mentioned the fact that a citizen of Rhode
Island (James D'Wolf), long and largely concerned in the slave-trade,
was sent from that State to the Senate of the United States as late as
the year 1821. In 1825 he resigned his seat in the Senate and removed to
Havana, where he lived for many years, actively engaged in the same
pursuit, as president of a slave-trading company. The story is told of
him that, on being informed that the "trade" was to be declared piracy,
he smiled and said, "So much the better for us--the Yankees will be the
only people not scared off by such a declaration."]
PART II.
THE CONSTITUTION.
CHAPTER I.
The Original Confederation.--"Articles of Confederation and
Perpetual Union."--Their Inadequacy ascertained.--Commercial
Difficulties.--The Conference at Annapolis.--Recommendation of a
General Convention.--Resolution of Congress.--Action of the
Several States.--Conclusions drawn therefrom.
When certain American colonies of Great Britain, each acting for itself,
although in concert with the others, determined to dissolve their
political connection with the mother-country, they sent their
representatives to a general Congress of those colonies, and through
them made a declaration that the Colonies were, and of right ought to
be, "free and independent States." As such they contracted an alliance
for their "common defense," successfully resisted the effort to reduce
them to submission, and secured the recognition by Great Britain of
their separate independence; each State being distinctly recognized
under its own name--not as one of a group or nation. That this was not
merely a foreign view is evident from the second of the "Articles of
Confederation" between the States, adopted subsequently to the
Declaration of Independence, which is in these words: "Each State
retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power,
jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly
delegated to the United States in Congress assembled."
These "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union between the
States," as they were styled in their title, were adopted by eleven of
the original States in 1778, and by the other two in the course of the
three years next ensuing, and continued in force until 1789. During this
period the General Government was vested in the Congress alone, in which
each State, through its representatives, had an equal vote in the
determination of all questions whatever. The Congress exercised all the
executive as well as legislative powers delegated by the States. When
not in session the general management of affairs was intrusted to a
"Committee of the States," consisting of one delegate from each State.
Provision was made for the creation, by the Congress, of courts having a
certain specified jurisdiction in admiralty and maritime cases, and for
the settlement of controversies between two or more States in a mode
specifically prescribed.
The Government thus constituted was found inadequate for some necessary
purposes, and it became requisite to reorganize it. The first idea of
such reorganization arose from the necessity of regulating the
commercial intercourse of the States with one another and with foreign
countries, and also of making some provision for payment of the debt
contracted during the war for independence. These exigencies led to a
proposition for a meeting of commissioners from the various States to
consider the subject. Such a meeting was held at Annapolis in September,
1786; but, as only five States (New York, New Jersey, Delaware,
Pennsylvania, and Virginia) were represented, the Commissioners declined
to take any action further than to recommend another Convention, with a
wider scope for consideration. As they expressed it, it was their
"unanimous conviction that it may essentially tend to advance the
interests of the Union, if the States, by whom they have been
respectively delegated, would themselves concur, and use their endeavors
to procure the concurrence of the other States, in the appointment of
commissioners, to meet at Philadelphia on the second Monday in May next,
to take into consideration the situation of the United States, to devise
such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the
Constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the
Union, and to report such an act for that purpose to the United States
in Congress assembled, as, when agreed to by them, and afterward
confirmed by the Legislatures of every State, will effectually provide
for the same."
It is scarcely necessary to remind the well-informed reader that the
terms, "Constitution of the Federal Government," employed above, and
"Federal Constitution," as used in other proceedings of that period, do
not mean the instrument to which we now apply them; and which was not
then in existence. They were applied to the system of government
formulated in the Articles of Confederation. This is in strict accord
with the definition of the word constitution, given by an eminent
lexicographer:[29] "The body of fundamental laws, as contained in
written documents or prescriptive usage, which constitute the form of
government for a nation, state, community, association, or society."[30]
Thus we speak of the British Constitution, which is an unwritten system
of "prescriptive usage"; of the Constitution of Massachusetts or of
Mississippi, which is the fundamental or organic law of a particular
State embodied in a written instrument; and of the Federal Constitution
of the United States, which is the fundamental law of an association of
States, at first as embraced in the Articles of Confederation, and
afterward as revised, amended, enlarged, and embodied in the instrument
framed in 1787, and subsequently adopted by the various States. The
manner in which this revision was effected was as follows. Acting on the
suggestion of the Annapolis Convention, the Congress, on the 21st of the
ensuing February (1787), adopted the following resolution:
"_Resolved_, That, in the opinion of Congress, it is expedient
that, on the second Monday in May next, a convention of
delegates, who shall have been appointed by the several States,
be held at Philadelphia, for the sole and express purpose of
revising the Articles of Confederation, and reporting to
Congress and the several Legislatures, such alterations and
provisions therein as shall, when agreed to in Congress and
confirmed by the States, render the Federal Constitution
adequate to the exigencies of Government and the preservation of
the Union."
