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THE ABOLITION CRUSADE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Four Periods of American History
by
HILARY A. HERBERT, LL.D.
New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
1912
Copyright, 1912, by
Charles Scribner's Sons
Published April, 1912
TO MY GRANDCHILDREN
THIS LITTLE BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
IN THE HOPE THAT ITS PERUSAL
WILL FOSTER IN THEM, AS CITIZENS OF THIS GREAT
REPUBLIC, A DUE REGARD FOR THE CONSTITUTION
OF THEIR COUNTRY
AS THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND
PREFATORY NOTE BY JAMES FORD RHODES
"Livy extolled Pompey in such a panegyric that Augustus called him
Pompeian, and yet this was no obstacle to their friendship." That we
find in Tacitus. We may therefore picture to ourselves Augustus reading
Livy's "History of the Civil Wars" (in which the historian's republican
sympathies were freely expressed), and learning therefrom that there
were two sides to the strife which rent Rome. As we are more than
forty-six years distant from our own Civil War, is it not incumbent on
Northerners to endeavor to see the Southern side? We may be certain that
the historian a hundred years hence, when he contemplates the lining-up
of five and one-half million people against twenty-two millions, their
equal in religion, morals, regard for law, and devotion to the common
Constitution, will, as matter of course, aver that the question over
which they fought for four years had two sides; that all the right was
not on one side and all the wrong on the other. The North should
welcome, therefore, accounts of the conflict written by candid Southern
men.
Mr. Herbert, reared and educated in the South, believing in the moral
and economical right of slavery, served as a Confederate soldier during
the war, but after Appomattox, when thirty-one years old, he told his
father he had arrived at the conviction that slavery was wrong. Twelve
years later, when home-rule was completely restored to the South (1877),
he went into public life as a Member of Congress, sitting in the House
for sixteen years. At the end of his last term, in 1893, he was
appointed Secretary of the Navy by President Cleveland, whom he
faithfully served during his second administration.
Such an experience is an excellent training for the treatment of any
aspect of the Civil War. Mr. Herbert's devotion to the Constitution, the
Union, and the flag now equals that of any soldier of the North who
fought against him. We should expect therefore that his work would be
pervaded by practical knowledge and candor.
After a careful reading of the manuscript I have no hesitation in saying
that the expectation is realized. Naturally unable to agree entirely
with his presentation of the subject, I believe that his work exhibits a
side that entitles it to a large hearing. I hope that it will be placed
before the younger generation, who, unaffected by any memory of the heat
of the conflict, may truly say:
Tros Tyriusve, mihi nullo discrimine agetur.
JAMES FORD RHODES.
BOSTON, _November_, 1911.
PREFACE
In 1890 Mr. L. E. Chittenden, who had been United States Treasurer under
President Lincoln, published an interesting account of $10,000,000
United States bonds secretly sent to England, as he said, in 1862, and
he told all about what thereupon took place across the water. It was a
reminiscence. General Charles Francis Adams in his recent instructive
volume, "Studies Military and Diplomatic," takes up this narrative and,
in a chapter entitled "An Historical Residuum," conclusively shows from
contemporaneous evidence that the bonds were sent, not in 1862, but in
1863, but that, as for the rest of the story, the residuum of truth in
it was about like the speck of moisture that is left when a soap bubble
is pricked by a needle.
General Adams did not mean that Mr. Chittenden knew he was drawing on
his imagination. He was only demonstrating that one who intends to
write history cannot rely on his memory.
The author, in the following pages, is undertaking to write a connected
story of events that happened, most of them, in his lifetime, and as to
many of the most important of which he has vivid recollections; but,
save in one respect, he has not relied upon his own memory for any
important fact. The picture he has drawn of the relations between the
slave-holder and non-slave-holder in the South is, much of it, given as
he recollects it. His opportunities for observation were somewhat
extensive, and here he is willing to be considered in part as a witness.
Elsewhere he has relied almost entirely upon contemporaneous written
evidence, memory, however, often indicating to him sources of
information.
Nowhere are there so many valuable lessons for the student of American
history as in the story of the great sectional movement of 1831, and of
its results, which have profoundly affected American conditions through
generation after generation.
