Page images
PDF
EPUB

CHAPTER V.

[ocr errors]

PREPARATIONS OF SOUTH CAROLINA TO WITHDRAW FROM THE UNION.-PASSAGE OF HER ORDINANCE OF SECESSION. THE FEDERAL FORCE IN CHARLESTON HARBOUR EVACUATES FORT MOULTRIE, AND OCCUPIES SUMTER. DESCRIPTION OF FORT SUMTER.-HOW THE SECESSION OF SOUTH CAROLINA WAS ENTERTAINED IN THE NORTH.-THE LEVITY AND INCONSISTENCY OF THE NORTH WITH RESPECT TO THIS EVENT.-DOCTRINE OF SECESSION, AND NORTHERN PRECEDENTS.-RECORD OF MASSACHUSSETTS.-MR. QUINCY'S DECLARATION IN CONGRESS.-A DOUBLE JUSTIFICATION OF THE WITHDRAWAL OF THE SOUTHERN STATES FROM THE UNION. THE RIGHT OF SELF-GOVERNMENT.-OPINION OF MR. LINCOLN. -OPINION OF THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE."-OPINION OF MR. SEWARD.-THE SECESSION QUESTION IN THE COTTON STATES.-HESITATION OF GEORGIA.-PROJECT OF ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS.-SECESSION OF ALL THE COTTON STATES.-SEIZURE OF FEDERAL FORTS AND ARSENALS.-FORT PICKENS.-SENATOR YULEE'S LETTER.—THE SCENES OF SECESSION TRANSFERRED TO WASHINGTON.-RESIGNATION OF SOUTHERN SENATORS.-JEFFERSON DAVIS' FAREWELL SPEECH TO THE FEDERAL SENATE.-SENATOR CLAY'S BILL OF INDICTMENT AGAINST THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.-THE CONVENTION AT MONTGOMERY.-CONSTITUTION OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES.-JEFFERSON DAVIS CHOSEN PRESIDENT.-HIS PERSONAL HISTORY.-HIS CHARACTER.-WHY THE PUBLIC OPINION ABOUT HIM WAS SO DIVIDED AND CONTRADICTORY.-MEASURES LOOKING TO PACIFICATION.-THREE AVENUES THROUGH WHICH IT WAS EXPECTED.-EARLY PROSPECTS OF PACIFICATION IN CONGRESS. 66

-THE REPUBLICAN ULTIMATUM."—“ THE CRITTENDEN COMPROMISE."-MEASURES OF COMPROMISE AND PEACE IN CONGRESS EXCLUSIVELY PROPOSED BY THE SOUTH, And deLIBERATELY DEFEATED BY THE NORTH.-THE PEACE CONFERENCE.-ITS FAILURE.-DISPOSITION OF THE BORDER SLAVE STATES.-HOW MISTAKEN BY THE NORTH.-THE VIRGINIA CONVENTION.-HOW THE SECESSION PARTY GAINED IN IT.-THE RECORD OF VIRGINIA ON THE SUBJECT OF STATE RIGHTS.-PRESIDENT BUCHANAN ON THE SECESSION QUESTION.HIS WEAK CHABACTER AND UNDECIDED POLICY.-HOW OVER-CENSURED BY THE NORTH.GEN. SCOTT'S INTERMEDDLING. HIS IMPRACTICABLE ADVICE.-PRESIDENT BUCHANAN'S PERFIDY IN THE MOULTRIE-SUMTER AFFAIR.-HIS INTERVIEW WITH THE SOUTH CAROLINA DELEGATION.-A SECOND DECEPTION.-THE STAR OF THE WEST AFFAIR.-THE SITUATION AT THE CLOSE OF BUCHANAN'S ADMINISTRATION. THE COUNTRY WAITING FOR THE SIGNAL OF COMBAT.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

THE telegraph had no sooner announced the election of Abraham Lincoln President of the United States than the State of South Carolina prepared for a deliberate withdrawal from the Union. Considering the argu

SECESSION OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

83

ment as fully exhausted, she determined to resume the exercise of her rights as a sovereign State; and for this purpose her Legislature called a Convention. It assembled in Columbia on the 17th of December, 1860. Its sessions were held in a church, over which floated a flag bearing the device of a palmetto tree, with an open Bible at its trunk, with the inscription: "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in time of trouble, therefore will we not fear, though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the sea; the Lord of Hosts is with us—the God of Jacob is our refuge.'

