afterwards remarks, that the progress of a people "rising" to the
point of civilization which entitles them to freedom, is "necessarily
slow." How very slow, then, it must be, when the means of civilization
are forbidden to them by law!
With his remarks upon England, Mr. Calhoun terminates his discussion
of the theory of government. Let us grant all that he claims for it,
and see to what it conducts us. Observe that his grand position is,
that a "numerical majority," like all other sovereign powers, will
certainly tyrannize if it can. His remedy for this is, that a local
majority, the majority of each State, shall have a veto upon the acts
of the majority of the whole country. But he omits to tell us how that
local majority is to be kept within bounds. According to his
reasoning, South Carolina should have a veto upon acts of Congress.
Very well; then each county of South Carolina should have a veto upon
the acts of the State Legislature; each town should have a veto upon
the behests of the county; and each voter upon the decisions of the
town. Mr. Calhoun's argument, therefore, amounts to this: that one
voter in South Carolina should have the constitutional right to
nullify an act of Congress, and no law should be binding which has not
received the assent of every citizen.
Having completed the theoretical part of his subject, the author
proceeds to the practical. In his first essay he describes the
"organism" that is requisite for the preservation of liberty; and in
his second, he endeavors to show that the United States _is_ precisely
such an organism, since the Constitution, rightly interpreted, _does_
confer upon South Carolina the right to veto the decrees of the
numerical majority. Mr. Calhoun's understanding appears to much better
advantage in this second discourse, which contains the substance of
all his numerous speeches on nullification. It is marvellous how this
morbid and intense mind had brooded over a single subject, and how it
had subjugated all history and all law to its single purpose. But we
cannot follow Mr. Calhoun through the tortuous mazes of his second
essay; nor, if we could, should we be able to draw readers after us.
We can only say this: Let it be granted that there _are_ two ways in
which the Constitution can be fairly interpreted;--one, the Websterian
method; the other, that of Mr. Calhoun. On one of these
interpretations the Constitution will work, and on the other it will
not. We prefer the interpretation that is practicable, and leave the
other party to the enjoyment of their argument. Nations cannot be
governed upon principles so recondite and refined, that not one
citizen in a hundred will so much as follow a mere statement of them.
The fundamental law must be as plain as the ten commandments,--as
plain as the four celebrated propositions in which Mr. Webster put the
substance of his speeches in reply to Mr. Calhoun's ingenious defence
of his conduct in 1833.
The author concludes his essay by a prophetic glance at the future. He
remarks, that with regard to the future of the United States, as then
governed, only one thing could be predicted with absolute certainty,
and that was, that the Republic could not last. It might lapse into a
monarchy, or it might be dismembered,--no man could say which; but
that one of these things would happen was entirely certain. The
rotation-in-office system, as introduced by General Jackson, and
sanctioned by his subservient Congress, had rendered the Presidential
office a prize so tempting, in which so large a number of men had an
interest, that the contest would gradually cease to be elective, and
would finally lose the elective form. _The incumbent would appoint his
successor_; and "thus the absolute form of a popular, would end in the
absolute form of a monarchical government," and there would be no
possibility of even rendering the monarchy limited or constitutional.
Mr. Calhoun does not mention here the name of General Jackson or of
Martin Van Buren, but American readers know very well what he was
thinking of when he wrote the passage.
Disunion, according to Mr. Calhoun, was another of our perils. In view
of recent events, our readers may be interested in reading his remarks
on this subject, written in 1849, among the last words he ever
deliberately put upon paper:--
"The conditions impelling the government toward disunion are
very powerful. They consist chiefly of two;--the one arising
from the great extent of the country; the other, from its
division into separate States, having local institutions and
interests. The former, under the operation of the numerical
majority, has necessarily given to the two great parties, in
their contest for the honors and emoluments of the
government, a geographical character, for reasons which have
been fully stated. This contest must finally settle down
into a struggle on the part of the stronger section to
obtain the permanent control; and on the part of the weaker,
to preserve its independence and equality as members of the
Union. The conflict will thus become one between the States
occupying the different sections,--that is, between
organized bodies on both sides,--each, in the event of
separation, having the means of avoiding the confusion and
anarchy to which the parts would be subject without such
organization. This would contribute much to increase the
power of resistance on the part of the weaker section
against the stronger in possession of the government. With
these great advantages and resources, it is hardly possible
that the parties occupying the weaker section would consent
quietly, under any circumstances, to break down from
independent and equal sovereignties into a dependent and
colonial condition; and still less so, under circumstances
that would revolutionize them _internally_, and put their
very existence as a people at stake. Never was there an
issue between independent States that involved greater
calamity to the conquered, than is involved in that between
the States which compose the two sections of the Union. The
condition of the weaker, should it sink from a state of
independence and equality to one of dependence and
subjection, would be more calamitous than ever before befell
a civilized people. It is vain to think that, with such
consequences before them, they will not resist; especially,
when resistance _may_ save them, and cannot render their
condition worse. That this will take place, unless the
stronger section desists from its course, may be assumed as
certain; and that, if forced to resist, the weaker section
would prove successful, and the system end in disunion, is,
to say the least, highly probable. But if it should fail,
the great increase of power and patronage which must, in
consequence, accrue to the government of the United States,
would but render certain and hasten the termination in the
other alternative. So that, at all events, to the one or to
the other--to monarchy or disunion--it must come, if not
prevented by strenuous or timely efforts."
