USA > New Jersey > New Jersey and the rebellion : a history of the service of the troops and people of New Jersey in aid of the Union cause, Pt. 1 > Part 2
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* * The real civilization of a country is in its aristocracy. To make an aristocrat in the future, we must sacrifice a thousand paupers."
6 The declarations of the secession leaders in South Carolina, as made in the state- ment setting forth the "causes" which led to the secession of that State, are con- clusive upon this point, as to the influence of the slavery question in precipitating the revolt. We quote from Dr. Stanton's work, "The Church and the Rebellion" :
"After a long historical statement from their peenliar standpoint, and an argument to show that sceession is authorized by the Constitution of the United States, these South Carolina leaders proceed to state the grievances which have impelled them to sceede. It is noteworthy that there is not a solitary allusion in the ordinance of seces- sion to grievances on any subject but slavery. But the relation of the General and State goverments to that institution and their apprehensions for the future, they argue at length. A sentence or two will show their position : 'Those States (the non- slaveholding) have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions ; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery ; they have permitted the open establishment among them of societies whose avowed objects is, to disturb the peace and ruin the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes ; and those who remain have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to
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NEW JERSEY AND THE REBELLION.
But there were other causes of this rebellion, lying nearer the surface of our life as a people. These causes had always existed, dating from the very foundation of the government. They may be
servile insurrection. For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. * On * the 4th of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has an- nounced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunal shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall ecase throughout the United States. The guarantees of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.' Whatever may be true about the justice of these charges, the proof is conclusive, from this official act, that slavery, in its extravagant claims and unfounded fears, was at the bottom of the secession of South Carolina. This conclusion cannot be avoided, unless we take the ground either that the men of that Convention did not know and were unanimously mistaken as to what their own complaints were, or that they were utterly hypocritical in stating theni and are not to be believed at all, and that, too, in a document intended to vindicate their course before the world.
"The acts of secession, along with other proceedings of the Conventions of the other rebel States respectively, show precisely the same cause for the revolt as that assigned by the Convention of South Carolina-the assumed hostility of the General Government to slavery and the corresponding sentiments of the people of the North- and there is no other reason given in any ordinance of' secession.
"A more recent and conelusive official testimony is found in the action of the so- called Rebel Congress at Richmond, in an 'Address to the People of the Confederate States,' issued in February, 1864, in which they speak of the cause of their secession as follows: 'Compelled by a long series of oppressive and tyrannical acts culminating at last in the selection of a President and Vice President by a party confessedly sectional and hostile to the South and her institutions, these States withdrew from the former Union and formed a new Confederate allianee as an independent Government, based on the proper relations of lubor and capital. The Republican party was formed to destroy slavery and the equality of the States, and Lincoln was selected as the instrument to accom- plish this object.'
"Besides this official testimony, many witnesses to the same effect might be cited from among leading statesmen and divines. We give a sample of their testimony. Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the Southern Confederacy, was a representa- tive man among Southern statesmen, and one of the ablest of them all. In his speech at Savannah, Georgia, already quoted, showing the superiority of their Constitution, he said : 'The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions re- lating to our peculiar institution-African slavery as it exists among us-the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the . late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast had anticipated this as the 'rock upon which the old Union would split.' He was right. What was conjecture with him is now a realized fact. But whether he comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Con- stitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle-socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not how to deal with : but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, some how or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time. The Constitution, it is true, secured every essen-
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CAUSES OF THE REBELLION.
comprehensively stated as originating in errors of construction as to the powers respectively of the individual States and the General Government. The close of the revolution found the American colonists with a governmental system which, adopted during the exigencies of war, had really none of the attributes of a govern- ment, being a mere league of communities which had never been sovereign before, and lacking power to enforce its commands in any matter of vital concern. Though independent, having cast off the British control, the colonies were still, not a nation, but a mere cluster of petty States, bound together by a feeble alliance which was the source rather of discord and weakness than of concord and strength. Obviously, this condition of affairs could not be permit- ted to continue. It was indispensable to the welfare of all alike that there "should be lodged somewhere a supreme power to regu- late and govern the concerns of the confederated republic."" There must be a stronger government for the Union, or separation and
tial guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly used against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of raees. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation and the idea of a Government built upon it-when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell." Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas.'