[ocr errors]

On the 18th the Convention adjourned to Charleston, and on the 20th of December passed the memorable ordinance of Secession, concluding that "the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'The United States of America' is hereby dissolved." The ordinance was passed by a unanimous vote. A ceremony was appointed for the signing in public of the roll of parchment on which the ordinance was engrossed. The public procession entered St. Andrew's Hall in order the President and members of the Convention coming first, followed by the President and members of the Senate, and the Speaker and House of Representatives. Their entry was greeted by loud and prolonged cheers from the spectators; the proceedings were commenced with prayer; the Attorney-General of the State then announced that the ordinance had been engrossed by order of the Convention, and the parchment roll was signed by the members who were called successively to the table. When all had signed, the parchment was raised in the sight of the assemblage, and when the President announced the State of South Carolina an Independent Commonwealth, the whole audience rose to their feet, and with enthusiastic cheers testified their sense of the thrilling proclamation.

A few days after this event a memorable event occurred in Charleston harbour. On the 26th of December Major Anderson, who was in command of the Federal forces there, evacuated Fort Moultrie, spiking the guns and burning the gun carriages, and occupied Fort Sumter with a view of strengthening his position. This movement was effected as a surprise under cover of night. The place in which Major Anderson had now taken refuge was pronounced by military critics to be well-nigh impregnable. Fort Sumter was a small work; but as strong as could well be conceived. It was a modern truncated pentagonal fort, rising abruptly out of the water at the mouth of Charleston harbour, three and a half miles from the city. The foundation was an artificial one, made of chips of granite firmly imbedded in the mud and sand, and so well constructed that it had cost half a million of dollars, and consumed ten years of labour. When Major Anderson occupied the fortification, it was so nearly completed as to admit the introduction of its armament. The walls were of solid brick and concrete masonry, sixty feet high, and from eight to twelve

feet in thickness, and pierced for three tiers of guns on the northern, castern, and western sides. These guns commanded the harbour, thus giving the Federal garrison the power to arrest the shipping bound to and from the port, and to assume an attitude of hostility inconsistent with the safety of that part of the State of South Carolina.

In the mean time the event of South Carolina's formal withdrawal from. the Union was treated by the North generally with derision. Northern newspapers scoffed at her; Northern pictorials abounded with caricatures of Palmetto chivalry; secession cockades, it was said, would soon pass out of fashion, and, on the appearance of the first United States regiment in Charleston harbour, would be found as scarce as cherries in the snow. But what was most remarkable in the treatment of the event by the Northern newspapers and politicians was, that they all united in affecting the most entire and ready willingness that South Carolina, and as many Slave States as chose to accompany her should go out of the Union whenever they pleased. This affectation, which was half insolence and half hypocrisy, was heard everywhere in the North. As long, indeed, as the North apprehended no serious consequences, and from its very vanity refused to entertain the idea that the South had any means or resources for making a serious resistance to the Federal authority, it easily afforded to ridicule the movement of South Carolina; to compare her to a "spoilt child," wandering from the fold of a "paternal government; " and to declare that there was really no design to coerce her or her sister States, but rather pleasure at the separation. "Let the prodigal go," exclaimed one of the political preachers of the North. A God-speed was added by Mr. Greeley, of the New York Tribune. And yet a few months later, and these men and their followers were in agonies of anxiety and paroxysms of fury to reclaim what they then called the "rebel " States, declaring that their cities should be laid in ashes, and their soil sown with blood; while the benevolent Tribune drew from its imagination and hopes a picture, not of the returned prodigal, but of punished "rebels " returning home to find their wives and children cowering in rags, and Famine sitting at the fireside.*

*(From the New York Tribune of Nov. 26, and Dec. 17, 1860.)

"We hold with Jefferson to the inalienable right of communities to alter or abolish forms of government that have become oppressive or injurious, and if the Cotton States shall become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one, but it exists nevertheless, and we do not see how one party can have a right to do what another party has a right to prevent. Whenever a considerable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep it in. We hope never to live in a Republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets. If ever seven or eight States send agents to Washington to say, We want to go out of the Union,' we shall feel constrained by our devotion to human liberty, to say, 'Let them go!' And we do not see how we could take the other side, without coming in

[ocr errors]

DOCTRINE OF SECESSION, AND NORTHERN PRECEDENTS.

