USA > North Carolina > North Carolina in the War Between the States > Part 3
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This wrong and outrage did not pass without a protest on the part of the victim. Unfortunately, the protest was not made with sufficient vigor. It is true that the tariff contro- versy of 1832- 33 caused the pillars of the Union to totter to their foundations, and that South Carolina passed what is popularly known as the nullification acts. The North re- ceded, a compromise was effected, and South Carolina then, and not until then, repealed her statute. But the South little knew with what a wily and treacherous foe she had to deal. When the danger was passed the North violated the agree- ment, and again levied protective mail.
It is futile to speak of what ought to have been done, but in the light of subsequent events, it is sufficiently clear that the South should then have resisted this disregard not only of plighted faith, but of the Constitution itself, to the end of separation. What was the value of pledges? What were guarantees worth? What did the Constitution avail? Noth- ing!
Let us now return and trace briefly the history of the . anti-slavery agitation. The North dared not to attack slav- ery at once. The adoption of the Constitution had been of too recent date: so the fugitive slave law of 1793 was passed without a dissenting voice in the Senate, and by a vote of forty-eight to seven in the House of Representatives. Public opinion at the North favored the return of such fugitives. The anti-slavery movement was formally organized in 1814. when the famous Hartford convention assembled. It was this convention which proposed to deprive the South of her slave representation. The Missouri compromise of 1820. which bounded slavery by a parallel of latitude, drew the see- tional lines and established a political North on the one side and a political South on the other. The South gained Mis-
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souri-fatal acquisition !- at the expense of a virtual surrender of a principle, and of her rights in the territory north of the line. The next struggle was over the vast domain of Texas, which was admitted as a slave State, but the territory ac- quired by the war with Mexico was lost. In 1850 California was admitted as a free State, in violation of the Missouri compromise, and South Carolina threatened secession. Un- der Pierce's administration, Douglas reported the Kansas- Nebraska bill, which declared that the Missouri compromise was abrogated by the compromise measures of 1850, and the admission of California as a free State. The bill passed and the South thought it had won a triumph in the repeal of the Missouri compromise. Little did she reckon on the double- dealing and play upon words which the demagogue Douglas intended to make, in order to regain popular favor at the North, which an honest construction of his bill had lost him. For lo! the thimble-rigger turned up "popular sovereignty," which gave to the territory, in its territorial capacity, the right and power to exclude slavery.
The determination of the North to destroy slavery, and their reckless defiance of the Constitution. was seen in the debate on the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Mr. English, of Indiana, asked, "Is there a Southern man here who will vote against the admission of Kansas as a free State, if such be the un- doubted will of the people of that territory?" And there was a universal response, "not one," from the Southern side. Mr. Barksdale, of Mississippi, put the question to the Repub- licans, if they would vote for the admission of Kansas as a slave State, if such were the will of her people? Mr. Gid- dings, of Ohio, replied, that "he would never vote to compel his State to associate with another slave State:" and Mr. Stanton added, "I will say that the Republican members of this House, so far as I know, will never vote for the admis- sion of any slave State north of 36° 30'."
The contest for power on the part of the North, under the pretext of opposition to slavery, now exhibited an immense in-
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crease of strength. In the campaign of 1852 Hale, the aboli- tionist, did not receive the vote of a single State, and less than 200,000 of the popular vote, but Republicanism swept the Northern States, and Banks, a Massachusetts abolitionist, was elected Speaker of the House in the Thirty-first Con- gress. The election of 1856 showed for Fremont and Day- ton 114 of the 296 electoral votes, representing one-third of the popular vote, and that, all in one section. In 1859 the John Brown raid followed. and the manifestations of ap- proval of his murderous purposes which took place in the Northern towns and cities, and the indorsement of the Helper book, which, added to the increased Republican majorities. left the South but little room for hope. Up to this period the co-operation of the Northern Democrats with the South had saved the Union. The disintegration of that party at the Charleston convention. and the election of Abraham Lin- coln as a sectional President, precipitated the crisis, and winged away the last hope. Remonstrance had been tried and failed. A deaf ear was turned to the appeals of justice. There was no hope in political power; for the preponderance was in black- Republican hands, and was increasing. There was none under the Constitution, for its obligations were no longer observed. Lastly, there was none in the Supreme Court, for Lincoln had been elected on a principle which that court had declared expressly to be unconstitutional.
