CHAPTER VII

DISUNIONISM.

MAY, 1859.

To the Conservative Union-loving Men of Kentucky and
Tennessee.

IT has been thought that you desire a fuller exposition than any yet given of the motives for the political movement inaugurated by the Opposition Conventions of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Maryland. The task of making that exposé has been assigned to the writer, as one intimately familiar with the views of those who were actively participant in starting the movement in Kentucky. It will be performed as fully as the brevity necessary to newspaper publications will permit.

The leading idea was present and future peril to the Union from the collisions of the two sectional parties, and the necessity of their being broken up or defeated by a large national organization, having the preservation of the Union for its principal object.

Subsidiary to this, but second in importance to this alone, was the desire to rescue the nation from the misrule of those leaders of the modern Democracy, who, according to the indignant avowal of one of the most talented and honest among them, have made ours "the most corrupt government in the world."

The last speech of Mr. Clay was delivered before the Kentucky Legislature, in compliance with a joint, perhaps unanimous request of its two Houses. That request was probably made in consequence of a reliable intimation that it would be acceptable to him. He seemed to desire an occasion for arousing the attention of the representatives of Kentucky, and through them that of the nation, to the grave subject of disunion. How well he succeeded with his immediate audience, may be inferred from the fact stated by a member, that, while he spoke of the value and danger of the

Union, tears of warm sympathy started to the eyes of many, and among them some of the most inveterate old Democrats in the assembly. He spoke of disunion as a danger then rapidly approaching. He said it would not be long before it would become necessary to organize a great distinctive "Union party." Whenever that was done, if it should happen during his life, he declared his purpose to join that party, regardless of all party ties. After his speech, old Democrats, who had warred with him politically for twenty years, cordially shook his hand, and assured him that whenever the Union party to which he referred was formed they would go with him.

Since his death, the rapid development of the disunion tendency has proved the sagacity with which he judged the then aspect of affairs. The South has been flooded with speeches, essays, and newspaper discussions to prove the great benefit it would derive from separation on the slave line. Inspired with undue confidence by apparent success in alluring nearly the whole South into the Democratic party, and thus consolidating it in the fierce sectional contest which ensued the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, its leaders threw off all disguise. In the last Presidential campaign some of them went so far as to avow, to applauding audiences, a long-cherished hatred of the Union. Pending that contest, and in anticipation of a then probable defeat, Governors, Senators, Representatives, etc. organized a conspiracy, the avowed object of which was, in that event, to march upon Washington with an adequate military force, seize the Government before the inauguration of the new President, and dictate the terms of separation. The accidental circumstance of Mr. Fillmore being a candidate, with the consequent defeat of Fremont, alone saved the nation from the attempt to carry out that widespread conspiracy.

One of their chiefs, Governor Wise, in publicly developing the scheme and the means of carrying it out, spoke of a national civil war as what they would have to encounter; but that was not what he most deprecated. It was "the neighborhood civil war," as he termed it, which they would have to carry on with the fifty thousand Unionists of Virginia that he deplored. That it was which gave him pain to contemplate. To meet the exigency of this double warfare, to provide an adequate force against their external and internal foes, he said they would "arm their slaves."

Another of their leaders, Senator Clingman, in a published letter, said they meant to put down the opposition of Union men in North Carolina by the "swift attention of vigilance committees;" that is, by organized assassination.

These avowals were nowhere rebuked by any portion of the Southern Democracy. It seemed as though nearly the whole Southern wing of the party was deeply tainted with disunionism. If such had not been the fact, those men would never have dared to make these avowals. The Democratic administration organ, published at Washington under the control of the President, admitted within the last few months, as an undisputed fact, that there is still a "widespread and desperate conspiracy at the South for dissolving the Union." This charge met with neither rebuke nor denial from any Democratic quarter. Such acquiescence under the charge is equal to admission or full proof.

Aaron Burr, for a suspected intention of attempting a severance of the Union, had to endure, during a long remnant of his life, the ignominy of an unrelaxed national odium.

The members of the Hartford Convention brought upon themselves a similar odium for a suspected intention of bringing about a peaceable secession of the New England States, with the regularly obtained assent of their people. This suspicion threw all the members of that convention under a proscription of national hate, which thereafter excluded them from all public trust and confidence. Nor was this all. Such was the popular odium which they incurred, that it effectually broke down the once powerful Federal party, to which they belonged. Hartford Conventionist became a stigma of reproach, and remained until recently without a compeer for imputed severity.

