Chapter VIII
Excited Condition of the South.--The John Brown Raid at Harper's Ferry.--Character of Brown.--Governor Wise.--Hot Temper.--Course of Republicans in Regard to John Brown.--Misunderstanding of the Two Sections.--Assembling of the Charleston Convention.--Position of Douglas and his Friends.--Imperious Demands of Southern Democrats. --Caleb Cushing selected for Chairman of the Convention.--The South has Control of the Committee on Resolutions.--Resistance of the Douglas Delegates.--They defeat the Report of the Committee.-- Delegates from Seven Southern States withdraw.--Convention unable to make a Nomination.--Adjourns to Baltimore.--Convention divides. --Nomination of both Douglas and Breckinridge.--Constitutional Union Convention.--Nomination of Bell and Everett.--The Chicago Convention.--Its Membership and Character.--Mr. Seward's Position. --His Disabilities.--Work of his Friends, Thurlow Weed and William M. Evarts.--Opposition of Horace Greeley.--Objections from Doubtful States.--Various Candidates.--Nomination of Lincoln and Hamlin.-- Four Presidential Tickets in the Field.--Animated Canvass.--The Long Struggle over.--The South defeated.--Election of Lincoln.-- Political Revolution of 1860 complete.
The South was unnaturally and unjustifiably excited. The people of the slave States could not see the situation accurately, but, like a man with disordered nerves, they exaggerated every thing. Their sense of proportion seemed to be destroyed, so that they could no longer perceive the intrinsic relation which one incident had to another. In this condition of mind, when the most ordinary events were misapprehended and mismeasured, they were startled and alarmed by an occurrence of extraordinary and exceptional character. On the quiet morning of October, 1859, with no warning whatever to the inhabitants, the United-States arsenal, at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, was found to be in the possession of an invading mob. The town was besieged, many of its citizens made prisoners, telegraph wires cut, railway-trains stopped by a force which the people, as they were aroused from sleep, had no means of estimating. A resisting body was soon organized, militia came in from the surrounding country, regular troops were hurried up from Washington. By the opening of the second day, a force of fifteen hundred men surrounded the arsenal, and, when the insurgents surrendered, it was found that there had been but twenty-two in all. Four were still alive, including their leader, John Brown.
JOHN BROWN AT HARPER'S FERRY.
Brown was a man of singular courage, perseverance, and zeal, but was entirely misguided and misinformed. He had conceived the utterly impracticable scheme of liberating the slaves of the South by calling on them to rise, putting arms in their hands, and aiding them to gain their freedom. He had borne a very conspicuous and courageous part in the Kansas struggles, and had been a terror to the slave-holders on the Missouri border. His bravery was of a rare type. He had no sense of fear. Governor Wise stated that during the fight, while Brown held the arsenal, with one of his sons lying dead beside him, another gasping with a mortal wound, he felt the pulse of the dying boy, used his own musket, and coolly commanded his men, all amid a shower of bullets from the attacking force. While of sound mind on most subjects, Brown had evidently lost his mental balance on the one topic of slavery. His scheme miscarried the moment its execution was attempted, as any one not blinded by fanaticism could have from the first foreseen.
The matter was taken up in hot wrath by the South, with Governor Wise in the lead. The design was not known to or approved by any body of men in the North; but an investigation was moved in the Senate, by Mr. Mason of Virginia, with the evident view of fixing the responsibility on the Northern people, or, at least, upon the Republican party. These men affected to see in John Brown, and his handful of followers, only the advance guard of another irruption of Goths and Vandals from the North, bent on inciting servile insurrection, on plunder, pillage, and devastation. Mr. Mason's committee found no sentiment in the North justifying Brown, but the irritating and offensive course of the Virginia senator called forth a great deal of defiant anti-slavery expression which, in his judgment, was tantamount to treason. Brown was tried and executed. He would not permit the plea of unsound mind to be made on his behalf, and to the end he behaved with that calm courage which always attracts respect and admiration. Much was made of the deliverance of the South, from a great peril, and every thing indicated that the John Brown episode was to be drawn into the political campaign as an indictment against anti-slavery men. It was loudly charged by the South, and by their partisans throughout the North, that such insurrections were the legitimate outgrowth of Republican teaching, and that the national safety demanded the defeat and dissolution of the Republican party. Thus challenged, the Republican party did not stand on the defensive. Many of its members openly expressed their pity for the zealot, whose rashness had led him to indefensible deeds and thence to the scaffold. On the day of his execution, bells were tolled in many Northern towns --not in approval of what Brown had done, but from compassion for the fate of an old man whose mind had become distempered by suffering, and by morbid reflection on the suffering of others; from a feeling that his sentence, in view of this fact, was severe; and lastly, and more markedly, as a Northern rebuke to the attempt on the part of the South to make a political issue from an occurrence which was as unforeseen and exceptional as it was deplorable.
The fear and agitation in the South were not feigned but real. Instead of injuring the Republican party, this very fact increased its strength in the North. The terror of the South at the bare prospect of a negro insurrection led many who had not before studied the slavery question to give serious heed to this phase of it. The least reflection led men to see that a domestic institution must be very undesirable which could keep an entire community of brave men in dread of some indefinable tragedy. Mobs and riots of much greater magnitude than the John Brown uprising had frequently occurred in the free States, and they were put down by the firm authority of law, without the dread hand of a spectre behind which might in a moment light the horizon with the conflagration of homes, and subject wives and daughters to a fate of nameless horror. Instead, therefore, of arresting the spread of Republican principles, the mad scheme of John Brown tended to develop and strengthen them. The conviction grew rapidly that if slavery could produce such alarm and such demoralization in a strong State like Virginia, inhabited by a race of white men whose courage was never surpassed, it was not an institution to be encouraged, but that its growth should be prohibited in the new communities where its weakening and baleful influence was not yet felt.
Sentiment of this kind could not be properly comprehended in the South. It was honestly misrepresented by some, willfully misrepresented by others. All construed it into a belief, on the part of a large proportion of the Northern people, that John Brown was entirely justifiable. His wild invasion of the South, they apprehended, would be repeated as opportunity offered on a larger scale and with more deadly purpose. This opinion was stimulated and developed for political ends by many whose intelligence should have led them to more enlightened views. False charges being constantly repeated and plied with incessant zeal, the most radical misconception became fixed in the Southern mind. It was idle for the Republican party to declare that their aim was only to prevent the extension of slavery to free territory, and that they were pledged not to interfere with its existence in the States. Such distinctions were not accepted by the Southern people. Their leaders had taught them that the one necessarily involved the other, and that a man who was in favor of the Wilmot Proviso was as bitter an enemy to the South as one who incited a servile insurrection. These views were unceasingly pressed upon the South by the Northern Democracy, who, in their zeal to defeat the Republicans at home, did not scruple to misrepresent their aims in the most reckless manner. They were constantly misleading the public opinion of the slave States, until at last the South recognized no difference between the creed of Seward and the creed of Gerrit Smith, and held Lincoln responsible for all the views and expressions of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. The calling of a National Republican Convention was to their disordered imagination a threat of destruction. The success of its candidates would, in their view, be just cause for resistance outside the pale of the Constitution.
MEETING OF CHARLESTON CONVENTION.
It was at the height of this overwrought condition of the Southern mind, that the National Convention of the Democratic party met at Charleston on the 23d of April, 1860. The convention had been assembled in South Carolina, as the most discontented and extreme of Southern States, in order to signify that the Democracy could harmonize on her soil, and speak peace to the nation through the voice which had so often spoken peace before. But the Northern Democrats failed to comprehend their Southern allies. In their anxiety to impress the slave-holders with the depth and malignity of Northern anti-slavery feeling, they had unwittingly implicated themselves as accessories to the crime they charged on others. If they were, in fact, the friends to the South which they so loudly proclaimed themselves to be, now was the time to show their faith by their works. The Southern delegates had come to the convention in a truculent spirit,--as men who felt that they were enduring wrongs which must then and there be righted. They had a grievance for which they demanded redress, as a preliminary step to further conference. They wanted no evasion, they would accept no delay. The Northern delegates begged for the nomination of Douglas as the certain method of defeating the Republicans, and asked that they might not be borne down by a platform which they could not carry in the North. The Southern delegates demanded a platform which should embody the Constitutional rights of the slave-holder, and they would not qualify or conceal their requirements. If the North would sustain those rights, all would be well. If the North would not sustain them, it was of infinite moment to the South to be promptly and definitely advised of the fact. The Southern delegates were not presenting a particular man as candidate. On that point they would be liberal and conciliatory. But they were fighting for a principle, and would not surrender it or compromise it.
The supporters of Douglas from the North saw that they would be utterly destroyed at home if they consented to the extreme Southern demand. Their destruction would be equally sure even with Douglas as their candidate if the platform should announce principles which he had been controverting ever since his revolt against the Lecompton bill. For the first time in the history of national Democratic conventions the Northern delegates refused to submit to the exactions of the South. Hitherto platforms had been constructed just as Southern men dictated. Candidates had been taken as their preference directed. But now the Northern men, pressed by the rising tide of Republicanism in every free State, demanded some ground on which they could stand and make a contest at home.
PROCEEDINGS OF CHARLESTON CONVENTION.
Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts was chosen President of the Convention. The political career of Mr. Cushing had not been distinguished for steady adherence to party. He was elected to Congress in 1834, as representative from the Essex district in Massachusetts. He was at that time a zealous member of the Whig party, and was active on the Northern or anti-slavery side in the discussions relating to the "right of petition." He served in the House for eight years. After the triumph of Harrison in 1840, Mr. Cushing evidently aspired to be a party leader. In the quarrel which ensued between President Tyler and Mr. Clay, he saw an opportunity to gratify his ambition by adhering to the administration. This brought him into very close relations with Mr. Webster, who remained in Tyler's Cabinet after his colleagues retired, and threw him at the same time into rank antagonism with Mr. Clay, to whose political fortunes he had previously been devoted. In view of the retirement of Mr. Webster from the State Department in 1843, President Tyler nominated Mr. Cushing for Secretary of the Treasury, but the Whig senators, appreciating his power and influence in that important position, procured his rejection. Some Democratic votes from the South were secured against him because of his course in the House of Representatives. The President then nominated him as Commissioner to China, and he was promptly confirmed. Oriental diplomatists never encountered a minister better fitted to meet them with their own weapons.
Upon his return home, Mr. Cushing found that Mr. Webster had resumed his place as the leader of the Northern Whigs. Mr. Clay had meanwhile been defeated for the Presidency, his followers were discouraged, the administration of Mr. Polk was in power. Mr. Cushing at once joined the Democracy, and was made a Brigadier- General in the army raised for the war with Mexico. From that time onward he became a partisan of the extreme State-rights school of the Southern Democracy, and was appropriately selected for Attorney- General by President Pierce in 1853. In conjunction with Jefferson Davis, he was considered to be the guiding and controlling force in the administration. His thorough education, his remarkable attainments, his eminence in the law, his ability as an advocate, rendered his active co-operation of great value to the pro-slavery Democrats of the South. He was naturally selected for the important and difficult duty of presiding over the convention whose deliberations were to affect the interests of the Government, and possibly the fate of the Union.
It was soon evident that the South would have every advantage in the convention which an intelligent and skillful administration of parliamentary law could afford. Without showing unfairness, the presiding officer, especially in a large and boisterous assembly, can impart confidence and strength to the side with which he may sympathize. But, apart from any power to be derived from having the chairman of the convention, the South had a more palpable advantage from the mode in which the standing committees must, according to precedent, be constituted. As one member must be taken from each State, the Southern men obtained the control of all the committees, from the fact that the delegates from California and Oregon steadily voted with them. There were thirty-three States in the Union in 1860,--eighteen free and fifteen slave-holding. California and Oregon, uniting with the South, gave to that section seventeen, and left to the North but sixteen on all the committees. The Democratic delegates from the Pacific States assumed a weighty responsibility in thus giving to the Disunionists of the South preliminary control of the convention, by permitting them to shape authoritatively all the business to be submitted. It left the real majority of the convention in the attitude of a protesting minority. The Southern majority of one on the committees was fatal to Democratic success. In a still more important aspect its influence was in the highest degree prejudicial to the Union of the States.
Constituted in the manner just indicated, the Committee on Resolutions promptly and unanimously agreed on every article of the Democratic creed, except that relating to slavery. Here they divided, stubbornly and irreconcilably. The fifteen slave States, re-enforced by California and Oregon, gave to the Southern interest a majority of one vote on the committee. The other free States, sixteen in all, were hostile to the extreme Southern demands, and reported a resolution, which they were willing to accept. The South required an explicit assertion of the right of citizens to settle in the Territories with their slaves,--a right not "to be destroyed or impaired by Congressional or Territorial legislation." They required the further declaration that it is the duty of the Federal Government, when necessary, to protect slavery "in the Territories, and wherever else its constitutional authority extends." This was in substance, and almost identically in language, the extreme creed put forth by the Southern Democratic senators in the winter of 1858-59, after the "popular sovereignty" campaign of Douglas against Lincoln. It was the most advanced ground ever taken by the statesmen of the South, and its authorship was generally ascribed to Judah F. Benjamin, senator from Louisiana. Its introduction in the Charleston platform was intended apparently as an insult to Douglas. The evident purpose was to lay down doctrines and prescribe tests which Douglas could not accept, and thus to exclude him, not only from candidacy, but from further participation in the councils of the party.
QUARREL OF DEMOCRATIC FACTIONS.
The courage of the Northern Democrats was more conspicuously shown in their resistance to these demands than in the declarations which they desired to substitute. They quietly abandoned all their assertions in regard to popular sovereignty, refrained from any protest against the doctrine that the Constitution carried slavery as far as its jurisdiction extended, and contented themselves with a resolution that "inasmuch as differences of opinion exist in the Democratic party as to the nature and extent of the powers of a Territorial Legislature, and as to the powers and duties of Congress under the Constitution of the United States over the institution of slavery within the Territories, the Democratic party will abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States upon questions of Constitutional law." This was perhaps the best device practicable at the time; and had it been adopted with Douglas as the candidate, and a united Democracy supporting him, it is not improbable that a successful campaign might have been made. But it was a makeshift, uncandid, unfair, cunningly contrived to evade the full responsibility of the situation. It was a temporizing expedient, and did not frankly meet the question which was engaging the thoughts of the people. Had it succeeded, nothing would have been settled. Every thing would have been postponed, and the crisis would have inevitably recurred. So far as the Supreme Court could determine the questions at issue, it had already been done in the Dred Scott decision; and that decision, so far from being final, was a part of the current controversy. There was, therefore, neither logic nor principle in the proposition of the Douglas minority. The Southern delegates keenly realized this fact, and refused to accept the compromise. They could not endure the thought of being placed in a position which was not only evasive, but might be deemed cowardly. They were brave men, and wished to meet the question bravely. They knew that the Republicans in their forthcoming convention would explicitly demand the prohibition of slavery in the Territories. To hesitate or falter in making an equally explicit assertion of their own faith would subject them to fatal assault from their slave-holding constituencies.
The Douglas men would not yield. They were enraged by the domineering course of the Southern Democrats. They could not comprehend why they should higgle about the language of the platform when they could carry the slave States on the one form of expression as well as the other. In the North it was impossible for the Democrats to succeed with the Southern platform, but in the South it was, in their judgment, entirely easy to carry the Douglas platform. From the committee the contest was transferred to the convention, and there the Douglas men were in a majority. They did not hesitate to use their strength, and by a vote of 165 to 138 they substituted the minority platform for that of the majority. It was skillfully accomplished under the lead of Henry B. Payne of Ohio and Benjamin Samuels of Iowa. The total vote of the convention was 303,--the number of Presidential electors; and every vote had been cast on the test question. The South voted solidly in the negative, and was aided by the vote of California and Oregon, and a few scattering delegates from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The other fourteen States of the North voted unanimously on the side of Douglas, and gave him a majority of twenty-seven.
The Northern victory brought with it a defeat. A large number of the Southern delegates, though fairly and honorably outvoted, refused to abide by the decision. Seven States--Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas--withdrew from the convention, and organized a separate assemblage, presided over by Senator James A. Bayard of Delaware. By this defection the Douglas men were left in absolute control of the convention. But the friends of Douglas fatally obstructed his program by consenting to the two-thirds rule, so worded as to required that proportion of a full convention to secure a nomination. The first vote disclosed the full strength of Douglas to be 152. He required 202 to be declared the nominee. After an indefinite number of ballots, it was found impossible to make a nomination; and on the 3d of May the convention adjourned to meet in Baltimore on the 18th of June. In the intervening weeks it was hoped that a more harmonious spirit would return to the party. But the expectation was vain. The differences were more pronounced than ever when the convention re-assembled, and, all efforts to find a common basis of action having failed, the convention divided. The Southern delegates with California and Oregon, and with some scattering members from other States, among whom were Caleb Cushing and Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts, nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky for President, and Joseph Lane of Oregon for Vice-President. The Northern convention, with a few scattering votes from the South, nominated Stephen A. Douglas for President, and Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia for Vice-President. Of the seventeen States that made up the Breckinridge convention, it was deemed probable that he could carry all. Of the sixteen that voted for Douglas, it was difficult to name one in which with a divided party he could be sure of victory. United in support of either candidate, the party could have made a formidable contest, stronger in the North with Douglas, stronger in the South with Breckinridge. Had the Democracy presented Douglas and Breckinridge as their National nominees, they would have combined all the elements of strength in their party. But passion and prejudice prevented. The South was implacable toward Douglas, and deliberately resolved to accept defeat rather than secure a victory under his lead.
DISRUPTION OF THE DEMOCRACY.
The disruption of the Democracy was undoubtedly hastened by the political events which had occurred since the adjournment at Charleston. An organization, styling itself the Constitutional- Union Party, representing the successors of the Old Whigs and Americans, had met in Baltimore, and nominated John Bell of Tennessee for President, and Edward Everett of Massachusetts for Vice-President. The strength of the party was in the South. In the slave States it formed the only opposition to the Democratic party, and was as firm in defense of the rights of the slave-holder as its rival. Its members had not been so ready to repeal the Missouri Compromise as the Democrats, and they were unrelenting in their hostility to Douglas, and severe in their exposure of his dogma of popular sovereignty. They had effectively aided in bringing both the doctrine and its author into disrepute in the South, and, if the Democrats had ventured to nominate Douglas, they had their weapons ready for vigorous warfare against him.
With a Southern slave-holder like Mr. Bell at the head of the ticket, and a Northern man of Mr. Everett's well-known conservatism associated with him, the Constitutional-Union Party was in a position to make a strong canvass against Douglas in the South. It was this fact which, on the re-assembling of the Democratic convention at Baltimore, had increased the hostility of the South to Douglas, and made their leaders firm in their resolution not to accept him. Had the Union party nominated a Northern man instead of Mr. Bell for President, the case might have been different for Douglas; but the Southern Democrats feared that their party would be endangered in half the slave States if they should present Douglas as a candidate against a native Southerner and slave-holder of Bell's character and standing. If they were to be beaten in the contest for the Presidency, they were determined to retain, if possible, the control of their States, and not to risk their seats in the Senate and the House in a desperate struggle for Douglas. It would be poor recompense to them to recover certain Northern States from the Republicans, if at the same time, and by co-ordinate causes, an equal number of Southern States should be carried by Bell, and the destiny of the South be committed to a conservative party, which would abandon threats and cultivate harmony. Bell's nomination had, therefore, proved the final argument against the acceptance of Douglas by the Southern Democracy.
Meanwhile, between the adjournment of the Democratic convention at Charleston, and its re-assembling at Baltimore, the Republicans had held their national convention at Chicago. It was a representative meeting of the active and able men of both the old parties in the North, who had come together on the one overshadowing issue of the hour. Differing widely on many other questions, inheriting their creeds from antagonistic organizations of the past, they thought alike on the one subject of putting a stop to the extension of slavery. Those who wished to go farther were restrained, and an absolute control of opinion and action was commanded on this one line. In the entire history of party conventions, not one can be found so characteristic, so earnest, so determined to do the wisest thing, so little governed by personal consideration, so entirely devoted to one absorbing idea. It was made up in great part of young men, though there were gray-haired veterans in sufficient number to temper action with discretion. A large proportion of the delegates were afterwards prominent in public life. At least sixty of them, till then unknown beyond their districts, were sent to Congress. Many became governors of their States, and in other ways received marks of popular favor. It was essentially a convention of the free States--undisguisedly sectional in the political nomenclature of the day. The invitation was general, but, in the larger portion of the South, no one could be found who would risk his life by attending as a delegate. Nevertheless, there were delegates present from the five slave States which bordered on the free States, besides a partial and irregular representation from Texas.
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION.
