The vindication of the Southern States for their Ordinances of Secession in 1861 involves two considerations, namely: their rightful power to withdraw from the Union into which they had entered by voluntary compact; and the causes that justified the exercise of that power.
In treating this question in its twofold aspect, the legal and the moral, it is not intended to vex the weary ear by adducing time-worn arguments; but, believing the case to be one which must be adjusted finally by historical facts, the candid reader is asked, without favor or prejudice, to make a decision on the unquestionable record.
The British Colonies of North America — subsequently the United States — had a common allegiance to the British Crown. Otherwise they were as distinct from one another as they were from Canada, Nova Scotia, and the American islands owned by Great Britain. When, by the violation of both charter and inalienable rights, for which neither redress nor security against repetition could be obtained, some of the colonies decided to sever their connection with the British Crown, they formed an alliance, declared themselves free and independent States, and, with their united strength, made such vigorous resistance to the efforts of the Mother Country to reduce them to subjection that, finally, a Treaty of Peace was made, in September, 1783, in the following words:
"Article I. His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz.: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut and New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, to be free, sovereign, and independent States; that he treats with them as such," etc., etc.
It has been contended that, although the States were severally named, the recognition was to the Union, not merely as the negotiating agent, but as the supreme authority.
The fallacy of this assumption is shown by the provisions of Articles V. and VII., recognizing the separate, independent power of the respective States to provide for the restitution of all estates, rights, and properties which had been confiscated, belonging to real British subjects; and also of the estates, rights,.and properties of persons resident in districts in the possession of His Majesty's arms, and who had not borne arms against the said United States, etc.
"Article XI I. There shall be a firm and perpetual peace between His Britannic Majesty and the said States, and between the subjects of the one and the citizens of the other. And His Britannic Majesty shall also order and cause all archives, records, deeds, and papers belonging to any of the said States, or to their citizens, which, in the course of the war, may have fallen into the hands of his officers, to be forthwith restored and delivered to the proper States and persons to whom they belonged."
The States, now recognized as free and independent, had, in November, 1777, agreed upon "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union," which were referred to the Legislatures of the several States, and, being duly approved, were adopted by the Congress on the 9th day of July, 1778.
From these "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union "the subjoined extracts are made:
"Article I. The style of this Confederacy shall be, the United States of America."
"Article II. Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by the Confederation delegated to the United States in Congress assembled."
"Article X. In determining questions in the United States, in Congress assembled, each State shall have one vote."
"Article XIII. Each State shall abide by the determinations of the United States, in Congress assembled, on all questions which by this Confederation is submitted to them. And the articles of this Confederation shall be inviolably observed by every State, and the Union shall be perpetual; nor, shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them, unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress of the United States and be afterward confirmed by the Legislature of every State."
Our heroic ancestors, against fearful odds, had staked all that men hold most dear in the War for Independence. By unexampled sacrifices they gained that priceless possession. But a long, exhausting war left them poor and heavily encumbered by debts, to provide for which the Confederation had little power. The western lands, for the time unproductive of revenue but of great prospective value, were covered by claims of several States. These were, in some cases, conflicting, and, because of vaguely defined territorial limits and questionable title, the controversies were of such difficult adjustment that they continued after the war had ended.
Happily, the patriotism of the people came to the relief of the General Government and terminated the disputes by the cession of unoccupied lands to be disposed of for the public good.
The Congress applied to the States for a grant of power to regulate foreign trade and commerce, and to impose duties on imports to obtain the needed revenue. It was not found possible to obtain the unanimous assent of the States, and the current of events, including the hostile commercial policy of England, rendering the grant more and more obviously necessary to the general welfare, the Congress, on February 21, 1787,
"Resolved, That it is expedient that, on the second Monday of May next, a convention of delegates, who shall have been appointed by the several States, be held in Philadelphia, for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation, and reporting to Congress and the several legislatures such alterations and provisions thereon as shall, when agreed to in Congress and confirmed by the States, render the Federal Constitution adequate to the exigencies of Government and the preservation of the Union."
