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