of the report of 1799, was still living in a green old age. His connection with those state papers and still more his large participation in the formation and adoption of the constitution, entitled him beyond all men living to be consulted on the subject. No effort was spared by the leaders of the nullification school to draw from him even a qualified assent to their theories. But in vain. He not only refused to admit their soundness, but he devoted his time ande nergies for three laborious years to the preparation of essays and letters, the object of which was to demonstrate that his resolutions and report did not and could not bear the Carolina interpretation. He earnestly maintained that the separate action of an individual state was not contemplated by them, and that they had in view nothing but the concerted action of the states to procure the repeal of unconstitutional laws or an amendment of the constitution.*

With one such letter written with this intent, I was myself honored. It filled ten pages of the journal in which, with his permission, it was published. It unfolded the true theory of the constitution and the meaning and design of the resolution, and exposed the false gloss attempted to be placed upon them, with a clearness and force of reasoning which defied refutation. None, to my knowledge, was ever attempted. The politicians of the nullification and secession school, as far as I am aware, have from that day to this made no attempt to grapple with Mr. Madison's letter of August, 1830. (North American Review, Vol. XXXI., p. 587.) Mr. Calhoun certainly made no such attempt in the elaborate treatise composed by him, mainly for the purpose of expounding the doctrine of nullification. He claims the support of these resolutions without adverting to the fact that his interpretation of them had been repudiated by their illustrious author. He repeats his exploded paradoxes as confidently as if Mr. Madison himself had expired with the Alien and Sedition laws, and left no testimony to the meaning of his resolutions; while, at the present day, with equal confidence, the same resolutions are appealed to by the disciples of Mr. Calhoun as sustaining the doctrine of secession, in the face of the positive declaration of their author, when that doctrine was first timidly broached, that they will bear no such interpretation.

In this respect the disciples have gone beyond the master. There is a single sentence in Mr. Calhoun's elaborate volume in which he maintains the right of a state to secede from the Union. (Page 301.) There is reason to suppose, however, that he intended to claim only the inalienable right of revolution. In 1828 a declaration of political principles was

* A very considerable portion of the important volume containing a selection from the Madison papers, and printed "exclusively for private distribution," by J. C. McGuire, Esq., in 1853, is taken up with these letters and essays.

drawn up by him for the state of South Carolina, in which it was expressly taught, that the people of that state, by adopting the federal constitution had "modified its original right of sovereignty, whereby its individual consent was necessary to any change in its political condition, and by becoming a member of the Union, had placed that power in the hands of three-fourths of the states [the number necessary for a constitutional amendment], in whom the highest power known to the constitution actually resides." In a recent patriotic speech of Mr. Reverdy Johnson, at Frederick, Md., on the 7th of May, the distinct authority of Mr. Calhoun is quoted as late as 1844 against the right of separate action on the part of an individual state, and I am assured by the same respected gentleman, that it is within his personal knowledge, that Mr. Calhoun did not maintain the peaceful right of secession.

But it may be thought a waste of time to argue against a constitutional right of peaceful secession, since no one denies the right of revolution; and no pains are spared by the disaffected leaders, while they claim indeed the constitutional right, to represent their movement as the uprising of an indignant people against an oppressive and tyrannical government.

An oppressive and tyrannical government! Let us examine this pretence for a few moments, first in the general and then in the detail of its alleged tyrannies and abuses.

It

This oppressive and tyrannical government is the successful solution of a problem which had tasked the sagacity of mankind from the dawn of civilization; viz.: to find a form of polity by which institutions purely popular could be extended over a vast empire, free alike from despotic centralization and undue preponderance of the local powers. It was necessarily a complex system, a Union at once federal and national. leaves to the separate states the control of all matters of purely local administration, and confides to the central power the management of foreign affairs and of all other concerns in which the united family have a joint interest. All the organized and delegated powers depend directly or very nearly so on popular choice. This government was not imposed upon the people by a foreign conqueror; it is not an inheritance descending from barbarous ages, laden with traditionary abuses, which create a painful ever-recurring necessity of reforin; it is not the conceit of heated enthusiasts in the spasms of a revolution. It is the recent and voluntary framework of an enlightened age, compacted by wise and good men, with deliberation and care, working upon materials prepared by long colonial discipline. In framing it they sought to combine the merits and to avoid the defects of former systems of government. The greatest possible liberty of

the citizen is the basis; just representation the ruling principle, reconciling with rare ingenuity the federal equality of the states with the proportionate influence of numbers. Its legislative and executive magistrates are freely chosen at short periods; its judiciary alone holding office by a more permanent but still sufficiently responsible tenure. No money flows into or out of the treasury but under the direct sanction of the representatives of the people, on whom also all the great functions of the government for peace and war, within the limits already indicated, are devolved. No hereditary titles or privileges; no distinction of ranks, no established church, no courts of high commission are known to the system; not a drop of blood has ever flowed under its authority for a political offence; but this tyrannical and oppressive government has certainly exhibited a more perfect development of equal republican principles than has ever before existed on any considerable scale. Under its benign influence the country, every part of the country, has prospered beyond all former example. Its population has increased; its commerce, agriculture and manufactures have flourished; manners, arts, education, letters, all that dignifies and ennobles man, have in a shorter period attained a higher point of cultivation than has ever before been witnessed in a newly-settled region. The consequence has been consideration and influence abroad and marvellous well-being at home. The world has looked with admiration upon the country's progress; we have ourselves contemplated it perhaps with undue self-complacercy. Armies without conscription; navies without impressment, and neither army nor navy swelled to an oppressive size; an overflowing treasury without direct taxation or oppressive taxation of any kind; churches without number and with no denominational preferences on the part of the state; schools and colleges accessible to all the people; a free and a cheap press; all the great institutions of social life extending their benefits to the mass of the community. Such, no one can deny, is the general character of this oppressive and tyrannical govern

ment.