This resolution has been quoted at length because it declares the sole purpose to be to revise the Articles of Confederation and recognizes the supremacy of the States as the power to confirm the resolution to be submitted to their several legislatures. And it is to be remembered that it required the tmanijnous assent of the States to make any alteration in the Articles of Confederation.
When the delegates met in convention, discussion developed the impracticability of amending the Articles of Confederation so as to make them adequate to the exigencies of government, and the convention proceeded to devise a new form of Federal Constitution. There was a well-grounded apprehension that no instrument granting the powers deemed essential would receive unanimous confirmation by the States; and it was provided, by Article XII., that
"The ratification of the Convention of nine States shall be sufficient for the establishment of the Constitution between the States so ratifying the same."
Therefore the names of the States were not written in the preamble, as they had been in the first draft of the Constitution, and as had been done in the Articles of Confederation, but only the general expression, " We, the People of the United States," which could mean no more or less than the people of the ratifying States.
If it be asked how could nine States consistently secede from the "Confederation and Perpetual Union," of which they were a component part, and the terms of which Union could not be altered unless such alteration should "be confirmed by the Legislature of every State," it is submitted, as an answer to the question, that the States, that is, the people of each State, had never surrendered their Sovereignty, and, by virtue of it, if the Government failed to fulfill the end for which it was established, they had the unalienable right to "alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them should seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
In Convention it was agreed that such States as chose, not less than nine in number, might establish a new form of government; which necessarily involved separation from some of their associates in the Union which they had covenanted should be perpetual. George Washington presided over their Convention, and transmitted the Constitution drafted by it to the several States, to be ratified or rejected by the people of each State in convention assembled.
The duty assigned to him was not perfunctorily performed; but, deeply anxious for the formation of the more perfect Union projected, which rested on the power of a State to secede from the old Union, and to accede to the new one — as provided by the closing Article (VII.) of the Constitution as submitted to the States — he exerted his great influence to secure ratification by the requisite number of States for the " establishment of the Constitution between the States so ratifying the same." In one of his letters he asks "what the opponents of the Constitution in Virginia would do if nine other States should accede to the Constitution ?"
After a time the Constitution was ratified by eleven States, and the "more perfect Union" was organized, leaving two States — North Carolina and Rhode Island — sole representatives of the Confederation which had raised the Colonies to statehood and independence. The position of these two States conclusively proves that the sovereignty of each State was an admitted fact, and that it was a voluntary compact to which their assent was requested and from which it was withheld.
The power of the States, in whole or in part, to withdraw from the Union of the Confederation, in 1787, has been conceded by the succeeding generations, and the causes which led to the act have, in like manner, been admitted to be an all-sufficient justification.
And this fact suggests the inquiry. Did the States, by the adoption of the new form of government, deprive themselves of that power ? and if not, did there exist, in 1861, justifiable causes for its exercise ?
Article X., in amendment of the Constitution (the more entitled to consideration because it was one of the conditions on which the Constitution was ratified), is in these words:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people''
If nowhere is to be found the delegation by the States of sovereignty to the United States, that remained with the States, severally, to be exercised thereafter as it had been in 1787.
Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts, said, in reference to the power of nine States to withdraw from the Confederation: "If nine out of thirteen can dissolve the compact, six out of nine will be just as able to dissolve the new one hereafter." Certainly the act of withdrawal, as provided, was to be by the States severally. The number agreeing to withdraw involved the power to maintain the new government, not the right of each to separate itself from the old one. That was a function of Sovereignty, and the terms of the Constitution recognized the right of each State to exercise it; and to Mr. Gerry's contention it might be answered, the power inherently belongs not to a majority, but to each State.
It has sometimes been argued that the powers delegated by the States to the Federal Government included such as were only exercised by sovereigns. It suffices for the present to say that so did those which had been delegated to the Congress of the Confederation.