An effort is here made to tell that story succinctly, tracing it, step
after step, from cause to effect. The subject divides itself naturally
into four historic periods:
1. The anti-slavery crusade, 1831 to 1860.
2. Secession and four years of war, 1861 to 1865.
3. Reconstruction under the Lincoln-Johnson plan, with the overthrow by
Congress of that plan and the rule of the negro and carpet-bagger, from
1865 to 1876.
4. Restoration of self-government in the South, and the results that
have followed.
The greater part of the book is devoted to the first period--1831 to
1860, the period of causation. The sequences running through the three
remaining periods are more briefly sketched.
Italics, throughout the book, it may be mentioned here, are the
author's.
Now that the country is happily reunited in a Union which all agree is
indissoluble, the South wants the true history of the times here treated
of spread before its children; so does the North. The mistakes that were
committed on both sides during that lamentable and prolonged sectional
quarrel (and they were many) should be known of all, in order that like
mistakes may not be committed in the future. The writer has, with
diffidence, attempted to lay the facts before his readers, and so to
condense the story that it may be within the reach of the ordinary
student. How far he has succeeded will be for his readers to say. The
verdict he ventures to hope for is that he has made an honest effort to
be fair.
The author takes this occasion to thank that accomplished young teacher
of history, Mr. Paul Micou, for valuable suggestions, and his friend,
Mr. Thomas H. Clark, who with his varied attainments has aided him in
many ways.
HILARY A. HERBERT.
WASHINGTON, D. C., _March_, 1912.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION 3
I. SECESSION AND ITS DOCTRINE 15
II. EMANCIPATION PRIOR TO 1831 37
III. THE NEW ABOLITIONISTS 56
IV. FEELING IN THE SOUTH--1835 77
V. ANTI-ABOLITION AT THE NORTH 84
VI. A CRISIS AND A COMPROMISE 93
VII. EFFORTS FOR PEACE 128
VIII. INCOMPATIBILITY OF SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 147
IX. FOUR YEARS OF WAR 180
X. RECONSTRUCTION, LINCOLN-JOHNSON PLAN AND CONGRESSIONAL 208
XI. THE SOUTH UNDER SELF-GOVERNMENT 229
INDEX 245
THE ABOLITION CRUSADE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
INTRODUCTION
The Constitution of the United States attempts to define and limit the
power of our Federal Government.
Lord Brougham somewhere said that such an instrument was not worth the
parchment it was written on; people would pay no regard to self-imposed
limitations on their own will.
When our fathers by that written Constitution established a government
that was partly national and partly federal, and that had no precedent,
they knew it was an experiment. To-day that government has been in
existence one hundred and twenty-three years, and we proudly claim that
the experiment of 1789 has been the success of the ages.
Happy should we be if we could boast that, during all this period, the
Constitution had never been violated in any respect!
The first palpable infringement of its provisions occurred in the
enactment of the alien and sedition laws of 1798. The people at the
polls indignantly condemned these enactments, and for years thereafter
the government proceeded peacefully; the people were prosperous, and the
Union and the Constitution grew in favor.
Later, there grew up a rancorous sectional controversy about slavery
that lasted many years; that quarrel was followed by a bloody sectional
war; after that war came the reconstruction of the Southern States.
During each of these three trying eras it did sometimes seem as if that
old piece of "parchment," derided by Lord Brougham, had been utterly
forgotten. Nevertheless, and despite all these trying experiences, we
have in the meantime advanced to the very front rank of nations, and our
people have long since turned, not only to the Union, but, we are happy
to think, to the Constitution as well, with more devotion than ever.
It may be further said that, notwithstanding all the bitter animosities
that for long divided our country into two hostile sections, that
wonderful old Constitution, handed down to us by our fathers, was
always, and in all seasons, in the hearts of our people, and that never
for a moment was it out of mind. Even in our sectional war Confederates
and Federals were both fighting for it--one side to maintain it over
themselves as an independent nation; the other to maintain it over the
whole of the old Union. In the very madness of reconstruction the
fundamental idea of the Constitution, the equality of the States,
ultimately prevailed--this idea it was that imperatively demanded the
final restoration of the seceded States, with the right of
self-government unimpaired.
