Mr. Ambrose's letters on the rebellion

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LETTER I. January, 1863

My dear Mr. Seaton : — This year, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, marks our entrance upon the third annual period of the civil war. The quarrel still rages with unabated fury. Indeed, as it grows older, it seems to become instinct with fiercer hatreds and to gather new vigor of resistance from its desperation. Is it not strange that such " a zeal to destroy " should so fire the heart of American citizens against the life of a nation whose birth and career have been the theme of more incessant, boastful, and extravagant panegyric than the affection of any people ever before heaped upon their country ? Posterity will read the history of this commotion with an interest full of amazement at the intensity of the passion it has stirred in the hearts of its authors, and tlie utter insignificance of the provocation upon which it arose. They will distrust with natural wonder the narrative wdiich informs them that laro-e communities of intelligent people, as happy in their homes as a propitious Heaven and a beneficent Government could make them, peaceful and prosperous in the enjoyment of every blessing coveted by man, fondly addicted to self-gratulation for their well-earned eminence amongst nations, envied by the whole world for their freedom, conscious only of Government by its ever-present bounty ; that they should turn upon the work of their own hands, and in a year of singular cheerfulness — a year of ovations, festivities, and pageants — should, all at once, convert their own Paradise into a Pandemonium, and fall to rendino; the mao:nificent structure of their liberties into fragments ; that they should pursue this awful labor of demolition through two long years of such carnage and desolation as the world never saw before, and should, with still more bitter hate and eager ferocity, enter upon a third : that a thinking, shrewd, kind-hearted. Christian people should do this, with unremitting effort to render the obloquy and disgrace of the American name immortal ! How shall after-ages study this terrible anomaly without a charitable doubt of its truth ?

I know how painfully you meditate over this crisis, and I cannot but believe — nay, I am sure — that many of our old friends on the other side of the line are in full sympathy with us in deploring the madness that has brought our country into this unhappy distraction. If we could but reach them with an invocation to a calm review of those elements of discord which now separate us, I should be full of hope that the same wise spirit of counsel which won our confidence and love in past time, would bring us, as of old, into full accord, and that the kindly and powerful influence they were wont to exercise over the brotherhood, of which they and we were equally proud as citizens of our broad Republic, would be exerted within their own sphere, to stay the further rage of this tempest and open the path to that harmony and union which have been so causelessly disturbed.

With this intent and the indulgence of this hope, I address these letters to you, purposing, if haply the chances of the war should allow them to cross the line, to send them forth with a message of kind remembrance to old and cherished friends there, who I would fain believe have preserved their integrity and their reason unclouded by the passions which have hurried the multitudes around them into the dreadful vortex of the rebellion.

Your friend, PAUL AMBROSE.

To Wm. W. Seaton, Esquire,

Washington.

MR, AMBROSE'S LETTERS.

Letter II. Sudden Conversions

January, 1863.

When a votary desires to make a sacrifice, he will find sticks enough under every hedge to kindle the fire. There is a Latin proverb to the same purport — " Qui vult ccedere canem facile invenit fustem.^^ My interpretation of this bit of experience is, that whenever we set our hearts upon a forbidden enterprise, an easy virtue will encounter no difficulty in the search for the means to get it on foot. Or, let me put it in another shape more germane to my present subject ; Whenever it is necessary to support a bad or doubtful cause by an argument, he is but a sorry casuist who will have to go far to find one.

I am every day struck by the proof which the rebellion affords to the accuracy of this insight into the nature of the ordinary conscience of mankind. It is curious to note the facility with which, at this time, many of the most respectable minds of the country, even many eminent in pubhc affairs, have permitted themselves to lapse into that fatal apostasy which, in a moment, has cast aside the honorable conservatism of their whole lives, and plunged them into that very maze of political error which they have always taught themselves and others to shun.