The consideration of the second branch of the inquiry involves a comparison between the causes which led to secession in 1787 and 1861. In the former case the inefficiency of the Articles of Confederation for some of the purposes of the General Government was presented as the reason for requiring its amendment; and the Convention, when it assembled, proceeded to draft a new form of government which, being submitted and adopted, became the Constitution for a more perfect Union. In the latter case, the destruction of the balance of power which existed when the Constitution was adopted, and subsequent legislation for sectional advantages rather than the general welfare, together with gross and persistent violations of obligations which the States had assumed in the formation of the compact of Union, added to increasing hostility, shamefully displayed, and culminating in invasion, had at length created a feeling that the fraternity in which the Union was founded had ceased to exist — that the Union was no longer one of the heart. In these circumstances a president was elected by a strictly sectional vote — a man who had declared that the Union could not continue to exist "half slave, half free;" whose party dogma was the exclusion of slave-holders from the territory belonging in common to the States, and whose partisans hurled bitterest denunciations and derisive anathemas on the flag of the Union.
The South, as a minority, was naturally attached to the Constitution, as a guarantee of equal rights and protection to public and private interests. Her sons had gathered much glory under the flag of the Union; it was an emblem of free and independent States, and was the object of pride and affection to her people. A very large majority of her people believed secession to be a remedy that could be peacefully exercised. The Southern States, one after another, passed Ordinances of Secession, but they made no adequate preparations for war, because it was generally believed none were necessary. At the instance of Virginia, leading now for peace as she had led for war in the revolutionary era, a call was issued inviting the States to a convention for the purpose of securing peace to the Union. The Convention met at Washington, D. C, on February 4, 1861,a majority of Northern and Northwestern States and eight of the Southern States being represented. The effort of the wise and patriotic members to secure some proper adjustment of existing issues proved unsuccessful.
The States that had seceded met at Montgomery, Ala., February 4, 1861, formed a Provisional Government by their delegates in Congress assembled, and by them a president and a vice-president were elected, and the Provisional Government was inaugurated on the 18th of the same month.
Immediately thereafter commissioners were sent to Washington with authority to negotiate with the Federal Government for a settlement of all issues between it and the seceded States on the basis of equality and goodwill. These efforts, which continued to the expiration of Mr. Buchanan's term and into the administration of Mr. Lincoln, proved as unproductive of the desired fruit as had the Peace Congress; and yet there were not wanting those among us who believed that the Federal Government, having no grant in the Constitution to use force against a State, would not attempt invasion, but, as did General Jackson, would limit their operations to collecting revenue from the outside of Southern ports.
Ignorance and credulity have enabled unscrupulous partisans so to mislead public opinion, both at home and abroad, as to create the belief that the institution of African slavery was the chief cause, instead of being a mere incident in the group of causes, which led to war. In keeping with the first misrepresentation was that of the position assigned to the belligerent parties. Thus, the North is represented as having fought for the emancipation of the African slaves, and the South for the increase and extension of the institution of African servitude as it existed in the Southern States. Therein is a twofold fallacy. First, the dominant party at the North, in 1861, through their exponent, President Lincoln, declared, in his inaugural message, as follows:
"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so; and I have no inclination to do so."
This declaration was reinforced by quoting from the platform of the political convention which nominated him, an emphatic resolution, in these words:
"Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends; and we denounce the lawless invasion, by armed force, of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes."
Fitly, as to time and occasion, was the armed invasion of a State denounced as among the gravest of crimes, and so it remains, whether or not a State's secession should be an accomplished fact. If the State were still in the Union, it was a crime against the Constitution, which did not grant power to coerce a State (indeed the convention which formed that Constitution refused to give that power); if a State had withdrawn from the Union, it was a crime against humanity and justice to make war upon a neighbor's late associate for the exercise of that sovereign right: in either case it was a crime against the hopes of mankind in destroying the fairest prospect for the success of federative government and substituting the theory of force for that of consent.
When Mr. Lincoln endorsed that resolution and incorporated it in his inaugural the effect was like a rift in the cloud while the storm and darkness were gathering, and the words closely following were the more cheering because of the prevalent belief in his rugged honesty. Pity that the confidence should have been impaired by subsequent passages in his address, and that the past and passing acts and avowals of his party gave no reasonable expectation that he would be able to execute his declared policy!