The anti-slavery character of the assemblage was typified by the selection of David Wilmot for temporary chairman, and its conservative side by the choice of an old Webster Whig, in the person of George Ashmun of Massachusetts, for permanent president. This tendency to interweave the radical and conservative elements, and, where practicable, those of Whig with those of Democratic antecedents, was seen in many delegations. John A. Andrew and George S. Boutwell came from Massachusetts, William M. Evarts and Preston King from New York, Thaddeus Stevens and Andrew H. Reeder from Pennsylvania, Thomas Corwin and Joshua R. Giddings from Ohio, David Davis and N. B. Judd from Illinois. Outside of the regular delegations, there were great crowds of earnest men in Chicago, all from the free States. The number in attendance was reckoned by tens of thousands. Considering the restricted facilities for travel at that time, the multitude was surprising and significant. The whole mass was inspired with energy, and believed, without shadow of doubt, that they had come to witness the nomination of the next President of the United States. Confidence of strength is as potential an element in a political canvass as in a military campaign, and never was a more defiant sense of power exhibited than by the Chicago convention of 1860 and by the vast throng which surrounded its meetings. Such a feeling is contagious, and it spread from that centre until it enveloped the free States.
The impression in the country, for a year preceding the convention, was that Mr. Seward would be nominated. As the time drew nigh, however, symptoms of dissent appeared in quarters where it had not been expected. New parties are proverbially free from faction and jealousy. Personal antagonisms, which come with years, had not then been developed in the Republican ranks. It was not primarily a desire to promote the cause of other candidates which led to the questioning of Mr. Seward's availability, nor was there any withholding of generous recognition and appreciation of all that he had done for Republican principles. His high character was gladly acknowledged, his eminent ability conceded, the magnitude and unselfishness of his work were everywhere praised. Without his aid, the party could not have been organized. But for his wise leadership, it would have been wrecked in the first years of its existence. He was wholly devoted to its principles. He had staked every thing upon its success.
Mr. Seward had, however, some weak points as a candidate. A large proportion of the Republicans had been connected with the American organization, and still cherished some of its principles. Mr. Seward had been the determined foe of that party. In battling for the rights of the negro, he deemed it unwise and inconsistent to increase the disabilities of the foreign-born citizen. His influence, more than that of any other man, had broken down the proscriptive creed of the American party, and turned its members into the Republican ranks. But many of them came reluctantly, and in a complaining mood against Mr. Seward. This led political managers to fear that Mr. Seward would lose votes which another candidate might secure. Others though that the radicalism of Mr. Seward would make him weak, where a more conservative representative of Republican principles might be strong. He had been at the forefront of the battle for twelve years in the Senate, and every extreme thing he had said was remembered to his injury. He had preached the doctrine of an "irrepressible conflict" between the forces of slavery and the forces of freedom, and timid men dreaded such a trial as his nomination would presage. The South had made continuous assault on this speech, and on the particular phrase which distinguished it, and had impressed many Northern men with the belief that Mr. Seward had gone too far. In short, he had been too conspicuous, and too many men had conceived predilections against him.
When the convention assembled, notwithstanding all adverse influences, Mr. Seward was still the leading and most formidable candidate. His case was in strong and skillful hands. Mr. Thurlow Weed, who had been his lifelong confidential friend, presented his claims, before the formal assembling of the convention, with infinite tact. Mr. Weed, though unable to make a public speech, was the most persuasive of men in private conversation. He was quiet, gentle, and deferential in manner. He grasped a subject with a giant's strength, presented its strong points, and marshaled its details with extraordinary power. Whatever Mr. Weed might lack was more than supplied by the eloquent tongue of William M. Evarts. Seldom if ever in the whole field of political oratory have the speeches of Mr. Evarts at Chicago been equaled. Even those who most decidedly differed from him followed him from one delegation to another allured by the charm of his words. He pleaded for the Republic, for the party that could save it, for the great statesman who had founded the party, and knew where and how to lead it. He spoke as one friend for another, and the great career of Mr. Seward was never so illumined as by the brilliant painting of Mr. Evarts.
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION.
With all the potential efforts and influences in his behalf, Mr. Seward was confronted with obstacles which were insuperable. He was seriously injured by the open defection of Horace Greeley. Not able, or even desirous, to appear on the New-York delegation, Mr. Greeley sat in the convention as a representative from Oregon. The old firm of Seward, Weed, and Greeley, according to his own humorous expression, had been dissolved by the withdrawal of the junior partner; and a bitter dissension had in fact existed for six years without public knowledge. With his great influence in the agricultural regions of the country, Mr. Greeley was enabled to turn a strong current of popular feeling against the eminent senator from New York. Mr. Seward sustained further injury by the action of the States which were regarded as politically doubtful. Pennsylvania and Indiana took part against him. Henry S. Lane had just been nominated for governor of Indiana, with Oliver P. Morton --not then known beyond his State--for lieutenant-governor. It was understood that Lane would be sent to the Senate if the Republicans should carry the State, and that Morton, whose strength of character was known and appreciated at home, would become governor. Both candidates, having each a personal stake in the contest, united in declaring that the nomination of Mr. Seward meant a Democratic victory in Indiana. Andrew G. Curtin, who had been nominated for governor of Pennsylvania, gave the same testimony respecting that State; and his judgment was sustained by his faithful friend and adviser, Alexander K. McClure. Delegates from other States, where the contest was close, sympathized with the views of Pennsylvania and Indiana, and there was a rapid and formidable combination against Mr. Seward. The reformer and his creed rarely triumph at the same time, and the fate of Mr. Seward was about to add one more illustration of this truth.
But if not Mr. Seward, who? The Blairs and Horace Greeley answered, "Edward Bates of Missouri,"--an old Whig, a lawyer of ability, a gentleman of character. Though still in vigorous life, he had sat in the convention which framed the constitution of Missouri in 1820. He had revered the Compromise of that year, and had joined the Republicans in resentment of its repeal. Ohio, in a half- hearted manner, presented Salmon P. Chase, who, with great ability and spotless fame, lacked the elements of personal popularity. Pennsylvania, with an imposing delegation, named Simon Cameron; New Jersey desired William L. Dayton; Vermont wanted Jacob Collamer; and delegates here and there suggested Judge McLean or Benjamin F. Wade. The popular candidate of 1856, John C. Fremont, had forbidden the use of his name.
Illinois had a candidate. He was held back with sound discretion, and at the opportune moment presented with great enthusiasm. Ever since the discussion with Douglas, Mr. Lincoln had occupied a prominent place before the public; but there had been little mention of his name for the Presidency. His friends at home had apparently hoped to nominate him for Vice-President on the ticket with Mr. Seward. But as the proofs of hostility to Seward multiplied, speculation was busy as to the man who could be taken in his stead. At the moment when doubts of Seward's success were most prevalent, and when excitement in regard to the nomination was deepest, the Republicans of Illinois met in State convention. It was but a few days in advance of the assembling of the National convention. By a spontaneous movement they nominated Mr. Lincoln for President. It was a surprise to the convention that did it. The man who created the great outburst for Mr. Lincoln in that Illinois assemblage, who interpreted the feelings of delegates to themselves, was Richard J. Oglesby, a speaker of force and eloquence, afterward honorably prominent and popular in military and civil life. He was seconded with unanimity, and with boisterous demonstrations of applause. The whole State was instantly alive and ablaze for Lincoln. A delegation competent for its work was sent to the convention. David Davis, O. H. Browning, Burton C. Cook, Gustavus Koerner, and their associates, met no abler body of men in a convention remarkable for its ability. They succeeded in the difficult task assigned to them. They did not in their canvass present Mr. Lincoln as a rival to Mr. Seward, but rather as an admirer and friend. The votes which were given to Mr. Lincoln on the first ballot were, in large part, from delegations that could not be induced in any event to vote for Mr. Seward. The presentation of Mr. Lincoln's name kept these delegates from going to a candidate less acceptable to the immediate friends of Mr. Seward. No management could have been more skillful, no tact more admirable. The result attested the vigor and wisdom of those who had Mr. Lincoln's fortunes in charge.
Mr. Seward's support, however, after all the assaults made upon it, was still very formidable. On the first ballot he received 1751/2 votes, while Mr. Lincoln received but 102. Delegates to the number of 190 divided their votes between Bates, Chase, Cameron, Dayton, McLean, and Collamer. They held the balance of power, and on the second ballot it was disclosed that the mass of them favored Mr. Lincoln as against Mr. Seward. The latter gained but nine votes, carrying his total up to 1841/2, while Mr. Lincoln received 181. On the third ballot, Mr. Lincoln was nominated by general consent.
NOMINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
It is one of the contradictions not infrequently exhibited in the movement of partisan bodies, that Mr. Seward was defeated because of his radical expressions on the slavery questions, while Mr. Lincoln was chosen in spite of expressions far more radical than those of Mr. Seward. The "irrepressible conflict" announced by Mr. Seward at Rochester did not go so far as Mr. Lincoln's declaration at Springfield, that "the Union could not exist half slave, half free." Neither Mr. Seward nor Mr. Lincoln contemplated the destruction of the government, and yet thousands had been made to believe that Mr. Seward made the existence of the Union depend on the abolition of slavery. Mr Lincoln had announced the same doctrine in advance of Mr. Seward, with a directness and bluntness which could not be found in the more polished phrase of the New-York senator. Despite these facts, a large number of delegates from doubtful States--delegates who held the control of the convention --supported Mr. Lincoln, on the distinct ground that the anti- slavery sentiment which they represented was not sufficiently radical to support the author of the speech in which had been proclaimed the doctrine of an "irrepressible conflict" between freedom and slavery.
In a final analysis of the causes and forces which nominated Mr. Lincoln, great weight must be given to the influence which came from the place where the convention was held, and from the sympathy and pressure of the surrounding crowd. Illinois Republicans, from Cairo to the Wisconsin line, were present in uncounted thousands. The power of the mob in controlling public opinion is immeasurable. In monarchical governments it has dethroned kings, and in republics it dictates candidates. Had the conditions been changed and the National convention of the Republicans assembled in Albany, it is scarcely to be doubted that Mr. Seward would have been nominated. It is quite certain that Mr. Lincoln would not have been nominated. The great achievement at Chicago was the nomination of Mr. Lincoln without offending the supporters of Seward. This happy result secured victory for the party in the national contest. No wounds were inflicted, no hatreds planted, no harmonies disturbed. The devotion to the cause was so sincere and so dominant, that the personal ambitions of a lifetime were subordinated in an instant upon the demand of the popular tribunal whose decision was final. The discipline of defeat was endured with grace, and self-abnegation was accepted as the supreme duty of the hour.
A wise selection was made for Vice-President. Hannibal Hamlin belonged originally to the school of Democrats who supported Jackson, and who took Silas Wright as their model. After the repeal of the Missouri Compromise he separated himself from his old associates, and proved to be a powerful factor in the formation of the Republican party. His candidacy for Governor of Maine, in 1856, broke down the Democratic party in that State, and gave a great impulse to the Republican campaign throughout the country. In strong common sense, in sagacity and sound judgment, in rugged integrity of character, Mr. Hamlin has had no superior among public men. It is generally fortunate for a political party if the nominee for Vice- President does not prove a source of weakness in the popular canvass. Mr. Hamlin proved a source of strength, and the imparted confidence and courage to the great movement against the Democratic party.
In the four Presidential tickets in the field, every shade of political opinion was represented, but only two of the candidates embodied positive policies. Mr. Lincoln was in favor of prohibiting the extension of slavery by law. Mr. Breckinridge was in favor of protecting its extension by law. No issue could have been more pronounced than the one thus presented. Mr. Douglas desired to evade it, and advocated his doctrine of non-intervention which was full of contradictions, and was in any event offensive to the anti- slavery conscience. It permitted what was considered a grievous moral wrong to be upheld, if a majority of white men would vote in favor of upholding it. Mr. Bell desired to avoid the one question that was in the popular mind, and to lead the people away from every issue except the abstract one of preserving the Union. By what means the Union could be preserved against the efforts of Southern secessionists, Mr. Bell's party did not explain. The popular apprehension was that Mr. Bell would concede all they asked, and insure the preservation of the Union by yielding to the demands of the only body of men who threatened to destroy it.
ELECTION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
As the canvass grew animated, and the questions at issue were elaborately discussed before the people, the conviction became general that the supporters of Breckinridge contemplated the destruction of the government. This was not simply the belief of the Republicans. It was quite as general among the supporters of Douglas and the supporters of Bell. In an earlier stage of the anti-slavery contest, this fact would have created great alarm in the Northern States, but now the people would not yield to such a fear. They were not only inspired by the principles they upheld, but there was a general desire to test the question thus presented. If a President, constitutionally elected, could not be inaugurated, it was better then and there to ascertain the fact than to postpone the issue by an evasion or a surrender. The Republicans were constantly strengthened by recruits from the Douglas ranks. Many of the friends of Douglas had become enraged by the course of the Southern Democrats, and now joined the Republicans, in order to force the issue upon the men who had been so domineering and offensive in the Charleston and Baltimore conventions. Mr. Lincoln gained steadily and derived great strength from the division of his opponents. But their union could not have defeated him. In New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, but one electoral ticket was presented against Mr. Lincoln, his opponents having coalesced in a joint effort to defeat him. In New Jersey, the "Fusion" ticket, as the combination was termed, was made up of three Douglas, two Bell, and two Breckinridge representatives. Owing to the fact that some of the supporters of Douglas refused to vote for the Breckinridge and Bell candidates, Mr. Lincoln received four electoral votes in New Jersey, though, in the aggregate popular vote, the majority was against him. In California and Oregon he received pluralities. In every other free State he had an absolute majority. Breckinridge carried every slave State except four,--Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee voting for Bell, and Missouri voting for Douglas.
The long political struggle was over. A more serious one was about to begin. For the first time in the history of the government, the South was defeated in a Presidential election where an issue affecting the slavery question was involved. There had been grave conflicts before, sometimes followed by compromise, oftener by victory for the South. But the election of 1860 was the culmination of a contest which was foreshadowed by the Louisiana question of 1812; which became active and angry over the admission of Missouri; which was revived by the annexation of Texas, and still further inflamed by the Mexican war; which was partially allayed by the compromises of 1850; which was precipitated for final settlement by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, by the consequent struggle for mastery in Kansas, and by the aggressive intervention of the Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott. These are the events which led, often slowly, but always with directness, to the political revolution of 1860. The contest was inevitable, and the men whose influence developed and encouraged it may charitably be regarded as the blind agents of fate. But if personal responsibility for prematurely forcing the conflict belongs to any body of men, it attaches to those who, in 1854, broke down the adjustments of 1820 and of 1850. If the compromises of those years could not be maintained, the North believed that all compromise was impossible; and they prepared for the struggle which this fact foreshadowed. They had come to believe that the house divided against itself could not stand; that the Republic half slave, half free, could not endure. They accepted as their leader the man who proclaimed these truths. The peaceful revolution was complete when Abraham Lincoln was chosen President of the United States.
In the closing and more embittered period of the political struggle over the question of Slavery, public opinion in the South grew narrow, intolerant, and cruel. The mass of the Southern people refused to see any thing in the anti-slavery movement except fanaticism; they classed Abolitionists with the worst of malefactors; they endeavored to shut out by the criminal code and by personal violence the enlightened and progressive sentiment of the world. Their success in arousing the prejudice and unifying the action of the people in fifteen States against the surging opinion of Christendom is without parallel. Philanthropic movements elsewhere were regarded with jealousy and distrust. Southern statesmen of the highest rank looked upon British emancipation in the West Indies as designedly hostile to the prosperity and safety of their own section, and as a plot for the ultimate destruction of the Republic. Each year the hatred against the North deepened, and the boundary between the free States and the slave States was becoming as marked as a line of fire. The South would see no way of dealing with Slavery except to strengthen and fortify it at every point. Its extinction they would not contemplate. Even a suggestion for its amelioration was regarded as dangerous to the safety of the State and to the sacredness of the family.
BRITISH SUPPORT OF THE SLAVE-TRADE.
Southern opinion had not always been of this type. It had changed with the increase in the number of slaves, and with the increased profit from their labor. Before the Revolutionary war, Virginia had earnestly petitioned George III. to prohibit the importation of slaves from Africa, and the answer of His Majesty was a peremptory instruction to the Royal Governor at Williamsburg, "not to assent to any law of the Colonial Legislature by which the importation of slaves should in any respect be prohibited or obstructed." Anti- slavery opinion was developed in a far greater degree in the American Colonies than in the mother country. When the Convention of 1787 inserted in the Federal Constitution a clause giving to Congress the power to abolish the slave-trade after the year 1808, they took a step far in advance of European opinion. A society was formed in London, in the year 1787, for the suppression of the slave-trade. Although it was organized under the auspices of the distinguished philanthropists, William Clarkson and Granville Sharp, it had at the time as little influence upon the popular opinion of England as the early efforts of William Lloyd Garrison and the Society for the Abolition of Domestic Slavery had upon the public opinion of the United States. It was not until 1791 that Mr. Wilberforce introduced in Parliament his first bill for the suppression of the slave-trade, and though he had the enlightened sympathy of Mr. Pitt, the eminent premier did not dare to make it a ministerial measure. The bill was rejected by a large vote. It was not until fifteen years later that the conscience of England won a victory over the organized capital engaged in the infamous traffic. It was the young and struggling Republic in America that led the way, and she led the way under the counsel and direction of Southern statesmen. American slave-holders were urging the abolition of the traffic while London merchants were using every effort to continue it, and while Bristol, the very headquarters of the trade, was represented in Parliament by Edmund Burke. Even among the literary men of England,--if Boswell's gossip may be trusted,--Dr. Johnson was peculiar in his hatred of the infamy--a hatred which is obsequious biographer mollifies to an "unfavorable notion," and officiously ascribes to "prejudice and imperfect or false information." The anti-slavery work of England was originally inspired from America, and the action of the British Parliament was really so directed as to make the prohibition of the slave-trade correspond in time with that prescribed in the Federal Constitution. The American wits and critics of that day did not fail to note the significance of the date, and to appreciate the statesmanship and philosophy which led the British Parliament to terminate the trade at the precise moment when the American Congress closed the market.
The slaves in the United States numbered about seven hundred thousand when Washington's administration was organized. They had increased to four millions when Lincoln was chosen President. Their number in 1860 was less in proportion to the white population than it was in 1789. The immigration of whites had changed the ratio. But the more marked and important change had been in the value of slave labor. In 1789 the slaves produced little or no surplus, and in many States were regarded as a burden. In 1860 they produced a surplus of at least three hundred millions of dollars. The power of agricultural production in the Southern States had apparently no limit. If the institution of Slavery could be rendered secure, the dominant minds of the South saw political power and boundless wealth within their grasp. They saw that they could control the product and regulate the price of a staple in constant demand among every people on the globe. The investment of the South in slaves represented a capital of two thousand millions of dollars, reckoned only upon the salable value of the chattel. Estimated by its capacity to produce wealth, the institution of Slavery represented to the white population of the South a sum vastly in excess of two thousand millions. Without slave-labor, the cotton, rice, and sugar lands were, in the view of Southern men, absolutely valueless. With the labor of the slave, they could produce three hundred millions a year in excess of the food required for the population. Three hundred millions a year represented a remunerative interest on a capital of five thousand millions of dollars. In the history of the world there has perhaps never been so vast an amount of productive capital firmly consolidated under one power, subject to the ultimate control and direction of so small a number of men.
THE SOUTH AND THE SLAVE-TRADE.
With such extraordinary results attained, the natural desire of slave-holders was to strive for development and expansion. They had in the South more land than could be cultivated by the slaves they then owned, or by their natural increase within any calculable period. So great was the excess of land that, at the time Texas was annexed, Senator Ashley of Arkansas declared that his State alone could, with the requisite labor, produce a larger cotton-crop than had ever been grown in the whole country. In the minds of the extreme men of the South the remedy was to be found in re- opening the African slave-trade. So considerate and withal so conservative a man as Alexander H. Stephens recognized the situation. When he retired from public service, at the close of the Thirty- sixth Congress, in 1859, he delivered an address to his constituents, which was in effect a full review of the Slavery question. He told them plainly that they could not keep up the race with the North in the occupation of new territory "unless they could get more Africans." He did not avowedly advocate the re-opening of the slave-trade, but the logic of his speech plainly pointed to that end.