The future is now bright before us. The complex civilization of the
present is, we do not forget, continually presenting new and complex
problems of government, and we are mindful, too, that, for the people
who must deal with these problems, a higher culture is required, but to
all this our national and State governments seem to be fully alive. We
are everywhere erecting memorials to our patriotic dead, we have our
"flag day" and many ceremonies to stimulate patriotism, and, throughout
our whole country, young Americans are being taught more and more of
American history and American traditions.
The essence of these teachings presumably is that time has hallowed our
Constitution, and that experience has fully shown the wisdom of its
provisions. In this land of ours, where there are so much property and
so many voters who want it, and where the honor and emoluments of high
place are so tempting to the demagogue, there can be no such security
for either life, liberty, or property as those safeguards which our
fathers devised in the Constitution of the United States.
Our teachers of history must therefore expose fearlessly every violation
in the past of our Constitution, and point out the penalties that
followed; and, above all, they cannot afford to condone, or to pass by
in silence, the conduct of those who have heretofore advocated, or acted
on, any law which to them was _higher than the American Constitution_.
One of the most serious troubles in the past, many think our greatest,
was our terrible war among ourselves. Perhaps, after the lapse of nearly
fifty years, we can all now agree that if our people and our States had
always, between 1830 and 1860, faithfully observed the Federal
Constitution we should have not had that war. However that may be, the
crusade of the Abolitionists, which began in 1831, was the beginning of
an agitation in the North against the existence of slavery in the South,
which continued, in one form or another, until the outbreak of that war.
The negro is now located, geographically, much as he was then. If
another attempt shall be made to project his personal status into
national politics, the voters of the country ought to know and consider
the mistakes that occurred, North and South, during the unhappy era of
that sectional warfare. This little book is a study of that period of
our history. It concludes with a glance at the war between the North and
South, and the reconstruction that followed.
The story of Cromwell and the Great Revolution it was impossible for any
Englishman to tell correctly for nearly or quite two centuries. The
changes that had been wrought were too profound, too far-reaching; and
English writers were too human. The changes--economic, political, and
social--wrought in our country by the great controversy over slavery and
State-rights, and by the war that ended it, have been quite as profound,
and the revolution in men's ideas and ways of looking at their past
history has been quite as complete as those which followed the downfall
of the government founded by Cromwell. But we are now in the twentieth
century; history is becoming a science, and we ought to succeed better
in writing our past than the Englishmen did.
The culture of this day is very exacting in its demands, and if one is
writing about our own past the need of fairness is all the more
imperative. And why not? The masses of the people, who clashed on the
battlefields of a war in which one side fought for the supremacy of the
Union and the other for the sovereignty of the States, had honest
convictions; they differed in their convictions; they had made honest
mistakes about each other; now they would like their histories to tell
just where those mistakes were; they do not wish these mistakes to be
repeated hereafter. Nor is there any reason why the whole history of
that great controversy should not now be written with absolute fairness;
the two sections of our country have come together in a most wonderful
way. There has been reunion after reunion of the blue and the gray. The
survivors of a New Jersey regiment, forty-four years after the bloody
battle of Salem Church, put up on its site a monument to their dead, on
one side of which was a tablet to the memory of the "brave Alabama
boys," who were their opponents in that fight. One of those "Alabama
boys" wrote the story of that battle for the archives of his own State,
and the State of New Jersey has published it in her archives, as a fair
account of the battle.
The author has attempted to approach his subject in a spirit like this,
and while he hopes to be absolutely fair, he is perfectly aware that he
sees things from a Southern view-point. For this, however, no apology is
needed. Truth is many-sided and must be seen from every direction.
Nearly all the school-books dealing with the period here treated of, and
now considered as authority, have been written from a Northern
stand-point; and many of the extended histories that are most widely
read seem to the writer to be more or less partisan, although the
authors were apparently quite unconscious of it. Attempts made here to
point out some of the errors in these books are, as is conceived, in the
interests of history.
Of course it is important that readers should know the stand-point of an
author who writes at this day of events as recent as those here treated
of. Dr. Albert Bushnell Hart, professor of history in Harvard
University, in the preface to his "Slavery and Abolition" (Harper
Brothers, 1906), says of himself: "It is hard for a son and grandson of
abolitionists to approach so explosive a question with impartiality."
Following this example, the writer must tell that he was born in the
South, of slave-holding parents, three years after the Abolition crusade
began in 1831. Growing up in the South under the stress of that crusade,
he maintained all through the war, in which he was a loyal Confederate
soldier, the belief in which he had been educated--that slavery was
right, morally and economically.