Federation had so generally proved a failure that the world had become distrustful of it; but its success in the United States had revived the hopes of those who saw in it the best mode of securing community welfare and happiness. It was therefore most proper to denounce as among- the gravest of crimes the armed invasion of any State; for their conquest would be the extinguishment of the beacon which was illuminating the world by the rays of federal liberty.
If additional evidence be needed to prove that "emancipation" was not an original purpose, it may be found not only in the inaugural, but also in the fact that President Lincoln subsequently defended the issuance of his emancipation proclamation, in 1863, on the ground of "military necessity."
Therefore, the North could not have entered upon the war to abolish Slavery. Developments in the course of the war cannot be transplanted to its beginning, and then be made to do duty as the cause.
The Southern States could not have contemplated war as a means of defending her citizens against the evasion of their duty by the Northern States in the matter of fugitives from service or labor, nor because of lawless criminals who were secretly instigated to disturb the peace and property of border residents. Equally unfounded is any accusation that the South desired to increase the number of African slaves by importation. Her whole history from the colonial times, when Southern colonies opposed the slave-trade, in which Old England and New England were engaged, refutes the base and baseless reflection. The Constitution of the Confederate States gave no years of grace to the slave-trade, but forbade it immediately, from any foreign country other than the slave holding States and Territories of the United States, and gave to Congress the power to prohibit the introduction of slaves; from the Federal States or Territories. No more need be' said as to increase.
The next point is extension. This is based on the assertion of the equal right of all citizens in and to the territory belonging to the United States. This equality, it was contended, carried with it the right of such citizen, migrating to a territory, to take with him any kind of property lawfully held in the State from which he migrated. This was a claim reasonably deduced from the fact that the Territories belonged to the States in common, and the denial of it was resisted because of its unequality and was an offensive discrimination. There could have been little, if any, pecuniary inducement to take slaves into the Northwest Territory. Persons migrating from the Southern States would probably desire to take with them their domestics, to whom they were personally attached; but the same climatic causes which had led to the transfer of African slaves from the Northeast to the South would have prevented the permanent establishment of the institution of Slavery in the States which might arise out of its Western Territories. What, then, was the objection? The transfer from a Southern State to a Western Territory would certainly not increase the number, and dispersion could only lead to comfort and harmony. If the purpose was, as some extremists asserted, to confine the institution until, by its density, slaves should become unprofitable — that is, until their labor should no longer enable the master adequately to provide for them, and want should compel emancipation — the humane man, looking at all the progressive stages of suffering and consequent crime to which this programme inevitably would tend, might ask, Is this the feast which philanthropy has spread for us?
The existence of African servitude gave rise to acrimonious political discussions long before the secession of the Southern States in 1861; and, owing to persistent misrepresentations and a general misunderstanding of the true nature and character of the questions growing out of the institution, the misconceptions that have been engendered not in our own country only, but, still more, abroad, have tended and still tend to mislead the judgment of the world in arriving at a correct apprehension of the causes of the war between the States and of the controversies that preceded it. It is important, therefore, at the very outset, to have a right understanding of the nature of those questions, and to show by a brief retrospect that the contest had no just application whatever to the essential merits of freedom and slavery; that no moral or sentimental considerations were really involved in either the earlier or later controversies which, after fiercely agitating, finally disrupted, the Union; that they were simply political struggles between sections with diverse institutions and conflicting interests.
At the time of the adoption of the Articles of Confederation, under which the War of Independence was waged, slavery existed in all the States that were parties to that compact. The slaves, however, were comparatively numerous in the Southern and few in the Northern States, This diversity was caused by differences of climate, soil, and industrial interests. Slave labor was profitable in the South and unprofitable in the North. No ethical consideration contributed to this diversity, for at that period moral scruples had not appeared as a factor in the problem. The same industrial interests that had checked the introduction of slave labor in the North and fostered it in the South, impelled the Northern States gradually to abolish slavery; although, at the same time, they did not inhibit Northern merchants from prosecuting the slave-trade in Northern ships between Africa and Southern ports until the traffic was forever prohibited by the Southern States themselves.