John Forsythe of Alabama, an aggressive leader of the most radical pro-slavery type, carried the argument beyond the point where the prudence of Mr. Stephens permitted him to go. In recounting the triumphs of the South, he avowed that one stronghold remained to be carried, "the abrogation of the prohibition of the slave-trade." So eminent a man as William L. Yancey formally proposed in a Southern commercial convention, in 1858, that the South should demand the repeal of the laws "declaring the slave-trade to be piracy;" and Governor Adams of South Carolina pronounced those laws to be "a fraud upon the slave-holders of the South." The Governor of Mississippi went still farther, and exhibited a confidence in the scheme which was startling. He believed that "the North would not refuse so just a demand if the South should unitedly ask it." Jefferson Davis did not join in the movement, but expressed a hearty contempt for those "who prate of the inhumanity and sinfulness of the slave-trade."
Quotations of this character might be indefinitely multiplied. The leaders of public opinion in the Cotton States were generally tending in the same direction, and, in the language of Jefferson Davis, were basing their conclusion on "the interest of the South, and not on the interest of the African." Newspapers and literary reviews in the Gulf States were seconding and enforcing the position of their public men, and were gradually but surely leading the mind of the South to a formal demand for the privilege of importing Africans. A speaker in the Democratic National Convention at Charleston, personally engaged in the domestic slave-trade, frankly declared that the traffic in native Africans would be far more humane. The thirty thousand slaves annually taken from the border States to the cotton-belt represented so great an aggregation of misery, that the men engaged in conducting it were, even by the better class of slave-holders, regarded with abhorrence, and spoken of as infamous.
It is worthy of observation that the re-opening of the African slave-trade was not proposed in the South until after the Dred Scott decision. This affords a measure of the importance which pro-slavery statesmen attached to the position of the Supreme Court. In the light of these facts, the repeated protests of Senator Douglas "against such schemes as the re-opening of the African slave-trade" were full of significance; nor could any development of Southern opinion have vindicated more completely the truth proclaimed by Mr. Lincoln, that the country was destined to become wholly anti-slavery or wholly pro-slavery. The financial interest at stake in the fate of the institution was so vast, that Southern men felt impelled to seek every possible safeguard against the innumerable dangers which surrounded it. The revival of the African slave-trade was the last suggestion for its protection, and was the immediate precursor of its destruction.
In reckoning the wealth-producing power of the Southern States, the field of slave labor has been confined to the cotton-belt. In the more northern of the slave-holding States, free labor was more profitable, and hence the interest in Slavery was not so vital or so enduring as in the extreme South. There can be little doubt that the slave States of the border would have abolished the institution at an early period except for the fact that their slaves became a steady and valuable source of labor-supply for the increased demand which came from the constantly expanding area of cotton. But his did not create so palpable or so pressing an interest as was felt in the Gulf States, and the resentment caused by the election of Lincoln was proportionately less. The border States would perhaps have quietly accepted the result, however distasteful, except for the influence brought upon them from the extreme South, where the maintenance of Slavery was deemed vital to prosperity and to safety.
In the passions aroused by the agitation over slavery, Southern men failed to see (what in cooler moments they could readily perceive) that the existence of the Union and the guaranties of the Constitution were the shield and safeguard of the South. The long contest they had been waging with the anti-slavery men of the free States had blinded Southern zealots to the essential strength of their position so long as their States continued to be members of the Federal Union. But for the constant presence of national power, and its constant exercise under the provisions of the Constitution, the South would have had no protection against the anti-slavery assaults of the civilized world. Abolitionists from the very beginning of their energetic crusade against slavery had seen the Constitution standing in their way, and with the unsparing severity of their logic had denounced it as "a league with hell and a covenant with death." The men who were directing public opinion in the South were trying to persuade themselves, and had actually persuaded many of their followers, that the election of Lincoln was the overthrow of the Constitution, and that their safety in the Union was at an end. They frightened the people by Lincoln's declaration that the Republic could not exist half slave, half free. They would not hear his own lucid and candid explanation of his meaning, but chose rather to accept the most extreme construction which the pro-slavery literature and the excited harangues of a Presidential canvass had given to Mr. Lincoln's language.
SOUTHERN CONFIDENCE IN SECESSION.
The confidence of Southern men in their power to achieve whatever end they should propose was unbounded. They apparently did not stop to contemplate the effect upon slavery which a reckless course on their part might produce. Having been schooled to the utmost conservatism in affairs of government, they suddenly became rash and adventurous. They were apparently ready to put every thing to hazard, professing to believe that nothing could be as fatal as to remain under what they termed the "Government of Lincoln." They believed they could maintain themselves against physical force, but they took no heed of a stronger power which was sure to work against them. They disregarded the enlightened philanthropy and the awakened conscience which had abolished slavery in every other Republic of America, which had thrown the protection of law over the helpless millions of India, which had moved even the Russian Autocracy to consider the enfranchisement of the serf. They would not realize that the contest they were rashly inviting was not alone with the anti-slavery men of the free States, not alone with the spirit of loyalty to the Republic, but that it carried with it a challenge to the progress of civilization, and was a fight against the nineteenth century.
Chapter IX
The Tariff Question in its Relation to the Political Revolution of 1860.--A Century's Experience as to Best Mode of levying Duties.-- Original Course of Federal Government in Regard to Revenue.--First Tariff Act.--The Objects defined in a Preamble.--Constitutional Power to adopt Protective Measure.--Character of Early Discussions. --The Illustrious Men who participated.--Mr. Madison the Leader.-- The War Tariff of 1812.--Its High Duties.--The Tariff of 1816.-- Interesting Debate upon its Provisions.--Clay, Webster, and Calhoun take part.--Business Depression throughout the Country.--Continues until the Enactment of the Tariff of 1824.--Protective Character of that Tariff.--Still Higher Duties levied by the Tariff of 1828. --Southern Resistance to the Protective Principle.--Mr. Calhoun leads the Nullification Movement in South Carolina.--Compromise effected on the Tariff Question.--Financial Depression follows.-- Panic of 1837.--Protective Tariff passed in 1842.--Free-trade Principles triumph with the Election of President Polk.--Tariff of 1846.--Prosperous Condition of the Country.--Differences of Opinion as to the Causes.--Surplus Revenue.--Plethoric Condition of the Treasury.--Enactment of the Tariff of 1857.--Both Parties support it in Congress.--Duties lower than at Any Time since the War of 1812.--Panic of 1857.--Dispute as to its causes.--Protective and Free-trade Theories as presented by their Advocates.--Connection of the Tariff with the Election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency. --General Review.
The Slavery question was not the only one which developed into a chronic controversy between certain elements of Northern opinion and certain elements of Southern opinion. A review of the sectional struggle would be incomplete if it did not embrace a narrative of those differences on the tariff which at times led to serious disturbance, and, on one memorable occasion, to an actual threat of resistance to the authority of the government. The division upon the tariff was never so accurately defined by geographical lines as was the division upon slavery; but the aggressive elements on each side of both questions finally coalesced in the same States, North and South. Massachusetts and South Carolina marched in the vanguard of both controversies; and the States which respectively followed on the tariff issue were, in large part, the same which followed on the slavery question, on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line. Anti-slavery zeal and a tariff for protection went hand in hand in New England, while pro-slavery principles became nearly identical with free-trade in the Cotton States. If the rule had its exception, it was in localities where the strong pressure of special interest was operating, as in the case of the sugar-planter of Louisiana, who was willing to concede generous protection to the cotton-spinner of Lowell if he could thereby secure an equally strong protection, in his own field of enterprise, against the pressing competition of the island of Cuba.
PROTECTION AND FREE-TRADE SECTIONAL.
The general rule, after years of experimental legislation, resolved itself into protection in the one section and free-trade in the other. And this was not an unnatural distinction. Zeal against slavery was necessarily accompanied by an appreciation of the dignity of free labor; and free labor was more generously remunerated under the stimulus of protective laws. The same considerations produced a directly opposite conclusion in the South, where those interest in slave labor could not afford to build up a class of free laborers with high wages and independent opinions. The question was indeed one of the kind not infrequently occurring in the adjustment of public policies where the same cause is continually producing different and apparently contradictory effects when the field of its operation is changed.
The issues growing out of the subject of the tariff were, however, in many respects entirely distinct from the slavery question. The one involved the highest moral considerations, the other was governed solely by expediency. Whether one man could hold property in another was a question which took deep hold of the consciences of men, and was either right or wrong in itself. But whether the rate of duty upon a foreign import should be increased or lowered was a question to be settled solely by business and financial considerations. Slavery in the United States, as long experience had proved, could be most profitably employed in the cultivation of cotton. The cost of its production, in the judgment of those engaged in it, was increased by the operation of a tariff, whereas its price, being determined by the markets of the world, derived no benefit from protective duties. The clothing of the slave, the harness for the horses and mules, the ploughs, the rope, the bagging, the iron ties, were all, they contended, increased in price to the planter without any corresponding advance in the market value of the product. In the beginning of the controversy it was expected that the manufacture of cotton would grow up side by side with its production, and that thus the community which produced the fibre would share in the profit of the fabric. During this period the representatives from the Cotton States favored high duties; but as time wore on, and it became evident that slave-labor was not adapted to the factory, and that it was undesirable if not impossible to introduce free white labor with remunerative wages side by side with unpaid slave-labor, the leading minds of the South were turned against the manufacturing interest, and desired to legislate solely in aid of the agricultural interest.
It was this change in the South that produced the irritating discussions in Congress,--discussions always resulting in sectional bitterness and sometimes threatening the public safety. The tariff question has in fact been more frequently and more elaborately debated than any other issue since the foundation of the Federal Government. The present generation is more familiar with questions relating to slavery, to war, to reconstruction; but as these disappear by permanent adjustment the tariff returns, and is eagerly seized upon by both sides to the controversy. More than any other issue, it represents the enduring and persistent line of division between the two parties which in a generic sense have always existed in the United States;--the party of strict construction and the party of liberal construction, the party of State Rights and the party of National Supremacy, the party of stinted revenue and restricted expenditure, and the party of generous income with its wise application to public improvement; the part, in short, of Jefferson as against the party of Hamilton, the party of Jackson as against that of Clay, the party of Buchanan and Douglas as against that of Lincoln and Seward. Taxes, whether direct or indirect, always interest the mass of mankind, and the differences of the systems by which they shall be levied and collected will always present an absorbing political issue. Public attention may be temporarily engrossed by some exigent subject of controversy, but the tariff alone steadily and persistently recurs for agitation, and for what is termed settlement. Thus far in our history, settlement has only been the basis of new agitation, and each successive agitation leads again to new settlement.
EXPERIENCE IN TARIFF LEGISLATION.
After the experience of nearly a century on the absorbing question of the best mode of levying duties on imports, the divergence of opinion is as wide and as pronounced as when the subject first engaged the attention of the Federal Government. Theories on the side of high duties and theories on the side of low duties are maintained with just as great vigor as in 1789. In no question of a material or financial character has there been so much interest displayed as in this. On a question of sentiment and of sympathy like that of slavery, feeling is inevitable; but it has been matter of surprise that the adjustment of a scale of duties on importations of foreign merchandise should be accompanied, as it often has been, by displays of excitement often amounting to passion.
The cause is readily apprehended when it is remembered that the tariff question is always presented as one not merely affecting the general prosperity, but as specifically involving the question of bread to the millions who are intrusted with the suffrage. The industrial classes study the question closely; and, in many of the manufacturing establishments of the country, the man who is working for day wages will be found as keenly alive to the effect of a change in the protective duty as the stockholder whose dividends are to be affected. Thus capital and labor coalesce in favor of high duties to protect the manufacturer, and, united, they form a political force which has been engaged in an economic battle from the foundation of the government. Sometimes they have suffered signal defeat, and sometimes they have gained signal victories.
The landmarks which have been left in a century of discussion and of legislative experiment deserve a brief reference for a better understanding of the subject to-day. Our financial experience has been practically as extended as that of the older nations of Europe. When the Republic was organized, Political Economy as understood in the modern sense was in its elementary stage, and indeed could hardly be called a science. Systems of taxation were everywhere crude and ruthless, and were in large degree fashioned after the Oriental practice of mulcting the man who will pay the most and resist the least. Adam Smith had published his "Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" in the year of the Declaration of Independence. Between that time and the formation of the Federal Government his views had exerted no perceptible influence on the financial system of England. British industries were protected by the most stringent enactments of Parliament, and England was the determined enemy not only of free trade but of fair trade. The emancipated Colonies found therefore in the mother country the most resolute foe to their manufacturing and commercial progress. American statesmen exhibited wisdom, moderation, and foresight in overcoming the obstacles to the material prosperity of the new Republic.
When the administration of Washington was organized in 1789, the government which he represented did not command a single dollar of revenue. They inherited a mountain of debt from the Revolutionary struggle, they had no credit, and the only representative of value which they controlled was the vast body of public land in the North- west Territory. But this was unavailable as a resource for present needs, and called for expenditure in the extensive surveys which were a prerequisite to sale and settlement. In addition therefore to every other form of poverty, the new government was burdened in the manner so expressively described as land poor, which implies the ownership of a large extent of real estate constantly calling for heavy outlay, and yielding no revenue. The Federal Government had one crying need, one imperative demand,--money!
An immediate system of taxation was therefore required, and the newly organized Congress lost no time in proceeding to the consideration of ways and means. As soon as a quorum of each branch of Congress was found to be present, the House gave its attention to the pressing demand for money. They did not even wait for the inauguration of President Washington, but began nearly a month before that important event to prepare a revenue bill which might, at the earliest moment, be ready for the Executive approval. Duties on imports obviously afforded the readiest resource, and Congress devoted itself with assiduous industry to the consideration of that form of revenue. With the exception of an essential law directing the form of oath to be taken by the Federal officers, the tariff Act was the first passed by the new government. It was enacted indeed two months in advance of the law creating a Treasury Department, and providing for a Secretary thereof. The need of money was indeed so urgent that provision was made for raising it by duties on imports before the appointment of a single officer of the Cabinet was authorized. Even a Secretary of State, whose first duty it was to announce the organization of the government to foreign nations, was not nominated for a full month after the Act imposing duties had been passed.
THE TARIFF ENACTED BY FIRST CONGRESS.
All the issues involved in the new Act were elaborately and intelligently debated. The first Congress contained a large proportion of the men who had just before been engaged in framing the Federal Constitution, and who were therefore fresh from the councils which had carefully considered and accurately measured the force of every provision of that great charter of government. It is therefore a fact of lasting importance that the first tariff law enacted under the Federal Government set forth its object in the most succinct and explicit language. It opened, after the excellent fashion of that day, with a stately preamble beginning with the emphatic "whereas," and declaring that "it is necessary for the support of government, for the discharge of the debts of the United States, and for the encouragement and protection of manufactures, that duties be laid on imported goods, wares, and merchandise." Among the men who agreed to that declaration were some of the most eminent in our history. James Madison, then young enough to add junior to his name, was the most conspicuous; and associated with him were Richard Henry Lee, Theodorick Bland, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Rufus King, George Clymer, Oliver Ellsworth, Elias Boudinot, Fisher Ames, Elbridge Gerry, Roger Sherman, Jonathan Trumbull, Lambert Cadwalader, Thomas Fitzsimons, the two Muhlenbergs, Thomas Tudor Tucker, Hugh Williamson, Abraham Baldwin, Jeremiah Van Rensselaer, and many other leading men, both from the North and the South.
It is a circumstance of curious interest that nearly, if not quite, all the arguments used by the supporters and opponents of a protective system were presented at that time and with a directness and ability which have not been surpassed in any subsequent discussion. The "ad valorem" system of levying duties was maintained against "specific" rates in almost the same language employed in the discussions of recent years. The "infant manufactures," the need of the "fostering care of the government" for the protection of "home industry," the advantages derived from "diversified pursuits," the competition of "cheap labor in Europe," were all rehearsed with a familiarity and ease which implied their previous and constant use in the legislative halls of the different States before the power to levy imposts was remitted to the jurisdiction of Congress. A picture of the industrial condition of the country at that day can be inferred from the tariff bill first passed; and the manufactures that were deemed worthy of encouragement are clearly outlined in the debate. Mr. Clymer of Pennsylvania asked for a protective duty on steel, stating that a furnace in Philadelphia "had produced three hundred tons in two years, and with a little encouragement would supply enough for the consumption of the whole Union." The Pennsylvania members at the same time strenuously opposed a duty on coal which they wished to import as cheaply as possible to aid in the development of their iron ores. The manufacture of glass had been started in Maryland, and the members from that State secured a duty on the foreign article after considerable discussion, and with the significant reservation, in deference to popular habits, that "black quart-bottles" should be admitted free.
Mr. Madison opposed a tax on cordage, and "questioned the propriety of raising the price of any article that entered materially into the structure of vessels," making in effect the same argument on that subject which has been repeated without improvement so frequently in later years. Indigo and tobacco, two special products of the South, were protected by prohibitory duties, while the raising of cotton was encouraged by a duty of three cents per pound on the imported article. Mr. Burke of South Carolina said the culture of cotton was contemplated on a large scale in the South, "if good seed could be procured." The manufacture of iron, wool, leather, paper, already in some degree developed, was stimulated by the bill. The fisheries were aided by a bounty on every barrel caught; and the navigation interest received a remarkable encouragement by providing that "a discount of ten per cent on all duties imposed by this Act shall be allowed on such goods, wares, and merchandise as shall be imported in vessels built in the United States, and wholly the property of a citizen or citizens thereof." The bill throughout was an American measure, designed to promote American interests; and as a first step in a wide field of legislation, it was characterized in an eminent degree by wisdom, by moderation, and by a keen insight into the immediate and the distant future of the country. The ability which framed the Constitution was not greater than that displayed by the first generation of American statesmen who were called to legislate under its generous provisions and its wise restrictions.
These great statesmen proceeded in the light of facts which taught them that, though politically separated from the mother country, we were still in many ways dependent upon her, in as large a degree as when we were Colonies, subject to her will and governed for her advantage. The younger Pitt boasted that he had conquered the Colonies as commercial dependencies, contributing more absolutely and in larger degree to England's prosperity than before the political connection was severed. He treated the States, after the close of the peace of 1783, with a haughty assumption of superiority, if not indeed with contempt--not even condescending to accredit a diplomatic representative to the country, though John Adams was in London as Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary from the United States. English laws of protection under the Pitt administration were steadily framed against the development of manufactures and navigation in America, and the tendency when the Federal Constitution was adopted had been, in the planting States especially, towards a species of commercial dependence which was enabling England to absorb our trade.
TARIFF ACT APPROVED BY WASHINGTON.
The first tariff Act was therefore in a certain sense a second Declaration of Independence; and by a coincidence which could not have been more striking or more significant, it was approved by President Washington on the fourth day of July, 1789. Slow as were the modes of communicating intelligence in those days, this Act of Congress did, in a suggestive way, arouse the attention of both continents. The words of the preamble were ominous. The duties levied were exceedingly moderate, scarcely any of them above fifteen per cent, the majority not higher than ten. But the beginning was made; and the English manufacturers and carriers saw that the power to levy ten per cent. could at any time levy a hundred per cent. if the interest of the new government should demand it. The separate States had indeed possessed the power to levy imposts, but they had never exercised it in any comprehensive manner, and had usually adapted the rate of duty to English trade rather than to the protection of manufacturing interests at home. The action of the Federal Government was a new departure, of portentous magnitude, and was so recognized at home and abroad.
It was not the percentage which aroused and disturbed England. It was the power to levy the duty at all. In his famous speech on American taxation in the House of Commons fifteen years before, Mr. Burke asserted that it was "not the weight of the duty, but the weight of the preamble, which the Americans were unable and unwilling to bear." The tax actually imposed was not oppressive, but the preamble implied the power to levy upon the Colonies whatever tax the British Government might deem expedient, and this led to resistance and to revolution. The force of the preamble was now turned against Great Britain. She saw that the extent to which the principle of protective duties might be carried was entirely a matter of discretion with the young Republic whose people had lately been her subjects and might now become her rivals. The principle of protecting the manufactures and encouraging the navigation of America had been distinctly proclaimed in the first law enacted by the new government, and was thus made in a suggestive and emphatic sense the very corner-stone of the republican edifice which the patriots of the Revolution were aiming to construct.
The opinions of Mr. Madison as thus shown in the first legislation by Congress are the more significant from the fact that he belonged in the Jeffersonian school, believed in the strictest construction of granted power, was a zealous Republican in the partisan divisions of the day, and was always opposed to the more liberal, or, as he would regard them, the more latitudinarian views of the Federal party. In regard to the protection and encouragement of manufactures there seemed to be no radical difference between parties in the early period of the government. On that issue, to quote a phrase used on another occasion, "they were all Federalists and all Republicans." Mr. Hamilton's celebrated report on Manufactures, submitted in answer to a request from the House of Representatives of December, 1790, sustained and elaborated the views on which Congress had already acted, and brought the whole influence of the Executive Department to the support of a Protective Tariff. Up to that period no minister of finance among the oldest and most advanced countries of Europe had so ably discussed the principles on which national prosperity was based. The report has long been familiar to students of political economy, and has had, like all Mr. Hamilton's work, a remarkable value and a singular application in the developments of subsequent years.