This is a very instructive passage, and one that shows well the
complexity of human motives. Mr. Calhoun betrays the secret that,
after all, the contest between the two sections is a "contest for the
honors and emoluments of the government," and that all the rest is but
pretext and afterthought,--as General Jackson said it was. He plainly
states that the policy of the South is rule or ruin. Besides this, he
intimates that there is in the United States an "interest," an
institution, the development of which is incompatible with the
advancement of the general interest; and either that one interest must
overshadow and subdue all other interests, or all other interests must
unite to crush that one. The latter has been done.
Mr. Calhoun proceeds to suggest the measures by which these calamities
can be averted. The government must be "restored to its federal
character" by the repeal of all laws tending to the annihilation of
State sovereignty, and by a strict construction of the Constitution.
The President's power of removal must be limited. In earlier times,
these would have sufficed; but at that day the nature of the disease
was such that nothing could reach it short of an organic change, which
should give the weaker section a negative on the action of the
government. Mr. Calhoun was of opinion that this could best be done by
our having two Presidents,--one elected by the North and the other by
the South,--the assent of both to be necessary to every act of
Congress. Under such a system, he thought,--
"The Presidential election, instead of dividing the Union
into hostile geographical parties, the stronger struggling
to enlarge its powers, and the weaker to defend its rights,
as is now the case, would become the means of restoring
harmony and concord to the country and the government. It
would make the Union a union in truth,--a bond of mutual
affection and brotherhood; and not a mere connection used by
the stronger as the instrument of dominion and
aggrandizement, and submitted to by the weaker only from the
lingering remains of former attachment, and the fading hope
of being able to restore the government to what it was
originally intended to be,--a blessing to all."
The utter misapprehension of the purposes and desires of the Northern
people which this passage betrays, and which pervades all the later
writings of Mr. Calhoun, can only be explained by the supposition that
he judged them out of his own heart. It is astounding to hear the
author of the annexation of Texas charging the North with the lust of
dominion, and the great Nullifier accusing Northern statesmen of being
wholly possessed by the mania to be President.
Webster, Clay, and Calhoun,--these were great names in their day. When
the last of them had departed, the country felt a sense of
bereavement, and even of self-distrust, doubting if ever again such
men would adorn the public councils. A close scrutiny into the lives
of either of them would, of course, compel us to deduct something from
his contemporary renown, for they were all, in some degree, at some
periods, diverted from their true path by an ambition beneath an
American statesman, whose true glory alone consists in serving his
country well in that sphere to which his fellow-citizens call him.
From such a scrutiny the fame of neither of those distinguished men
would suffer so much as that of Calhoun. His endowments were not
great, nor of the most valuable kind; and his early education, hasty
and very incomplete, was not continued by maturer study. He read
rather to confirm his impressions than to correct them. It was
impossible that he should ever have been wise, because he refused to
admit his liability to error. Never was mental assurance more
complete, and seldom less warranted by innate or acquired superiority.
If his knowledge of books was slight, his opportunities of observing
men were still more limited, since he passed his whole life in places
as exceptional, perhaps, as any in the world,--Washington and South
Carolina. From the beginning of his public career there was a canker
in the heart of it; for, while his oath, as a member of Congress, to
support the Constitution of the United States, was still fresh upon
his lips, he declared that his attachment to the Union was conditional
and subordinate. He said that the alliance between the Southern
planters and Northern Democrats was a false and calculated compact, to
be broken when the planters could no longer rule by it. While he
resided in Washington, and acted with the Republican party in the
flush of its double triumph, he appeared a respectable character, and
won golden opinions from eminent men in both parties. But when he was
again subjected to the narrowing and perverting influence of a
residence in South Carolina, he shrunk at once to his original
proportions, and became thenceforth, not the servant of his country,
but the special pleader of a class and the representative of a
section. And yet, with that strange judicial blindness which has ever
been the doom of the defenders of wrong, he still hoped to attain the
Presidency. There is scarcely any example of infatuation more
remarkable than this. Here we have, lying before us at this moment,
undeniable proofs, in the form of "campaign lives" and "campaign
documents," that, as late as 1844. there was money spent and labor
done for the purpose of placing him in nomination for the highest
office.