The Constitution forbade any Federal interference with the slave-trade prior to 1808. But, during the intervening period of more than twenty years, every Southern State had enacted laws prohibiting the importation of slaves. Virginia was the first of all the States of the Union to prohibit the slave-trade, and Georgia the first to abolish it by constitutional enactment.
In 1807, availing itself of the earliest moment at which the constitutional restriction ceased to be operative, Congress, with great unanimity — by a vote of 113 yeas to 5 nays — passed an act prohibiting the future importation.
The slave-trade was thus finally abolished, and has never since had any legal existence in any of the States.
The question of the maintenance or extinction of the system of negro slavery in any State was one exclusively belonging to such State. It follows that no subsequent question, legitimately arising in Federal legislation, could properly have any reference to the merits or the policy of the institution itself. A few zealots in the North afterward created much agitation by demands for the abolition of slavery within the States by Federal intervention, and by their activity and perseverance finally became a recognized party, which, holding the balance of power between the two great political organizations in the North, gradually obtained the control of one, and to no small degree corrupted the other. The dominant purpose, however — the object at least of the absorbed party — was sectional aggrandizement looking to absolute control.
Theirs, therefore, is the responsibility for the war that resulted.
The fervid phraseology of the period is essentially deceptive, and has done much to confuse the perceptions and mislead the sympathies of the world with the struggles of the South for equality of rights within the Union, and for security with independence by secession. No charge was more unjust, for example, than the accusation that the South sought the "extension of slavery" when it insisted on equal rights in the Territories. The question was merely whether the slave-holder should be permitted to go with his slaves into territory (the common property of all) into which the non-slave-holder could go with his property of any sort. It was simply a question of the dispersion of slaves rather than of the extension of slavery." Removal is not extension.
This distinction between the two policies — essentially different although so generally confounded — was early and clearly drawn during the progress of the settlement of the Northwestern Territory.
Virginia, in 1784, ceded to the United States the vast territory out of which the great States of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota were subsequently formed. In 1787, at the express instance of Virginia, Congress adopted the celebrated ordinance for the government of this vast domain. Its sixth article ordains that " there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crime whereof the party shall have been convicted."
In December, 1805, a petition of the Legislative Council , and House of Representatives of the Indiana Territory — then comprising all the area now occupied by the States of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin — was presented to Congress, asking for a suspension of the sixth article, so as to permit the introduction of slaves. Similar petitions from inhabitants of the Territory, endorsed by a letter from Governor William Henry Harrison (afterward President of the United States), had been received and referred two years before. The Select Committee of seven members — representing Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Kentucky, and New York, with the delegate from the Territory — reported in February, 1806, in favor of the petitioners, and recommended a suspension of the prohibitory article for ten years. They reported that the suspension was " almost universally desired in the Territory," and recorded it as their opinion that the suspension would be a measure alike in the interests of the Territory, the slave-holders, and the slaves," and that it was "a question entirely different from that between slavery and freedom, as it would merely occasion the removal of persons already slaves from one part of the country to another."
It is noteworthy that these dispassionate utterances of representatives of every part of the Union, by men contemporary with the origin of the Constitution, when repeated fifty years later, came to be denounced and repudiated as partisan and sectional.
At the next session of Congress the subject was again introduced in a more imposing form — by a letter laid before the House from Governor Harrison, indorsing resolutions unanimously adopted by the Legislature of the Indiana Territory in favor of the suspension of the prohibitory article — a measure, they stated, that would meet "the approbation of at least nine-tenths of the good citizens" of the Territory. These resolutions again disclaimed the desire to "extend slavery," as, by the suspension asked for, " the number of slaves in the United States would not be augmented," and they reiterated that the suspension would tend to be advantageous to the negroes themselves as well as to the Territory and to the States from which the slaves would be brought.
A committee again reported in favor of the petition; a resolution to suspend the prohibitory article was adopted, but it failed to pass the Senate, and there the matter seems to have been dropped.