MR. HAMILTON'S PROTECTION VIEWS.
Mr. Hamilton sustained the plan of encouraging home manufactures by protective duties, even to the point in some instances of making those "duties equivalent to prohibition." He did not contemplate a prohibitive duty as the means of encouraging a manufacture not already domesticated, but declared it "only fit to be employed when a manufacture has made such a progress, and is in so many hands, as to insure a due competition and an adequate supply on reasonable terms." This argument did not seem to follow the beaten path which leads to the protection of "infant manufactures," but rather aimed to secure the home market for the strong and well-developed enterprises. Mr. Hamilton did not turn back from the consequences which his argument involved. He perceived its logical conclusions and frankly accepted them. He considered "the monopoly of the domestic market to its own manufacturers as the reigning policy of manufacturing nations," and declared that "a similar policy on the part of the United States in every proper instance was dictated by the principles of distributive justice, certainly by the duty of endeavoring to secure to their own citizens a reciprocity of advantages." He avowed his belief that "the internal competition which takes place, soon does away with every thing like monopoly, and by degrees reduces the price of the article to the minimum of a reasonable profit on the capital employed. This accords with the reason of the thing and with experience." He contended that "a reduction has in several instances immediately succeeded the establishment of domestic manufacture." But even if this result should not follow, he maintained that "in a national view a temporary enhancement of price must always be well compensated by a permanent reduction of it." The doctrine of protection, even with the enlarged experience of subsequent years, has never been more succinctly or more felicitously stated.
Objections to the enforcement of the "protective" principle founded on a lack of constitutional power were summarily dismissed by Mr. Hamilton as "having no good foundation." He had been a member of the convention that formed the Constitution, and had given attention beyond any other member to the clauses relating to the collection and appropriation of revenue. He said the "power to raise money" as embodied in the Constitution "is plenary and indefinite," and "the objects for which it may be appropriated are no less comprehensive than the payment of the public debts, the providing for the common defense and the general welfare." He gives the widest scope to the phrase "general welfare," and declares that "it is of necessity left to the discretion of the national Legislature to pronounce upon the objects which concern the general welfare, and for which under that description an appropriation of money is requisite and proper." Mr. Hamilton elaborates his argument on this head with consummate power, and declares that "the only qualification" to the power of appropriation under the phrase "general welfare" is that the purpose for which the money is applied shall "be general, and not local, its operation extending in fact throughout the Union, and not being confined to a particular spot." The limitations and hypercritical objections to the powers conferred by the Constitution, both in the raising and appropriating of money, originated in large part after the authors of that great charter had passed away, and have been uniformly stimulated by class interests which were not developed when the organic law was enacted.
Some details of Mr. Hamilton's report are especially interesting in view of the subsequent development of manufacturing enterprises. "Iron works" he represents as "greatly increasing in the United States," and so great is the demand that "iron furnished before the Revolution at an average of sixty-four dollars per ton" was then sold at "eighty." Nails and spikes, made in large part by boys, needed further "protection," as 1,800,000 pounds had been imported the previous year. Iron was wholly made by "charcoal," but there were several mines of "fossil coal" already "worked in Virginia," and "a copious supply of it would be of great value to the iron industry." Respecting "cotton" Mr. Hamilton attached far more consideration to its manufacture than to its culture. He distrusted the quality of that grown at home because so far from the equator, and he wished the new factories in Rhode Island and Massachusetts to have the best article at the cheapest possible rate. To this end the repeal of the three-cent duty on cotton levied the preceding year was "indispensable." He argued that "not being, like hemp, an universal production of the country, cotton affords less assurance of an adequate internal supply." If the duty levied on glass should not prove sufficient inducement to its manufacture, he would stimulate it "by a direct bounty."
Mr. Hamilton's conceptions of an enlarged plan of "protection" included not only "prohibitive duties," but when necessary a system of "bounties and premiums" in addition. He was earnestly opposed to "a capitation-tax," and declared such levies as an income-tax to be "unavoidably hurtful to industry." Indirect taxes were obviously preferred by him whenever they were practicable. Indeed upon any other system of taxation he believed it would prove impossible for the Republic of 1790 to endure the burden imposed upon the public treasury by the funding of the debt of the Revolution. More promptly than any other financier of that century he saw that ten dollars could be more easily collected by indirect tax than one dollar by direct levy, and that he could thus avoid those burdensome exactions from the people which had proved so onerous in Europe, and which had just aided in precipitating France into bloody revolution.
THE WAR TARIFF ENACTED IN 1812.
Important and radical additions to the revenue system promptly followed Mr. Hamilton's recommendations. From that time onward, for a period of more than twenty years, additional tariff laws were passed by each succeeding Congress, modifying and generally increasing the rate of duties first imposed, and adding many new articles to the dutiable list. When the war of 1812 was reached, a great but temporary change was made in the tariff laws by increasing the entire list of duties one hundred per cent.--simply doubling the rate in every case. Not content with this sweeping and wholesale increase of duty, the law provided an additional ten per cent. upon all goods imported in foreign vessels, besides collecting an additional tonnage-tax of one dollar and a half per ton on the vessel. Of course this was war-legislation, and the Act was to expire within one year after a treaty of peace should be concluded with Great Britain. With the experience of recent days before him, the reader does not need to be reminded that, under the stimulus of this extraordinary rate of duties, manufactures rapidly developed throughout the country. Importations from England being absolutely stopped by reason of the war, and in large part excluded from other countries by high duties, the American market was for the first time left substantially, or in large degree, to the American manufacturers.
With all the disadvantages which so sudden and so extreme a policy imposed on the people, the progress for the four years of these extravagant and exceptional duties was very rapid, and undoubtedly exerted a lasting influence on the industrial interests of the United States. But the policy was not one which commanded general support. Other interests came forward in opposition. New England was radically hostile to high duties, for the reason that they seriously interfered with the shipping and commercial interest in which her people were largely engaged. The natural result moreover was a sharp re-action, in which the protective principle suffered. Soon after the Treaty of Ghent was signed, movements were made for a reduction of duties, and the famous tariff of 1816 was the result.
In examining the debates on that important Act, it is worthy of notice that Mr. Clay, from an extreme Western State, was urging a high rate of duties on cotton fabrics, while his chief opponent was Daniel Webster, then a representative from Massachusetts. An additional and still stranger feature of the debate is found when Mr. Calhoun, co-operating with Mr. Clay, replied to Mr. Webster's free-trade speech in an elaborate defense of the doctrine of protection to our manufactures.
Mr. Calhoun spoke with enthusiasm, and gave an interesting resume of the condition of the country as affected by the war with Great Britain. He believed that the vital deficiency in our financial condition was the lack of manufactures, and to supply that deficiency he was willing to extend the protecting arm of the government. "When our manufactures are grown to a certain perfection, as they soon will be under the fostering care of the government, we shall no longer experience these evils. The farmer will find a ready market for his surplus products, and, what is almost of equal consequence, a certain and cheap supply for all his wants. His prosperity will diffuse itself through every class in the community." Not satisfied with this unqualified support of the protective system, Mr. Calhoun supplemented it by declaring that "to give perfection to this state of things, it will be necessary to add as soon as possible a system of internal improvements." Mr. Webster's opposition to protection was based on the fact that it tended to depress commerce and curtail the profits of the carrying-trade.
The tariff of 1816 was termed "moderately protective," but even in that form it encountered the opposition of the commercial interest. It was followed in the country by severe depression in all departments of trade, not because the duties were not in themselves sufficiently high, but from the fact that it followed the war tariff, and the change was so great as to produce not only a re-action but a revolution in the financial condition of the country. All forces of industry languished. Bankruptcy was wide-spread, and the distress between 1817 and 1824 was perhaps deeper and more general than at any other period of our history. There was no immigration of foreigners, and consequently no wealth from that source. There was no market for agricultural products, and the people were therefore unable to indulge in liberal expenditure. Their small savings could be more profitably invested in foreign than in domestic goods, and hence American manufactures received little patronage. The traditions of that period, as given by the generation that lived through it, are sorrowful and depressing. The sacrifice of great landed estates, worth many millions could they have been preserved for the heirs of the next generation, was a common feature in the general distress and desolation. The continuance of this condition of affairs had no small influence on the subsequent division of parties. It naturally led to a change in the financial system, and in 1824 a tariff Act was passed, materially enlarging the scope of the Act of 1816.
THE PROTECTIVE TARIFF OF 1824.
The Act of 1824 was avowedly protective in its character and was adopted through the influence of Mr. Clay, then Speaker of the House of Representatives. His most efficient ally on the floor was Mr. Buchanan of Pennsylvania who exerted himself vigorously in aid of the measure. Mr. Webster again appeared in the debate, arguing against the "obsolete and exploded notion of protection," and carrying with him nearly the whole vote of Massachusetts in opposition. Mr. Clay was enabled to carry the entire Kentucky delegation for the high protective tariff, and Mr. Calhoun's views having meanwhile undergone a radical change, South Carolina was found to be unanimous in opposition, and cordially co-operating with Massachusetts in support of free-trade. The effect of that tariff was undoubtedly favorable to the general prosperity, and during the administration of John Quincy Adams every material interest of the country improved. The result was that the supporters of the protective system, congratulating themselves upon the effect of the work of 1824, proceeded in 1828 to levy still higher duties. They applied the doctrine of protection to the raw materials of the country, the wool, the hemp, and all unmanufactured articles which by any possibility could meet with damaging competition from abroad.
It was indeed an era of high duties, of which, strange as it may seem to the modern reader, Silas Wright of New York and James Buchanan of Pennsylvania appeared as the most strenuous defenders, and were personally opposed in debate by John Davis of Massachusetts and Peleg Sprague of Maine. To add to the entanglement of public opinion, Mr. Webster passed over to the side of ultra-protection and voted for the bill, finding himself in company with Martin Van Buren of New York, and Thomas H. Benton of Missouri. It was an extraordinary commingling of political elements, in which it is difficult to find a line of partition logically consistent either with geographical or political divisions. Mr. Webster carried with him not more than two or three votes of the Massachusetts delegation. His colleague in the Senate, Nathaniel Silsbee, voted against him, and in the House such personal adherents as Edward Everett and Isaac C. Bates recorded themselves in the negative. There was a great deal of what in modern phase would be called "fencing for position" in the votes on this test question of the day. The names of no less than five gentlemen who were afterwards Presidents of the United States were recorded in the yeas and nays on the passage of the bill in the two Houses,--Mr. Van Buren, General Harrison, John Tyler, in the Senate, and Mr. Polk and Mr. Buchanan in the House.
There was a general feeling that the Act of 1828 marked a crisis in the history of tariff discussion, and that it would in some way lead to important results in the fate of political parties and political leaders. Mr. Calhoun was this year elected Vice-President of the United States, with General Jackson as President, and Mr. Van Buren was transferred from the Senate to the State Department as the head of Jackson's cabinet. When by his address and tact he had turned the mind of the President against Calhoun as his successor, and fully ingratiated himself in executive favor, the quarrel began which is elsewhere detailed at sufficient length. In this controversy, purely personal at the outset, springing from the clashing ambitions of two aspiring men, the tariff of 1828, especially with the vote of Mr. Van Buren in favor of it, was made to play an important part. The quarrel rapidly culminated in Mr. Calhoun's resignation of the Vice-Presidency, his leadership of the Nullification contest in South Carolina, and his re-election to the Senate of the United States some time before the expiration of the Vice-Presidential term for which he had been chosen. The result was a reduction of duties, first by the Act of July, 1832, and secondly by Mr. Clay's famous compromise Act of March 2, 1833, in which it was provided that by a sliding-scale all the duties in excess of twenty per cent. should be abolished within a period of ten years. It was this Act which for the time calmed excitement in the South, brought Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Clay into kindly relations, and somewhat separated Mr. Webster and Mr. Clay,--at least producing one of those periods of estrangement which, throughout their public career, alternated with the cordial friendship they really entertained for each other.
THE PROTECTIVE TARIFF OF 1842.
During the operation of this Act,--which was really an abandonment of the protective principle,--the financial crisis of 1837 came upon the country, and a period of distress ensued, almost equal to that which preceded the enactment of the tariff of 1824. Many persons, still in active business, recall with something of horror the hardships and privations which were endured throughout the country from 1837 to 1842. The long-continued depression produced the revolution against the Democratic party which ended in the overthrow of Mr. Van Buren and the election of General Harrison as President of the United States in 1840. The Whig Congress that came into power at the same time, proceeded to enact the law popularly known as the tariff of 1842, which was strongly protective in its character though not so extreme as the Act of 1828. The vote in favor of the bill was not exclusively Whig, as some of the Northern Democrats voted for it and some of the Southern Whigs against it. Conspicuous among the former were Mr. Buchanan of Pennsylvania and Mr. Wright of New York, who maintained a consistency with their vote for the tariff of 1828. Conspicuous among Southern Whigs against it were Berrien of Georgia, Clayton of Delaware, Mangum of North Carolina, Merrick of Maryland, and Rives of Virginia. The two men who above all others deserve honor for successful management of the bill were George Evans, the brilliant and accomplished senator from Maine, and Thomas M. T. McKennan, for many years an able, upright, and popular representative from Pennsylvania. John Quincy Adams, in a public speech delivered in 1843 in the town of Mr. McKennan's residence, ascribed to that gentleman the chief credit of carrying the Protective Tariff Bill through the House of Representatives. The vote showed, as all tariff bills before had, and as all since have shown, that the local interest of the constituency determines in large measure the vote of the representative; that planting sections grow more and more towards free-trade and manufacturing sections more and more towards protection.
The friends of home industry have always referred with satisfaction to the effect of the tariff of 1842 as an explicit and undeniable proof of the value of protection. It raised the country from a slough of despond to happiness, cheerfulness, confidence. It imparted to all sections a degree of prosperity which they had not known since the repeal of the tariff of 1828. The most suggestive proof of its strength and popularity was found in the contest of 1844 between Mr. Polk and Mr. Clay, where the Democrats in the critical Northern States assumed the advocacy of the tariff of 1842 as loudly as the supporters of Mr. Clay. Other issues overshadowed the tariff, which was really considered to be settled, and a President and Congress were chosen without any distinct knowledge on the part of their constituents as to what their action might be upon this question. The popular mind had been engrossed with the annexation of Texas and with the dawn of the free-soil excitement; hence protection and free-trade were in many States scarcely debated from lack of interest, and, in the States where interest prevailed, both parties took substantially the same side.
A deception had however been practiced in the manufacturing States of the North, and when the administration of Mr. Polk was installed, the friends of protection were startled by the appointment of a determined opponent of the tariff of 1842, as Secretary of the Treasury. Robert J. Walker was a senator from Mississippi when the Act was passed, and was bitterly opposed to it. He was a man of great originality, somewhat speculative in his views, and willing to experiment on questions of revenue to the point of rashness. He was not a believer in the doctrine of protection, was persuaded that protective duties bore unjustly and severely upon the planting section with which he was identified; and he came to his office determined to overthrow the tariff Act, which he had been unable to defeat in the Senate. Mr. Walker was excessively ambitious to make his term in the Treasury an era in the history of the country. He had a difficult task before him,--one from which a conservative man would have shrunk. The tariff was undoubtedly producing a valuable revenue; and, as the administration of Mr. Polk was about to engage in war, revenue was what they most needed. Being about to enter upon a war, every dictate of prudence suggested that aggressive issues should not be multiplied in the country. But Mr. Walker was not Secretary of War or Secretary of State, and he was unwilling to sit quietly down and collect the revenue under a tariff imposed by a Whig Congress, against which he had voted, while Buchanan in directing our foreign relations, and Marcy in conducting a successful war, would far outstrip him in public observation and in acquiring the elements of popularity adapted to the ambition which all three alike shared.
Mr. Walker made an elaborate report on the question of revenue, and attacked the tariff of 1842 in a manner which might well be termed savage. He arraigned the manufacturers as enjoying unfair advantages,--advantages held, as he endeavored to demonstrate, at the expense and to the detriment of the agriculturist, the mechanic, the merchant, the ship-owner, the sailor, and indeed of almost every industrial class. In reading Mr. Walker's report a third of a century after it was made, one might imagine that the supporters of the tariff of 1842 were engaged in a conspiracy to commit fraud, and that the manufacturers who profited by its duties were guilty of some crime against the people. But extreme as were his declarations and difficult as were the obstructions in his path, he was able to carry his point. Mr. Buchanan, the head of the Cabinet, had voted for the tariff of 1842, and Mr. Dallas, the Vice-President, had steadily and ably upheld the doctrine of protection when a member of the Senate. It was the position of Buchanan and Dallas on the tariff that won the October election of 1844 for Francis R. Shunk for governor of Pennsylvania, and thus assured the election of Mr. Polk. The administration of which Buchanan and Dallas were such conspicuous and influential members could not forswear protection and inflict a free-trade tariff on Pennsylvania, without apparent dishonor and the abandonment of that State to the Whigs. It was therefore regarded not only as impracticable but as politically impossible.
THE FREE-TRADE TARIFF OF 1846.
It was soon ascertained however that Mr. Polk sympathized with Mr. Walker, and Mr. Buchanan was silenced and overridden. The free- trade tariff of 1846 was passed; and Mr. Dallas, who had been nominated because of his record as a protectionist, was subjected to the humiliation of giving his casting vote as Vice-President in favor of a tariff which was execrated in Pennsylvania, and which was honestly believed to be inimical in the highest degree to the interest of the American manufacturer and the American mechanic. The Act had no small influence in the overthrow of the Polk administration at the elections for the next ensuing Congress, and in the defeat of General Cass for the Presidency in 1848. As senator from Michigan, General Cass had voted for the bill, influenced thereto by his Southern associates, for whom he always did so much, and from whom he always received so little. Pennsylvania was at that time really a Democratic State, but she punished General Cass for his free-trade course by giving her electoral vote to Taylor. If she had given it to Cass he would have been chosen President.
It was in connection with the tariff agitation of 1846 that Simon Cameron originally obtained his strong hold upon the popular sympathy and support of Pennsylvania. He was a Democrat; had long been confidential adviser to Mr. Buchanan, and had supported Mr. Polk. But he was a believer in the doctrine of protection; and as he had aided in carrying Pennsylvania by declaring himself a friend to the tariff of 1842, he maintained his faith. When the Polk administration was organized, a vacancy was created in the Senate by Mr. Buchanan's appointment as Secretary of State. George W. Woodward was the regular nominee of the Democratic party for the place. But Cameron bolted, and with the aid of Whig votes was chosen senator. He resisted the passage of the tariff of 1846, stood firmly and consistently for the industrial interests of his State, cultivated an alliance with the Whigs in the Senate, and by their aid thwarted all the attempts of the Polk administration to interfere with his plans and purposes in Pennsylvania. The President endeavored to heal Judge Woodward's wounds by placing him on the bench of the Supreme Court as the successor of the eminent Henry Baldwin. Cameron induced the Whigs to reject him, and then forced the administration to nominate Robert C. Grier whose appointment was personally acceptable and agreeable to him. In the successful tactics then employed by Cameron may be found the secret of his remarkable career as a party manager in the field in which, for a full half-century, he was an active and indefatigable worker.
The Whig victory of 1848 was not sufficiently decisive to warrant any attempt, even had there been desire, to change the tariff. General Taylor had been elected without subscribing to a platform or pledging himself to a specific measure, and he was therefore in a position to resist and reject appeals of the ordinary partisan character. Moreover the tariff of 1846 was yielding abundant revenue, and the business of the country was in a flourishing condition at the time his administration was organized. Money became very abundant after the year 1849; large enterprises were undertaken, speculation was prevalent, and for a considerable period the prosperity of the country was general and apparently genuine. After 1852 the Democrats had almost undisputed control of the government, and had gradually become a free-trade party. The principles embodied in the tariff of 1846 seemed for the time to be so entirely vindicated and approved that resistance to it ceased, not only among the people but among the protective economists, and even among the manufacturers to a large extent. So general was this acquiescence that in 1856 a protective tariff was not suggested or even hinted by any one of the three parties which presented Presidential candidates.
THE FREE-TRADE TARIFF OF 1857.
