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give back to France the then boundless wastes of the territory of Louisiana. The cession was made by the secret treaty of San Ildefonso, of the 1st of October, 1800 (of which one sentence only has ever been published, but that sentence gave away half a continent), and the youthful conqueror concentrated all the resources of his mighty genius on the accomplishment of the vast project. If successful, it would have established the French power on the nouth and on the right bank of the Mississippi, and would have "pposed the most formidable barrier to the expansion of the United States. The peace of Amiens, at this juncture, relieved Napoleon from the pressure of the war with England, and everything seemed propitious to the success of the great enterprise. The fate of America trembled for a moment in doubtful balance, and five hundred thousand citizens in that region felt the danger and sounded the alarm.*

But in another moment the aspect of affairs was changed by a stroke of policy grand, unexpected, and fruitful of consequences, perhaps without a parallel in history. The short-lived truce of Amiens was about to end; the renewal of war was inevitable; Napoleon saw that before he could take possession of Louisiana it would be wrested from him by England, who commanded the seas, and he determined at once, not merely to deprive her of this magnificent conquest, but to contribute, as far as in him lay, to build up a great rival maritime power in the West. The Government of the United States, not less sagacious, seized the golden moment -a moment such as does not occur twice in a thousand years. Mr. Jefferson perceived that, unless acquired by the United States, Louisiana would in a short time belong to France or to England, and with equal wisdom and courage he determined that it should belong to neither. True, he held the acquisition to be unconstitutional, but he threw to the winds the resolutions of 1798, which had just brought him into power; he broke the Constitution, and he gained an empire. Mr. Monroe was sent to France to conduct the negotiation, in conjunction with Chancellor Livingston, the resident minister, contemplating, however, at that time only the acquisition of New Orleans and the adjacent territory.

But they were dealing with a man that did nothing by halves. -Napoleon knew-and we know that to give up the mouth of the river was to give up its course. On Easter-Sunday of 1803 he

* Speech of Mr. Ross, in the Senate of the United States, 14th February, 1808.

amazed his council with the announcement, that he had determined to cede the whole of Louisiana to the United States. No less to the astonishment of the American envoys, they were told by the French negotiators at the first interview, that their master was prepared to treat with them, not merely for the Isle of New Orleans, but for the whole vast province which bore the name of Louisiana, whose boundaries, then unsettled, have since been carried on the north to the British line, on the west to the Pacific Ocean-a territory half as big as Europe transferred by a stroke of the pen. Fifty-eight years have elapsed since the acquisition was made. The States of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, and Kansas, the Territories of Nebraska, Dacotah, and Jefferson, and part of Colorado, have been established within its limits, on this side of the Rocky Mountains; the State of Oregon and the Territory of Washington on their western slope; while a tide of population is annually pouring into the region destined in addition to the natural increase, before the close of the century, to double the number of the States and Territories. For the entire region west of the Alleghanies and east of the Rocky Mountains, the Missouri and the Mississippi form the natural outlet to the sea. Without counting the population of the seceding States, there are ten millions of the free citizens of the country, between Pittsburg and Fort Union, who claim the course and the mouth of the Mississippi as belonging to the United States. It is theirs by a transfer of truly imperial origin and magnitude; theirs by a sixty years' undisputed title; theirs by occupation and settlement; theirs by the law of Nature and of God. Louisiana, a fragment of this colonial empire, detached from its main portion and first organized as a State, undertakes to secede from the Union, and thinks by so doing that she will be allowed by the Government and people of the United States to revoke this imperial transfer, to disregard this possession and occupation of sixty years, to repeal this law of Nature and of God; and she fondly believes that ten millions of the free people of the Union will allow her and her seceding brethren to open and shut the portals of this mighty region at their pleasure. They may do so, and the swarming millions which throng the course of these noble streams and their tributaries may consent to exchange the charter which they hold from the God of heaven for a bit of parchment signed at Montgomery or Richmond; but if I may repeat the words which I have lately used on another occasion, it will be

when the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains, which form the eastern and western walls of the imperial valley, shall sink to the level of the sea, and the Mississippi and the Missouri shall flow back to their fountains.

Such, fellow-citizens, as I contemplate them, are the great issues before the country; nothing less, in a word, than whether the work of our noble fathers of the Revolutionary and Constitutional age shall perish or endure; whether this great experiment in national polity, which binds a family of free republics in one united government-the most hopeful plan for combining the home-bred blessings of a small state with the stability and power a great empire-shall be treacherously and shamefully stricken down, in the moment of its most successful operation, or whether it shall be bravely, patriotically, triumphantly maintained. We wage no war of conquest and subjugation; we aim at nothing but to protect our loyal fellow-citizens, who against fearful odds are fighting the battles of the Union in the disaffected States, and to re-establish, not for ourselves alone, but for our deluded fellow-citizens, the mild sway of the Constitution and the laws. The result can not be doubted. Twenty millions of freemen, forgetting their divisions, are rallying as one man in support of the righteous cause; their willing hearts and their strong hands, their fortunes and their lives, are laid upon the altar of the country. We contend for the great inheritance of constitutional freedom transmitted from our revolutionary fathers. We engage in the struggle forced upon us with sorrow, as against our misguided brethren, but with high heart and faith, as we war for that Union which our sainted Washington commended to our dearest affections. The sympathy of the civilized world is on our side, and will join us in prayers to Heaven for the success of our

arms.

APPENDIX.

APPENDIX A (p. 238).

