Senator to perform his functions and before a declaration of war was made, against the State to which he was a citizen, he expected to be out of the Chamber; the sovereign State of which he was an ambassador would be found quite ready and willing to meet war.1

On the sixth, Powell, of Kentucky, offered a resolution that the part of the President's message relating "to the present agitated and distracted condition of the country, and the grievances between the slaveholding and the nonslaveholding States" be referred to a Committee of Thirteen, with instructions to report such amendments to the Constitution as might be necessary "to give certain, prompt and full protection to the rights of property of the citizens of every State and territory, and insure the equality of the States and the equal rights of all the citizens aforesaid, under the federal Constitution."2 On the tenth the resolution was modified by its author; the committee should be instructed to report by bill or otherwise, and for a week the Senate discussed this change.

"Our Government," said Jefferson Davis, "is an agency of delegated and strictly limited powers. Its founders did not look to its preservation by force." Complaints were of long standing, but the people had now taken the matter into their own hands. "States, in their sovereign capacity, have now resolved to judge of the infractions of the federal compact, and of the mode and measure of redress." "The theory of our Constitution is one of peace, of equality of sovereign States. It was made by States and made for States." Therefore whatever Congress might choose to do, to solve the grave problem of union, it rested with the States, at last, to accept or reject its solution. Thus whether the Constitution was amended, or a bill, or a joint resolution was passed, guaranteeing 1 Id., p. 12.

2 Id., p. 19.

604

JAMES M. MASON.

what the South demanded, the slaveholding States would decide for themselves whether to accept the program. This, in a nut-shell, was the attitude of the South toward all schemes for quieting the country that might emanate from Congress, in 1860; and this fact explains the entire legislation of Congress at this time.

The slaveholding States were in the hands of disunionists, bound to secede and to establish a slaveholding confederacy. The history of the Thirteenth Amendment of 1861 is the history of a policy of conciliation which those for whom it was made would not have under any conditions. This is evident from the words of Mason, of Virginia: "My State and a great many others of the slaveholding States are going into convention to take up the subject for themselves, and as separate, sovereign communities, to determine what is best for their safety. I know that the public mind in the State of Virginia is in no sense directed to Congress with any idea that it is competent to them to afford relief. The States are taking the subject into their own hands. I should regret extremely if the passage of this resolution should lead the citizens of the other States, the non-slaveholding States, to look to Congress for any hope of an adjustment of these differIt would mislead them. I should certainly hope that those States, North and East and West would do as we are doing in the South,-resolve themselves into their separate political communities and there determine whether anything and what can be done to save this Union. If they look to us with any such hope, they are misled, in my judgment." This would indicate that Congress, in 1860, was in the condition of Congress in 1786,-impotent, superfluous, decaying. The effort of the secessionists to put the national government in the place of 1 Globe, December 10, 1860, p. 35.

ences.

THE MISSOURI SENATORS.

605

Parliament, in 1776, suggests a new meaning to the words of Mason, and others: that the Government, like the Confederation of 1781, had failed to meet the wants of the country. Let those States which were satisfied with it, continue to support it; the slaveholding States were going to abandon it. It was folly then to expect Congress to preserve the Union. This startling fact appeared, whatever the source of the remedy.

The Union consisted of three zones of States, extending east and west, preserving, to this late day, the three zones of settlement authorized under the charter of James I. The three zones, now, were the free States; the border States, and the cotton States. Though the border States were slaveholding, they were not for secession. Green, of Missouri, offered a resolution, on the fifth, providing for a border police that should prevent invasion of States by citizens of another, and efficiently execute the fugitive slave laws. Davis promptly pronounced it a quack remedy; a device to set up a military despotism; a means of coercing a State. His colleague, Brown, also saw in it a new engine of attack upon the South. But the Missouri Senator, though wholly out of sympathy with Northern ideas, declared that the Constitution was good enough for the Union. Public opinion there might re-act. What if power was soon to pass to an opposition President? "I do not stop to consider it," continued Green. "I will give him as much power to enforce the Federal Constitution and protect the rights of the people as I would anybody else; and I will hold him just as responsible for the manner in which he exercises it. Do you say that that gives him power to overawe the States? I say it does. not. He cannot invade a single State; but he can prevent States from being invaded. He cannot take one article of your property; but he can protect your prop

606

JUDAH P. BENJAMIN.

erty from being taken by others." And this, we now know, was substantially the position which President Lincoln claimed for himself in his inaugural.2 Green plainly defined the purposes of Iverson, Davis, Mason and Wigfall. Right or wrong they were going out of the Union. They did not wish to preserve it, and every attempt to preserve it they called an attempt to set up a military despotism. Benjamin, of Louisiana, who for fifteen years had been meditating on a Southern Confederacy, asked King, of New York, whether the party which had elected Lincoln intended to use physical force against a State which might think proper to withdraw from the Union; to which King replied, that the sentiment of the great body of the people of New York was that the Union "must and shall be preserved." Evidently, the party of secession was determined to make much of prospective coercion and to use any sign of it as a sufficient excuse for disunion.4

But the cotton States wished the border States to go out with them. The reasons for this, and the terrible fear that impelled secession were plainly put by Iverson, after reviewing the history of slavery, under the Constitution, and the various compromises and laws for its security.

It had been customary among Southern men for nearly twenty years to complain that the personal liberty bills of some of the Northern States had prevented the execution of the fugitive slave law. Iverson went to the bottom of the matter when he said, that it was not these personal

1 Id., p. 31.

2 Lincoln's Works, II, 1, 2.

3 See my Constitutional History of the American People, 17761850, I, 425, 489.

4 This conclusion is drawn from the speeches of the secession leaders, and especially that of Davis, quoted later, to which Trumbull replied, see p. 629.

liberty laws, but public sentiment at the North which had prevented the execution of the law. This sentiment was stronger than the law, therefore, the fugitive was not reclaimed. He scorned the idea that the law imposed damages on those who secreted or refused to deliver up slaves, and his scorn was logical, for he believed that a State was a sovereign power and could not be sued. As he expressed it, there was no way of making the State of Massachusetts liable, if its people seized a thousand slaves and refused to surrender them; hence his first conclusion, that a stricter fugitive slave law would be valueless.

It had been proposed, in order to appease the South, that the doctrine should be made a law that Congress must protect slavery in the territories. But the Republican party was a unit against any such legislation. They had fought the recent bill on that issue and had won, and the principle that slavery should never advance one inch beyond its existing boundary and never plant a foot on the United States, was at the basis of their organization, therefore, legislation of the protective kind indicated, was impossible. Moreover, many Northern Democrats opposed the doctrine, of whom those constituting "The Douglasnon-interference-squatter-sovereignty-party" would equal the Republicans in opposing the doctrine. It was futile, therefore, for the South to get congressional protection for its slave property by law, and yet the Southern people would never be satisfied with anything else. The Wilmot proviso, non-interference and squatter sovereignty, would lead to the total and eternal exclusion of the Southern people from their share of the territory of the United States, a deprivation and wrong to which they would never submit. The object and ultimate end of all anti-slavery restriction was to circumscribe the area of slavery and compel the South to get rid of its slaves. As soon as the