It was not surprising therefore that with a plethoric condition of the National Treasury for two or three consecutive years, the Democratic Congress, in the closing session of Pierce's administration, enacted what has since been known as the tariff of 1857. By this law the duties were placed lower then they had been at any time since the war of 1812. The Act was well received by the people, and was indeed concurred in by a considerable proportion of the Republican party. The Senate had a large Democratic majority, but in the House three parties divided the responsibility,--no one of them having an absolute majority. The Republicans had a plurality and had chosen Mr. Banks Speaker, but the American party held the balance of power in the House and on several of the leading committees. Some prominent Republicans, however, remaining true to their old Whig traditions, opposed the reduction of duties. Mr. Seward voted against it, but his colleague, Mr. Hamilton Fish, voted for it. Mr. Seward represented the protective tendencies of the country districts of New York, and Mr. Fish the free-trade tendencies of the city. Mr. Sumner and Mr. Wilson both voted for it, as did also Senator Allen of Rhode Island, the direct representative of the manufacturers of that State. Mr. Bell of New Hampshire voted for it, while Senators Collamer and Foote of Vermont voted against it. Mr. Fessenden did not oppose it, but his colleague, Mr. Nourse, voted against it. The Connecticut senators, Foster and Toucey, one of each party, supported the measure.
In the House, the New-England representatives generally voted for the bill, but Mr. Morrill of Vermont opposed it. The Pennsylvania delegation, led by James H. Campbell and John Covode, did all in their power to defeat it. The two Washburns, Colfax, and George G. Dunn headed a formidable opposition from the West. Humphrey Marshall and Samuel F. Swope of Kentucky were the only representatives from slave States who voted in the negative; though in the Senate three old and honored Whigs, John Bell of Tennessee, John B. Thompson of Kentucky, and Henry S. Geyer of Missouri maintained their ancient faith and voted against lowering the duties. It was an extraordinary political combination that brought the senators from Massachusetts and the senators from South Carolina, the representatives from New England and the representatives from the cotton States, to support the same tariff bill,--a combination which had not before occurred since the administration of Monroe. This singular coalition portended one of two results: Either an entire and permanent acquiescence in the rule of free-trade, or an entire abrogation of that system, and the revival, with renewed strength, of the doctrine of protection. Which it should be was determined by the unfolding of events not then foreseen, and the force of which it required years to measure.
The one excuse given for urging the passage of the Act of 1857 was that under the tariff of 1846 the revenues had become excessive, and the income of the government must be reduced. But it was soon found to be a most expensive mode of reaching that end. The first and most important result flowing from the new Act was a large increase in importations and a very heavy drain in consequence upon the reserved specie of the country, to pay the balance which the reduced shipments of agricultural products failed to meet. In the autumn of 1857, half a year after the passage of the tariff Act, a disastrous financial panic swept over the country, prostrating for the time all departments of business in about the same degree. The agricultural, commercial, and manufacturing interests were alike and equally involved. The distress for a time was severe and wide-spread. The stagnation which ensued was discouraging and long continued, making the years from 1857 to 1860 extremely dull and dispiriting in business circles throughout the Union. The country was not exhausted and depleted as it was after the panic of 1837, but the business community had no courage, energy was paralyzed, and new enterprises were at a stand-still.
It soon became evident that this condition of affairs would carry the tariff questions once more into the political arena, as an active issue between parties. Thus far, the new Republican organization had passively acquiesced in existing laws on the subject; but the general distress caused great bodies of men, as is always the case, to look to the action of the Government for relief. The Republicans found therefore a new ground for attacking the Democracy,--holding them responsible for the financial depression, initiating a movement for returning to the principle and practice of protection, and artfully identifying the struggle against slavery with the efforts of the workingmen throughout the North to be freed from injurious competition with the cheapened labor of Europe. This phase of the question was presented with great force in certain States, and the industrial classes, by a sort of instinct of self- preservation as it seemed to them, began to consolidate their votes in favor of the Republican party. They were made to see, by clever and persuasive speakers, that the slave labor of the South and the ill-paid labor of Europe were both hostile to the prosperity of the workingman in the free States of America, and that the Republican party was of necessity his friend, by its opposition to all the forms of labor which stood in the wy of his better remuneration and advancement.
REPUBLICAN PARTY FAVORS PROTECTION.
The convention which nominated Mr. Lincoln met when the feeling against free-trade was growing, and in many States already deep- rooted. A majority of those who composed that convention had inherited their political creed from the Whig party, and were profound believers in the protective teachings of Mr. Clay. But a strong minority came from the radical school of Democrats, and, in joining the Republican party on the anti-slavery issue, had retained their ancient creed on financial and industrial questions. Care was for that reason necessary in the introduction of new issues and the imposition of new tests of party fellowship. The convention therefore avoided the use of the word "protection," and was contented with the moderate declaration that "sound policy requires such an adjustment of imposts as will encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country." A more emphatic declaration might have provoked resistance from a minority of the convention, and the friends of protection acted wisely in accepting what was offered with unanimity, rather than continue the struggle for a stronger creed which would have been morally weakened by party division. They saw also that the mere form of expression was not important, so long as the convention was unanimous on what theologians term the "substance of doctrine." It was noted that the vast crowd which attended the convention cheered the tariff resolution as lustily as that which opposed the spread of slavery into free territory. From that hour the Republican party gravitated steadily and rapidly into the position of avowed advocacy of the doctrine of protection. The national ticket which they presented was composed indeed of an original Whig protectionist and an original Democratic free-trader; but the drift of events, as will be seen, carried both alike into the new movement for a protective system.
A review of the tariff legislation in the period between the war of 1812 and the political revolution of 1860 exhibits some sudden and extraordinary changes on the part of prominent political leaders in their relation to the question. The inconsistency involved is however more apparent than real. Perhaps it would be correct to say that the inconsistency was justifiable in the eyes of those who found it necessary to be inconsistent. Mr. Webster was a persistent advocate of free-trade so long as Massachusetts was a commercial State. But when, by the operation of laws against the enactment of which he had in vain protested, Massachusetts became a manufacturing State, Mr. Webster naturally and inevitably became a protectionist. Mr. Calhoun began as a protectionist when he hoped for the diffusion and growth of manufactures throughout all sections alike. He became a free-trader when he realized that the destiny of the South was to be purely agricultural, devoted to products whose market was not, in his judgment, to be enlarged by the tariff, and whose production was enhanced in cost by its operation. Colonel Benton's change was similar to Mr. Calhoun's, though at a later period, and not so abrupt or so radical. Mr. Van Buren's shifting of position was that of a man eagerly seeking the current of popular opinion, and ready to go with the majority of his party. Of all the great lights, but one burned steadily and clearly. Mr. Clay was always a protectionist, and, unlike Mr. Van Buren, he forced his party to go with him. But as a whole, the record of tariff legislation, from the very origin of the government, is the record of enlightened selfishness; and enlightened selfishness is the basis of much that is wisest in legislation.
It is natural that both sides to the tariff controversy should endeavor to derive support for their principles from the experience of the country. Nor can it be denied that each side can furnish many arguments which apparently sustain its own views and theories. The difficulty in reaching a satisfactory and impartial conclusion arises from the inability or unwillingness of the disputants to agree upon a common basis of fact. If the premises could be candidly stated, there would be not trouble in finding a true conclusion. In the absence of an agreement as to the points established, it is the part of fairness to give a succinct statement of the grounds maintained by the two parties to the prolonged controversy,--grounds which have not essentially changed in a century of legislation and popular contention.
It is maintained by free-traders that under the moderate tariff prevailing from the origin of the government to the war of 1812 the country was prosperous, and manufactures were developing as rapidly as was desirable or healthful. Protectionists on the other hand aver that the duty levied in 1789 was the first of uniform application throughout all the States, and that, regardless of its percentage, its influence and effect were demonstrably protective; that it was the first barrier erected against the absolute commercial supremacy of England, and that it effectually did its work in establishing the foundation of the American system. In the absence of that tariff, they maintain that England, under the influence of actual free-trade, had monopolized our market and controlled our industries. Finally they declare that the free-traders yield the whole case in acknowledging that the first tariff imparted an impetus to manufactures and to commercial independence wholly unknown while the States were under the Articles of Confederation and unable to levy uniform duties on imports.
COMPARISON OF REVENUE SYSTEMS.
The free-traders point to the destructive effect of the war tariff of 1812, which unduly stimulated and then inevitably depressed the country. They assume this to be a pregnant illustration of a truth, otherwise logically deduced by them, as to the re-action sure to follow an artificial stimulus given to any department of trade. The protectionists declining to defend the war duties as applicable to a normal condition, find in the too sudden dropping of war rates the mistake which precipitated the country into financial trouble. Depression, they say, would naturally have come; but it was hastened and increased by the inconsiderate manner in which the duties were lowered in 1816. From that time onward the protectionists claim that the experience of the country has favored their theories of revenue and financial administration. The country did not revive, or prosperity re-appear, until the protective tariff of 1824 was enacted. The awakening of all branches of industry by that Act was further promoted by the tariff of 1828, to which the protectionists point as the perfected wisdom of their school. Mr. Clay publicly asserted that the severest depression he had witnessed in the country was during the seven years preceding the tariff of 1824, and that the highest prosperity was during the seven years following that Act.
The free-traders affirm that the excitement in the South and the sectional resistance to the tariff of 1828 show the impossibility of maintaining high duties. The protectionists reply that such an argument is begging the question, and is simply tantamount to admitting that protection is valuable if it can be upheld. The protectionists point to the fact that their system was not abandoned in 1832 upon a fair consideration of its intrinsic merits, but as a peace-offering to those who were threatening the destruction of the government if the duties were not lowered. Many protectionists believe that if Mr. Clay had been willing to give to General Jackson the glory of an absolute victory over the Nullifiers of South Carolina, the revenue system of the country would have been very different. They think however that the temptation to settle the question by compromise instead of permitting Jackson to settle it by force was perhaps too strong to be resisted by one who had so many reasons for opposing and hating the President.
A more reasonable view held by another school of protectionists is that Mr. Clay did the wisest possible thing in withdrawing the tariff question from a controversy where it was complicated with so many other issues,--some of them bitter and personal. He justly feared that the protective principle might be irretrievably injured in the collision thought to be impending. He believed moreover that the best protective lesson would be taught by permitting the free-traders to enforce their theories for a season, trusting for permanent triumph to the popular re-action certain to follow. There was nothing in the legislation to show that Mr. Clay or his followers had in any degree abandoned or changed their faith in protective duties of their confidence in the ultimate decision of the public judgment. The protectionists aver that the evils which flowed from the free-trade tariff of 1833, thus forced on the country by extraneous considerations, were incalculably great, and negatively established the value of the tariff of 1828 which had been so unfairly destroyed. They maintain that it broke down the manufacturing interest, led to excessive importations, threw the balance of trade heavily against us, drained us of our specie, and directly led to the financial disasters of 1837 and the years ensuing. They further declare that this distressing situation was not relieved until the protective tariff of 1842 was passed, and that thenceforward, for the four years in which that Act was allowed to remain in force, the country enjoyed general prosperity,--a prosperity so marked and wide-spread that the opposing party had not dared to make an issue against the tariff in States where there was large investment in manufacturing.
The free-traders consider the tariff of 1846 to be a conclusive proof the beneficial effect of low duties. They challenge a comparison of the years of its operation, between 1846 and 1857, with any other equal period in the history of the country. Manufacturing, they say, was not forced by a hot-house process to produce high-priced goods for popular consumption, but was gradually encouraged and developed on a healthful and self-sustaining basis, not to be shaken as a reed in the wind by every change in the financial world. Commerce, as they point out, made great advances, and our carrying trade grew so rapidly that in ten years from the day the tariff of 1846 was passed our tonnage exceeded the tonnage of England. The free-traders refer with especial emphasis to what the term the symmetrical development of all the great interests of the country under this liberal tariff. Manufactures were not stimulated at the expense of the commercial interest. Both were developed in harmony, while agriculture, the indispensable basis of all, was never more flourishing. The farmers and planters at no other period of our history were in receipt of such good prices, steadily paid to them in gold coin, for their surplus product, which they could send to the domestic market over our own railways and to the foreign market in our own ships.
COMPARISON OF REVENUE SYSTEMS.
Assertions as to the progress of manufactures in the period under discussion are denied by the protectionists. While admitting the general correctness of the free-trader's statements as to the prosperous condition of the country, they call attention to the fact that directly after the enactment of the tariff of 1846 the great famine occurred in Ireland, followed in the ensuing years by short crops in Europe. The prosperity which came to the American agriculturist was therefore from causes beyond the sea and not at home,--causes which were transient, indeed almost accidental. Moreover an exceptional condition of affairs existed in the United States in consequence of our large acquisition of territory from Mexico at the close of the war and the subsequent and almost immediate discovery of gold in California. A new and extended field of trade was thus opened in which we had the monopoly, and an enormous surplus of money was speedily created from the products of the rich mines on the Pacific coast. At the same time Europe was in convulsion from the revolutions of 1848, and production was materially hindered over a large part of the Continent. This disturbance had scarcely subsided when three leading nations of Europe, England, France, and Russia, engaged in the wasteful and expensive war of the Crimea. This struggle began in 1853 and ended in 1856, and during those years it increased consumption and decreased production abroad, and totally closed the grain-fields of Russia from any competition with the United States.
The protectionists therefore hold that the boasted prosperity of the country under the tariff of 1846 was abnormal in origin and in character. It depended upon a series of events exceptional at home and even more exceptional abroad,--events which by the doctrine of probabilities would not be repeated for centuries. When peace was restored in Europe, when foreign looms and forges were set going with renewed strength, when Russia resumed her export of wheat, and when at home the output of the gold-mines suddenly decreased, the country was thrown into distress, followed by a panic and by long years of depression. The protectionists maintain that from 1846 to 1857 the United States would have enjoyed prosperity under any form of tariff, but that the moment the exceptional conditions in Europe and in America came to an end, the country was plunged headlong into a disaster from which the conservative force of a protective tariff would in large part have saved it. The protectionists claim moreover that in these averments they are not wise after the fact. They show a constant series of arguments and warnings from leading teachers of their economic school, especially from Horace Greeley and Henry C. Carey, accurately foretelling the disastrous results which occurred at the height of what was assumed to be our solid and enduring prosperity as a nation. These able writers were prophets of adversity, and the inheritors of their faith claim that their predictions were startlingly verified.
The free-traders, as an answer to this arraignment of their tariff policy, seek to charge responsibility for the financial disasters to the hasty and inconsiderate changes made in the tariff in 1857, for which both parties were in large degree if not indeed equally answerable. The protectionists will not admit the plea, and insist that the cause was totally inadequate to the effect, considering the few months the new tariff had been in operation. They admit that the low scale of duties in the new tariff perhaps may have added to the distress, by the very rapid increase of importations which it invited; but they declare that its period of operation was entirely too brief to create a result so decided, if all the elements of disaster had not been in existence, and in rapid development, at the time the Act was passed. The tariff of 1846 therefore under which there had been a very high degree of prosperity, was, in the judgment of the protectionists, successfully impeached, and a profound impression in consequence made on the public mind in favor of higher duties.
PROTECTION IN PENNSYLVANIA.
The question of the tariff was of especial significance and influence in Pennsylvania. Important in that State, it became important everywhere. Pennsylvania had been continuously and tenaciously held by the Democratic party. In the old political divisions she had followed Jefferson and opposed Adams. In the new divisions she had followed Jackson and opposed Clay. She was Republican as against the Federalists, she was Democratic as against the Whigs. From the election of Jackson in 1828 to the year 1860,--a period that measured the lifetime of a generation,--she had, with very few exceptions, sustained the Democratic party. Joseph Ritner was elected governor by the Whigs in 1835, in consequence of Democratic divisions. Harrison, in the political convulsion of 1840, triumphed in the State by the slight majority of three hundred. Taylor received her electoral vote, partly in consequence of dissensions between Cass and Van Buren, and partly in consequence of the free- trade opinions of Cass. In 1854 James Pollock was chosen governor by the sudden uprising and astounding development of the Native- American excitement as organized by the Know-Nothing party. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise aided the canvass of Pollock, but that alone would not have loosened the strong moorings of the Pennsylvania Democracy. Mr. Buchanan recovered the State two years afterwards, and would have held it firmly in his grasp but for the financial revulsion and the awakened demand for a protective tariff.
Dissociated from the question of protection, opposition to the extension of slavery was a weak issue in Pennsylvania. This was conclusively shown in the gubernatorial contest of 1857, when David Wilmot, the personal embodiment of Free-soil principles, was the Republican candidate for governor. Besides the general strength of the Territorial issue, Mr. Wilmot had the advantage of all the anti-slavery zeal which was aroused by the announcement of the Dred Scott decision, with the censurable connection therewith of President Buchanan. Thus an angry element was superadded for personal prejudice and effective agitation. Yet Mr. Wilmot was disastrously beaten by the Democratic candidate, Governor Parker, the adverse majority reaching indeed tens of thousands.
The crushing Republican defeat received in the person of Wilmot occurred on the very eve of the financial distress of 1857. The Democratic canvass had been made while there was yet no suspicion of impending panic and revulsion,--made indeed with constant boasts of the general prosperity and with constant ascription of that prosperity to the well-defined and long-continued policy of the Democratic party. From that time the Democratic party became embarrassed in Pennsylvania. With a tariff of their own making, with a President of their own choice, with both branches of Congress and every department of the government under their control, a serious disaster had come upon the country. The promises of Democratic leaders had failed, their predictions had been falsified, and as a consequence their strength was shattered. The Republicans of Pennsylvania, seeing their advantage, pressed it by renewed and urgent demands for a protective tariff. On the other issues of the party they had been hopelessly beaten, but the moment the hostility to slave-labor in the Territories became identified with protected labor in Pennsylvania, the party was inspired with new hopes, received indeed a new life.
It was this condition of public opinion in Pennsylvania which made the recognition of the protective system so essential in the Chicago platform of 1860. It was to that recognition that Mr. Lincoln in the end owed his election. The memorable victory of Andrew G. Curtin, when he was chosen governor by a majority of thirty-two thousand, was largely due to his able and persuasive presentation of the tariff question, and to his effective appeals to the laboring- men in the coal and iron sections of the State. But for this issue there was in fact no reason why Curtin should have been stronger in 1860 than Wilmot was in 1857. Indeed, but for that issue he must have been weaker. The agitation over the repeal of the Missouri Compromise had somewhat subsided with the lapse of years: the free- State victory in Kansas was acknowledged and that angry issue removed; while the Dred Scott decision, failing to arouse popular resentment at the time it was pronounced, could hardly be effective for an aggressive canvass three years later. If Governor Curtin could have presented no other issue to the voters of Pennsylvania, he would undoubtedly have shared the fate which Wilmot met when he had these anti-slavery questions as his only platform. Governor Curtin gave a far greater proportion of his time to the discussion of the tariff and financial issues than to all others combined, and he carried Pennsylvania because a majority of her voters believed that the Democratic party tended to free-trade, and that the Republican party would espouse and maintain the cause of protection.
PENNSYLVANIA'S INFLUENCE IN 1860.
Had the Republicans failed to carry Pennsylvania, there can be no doubt that Mr. Lincoln would have been defeated. An adverse result in Pennsylvania in October would certainly have involved the loss of Indiana in November, besides California and Oregon and the four votes in New Jersey. The crisis of the national campaign was therefore reached in the triumph of Governor Curtin in the State election which preceded by four weeks the direct choice of President. It would be difficult to compute the possible demoralization in the Republican ranks if Pennsylvania had been lost in October. The division among the Democrats was a fruitful source of encouragement and strength to the Republicans, but would probably have disappeared with the positive assurance of success in the national struggle. Whether in the end Douglas or Breckinridge would have been chosen President is matter of speculation, but it is certain that Mr. Lincoln would have been defeated. The October election of Pennsylvania was for so long a period an unerring index to the result of the contest for the Presidency, that a feeling almost akin to superstition was connected with it. Whichever party carried it was sure, in the popular judgment, to elect the President. It foretold the crushing defeat of John Quincy Adams in 1828; it heralded the disaster to Mr. Clay in 1844; it foredoomed General Cass in 1848. The Republicans, having elected their candidate for governor in 1854 by a large majority, confidently expected to carry the State against Mr. Buchanan in 1856. But the Democratic party prevailed in the October election, and the supporters of Fremont at once recognized the hopelessness of their cause. The triumph of Governor Curtin was the sure precursor of Mr. Lincoln's election, and that very fact added immeasurably to his popular strength in the closing month of the prolonged and exciting struggle.
In reviewing the agencies therefore which precipitated the political revolution of 1860, large consideration must be given to the influence of the movement for Protection. To hundreds of thousands of voters who took part in that memorable contest, the tariff was not even mentioned. Indeed this is probably the fact with respect to the majority of those who cast their suffrages for Mr. Lincoln. It is none the less true that these hundreds of thousands of ballots, cast in aid of free territory and as a general defiance to the aggressions of the pro-slavery leaders of the South, would have been utterly ineffectual if the central and critical contest in Pennsylvania had not resulted in a victory for the Republicans in October. The tariff therefore had a controlling influence not only in deciding the contest for political supremacy but in that more momentous struggle which was to involve the fate of the Union. It had obtained a stronger hold on the Republican party than even the leaders of that organization were aware, and it was destined to a larger influence upon popular opinion than the most sagacious could foresee.