The language of this resolution, substantially according with that of
the recommendation made by the commissioners at Annapolis a few months
before, very clearly defines the objects of the proposed Convention and
the powers which it was thought advisable that the States should confer
upon their delegates. These were, "solely and expressly," as follows:
1. "To revise the Articles of Confederation with reference to
the 'situation of the United States';
2. "To devise such alterations and provisions therein as should
seem to them requisite in order to render 'the Federal
Constitution,' or 'Constitution of the Federal Government,'
adequate to 'the exigencies of the Union,' or 'the exigencies of
the Government and the preservation of the Union';
3. "To report the result of their deliberations--that is, the
'alterations and provisions' which they should agree to
recommend--to Congress and the Legislatures of the several
States."
Of course, their action could be only advisory until ratified by the
States. The "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union," under which
the States were already united, provided that no alteration should be
made in any of them, "unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress
of the United States, and afterward confirmed by the Legislatures of
every State."
The Legislatures of the various States, with the exception of Rhode
Island, adopted and proceeded to act upon these suggestions by the
appointment of delegates--some of them immediately upon the
recommendation of the Annapolis Commissioners in advance of that of the
Congress, and the others in the course of a few months after the
resolution adopted by Congress. The instructions given to these
delegates in all cases conformed to the recommendations which have been
quoted, and in one case imposed an additional restriction or limitation.
As this is a matter of much importance, in order to a right
understanding of what follows, it may be advisable to cite in detail the
action of the several States, italicizing such passages as are specially
significant of the duties and powers of the delegates to the Convention.
The General Assembly of Virginia, after reciting the recommendation made
at Annapolis, enacted: "That seven commissioners be appointed by joint
ballot of both Houses of Assembly, who, or any three of them, are hereby
authorized, as deputies from this Commonwealth, to meet such deputies as
may be appointed and authorized by other States, to assemble in
convention at Philadelphia, as above recommended, and to join with them
in devising and discussing _all such alterations and further provisions
as may be necessary to render the Federal Constitution adequate to the
exigencies of the Union, and in reporting such an act for that purpose
to the United States in Congress, as, when agreed to by them, and duly
confirmed by the several States_, will effectually provide for the
same."
The Council and Assembly of New Jersey issued commissions to their
delegates to meet such commissioners as have been, or may be, appointed
by _the other States of the Union_, at the city of Philadelphia, in the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, on the second Monday in May next, "_for the
purpose of taking into consideration the state of the Union as to trade
and other important objects, and of devising such other provisions as
shall appear to be necessary to render the Constitution of the Federal
Government adequate to the exigencies thereof_."
The act of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania constituted and
appointed certain deputies, designated by name, "with powers to meet
such deputies as may be _appointed and authorized by the other States_
... and to join with them in devising, deliberating on, and discussing
_all such alterations and further provisions_ as may be necessary _to
render the Federal Constitution fully adequate to the exigencies of the
Union_, and in reporting such act or acts for that purpose, to the
United States in Congress assembled, as, _when agreed to by them and
duly confirmed by the several States_, will effectually provide for the
same."
The General Assembly of North Carolina enacted that commissioners should
be appointed by joint ballot of both Houses, "to meet and confer with
such deputies as may be _appointed by the other States_ for similar
purposes, and with them to discuss and decide upon _the most effectual
means to remove the defects of our Federal Union, and to procure the
enlarged purposes which it was intended to effect; and that they report
such an act to the General Assembly of this State, as, when agreed to by
them_, will effectually provide for the same." (In the case of this
State alone nothing is said of a report to Congress. Neither North
Carolina nor any other State, however, fails to make mention of the
necessity of a submission of any action taken to the several States for
ratification.)
The commissions issued to the representatives of South Carolina, by the
Governor, refer to an act of the Legislature of that State authorizing
their appointment "to meet such deputies or commissioners as may be
_appointed and authorized by other of the United States_," at the time
and place designated, and to join with them "in devising and discussing
all _such alterations, clauses, articles, and provisions_, as may be
thought necessary _to render the Federal Constitution entirely adequate_
to the actual situation and future good government of the _Confederate
States_," and to "join in reporting such an act to the United States in
Congress assembled, as, _when approved and agreed to by them, and duly
ratified and confirmed by the several States_, will effectually provide
for the exigencies of the Union." In these commissions the expression,
"alterations, clauses, articles, and provisions," clearly indicates the
character of the duties which the deputies were expected to discharge.