One day, not long after Appomattox, he told his father he had reached
the conclusion that slavery was wrong. The reply was, to the writer's
surprise, that his mother in early life had been an avowed
emancipationist; that she (who had lived until the writer was sixteen
years old) had never felt at liberty to discuss slavery after the rise
of the new abolitionists and the Nat Turner insurrection; and then
followed the further information that when, in 1846, the family removed
from South Carolina to Alabama, Greenville, Ala., was chosen for a home
because it was thought that the danger from slave insurrections would be
less there than in one of the richer "black counties."
What a creature of circumstances man is! The writer's belief about a
great moral question, his home, his school-mates, and the companions of
his youth, were all determined by a movement begun in Boston,
Massachusetts, before he was born in the far South!
With a vivid personal recollection of the closing years of the great
anti-slavery crusade always in his mind, the writer has studied closely
many of the histories dealing with that movement, and he has found quite
a consensus of opinion among Northern writers--a view that has even been
sometimes accepted in the South--that it was not so much the fear of
insurrections, created by Abolition agitation, that shut off discussion
in the South about the rightfulness of slavery as it was the invention
of the cotton-gin, that made cotton growing and slavery profitable. The
cotton-gin was invented in 1792, and was in common use years before the
writer's mother was born. A native of, she grew to maturity entirely in,
the South, and in 1830 was an avowed emancipationist. The subject was
then being freely discussed.
The author has ventured to relate in the pages that follow this
introduction two or three incidents that were more or less personal, in
the hope that their significance may be his sufficient excuse.
And now, having spoken of himself as a Southerner, the author thinks it
but fair, when invoking for the following pages fair consideration, to
add that, since 1865, he has never ceased to rejoice that slavery is no
more, and that secession is now only an academic question; and, further,
that he has, since Appomattox, served the government of the United
States for twenty years as loyally as he ever served the Confederacy. He
therefore respectfully submits that his experiences ought to render him
quite as well qualified for an impartial consideration of the
anti-slavery crusade and its consequences as are those who have never,
either themselves or through the eyes of their ancestors, seen more than
one side of those questions. Certain he is, in his own mind, that this
Union has now no better friend than is he who submits this little study,
conscious of its many shortcomings, claiming for it nothing except that
it is the result of an honest effort to be fair in every statement of
facts and in the conclusions reached.
Not much effort has been made in the direction of original research.
Facts deemed sufficient to illustrate salient points, which alone can be
treated of in a short story, have been found in published documents,
and other facts have been purposely taken, most of them, from Northern
writers; and the authorities have been duly cited. These facts have been
compressed into a small compass, so that the book may be available to
such students as have not time for a more extended examination.
Of the results of the crusade of the Abolitionists, and the consequent
sectional war, George Ticknor Curtis, one of New England's distinguished
biographers, says in his "Life of Buchanan," vol. II, p. 283:
"It is cause for exultation that slavery no longer exists in the broad
domain of this republic--that our theory of government and practice are
now in complete accord. But it is no cause for national pride that we
did not accomplish this result without the cost of a million of precious
lives and untold millions of money."
CHAPTER I
SECESSION AND ITS DOCTRINE
John Fiske has said in his school history: "Under the government of
England before the Revolution the thirteen commonwealths were
independent of one another, and were held together juxtaposed, rather
than united, only through their allegiance to the British Crown. Had
that allegiance been maintained there is no telling how long they might
have gone on thus disunited."
They won their independence under a very imperfect union, a government
improvised for the occasion. The "Articles of Confederation," the first
formal constitution of the United States of America, were not ratified
by Maryland, the last to ratify, until in 1781, shortly before Yorktown.
In 1787 the thirteen States, each claiming to be still sovereign, came
together in convention at Philadelphia and formed the present
Constitution, looking to "a more perfect union." The Constitution that
created this new government has been rightly said to be "the most
wonderful work ever struck off, at a given time, by the brain and
purpose of man."[1] And so it was, but it left unsettled the great
question whether a State, if it believed that its rights were denied to
it by the general government, could peaceably withdraw from the Union.
[1] Gladstone, "Kin Beyond the Sea."
