American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) by Various

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You need not be told now that the slave system is the older of the two,
and that once it was universal. The emancipation of our own ancestors,
Caucasians and Europeans as they were, hardly dates beyond a period of
five hundred years. The great melioration of human society which modern
times exhibit, is mainly due to the incomplete substitution of the
system of voluntary labor for the one of servile labor, which has
already taken place. This African slave system is one which, in its
origin and in its growth, has been altogether foreign from the habits
of the races which colonized these States, and established civilization
here. It was introduced on this continent as an engine of conquest, and
for the establishment of monarchical power, by the Portuguese and the
Spaniards, and was rapidly extended by them all over South America,
Central America, Louisiana, and Mexico. Its legitimate fruits are seen
in the poverty, imbecility, and anarchy which now pervade all Portuguese
and Spanish America. The free-labor system is of German extraction, and
it was established in our country by emigrants from Sweden, Holland,
Germany, Great Britain and Ireland. We justly ascribe to its influences
the strength, wealth, greatness, intelligence, and freedom, which the
whole American people now enjoy. One of the chief elements of the value
of human life is freedom in the pursuit of happiness. The slave system
is not only intolerable, unjust, and inhuman, toward the laborer, whom,
only because he is a laborer, it loads down with chains and converts
into merchandise, but is scarcely less severe upon the freeman, to whom,
only because he is a laborer from necessity, it denies facilities for
employment, and whom it expels from the community because it cannot
enslave and convert into merchandise also. It is necessarily improvident
and ruinous, because, as a general truth, communities prosper and
flourish, or droop and decline, in just the degree that they practise
or neglect to practise the primary duties of justice and humanity.
The free-labor system conforms to the divine law of equality, which is
written in the hearts and consciences of man, and therefore is always
and everywhere beneficent.

The slave system is one of constant danger, distrust, suspicion, and
watchfulness. It debases those whose toil alone can produce wealth and
resources for defence, to the lowest degree of which human nature is
capable, to guard against mutiny and insurrection, and thus wastes
energies which otherwise might be employed in national development and
aggrandizement.

The free-labor system educates all alike, and by opening all the fields
of industrial employment and all the departments of authority, to the
unchecked and equal rivalry of all classes of men, at once secures
universal contentment, and brings into the highest possible activity all
the physical, moral, and social energies of the whole state. In states
where the slave system prevails, the masters, directly or indirectly,
secure all political power, and constitute a ruling aristocracy.
In states where the free-labor system prevails, universal suffrage
necessarily obtains, and the state inevitably becomes, sooner or later,
a republic or democracy.

Russia yet maintains slavery, and is a despotism. Most of the other
European states have abolished slavery, and adopted the system of free
labor. It was the antagonistic political tendencies of the two systems
which the first Napoleon was contemplating when he predicted that Europe
would ultimately be either all Cossack or all republican. Never did
human sagacity utter a more pregnant truth. The two systems are at once
perceived to be incongruous. But they are more than incongruous--they
are incompatible. They never have permanently existed together in
one country, and they never can. It would be easy to demonstrate this
impossibility, from the irreconcilable contrast between their great
principles and characteristics. But the experience of mankind has
conclusively established it. Slavery, as I have already intimated,
existed in every state in Europe. Free labor has supplanted it
everywhere except in Russia and Turkey. State necessities developed in
modern times are now obliging even those two nations to encourage and
employ free labor; and already, despotic as they are, we find them
engaged in abolishing slavery. In the United States, slavery came into
collision with free labor at the close of the last century, and fell
before it in New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania,
but triumphed over it effectually, and excluded it for a period yet
undetermined, from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Indeed,
so incompatible are the two systems, that every new State which is
organized within our ever-extending domain makes its first political act
a choice of the one and the exclusion of the other, even at the cost
of civil war, if necessary. The slave States, without law, at the last
national election, successfully forbade, within their own limits, even
the casting of votes for a candidate for President of the United States
supposed to be favorable to the establishment of the free-labor system
in new States.