But perhaps this government, however wisely planned, however beneficial even in its operation, may have been rendered distasteful, or may have become oppressive in one part of the country and to one portion of the people, in consequence of the control of affairs having been monopolized or unequally shared by another portion. In a confederacy the people of one section are not well pleased to be even mildly governed by an exclusive domination of the other. In point of fact this is the allegation, the persistent allegation of the South, that from the foundation of the government it has been wielded by the people of the North for their special, often exclusive benefit, and to the injury and oppres

sion of the South. Let us see. Out of seventy-two years since the organization of the government, the executive chair has for sixty-four years been filled nearly all the time by Southern Presidents, and when that was not the case, by Presidents possessing the confidence of the South. For a still longer period the controlling influence of the legislative and judicial departments of the government have centred in the same quarter. Of all the offices in the gift of the central power in every department, far more than her proportionate share has always been enjoyed by the South. She is at this moment revolting against a government, not only admtted to be the mildest and most beneficent ever organized this side Utopia, but one which she has herself from the first almost monopolized.

But are there no wrongs, abuses and oppressions alleged to have been suffered by the South, which have rendered her longer submission to the federal government intolerable, and which are pleaded as the motive and justification of the revolt? Of course there are, but with such variation and uncertainty of statement as to render their examination difficult. The manifesto of South Carolina of the 20th December last, which led the way in this inauspicious movement, sets forth nothing but the passage of state laws to obstruct the surrender of fugitive slaves. The document does not state that South Carolina herself ever lost a slave in consequence of these laws; it is not probable she ever did, and yet she makes the existence of these laws, which are wholly inoperative as far as she is concerned, and which probably never caused to the entire South the loss of a dozen fugitives, the ground for breaking up the Union and plunging the country into a civil war. But I shall presently revert to this topic.

Other statements in other quarters enlarge the list of grievances. In the month of November, after the result of the election was ascertained, a very interesting discussion of the subject of secession took place at Milledgeville, before the members of the legislature of Georgia and the citizens generally, between two gentlemen of great ability and eminence, since elected, the one Secretary of State, and the other Vice-President of the new confederacy; the former urging the necessity and duty of immediate secession-the latter opposing it. I take the grievances and abuses of the federal government, which the South has suffered at the hands of the North, and which were urged by the former speaker as the grounds of secession, as I find them stated and answered by his friend and fellow-citizen (then opposed to secession) according to the report in the Milledgeville papers.

And what think you, was the grievance in the front rank of those op

pressions on the part of the North which have driven the long suffering and patient Sonth to open rebellion against "the best government that the history of the world gives any account of ?" It was not that upon which the convention of South Carolina relied. You will hardly believe it; posterity will surely not believe its "We listened said Mr. VicePresident Stephens in his reply, "to my honorable friend last night (Mr. Toombs), as he recounted the evils of this government. The first was the fishing bounties paid mostly to the sailors of New England." The bounty paid by the federal government to encourage the deep-sea fisheries of the United States!

You are aware that this laborious branch of industry has by all maritime states been ever regarded with special favor as the nursery of naval power. The fisheries of the American colonies before the American Revolution drew from Burke one of the most gorgeous bursts of eloquence in our language-in any language. They were all but annihilated by the revolution, but they furnished the men who followed Manly, and Tucker, and Biddle, and Paul Jones to the jaws of death. Reviving after the war, they attracted the notice of the first Congress, and were recommended to their favor by Mr. Jefferson, then Secretary of State. This favor was at first extended to them in the shape of a drawback of the duty on the various imported articles employed in the building and outfit of vessels and on the foreign salt used in preserving the fish. The complexity of this arrangement led to the substitution at first of a certain bounty on the quantity of fish exported; subsequently on the tonnage of the vessels employed in the fisheries. All administrations have concurred in the measure; Presidents of all parties-though there has not been much variety of party in that office-have approved the appropriations. If the North has a local interest in these bounties, the South got the principal food of her laboring population so much the cheaper; and she had her common share in the protection which the navy afforded her coasts, and in the glory which it shed on the flag of the country. But since, unfortunately, the deep-sea fisheries do not exist in the Gulf of Mexico, nor, as in the "age of Pyrrha," on the top of the Blue Ridge, it has been discovered of late years, that these bounties are a violation of the constitution; a largess bestowed by the common treasury on one section of the country, and not shared by the other; one of the hundred ways, in a word, in which the rapacious North is fattening upon the oppressed and pillaged South. You will naturally wish to know the amount of this tyrannical and oppressive bounty. It is stated by a senator from Alabama (Mr. Clay), who has warred against it with perseverance and zeal, and succeeded in the last Congress in carrying a bill through