The Federal Government was given by the Constitution only limited
powers, powers that it could not transcend. Nowhere on the face of that
Constitution was any right expressly conferred on the general government
to decide exclusively and finally upon the extent of the powers granted
to it. If any such right had been clearly given, it is certain that many
of the States would not have entered into the Union. As it was, the
Constitution was only adopted by eleven of the States after months of
discussion. Then the new government was inaugurated, with two of the
States, Rhode Island and North Carolina, still out of the Union. They
remained outside, one of them for eighteen months and the other for a
year.
The States were reluctant to adopt the Constitution, because they were
jealous of, and did not mean to give up, the right of self-government.
The framers of the Constitution knew that the question of the right of a
State to secede was thus left unsettled. They knew, too, that this might
give trouble in the future. Their hope was that, as the advantages of
the Union became, in process of time, more and more apparent, the Union
would grow in favor and come to be regarded in the minds and hearts of
the people as indissoluble.
From the beginning of the government there were many, including
statesmen of great influence, who continued to be jealous of the right
of self-government, and insisted that no powers should be exercised by
the Federal Government except such as were very clearly granted in the
Constitution. These soon became a party and called themselves
Republicans. Some thirty years later they called themselves Democrats.
Those, on the other hand, who believed in construing the grants of
power in the Constitution liberally or broadly, called themselves
Federalists.
Washington was a Federalist, but such was his influence that the dispute
between the Republicans and the Federalists about the meaning of the
Constitution did not, during his administration, assume a serious
aspect; but when a new president, John Adams, also a Federalist, came in
with a congress in harmony with him, the Republicans made bitter war
upon them. France, then at war with England, was even waging what has
been denominated a "quasi war" upon us, to compel the United States,
under the old treaty of the Revolution, to take her part against
England; and England was also threatening us. Plots to force the
government into the war as an ally of France were in the air.
Adams and his followers believed in a strong and spirited government. To
strike a fatal blow at the plotters against the public peace, and to
crush the Republicans at the same time, Congress now passed the famous
alien and sedition laws.
One of the alien laws, June 25, 1798, gave the President, for two years
from its passage, power to order out of the country, _at his own will,
and without "trial by jury" or other "process of law," any alien he
deemed dangerous_ to the peace and safety of the United States.
The sedition law, July 14, 1798, made criminal any unlawful conspiracy
to oppose any measure of the government of the United States "which was
directed by proper authority," as well as also any "false and scandalous
accusations against the Government, the President, or the Congress."
The opportunity of the Republicans had come. They determined to call
upon the country to condemn the alien and sedition laws, and at the
presidential election in 1800 the Federalists received their death-blow.
The party as an organization survived that election only a few years,
and in localities the very name, Federalist, later became a reproach.
The Republicans began their campaign against the alien and sedition laws
by a series of resolutions, which, drawn by Jefferson, were passed by
the Kentucky legislature in November, 1798. Other quite similar
resolutions, drawn by Madison, passed the Virginia assembly the next
year; and these together became the celebrated Kentucky and Virginia
resolutions of 1798-9.[2] The alien and sedition laws were denounced in
these resolutions for the exercise of powers not delegated to the
general government. Adverting to the sedition law, it was declared that
no power over the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of
the press had been given. On the contrary, it had been expressly
provided by the Constitution that "Congress shall make no law respecting
an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,
_or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press_."
[2] Warfield, in his "Kentucky Resolutions of 1798," relates that John
Breckenridge introduced the Kentucky and John Taylor, of Caroline, moved
the Virginia resolutions. In 1814 Taylor made it known that Madison was
the author of the Virginia resolves, but not till 1821 did Jefferson
admit his authorship of the Kentucky resolutions. Jefferson was
Vice-President when they were drawn, and it would have been thought
unseemly for him to appear openly in a canvass against the President,
but by correspondence with his friends he "gradually drew out a program
of action" (Warfield, p. 17). The Kentucky Resolutions were sent by the
Governor to the Legislatures of the other States, ten of which, being
controlled by the Federalists, are known to have declared against them
(Warfield, p. 115). But of course the resolutions were canvassed by the
public before the presidential election of 1800.