Calhoun failed in all the leading objects of his public life, except
one; but in that one his success will be memorable forever. He has
left it on record (see Ben on, II. 698) that his great aim, from 1835
to 1847, was to force the slavery issue on the North. "It is our
duty," he wrote in 1847, "to force the issue on the North." "Had the
South," he continued, "or even my own State, backed me, I would have
forced the issue on the North in 1835"; and he welcomed the Wilmot
Proviso in 1847, because, as he privately wrote, it would be the means
of "enabling us to force the issue on the North." In this design, at
length, when he had been ten years in the grave, he succeeded. Had
there been no Calhoun, it is possible--nay, it is not improbable--that
that issue might have been deferred till the North had so outstripped
the South in accumulating all the elements of power, that the
fire-eaters themselves would have shrunk from submitting the question
to the arbitrament of the sword. It was Calhoun who forced the issue
upon the United States, and compelled us to choose between
annihilation and war.
[Footnote 1: Mr. Calhoun had still Irish enough in his composition to
use "will" for "shall."]
JOHN RANDOLPH.
In June, 1861, Dr. Russell, the correspondent of the London Times, was
ascending the Mississippi in a steamboat, on board of which was a body
of Confederate troops, several of whom were sick, and lay along the
deck helpless. Being an old campaigner, he had his medicine-chest with
him, and he was thus enabled to administer to these men the medicines
which he supposed their cases required. One huge fellow, attenuated to
a skeleton by dysentery, who appears to have been aware of his
benefactor's connection with the press, gasped out these words:
"Stranger, remember, if I die, that I am Robert Tallon of
Tishimingo County, and that I died for States' Rights. See,
now, they put that in the papers, won't you? Robert Tallon
died for States' Rights."
Having thus spoken, he turned over on his blanket, and was silent. Dr.
Russell assures his readers that this man only expressed the nearly
unanimous feeling of the Southern people at the outbreak of the war.
He had been ten weeks travelling in the Southern States, and he
declared that the people had but one battle-cry,--"States' Rights, and
death to those who make war upon them!" About the same time, we
remember, there was a paragraph going the rounds of the newspapers
which related a conversation said to have taken place between a
Northern man and a Southern boy. The boy happening to use the word
"country," the Northerner asked him, "What is your country?" To which
the boy instantly and haughtily replied, "SOUTH CAROLINA!"
Such anecdotes as these were to most of us here at the North a
revelation. The majority of the Northern people actually did not know
of the _existence_ of such a feeling as that expressed by the Carolina
boy, nor of the doctrine enunciated by the dying soldier. If every boy
in the Northern States old enough to understand the question had been
asked, What is your country? every one of them, without a moment's
hesitation, would have quietly answered in substance thus: "Why, the
United States, of course";--and the only feeling excited by the
question would have been one of surprise that it should have been
asked. And with regard to that "battle-cry" of States' Rights, seven
tenths of the voters of the North hardly knew what a Southern man
meant when he pronounced the words. Thus we presented to the world the
curious spectacle of a people so ignorant of one another, so little
homogeneous, that nearly all on one side of an imaginary line were
willing to risk their lives for an idea which the inhabitants on the
other side of the line not only did not entertain, but knew nothing
about. We observe something similar in the British empire. The
ordinary Englishman does not know what it is of which Ireland
complains, and if an Irishman is asked the name of his country, he
does not pronounce any of the names which imply the merging of his
native isle in the realm of Britain.
Few of us, even now, have a "realizing sense," as it is called, of the
strength of the States' Rights feeling among the Southern people. Of
all the Southern States in which we ever sojourned, the one that
seemed to us most like a Northern State was North Carolina. We stayed
some time at Raleigh, ten years ago, during the session of the
Legislature, and we were struck with the large number of reasonable,
intelligent, upright men who were members of that body. Of course, we
expected to find Southern men all mad on one topic; but in the
Legislature of North Carolina there were several individuals who could
converse even on that in a rational and comfortable manner. We were a
little surprised, therefore, the other day, to pick up at a book-stall
in Nassau Street a work entitled:
"The North Carolina Reader, Number III. Prepared with
Special Reference to the Wants and Interests of North
Carolina. Under the Auspices of the Superintendent of Common
Schools. Containing Selections in Prose and Verse. By C.H.
Wiley. New York: A.S. Barnes and Burr."