"Again : all the religious public bodies of the South which spoke on the subject at all, presented slavery as the cause of the disruption. Among other numerous in- stances, the 'Address of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Con- federate States of America, to all the Churches throughout the Earth,' adopted unani- mously, at Augusta, Georgia, December, 1861, states the matter as follows: 'In ad- dition to this, there is one difference which so radically and fundamentally distinguishes the North and the South, that it is becoming every day more and more apparent that the religious as well as the seeular interest of both will be more effectually promoted by a complete and lasting separation. The antagonism of Northern and Southern sen- timent on the subject of slavery lies at the root of all the difficulties which have resulted in the dismemberment of the Federal Union and involved us in the horrors of an un- natural war.' The Southern Baptist Convention, a body representing, as they say, 'a constituency of six or seven hundred thousand Christians,' sitting in Savannah, Georgia, May 13, 1861, unanimously adopted a paper in which they thus refer to slavery as the cause of disunion: . The Union constituted by our forefathers was one of co-conal sovereign States. The fanatical spirit of the North has long been seeking to deprive us of rights and franchises guaranteed by the Constitution; and after years of persist- ent aggression, they have at last accomplished their purpose.' And similar testimony is borne by all the leading denominations of Christians at the South; the purport of all being-that slavery, its claims and apprehensions as urged by the Southern leaders, caused the rebellion."
: Washington's circular to the Governors of the States.
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NEW JERSEY AND THE REBELLION.
dismemberment were inevitable. Our present Constitution was the outgrowth of this palpable necessity. Its object was to make the inhabitants of all the States perpetually one people, to create a na- tion-not a league. To that end, and the preservation of the nation so constituted, it conferred upon the General Government authority to make and execute supreme laws, to impose taxes, to maintain an army and navy, to declare war, to make treaties-to perform, in short, all the usual functions of a government acting upon persons and property. At the same time, every power was prohibited to the States which was deemed inconsistent with, or would impair the omnipotence of, that central authority. With the adoption of the Constitution by the people, the States as they had previously existed were blotted out,8 and to the new States which arose there remained the powers not directly or impliedly granted to the General Government.9 In other words, the power of the States thus annihilated passed to their successor, which is the nation, for any act of supreme sovereignty that "the exigencies of the Union " may require.
Clearly, there could be no higher exigency than that of the pre servation of the Union, and it would be a waste of words to argue that for this purpose, when rebellion came, the Government had ample power. It was made for this very purpose. The question of maintaining the indivisibility of the Union was purely a ques- tion for the General Government to decide, and not a question for each individual State. It was never intended that one of the States created and assimilated by the engagement of all should have power to defeat its object ; this would have been incompatible with the general principles on which every government must be founded.1.
: "The general power, whatever be its form, if it preserves itself, must swallow up the State governments, otherwise it would be swallowed up by them. Two sovereign- ties cannot exist within the same limits. - Mr. Hamilton in the Federal Convention of 1787.
The powers reserved to the States are the powers of local self-government by their own executive officers, legislative assemblies and courts.
10 "I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the let- ter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed."- President Jackson's anti-nullification message.
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CAUSES OF THE REBELLION.
A constitutional right of secession is wholly inconsistent with the necessary authority of the Government, and with its inherent power to preserve the Union. A nation has a right to everything essen- tial to its safety and well-being. This nation has a right to a Union consistent with its security, liberty and progress in civilization. It had exercised power over the Union from the beginning. But Southern men held other views. They held that each State was sovereign, and that the Government had no power to preserve itself or the Union, because none was expressly granted. They claimed for each State the right, at its own will and pleasure, and without the consent of other States, or consultation with them, to withdraw from the Union.11 They went even further, and claimed that by reason of the secession of any State, the legal tie which bound the others was severed, the central government annihilated, and each State at liberty to form such combinations, and enter into such alli- ances, as it might elect. Not only could a single State withdraw, but at its command the Union could be disintegrated-torn into as many fragments as there are States; and when thus broken, it could never be re-united, except by another convention and the formation of another Constitution.