Hitherto, the two systems have existed in different States, but side by
side within the American Union. This has happened because the Union is
a confederation of States. But in another aspect the United States
constitute only one nation. Increase of population, which is filling
the States out to their very borders, together with a new and extended
network of railroads and other avenues, and an internal commerce which
daily becomes more intimate, is rapidly bringing the States into a
higher and more perfect social unity or consolidation. Thus, these
antagonistic systems are continually coming into closer contact, and
collision results.

Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think that it is
accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators,
and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an
irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it
means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become
either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.
Either the cotton- and rice-fields of South Carolina and the sugar
plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free-labor, and
Charleston and New Orleans become marts of legitimate merchandise alone,
or else the rye-fields and wheat-fields of Massachusetts and New York
must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and to the
production of slaves, and Boston and New York become once more markets
for trade in the bodies and souls of men. It is the failure to apprehend
this great truth that induces so many unsuccessful attempts at final
compromises between the slave and free States, and it is the existence
of this great fact that renders all such pretended compromises, when
made, vain and ephemeral. Startling as this saying may appear to you,
fellow-citizens, it is by no means an original or even a modern one. Our
forefathers knew it to be true, and unanimously acted upon it when
they framed the Constitution of the United States. They regarded the
existence of the servile system in so many of the States with sorrow and
shame, which they openly confessed, and they looked upon the collision
between them, which was then just revealing itself, and which we are now
accustomed to deplore, with favor and hope. They knew that one or the
other system must exclusively prevail.

Unlike too many of those who in modern time invoke their authority, they
had a choice between the two. They preferred the system of free labor,
and they determined to organize the government, and so direct its
activity, that that system should surely and certainly prevail. For this
purpose, and no other, they based the whole structure of the government
broadly on the principle that all men are created equal, and therefore
free--little dreaming that, within the short period of one hundred
years, their descendants would bear to be told by any orator, however
popular, that the utterance of that principle was merely a rhetorical
rhapsody; or by any judge, however venerated, that it was attended by
mental reservation, which rendered it hypocritical and false. By the
ordinance of 1787, they dedicated all of the national domain not yet
polluted by slavery to free labor immediately, thenceforth and forever;
while by the new Constitution and laws they invited foreign free labor
from all lands under the sun, and interdicted the importation of African
slave labor, at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances
whatsoever. It is true that they necessarily and wisely modified this
policy of freedom by leaving it to the several States, affected as they
were by different circumstances, to abolish slavery in their own way and
at their own pleasure, instead of confiding that duty to Congress; and
that they secured to the slave States, while yet retaining the system
of slavery, a three-fifths representation of slaves in the Federal
Government, until they should find themselves able to relinquish it
with safety. But the very nature of these modifications fortifies my
position, that the fathers knew that the two systems could not endure
within the Union, and expected within a short period slavery would
disappear forever. Moreover, in order that these modifications might not
altogether defeat their grand design of a republic maintaining universal
equality, they provided that two thirds of the States might amend the
Constitution.

It remains to say on this point only one word, to guard against
misapprehension. If these States are to again become universally
slave-holding, I do not pretend to say with what violations of the
Constitution that end shall be accomplished. On the other hand, while I
do confidently believe and hope that my country will yet become a land
of universal freedom, I do not expect that it will be made so otherwise
than through the action of the several States cooperating with the
Federal Government, and all acting in strict conformity with their
respective constitutions.

The strife and contentions concerning slavery, which gently-disposed
persons so habitually deprecate, are nothing more than the ripening of
the conflict which the fathers themselves not only thus regarded with
favor, but which they may be said to have instituted.