The first of the Kentucky resolutions was as follows:
"_Resolved_, That the several States composing the United States of
America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to
their general government, _but that by compact_, under the style
and title of a constitution for the United States, and of
amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for
specific purposes, delegated to that Government certain definite
powers, _reserving, each State to itself_, the residuary mass of
right to their own self-government; and _that whensoever the
general government assumes undelegated powers its acts are
unauthoritative, void, and of no effect_: That to this _compact
each State acceded as a State_, and is an integral party, its
co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: That the
government created by _this compact, was not made the exclusive or
final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself_, since
that would have made its direction, and not the Constitution, the
measure of its powers; but that, _as in all other cases of compact
among parties having no common judge, each party has a right to
judge for itself as well of infractions as of the mode and measure
of redress._"
Undoubtedly it is from the famous resolutions of 1798-9 that the
secessionists of a later date drew their arguments. The authors of these
celebrated resolutions were, both of them, devoted friends of the Union
they had helped to construct. Why should they announce a theory of the
Constitution that was so full of dangerous possibilities?
The answer is, they were announcing the theory upon which the States, or
at least many of the States, had ten years before ratified the
Constitution. A crisis in the life of the new government had now come.
Congress had usurped powers not given; it had exercised powers that had
been prohibited, and the government was enforcing the obnoxious statutes
with a high hand. Dissatisfaction was intense.
Jefferson and Madison were undoubtedly Republican partisans, Jefferson
especially; but it is equally certain that they were both friends of the
Union, and as such they concluded, with the lights before them, that the
wise course would be to submit to the people, in ample time for full
consideration, before the then coming presidential election, a full,
clear, and comprehensive exposition of the Constitution precisely as
they, and as the people, then understood it. This they did in the
resolutions of 1798 and 1799, and the very same voters who had created
the Constitution of 1789, now, with their sons to aid them, endorsed
these resolutions in the election of 1800, which had been laid before
them by the legislatures of two Republican States as a correct
construction of that instrument.
The Republicans under Jefferson came into power with an immense
majority. The people were satisfied with the Constitution as it had been
construed in the election of 1800, and the country under control of the
Republicans was happy and prosperous for three decades. Then the party
in power began to split into National Republicans and Democratic
Republicans. The National Republicans favored a liberal construction of
the Constitution and became Whigs; the Democratic Republicans dropped
the name Republican and became Democrats.
The foregoing sketch has been given with no intent to write a political
history, but only to show with what emphasis the American people
condemned all violations of the Constitution up to the time when, in
1831, our story of the Abolitionists is to begin. The sketch has also
served to explain the theory of State-rights, as it was held in early
days, and later, by the Southern people.
Whether the union of the States under the Constitution as expounded by
the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions would survive every trial that was
to come, remained to be seen. The question was destined to perplex Mr.
Jefferson himself, more than once.
Indeed, even while Washington was President there had been disunion
sentiment in Congress. In 1794 the celebrated Virginian, John Taylor, of
Caroline, shortly after he had expressed an intention of publicly
resigning from the United States Senate, was approached in the privacy
of a committee room by Rufus King, senator from New York, and Oliver
Ellsworth, a senator from Massachusetts, both Federalists, with a
proposition for a dissolution of the Union by mutual consent, the line
of division to be somewhere from the Potomac to the Hudson. This was on
the ground "that it was utterly impossible for the Union to continue.
That the Southern and the Eastern people thought quite differently,"
etc. Taylor contended for the Union, and nothing came of the
conference, the story of which remained a secret for over a hundred
years.[3]
[3] Taylor was so deeply impressed by the conference, which was
protracted, that two days later, May 11, 1794, he made an extended note
of it which he sent to Mr. Madison. At the foot of his note Taylor says,
among other things: "He (T.) is thoroughly convinced that the design to
break up the Union is contemplated. The assurance, the manner, the
earnestness, and the countenances with which the idea was uttered, all
disclosed the most serious intention. It is also probable that K. (King)
and E. (Ellsworth) having heard that T. (Taylor) was against the
(adoption of) the Constitution have hence imbibed a mistaken opinion
that he was secretly an enemy of the Union, and conceived that he was a
fit instrument (as he was about retiring) to infuse notions into the
anti-federal temper of Virginia, consonant to their views."--"Disunion
Sentiment in the Congress in 1794" (with fac-simile of Taylor
memorandum), by Gaillard Hunt, Editor of Writings of James Madison.
Lowdermilk Co., Washington, D. C., 1905.
