energies of the Democratic party, which is identical with the slave
power. I do ample justice to its traditional popularity. I know
further--few, I think, know better than I--the difficulties and
disadvantages of organizing a new political force, like the Republican
party, and the obstacles it must encounter in laboring without prestige
and without patronage. But, understanding all this, I know that the
Democratic party must go down, and that the Republican party must rise
into its place. The Democratic party derived its strength, originally,
from its adoption of the principles of equal and exact justice to
all men. So long as it practised this principle faithfully, it was
invulnerable. It became vulnerable when it renounced the principle,
and since that time it has maintained itself, not by virtue of its own
strength, or even of its traditional merits, but because there as
yet had appeared in the political field no other party that had the
conscience and the courage to take up, and avow, and practise the
life-inspiring principle which the Democratic party had surrendered.
At last, the Republican party has appeared. It avows, now, as the
Republican party of 1800 did, in one word, its faith and its works,
"Equal and exact justice to all men." Even when it first entered the
field, only half organized, it struck a blow which only just failed to
secure complete and triumphant victory. In this, its second campaign, it
has already won advantages which render that triumph now both easy and
certain.
The secret of its assured success lies in that very characteristic
which, in the mouth of scoffers, constitutes its great and lasting
imbecility and reproach. It lies in the fact that it is a party of
one idea; but that is a noble one--an idea that fills and expands all
generous souls; the idea of equality--the equality of all men before
human tribunals and human laws, as they all are equal before the Divine
tribunal and Divine laws.
I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun. I know, and all the
world knows, that revolutions never go backward. Twenty Senators and a
hundred Representatives proclaim boldly in Congress to-day sentiments
and opinions and principles of freedom which hardly so many men, even
in this free State, dared to utter in their own homes twenty years ago.
While the Government of the United States, under the conduct of the
Democratic party, has been all that time surrendering one plain and
castle after another to slavery, the people of the United States have
been no less steadily and perseveringly gathering together the forces
with which to recover back again all the fields and all the castles
which have been lost, and to confound and overthrow, by one decisive
blow, the betrayers of the Constitution and freedom forever.
VI. -- SECESSION.
From the beginning of our history it has been a mooted question whether
we are to consider the United States as a political state or as a
congeries of political states, as a _Bundesstaat_ or as a _Staatenbund_.
The essence of the controversy seems to be contained in the very title
of the republic, one school laying stress on the word United, as the
other does on the word States. The phases of the controversy have been
beyond calculation, and one of its consequences has been a civil war of
tremendous energy and cost in blood and treasure.
Looking at the facts alone of our history, one would be most apt to
conclude that the United States had been a political state from the
beginning, its form being entirely revolutionary until the final
ratification of the Articles of Confederation in 1781, then under the
very loose and inefficient government of the Articles until 1789,
and thereafter under the very efficient national government of the
Constitution; that, in the final transformation of 1787-9, there were
features which were also decidedly revolutionary; but that there was
no time when any of the colonies had the prospect or the power of
establishing a separate national existence of its own. The facts are
not consistent with the theory that the States ever were independent
political states, in any scientific sense.
It cannot be said, however, that the actors in the history always had
a clear perception of the facts as they took place. In the teeth of the
facts, our early history presents a great variety of assertions of State
independence by leading men, State Legislatures, or State constitutions,
which still form the basis of the argument for State sovereignty. The
State constitutions declared the State to be sovereign and independent,
even though the framers knew that the existence of the State depended
on the issue of the national struggle against the mother country. The
treaty of 1783 with Great Britain recognized the States separately and
by name as "free, sovereign, and independent," even while it established
national boundaries outside of the States, covering a vast western
territory in which no State would have ventured to forfeit its
interest by setting up a claim to practical freedom, sovereignty, or
independence. All our early history is full of such contradictions
between fact and theory. They are largely obscured by the
undiscriminating use of the word "people." As used now, it usually means
the national people; but many apparently national phrases as to the
"sovereignty of the people," as they were used in 1787-9, would seem
far less national if the phraseology could show the feeling of those
who then used them that the "people" referred to was the people of
the State. In that case the number of the contradictions would be
indefinitely increased; and the phraseology of the Constitution's
preamble, "We, the people of the United States," would not be offered
as a consciously nationalizing phrase of its framers. It is hardly to
be doubted, from the current debates, that the conventions of
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, Virginia, North
Carolina, and South Carolina, seven of the thirteen States, imagined and
assumed that each ratified the Constitution in 1788--90 by authority of
the State's people alone, by the State's sovereign will; while the facts
show that in each of these conventions a clear majority was coerced
into ratification by a strong minority in its own State, backed by
the unanimous ratifications of the other States. If ratification or
rejection had really been open to voluntary choice, to sovereign will,
the Constitution would never have had a moment's chance of life; so far
from being ratified by nine States as a condition precedent to going
into effect, it would have been summarily rejected by a majority of the
States. In the language of John Adams, the Constitution was "extorted
from the grinding necessities of a reluctant people." The theory of
State sovereignty was successfully contradicted by national necessities.