In the foregoing summary of legislation upon the tariff, the terms Free-trade and Protection are used in their ordinary acceptation in this country,--not as accurately defining the difference in revenue theories, but as indicating the rival policies which have so long divided political parties. Strictly speaking, there has never been a proposition by any party in the United States for the adoption of free-trade. To be entirely free, trade must encounter no obstruction in the way of tax, either upon export or import. In that sense no nation has ever enjoyed free-trade. As contradistinguished from the theory of protection, England has realized freedom of trade by taxing only that class of imports which meet no competition in home production, thus excluding all pretense of favor or advantage to any of her domestic industries. England came to this policy after having clogged and embarrassed trade for a long period by the most unreasonable and tyrannical restrictions, ruthlessly enforced, without regard to the interests or even the rights of others. She had more than four hundred Acts of Parliament, regulating the tax on imports, under the old designations of "tonnage and poundage," adjusted, as the phrase indicates, to heavy and light commodities. Beyond these, she had a cumbersome system of laws regulating and in many cases prohibiting the exportation of articles which might teach to other nations the skill by which she had herself so marvelously prospered.
When by long experiment and persistent effort England had carried her fabrics to perfection; when by the large accumulation of wealth and the force of reserved capital she could command facilities which poorer nations could not rival; when by the talent of her inventors, developed under the stimulus of large reward, she had surpassed all other countries in the magnitude and effectiveness of her machinery, she proclaimed free-trade and persuasively urged it upon all lands with which she had commercial intercourse. Maintaining the most arbitrary and most complicated system of protection so long as her statesmen considered that policy advantageous, she resorted to free-trade only when she felt able to invade the domestic markets of other countries and undersell the fabrics produced by struggling artisans who were sustained by weaker capital and by less advanced skill. So long as there was danger that her own marts might be invaded, and the products of her looms and forges undersold at home, she rigidly excluded the competing fabric and held her own market for her own wares.
FREE-TRADE POLICY OF ENGLAND.
England was however neither consistent nor candid in her advocacy and establishment of free-trade. She did not apply it to all departments of her enterprise, but only to those in which she felt confident that she could defy competition. Long after the triumph of free-trade in manufactures, as proclaimed in 1846, England continued to violate every principle of her own creed in the protection she extended to her navigation interests. She had nothing to fear from the United States in the domain of manufacturers, and she therefore asked us to give her the unrestricted benefit of our markets in exchange for a similar privilege which she offered to us in her markets. But on the sea we were steadily gaining upon her, and in 1850-55 were nearly equal to her in aggregate tonnage. We could build wooden vessels at less cost than England and our ships excelled hers in speed. When steam began to compete with sail she saw her advantage. She could build engines at less cost than we, and when, soon afterward, her ship-builders began to construct the entire steamer of iron, her advantages became evident to the whole world.
England was not content however with the superiority which these circumstances gave to her. She did not wait for her own theory of Free-trade to work out its legitimate results, but forthwith stimulated the growth of her steam marine by the most enormous bounties ever paid by any nation to any enterprise. To a single line of steamers running alternate weeks from Liverpool to Boston and New York, she paid nine hundred thousand dollars annually, and continued to pay at this extravagant rate for at least twenty years. In all channels of trade where steam could be employed she paid lavish subsidies, and literally destroyed fair competition, and created for herself a practical monopoly in the building of iron steamers, and a superior share in the ocean traffic of the world. But every step she took in the development of her steam marine by the payment of bounty, was in flat contradiction of the creed which she was at the same time advocating in those departments of trade where she could conquer her competitors without bounty.
With her superiority in navigation attained and made secure through the instrumentality of subsidies, England could afford to withdraw them. Her ships no longer needed them. Thereupon, with a promptness which would be amusing if it did not have so serious a side for America, she proceeded to inveigh through all her organs of public opinion against the discarded and condemned policy of granting subsidies to ocean steamers. Her course in effect is an exact repetition of that in regard to protection of manufactures, but as it is exhibited before a new generation, the inconsistency is not so readily apprehended nor so keenly appreciated as it should be on this side of the Atlantic. Even now there is good reason for believing that many lines of English steamers, in their effort to seize the trade to the exclusion of rivals, are paid such extravagant rates for the carrying of letters as practically to amount to a bounty, thus confirming to the present day (1884) the fact that no nation has ever been so persistently and so jealously protective in her policy as England so long as the stimulus of protection is needed to give her the command of trade. What is true of England is true in greater or less degree of all other European nations. They have each in turn regulated the adoption of free-trade by the ratio of their progress towards the point where they could overcome competition. In all those departments of trade where competition could overcome them, they have been quick to interpose protective measures for the benefit of their own people.
The trade policy of the United States at the foundation of the government had features of enlightened liberality which were unknown in any other country of the world. The new government was indeed as far in advance of European nations in the proper conception of liberal commerce as it was on questions relating to the character of the African slave-trade. The colonists had experienced the oppression of the English laws which prohibited export from the mother country of the very articles which might advance their material interest and improve their social condition. They now had the opportunity, as citizens of a free Republic, to show the generous breadth of their statesmanship, and they did so by providing in their Constitution, that Congress should never possess the power to levy "a tax or duty on articles exported from any State."
At the same time trade was left absolutely free between all the States of the Union, no one of them being permitted to levy any tax on exports or imports beyond what might be necessary for its inspection laws. Still further to enforce this needful provision, the power to regulate commerce between the States was given to the General Government. The effect of these provisions was to insure to the United States a freedom of trade beyond that enjoyed by any other nation. Fifty-five millions of American people (in 1884), over an area nearly as large as the entire continent of Europe, carry on their exchanges by ocean, by lake, by river, by rail, without the exactions of the tax-gatherer, without the detention of the custom house, without even the recognition of State lines. In these great channels, the domestic exchanges represent an annual value perhaps twenty-five times as great as the total of exports and imports. It is the enjoyment of free-trade and protection at the same time which has contributed to the unexampled development and marvelous prosperity of the United States.
OPERATION OF PROTECTIVE LAWS.
The essential question which has grown up between political parties in the United States respecting our foreign trade, is whether a duty should be laid upon any import for the direct object of protecting and encouraging the manufacture of the same article at home. The party opposed to this theory does not advocate the admission of the article free, but insists upon such rate of duty as will produce the largest revenue and at the same time afford what is termed "incidental protection." The advocates of actual free-trade according to the policy of England--taxing only those articles which are not produced at home--are few in number, and are principally confined to doctrinaires. The instincts of the masses of both parties are against them. But the nominal free- trader finds it very difficult to unite the largest revenue from any article with "incidental protection" to the competing product at home. If the duty be so arranged as to produce the greatest amount of revenue, it must be placed at that point where the foreign article is able to undersell the domestic article and thus command the market to the exclusion of competition. This result goes beyond what the so-called American free-trader intends in practice, but not beyond what he implies in theory.
The American protectionist does not seek to evade the legitimate results of his theory. He starts with the proposition that whatever is manufactured at home gives work and wages to our own people, and that if they duty is even put so high as to prohibit the import of the foreign article, the competition of home producers will, according to the doctrine of Mr. Hamilton, rapidly reduce the price to the consumer. He gives numerous illustrations of articles which under the influence of home competition have fallen in price below the point at which the foreign article was furnished when there was no protection. The free-trader replies that the fall in price has been still greater in the foreign market, and the protectionist rejoins that the reduction was made to compete with the American product, and that the former price would probably have been maintained so long as the importer had the monopoly of our market. Thus our protective tariff reduced the price in both countries. This has notably been the result with respect to steel rails, the production of which in America has reached a magnitude surpassing that of England. Meanwhile rails have largely fallen in price to the consumer, the home manufacture has disbursed countless millions of money among American laborers, and has added largely to our industrial independence and to the wealth of the country.
While many fabrics have fallen to as low a price in the United States as elsewhere, it is not to be denied that articles of clothing and household use, metals and machinery, are on an average higher than in Europe. The difference is due in large degree to the wages paid to labor, and thus the question of reducing the tariff carries with it the very serious problem of a reduction in the pay of the artisan and the operative. This involves so many grave considerations that no party is prepared to advocate it openly. Free-traders do not, and apparently dare not, face the plain truth--which is that the lowest priced fabric means the lowest priced labor. On this point protectionists are more frank than their opponents; they realize that it constitutes indeed the most impregnable defense of their school. Free-traders have at times attempted to deny the truth of the statement; but every impartial investigation thus far has conclusively proved that labor is better paid, and the average condition of the laboring man more comfortable, in the United States than in any European country.
An adjustment of the protective duty to the point which represents the average difference between wages of labor in Europe and in America, will, in the judgment of protectionists, always prove impracticable. The difference cannot be regulated by a scale of averages because it is constantly subject to arbitrary changes. If the duty be adjusted on that basis for any given date, a reduction of wages would at once be enforced abroad, and the American manufacturer would in consequence be driven to the desperate choice of surrendering the home market or reducing the pay of workmen. The theory of protection is not answered, nor can its realization to attained by any such device. Protection, in the perfection of its design as described by Mr. Hamilton, does not invite competition from abroad, but is based on the controlling principle that competition at home will always prevent monopoly on the part of the capitalist, assure good wages to the laborer, and defend the consumer against the evils of extortion.
TENDENCY OF OVER-PRODUCTION.
An argument much relied upon and strongly presented by the advocates of free-trade is the alleged tendency to over-production of protected articles, followed uniformly by seasons of depression and at certain intervals by financial panic and wide-spread distress. These results are unhappily too familiar in the United States, but the protectionists deny that the cause is correctly given. They aver indeed that a glut of manufactured articles is more frequently seen in England than in the United States, thus proving directly the reverse of the conclusion assumed by the free-traders, and establishing the conservative and restraining power of a protective tariff. The protectionists direct attention to the fact that the first three instances in our history in which financial panic and prolonged depression fell upon the country, followed the repeal of protective tariffs and the substitution of mere revenue duties,--the depression of 1819-24, that of 1837-42, and that of 1857-61. They direct further attention to the complementary fact that, in each of these cases, financial prosperity was regained through the agency of a protective tariff, the operation of which was prompt and beneficent.
On the other hand the panic of 1873 and the depression which lasted until 1879 undoubtedly occurred after a protective tariff had been for a long time in operation. Free-traders naturally make much of this circumstance. Protectionists, however, with confidence and with strong array of argument, make answer that the panic of 1873 was due to causes wholly unconnected with revenue systems,--that it was the legitimate and the inevitable outgrowth of an exhausting war, a vitiated and redundant currency, and a long period of reckless speculation directly induced by these conditions. They aver that no system of revenue could have prevented the catastrophe. They maintain however that by the influence of a protective tariff the crisis was long postponed; that under the reign of free-trade it would have promptly followed the return of peace when the country was ill able to endure it. They claim that the influence of protection would have put off the re-action still longer if the rebuilding of Chicago and Boston, after the fires of 1871 and 1872, had not enforced a sudden withdrawal of $250,000,000 of ready money from the ordinary channels of trade to repair the loss which these crushing disasters precipitated.
The assailants of protection apparently overlook the fact that excessive production is due, both in England and in America, to causes beyond the operation of duties either high or low. No cause is more potent than the prodigious capacity of machinery set in motion by the agency of steam. It is asserted by an intelligent economist that, if performed by hand, the work done by machinery in Great Britain would require the labor of seven hundred millions of men,--a far larger number of adults than inhabit the globe. It is not strange that, with this vast enginery, the power to produce has a constant tendency to outrun the power to consume. Protectionists find in this a conclusive argument against surrendering the domestic market of the United States to the control of British capitalists, whose power of production has no apparent limit. When the harmonious adjustment of international trade shall ultimately be established by "the Parliament of man" in "the Federation of the world," the power of production and the power of consumption will properly balance each other; but in traversing the long road and enduring the painful process by which that end shall be reached, the protectionist claims that his theory of revenue preserves the newer nations from being devoured by the older, and offers to human labor a shield against the exactions of capital.
Chapter X
Presidential Election of 1860.--The Electoral and Popular Vote.-- Wide Divergence between the Two.--Mr. Lincoln has a Large Majority of Electors.--In a Minority of 1,000,000 on Popular Vote.--Beginning of Secession.--Rash Course of South Carolina.--Reluctance on the Part of Many Southern States.--Unfortunate Meeting of South-Carolina Legislature.--Hasty Action of South-Carolina Convention.--The Word "Ordinance."--Meeting of Southern Senators in Washington to promote Secession.--Unwillingness in the South to submit the Question to Popular Vote.--Georgia not eager to Secede.--Action of Other States. --Meeting of Congress in December, 1860.--Position of Mr. Buchanan. --His Attachment to the Union as a Pennsylvanian.--Sinister Influences in his Cabinet.--His Evil Message to Congress.--Analysis of the Message.--Its Position destructive to the Union.--The President's Position Illogical and Untenable.--Full of Contradictions.--Extremists of the South approve the Message.--Demoralizing Effect of the Message in the North and in the South.--General Cass resigns from State Department.--Judge Black succeeds him.--Character of Judge Black.--Secretaries Cobb, Floyd, and Thompson.--Their Censurable Conduct in the Cabinet.--Their Resignation.--Re-organization of Cabinet.--Dix, Holt, Stanton.--Close of Mr. Buchanan's Administration. --Change in the President's Course.--The New Influences.--Analysis of the President's Course.--There were two Mr. Buchanans.--Personal and Public Character of Mr. Buchanan.
The winter following the election of Mr. Lincoln was filled with deplorable events. In the whole history of the American people, there is no epoch which recalls so much that is worthy of regret and so little that gratifies pride. The result of the election was unfortunate in the wide divergence between the vote which Mr. Lincoln received in the electoral colleges and the vote which he received at the polls. In the electoral colleges he had an aggregate of 180. His opponents, united, had but 123. Of the popular vote, Lincoln received 1,866,452; Douglas, 1,291,547; Breckinridge, 850,082; Bell, 646,124. Mr. Lincoln's vote was wholly from the free States, except some 26,000 cast for him in the five border slave States. In the other slave States his name was not presented as a candidate. Mr. Douglas received in the South about 163,000 votes. In the North the votes cast distinctively for the Breckinridge electoral ticket were less than 100,000, and distinctively for the Bell electoral ticket about 80,000.
It was thus manifest that the two Northern Presidential candidates, Lincoln and Douglas, had absorbed almost the entire vote in the free States, and the two Southern Presidential candidates, Breckinridge and Bell, had absorbed almost the entire vote in the slave States. The Northern candidate received popular support in the South in about the same degree that the Southern candidate received popular support in the North. In truth as well as in appearance it was a sectional contest in which the North supported Northern candidates, and the South supported Southern candidates. It was the first time in the history of the government in which the President was chosen without electoral votes from both the free and the slave States. This result was undoubtedly a source of weakness to Mr. Lincoln,-- weakness made more apparent by his signal failure to obtain a popular majority. He had a large plurality, but the combined vote of his opponents was nearly a million greater than the vote which he received.
The time had now come when the Southern Disunionists were to be put to the test. The event had happened which they had declared in advance to be cause of separation. It was perhaps the belief that their courage and determination were challenged, which forced them to action. Having so often pledged themselves not to endure the election of an anti-slavery President, they were now persuaded that, if they quietly submitted, they would thereby accept an inferior position in the government. This assumed obligation of consistency stimulated them to rash action; for upon every consideration of prudence and wise forecast, they would have quietly accepted a result which they acknowledged to be in strict accordance with the Constitution. The South was enjoying exceptional prosperity. The advance of the slave States in wealth was more rapid then at any other period of their history. Their staple products commanded high prices and were continually growing in amount to meet the demands of a market which represented the wants of the civilized world. In the decade between 1850 and 1860 the wealth of the South had increased three thousand millions of dollars, and this not from an overvalution of slaves, but from increased cultivation of land, the extension of railways, and all the aids and appliances of vast agricultural enterprises. Georgia alone had increased in wealth over three hundred millions of dollars, no small proportion of which was from commercial and manufacturing ventures that had proved extremely profitable. There was never a community of the face of the globe whose condition so little justified revolution as that of the slave States in the year 1860. Indeed, it was a sense of strength born of exceptional prosperity which led them to their rash adventure of war.
THE FIRST EFFORT AT SECESSION.
It would however be an injustice to the People of the South to say that in November, 1860, they desired, unanimously, or by a majority, or on the part of any considerable minority, to engage in a scheme of violent resistance to the National authority. The slave-holders were in the main peacefully disposed, and contented with the situation. But slavery as an economical institution and slavery as a political force were quite distinct. Those who viewed it and used it merely as a system of labor, naturally desired peace and dreaded commotion. Those who used it as a political engine for the consolidation of political power had views and ambitions inconsistent with the plans and hopes of law-abiding citizens. It was only by strenuous effort on the part of the latter class that an apparent majority of the Southern people committed themselves to the desperate design of destroying the National Government.
The first effort at secession was made, as might have been expected, by South Carolina. She did not wait for the actual result of the election, but early in October, on the assumption of Lincoln's success, began a correspondence with the other Cotton States. The general tenor of the responses did not indicate a decided wish or purpose to separate from the Union. North Carolina was positively unwilling to take any hasty step. Louisiana, evidently remembering the importance and value of the Mississippi River and of its numerous tributaries to her commercial prosperity, expressed an utter disinclination to separate from the North-West. Georgia was not ready to make resistance, and at most advocated some form of retaliatory legislation. It was evident that even in the Cotton- belt and the Gulf States there was in the minds of sober people the gravest objection to revolutionary measures.
It happened, most unfortunately, that the South-Carolina Legislature assembled early in November for the purpose of choosing Presidential electors, who in that State were never submitted to the popular vote. While it might seem extravagant to ascribe the revolution which convulsed the country to an event so disconnected and apparently so inadequate, it is nevertheless true that the sudden furor which seized a large number of the Southern people came directly from that event. Indeed, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the great civil war, which shook a continent, was precipitated by the fact that the South-Carolina Legislature assembled at the unpropitious moment. Without taking time for reflection, without a review of the situation, without stopping to count the cost, with a boldness born of passionate resentment against the North, the rash men of South Carolina fired the train. In a single hour they created in their own State a public sentiment which would not brook delay or contradiction or argument. The leaders of it knew that the sober second thought, even in South Carolina, would be dangerous to the scheme of a Southern confederacy. They knew that the feeling of resentment among the Southern people must be kept at white-heat, and that whoever wished to speak a word of caution or moderation must be held as a public enemy, and subjected to the scorn and the vengeance of the people.
In this temper a convention was ordered by the Legislature. The delegates were to be chosen directly by the people, and when assembled were to determine the future relation of South Carolina to the Government of the United States. The election was to be held in four weeks, and the convention was to assemble on the 17th of December. The unnatural and unprecedented haste of this action, by which South Carolina proceeded, as she proclaimed, to throw off her national relations, is more easily comprehended by recalling the difficult mode provided in every State for a change in its constitution. In not a single State of the American Union can the organic law be changed in less than a year, or without ample opportunity for serious consideration by the people. At that very moment the people of South Carolina were inhibited from making the slightest alteration in their own constitution except by slow and conservative processes which gave time for deliberation and reflection. In determining a question momentous beyond all calculation to themselves and to their posterity, they were hurried into the election of delegates, and the delegates were hurried into convention, and the convention was hurried into secession by a terror of public opinion that would not endure resistance and would not listen to reason.
The few who were left in possession of coolness and sound judgment among the public men of South Carolina, desired to stay the rush of events by waiting for co-operation with the other slave-holding States. Their request was denied and their argument answered by the declaration that co-operation had been tried in 1850, and had ended in defeating all measures looking to Disunion. One of the members declared that if South Carolina again waited for co-operation, slavery and State-rights would be abandoned, State-sovereignty and the cause of the South would be lost forever. The action of the convention was still further stimulated by the resignation of Mr. Hammond and Mr. Chestnut, United-States senators from South Carolina, and by the action of Governor Pickens in appointing a cabinet of the same number and of the same division of departments that had been adopted in the National Government.
THE ACTION OF SOUTH CAROLINA.
South Carolina was urged forward in this course by leading Disunionists in other States who needed the force of one bold example of secession to furnish the requisite stimulus to their own communities. The members of the South Carolina convention, recognizing the embarrassment and incongruity of basing their action simply upon the constitutional election of a President, declared that the public opinion of their State "had for a long period been strengthening and ripening for Disunion." Mr. Rhett, eminent in the public service of his State, asserted "that the secession of South Carolina was not produced by Mr. Lincoln's election, or by the non-execution of the Fugitive- slave Law; that it was a matter which had been gathering head for thirty years," and that they were now "determined upon their course at whatever risk."