It is not lonor a^o when it was almost the universal conviction of our most approved statesmen, both North and South, and still more that of the great multitude who take their opinions at second hand, that the doctrine of secession was a shallow invention of a few Quixotes in politics. In the days of Gen. Jackson it was denounced and derided as the blackest of treasons by the whole of that imperious party which, under his lead, swayed the public mind with absolute authority. When he said " the Union must be preserved," these words meant something more than a policy of conciliation ; they were uttered as an angry threat against those who meditated disunion, and intimated that, if necessary, the Union should be preserved by the sword. The words were applauded by thousands and tens of thousands of those who to-day are crying out " this Union shall be destroyed." When he said, in strong and unequivocal phrase, that secession was treason, these same thousands reechoed the sentiment with such earnest rej^etition as to plant it in the very heart of the country as an article of faith. The intuition of the masses in this conviction was sustained by the better informed judgment of the most eminent expomders of the Constitution, by the Courts, by Congress, and by the Cabinet, at that time illmtrious for the great ability and experience of is members. It was not less sustained by the cuiet support of nine-tenths of the educated men in every State, who, taking no share in the popu ar demonstrations of political action, gave their 3 wn healthful tone of thought to the social circle of their respective neighborhoods.

Tl)ere were notable exceptions, it is true, to this common consent of opinion ; many in South Carolina, where a threatened revolt had been staked upon the issue ; some in other States, and more particularly in Eastern Virginia, where a peculiar system of traditionary dialectics had bred a class of hair-splitting doctrinaires., not less remarkable for the eccentricity of their dogmas than for the acuteness with which they maintained them. The philosophers of the Resolutions of '98 were few enough and grotesque enough, in the ordinary estimation of the country, to provoke a goodnatured laugh at the perseverance with which they muddled their brains in the mystification of a problem that, in the common computation, had about as much practical value as that more celebrated scheme of Laputa, the extracting of sunbeams from cucumbers. But even the Eesolutionists, for the most part, stood by Jackson, and turned their back upon the doctrins of secession. /

Indeed, it may be affirmed, as an histmcal fact, that the whole South has, in different stages of our national career, at one tine or another, repudiated this doctrine. i

The present generation is but little iware, and many of the last generation of Soithern statesmen now alive choose to forget, thai there once was an occasion which called forth a great deal of notice of this pretension of the right of a State to secede from the Union, and that the prevailing sentiment of the South then branded it as a foul treason.

The Hartford Convention, after much preliminary announcement in the Legislatures of

New-England States, met in December 1814, to devise plans for the security and defence of those States in the war with Great Britain, and to adopt such measures of self-protection as were " not repugnant to their Federal obligations as members of the Union." A different purpose was suspected by their political ene- ' mies ; and, whether justly or not, the popular belief of the South was, that, notwithstanding the restriction they had set upon their action, it was their design, in certain contingencies, to recommend the retirement of their States from the Union. The members of that Convention have vehemently denied this charo-e, but, so far as the South was concerned, utterly without effect. Every man, woman, and child of the South who was capable of receiving an impression from the topics of the day, heard the subject alluded to in conversation, or read of it in the papers, only as a scheme to dissolve the Union — a project of secession. It was at that time the word " secession " itself first became familiar as a term of our political vocabulary. Before that date Mr. Jefferson called it " scission ; " and, by the by, pronounced it to be incompatible with any government. Whether, therefore, the Hartford Convention was slandered or not — as I believe it was — by this imputation, the general impression of its truth south of Mason and Dixon's line, brought up the opportunity for the expression of Southern opinion on the question of secession. Now, I am sure I am correct when I say that the imputed purpose of the Convention was denounced from one end of the Southern States to the other, with peculiar bitterness, as a purpose to commit a monstrous treason. They who remember the events of that day know that every leading man in those States, who made this supposed design of secession a theme for a speech from any forum ; that the general current of popular opinion in educated society; the voice of the multitude which repeats the passwords of the day ; and the whole flow of editorial comment in the most authentic presses, — all united in a common note of censure upon it as treason.

More recently, in 1850 and 1851, when South Carolina, in her vigilant outlook for an opportunity to strike another blow at the Union, thought she had found it in the admission of California, and had summoned the malcontents of the South to a new attempt at secession, every one remembers, how her favorite scheme of crushing out our nationality failed for want of cooperation from her sister States. The manly opposition of a loyal minority within her own borders, and, still more, the calm good sense of those to whom she appealed outside of her borders, defeated her charitable design. The people of Mississippi met in Convention and adjourned their deliberations with a sober resolution asjainst the doctrine of a rio-ht of secession. Georgia discussed it, through the press and on the hustings, by her ablest exponents of constitutional law, and set her seal of condemnation upon it. It found no strencrth with which it was able to shake the faith of the people in their conviction of the right to be regarded as a nation. In that defeat there was nothing more to be admired than the instinctive recoil of the masses from the insidious teachings of ambitious politicians who sought to seduce them into this treason arainst the Government ; nothing more significant of tl^e common perception of the danger and disgrace of this principal of disunion than the dexterity with which some of the present oracles of secession then shirked the responsibility of appearing as its advocates.