The change from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution,
though it could not help antagonizing State sovereignty, was carefully
managed so as to do so as little as possible. As soon as the plans
by which the Federal party, under Hamilton's leadership, proposed to
develop the national features of the Constitution became evident, the
latent State feeling took fire. Its first symptom was the adoption
of the name Republican by the new opposition party which took form in
1792-3 under Jefferson's leadership. Up to this time the States had been
the only means through which Americans had known any thing of republican
government; they had had no share in the government of the mother
country in colonial times, and no efficient national government to take
part in under the Articles of Confederation. The claim of an exclusive
title to the name of Republican does not seem to have been fundamentally
an implication of monarchical tendencies against the Federalists so much
as an implication that they were hostile to the States, the familiar
exponents of republican government. When the Federalist majority in
Congress forced through, in the war excitement against France in 1798,
the Alien and Sedition laws, which practically empowered the President
to suppress all party criticism of and opposition to the dominant party,
the Legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia, in 1798-9, passed series of
resolutions, prepared by Jefferson and Madison respectively, which for
the first time asserted in plain terms the sovereignty of the
States. The two sets of resolutions agreed in the assertion that the
Constitution was a "compact," and that the States were the "parties"
which had formed it. In these two propositions lies the gist of State
sovereignty, of which all its remotest consequences are only natural
developments. If it were true that the States, of their sovereign will,
had formed such a compact; if it were not true that the adoption of
the Constitution was a mere alteration of the form of a political state
already in existence; it would follow, as the Kentucky resolutions
asserted, that each State had the exclusive right to decide for itself
when the compact had been broken, and the mode and measure of redress.
It followed, also, that, if the existence and force of the Constitution
in a State were due solely to the sovereign will of the State, the
sovereign will of the State was competent, on occasion, to oust the
Constitution from the jurisdiction covered by the State. In brief, the
Union was wholly voluntary in its formation and in its continuance; and
each State reserved the unquestionable right to secede, to abandon the
Union, and assume an independent existence whenever due reason, in
the exclusive judgment of the State, should arise. These latter
consequences, not stated in the Kentucky resolutions, and apparently not
contemplated by the Virginia resolutions, were put into complete form by
Professor Tucker, of the University of Virginia, in 1803, in the notes
to his edition of "Blackstone's Commentaries." Thereafter its statements
of American constitutional law controlled the political training of the
South.
Madison held a modification of the State sovereignty theory, which has
counted among its adherents the mass of the ability and influence
of American authorities on constitutional law. Holding that the
Constitution was a compact, and that the States were the parties to it,
he held that one of the conditions of the compact was the abandonment
of State sovereignty; that the States were sovereign until 1787-8, but
thereafter only members of a political state, the United States. This
seems to have been the ground taken by Webster, in his debates with
Hayne and Calhoun. It was supported by the instances in which the
appearance of a sovereignty in each State was yielded in the fourteen
years before 1787; but, unfortunately for the theory, Calhoun was able
to produce instances exactly parallel after 1787. If the fact that each
State predicated its own sovereignty as an essential part of the steps
preliminary to the convention of 1787 be a sound argument for State
sovereignty before 1787, the fact that each State predicated its
sovereignty as an essential part of the ratification of the Constitution
must be taken as an equally sound argument for State sovereignty under
the Constitution; and it seems difficult, on the Madison theory, to
resist Calhoun's triumphant conclusion that, if the States went into the
convention as sovereign States, they came out of it as sovereign States,
with, of course, the right of secession. Calhoun himself had a sincere
desire to avoid the exercise of the right of secession, and it was as a
substitute for it that he evolved his doctrine of nullification,
which has been placed in the first volume. When it failed in 1833, the
exercise of the right of secession was the only remaining remedy for an
asserted breach of State sovereignty.