The abolition party in its orgin was obscure and insig- nificant. It did not even rise to the importance of a faction. Its advocates were regarded as a pack of crazy fanatics. It was not the purpose of the Free-soil party, or of the Republican party, which succeeded it, to interfere with slavery in the States. Power, with its pecuniary advantages, was all they aimed at, and if the South could be kept out of the Territo- ries this power could be secured. In addition to this the South was their great source of profit, and the moneyed men of the North, who have always controlled the legislation, feared that a revolution in the labor system of the South 3
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might kill the goose that laid their golden eggs. Meanwhile the abolition sentiment was spreading and permeating the great middle class of the Northern people. This sentiment was the great tap-root which fed the Republican party with life-giving substance. To it the Republican party owed its growth, its influence, and what of sincerity there might have been in it. The abolitionists were logical and consistent ; the Republicans, as a political party, were not only illogical, but dishonest. The abolitionists said slavery was a crime and ought to be abolished. If their premise was right the con- clusion wasirresistible. The Republicansassented to the same premise, but stopped before reaching the inevitable result. They paltered in a double sense. To the abolitionists they said, "your principles are just and true and we are in accord with you." To the South they said, "it is not our purpose to interfere with slavery in the States ; we confine ourselves to resisting its extension into the Territories." The abolition party grew apace and increased in numbers in a greater ratio than did the Republican party. It possessed more vigor and aggressiveness-the restless energy that is born of religious fanaticism. It did not seek for office and pecuniary profit. Without these incentives the Republican party would never have existed. The abolitionists were never clamorous for a protective tariff. The Republicans made slavery a pretext to fasten such a tariff on the country. The abolitionists hon- estly said that the Constitution was a guarantee of slavery, and hence they denounced it as a " covenant with hell." The Republican tricksters pretended that slavery was not in the Constitution, and existed only in virtue of local law. The path of the abolitionists was plain, straight-forward and direct before them ; that of the Republicans was tortuous and diffi. cult. Their Janus face turned one way to the North and another way to the South. Above all things they courted the abolitionists, who had succeeded in capturing the machinery of the churches, most potent with the average rural popula- tions. But these one-idea zealots would hear to no compro-
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mise. Janus must put off one of his faces. Janus did, and the Republican party was finally merged and overwhelmed in the impetuous torrent of abolition fanaticism.
The first duty of the Government, said the abolitionists, was to exterminate slavery, root and branch, regardless of the Constitution, the Union. the laws, solemn compromises, compacts and plighted faith. They did not hesitate to de- clare their purpose in the most explicit and unmistakable language. Garrison and his colleagues proclaimed that the Constitution was " a covenant with death," and the Union "a league with hell," because slaves were recognized as private property, and as such protected under both.
The American Anti-Slavery Society resolved, that " seces- sion from the United States Government is the duty of every abolitionist." And why was secession a duty ? Be- cause the Constitution warranted and justified every demand of the South.
It was the pressure from this powerful party that moved the wily Seward to throw himself into its arms and to declare the doctrine of the " irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces." Under the same pressure the New York Tribune published the lines-
" Tear down the flaunting lie, Half-mast the starry flag, Insult no sunny sky With hate's polluted rag."
Thus the abolitionists triumphed over the Republicans and absorbed them in the fusion. Wendell Phillips was justified in saying that "the Republican party is a party of the North, pledged against the South." Mr. Lincoln afterwards echoed Mr. Seward, and declared that "the Union could not permanently exist half slave and half free." To get rid of the guarantees of the Constitution Mr. Seward brought for- ward his principle of a " higher law" than the Constitution, to which obedience was first due. Thad. Stevens, "the Great Commoner," said, with infinitely more honesty, in reference
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to war legislation, " In all this business we aet outside of the Constitution."