"In the winter of 1803-4, immediately after, and as a consequence of,
the acquisition of Louisiana, certain leaders of the Federal party
conceived the project of the dissolution of the Union and the
establishment of a Northern Confederacy, the justifying causes to those
who entertained it, that the acquisition of Louisiana to the Union
transcended the constitutional powers of the government of the United
States; that it created, in fact, a new confederacy to which the States,
united by the former compact, were not bound to adhere; that it was
oppressive of the interests and destructive of the influence of the
northern section of the Confederacy, whose right and duty it was
therefore to secede from the new body politic, and to constitute one of
their own."[4]
[4] C. F. Robertson, "The Louisiana Purchase," etc. "Papers of the
American Association," vol. I, pp. 262, 263.
This project did not assume serious proportions.
John Fiske in his school history says: "John Quincy Adams, a supporter
of the embargo act of 1807, privately informed President Jefferson (in
February, 1809) that further attempts to enforce it in the New England
States would be likely to drive them to secession. Accordingly, the
embargo was repealed, and the non-intercourse act substituted for it."
The spirit of nationality was yet in its infancy, threats of secession
were common, and they came then mostly from New England. These threats
were in no wise connected with slavery; agitators had not then made
slavery a national issue; the idea of separation was prompted by the
fear that power in the councils of the Union would pass into the hands
of other sections.
Massachusetts was heard from again in 1811, when the State of Louisiana,
the first to be carved from the Louisiana purchase, asked to come into
the Union. In discussing the bill for her admission, Josiah Quincy said:
"Why, sir, I have already heard of six States, and some say there will
be at no great distance of time more. I have also heard that the mouth
of the Ohio will be far to the east of the contemplated empire.... It
is impossible that such a power could be granted. It was not for these
men that our fathers fought. It was not for them this Constitution
was adopted. You have no authority to throw the rights and liberties
and property of this people into hotchpot with the wild men on
the Missouri, or with the mixed, though more respectable, race of
Anglo-Hispano-Gallo-Americans who bask in the sands in the mouth of the
Mississippi.... _I am compelled to declare it as my deliberate opinion
that, if this bill passes, the bonds of the Union are virtually
dissolved; that the States which compose it are free from their moral
obligations; and that, as it will be the right of all, so it will be
the duty of some, to prepare definitely for a separation--amicably, if
they can; violently, if they must._"
June 15, 1813, the Massachusetts legislature endorsed the position taken
in this speech.[5]
[5] "American State Documents and Federal Relations," p. 21.
Later, in 1814, a convention of representative New England statesmen met
at Hartford, to consider of secession unless the non-intercourse act,
which also bore hard on New England, should be repealed; but the war
then pending was soon to close, and the danger from that quarter was
over.
But secession was not exclusively a New England doctrine. "When the
Constitution was adopted by the votes of States in popular conventions,
it is safe to say there was not a man in the country, from Washington
and Hamilton, on the one side, to George Clinton and George Mason, on
the other, who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment,
entered into by the States, and from which each and every State had the
right to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised."[6]
[6] Henry Cabot Lodge's "Webster," p. 176.
As late as 1844 the threat of secession was to come again from
Massachusetts. The great State of Texas was applying for admission to
the Union. But Texas was a slave State; Abolitionists had now for
thirteen years been arousing in the old Bay State a spirit of hostility
against the existence of slavery in her sister States of the South, and
in 1844 the Massachusetts legislature resolved 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 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 at the threshold, may tend
to drive _these States into a dissolution of the Union_."
This was _just seventeen years before the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
began to arm her sons to put down secession in the South_!
The Southern reader must not, however, conclude from this startling
about-face on the question of secession, that the people of
Massachusetts, and of the North, did not, _in 1861_, honestly believe
that under the Constitution the Union was indissoluble, or that the
North went to war simply for the purpose of perpetuating its power over
the South. Such a conclusion would be grossly unjust. The spirit of
nationality, veneration of the Union, was a growth, and, after it had
fairly begun, a rapid growth. It grew, as our country grew in prestige
and power. The splendid triumphs of our ships at sea, in the War of
1812, and our victory at New Orleans over British regulars, added to it;
the masterful decisions of our great Chief Justice John Marshall,
pointing out how beneficently our Federal Constitution was adapted to
the preservation not only of local self-government but of the liberties
of the citizen as well; peace with, and the respect of, foreign nations;
free trade between the people of all sections, and abounding
prosperity--all these things created a deep impression, and Americans
began to hark back to the words of Washington in his farewell address:
"The unity of our government, which now constitutes you one people, is
also dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the
edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquillity at
home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that
very liberty which you so highly prize."