The events which led up to the success of the Republican party in
electing Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency in 1860 are so intimately
connected with the anti-slavery struggle that they have been placed in
the preceding volume. They culminated in the first organized attempt to
put the right of secession to a practical test. The election of
Lincoln, the success of a "sectional party," and the evasion of the
fugitive-slave law through the passage of "personal-liberty laws" by
many of the Northern States, are the leading reasons assigned by South
Carolina for her secession in 1860. These were intelligible reasons, and
were the ones most commonly used to influence the popular vote. But all
the evidence goes to show that the leaders of secession were not so
weak in judgment as to run the hazards of war by reason of "injuries"
so minute as these. Their apprehensions were far broader, if less
calculated to influence a popular vote. In 1789 the proportions of
population and wealth in the two sections were very nearly equal. The
slave system of labor had hung as a clog upon the progress of the South,
preventing the natural development of manufactures and commerce, and
shutting out immigration. As the numerical disproportion between the two
sections increased, Southern leaders ceased to attempt to control the
House of Representatives, contenting themselves with balancing new
Northern with new Southern States, so as to keep an equal vote in the
Senate. Since 1845 this resource had failed. Five free States, Iowa,
Wisconsin, California, Minnesota, and Oregon, had been admitted, with no
new slave States; Kansas was calling almost imperatively for admission;
and there was no hope of another slave State in future. When the
election of 1860 demonstrated that the progress of the antislavery
struggle had united all the free States, it was evident that it was but
a question of time when the Republican party would control both
branches of Congress and the Presidency, and have the power to make laws
according to its own interpretation of the constitutional powers of the
Federal Government.
The peril to slavery was not only the probable prohibition of the
inter-State slave-trade, though this itself would have been an event
which negro slavery in the South could hardly have long survived. The
more pressing danger lay in the results of such general Republican
success on the Supreme Court. The decision of that Court in the Dred
Scott case had fully sustained every point of the extreme Southern
claims as to the status of slavery in the Territories; it had held that
slaves were property in the view of the Constitution; that Congress
was bound to protect slave-holders in this property right in the
Territories, and, still more, bound not to prohibit slavery or allow a
Territorial Legislature to prohibit slavery in the Territories, and
that the Missouri compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional and void.
The Southern Democrats entered the election of 1860 with this distinct
decision of the highest judicial body of the country to back them. The
Republican party had refused to admit that the decision of the Dred
Scott case was law or binding. Given a Republican majority in both
Houses and a Republican President, there was nothing to hinder the
passage of a law increasing the number of Supreme Court justices to any
desired extent, and the new appointments would certainly be of such
a nature as to make the reversal of the Dred Scott decision an easy
matter. The election of 1860 had brought only a Republican President;
the majority in both Houses was to be against him until 1863 at least.
But the drift in the North and West was too plain to be mistaken, and it
was felt that 1860--would be the last opportunity for the Gulf States
to secede with dignity and with the prestige of the Supreme Court's
support.
Finally, there seems to have been a strong feeling among the extreme
secessionists, who loved the right of secession for its own sake, that
the accelerating increase in the relative power of the North would soon
make secession, on any grounds, impossible. Unless the right was to be
forfeited by non-user, it must be established by practical exercise, and
at once.
Until about 1825-9 Presidential electors were chosen in most of the
States by the Legislature. After that period the old practice was kept
up only in South Carolina. On election day of November, 1860, the
South Carolina Legislature was in session for the purpose of choosing
electors, but it continued its session after this duty was performed. As
soon as Lincoln's election was assured, the Legislature called a State
Convention for Dec. 17th, took the preliminary steps toward putting the
State on a war footing, and adjourned. The convention met at the State
capital, adjourned to Charleston, and here, Dec. 20, 1860, passed
unanimously an Ordinance of Secession. By its terms the people of South
Carolina, in convention assembled, repealed the ordinance of May 23,
1788, by which the Constitution had been ratified, and all Acts of the
Legislature ratifying amendments to the Constitution, and declared the
union between the State and other States, under the name of the United
States of America, to be dissolved. By a similar process, similar
ordinances were adopted by the State Conventions of Mississippi (Jan.
9th), Florida (Jan. 10th), Alabama (Jan. 11th), Georgia (Jan. 19th),
Louisiana (Jan. 25th), and Texas (Feb. 1st),--seven States in all.
Outside of South Carolina, the struggle in the States named turned on
the calling of the convention; and in this matter the opposition was
unexpectedly strong. We have the testimony of Alexander H. Stephens that
the argument most effective in overcoming the opposition to the calling
of a convention was: "We can make better terms out of the Union than in
it." The necessary implication was that secession was not to be final;
that it was only to be a temporary withdrawal until terms of compromise
and security for the fugitive-slave law and for slavery in the
Territories could be extorted from the North and West. The argument soon
proved to be an intentional sham.