These were not the views and utterances of private indi- viduals, but of great and trusted leaders of a powerful ele- ment of Northern society. They made these declarations with all due form and solemnity, and because popular senti- ment demanded such expressions. The election of Lincoln witnessed the final and complete triumph of the abolition principle, the full organization of a sectional Northern party, rooted and grounded in a sense of hostility to the South, and boldly avowing its purposes and aims. And this party was in control of the Federal Government-a government de- signed for the security and protection of the people of all the States !
The doctrines of the abolition party were not enounced with calmness and the absence of feeling, which should char- acterize the formulation of grave political principles. On the contrary, their expression was accompanied with an abiding and bitter malignity towards the Southern people. Envy and hatred were formulated with the leaven of Puri- tanism. The most influential Northern churches rang with fierce denunciations of Southern slave-holders, even refusing them Christian fellowship and communion. The satanic press agonized in the search of epithets to apply to the "slave-drivers." The public speakers and lectur- ers took up the refrain as the surest passport to popularity and profit. The most popular verses were those which depicted the horrors of slavery. The most popular book ever printed in the North was " Uncle Tom's Cabin." In its lying pages the South was represented under the type of a blood-hound. The people of the North were taught to look upon slave owners as wolves to be exterminated. The " underground railroad" stole negroes from the South and run them into the free States ; the fugitive slave law could not be executed. The preachers took up collections in their churches to send Sharp's rifles into Kansas to kill pro-slavery
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men. Old John Brown, a Kansas ruthian, led a band of assassins into Virginia to apply the midnight torch, to mur- der the unarmed and defenseless, and to stir up a servile insurrection, with all its horrors.
It is an undeniable fact that all this was either justified or palliated by the abolition party. Far worse than all, was the spirit and motive of the North towards the South as ex- hibited, without effort at concealment. in the joint declara- tions of sixty-nine black Republican members of Congress, chief among whom was Steward. It might be alleged that the John Brown raid was not representative of the dominant Northern sentiment, but such an allegation could not be made, with any shadow of truth or reason, with regard to these joint declarations. The publication of this document and the amazing growth of abolitionism which it revealed, left the most thoughtful minds of the South no hope of remaining in the Union, consistent with safety and with honor.
The sixty-nine say to the South :* "Frown, sirs; fret, foam, prepare your weapons, threaten, strike, shoot, bring on civil war, dissolve the Union; nay, annihilate the solar system if you will; do all this-more, less, better, worse- anything; do what you will, sirs-you can neither foil nor intimidate us: our purpose is as fixed as the eternal pillars of heaven. We have determined to abolish slavery and-so help us God !- we will ! * Our banner is inscribed, " No co-operation with slaveholders in politics ; no fellow- ship with them in religion; no affiliation with them in society ; no recognition of pro-slavery men, except as ruf- fians, outlaws and criminals.' * * We believe it is, as it ought to be, the desire, the determination and the destiny of the Republican party to give the death-blow to slavery. * In any event, come what will, transpire what may, the institution of slavery must be abolished. * * It is our honest conviction that all the pro-slavery slaveholders
* Helper's Impending Crisis.
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deserve to be at once reduced to a parallel with the basest criminals that lie fettered within the cells of our public prisons. * * Compensation to slave owners for ne- groes! Preposterous idea ! The suggestion is criminal, the demand unjust, wicked, monstrous, danmable! Shall we pat blood-hounds for the sake of doing them a favor? Shall we feed the curs of slavery to make them rich at our expense ? Pay these whelps for the privilege of converting them into decent, honest, upright men ?"
Mr. John Sherman, of Ohio,* was one of the sixty-nine, who addressed this language to the people of the South, and for nearly two months he was supported by more than three- fourths of the black Republican party for Speaker of the House in 1859.