85

[ocr errors]

But had the Northern people really been candid and just in their professed willingness to let the South go, they might have found, alike in the political precedents of the country and in the sound reason of its states men, ample grounds for such a disposition. The doctrine of State secession was no new thing in the North. The right of it had been reserved by the State of New York, on her adoption of the Federal Constitution. The exercise of such right had been threatened on four separate occasions by the State of Massachusetts. She had threatened to secede from the Union, with reference to the adjustment of the State debts; again, on account of the Louisiana Purchase; thirdly, because of the war of 1812-'14, when, as Mr. Jefferson said, "four of the Eastern States were only attached to the Union like so many inanimate bodies to living men ; and fourthly, on the annexation of Texas, when her Legislature actually resolved in advance that this event would be good cause for the dissolution of the Union. With reference to the Louisiana Purchase, and the bill to admit into the Union the Territory of Orleans, under the name of Louisiana, Mr. Quincy, of Massachusetts, had placed on record in Congress a definition of the remedy of secession; for, at the instance of members, he had put in writing, and placed on the desk of the House of Representatives, the following proposition: "If this bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that it is virtually a dissolution of this Union; that it will free the States from their moral obligations, and, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, definitely to prepare for a separation-amica bly, if they can; violently, if they must."

But it is not necessary to make here any discussion or recrimination on the subject of State secession. For the South claimed a double justification of her withdrawal from the Union; and in putting it on the alternative of that right of self-government proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence, and existing in all republican systems, she could claim its recognition from the highest sources, both of official and popular authority in the North.

Indeed, the President-elect, Mr. Lincoln, had, at another period of his public life, made this remarkable declaration: "Any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake

direct conflict with those rights of man which we hold paramount to all political arrangements, nowever convenient and advantageous."

(From the same, of May 1, 1861.)

"But, nevertheless, we mean to conquer them [the Confederate States], not merely to defeat, but to conquer, to subjugate them. But when the rebellious traitors are overwhelmed in the field, and scattered like leaves before an angry wind, it must not be to return to peaceful and contented homes! They must find poverty at their firesides, and see privation in the anxious eyes of mothers, and the rugs of children. The whole coast of the South, from the Delaware to the Rio Grande, mus ke a solitude.

off the existing Government, and form a new one that suits them better. Nor is this right confined to cases where the people of an existing Govern ment may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, putting down a minority intermingled with or near about them, who may oppose them."

On the eve of hostilities the New York Tribune declared: "Whenever portion of this Union, large enough to form an independent, self-sustaining nation, shall see fit to say authentically to the residue, 'We want to get away from you,' we shall say—and we trust self-respect, if not regard for the principle of self-government, will constrain the residue of the Amer ican people to say-Go!"

At a later period, Mr. Seward, then President Lincoln's Secretary of State, used the following language to Mr. Adams, the United States Minister at London: "For these reasons he [Mr. Lincoln] would not be disposed to reject a cardinal dogma of theirs [the Secessionists], namely, that the Federal Government could not reduce the seceding States to obedience by conquest, even although he were disposed to question that proposition. But in fact the President willingly accepts it as true. Only an imperial or despotic government could subjugate thoroughly disaffected and insurrectionary members of the State. This Federal Republican system of ours is, of all forms of government, the very one most unfitted for such a labour."

It was in the face of this plain and abundant record that the North, as we shall hereafter see, prepared to make upon the seceded Southern States a war the most terrible in modern annals, and the most monstrous of Christian times. But we must return here to the course of events immediately following the secession of South Carolina.

There could be no doubt of the disposition of all the Cotton States to accompany South Carolina in her withdrawal from the Union, and to make common cause with her. But there was some hesitation as to the time and mode of action; and in Georgia especially there was a strong party in favour of holding a conference of all the Southern States before taking the decisive and irrevocable step. The influence of Alexander H. Stephens was not only given to this party in Georgia, but betrayed a design to keep the State in the Union. He had made a speech of great ingenuity, to show that the cause of the Union was not yet hopeless, that all honourable means should be used to save it-that, notwithstanding the election of Mr. Lincoln, the Northern States might yield to a determined admonition from the South. But to this art of the demagogue there were plain and forcible replies. Mr. Howell Cobb urged that delay was dangerous, and that the Legislature ought to pass an act of secession to be ratified by the people; Mr. Toombs insisted that all hope of justice from the North was gone, and that nothing remained but separation, and, if

« PreviousContinue »