* * * I know--few, I think, know better than I--the resources and
energies of the Democratic party, which is identical with the slave
power. I do ample justice to its traditional popularity. I know
further--few, I think, know better than I--the difficulties and
disadvantages of organizing a new political force, like the Republican
party, and the obstacles it must encounter in laboring without prestige
and without patronage. But, understanding all this, I know that the
Democratic party must go down, and that the Republican party must rise
into its place. The Democratic party derived its strength, originally,
from its adoption of the principles of equal and exact justice to
all men. So long as it practised this principle faithfully, it was
invulnerable. It became vulnerable when it renounced the principle,
and since that time it has maintained itself, not by virtue of its own
strength, or even of its traditional merits, but because there as
yet had appeared in the political field no other party that had the
conscience and the courage to take up, and avow, and practise the
life-inspiring principle which the Democratic party had surrendered.
At last, the Republican party has appeared. It avows, now, as the
Republican party of 1800 did, in one word, its faith and its works,
"Equal and exact justice to all men." Even when it first entered the
field, only half organized, it struck a blow which only just failed to
secure complete and triumphant victory. In this, its second campaign, it
has already won advantages which render that triumph now both easy and
certain.

The secret of its assured success lies in that very characteristic
which, in the mouth of scoffers, constitutes its great and lasting
imbecility and reproach. It lies in the fact that it is a party of
one idea; but that is a noble one--an idea that fills and expands all
generous souls; the idea of equality--the equality of all men before
human tribunals and human laws, as they all are equal before the Divine
tribunal and Divine laws.

I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun. I know, and all the
world knows, that revolutions never go backward. Twenty Senators and a
hundred Representatives proclaim boldly in Congress to-day sentiments
and opinions and principles of freedom which hardly so many men, even
in this free State, dared to utter in their own homes twenty years ago.
While the Government of the United States, under the conduct of the
Democratic party, has been all that time surrendering one plain and
castle after another to slavery, the people of the United States have
been no less steadily and perseveringly gathering together the forces
with which to recover back again all the fields and all the castles
which have been lost, and to confound and overthrow, by one decisive
blow, the betrayers of the Constitution and freedom forever.

VI. -- SECESSION.

From the beginning of our history it has been a mooted question whether
we are to consider the United States as a political state or as a
congeries of political states, as a _Bundesstaat_ or as a _Staatenbund_.
The essence of the controversy seems to be contained in the very title
of the republic, one school laying stress on the word United, as the
other does on the word States. The phases of the controversy have been
beyond calculation, and one of its consequences has been a civil war of
tremendous energy and cost in blood and treasure.

Looking at the facts alone of our history, one would be most apt to
conclude that the United States had been a political state from the
beginning, its form being entirely revolutionary until the final
ratification of the Articles of Confederation in 1781, then under the
very loose and inefficient government of the Articles until 1789,
and thereafter under the very efficient national government of the
Constitution; that, in the final transformation of 1787-9, there were
features which were also decidedly revolutionary; but that there was
no time when any of the colonies had the prospect or the power of
establishing a separate national existence of its own. The facts are
not consistent with the theory that the States ever were independent
political states, in any scientific sense.