It seems proper here to notice the argument that the ordinance for the government of the Northwestern Territory afforded a precedent in support of the claim of a power in Congress to determine the question of the admission of slaves into the Territories, and in a justification of the prohibiting clause applied, in 1820, to a portion of the Louisiana Territory.
The difference between the Congress of the Confederation and that of the Federal Union is so broad that the action of the former can, in no just sense, be taken as a precedent for the latter. The Congress of the Confederation was, in fact, a Convention of Sovereign States, each delegation having one vote only, so that all the States were of equal weight in the decision of any question. It had legislative, executive, and, in some degree, judicial powers — thus combining all departments of government in itself. During its recess a committee, known as the Committee of the States, exercised the power of the Congress, which was, in spirit, an assemblage of the States.
On the other hand, the Congress of the United States is only the legislative department of the General Government, with legislative powers strictly defined and expressly limited to those delegated by the States. It is further held in check by an executive and a judiciary, and consists of two branches, each having peculiar and specified functions.
If, then, it be admitted — which at least is very questionable — that the Congress of the Confederation had rightfully the power to exclude slave property from the Northwest Territory, that power must have been derived from its character as an assemblage of the sovereign States, not from the Articles of Confederation, in which no indication of the grant of authority to exercise such a function can be found. The Congress of the Union is expressly prohibited from the assumption of any power not distinctly and specially delegated to it. What was questionable in the former case, therefore, becomes clearly inadmissible in the latter.
There is another material distinction. The States that owned the Northwest Territory were members of the Congress which adopted the ordinance, and gave it their full and free consent. The balance, therefore, may be regarded as a treaty between the ceding and the receiving States. But Missouri, and the entire region affected by the Missouri Compromise, were part of the territory acquired from France under the name of Louisiana; and, as it requires two parties to make or amend a treaty, France and the United States should have co-operated in any amendment of the treaty by which Louisiana had been acquired, and which guaranteed to the inhabitants of the ceded territory all the rights and advantages and immunities of citizens of the United States, and the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and the religion they professed.
For these reasons it seems to me conclusive that the action of the Congress of the Confederation, in 1787, could not constitute a precedent to justify the action of the Congress of the United States, in 1820, and that the prohibiting clause of the Missouri Compromise was without constitutional authority, in violation of the rights of a part of the joint owners of the territory, and in disregard of the obligations of the treaty with France.
The origin of the sectional controversy was the question of the balance of political power. In its earlier manifestations this was undisguised. The purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France, in 1803, and the subsequent admission of a portion of the territory into the Union as a State, afforded one of the earliest occasions for the manifestation of sectional jealousy and gave rise to the first threats or warnings (which proceeded from New England) of a dissolution of the Union. Yet, although negro slavery existed in Louisiana, no pretext was made of that as an objection to the acquisition. The cause of opposition is frankly stated in a letter of that period from one Massachusetts statesman to another — "that the influence of our part of the Union must be diminished by the acquisition of more weight at the other extremity."
Some years afterward (in 1819-20) occurred the memorable contest with regard to the admission into the Union of Missouri, the second State carved out of the Louisiana Territory. The controversy arose out of a proposition to attach to the admission of the new State a proviso prohibiting slavery or involuntary servitude therein. The vehement discussion that ensued was continued into the first session of the subsequent Congress, and agitated the whole country during the interval between the two. It was the first question that ever seriously threatened the stability of the Union, and the first in which the sentiment of opposition to slavery was introduced as an element of sectional controversy. It was clearly shown in debate that such considerations were irrelevant; that the number of existing slaves would not be affected by their removal from the older States to Missouri; and that the proposed restriction would be contrary to the spirit, if not to the letter, of the Constitution. Yet the restriction was adopted in the House of Representatives by a vote almost strictly sectional. It failed in the Senate through the firm resistance of the Southern, aided by a few patriotic and conservative Northern, members of that body.
The admission of the new State, without any restriction, was finally accomplished by the addition to the bill of a section forever prohibiting slavery, except as to Missouri, in all that portion of the Louisiana Territory north of 36° 30' north latitude; by implication leaving the portion south of that line open to settlement either with or without slaves.