These sixty-nine represented their constituents, and the few Republicans who had not yet come up to this orthodox standard were driven to it by those whom they represented. Could anything be plainer? Could the South any longer doubt ? The language of 1861 was like in kind and pro- ceeded from the same source. The New York Tribune, which best represented the black Republican party, voiced this malignity in words for which history does not afford a paral- lel. The New York Tribune of May 1, 1861. said : " But nevertheless we mean to conquer them, not merely to defeat, but to conquer and subjugate them. But when the rebellious traitors are overwhelmed in the field and scattered like leaves before an angry wind, it must not be to return to peaceful and contented homes! They must find poverty at their firesides, and, see priration in the anxious eyes of mothers and the rags of chil- dren. The whole coast of the South, from the Delaware to the Rio Grande, must be a solitude !"
Not less diabolical was the pulpit. Dr. Tyng said, addressing a public meeting in New York: "He would not meet pirates on the deck and call it warfare. He would hang them as quick as he would shoot a mad dog." Beecher remarked :
* At present U. S. Senator.
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" Oh, that the South would go; but then she must leave us her lands."
The only hope of safety for the South was in separation.
As late as 1830 Mr. Madison said: " It still remains to be seen whether the Union will answer the ends of its existence or otherwise." He had already said that, " if the Union was inconsistent with the public happiness, abolish it." And nów Mr. Madison's apprehensions were about to be realized.
The South began to cast about, and take into serious con- sideration, the question of exercising the reserved rights of the States. This involved a separation. The South was purely and devotedly attached to the Union, not from a love of gain, not because the Union was profitable in a material sense (for in this respect it was a burden), but from senti- ment. From the South had come the greater part of the leading spirits of the Revolution. She had supplied all the Presidents. from Washington to John Quincy Adams, with the exception of the one term of John Adams-and Virginia had given to the Union the great West. It was hallowed by a thousand associations, and had been baptized in the best blood of her sons. Nothing but the extremity of self-preser- vation could move the South, even to an earnest contem- plation of the remedy of secession. But the extremity was rapidly approaching, and the South reflected.
Mr. Buchanan, in the history of his administration, says : "The right of secession is not a plant of Southern origin-it first sprung up in the North." Mr. Buchanan was right. The Hartford convention declared that " when emergencies occur which are either beyond the reach of the judicial tri- bunals, or too pressing to admit of the delay incident to their forms, States, which have no cominon umpire, must be their own judges and execute their own. decisions." Nowhere is the doctrine of secession more strongly expressed, and the men who announced it represented the best thought of all the New England States. The motives which prompted the
* New York Herald.
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delegates to this convention have been severely and justly criticised, but the right of those States to withdraw from the Union was not denied. The adoption of the Constitution and its contemporaneous interpretation was yet too fresh in the minds of men to admit of any doubt on this question. Colonel Pickering, of Massachusetts, Secretary of State under Washington's administration, and long a United States Sena- tor, wrote, 1803: " I will not yet despair ; I will rather antici- pate a new confederacy, exempt from the corrupt and cor- rupting influence and oppression of the aristocratic Democrats of the South. There will be (and our children at farthest
will see it) a separation." A few weeks afterwards he writes : " A Northern confederacy would unite congenial characters and present a fairer prospect of public happiness. * * It (the separation) must begin in Massachusetts."* And this he claimed, as a right to be peaceably exercised.
In 1811, on the bill for the admission of Louisiana, Josiah Quincy, of the same State, said : " If this bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that it is a virtual dissolution of this Union."
During the Texas controversy the Legislature of Massa- chusetts in 1844-'5, declared the doctrine of reserved rights and State sovereignty in the most explicit terms. It said it would " submit to undelegated powers in no body of men on earth." * " The project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested on the threshold, may tend to drive these States into a dissolution of the Union." The same legisla- ture also adopted and forwarded to Congress resolutions which set forth that " the admission of Texas would have no binding force on the people of Massachusetts."