It cannot be said, however, that the actors in the history always had
a clear perception of the facts as they took place. In the teeth of the
facts, our early history presents a great variety of assertions of State
independence by leading men, State Legislatures, or State constitutions,
which still form the basis of the argument for State sovereignty. The
State constitutions declared the State to be sovereign and independent,
even though the framers knew that the existence of the State depended
on the issue of the national struggle against the mother country. The
treaty of 1783 with Great Britain recognized the States separately and
by name as "free, sovereign, and independent," even while it established
national boundaries outside of the States, covering a vast western
territory in which no State would have ventured to forfeit its
interest by setting up a claim to practical freedom, sovereignty, or
independence. All our early history is full of such contradictions
between fact and theory. They are largely obscured by the
undiscriminating use of the word "people." As used now, it usually means
the national people; but many apparently national phrases as to the
"sovereignty of the people," as they were used in 1787-9, would seem
far less national if the phraseology could show the feeling of those
who then used them that the "people" referred to was the people of
the State. In that case the number of the contradictions would be
indefinitely increased; and the phraseology of the Constitution's
preamble, "We, the people of the United States," would not be offered
as a consciously nationalizing phrase of its framers. It is hardly to
be doubted, from the current debates, that the conventions of
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, Virginia, North
Carolina, and South Carolina, seven of the thirteen States, imagined and
assumed that each ratified the Constitution in 1788--90 by authority of
the State's people alone, by the State's sovereign will; while the facts
show that in each of these conventions a clear majority was coerced
into ratification by a strong minority in its own State, backed by
the unanimous ratifications of the other States. If ratification or
rejection had really been open to voluntary choice, to sovereign will,
the Constitution would never have had a moment's chance of life; so far
from being ratified by nine States as a condition precedent to going
into effect, it would have been summarily rejected by a majority of the
States. In the language of John Adams, the Constitution was "extorted
from the grinding necessities of a reluctant people." The theory of
State sovereignty was successfully contradicted by national necessities.

The change from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution,
though it could not help antagonizing State sovereignty, was carefully
managed so as to do so as little as possible. As soon as the plans
by which the Federal party, under Hamilton's leadership, proposed to
develop the national features of the Constitution became evident, the
latent State feeling took fire. Its first symptom was the adoption
of the name Republican by the new opposition party which took form in
1792-3 under Jefferson's leadership. Up to this time the States had been
the only means through which Americans had known any thing of republican
government; they had had no share in the government of the mother
country in colonial times, and no efficient national government to take
part in under the Articles of Confederation. The claim of an exclusive
title to the name of Republican does not seem to have been fundamentally
an implication of monarchical tendencies against the Federalists so much
as an implication that they were hostile to the States, the familiar
exponents of republican government. When the Federalist majority in
Congress forced through, in the war excitement against France in 1798,
the Alien and Sedition laws, which practically empowered the President
to suppress all party criticism of and opposition to the dominant party,
the Legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia, in 1798-9, passed series of
resolutions, prepared by Jefferson and Madison respectively, which for
the first time asserted in plain terms the sovereignty of the
States. The two sets of resolutions agreed in the assertion that the
Constitution was a "compact," and that the States were the "parties"
which had formed it. In these two propositions lies the gist of State
sovereignty, of which all its remotest consequences are only natural
developments. If it were true that the States, of their sovereign will,
had formed such a compact; if it were not true that the adoption of
the Constitution was a mere alteration of the form of a political state
already in existence; it would follow, as the Kentucky resolutions
asserted, that each State had the exclusive right to decide for itself
when the compact had been broken, and the mode and measure of redress.
It followed, also, that, if the existence and force of the Constitution
in a State were due solely to the sovereign will of the State, the
sovereign will of the State was competent, on occasion, to oust the
Constitution from the jurisdiction covered by the State. In brief, the
Union was wholly voluntary in its formation and in its continuance; and
each State reserved the unquestionable right to secede, to abandon the
Union, and assume an independent existence whenever due reason, in
the exclusive judgment of the State, should arise. These latter
consequences, not stated in the Kentucky resolutions, and apparently not
contemplated by the Virginia resolutions, were put into complete form by
Professor Tucker, of the University of Virginia, in 1803, in the notes
to his edition of "Blackstone's Commentaries." Thereafter its statements
of American constitutional law controlled the political training of the
South.