These principles-principles of misrule, of discord and death, embodying intrinsically all the perils of anarchy-had long had
11 The fallacy of this reasoning as to State sovereignty has never been better exposed than by President Jackson, thus:
"The States severally have not retained their entire sovereignty. It has been shown that, in becoming parts of a nation, not members of a league, they surrendered many of their essential parts of sovereignty. The right to make treaties, declare war, levy taxes, exercise exclusive judicial and legislative powers, were all of them functions of sovereign power. The States, then, for all these important purposes, were no longer sovereign. The allegiance of their citizens was transferred, in the first instance, to the government of the United States; they became American citizens, and owed obedience to the Constitution of the United States; and to laws made in conformity with the powers it vested in Congress. This last position has not been, and cannot be, denied. How, then, can that State be said to be sovereign and independent, whose citizens owe obedience to laws not made by it, and whose magistrates are sworn to disregard those jaws when they come in conflict with those passed by another? What shows, conclu - sively, that the States cannot be said to have reserved an undivided sovereignty, is, that they expressly ceded the right to punish treason-not treason against their separate power, but treason against the United States. Treason is an offence against sovereignty, and sovereignty must reside with the power to punish it."
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possession of the Southern mind.12 The whole Southern people had been educated in this faith. Southern society everywhere was permeated by its influence. In repeated encounters Southern men had maintained it with resolute, if not implacable, tenacity of pur- pose. Often they had menaced the nation with the horrors of war in its defence. There were men, too, at the North, who held, with Calhoun and with President Buchanan,13 that the Constitution con- fers no power upon the general government to make war upon a State; that in other words, there is no inhering or acquired power in the government, when summoned by armed rebellion to abdicate its authority, enabling it to maintain its own existence. They forgot that self-preservation is the first law of nature ; that the law acts upon individuals, and that to execute the law upon persons is not to make war upon a State. They forgot, too, that all rights known to the law have some formal and orderly manner appointed for their assertion; but this pretended right of secession had no such specified method of declaration. It could only be asserted by violence, and this fact alone made its attempted exercise outlawry, sedition, rebellion-offences clearly cogniza ble by the paramount law of the public safety.
In these causes, the war which for over four years filled this land with death and tears, originated. It was inevitable that conflict should result from the principle of secession. It was in itself a menace and a disorder-an element of decay lodged at the
12 In 1832, South Carolina embodied nullification in a solemn ordinance, declaring that, should the Federal government attempt to enforce a certain Tariff law, "the people of that State would henceforth hold themselves absolved from all further obli- gation to maintain or preserve their political connection with the people of the other States, and would forthwith proceed to organize a separate government, and do all other acts and things which sovereign and independent States may of right do." Governor Hayne, in his message to the Legislature of that State, explicitly sanc- tioned the nullifying ordinance. "I recognize," said he, "no allegiance as para- mount to that which the citizens of South Carolina owe to the State of their birth or their adoption." Governor Pickens, in a proclamation issued twenty-eight years later (December 24th, 1860), declared that South Carolina is, and has a right to be, a separate, sovereign, free, and independent State, and, as such, has a right to levy war, to conclude peace, to negotiate treaties, leagues, or covenants, and to do all acts whatever that rightfully appertain to a free and independent State."
13 Mr. Buchanan's views upon this point are given at length in his last annnal mes- sage, laid before Congress on the third day of December, 1860.
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very tap-root of our system. The men who precipitated the contest had never been representatives of our highest life as a Christian people; they were the expositors, not of our democracy, but of the oligarchical clement and spirit which had so long aspired to broader and more absolute domination. It was not among them that the gospel of liberty, of love, and of universal brotherhood found the largest credence. It was not among them that the industrial arts had their grandest development. It was not under their patronage that our manufactures, our inventions, our culture had come to challenge the homage of the nations. Not by their efforts or wisdom-hardly by their consent-had the continent been rescued from barbarism, and great cities, with all the refinements of civilization, planted in the far forest depths where, half a century ago, only the red man's foot disturbed the solitudes. All these results, at once the wonder and envy of the world, had been achieved by the enterprise, the skill, the intelli- gence of the North, and were the legitimate product of the ideas which there found supreme recognition. They constituted, in the eyes of Northern men, certain proofs of the value of the Union, and of the wisdom of that doctrine of government which, as it were, images and epitomizes the people in the national polity, thus securing permanence and safety to the persons and properties of all alike, in the fact of a provident resource, or due reserve of potency, for the correction of all abuses on the part of those in authority. No such results of material, moral or political advance- ment or elevation had been possible under the Southern system ; on the contrary, all Southern policy faced to the Past rather than to the Future, cherished the effete and old rather than the vigorous and new in government and morals, and with that conservative instinct peculiar to aristocracies, perpetually cried out with San- ballat of old against the removal of the debris of decayed systems and the erection of new structures of law and new memorials of growth and expansion. It was but natural, therefore, that when, in the inevitable attrition of these hostile principles, those who recognized no restraints of law or fealty demanded the dissolution of the Union, the people of the North, educated to regard that
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Union as the embodiment of the national aspirations and the safe- guard of the national interests, and as necessarily, by the organic laws of its structure, perpetual, should resolutely resist, even as one resists an attempt to strike down those of his own household. The instinct of nationality, lying deep in the hearts of the people so long menaced by a grudging and ambitious oligarchy, when that oligarchy at last raised its hideous hand in actual hostility, in one grand outburst lifted the nation into an attitude of haughty and majestic defiance, and thus, in one moment of time, issue was joined between the forces which for eighty years had struggled for the mastery in our life, and silently prepared for the fatal hour of a final and decisive collision.