But far and away above every other single element contributing to the
development of Union sentiment was the wonderful speech of Daniel
Webster, January 26, 1830, in his debate in the United States Senate
with Hayne, of South Carolina. Hayne was eloquently defending States'
rights, and his argument was unanswerable if his premise was admitted,
that, as had been theretofore conceded, the Constitution was _a compact
between the States_. Webster saw this and he took new ground; the
Constitution was, he contended, not a compact, but the formation of a
government. His arguments were like fruitful seed sown upon a soil
prepared for their reception. No speech delivered in this country ever
created so profound an impression. It was the foundation of a new school
of political thought. It concluded with this eloquent peroration: "When
my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven,
may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a
once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a
land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!
Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gracious
ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth,
still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their
original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star
obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as 'What
is all this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and folly,
'Liberty first and Union afterwards,' but everywhere, spread all over
with living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over
the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens,
that other sentiment, dear to every American heart--'Liberty _and_
Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.'"
For many years every school-house in the land resounded with these
words. By 1861 they had been imprinted on the minds and had sunk into
the hearts of a whole generation. Their effect was incalculable.
It is perfectly true that the secession resolution of the Massachusetts
legislature of 1844 was passed fourteen years after Webster's speech,
but the Garrisonians had then been agitating the slavery question within
her borders for fourteen years, and the old State was now beside herself
with excitement.
There was another great factor in the rapid manufacture of Union
sentiment at the North that had practically no existence at the South.
It was immigration.
The new-comers from over the sea knew nothing, and cared less, about the
history of the Constitution or the dialectics of secession. They had
sought a land of liberty that to them was one nation, with one flag
flying over it, and in their eyes secession was rebellion. Immigrants to
America, practically all settling in Northern States, were during the
thirty years, 1831-1860, 4,910,590; and these must, with their natural
increase, have numbered at least six millions in 1860. In other words,
far more than one-fourth of the people of the North in 1860 were not,
themselves or their fathers, in the country in the early days when the
doctrine of States' rights had been in the ascendant; and, as a rule, to
these new people that old doctrine was folly.
In the South the situation was reversed. Slavery had kept immigrants
away. The whites were nearly all of the old revolutionary stock, and had
inherited the old ideas. Still, love of and pride in the Union had grown
in them too. Nor were the Southerners all followers of Jefferson. From
the earliest days much of the wealth and intelligence of the country,
North and South, had opposed the Democracy, first as Federalists and
later as Whigs. In the South the Whigs have been described as "a fine
upstanding old party, a party of blue broadcloth, silver buttons, and a
coach and four." It was not until anti-slavery sentiment had begun to
array the North, as a section, against the South, that Southern Whigs
began to look for protection to the doctrine of States' rights.
Woodrow Wilson says, in "Division and Reunion," p. 47, of Daniel
Webster's great speech in 1830: "The North was now beginning to insist
upon a national government; the South was continuing to insist upon the
original understanding of the Constitution; that was all."
And in those attitudes the two sections stood in 1860-61, one upon the
modern theory of an indestructible Union; the other upon the old idea
that States had the right to secede from the Union.
In 1848 there occurred in Ireland the "Rebellion of the Young Irishmen."
Among the leaders of that rebellion were Thomas F. Meagher and John
Mitchel. Both were banished to Great Britain's penal colony. Both made
their way, a few years later, to America. Both were devotees of liberty,
both men of brilliant intellect and high culture. Meagher settled in the
North, Mitchel in the South. This was about 1855. Each from his new
stand-point studied the history and the Constitution of his adopted
country. Meagher, when the war between the North and South came on,
became a general in the Union army. Mitchel entered the civil service of
the Confederacy and his son died a Confederate soldier.
The Union or Confederate partisan who has been taught that his side was
"eternally right, and the other side eternally wrong," should consider
the story of these two "Young Irishmen."
How fortunate it is that the ugly question of secession has been
settled, and will never again divide Americans, or those who come to
America!