tinguished men who took the lead on this occasion, then ardently engaged in the warfare of politics, must not make us fear to tell the truth, that the simple object of the entire movement was to make "political capital" for the approaching elec tion, by holding up to the excited imaginations of the masses the Alien and Sedition laws, as an infraction of the Constitution, which threatened the overthrow of the liberties of the People. The resolutions maintained that, the States being parties to the Constitutional compact, in a case of deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of powers not granted by the compact, the States have a right and are in duty bound to interpose for preventing the progress of the evil.

Such, in brief, was the main purport of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. The sort of interposition intended was left in studied obscurity. Not a word was dropped of secession from the Union. Mr. Nicholas's resolution in 1799 hinted at "nullification" as the appropriate remedy for an unconstitutional law, but what was meant by the ill-sounding word was not explained. The words "null, void, and of no effect," contained in the original draft of the Virginia resolutions, were, on motion of John Taylor of Caroline, stricken from them, on their passage through the assembly; and Mr. Madison, in his report of 1799, carefully explains that no extra constitutional measures were intended. One of the Kentucky resolutions ends with an invitation to the States to unite in a petition to Congress to repeal the laws.

These resolutions were communicated, as I have said, to the other States for concurrence. From most of them no response was received; some adopted dissenting reports and resolutions; NOT ONE CONCURRED. But the resolutions did their work-all that they were intended or expected to do-by shaking the Administration. At the ensuing election, Mr. Jefferson, at whose instance the entire movement was made, was chosen President by a very small majority; Mr. Madison was placed at the head of his administration as Secretary of State; the obnoxious laws expired by their own limitation not repealed by the dominant party, as Mr. Calhoun with strange inadvertence asserts;* and Mr. Jefferson proceeded to administer the Government upon constitutional principles quite as lax, to say the least, as those of his predecessors. If there was any marked departure in his general policy from the course hitherto pursued, it was that, having some theoret ical prejudices against a navy, he allowed that branch of the service to languish. By no Administration have the powers of the General Government been more liberally construed-not to say further strained-sometimes beneficially, as in the acquisition of Louisiana, sometimes perniciously as in the embargo. The resolutions of 1798, and the metaphysics they inculcated, were surrendered to the cobwebs which habitually await the plausible exaggerations of the canvass after an election is decided. These resolutions of 1798 have been sometimes in Virginia waked from their slumbers at closely contested elections as a party cry; the report of the Hartford Convention, without citing them by name, borrows their language; but as representing in their modern interpretation any system on which the Government ever was or could be administered, they were buried in the same grave as the Laws which called them forth.

Unhappily during their transient vitality, like the butterfly which deposits its egg in the apple blossoms that have so lately filled our orchards with beauty and

* Mr. Calhoun's Discourse on the Constitution, p. 359.

perfume a gilded harmless moth, whose food is a dew drop, whose life is a midsummer's day-these resolutions, misconceived and perverted, proved, in the minds of ambitious and reckless politicians, the germ of a fatal heresy. The butterfly's egg is a microscopic speck, but as the fruit grows, the little speck gives life to a greedy and nauseous worm, that gnaws and bores to the heart of the apple, and renders it, though smooth and fair without, foul and bitter and rotten within. In like manner, the theoretical generalities of these resolutions, intending nothing in the minds of their authors but constitutional efforts to procure the repeal of obnoxious laws, matured in the minds of a later generation into the deadly paradoxes of 1830 and 1860-kindred products of the same soil, venenorum ferax ;– the one asserting the monstrous absurdity that a State, though remaining in the Union, could by her single act nullify a law of Congress; the other teaching the still more preposterous doctrine, that a single State may nullify the Constitution. The first of these heresies failed to spread far beyond the latitude where it was engendered. In the Senate of the United States, the great acuteness of its inventor, (Mr. Calhoun,) then the Vice-President, and the accomplished rhetoric of its champion, (Mr. Hayne,) failed to raise it above the level of a plausible sophism. It sunk forever discredited beneath the sturdy common sense and indomitable will of Jackson, the mature wisdom of Livingston, the keen analysis of Clay, and the crushing logic of Webster.

Nor was this all: the venerable author of the Resolutions of 1798 and 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 and energies for three laborious years to the preparation of essays and letters, of which the object was to demonstrate that his resolutions and report did not, and could not bear the Carolina interpretation. He carnestly 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 resolutions, and exposed the false gloss attempted to be placed upon them by the Nullifiers, 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. 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

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. ↑ North American Review, vol. xxxi., p. 587.

by their illustrious author. He repeats his exploded parodoxes 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 first began to be broached, that they will bear no such interpretation.

MR. CALHOUN DID NOT CLAIM A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT OF SECESSION.

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 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.*

SECESSION AS A REVOLUTION.

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.

IS THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OPPRESSIVE AND TYRANNICAL?

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.

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. It 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

*Seo Appendix B.

IS THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES TYRANNICAL?

23

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 reform; it is not the conceit of heated enthusiasts in the spasms of a revolution. It is the recent and voluntary frame-work 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 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, no censorship of the press, 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 popula tion 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-complacency. 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 government.

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 oppression 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 influences 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 admitted to be the mildest and most beneficent ever organized this side Utopia, but one of which she has herself from the first, almost monopolized the administration.

CAUSE OF THE REVOLUTION ALLEGED BY SOUTH CAROLINA.

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 of Dec. 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 last, after the result of the presidential 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, 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 to some extent answered by his friend and fellow-citizen (then opposed to secession) according to the report in the Milledgeville papers.

CAUSES ALLEGED BY GEORGIA: THE FISHING BOUNTIES.

And what, think you, was the grievance in the front rank of those oppressions on the part of the North, which have driven the long-suffering and patient South 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 it. "We listened," said Mr. Vice-President 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!