There has always been a difference between the theory of the State
Convention at the North and at the South. At the North, barring a few
very exceptional cases, the rule has been that no action of a State
Convention is valid until confirmed by popular vote. At the South, in
obedience to the strictest application of State sovereignty, the action
of the State Convention was held to be the voice of the people of the
State, which needed no popular ratification. There was, therefore,
no remedy when the State Conventions, after passing the ordinances of
secession, went on to appoint delegates to a Confederate Congress, which
met at Montgomery, Feb. 4, 1861, adopted a provisional constitution
Feb. 8th, and elected a President and Vice-President Feb. 9th. The
conventions ratified the provisional constitution and adjourned, their
real object having been completely accomplished; and the people of
the several seceding States, by the action of their omnipotent State
Conventions, and without their having a word to say about it, found
themselves under a new government, totally irreconcilable with the
jurisdiction of the United States, and necessarily hostile to it. The
only exception was Texas, whose State Convention had been called in
a method so utterly revolutionary that it was felt to be necessary to
condone its defects by a popular vote.
No declaration had ever been made by any authority that the erection of
such hostile power within the national boundaries of the United
States would be followed by war; such a declaration would hardly seem
necessary. The recognition of the original national boundaries of
the United States had been extorted from Great Britain by successful
warfare. They had been extended by purchase from France and Spain in
1803 and 1819, and again by war from Mexico in 1848. The United States
stood ready to guarantee their integrity by war against all the rest of
the world; was an ordinance of South Carolina, or the election of a _de
facto_ government within Southern borders, likely to receive different
treatment than was given British troops at Bunker Hill, or Santa Anna's
lancers at Buena Vista? Men forgot that the national boundaries had been
so drawn as to include Vermont before Vermont's admission and without
Vermont's consent; that unofficial propositions to divide Rhode Island
between Connecticut and Massachusetts, to embargo commerce with North
Carolina, and demand her share of the Confederation debt, had in 1789-90
been a sufficient indication that it was easier for a State to get into
the American Union than to get out of it. It was a fact, nevertheless,
that the national power to enforce the integrity of the Union had never
been formally declared; and the mass of men in the South, even though
they denied the expediency, did not deny the right of secession, or
acknowledge the right of coercion by the Federal Government. To reach
the original area of secession with land-forces, it was necessary for
the Federal Government to cross the Border States, whose people in
general were no believers in the right of coercion. The first attempt
to do so extended the secession movement by methods which were far more
openly revolutionary than the original secessions. North Carolina and
Arkansas seceded in orthodox fashion as soon as President Lincoln called
for volunteers after the capture of Fort Sumter. The State governments
of Virginia and Tennessee concluded "military leagues" with the
Confederacy, allowed Confederate troops to take possession of their
States, and then submitted an ordinance of secession to the form of
a popular vote. The State officers of Missouri were chased out of the
State before they could do more than begin this process. In Maryland,
the State government arrayed itself successfully against secession.
In selecting the representative opinions for this period, all the
marked shades of opinion have been respected, both the Union and the
anti-coercion sentiment of the Border States, the extreme secession
spirit of the Gulf States, and, from the North, the moderate and the
extreme Republican, and the orthodox Democratic, views. The feeling of
the so-called "peace Democrats" of the North differed so little from
those of Toombs or Iverson that it has not seemed advisable to do more
than refer to Vallandigham's speech in opposition to the war, under the
next period.
JOHN PARKER HALE,
OF NEW HAMPSHIRE (BORN 1806, DIED 1873.)
ON SECESSION; MODERATE REPUBLICAN OPINION;
IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE, DECEMBER 5, 1860.
MR. PRESIDENT:
I was very much in hopes when the message was presented that it would be
a document which would commend itself cordially to somebody. I was not
so sanguine about its pleasing myself, but I was in hopes that it would
be one thing or another. I was in hopes that the President would have
looked in the face the crisis in which he says the country is, and that
his message would be either one thing or another. But, sir, I have read
it somewhat carefully. I listened to it as it was read at the desk; and,
if I understand it--and I think I do--it is this: South Carolina has
just cause for seceding from the Union; that is the first proposition.
The second is, that she has no right to secede. The third is, that we
have no right to prevent her from seceding. That is the President's
message, substantially. He goes on to represent this as a great and
powerful country, and that no State has a right to secede from it; but
the power of the country, if I understand the President, consists in
what Dickens makes the English constitution to be--a power to do nothing
at all.