In the Border States it had, at that date, no foothold amongst men of any repute in society, except perliaps in the rare and scattered instances of a few super-subtle extremists on the theory of State rights. Even with them it was rather a speculation than a practical principle. Maryland might have had a handful of such men, but nobody heard of them. Kentucky and Missouri could boast of as few. Virginia, notwithstanding her passion for pohtical metaphysics, though a little more demonstrative than the others, gave no further countenance to this heresy than the grandiloquence of a few of her country squires shed upon it when indulging their endemic proclivity towards the oracular at the monthly meetings of the county courts — the Solons of a great State, which they had seen, within their own days, dwindlino' down from a star of the first to one of a fifth magnitude in the firmament of the Union — a very natural experience to breed thoughts of discontent and separation.

In all this long period, from the date of the Constitution until that of the inauguration of this civil war, during which the fundamental ideas of our Government were acquiring solidity through that process of induration by which forms of polity become permanently established in the traditional respect of the people, the nationality of the Union was every day growing to be a more universally accepted fact. With the exception of a few sporadic instances of dissent, the mind of the country was settling down upon the conviction that the integrity of the Union was secured by the organic law, and could not lawfully be broken by any course of proceeding known to the Constitution or implied from the conditions under which it came into existence ; in short, that nothing but rebellion and successful revolution could overthrow it. This conviction grew up in a state of peace which afforded leisure for calm and studious deliberation ; a state of peace attended with such occasional perturbations as served to bring the question into prominent notice, and to invite a careful consideration of its terms and incidents, and yet free from that passion which is apt to cloud the judgment of the country. No national problem could be settled in circumstances more propitious to its true solution.

How does it happen, after such an experience with such a result, that, all at once, the year 1861 should find the question not only thrown into the wind, but the almost universal judgment of the country absolutely reversed, throughout a whole section of the South, embracing some eight or nine States and some four or five millions of citizens ?

It would be very absurd to say that this change sprang out of a more thorough study of the history of the Government or a deeper insight into the philosophy of the Constitution. The year 1861 brought a tornado of violent excitements ; men do not think with more careful deliberation in such a storm. It brought fierce ambitions into play, conspiracies, the clash of arms, the frenzy of party rage ; these are not the companions of patient research or wise conclusions. In point of capacity the men of 1861 were not the superiors — I hope their amour propre will not be offended by my boldness — of Marshall or Story, of Madison or Hamilton, of Webster or Clay, of Spencer Roane or Lowndes, of Livingston or Jefferson, or even of Washington. How many more might I mention ? Neither were these same men of 1861 wiser or more enlightened than they themselves were in 1851, when many of them took pains to teach their compatriots the fallacy as well as the dano-er of secession.

It is unpleasant to come to this conclusion, but thera is no other left to us. We must look

MB. AMBROSE'S LETTERS. 15

for this sudden abjuration of our ancient faith to causes which spring from less noble motives than conviction, and belong to a lower range of human action than that of honest judgment. We must submit to be disenchanted of the illusion that the many excellent men we were accustomed to admire, and among them so many of our cherished friends, were too staunch in their truth, and too courageous in their virtue, to be shaken by any popular tempest. Let us confess with sorrow that many — far too many to be thought of without a sigh for our country — had not the stamina for a time like this, and that they have either yielded to the spell of a popular excitement they had not the equanimity to withstand, or to the tyranny of a dictation they had not the manhood to brave. To one or the other of these influences they have surrendered the pride of their own intellectual eminence, their consistency, and their independence.

Yet, notwithstanding appearances to the contrary and the fact that many, from whom we hoped better things, had fallen off, I still believe that there is a host of true and patriotic men scattered through every State of the Southern Confederacy, who but bide their time to speak a potent word in support of that blessed old Union which the madness of our day has brought into jeopardy. I think you and I could name some of our old comrades, who will vet be heard sounding that clarion note of loyalty wdiich the country has often heard in past time, when these very dangers now upon us were only looming in the distance. They are quiet now ; many of them in voluntary exile, even in the bosom of the communities in which they dwell ; silent and sorrowful, no doubt, and longing for the day when they may come forward to speak of peace. I would fain believe that many good men of this cast are held in reserve by Providence for that special service. They wait for the subsiding of the waters, when it may be safe to venture forth in quest of the olive-branch. With what full hearts and overflowing eyes will they be welcomed to our bosoms, if they bring us that sacred symbol ! Let us wait and hope.