The General Assembly of Georgia "ordained" the appointment of certain
commissioners, specified by name, who were "authorized, as deputies from
this State, to meet such deputies as may be _appointed and authorized by
other States_, to assemble in convention at Philadelphia, and to join
with them in devising and discussing _all such alterations and further
provisions_ as may be necessary _to render the Federal Constitution
adequate to the exigencies of the Union_, and in reporting such an act
for that purpose to the United States in Congress assembled, as, _when
agreed to by them, and duly confirmed by the several States_, will
effectually provide for the same."
The authority conferred upon their delegates by the Assembly of New York
and the General Court of Massachusetts was in each case expressed in the
exact words of the advisory resolution of Congress: they were instructed
to meet the delegates of the other States "for the sole and express
purpose of _revising the Articles of Confederation_, and reporting to
Congress and to the several Legislatures _such alterations and
provisions therein_ as shall, when agreed to in Congress, and confirmed
by the several States, _render the Federal Constitution adequate to the
exigencies of the Union_."
The General Assembly of Connecticut designated the delegates of that
State by name, and empowered them, in conference with the delegates of
other States, "to discuss upon such alterations and provisions,
agreeable to the general principles of republican government, as they
shall think proper to render the Federal Constitution adequate to the
exigencies of the Government and the preservation of the Union," and
"_to report such alterations and provisions as may be agreed to by a
majority of the United States in convention_, to the Congress of the
United States and to the General Assembly of this State."
The General Court of New Hampshire authorized and empowered the deputies
of that State, _in conference with those of other States_, "to discuss
and decide upon the most effectual means _to remedy the defects of our
Federal Union, and to procure and secure the enlarged purposes which it
was intended to effect_"--language almost identical with that of North
Carolina, but, like the other States in general, instructed them to
report the result of their deliberations to Congress for the action of
that body, and subsequent confirmation "by the several States."
The delegates from Maryland were appointed by the General Assembly of
that State, and instructed "to meet such deputies as may be appointed
and authorized _by any other of the United States_, to assemble in
convention at Philadelphia, _for the purpose of revising the Federal
system_, and to join with them in considering such alterations and
further provisions," etc.--the remainder of their instructions being in
the same words as those given to the Georgia delegates.
The instructions given to the deputies of Delaware were substantially in
accord with the others--being almost literally identical with those of
Pennsylvania--but the following proviso was added: "So, always, and
provided, that such alterations or further provisions, or any of them,
do not extend to that part of the fifth article of the Confederation of
the said States, finally ratified on the first day of March, in the year
1781, which declares that, '_in determining questions in the United
States in Congress assembled, each State shall have one vote_.'"
Rhode Island, as has already been mentioned, sent no delegates.
From an examination and comparison of the enactments and instructions
above quoted, we may derive certain conclusions, so obvious that they
need only to be stated:
1. In the first place, it is clear that the delegates to the Convention
of 1787 represented, not _the people of the United States_ in mass, as
has been most absurdly contended by some political writers, but _the
people_ of the several States, _as States_--just as in the Congress of
that period--Delaware, with her sixty thousand inhabitants, having
entire equality with Pennsylvania, which had more than four hundred
thousand, or Virginia, with her seven hundred and fifty thousand.
2. The object for which they were appointed was not to organize a _new_
Government, but "solely and expressly" to amend the "Federal
Constitution" already existing; in other words, "to revise the Articles
of Confederation," and to suggest such "alterations" or additional
"provisions" as should be deemed necessary to render them "adequate to
the exigencies of the Union."
3. It is evident that the term "Federal Constitution," or its
equivalent, "Constitution of the Federal Government," was as freely and
familiarly applied to the system of government established by the
Articles of Confederation--undeniably a league or compact between States
expressly retaining their sovereignty and independence--as to that
amended system which was substituted for it by the Constitution that
superseded those articles.
4. The functions of the delegates to the Convention were, of course,
only to devise, deliberate, and discuss. No validity could attach to any
action taken, unless and until it should be afterward ratified by the
several States. It is evident, also, that what was contemplated was the
process provided in the Articles of Confederation for their own
amendment--first, a recommendation by the Congress; and, afterward,
ratification "by the Legislatures of every State," before the amendment
should be obligatory upon any. The departure from this condition, which
actually occurred, will presently be noticed.
[Footnote 29: Dr. Worcester.]
[Footnote 30: This definition is very good as far as it goes, but "the
form of government" is a phrase which falls short of expressing all that
should be comprehended. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, "which
constitute the form, _define the powers, and prescribe the functions_ of
government," etc. The words in italics would make the definition more
complete.]