General Jackson, in his famous nullification proclamation, said, "disunion by armed force is treason." This denunciation received the almost unanimous approval of the whole nation, outside of South Carolina. It is, therefore, altogether proper to characterize this conspiracy as treasonable, and the conspirators as would-be traitors. That they were not actual traitors within even the strict letter of the law, and earning the felon's doom, which it awards to the crime of treason, was only because the occasion did not occur which was to call forth the perpetration of any of the intended overt acts of their treasonable plot.

What degree of reprehension is due to men who, by fair, peaceful means, seek to break up our glorious Union, we need not stop to inquire. There may not be much moral delinquency in an endeavor to convince the people of certain States that their interests would be promoted by secession, nor even in playing upon their sectional passions and prejudices to accomplish that object. But, without consulting the people of those States, without any direct sanction from them, for a few men to assume the right to determine the question and attempt to force them into secession, is a very grave crime. It can find no justification or apology with any intelligent, honest man. When such attempt necessarily involves national civil war, it becomes a crime of the gravest magnitude, to be expiated only by a felon's death. When the purposed attempt was to be carried through, by such coolly premeditated appliances as were to signalize this treason, it merits a degree of popular abhorrence which, as it cannot be adequately expressed, each man must weigh for himself by the promptings of his own bosom. That it has not yet met with such abhorrence may be because public opinion, guided by an overscrupulous merciful justice, will not so punish the known few because it cannot reach the equally guilty but unknown many.

Consider those appliances. A neighborhood civil war to be carried on with the aid of armed slaves! The large slaveholders of Virginia to arm their negroes against their poorer fellowcitizens! To arm negro slaves and incite them to a taste of white men and women's blood! Once tasted, when would their thirst have been slaked? What would have been the result of such a neighborhood civil war? Virginia would have been visited by general massacre and desolation. Or take the North Carolinian's plan for putting down opposition. The murder of thousands of their fellow-citizens by organized bands of assassins, because they would not aid in treason against their country. What can be more atrocious? The very magnitude of the atrocity seems to have saved it from proper opprobrium. Like the big wars that make ambition virtue, it sublimates itself into satanic grandeur. The mind shrinks from the realization of such atrocity. It will not believe such wickedness of rational, accountable men, even though they themselves vauntingly avowed the fact.

Why has the execrable faction of Abolition disunionists earned

for itself such general abhorrence? It is because of the belief that they seek disunion and consequent war between the North and the South, in the hope of being thus enabled to incite a servile war, with all its horrid accompaniments. Shall these conspirators wholly escape a similar retribution?

If the contemplated occasion for the treason had occurred, and the whole plot been acted out, what would have been the fate of Kentucky and Tennessee? Though there was not probably a man in either State who would have voted for disunion, yet it is probable that both would have been precipitated into full participation in the national and the domestic civil war. At the first flow of blood, it would have been almost impossible to prevent our impetuous young men from mingling in the conflict. Nothing could have prevented them but the earnest, unanimous remonstrance of the leading men of all parties. Could such unanimous remonstrance have been obtained?

If the misdeeds of the Hartford Conventionists justly sank the old Federal party under the weight of popular odium, what ought to be the fate of the party that honors, sustains, trusts, and submits itself to the guidance of such moral traitors as these? Put down that party; and, though justice may not be fully satisfied, yet all the punishment that can be inflicted will reach these conspirators collectively and individually. Whether they shall be placed individually, like the Hartford Conventionists, under the ban of an enduring political proscription, the nation will determine hereafter.

No sooner had the contemplated occasion for the proposed treason failed to occur, than they began scheming as to the use they should make of the victory obtained by their party in the contest for the Presidency. The scheme for disunion was only deferred, not abandoned. One of the most talented and influential among them, in a published address to the Governor of South Carolina, advocating disunion, gave it as his opinion that "all true statesmanship in the South consists in forming combinations and shaping events to bring about a speedy dissolution of the Union and a Southern Confederacy." The talented Senator Hammond, in a speech delivered to his constituents last summer, expressed the opinion that, if the North succeeded in electing the next President, as it probably would, the Southern States generally would