MR. AMBROSE'S LETTERS. IT

Letter III. Secession

February, 1863.

It has been often said that the idea of restrictincr Government to a written constitution is a fallacy ; that such a constitution is inevitably incapable of providing for the emergencies of national progress. The real constitution of a nation lies deeper than its visible ordinances, — in the character, habits, and customs of the people, which do not admit of a complete expression by instrument of writing. The written fundamental law provides only for what is foreseen, and is, therefore, but imperfect wisdom. What is not foreseen lies in the breast of the nation, to be taken care of, when it comes into view, by such mode of disposal as the case may require ; either by process appointed for amendment, which is always slow and uncertain ; or by gradual and imperceptible adoption, which is only the work of years ; or by quick resort to such power as is at hand to meet an exigency which the nation recognizes as a necessity too urgent for delay. In one or the other of these modes a nation organizes itself and conforms its institutions to its needs. It crystallizes in the forms appropriate to its special quality. Thus all orderly government is manifested as a growth, and not merely as a formula.

We have somethino; of a verification of this opinion in the changes which have already crept into our Constitution by the side-paths of usage, and in the constant tendency towards change which, if not accomplished, has yet given birth to many party contests to procure it. The practical alteration of the mode of electing the President is one example ; the acquisition of territory, as in the purchase of Louisiana, is another ; the recent enactment of legal tender and the suspension of habeas corpus are initiatory movements in the same direction, and may be regarded as a primary utterance of a necessity which in time may grow into established law. We may readily enumerate cases in which the Constitution — thouo;h now but seventy-four years old — has been modified, or at least settled by construction ; and it is somewhat noticeable that in most of these expansions, if not invasions, of the letter, the strict constructionists have led the way. You and I can remember when the party now most active in urging the Government to make a railroad to California, was uncompromising in its denial of power to construct the Cumberland turnpike. Some of them were so conscientious as to refuse a vote for paving the Pennsylvania Avenue.

These scruples are obsolete now ; not because the written law is changed, nor that it is discovered to admit of a new meaninfr, but simply because it does not meet the exigencies of national growth. A change in the organic law has been effected by construction — that is to say, by adding something to the Constitution, or taking something away from it, or otherwise interpreting its meaning.

I cannot find fault with this gradual adaptation of the fundamental law to the wants of the nation. In general, it is a healthful mode of change, and is ordinarily the natural expression of a necessity, — a tacit acknowledgment of the will of the nation that its institutions should be moulded to the public convenience, — and is apt to be a wiser process of amendment than that prescribed by law. It moves in the track of experience, and does not go beyond its requirements. Such amendments, indeed, are experiences, not experiments. We thus insensibly get out of the trammels of a written constitution, by building upon it, through a series of accretions, a traditional constitution which, in the course of a few centuries, will ripen into a solid organism exactly suited to the needs and instincts of the people.

The final good, however, is not attained without many alternations between failure and success, — the vibrations of the needle before it settles upon its true point. It is only reached through occasional strussles, turbulent conflicts sometimes, and sometimes great convulsions. The ordinary process of national development is, in the main, peaceable. A century of progress may go on without a war, but epochs emerge sooner or later when disputed demands come into the arena of debate and opposing ideas assert themselves in arms. No nation has ever reached its highest term of manifestation without a resort to the fierce arbitrament of the sword and many a field of blood.

This seems to be the normal law of human society, by which it is ordained that Governments shall arrive at their greatest capability throiiMi a career of strife and sufferins!:. The sinews of nations are strengthened by conflict, and their virtues nourished by the disciphne of pain and sprrow. We are at this day passing through one of these dreadful probations.

I think any man trained in the study of history might have predicted that at whatever period in our national career the doctrine of a constitutional right on the part of a State peaceably and at its own pleasure, to secede from the compact of the Union, was seriously asserted and attempted to be exercised by a party in the country or by one or more States, such an attempt would necessarily produce a conflict of arms. Whatever might be the question upon which the claimant should choose to institute this proceeding, — whether on commercial tariffs, on slavery, on domestic or foreign policy, or any mere project of ambition, it matters not what, — the enterprise would invoke the determined resistance of every man who cherished a regard for the nationality of the Union ; and, if it could not be defeated by argument and persuasion, it would drive the parties into the collision of battle. If the advocates of the principle should succeed in that battle the old government would disappear, an entire new order of tilings would arise, and history would be furnished with one more example of disrupted empire and fragment communities settling into new forms or warrino; tlirough acres of chanseful disorder. If, on the other hand, they should be overthrown, the Constitution would come forth purified and renovated by the ordeal, and would strike with deeper root into the soil of the national faith and take a more sturdy growth in the attachment of the people. I think these might have been the predictions of any learned student of the prevailing sentiment of the American people, without waiting for the insight afforded him by the sad realities of the present day.