The acute reader will at once surmise that the object of this series
of school readers was to instil into the minds of the youth of North
Carolina a due regard for the sacredness and blessed effects of our
peculiar institution. But for once the acute reader is mistaken. No
such purpose appears, at least not in Number III.; in which there are
only one or two even distant allusions to that dread subject. Onesimus
is not mentioned; there is no reference to Ham, nor is there any
discourse upon long heels and small brains. The great, the only object
of this Reader was to nourish in the children of the State the feeling
which the boy expressed-when he proudly said that his country was
South Carolina. Nothing can exceed the innocent, childlike manner in
which this design is carried out in Number III. First, the children
are favored with a series of chapters descriptive of North Carolina,
written in the style of a school geography, with an occasional piece
of poetry on a North Carolina subject by a North Carolina poet. Once,
however, the compiler ventures to depart from his plan by inserting
the lines by Sir William Jones, "What constitutes a State?" To this
poem he appends a note apologizing for "breaking the thread of his
discourse," upon the ground that the lines were so "applicable to the
subject," that it seemed as if the author "must have been describing
North Carolina." When the compiler has done cataloguing the fisheries,
the rivers, the mountains, and the towns of North Carolina, he
proceeds to relate its history precisely in the style of our school
history books. The latter half of the volume is chiefly occupied by
passages from speeches, and poems from newspapers, written by natives
of North Carolina. It is impossible for us to convey an idea of the
innutritiousness and the inferiority of most of these pieces. North
Carolina is the great theme of orator and poet.
"We live," says one of the legislators quoted,
"in the most beautiful land that the sun of heaven ever
shone upon. Yes, sir, I have heard the anecdote from Mr.
Clay, that a preacher in Kentucky, when speaking of the
beauties of paradise, when he desired to make his audience
believe it was a place of bliss, said it was a Kentucky of a
place. Sir, this preacher had never visited the western
counties of North Carolina. I have spent days of rapture in
looking at her scenery of unsurpassed grandeur, in hearing
the roar of her magnificent waterfalls, second only to the
great cataract of the North; and while I gazed for hours,
lost in admiration at the power of Him who by his word
created such a country, and gratitude for the blessings He
had scattered upon it, I thought that if Adam and Eve, when
driven from paradise, had been near this land, they would
have thought themselves in the next best place to that they
had left."
We do not aver that the contents of this collection are generally as
ludicrous as this specimen; but we do say that the passage quoted
gives a very fair idea of the spirit and quality of the book. There is
scarcely one of the North Carolina pieces which a Northern man would
not for one reason or another find extremely comic. One of the reading
lessons is a note written fifteen years ago by Solon Robinson, the
agricultural editor of the Tribune, upon the use of the long leaves of
the _North Carolina_ pine for braiding or basket-work; another is a
note written to accompany a bunch of _North Carolina_ grapes sent to
an editor; and there are many other newspaper cuttings of a similar
character. The editor seems to have thought nothing too trivial,
nothing too ephemeral, for his purpose, provided the passage contained
the name of his beloved State.
How strange all this appears to a Northern mind! Everywhere else in
Christendom, teachers strive to enlarge the mental range of their
pupils, readily assenting to Voltaire's well-known definition of an
educated man: "One who is _not_ satisfied to survey the universe from
his parish belfry." Everywhere else, the intellectual class have some
sense of the ill-consequences of "breeding in and in," and take care
to infuse into their minds the vigor of new ideas and the nourishment
of strange knowledge. How impossible for a Northern State to think of
doing what Alabama did last winter, pass a law designed to limit the
circulation in that State of Northern newspapers and periodicals! What
Southern men mean by "State pride" is really not known in the Northern
States. All men of every land are fond of their native place; but the
pride that Northern people may feel in the State wherein they happened
to be born is as subordinate to their national feeling, as the
attachment of a Frenchman to his native province is to his pride in
France.
Why this difference? It did not always exist. It cost New York and
Massachusetts as severe a struggle to accept the Constitution of 1787
as it did Virginia. George Clinton, Governor of New York, had as much
State pride as Patrick Henry, orator of Virginia, and parted as
reluctantly with a portion of the sovereignty which he wielded. If it
required Washington's influence and Madison's persuasive reasoning to
bring Virginia into the new system, the repugnance of Massachusetts
was only overcome by the combined force of Hancock's social rank and
Samuel Adams's late, reluctant assent.
On this subject let us hear Samuel Adams for a moment as he wrote to a
friend in 1788:--
"I confess, as I enter the building I stumble at the
threshold. I meet with a national government instead of a
federal union of sovereign states. I am not able to conceive
why the wisdom, of the Convention led them to give the
preference to the former before the latter. If the several
States in the Union are to be one entire nation under one
Legislature, the powers of which shall extend to every
subject of legislation, and its laws be supreme and control
the whole, the idea of sovereignty in these States must be
lost. Indeed, I think, upon such a supposition, those
sovereignties ought to be eradicated from the mind, for they
would be _imperia in imperio_, justly deemed a solecism in
politics, and they would be highly dangerous and destructive
of the peace, union, arid safety of the nation.