Among the singular incidents of the South-Carolina secession, followed subsequently by other States, was the solemn import attached to the word ordinance. The South gave it a significance which elevated its authority above the Constitution, and above the laws of their own State and of the United States. And yet, neither in legal definition nor in any ordinary use of the word, was there precedent or authority for attaching to it such impressive meaning. An ordinance of Parliament was but a temporary Act which the Commons might alter at their pleasure. An Act of Parliament could not be changed except by the consent of king, lords, and commons. In this country, aside from the use of the word in declaring the freedom of the North-west Territory in 1787, ordinance has uniformly been applied to Acts of inferior bodies, to the councils of cities, to the authorities of towns, to the directors of corporations,--rarely if ever to the Acts of legislative assemblies which represent the power of the State.
It is still more singular that, in passing the ordinance of Secession, the convention worded it so that it should seem to be the repeal of the ordinance of the 23d of May, 1788, whereby the Constitution of the United States was ratified by South Carolina, when, in simple truth, the Act of that State ratifying the Federal Constitution was never called an ordinance. Mirabeau said that words were things; and this word was so used in the proceedings of Secession conventions as to impress the mind of the Southern people with its portentous weight and solemnity. With an amendment to the constitutions of their States they had all been familiar. In the enactment of their laws thousands had participated. But no one of them had ever before seen or heard or dreamed of any thing of such momentous and decisive character as an Ordinance. Even to this day, when disunion, secession, rebellion have all been destroyed by the shock of arms, and new institutions have been built over their common grave, the word "ordinance" has, in the minds of many people both in the North and in the South, a sound which represents the very majesty of popular power.
If the other Southern States would have been left to their own counsels, South Carolina would have stood alone, and her Secession of 1860 would have proved as abortive as her Nullification of 1832. The Disunion movement in the remaining States of the South originated in Washington. Finding that the Cotton States, especially those bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, were moving too slowly, the senators from Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, and Florida held a meeting in Washington on the 5th of January, 1861. The South had always contended for the right of States to instruct their senators, but now the Southern senators proceeded to instruct their States. In effect they sent out commands to the governing authorities and to the active political leaders, that South Carolina must be sustained; that the Cotton States must stand by her; and that the secession of each and all of them must be accomplished in season for a general convention to be held at Montgomery, not later than Feb. 15, and, in any event, before the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln. The design was that the new President of the United States should find a Southern Confederacy in actual existence, with the ordinary departments of government in regular operation, with a name and a flag and a great seal, and all the insignia of national sovereignty visible.
It is a suggestive fact that, in carrying out these designs, the political leaders determined, as far as possible, to prevent the submission of the ordinances of Secession to the popular vote. It is not indeed probable that, in the excited condition to which they had by this time brought the Southern mind, Secession would have been defeated; but the withholding of the question from popular decision is at least an indication that there was strong apprehension of such a result, and that care was taken to prevent the divisions and acrimonious contests which such submission might have caused. In the Georgia convention the resolution declaring it to be her right and her duty to secede was adopted only by a vote of 165 to 130. A division of similar proportion in the popular vote would have stripped the secession of Georgia of all moral force, and hence the people were not allowed to pass upon the question.
ACTION OF OTHER COTTON STATES.
Georgia was really induced to secede, only upon the delusive suggestion that better terms could be made with the National Government by going out for a season than by remaining steadfastly loyal. The influence of Alexander H. Stephens, while he was still loyal, was almost strong enough to hold the State in the Union; and but for the phantasm of securing better terms outside, the Empire State of the South would have checked and destroyed the Secession movement at the very outset. Mississippi followed Jefferson Davis with a vote amounting almost to unanimity. Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama followed with secession ordained by conventions and no vote allowed to the people. Texas submitted the ordinance, after the other States had seceded, and by the force of their example carried it by a vote of about three to one. These were the original seven States that formed the nucleus of the Confederacy. They had gone through what they deemed the complete process of separation from the Union, without the slightest obstruction from any quarter and without the interposition of any authority from the National Government against their proceedings.
Long before the Secession movement had been developed to the extent just detailed, Congress was in session. It assembled one month after the Presidential election, and fifteen days before the Disunionists of South Carolina met in their ill-starred convention. Up to that time there had been excitement, threats of resistance to the authority of the government in many sections of the South, and an earnest attempt in the Cotton States to promote co-operation in the fatal step which so many were bent on taking. But there had been no overt act against the national authority. Federal officers were still exercising their functions in all the States; the customs were still collected in Southern ports; the United- States mails were still carried without molestation from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. But the critical moment had come. The Disunion conspiracy had reached a point where it must go forward with boldness, or retreat before the displayed power and the uplifted flag of the Nation. The administration could adopt no policy so dangerous as to permit the enemies of the Union to proceed in their conspiracy, and the hostile movement to gain perilous headway. At that juncture Mr. Buchanan confronted a graver responsibility than had ever before been imposed on a President of the United States. It devolved on him to arrest the mad outbreak of the South by judicious firmness, or by irresolution and timidity to plunge the Nation into dangers and horrors, the extent of which was mercifully veiled from the vision of those who were to witness and share them.
PENNSYLVANIA AND THE UNION.
There could be no doubt in the mind of any one that the destruction of the Union would be deplored by Mr. Buchanan as profoundly as by any living man. His birth and rearing as a Pennsylvanian leave no other presumption possible. In the original Union, Pennsylvania was appropriated denominated the Keystone of the arch, supported by, and in turn supporting, the strength of all. Of the "old thirteen" there were six free States north of her, and six slave States south of her. She was allied as warmly by ties of friendship and of blood with her Maryland and Virginia neighbors on the one side as with those of New Jersey and New York on the other. Her political and social connection on both sides were not more intimate than those of a business and commercial character. As the Union grew in power and increased in membership, Pennsylvania lost nothing of her prestige. She held to the new States as intimate relations as she held to the old. The configuration of the country and the natural channels of communication have bound her closely to all sections. Her northern border touching the great lakes, connected her by sail and steam, before the era of the railway, with the magnificent domain which lies upon the shores of those inland seas. Her western rivers, whose junction marks the site of a great city, form part of the most extensive system of interior water-communications on the globe, affording a commercial highway twenty thousand miles in length through seventeen States not included in the original Union. Patriotic tradition increased Pennsylvania's attachment to the National Government. It was on her soil that the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed. It was in her Legislative halls that the Constitution was formed and the "more perfect Union" of the States ordained. From geographical position therefore, from material interest, from inherited pride, from every association and sympathy, from every aspiration, and from every hope, Pennsylvania was for the Union, inviolable and indissoluble. No threat of its destruction ever came from her councils, and no stress of circumstances could ever seduce her into a calculation of its value, or drive her to the contemplation of its end.
With all his attachment to the Union, Mr. Buchanan had been brought under influences which were hostile to it. In originally constituting his Cabinet, sinister agencies had controlled him, and far-seeing men anticipated trouble when the names were announced. From the South he had selected Howell Cobb of Georgia for the Treasury, John B. Floyd of Virginia for Secretary of War, Jacob Thompson of Missouri for the Interior, and Aaron V. Brown of Tennessee for Postmaster- General. From the North he had selected Lewis Cass of Michigan for the State Department, Isaac Toucey of Connecticut for the Navy, and Jeremiah S. Black of Pennsylvania for Attorney-General. It seemed extraordinary that out of seven Cabinet officers four should be given to the South, when the North had a vast preponderance of population and wealth. It was hardly less than audacious that the four departments assigned to the South should be those which dealt most intimately and most extensively with the finances, the manufactures, and the commerce of the country. The quiet manner in which the North accepted this inequitable distribution of political power added only another proof of the complete ascendency which the South had acquired in the councils of the Democratic party.
Mr. Buchanan had always looked to the statesmen of the South as a superior class; and after a political life wholly spent in close association and constant service with them, it could not be expected that, even in a crisis threatening destruction to the Union, he would break away from them in a day. They had fast hold of him, and against the influence of the better men in his Cabinet they used him for a time to carry out their own ends. Secessionists and Abolitionists Mr. Buchanan no doubt regarded as equally the enemies of the Union. But the Secessionists all came from the party that elected him President, and the Abolitionists had all voted against him. The Abolitionists, in which phrase Mr. Buchanan included all men of anti-slavery conviction, had no opportunity, even if they had desired, to confer with the President, while the Secessionists from old and friendly association, were in daily and intimate relations with him. They undoubtedly persuaded the President by the most plausible arguments that they were not in fault; that the whole responsibility lay at the door of the Northern anti-slavery men; and that, if these disturbers of the peace could be suppressed, all would be well. It was under these influences, artfully insinuated and persistently plied, that Mr. Buchanan was induced to write his mischievous and deplorable message of the first Monday of December, 1860,--a message whose evil effect can never be estimated, and whose evil character can hardly be exaggerated.
The President informed Congress that "the long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States has at last produced its natural effect. . . . The time has arrived so much dreaded by the Father of his Country, when hostile geographical parties have been formed." He declared that he had "long foreseen and often forewarned" his countrymen of "the impending danger." Apparently arguing the case for the Southern extremists, the President believed that the danger "does not proceed solely from the attempt to exclude slavery from the Territories, nor from the efforts to defeat the execution of the Fugitive-slave Law." Any or all of these evils, he said, "might have been endured by the South," trusting to time and reflection for a remedy. "The immediate peril," Mr. Buchanan informed the country, "arises from the fact that the long-continued agitation in the free States has at length produced its malign influence on the slaves, and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar. The feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehensions of servile insurrections, and many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and her children before morning." The President was fully persuaded that "if this apprehension of domestic danger should extend and intensify itself, disunion will become inevitable."
PRESIDENT BUCHANAN AND THE SOUTH.
Having thus stated what he believed to be the grievances of the South, Mr. Buchanan proceeded to give certain reasons why the slave- holders should not break up the government. His defensive plea for the North was worse, if worse were possible, than his aggressive statements on behalf of the South. "The election of any one of our fellow-citizens to the office of President," Mr. Buchanan complacently asserted, "does not of itself afford just cause for dissolving the Union." And then he adds an extraordinary qualification: "This is more especially true if his election has been effected by a mere plurality, and not a majority, of the people, and has resulted from transient and temporary causes, which may probably never again occur." Translated into plainer language, this was an assurance to the Southern Disunionists that they need not break up the government at that time, because Mr. Lincoln was a minority President, and was certain to be beaten at the next election. He reminded the Southern leaders moreover that in the whole history of the Federal Government "no single Act had ever passed Congress, unless the Missouri Compromise be an exception, impairing in the slightest degree the rights of the South to their property in slaves." The Missouri Compromise had been repealed, so that the entire body of national statutes, from the origin of the government to that hour was, according to President Buchanan, guiltless of transgression against the rights of slave-holders. Coming from such a source, the admission was one of great historic value.
The President found that the chief grievance of the South was in the enactments of the free States known as "personal liberty laws." When the Fugitive-slave Law subjected the liberty of citizens to the decision of a single commissioner, and denied jury trial to a man upon the question of sending him to lifelong and cruel servitude, the issue throughout the free States was made one of self-preservation. Without having the legal right to obstruct the return of a fugitive slave to his servitude, they felt not only that they had the right, but that it was their duty, to protect free citizens in their freedom. Very likely these enactments, inspired by an earnest spirit of liberty, went in many cases too far, and tended to produce conflicts between National and State authority. That was a question to be determined finally and exclusively by the Federal Judiciary. Unfortunately Mr. Buchanan carried his argument beyond that point, coupling it with a declaration and an admission fatal to the perpetuity of the Union. After reciting the statutes which he regarded as objectionable and hostile to the constitutional rights of the South, and after urging their unconditional repeal upon the North, the President said: "The Southern States, standing on the basis of the Constitution, have a right to demand this act of justice from the States of the North. Should it be refused, then the Constitution, to which all the States are parties, will have been willfully violated by one portion of them in a provision essential to the domestic security and happiness of the remainder. In that event, the injured States, after having used all peaceful and constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the government of the Union."
By this declaration the President justified, and in effect advised, an appeal from the constitutional tribunals of the country to a popular judgment in the aggrieved States, and recognized the right of those States, upon such popular judgment, to destroy the Constitution and Union. The "constitutional means" of redress were the courts of the country, and to these the President must have referred in the paragraph quoted. After an appeal to the courts, and a decision upon the questions presented, it would have been the plain duty of the parties to accept the decision as authoritative and final. By the advice of the President, the States of the South were to accept the decision obtained by constitutional means, in case it was favorable to them, and to disregard it, and to destroy both the Constitution and the Union, if it should prove to be adverse to the popular opinion in those States.
It is not improbable that the President's language conveyed more than his real meaning. He may have intended to affirm that if the free States should refuse to repeal their obnoxious statutes after a final decision against their constitutionality, then the slave States would be justified in revolutionary resistance. But he had no right to make such an argument or suggest such an hypothesis, for never in the history of the Federal Government had the decision of the Supreme judicial tribunal been disobeyed or disregarded by any State or by any individual. The right of "revolutionary resistance" was not so foreign to the conception of the American citizen as to require suggestion and enforcement from Mr. Buchanan. His argument in support of the right at that crisis was prejudicial to the Union, and afforded a standing-ground for many Southern men who were beginning to feel that the doctrine of Secession was illogical, unsafe, untenable. They now had the argument of a Northern President in justification of "revolutionary resistance." Throughout the South, the right of Secession was abandoned by a large class, and the right of Revolution substituted.
FATAL ADMISSION OF THE PRESIDENT.
Having made his argument in favor of the right of "Revolution," Mr. Buchanan proceeded to argue ably and earnestly against the assumption by any State of an inherent right to secede from the government at its own will and pleasure. But he utterly destroyed the force of his reasoning by declaring that "after much serious reflection" he had arrived at "the conclusion that no power has been delegated to Congress, or to any other department of the Federal Government, to coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw, or has actually withdrawn," from the Union. He emphasized his position by further declaring that, "so far from this power having been delegated to Congress, it was expressly refused by the convention which framed the Constitution." Congress "possesses many means," Mr. Buchanan added, "of preserving the Union by conciliation; but the sword was not placed in their hands to preserve it by force."
The fatal admission was thus evolved from the mind of the President, that any State which thought itself aggrieved and could not secure the concessions demanded, might bring the Government down in ruins. The power to destroy was in the State. The power to preserve was not in the Nation. The President apparently failed to see that if the Nation could not be preserved by force, its legal capacity for existence was dependent upon the concurring and continuing will of all the individual States. The original bond of union was, therefore, for the day only, and the provision of the Constitution which gave to the Supreme Court jurisdiction in controversies between States was binding no further than the States chose to accept the decisions of the Court.
The difference between the President and the Secessionists of the South was a difference of opinion as to the time for action, and as to the name by which that action should be called. In principle there was concurrence. The President insisted that the injured party should appeal to the aggressor, and then to the courts, with the reserved right of revolution always in view and to be exercised if neither the aggressor nor the courts furnished satisfactory redress. The President recognized the reserved right of revolution in the States, and it was a necessary incident of that right that each State might decide when the right should be exercised. He suggested that, as justification of revolution, the Federal Government must be guilty of "a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise" of powers not granted by the Constitution, quoting from the text of the State-rights declaration by Virginia in 1798. But in all his arguments he left the State to be the ultimate judge of the constitutionality of the Acts of the Federal Government. Under these doctrines the Government of the United States was shorn of all power to preserve its own existence, and the Union might crumble and fall while its constituted authorities stood paralyzed and impotent.
This construction was all that the extremists of the South desired. With so much conceded, they had every thing in their own hands. They could march out of the Union at their own will and caprice, without resistance from the National Government, and they could come back upon such conditions as, with the President's aid, they might extort from an alarmed and weakening North. Assured by the language of the President that they could with impunity defy the constitutional authority of the government, the Secessionists were immeasurably encouraged. The Southern men had for three generations been cherishing the belief that they were as a class superior to Northern men, and they were more than ever confirmed in this pleasing illusion when they saw a Northern President, with the power of the nation in his hands, deliberately affirming that he could exercise no authority over or against them.
Men who, under the wholesome restraint of executive power, would have refrained from taking aggressive steps against the National Government, were by Mr. Buchanan's action forced into a position of hostility. Men in the South, who were disposed to avoid extreme measures, were by taunt and reproach driven into the ranks of Secession. They were made to believe, after the President's message, that the South would be ruined if she did not assert a position which the National authority confessed it had no right and no means to contest. The Republicans had been taunting Southern men with the intention of using only bluster and bravado, and if they should now fail to take a decisive step in the direction of Disunion, they felt that it would be a humiliating retraction of all they had said in the long struggle over slavery. It would be an invitation to the Abolitionists and fanatics of the North, to deal hereafter with the South, and with the question of slavery, in whatever manner might seem good in their sight. No weapon of logic could have been more forcible; and, wielded as it was by Southern leaders with skill and courage, they were able to consolidate the public opinion and control the political action of their section.
The evil effects of Mr. Buchanan's message were not confined to the slave States. It did incalculable harm in the free States. It fixed in the minds of tens of thousands of Northern men who were opposed to the Republican party, the belief that the South was justified in taking steps to break up the government, if what they termed a war on Southern institutions should be continued. This feeling had in turn a most injurious influence in the South, and stimulated thousands in that section to a point of rashness which they would never have reached but for the sympathy and support constantly extended to them from the North. Even if a conflict of arms should be the ultimate result of the Secession movement, its authors and its deluded followers were made to believe that, against a South entirely united, there would be opposed a North hopelessly divided. They were confident that the Democratic party in the free States held the views expressed in Mr. Buchanan's message. They had conclusively persuaded themselves that the Democrats, together with a large proportion of the conservative men in the North who had supported Mr. Bell for the Presidency, would oppose an "abolition war," and would prove a distracting and destructive force in the rear of the Union army if it should ever commence its march Southward.
THE SECRETARY OF STATE RESIGNS.
The most alarming feature of the situation to reflecting men in the North was that, so far as known, all the members of Mr. Buchanan's Cabinet approved the destructive doctrines of the message. But as the position of the President was subjected to examination and criticism by the Northern press, uneasiness was manifested in Administration circles. It was seen that if the course foreshadowed by Mr. Buchanan should be followed, the authority of the Union would be compelled to retreat before the usurpations of seceding States, and that a powerful government might be quietly overthrown, without striking one blow of resistance, or uttering one word of protest. General Cass was the first of the Cabinet to feel the pressure of loyalty from the North. The venerable Secretary of State, whose whole life had been one of patriotic devotion to his country, suddenly realized that he was in a false position. When it became known that the President would not insist upon the collection of the national revenue in South Carolina, or upon the strengthening of the United-States forts in the harbor of Charleston, General Cass concluded that justice to his own reputation required him to separate from the Administration. He resigned on the twelfth of December,--nine days after Mr. Buchanan had sent his fatal message to Congress.
CHARACTER AND CONDUCT OF JUDGE BLACK.
Judge Black, who had from the beginning of the Administration been Mr. Buchanan's chief adviser, now became so by rank as the successor of General Cass in the State Department. He was a man of remarkable character. He was endowed by nature with a strong understanding and a strong will. In the profession of the law he had attained great eminence. His learning had been illustrated by a prolonged service on the bench before the age at which men, even of exceptional success at the bar, usually attract public observation. He had added to his professional studies, which were laborious and conscientious, a wide acquaintance with our literature, and had found in its walks a delight which is yielded to few. In history, biography, criticism, romance, he had absorbed every thing in our language worthy of attention. Shakspeare, Milton, indeed all the English poets, were his familiar companions. There was not a disputed passage or an obscure reading in any one of the great plays upon which he could not off-hand quote the best renderings, and throw original light from his own illumined mind. Upon theology he had apparently bestowed years of investigation and reflection. A sincere Christian, he had been a devout and constant student of the Bible, and could quote its passages and apply its teachings with singular readiness and felicity. To this generous store of knowledge he added fluency of speech, both in public address and private communication, and a style of writing which was at once unique, powerful, and attractive. He had attained unto every excellence of mental discipline described by Lord Byron. Reading had made him a full man, talking a ready man, writing an exact man. The judicial literature of the English tongue may be sought in vain for finer models than are found in the opinions of Judge Black when he sat, and was worthy to sit, as the associate of John Bannister Gibson, on the Supreme Bench of Pennsylvania.