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CHAPTER II.
THE UPRISING IN NEW JERSEY.
On the 20th of December, 1860, a convention of delegates elected under authority of the Legislature of South Carolina, adopted an ordinance of secession, declaring the "Union then subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of the United States of America," to be finally and forever dissolved. This act was hailed everywhere throughout the South with eager exultation, as the first decisive step toward the erection of an independent Southern Confederacy. Others of the slave States, where the disunion plotters had obtained control, at once pre- pared to follow the disastrous lead of South Carolina. Their Senators and Representatives in Congress, flinging taunts and insults in the faces of their loyal colleagues, resigned their places and hastened to their homes to aid in stirring up the passions of the people to an intenser heat and more implacable fury. Military organizations were rapidly matured, and equipped with arms stolen from Federal arsenals and armories, of which the conspirators took forcible pos- session. Vigilance committees, breathing the spirit of the mob, were formed in all the larger towns, and established a reign of terror which swept down, pitilessly, all thought of resistance to the ungovernable passion of the hour. The whole South rang with appeals to arms. In February, 1861, an assembly of usurpers, chosen by the secession conventions of six States without the con- sent or sanction of the people, adopted a form of government for the new Confederacy, which was afterwards distinguished by the title of " Confederate States of America."" On the 12th of April,
1 "This title was utterly false, because no States, as States, were parties to the league. The "government," so called, was composed only of a band of Confederate
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Fort Sumter, occupied by a Federal garrison, was assailed by · hostile batteries manned by Southern troops, and on the following day it capitulated, and the flag of the "Confederacy" was lifted over its shattered walls. From that hour, big with the fate of millions, inactivity on the part of the government was impossible, and it no longer hesitated to summon the people to defend the heritage thus boldly and traitorously assailed.
It is entirely safe to say that up to this time the masses of the Northern people were [unable to believe, notwithstanding the apparent exasperation and widely prevalent excitement of the Southern mind, that a blow would actually be struck against the national authority. The flag of the nation was the flag of the fathers. It was the symbol of a theory of government to which all the world was more and more approximating. It proclaimed on land and sea, to the ends of the earth, man's capacity for self- government. Under it the country had grown from the weakness of Colonial vassalage into the sturdy and stalwart strength of a NATION, whose power everywhere found recognition ; whose example had influenced the polity of the oldest and proudest States of Europe; whose enterprise had pushed its adventurous way into the remotest lands; whose science and philosophy had contributed to the comfort and advancement of every .people; whose laws embodied the ripest results of eighteen centuries of political experience and growth. That flag had through two wars led our armies to victory. It could not, surely, be that men who had found shelter under its folds, whose fathers had marched under it to battle, their way illuminated by the glory of its stars, would dare to seek its dishonor and the overthrow of the authority which it represented ? The same rivers that flowed by the doors of Northern homesteads, touched, in their majestic sweep, the borders of Southern plantations, and bore to Southern villages and cities
traitors, who had usurped the powers and trampled upon the rights of the people, who constitute the State, and were about to make war upon the Republic to the hurt of that people."-Lossing's " Civil War in America,"" page 248, vol. 1. It is noteworthy that while the insurgent leaders uniformly claimed to speak for the people, and in defence of their rights, the people were really ignored in the preliminary as well as in all subsequent proceedings under the Confederacy.
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