Madison held a modification of the State sovereignty theory, which has
counted among its adherents the mass of the ability and influence
of American authorities on constitutional law. Holding that the
Constitution was a compact, and that the States were the parties to it,
he held that one of the conditions of the compact was the abandonment
of State sovereignty; that the States were sovereign until 1787-8, but
thereafter only members of a political state, the United States. This
seems to have been the ground taken by Webster, in his debates with
Hayne and Calhoun. It was supported by the instances in which the
appearance of a sovereignty in each State was yielded in the fourteen
years before 1787; but, unfortunately for the theory, Calhoun was able
to produce instances exactly parallel after 1787. If the fact that each
State predicated its own sovereignty as an essential part of the steps
preliminary to the convention of 1787 be a sound argument for State
sovereignty before 1787, the fact that each State predicated its
sovereignty as an essential part of the ratification of the Constitution
must be taken as an equally sound argument for State sovereignty under
the Constitution; and it seems difficult, on the Madison theory, to
resist Calhoun's triumphant conclusion that, if the States went into the
convention as sovereign States, they came out of it as sovereign States,
with, of course, the right of secession. Calhoun himself had a sincere
desire to avoid the exercise of the right of secession, and it was as a
substitute for it that he evolved his doctrine of nullification,
which has been placed in the first volume. When it failed in 1833, the
exercise of the right of secession was the only remaining remedy for an
asserted breach of State sovereignty.

The events which led up to the success of the Republican party in
electing Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency in 1860 are so intimately
connected with the anti-slavery struggle that they have been placed in
the preceding volume. They culminated in the first organized attempt to
put the right of secession to a practical test. The election of
Lincoln, the success of a "sectional party," and the evasion of the
fugitive-slave law through the passage of "personal-liberty laws" by
many of the Northern States, are the leading reasons assigned by South
Carolina for her secession in 1860. These were intelligible reasons, and
were the ones most commonly used to influence the popular vote. But all
the evidence goes to show that the leaders of secession were not so
weak in judgment as to run the hazards of war by reason of "injuries"
so minute as these. Their apprehensions were far broader, if less
calculated to influence a popular vote. In 1789 the proportions of
population and wealth in the two sections were very nearly equal. The
slave system of labor had hung as a clog upon the progress of the South,
preventing the natural development of manufactures and commerce, and
shutting out immigration. As the numerical disproportion between the two
sections increased, Southern leaders ceased to attempt to control the
House of Representatives, contenting themselves with balancing new
Northern with new Southern States, so as to keep an equal vote in the
Senate. Since 1845 this resource had failed. Five free States, Iowa,
Wisconsin, California, Minnesota, and Oregon, had been admitted, with no
new slave States; Kansas was calling almost imperatively for admission;
and there was no hope of another slave State in future. When the
election of 1860 demonstrated that the progress of the antislavery
struggle had united all the free States, it was evident that it was but
a question of time when the Republican party would control both
branches of Congress and the Presidency, and have the power to make laws
according to its own interpretation of the constitutional powers of the
Federal Government.

The peril to slavery was not only the probable prohibition of the
inter-State slave-trade, though this itself would have been an event
which negro slavery in the South could hardly have long survived. The
more pressing danger lay in the results of such general Republican
success on the Supreme Court. The decision of that Court in the Dred
Scott case had fully sustained every point of the extreme Southern
claims as to the status of slavery in the Territories; it had held that
slaves were property in the view of the Constitution; that Congress
was bound to protect slave-holders in this property right in the
Territories, and, still more, bound not to prohibit slavery or allow a
Territorial Legislature to prohibit slavery in the Territories, and
that the Missouri compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional and void.
The Southern Democrats entered the election of 1860 with this distinct
decision of the highest judicial body of the country to back them. The
Republican party had refused to admit that the decision of the Dred
Scott case was law or binding. Given a Republican majority in both
Houses and a Republican President, there was nothing to hinder the
passage of a law increasing the number of Supreme Court justices to any
desired extent, and the new appointments would certainly be of such
a nature as to make the reversal of the Dred Scott decision an easy
matter. The election of 1860 had brought only a Republican President;
the majority in both Houses was to be against him until 1863 at least.
But the drift in the North and West was too plain to be mistaken, and it
was felt that 1860--would be the last opportunity for the Gulf States
to secede with dignity and with the prestige of the Supreme Court's
support.

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