AFTER the remarks in the foregoing address (p. 238) were written, touching the impossibility at the present day of repealing the instrument by which, in 1788, South Carolina gave her consent and ratification to the Constitution of the United States, I sought the opinion on that point of Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, the learned and accurate historian of the Constitution. It afforded me great pleasure to find from the following letter that my view of the subject is sustained by his high authority:

JAMAICA PLAIN, Saturday Evening, July 8, 1861.

MY DEAR SIR: Since I came home I have looked carefully at the ratification of the Constitution by South Carolina. The formal instrument sent to Congress seems to be much more in the nature of a deed or grant than of an ordinance. An ordinance would seem to be an instrument adopted by a public body for the regulation of a subject that in its nature remains under the regulation of that body, to operate until otherwise ordered. A deed or grant, on the other hand, operates to pass something; and unless there be a reservation of some control over the subject-matter by the grantor, his cession is necessarily irrevocable. I can perceive no reason why these distinctions are not applicable to the cession of political powers by a people, or their duly authorized representatives. The question submitted to the people of South Carolina by the Congress was, whether they would cede the powers of government embraced in an instrument sent to them, and called the Constitution of the United States. In other words, they were asked to make a grant of those powers. When, therefore, the duly authorized delegates of the people of South Carolina executed an instrument under seal, declaring that they," in the name and behalf” of that people, "assent to and ratify the said Constitution," I can perceive no propriety in calling this deed an ordinance. If they had adopted an instrument entitled "An Act [or ordinance] for the Government of the People of South Carolina," and had gone on in the body of the instrument to declare that the powers embraced in the Constitution of the United States should be exercised by the agents therein provided, until otherwise ordered, there would have been something left for a repeal to operate upon. But nothing like this was done, and everybody knows that such a ratification could not have been accepted.

There are those, as you are well aware, who pretend that the most absolute and unrestricted terms of cession, which would carry any other subject entirely out of the grantor, do not so operate when the subject of the grant is political sovereignty. But a political school which maintains that a deed is to be construed in one way when it purports to convey one description of right, such as political sovereignty, and in another way when it purports to convey a right of another kind, such as property, would hold a very weak brief in any tribunal of jurisprudence, if the question could be brought to that arbitrament. The American people have been very much accustomed to treat political grants made by the sovereign power without reservation, as irrevocable conveyances and executed contracts; and although they hold to the right of revolution, they have not yet found out how a deed, absolute on its face, is to be treated in point of law as a repealable instrument, because it deals with political rights and duties. If any court in South Carolina were now to have the question come before it, whether the laws of the United States are still binding upon their citizens, I think they would have to put their denial on the naked

doctrine of revolution; and that they could not hold that, as matter of law and regular political action, their ratification deed of May 23d, 1788, is "repealed" by their late ordinance. Mos', truly and respectfully yours,

MR. EVEREtt.

GEORGE T. CURTIS.

APPENDIX B (p. 257).

HON. REVERDY JOHNSON TO MR. EVERETT.

MY DEAR MR. EVERETT:

BALTIMORE, 24th June, 1861.

I have your note of the 18th, and cheerfully authorize you to use my name, as you suggest.

The letter I read in the speech which I made in Frederick should be conclusive evidence that, at its date, Mr. Calhoun denied the right of secession, as a constitutional right, either express or implied.

But, in addition to this, I had frequent opportunities of knowing that this was his opinion. It was my good fortune to be a member of the Senate of the United States while he was one of its greatest ornaments for four years, from 1845, until I became a member of Gen. Taylor's administration, and during two sessions (I think 1846 and 1847) I lived in the same house with him. He did me the honor to give me much of his confidence, and frequently his nullification doctrine was the subject of conversation. Time and time again have I heard him, and with ever increased surprise at his wonderful acuteness, defend it on constitutional grounds, and distinguish it, in that respect, from the doctrine of secession. This last he never, with me, placed on any other ground than that of revolution. This, he said, was to destroy the government; and no Constitution, the work of sane men, ever provided for its own destruction. The other was to preserve it; was, practically, but to amend it, and in a constitutional mode. As you know, and he was ever told, I never took that view. I could see no more constitutional warrant for this than for the other, which, I repeat, he ever, in all our interviews, repudiated, as wholly indefensible as a constitutional remedy. His mind, with all its wonderful power, was so ingenious that it often led him into error, and at times to such an extent as to be guilty of the most palpable inconsistencies. His views of the tariff and internal improvement powers of the government are instances. His first opinions upon both were decided and almost ultra. His earliest reputation was won as their advocate, and yet four years before his death he denounced both, with constant zeal and with rare power, and, while doing so, boldly asserted his uniform consistency. It is no marvel, therefore, with those who have observed his career and studied his character, to hear it stated now that he was the advocate of constitutional secession.

It may be so, and perhaps is so, but this in no way supports the doctrine, as far as it is rested on his authority. His first views were well considered, and formed without the influence of extraneous circumstances, of which he seemed to me to be often the victim. Pure in private life and in motives, ever, as I believe and have always believed, patriotic, he was induced, seemingly, without knowing it, in his later life, to surrender to section what was intended for the whole, his great powers of analysis and his extraordinary talent for public service. If such a heresy, therefore, as constitutional secession could rest on any individual name; if any mere human authority could support such an absurd and destructive folly, it can not be said to rest on that of Mr. Calhoun. With sincere regard, your friend, REVERDY JOHNSON.

HON. EDWARD EVERETT, Boston.

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