In political opinion he was a Democrat, self-inspired and self- taught, for his father was a Whig who had served his State in Congress. He idolized Jefferson and revered Jackson as embodying in their respective characters all the elements of the soundest political philosophy, and all the requisites of the highest political leadership. He believed in the principles of Democracy as he did in a demonstration of Euclid,--all that might be said on the other side was necessarily absurd. He applied to his own political creed the literal teachings of the Bible. If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had held slaves without condemnation or rebuke from the Lord of hosts, he believed that Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia might do the same. He found in the case of Onesiums, St. Paul's explicit approval of the Fugutive-slave Law of 1850, and in the cruel case of Passmore Williamson he believed himself to be enforcing the doctrines of the New Testament. Personally unwilling to hold even a beast of burden in oppressive bondage, nothing could induce him to condemn slave-holding in those whose conscience permitted them to practice it. In the Abolitionists he found the chief disturbers of the Republic, and he held New England answerable to posterity and to God for all the heresies which afflicted either Church or State. He had an uncompromising hostility to what are termed New- England ideas, though the tenderest ties of his life were of New- England origin. "The New-Englander individually I greatly affect," he often said, "but, in the mass, I judge them to be stark mad." "I think, too," he would add, "that if you are going to make much of a New-Englander, he should, like Dr. Johnson's Scotchman, be caught young."
To his native State Judge Black was devotedly attached. He inherited the blood of two strong elements of its population,--the German and the Scotch-Irish,--and he united the best characteristics of both in his own person. He had always looked upon Pennsylvania as the guardian of the Federal Union, almost as the guarantor of its safety and its perpetuity. He spoke of her as the break-water that protected the slave States from the waves of radicalism which were threatening to ingulf Southern institutions. The success of the Republican party in 1860 he regarded as a portent of direst evil, --indeed, as a present disaster, immeasurably sorrowful. The excitement in the Southern States over the probability of Mr. Lincoln's election he considered natural, their serious protest altogether justifiable. He desired the free States to be awakened to the gravity of the situation, to be thoroughly alarmed, and to repent of their sins against the South. He wished it understood from ocean to ocean that the position of the Republican party was inconsistent with loyalty to the Union, and that its permanent success would lead to the destruction of the government. It was not unnatural that with these extreme views he should be carried beyond the bounds of prudence, and that, in his headlong desire to rebuke the Republican party as enemies of the Union, he should aid in precipitating a dissolution of the government before the Republicans could enter upon its administration. He thus became in large degree responsible for the unsound position and the dangerous teachings of Mr. Buchanan. In truth some of the worst doctrines embodied in the President's evil message came directly from an opinion given by Judge Black as Attorney-General, and, made by Mr. Buchanan still more odious and more dangerous by the quotation of a part and not the whole.
It was soon manifest however to Judge Black, that he was playing with fire, and that, while he was himself desirous only of arousing the country to the dangers of anti-slavery agitation, Mr. Buchanan's administration was every day effectually aiding the Southern conspiracy for the destruction of the Union. This light dawned on Judge Black suddenly and irresistibly. He was personally intimate with General Cass, and when that venerable statesman retired from the Cabinet to preserve his record of loyalty to the Union, Judge Black realized that he was himself confronted by an issue which threatened his political destruction. Could he afford, as Secretary of State, to follow a policy which General Cass believed would destroy his own fame? General Cass was nearly fourscore years of age, with his public career ended, his work done. Judge Black was but fifty, and he had before him possibly the most valuable and most ambitious period of his life. He saw at a glance that if General Cass could not be sustained in the North-West, he could not be sustained in Pennsylvania. He possessed the moral courage to stand firm to the end, in defiance of opposition and regardless of obloquy, if he could be sure he was right. But he had begun to doubt, and doubt led him to review with care the position of Mr. Buchanan, and to examine its inevitable tendencies. He did it with conscience and courage. He had none of that subserviency to Southern men which had injured so many Northern Democrats. Until he entered the Cabinet in 1857, he had never come into personal association with men from the slave-holding States, and his keen observation could not fail to discern the inferiority to himself of the four Southern members of the Cabinet.
Judge Black entered upon his duties as Secretary of State on the 17th of December,--the day on which the Disunion convention of South Carolina assembled. He found the malign influence of Mr. Buchanan's message fully at work throughout the South. Under its encouragement only three days were required by the convention at Charleston to pass the Ordinance of Secession, and four days later Governor Pickens issued a proclamation declaring "South Carolina a separate, sovereign, free, and independent State, with the right to levy war, conclude peace, and negotiate treaties." From that moment Judge Black's position towards the Southern leaders was radically changed. They were no longer fellow-Democrats. They were the enemies of the Union to which he was devoted: they were conspirators against the government to which he had taken a solemn oath of fidelity and loyalty.
Judge Black's change, however important to his own fame, would prove comparatively fruitless unless he could influence Mr. Buchanan to break with the men who had been artfully using the power of his administration to destroy the Union. The opportunity and the test came promptly. The new "sovereign, free, and independent" government of South Carolina sent commissioners to Washington to negotiate for the surrender of the national forts, and the transfer of the national property within her limits. Mr. Buchanan prepared an answer to their request which was compromising to the honor of the Executive and perilous to the integrity of the Union. Judge Black took a decided and irrevocable stand against the President's position. He advised Mr. Buchanan that upon the basis of that fatal concession to the Disunion leaders he could not remain in his Cabinet. It was a sharp issue, but was soon adjusted. Mr. Buchanan gave way, and permitted Judge Black, and his associates Holt and Stanton, to frame a reply for the administration.
THE PRESIDENT AND THE SOUTHERN LEADERS.
Jefferson Davis, Mr. Toombs, Mr. Benjamin, Mr. Slidell, who had been Mr. Buchanan's intimate and confidential advisers, and who had led him to the brink of ruin, found themselves suddenly supplanted, and a new power installed at the White House. Foiled, and no longer able to use the National Administration as an instrumentality to destroy the National life, the Secession leaders in Congress turned upon the President with angry reproaches. In their rage they lost all sense of the respect due to the Chief Magistrate of the Nation, and assaulted Mr. Buchanan with coarseness as well as violence. Senator Benjamin spoke of him as "a senile Executive under the sinister influence of insane counsels." This exhibition of malignity towards the misguided President afforded to the North the most convincing and satisfactory proof that there had been a change for the better in the plans and purposes of the Administration. They realized that it must be a deep sense of impending danger which could separate Mr. Buchanan from his political associations with the South, and they recognized in his position a significant proof of the desperate determination to which the enemies of the Union had come.
The stand taken by Judge Black and his loyal associates was in the last days of December, 1860. The re-organization of the Cabinet came as a matter of necessity. Mr. John B. Floyd resigned from the War Department, making loud proclamation that his action was based on the President's refusal to surrender the national forts in Charleston Harbor to the Secession government of South Carolina. This manifesto was not necessary to establish Floyd's treasonable intentions toward the government; but, in point of truth, the plea was undoubtedly a pretense, to cover reasons of a more personal character which would at once deprive him of Mr. Buchanan's confidence. There had been irregularities in the War Department tending to compromise Mr. Floyd, for which he was afterwards indicted in the District of Columbia. Mr. Floyd well knew that the first knowledge of these shortcomings would lead to his dismissal from the Cabinet. Whatever Mr. Buchanan's faults as an Executive may have been, his honor in all transactions, both personal and public, was unquestionable, and he was the last man to tolerate the slightest deviation from the path of rigid integrity.
Mr. Thompson, the Secretary of the Interior, followed Mr. Floyd after a short interval. Mr. Cobb had left the Treasury a few days before General Cass resigned from the Cabinet, and had gone to Georgia to stimulate her laggard movements in the scheme of destroying the government. His successor was Philip Francis Thomas of Maryland, who entered the Cabinet as a representative of the principles whose announcement had forced General Cass to resign. The change of policy to which the President was now fully committed, forced Mr. Thomas to retire, after a month's service. He frankly stated that he was unable to agree with the President and his chief advisers "in reference to the condition of things in South Carolina," and therefore tendered his resignation. Mr. Thomas adhered to the Union, and always maintained an upright and honorable character, but his course at that crisis deprived him subsequently of a seat in the United-States Senate, though at a later period he served in the House as representative from Maryland.
Mr. Cobb, Mr. Floyd, and Mr. Thompson had all remained in the Cabinet after the Presidential election in November, in full sympathy, and so far as was possible in full co-operation, with the men in the South who were organizing resistance to the authority of the Federal Government. Neither those gentlemen, nor any friend in their behalf, ever ventured to explain how, as sworn officers of the United States, they could remain at their posts consistently with the laws of honor,--laws obligatory upon them not only as public officials who had taken a solemn oath of fidelity to the Constitution, but also as private gentlemen whose good faith was pledged anew every hour they remained in control of the departments with whose administration they had been intrusted. Their course is unfavorably contrasted with that of many Southern men (of whom General Lee and the two Johnstons were conspicuous examples), who refused to hold official positions under the National Government a single day after they had determined to take part in the scheme of Disunion.
BUCHANAN'S RECONSTRUCTED CABINET.
By the re-organization of the Cabinet, the tone of Mr. Buchanan's administration was radically changed. Judge Black had used his influence with the President to secure trustworthy friends of the Union in every department. Edwin M. Stanton, little known at the time to the public, but of high standing in his profession, was appointed Attorney-General soon after Judge Black took charge of the State Department. Judge Black had been associated with Stanton personally and professionally, and was desirous of his aid in the dangerous period through which he was called to serve.
Joseph Holt, who, since the death of Aaron V. Brown in 1859, had been Postmaster-General, was now appointed Secretary of War, and Horatio King of Maine, for many years the upright first assistant, was justly promoted to the head of the Post-office Department. Mr. Holt was the only Southern man left in the Cabinet. He was a native of Kentucky, long a resident of Mississippi, always identified with the Democratic party, and affiliated with its extreme Southern wing. Without a moment's hesitation he now broke all the associations of a lifetime, and stood by the Union without qualification or condition. His learning, his firmness, and his ability, were invaluable to Mr. Buchanan in the closing days of his administration.
General John A. Dix of New York was called to the head of the Treasury. He was a man of excellent ability, of wide experience in affairs, of spotless character, and a most zealous friend of the Union. He found the Treasury bankrupt, the discipline of its officers in the South gone, its orders disregarded in the States which were preparing for secession. He at once imparted spirit and energy into the service,--giving to the administration of this department a policy of pronounced loyalty to the government. No act of his useful and honorable life has been so widely known or will be so long remembered as his dispatch to the Treasury agent at New Orleans to take possession of a revenue cutter whose commander was suspected of disloyalty and of a design to transfer his vessel to the Confederate service. Lord Nelson's memorable order at Trafalgar was not more inspiring to the British navy than was the order of General Dix to the American people, when, in the gloom of that depressing winter, he telegraphed South his peremptory words, "If any man attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot."
Thus reconstructed, the Cabinet as a whole was one of recognized power,--marked by high personal character, by intellectual training, by experience in affairs, and by aptitude for the public service. There have been Cabinets perhaps more widely known for the possession of great qualities; but, if the history of successive administrations from the origin of the government be closely studied, it will be found that the re-organized Cabinet of President Buchanan must take rank as one of exceptional ability.
For the remaining two months of Mr. Buchanan's administration the destinies of the country were in the keeping of these constitutional advisers. If in any respect they failed to come to the standard of a loyalty that was quickened by subsequent developments, they no doubt fairly represented the demand of the Northern States at the time. There was everywhere the most earnest desire to avert a conflict, and an unwillingness to recognize the possibility of actual war. The majority of the Republican party in both branches of Congress was not advocating a more decided or more aggressive course with the South, during the months of January and February, than the Cabinet, with Judge Black at its head, was pursuing. The time for executive acts of a more pronounced character was directly after the Presidential election, when the first symptoms of resistance to national authority were visible in the South. If the new Cabinet had been then in power, the history of the civil revolt might have been different. But the force that will arrest the first slow revolution of a wheel cannot stand before it when, by unchecked velocity, it has acquired a destructive momentum. The measures which might have secured repression in November would only have produced explosion in January.
THE PRESIDENT'S NEW POSITION.
The change of position on the part of Mr. Buchanan was not left to inference, or to the personal assurance of the loyal men who composed his re-organized Cabinet. He announced it himself in a special message to Congress on the 8th of January, 1861. The tone was so different from the message of December, that it did not seem possible that the two could have been written by the same man. It was evident from many passages in the second message that he was trying to reconcile it with the first. This was the natural course suggested by the pride of one who overrated the virtue of consistency. The attempt was useless. The North with unaffected satisfaction, the South with unconcealed indignation, realized that the President had entirely escaped from the influences which dictated the first message. He now asserted that, "as the Chief Executive under the Constitution of the United States," he had no alternative but "to collect the public revenues, and to protect the public property, so far as this might be practicable under existing laws." Remarking that his province "was to execute, and not to make, the laws," he threw upon Congress the duty "of enlarging their provisions to meet exigencies as they may occur." He declared it as his own conviction that "the right and the duty to use military force defensively against those who resist the federal officers in the execution of their legal functions, and against those who assail the property of the Federal Government, are clear and undeniable." Conceding so much, the mild denial which the President re-asserted, of "the right to make aggressive war upon any State," may be charitably tolerated; for, under the defensive power which he so broadly approved, the whole force of national authority could be used against a State aggressively bent upon Secession.
The President did not fail to fortify his own position at every point with great force. The situation had become so serious, and had "assumed such vast and alarming proportions, as to place the subject entirely above and beyond Executive control." He therefore commended "the question, in all its various bearings, to Congress, as the only tribunal possessing the power to meet the existing exigency." He reminded Congress that "to them belongs exclusively the power to declare war, or to authorize the employment of military force in all cases contemplated by the Constitution." Not abandoning the hope of an amicable adjustment, the President pertinently informed Congress that "they alone possess the power to remove grievances which might lead to war, and to secure peace and union." As a basis of settlement, he recommended a formal compromise by which "the North shall have exclusive control of the territory above a certain line, and Southern institutions shall have protection below that line." This plan, he believed, "ought to receive universal approbation." He maintained that on Congress, and "on Congress alone, rests the responsibility." As Congress would certainly in a few days be under the control of the Republicans in both branches,--by the withdrawal of senators and representatives from the seceding States,--Mr. Buchanan's argument had a double force. Not only was he vindicating the position of the Executive and throwing the weight of responsibility on the Legislative Department of the government, but he was protecting the position of the Democratic party by saying, in effect, that the President chosen by that party stood ready to approve and to execute any laws for the protection of the government and the safety of the Union which a Republican Congress might enact.
A certain significance attached to the date which the President had selected for communicating his message to Congress. It was the eighth day of January, the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, celebrated that year with enthusiastic demonstrations in honor of the memory of Andrew Jackson, who had, on a memorable occasion not unlike the present, sworn an emphatic oath that "the Federal Union must and shall be preserved." There was also marked satisfaction throughout the loyal States with Mr. Buchanan's assurance of the peace of the District of Columbia on the ensuing 4th of March, on the occasion of Mr. Lincoln's inauguration. He did not himself "share in the serious apprehensions that were entertained of disturbance" on that occasion, but he made this declaration, which was received in the North with hearty applause: "In any event, it will be my duty to preserve the peace, and this duty shall be performed."
The change of sentiment towards Mr. Buchanan after the delivery of the special message, was as marked in the North as it was in the South, though in the opposite direction. It would not be true to say that any thing like popularity attended the President in his new position; but the change of feeling was so great that the Legislature of Massachusetts, on the 23d of January, 1861, adopted resolutions in which they declared that they regarded "with unmingled satisfaction the determination evinced in the recent firm and patriotic special message of the President of the United States to amply and faithfully discharge his constitutional duty of enforcing the laws, and preserving the integrity of the Union." The Legislature "proffered to the President, through the Governor of the Commonwealth, such aid in men and money as he may require to maintain the authority of the National Government." These resolutions were forwarded to Mr. Buchanan by Governor Andrew. They were only one of many manifestations which the President received of approval of his course.
The Massachusetts Legislature was radically Republican in both branches, and even in making a reference to "men and money" as requisite to maintain the Union, they had gone farther than the public sentiment at that time approved. Coercive measures were generally condemned. A few days after the action of the Legislature, a large meeting of the people of Boston, held in Faneuil Hall, declared that they "depended for the return of the seceding States, and the permanent preservation of the Union, on conciliatory counsels, and a sense of the benefits which the Constitution confers on all the States, and not on military coercion." They declared that they shrunk "with horror from the thought of civil war between the North and the South."
It must always be remembered that the disbelief in ultimate secession was nearly universal throughout the free States. The people of the North could not persuade themselves that the proceedings in the Southern States would lead to any thing more serious than hostile demonstrations, which would end, after coaxing and compromise, in a return to the Union. But with this hope of final security there was, on the part of the great mass of the people in the free States, the gravest solicitude throughout the winter of 1860-61, and a restless waiting and watching for a solution of the troubles. Partisan leaders were busy on both sides seeking for an advantage that might survive the pending trials. Northern Democrats in many instances sought to turn the occasion to one of political advantage by pointing out the lamentable condition to which anti-slavery agitation had brought the country. This was naturally answered by Republicans with defiance, and with an affected contempt and carelessness of what the South might do. Much that was written and much that was spoken throughout the North during that winter, both by Democrats and Republicans, would have remained unwritten and unspoken if they had realized the seriousness and magnitude of the impending calamity.
FINAL ESTIMATE OF MR. BUCHANAN.
In a final analysis and true estimate of Mr. Buchanan's conduct in the first stages of the revolt, the condition of the popular mind as just described must be taken into account. The same influences and expectations that wrought upon the people were working also upon him. There were indeed two Mr. Buchanans in the closing months of the administration. The first was Mr. Buchanan of November and December, angered by the decision of the Presidential election and more than willing that the North, including his own State, should be disciplined by fright to more conservative views and to a stricter observance of what he considered solemn obligations imposed by the Constitution. If the Southern threat of resistance to the authority of the Union had gone no farther than this, Mr. Buchanan would have been readily reconciled to its temporary violence, and would probably have considered it a national blessing in disguise.--The second was Mr. Buchanan of January and February, appalled by surrounding and increasing perils, grieved by the conduct of Southern men whom he had implicitly trusted, overwhelmed by the realization of the evils which had obviously followed his official declarations, hoping earnestly for the safety of the Union, and yet more disturbed and harrowed in his mind than the mass of loyal people who did not stand so near the danger as he, or so accurately measure its alarming growth. The President of December with Cobb and Floyd and Thompson in his Cabinet, and the President of January with Dix and Stanton and Holt for his councilors, were radically different men. No true estimate of Mr. Buchanan in the crisis of his public career can ever be reached if this vital distinction be overlooked.
It was Mr. Buchanan's misfortune to be called to act in an emergency which demanded will, fortitude, and moral courage. In these qualities he was deficient. He did not possess the executive faculty. His life had been principally devoted to the practice of law in the most peaceful of communities, and to service in legislative bodies where he was borne along by the force of association. He had not been trained to prompt decision, had not been accustomed to exercise command. He was cautious and conservative to the point of timidity. He possessed ability of a high order, and, though he thought slowly, he could master the most difficult subject with comprehensive power. His service of ten years in the House and an equal period in the Senate was marked by a conscientious devotion to duty. He did not rank with the ablest members of either body, but always bore a prominent part in important discussions and maintained himself with credit.
PERSONAL CHARACTER OF MR. BUCHANAN.
It was said of Mr. Buchanan that he instinctively dreaded to assume responsibility of any kind. His keenest critic remarked that in the tentative period of political issues assumed by his party, Mr. Buchanan could always be found two paces to the rear, but in the hour of triumph he marched proudly in the front rank. He was not gifted with independence or self-assertion. His bearing towards Southern statesmen was derogatory to him as a man of spirit. His tone towards administrations of his own party was so deferential as almost to imply a lack of self-respect. He was not a leader among men. He was always led. He was led by Mason and Soule into the imprudence of signing the Ostend Manifesto; he was led by the Southern members of his Cabinet into the inexplicable folly and blunder of indorsing the Lecompton iniquity; he was led by Disunion senators into the deplorable mistake contained in his last annual message. Fortunately for him he was led a month later by Black and Holt and Stanton to a radical change of his compromising position.
If Mr. Buchanan had possessed the unconquerable will of Jackson or the stubborn courage of Taylor, he could have changed the history of the revolt against the Union. A great opportunity came to him but he was not equal to it. Always an admirable adviser where prudence and caution were the virtues required, he was fatally wanting in a situation which demanded prompt action and strong nerve. As representative in Congress, as senator, as minister abroad, as Secretary of State, his career was honorable and successful. His life was singularly free from personal fault or short-coming. He was honest and pure-minded. His fame would have been more enviable if he had never been elevated to the Presidency.