For myself, I do not hesitate to affirm that I think this doctrine of a rio-ht of secession so intrinsically mischievous, so incompatible with any national progress, and so destructive of all rational hope of peace or happiness, that if it really had any place in our system, it should be the first duty of this generation to get rid of it at any cost ; that, in this earnest effort of combined States to plant it amongst the acknowledged rights of the members of the Union, it is worth all the sacrifice of this war, however long it may be protracted, worth all the tribulation it has brought or may bring us, to free our posterity from a heresy so full of evil to us and to them.

Notwithstandino; the vehemence with which this right is now asserted, the question, I am happy to believe, is not yet removed from the domain of argument which may be addressed, with some hope of patient consideration, to many honest minds in the South, to whom the disappointments of defeat or, at least, the delay of success, may have brought a calmer judgment and a more complacent temper. It is in that hope I expand the limits of this letter.

No one, I believe, has ever claimed Secession to be one of the rights acknowledged by the Constitution to reside in the States. The second section of the sixth article of the Constitution would seem to infer exactly the reverse. Its advocates generally claim it as a reserved or, more properly, an implied right, resulting from, what they assert to be, the original Sovereignty of the States. They say, that the States, being sovereign when they entered into the Union, and being the creators of the Union, necessarily retain all their original sovereignty — which they affirm to be inalienable by any compact — to be exercised whenever they think proper :

that, in fact, they are bound by the laws of the Union only as long as they choose to remain in it.

I have two objections to make to this statement. The first relates to the character and nature of the sovereignty claimed by the States, which I shall notice more at laro-e in a future letter, affirming, for the present, that the States possess no such sovereignty as is claimed for them. The second objection I make is — that, supposing a State to possess every attribute of sovereignty compatible with our system of government and to the fullest extent asserted by the defenders of the doctrine, it may, quite as effectively as an individual person, enter into a social or political compact and bind itself to the conditions and duties of that compact, even to the complete and perpetual surrender of its separate existence as an independent corporation.

This is precisely what the original States did, so far as they acted, as States, in forming the Constitution. But, combined with this State action in forming the Constitution, there was another party to the compact, more powerful than the States — the people of all the States, who designated themselves as " the people of the United States " — the nation < — who were the acknowledged repositories of all power, both over the States and over the National Government, and who, in that name, declared the supreme law by which both the National and State Governments were to be controlled in the due administration of the system they proposed to the country. In short, they, the people, created the United States and made them emphatically one nation, with supreme powers within the orbit assigned to it.

The question is simply reduced to this : Do the United States constitute a nation, or do they represent an agglomerate of nations, bound together by a temporary bond of a texture so feeble that any one may lawfully put an end to the combination whenever it may find a motive to do so ? Was it the intention of the States and the people really to construct a temporary alliance of separate nations, dependent for its duration upon a tenure so frail as the possible and probable discontent of a dominant party in any one of the associated nations ?

The answer to this question will lead us directly to a consideration of what we must suppose to be the common-sense view which the founders of the Government took ©f the enterprise they had in hand, — I mean to the estimate they made, whilst they were engaged in moulding the Constitution, of the object they intended to accomplish. This is an a priori view of' their purpose, and avoids all debate upon those subtleties of interpretation which, at a later day, ingenious logicians have invented to prove a right of secession.

What did the authors of the Constitution intend to establish, when they met together to frame a Constitution for the Government of the United States ?

I w^aive all reference to that record of historical facts, which is now extant, to prove that the controlling majority of the Convention discussed the question, and maturely decided that their purpose was to erect a nation out of Confederate States, which nation should possess every function of supremacy necessary to preserve its own existence ; and that to establish and secure such supremacy the several States should surrender, or, in more appropriate phrase, should be denied every attribute of sovereignty that could interfere with or impede the free and full exercise of the national sovereignty it was their design to create, and equally their declared intention to render perpetual.