Then and thus, as at a later period, it will be seen that the conflicts between South and North involved no ethical question as to slavery; that they were essentially struggles for sectional equality on the one side, and for sectional ascendency on the other; for the maintenance or destruction of that balance of power or equipoise between South and North which was early recognized as a cardinal principle in our federal system. It does not follow that either party to this contest was wholly right or wholly wrong. The determination of the question of right or wrong must be left to the candid inquirer after examination of the evidence.
The object of these preliminary investigations has been to clear the subject of the obscurity produced by irrelevant issues and the glamour of ethical illusions.
The period from the first session of the Thirty-first Congress (1849-50) to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, although marked by important controversies and measures that had a noteworthy influence on the future of the country, can be referred to here in the briefest outline only.
The acquisition of the territory of California and New Mexico, from Mexico, required Congressional legislation. From the deliberations of the committee of which Henry Clay was chairman emanated the bills generally known as the Compromise Measures of 1850.
With some others I advocated the division of the newly acquired territory by the extension, to the Pacific Ocean, of the Missouri Compromise line of 36° 30', not because of any inherent merit or fitness in that line, but because, having been accepted as a settlement of a threatening controversy thirty years before, it had acquired a popular respect which it seemed unwise to ignore. This compromise was rejected by the majority, composed almost exclusively of Northern representatives. The tree whose first-fruits had been peace was thus recklessly hewn down and cast into the fire. History shows that the South was not responsible for this action, whicU proved to be the opening of Pandora's box.
By this refusal to extend the Missouri line to the Pacific, California was admitted into the Union as a free State. The compensation offered to the South was a more effective law for the rendition of fugitive slaves. The obligation to return such fugitives was a duty that had been assumed in the adoption of the compact of Union. Yet in defiance of this plain constitutional obligation the legislatures of fourteen of the States had enacted what were termed " Personal Liberty
Bills," which prohibited the co-operation of all State officials in the rendition of fugitives. Hence the necessity of Federal intervention in aid of the execution of State obligations, it was argued, in forgetfulness of the obvious fact that whatever tended to lead the people of any of the States to feel that they could be relieved of their constitutional obligations by transferring them to the General Government, or that they might thus or otherwise evade or resist them, could not fail to be like the tares which the enemy sowed among the wheat. The bill was passed, but was made the pretext for the most hostile denunciations of the South from the press, platforms, and pulpits of the North, in which all guise of friendship was thrown away, constitutional obligations and respect for law alike were derided, and resistance to the execution of these laws of the land was recommended in obedience to the dictates of " the higher law."
It was during the progress of these memorable controversies that the South lost its most trusted leader, John C. Calhoun. He was taken from us,
"Like a summer-dried fountain,
When our need was the sorest;"
when his intellectual power, his administrative talent, his love of peace, and his devotion to the Constitution might have averted collision; or, failing in that, when he might have been to the South the Palinurus to steer the bark in safety over the perilous sea.
I was re-elected by the Legislature of Mississippi as my own successor as United States Senator, and entered on my second term on March 4, 1851.
After traversing the State I returned from my tour at the time appointed for the convention of the Democratic (or State-rights) party. During the previous year the Governor of Mississippi, General John A. Quitman, had been compelled to resign to answer an indictment against him for complicity with a recent "filibustering" expedition against Cuba. The charge was not sustained, and the Democratic party recognized an obligation to renominate him, if he should be a candidate. But when the party met in convention it was deemed expedient, in order to defeat an attempt to fix on the Democracy the reputation of a purpose of disunion, which some of General Quitman's antecedents might have seemed to encourage, to invite me to become a candidate, with the understanding, if General Quitman should be appointed my successor to the seat in the United States Senate, that I should be under the necessity of resigning. My own devotion to the Union of our fathers had been so often and so fully declared; my services to the Union, civil and military, were so extended and so well known, that it was believed that my nomination would remove the danger of defeat which the candidacy of a less pronounced advocate of the Union might provoke. Then, as afterward, I regarded the separation of the States as a great, though not the greatest, evil.