Since that time, and previous to 1861, New England, by means of protective tariff and other sectional legislation, had grown rich off the South, had experienced the pecuniary profit that she had gained in the Union, and modified her views of the nature of the Government accordingly. But
* Life of Cabot, pp. 338-340.
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the nature of the Government remained the same, notwith- standing this revolution of political opinion-or rather pre- tense of opinion-on the part of the North.
No respectable writer or speaker has yet had the hardihood to deny that under the old Confederation cach State was a separate and distinct sovereign and nationality. The Conven- tion which framed the Federal Constitution was called solely to revise the Articles of Confederation. But eleven of the States formed a new compact and withdrew from the old form, leaving out Rhode Island and North Carolina, although, by its very terms. the old articles were declared " to be per- petual." This the States, entering into the new compact, had a right to do as sovereigns. The States did not lose their sovereignty under the new compact. The new com- pact or constitution did not even declare itself to be per- petual, as did the articles, and it is a noteworthy fact that all the grants of power in the Constitution, which are relied upon as proving that the States had parted with their sov- ereignty, existed equally under the old Confederation. Mr. Madison, "the father of the Constitution," says in the Federalist, speaking of this change, " the change consists much less in the addition of new powers than in the invigo- ration of its original powers." Again he says : "The truth is, that the great principles of the Constitution proposed by the Convention may be considered less as absolutely new than as the expansion of principles which are found in the Ar- ticles of Confederation."
Speaking further of these principles, he says : " I ask what are these principles ? Do they require that in the establish- ment of the Constitution, the States should be regarded as distinct and independent sovereigns ? They are so regarded by the Constitution proposed." In other words, and in the language of Mr. Davis, "it was an amended union, not a consolidation."+
*Federalist, No. XL.
+Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, vol. 1, p. 170.
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There were those in the Convention who desired a national or consolidated system, but they were few in number and were overwhelmed by the opposition to such a radical and revo- lutionary change. Gouverneur Morris' proposition to submit the Constitution for ratification to the people at large was, as Mr. Madison tells us, not even seconded. Everything which looked towards a national system was unqualifiedly repudiated and voted down. Mr. Madison said the Gov- ernment was not national but federal, because it did not de- pend for its ratification upon a majority of the people, but upon the assent of the States who were parties to it. Such also was the opinion of Jay and Gouverneur Morris. Ham- ilton, the leader of the national school, after failing to secure the system he desired, admitted its federal character, and de- clared it to be, on that account. "a frail and worthless fabric."
It was States that were represented in the Convention. It was States that adopted the Constitution. The ex- pression, "we. the people," was well understood in the Convention to mean the people of the ratifying States acting in their organic and sovereign capacity. As origi- nally drafted, after this expression, "we, the people," fol- lowed the name of each respective State. But this was changed to the present phraseology, because it was not known what States would ratify, and hence the names of the States could not be inserted beforehand. Upon this ex- pression, and with a full knowledge of the attending circum- stances, the consolidationists have grounded their strongest argument. To such pitiful evasions have they been re- duced! It may be proper to remark just here that the provision in the Constitution that it shall be " the supreme law of the land," &c., received a contemporaneous construc- tion by our own Judge Iredell. He said: "What is the meaning of this ? * * It is saying no more than that when we adopt the Government we will maintain and obey it; when Congress passes a law consistent with the Constitution
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it is to be binding on the people." He said again : "The power that created the Government can destroy it." Judge Iredell was laboring to secure the adoption of the Constitu- tion in North Carolina. as Mr. Madison was in Virginia. The great overshadowing fear of the States-of all the States-was that by acceding to the new compact they might in some way impair their sovereign rights. To remove this unfounded apprehension Judge Iredell and Mr. Madison devoted their best efforts. It only remains to be mentioned in this con- nection that the provisions for the amendment of the Consti- tution and the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court present no difficulty whatever, when we consider that the Constitution is a compact. and that the fundamental character of the General Government is that of an agent exercising delegated powers.
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