DISCORDANT ELEMENTS.

577

it was abolished.

There must be conflict, and the weaker section of the Union can only find peace and liberty in an independence of the North. The repeated efforts made by South Carolina, in a wise conservatism, to arrest the progress of the general government in its fatal progress to consolidation have been unsupported, and she has been denounced as faithless to the obligations of the Constitution by the very men and States who were destroying it by their usurpations. It is now too late to reform or restore the government of the United States. All confidence in the North is lost by the South. The faithlessness of the North for half a century has opened a gulf of separation between the North and the South which no promises nor engagements can fill.

"It cannot be believed that our ancestors would have assented to any union whatever with the people of the North if the feelings and opinions now existing amongst them had existed when the Constitution was framed. There was no tariff-no fanaticism concerning negroes. It was the delegates from New England who proposed in the convention which framed the Constitution to the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia that if they would agree to give Congress the power of regulating commerce by a majority, they would support the extension of the African slave trade for twenty years. can slavery existed in all the States but one. The idea that the southern States would be made to pay that tribute to their northern confederates which they had refused to pay to Great Britain, or that the institution of African slavery would be made the grand basis of a sectional organization of the North to rule the South never crossed the imagination of our ancestors. The Union of the Constitution was a Union of the slave-holding States. It rests on slavery by prescribing a representation in Con

Afri

578

ECONOMIC DISCORD.

gress for three-fifths of our slaves. There is nothing in the proceedings of the convention which framed the Constitution to show that the southern States would have formed any other Union, and still less that they would have formed a Union with more powerful non-slaveholding States having a majority in both branches of the Legislature of the government. They were guilty of no such folly. Time and the progress of things have totally altered the relations between the northern and southern States since the Union was established. That identity of feelings, interests and institutions which once existed is gone. They are now divided between agricultural and manufacturing, and commercial States; between slaveholding and non-slaveholding States. Their institutions and industrial pursuits have made them totally different peoples. That equality in the government between the two sections of the Union which once existed no longer exists. We but imitate the policy of our fathers in dissolving a union with non-slaveholding confederates and seeking a confederation with slave-holding States.

"Experience has proved that slaveholding States cannot be safe in subjection to non-slaveholding. Indeed, no people can ever expect to preserve its rights and liberties unless these be in its own custody. To plunder and oppress, where the plunder and oppression can be practiced with impunity, seems to be the natural order of things. The fairest portions of the world elsewhere have been turned into wildernesses, and the most civilized and prosperous communities have been impoverished and ruined by anti-slavery fanaticism. The people of the North have not left us in doubt as to their designs and policy. United as a section in the late presidential election, they have elected, as the exponent of their policy, one who has openly declared that all the States of the

DESIRE OF THE SOUTH.

579

United States must be made free States or slave States. It is true that amongst those who aided in his election there are various shades of anti-slavery hostility. But if African slavery in the Southern States be the evil their political combination affirms it to be, the requisitions of an inexorable logic must lead them to emancipation. If it is right to preclude or abolish slavery in a territory, why should it be allowed to remain in the States? The one is not at all more unconstitutional than the other, according to the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. And when it is considered that the Northern States will soon have the power to make the Court what they please, and that the Constitution never has been any barrier whatever to their exercise of power, what check can there be, in the unrestrained counsels of the North, to emancipation?

"In separating from them we invade no rights, no interests of theirs. We violate no obligation or duty to them. As separate, independent States in convention, we made the Constitution of the United States with them, and as separate, independent States, each acting for itself, we adopted it. South Carolina, acting in her sovereign capacity, now thinks proper to secede from the Union. She did not part with her sovereignty in adopting the Constitution. The last thing a State can be presumed to have surrendered is her sovereignty. Her sovereignty is her life. Nothing but a clear, express grant can alienate it. Inference is inadmissible. Yet it is not surprising that those who have construed away all the limitations of the Constitution should also, by construction, claim the annihilation of the sovereignty of the States.

"Citizens of the slave-holding States of the United States! Circumstances beyond our control have placed

580

A SLAVEHOLDING CONFEDERACY.

us in the van of the great controversy between the Northern and Southern States. South Carolina desires no destiny separated from yours. To be one of a great slaveholding Confederacy, stretching its arms over a territory larger than any power in Europe possesses; with a population four times greater than that of the whole United States when they achieved their independence of the British empire; with productions which make our existence more important to the world than that of any other people inhabiting it; with common institutions to defend and common dangers to encounter, we ask your sympathy and confederation. Whilst constituting a portion of the United States, it has been your statesmanship which has guided it in its mighty strides to power and expansion. In the field, as in the cabinet, you have led the way to its renown and grandeur. You have loved the Union, in whose service your great statesmen have labored and your great soldiers have fought and conquered-not for the material benefits it conferred, but with the faith of a generous and devoted chivalry. You have long lingered in hope over the shattered remains of a broken Constitution. Compromise after compromise, formed by your concessions, has been trampled under foot by your Northern confederates. All fraternity of feeling between the North and the South is lost, or has been converted into hate; and we of the South are at last driven together by the stern destiny which controls the existence of nations. Your bitter experience of the faithlessness and rapacity of your Northern confederates may have been necessary to evolve those great principles of free government, upon which the liberties of the world depend, and to prepare you for the grand mission of vindicating and re-establishing them. We rejoice that other nations should be satisfied with their institutions. We are satisfied with ours. If they prefer

NORTH AND SOUTH CONTRASTED.

581

a system of industry in which capital and labor are in perpetual conflict and chronic starvation keeps down the natural increase of population—and a man is worked out in eight years—and the law ordains that children shall be worked only ten hours a day-and the sabre and the bayonet are the instruments of order—be it so. It is their affair, not ours. We prefer, however, our system of industry, by which labor and capital are identified in interest, and capital, therefore, protects labor; by which our population doubles every twenty years; by which starvation is unknown and abundance crowns the land; by which order is preserved by an unpaid police, and many fertile regions of the world, where the white man cannot labor, are brought into usefulness by the labor of the African, and the whole world is blessed by our productions. All we demand of other peoples is to be left alone to work out our own high destinies. United together, and we must be the most independent as we are among the most important of the nations of the world. United together, and we require no other instrument to conquer peace than our beneficent productions. United together, and we must be a great, free, prosperous people whose renown must spread throughout the civilized world and pass down, we trust, to the remotest ages. We ask you to join us in forming a Confederacy of Slaveholding States."1

This declaration of independence by American slavocracy is among the most extraordinary documents of history. An American can scarcely believe now that such

1 Journal of South Carolina Convention, 467-476.

For a similar "Declaration of Causes" see those of Georgia, in Journal of Georgia Convention, 104-113, and Mississippi, in Journal of the Mississippi Convention, pp. 86-88.

The South Carolina Declaration to the Slaveholding States was reprinted in the Journal of the Arkansas Convention, 1861, pp. 495-504; the South Carolina Declaration of Causes, on pp. 487-492.