PRECEDENTS FOR 1860. 587 tion, but the antagonistic administrative policies which necessarily grew out of the two industrial systems in the country, bred disaffection, sectionalism, distrust and disunion. Because the Hartford Convention voiced the opinion of some New Englanders, in 1812, touching slave-representation, the admission of new States, embargoes, the power to declare war, native-Americanism, and a single term for the President,1 it is by no means proof that New England, or the delegates who framed the Hartford resolutions had any intention to advocate disunion and secession. But even granting the truth of such a charge, the Hartford resolutions indicate no more than political discontent.2 From 1814 to 1832, disunion sentiments were frequently heard in Congress; secession as a political remedy was openly mentioned in debate in State legislatures, and in conventions, and it was the theme of an ever-growing volume of pamphlet literature. The South Carolina Convention of 1832 merely condensed a mass of disunion sentiment that had been accumulating for at least twenty years. Nullification was as old as the Kentucky Resolutions and was quieted for a time by the vigorous Jackson and the compromising Clay. After 1848 and the acquisition of California, and the discovery of gold, and the swift movement of population into Western territory, the doctrines of State sovereignty, free-trade, slavery extension and confederacy became more clearly antithetic to those of national sovereignty, a tariff for protection, unrestricted immigration, and the extension of the franchise, and a growing demand, after 1850, that slavery be excluded from 1 Proceedings (Boston, 1815), 20, 21. 2 For a refutation of the charge of disloyalty, made against this Convention, see Otis' Letters, in Defence of the Hartford Convention, especially Nos. VIII and IX (Boston, 1824). Also Dwight's History of the Convention, 405. 588 EVOLUTION OF THE CONTEST. the territories.1 A contest for population sprang up be tween the supporters of the two industrial systems. By the Compromise of 1820 and again by that of 1850, slavery lost in the great struggle. At last, population, from the North and from the South, met face to face in a new territory, Kansas, in the middle of the continent, and a local war broke out between the slaveholders and the freesoilers. The organization of Kansas and Nebraska in 1854, with the accompanying repeal of the Compromise of 1850 demonstrated that the party in power was bent upon the nationalization of slavery. The pro-slavery triumph seemed for a moment permanent. The elections in 1856 continued the executive and the legislative departments of the national government in the hands of proslavery men. The Supreme Court followed, immediately, in the Dred Scott decision, as it seems to have believed, with a final disposition of the great issue: making the nationalization of slavery the law of the Constitution. The very success of slavocracy made disunion sentiment superfluous. But it existed and exercised a powerful influence. In September, 1856, Governor Wise, of Virginia, in a letter to the Governor of Maryland, advocated a meeting of the executives of slaveholding States to consult on the best means of protecting their honor and interests.2 Threats of a resort to force, to protect these interests, abounded at the time the admission of California was a national issue, and, indeed, from the time when, in 1837, the "re-annexation" of Texas was advo 1 This was brought out fully in the Debates in the California Constitutional Convention of 1849. See my Constitutional History of the American People, 1776-1850, Vol. II, Chapters X, XI, XII. 2 Henry A. Wise to Thomas W. Ligon, Richmond, Sept. 15, 1856. Printed in full in Nicolay and Hay's Lincoln, II, 299. PREPARATION FOR THE CONTEST. 589 cated by the Alabama legislature.1 State after State responded to Alabama, North and South, but the resolutions of Southern legislatures spoke with a military tone, which became sharper and more peremptory as the years passed. While Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War,during the whole of Pierce's administration, the South was put gradually in a state of military defense. "Immediate, absolute and eternal separation" was advocated, but secretly. For years before the election of Lincoln, William L. Yancey had boldly advocated disunion. He would imitate the Fathers, "organize 'committees of safety' all over the Cotton States," "fire the Southern heart" "and at the proper moment, by one organized, concerted action, we can precipitate the Cotton States into a revolution." "The Southern issue" he declared "paramount," that it would "influence parties, legislatures and statesmen." This was the notorious "Scarlet Letter" and was written during the second year of Buchanan's term. At this time "an active, organized and dangerous faction" in the South was well known to its public men, and Governor Wise declared that its efforts, nominally to secure the election in 1860, were "for no other end than to make a pretext for the clamor of dissolution."4 As soon as Lincoln was nominated for the Presidency, the secession program was hurried up, and his election. was declared to be sufficient cause for breaking up the Union. The similarity between the correspondence of 1 For the resolutions of Northern and Southern States on this subject, on California and Slavery, 1837-1850, see my Constitutional History of the American People, 1776-1850, Vol. I, 337-341. 2 Louisiana, 1837; Florida, 1849; S. C., 1850, in above resolutions. • See letters of J. M. Wise and W. L. Yancey, in Nicolay and Hay's Lincoln, II, 300, 301. ♦ Id., 302, note. 590 OLD COMPLAININGS. the slave-State executives and the declarations of the secession conventions make this clear.1 The issue was plainly put by the Governor of North Carolina: "the institution of negro slavery in this country."2 Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana,-as their Governors spoke for them, would not secede alone, but would meet the slaveholding States in Convention and agree upon final measures, the formation of a slaveholding Confederacy. The persistence of the word "confederacy” in our history was ominous. It stood, from the beginning, for disunion and weakness. At first, the danger was said to be a "consolidated government;" this was the complaint down to 1815. Then the federal government made an alliance with a protective policy; this was the complaint down to 1833. Then began mutterings of a federal policy to exclude slavery from new soil and to tolerate abolition petitions. This complaint continued to the hour of the South Carolina Convention of 1860.3 But behind all these complaints was the radical and permanent difference between two 1 Much of this correspondence is printed in the Journals of the Secession Conventions. See Appendix to Journals of Mississippi Convention; also of Georgia Convention; of Arkansas Convention, and communications printed in the Virginia Journal. 2 Governor John W. Ellis to Governor W. H. Gist of S. C., Raleigh, Oct. 18, 1860, in Nicolay and Hay's Lincoln, II, 307. 3 "Did the Constitution protect us from the cupidity of the Northern people, who for thirty-five years have imposed the burden of supporting the General Government chiefly on the industry of the South? Did it save us from Abolition petitions, designed to annoy and insult us, in the very halls of our Federal Congress? Did it enable us to obtain a single foot of the soil acquired in the war with Mexico, where the South furnished three-fourths of the money, two-thirds of the men and four-fifths of the graves? Did it oppose any obstacle to the erection of California into a free-soil State, without any previous territorial existence, without any defined boundaries or any census of her population? Speech of D. F. Jameson on taking the chair in the S. C. Convention, December 17, 1860. Journal, p. 4. INERTNESS OF THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. 591 social and industrial systems. There was nothing congenial between the two sections of the country. The gulf between them was accurately described in the Declaration of Causes for Secession issued by South Carolina.1 But the program of secession received no check from the national government itself. The President himself, in 1860, would say no more than non possumus. In his last annual message to Congress, Buchanan fixed, at least to his satisfaction, the responsibility for the prevailing discontent, that threatened the Union with destruction: "The long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery has at length produced its natural effects." The abolitionists were wholly to blame. Let the slaveholding States alone and allow them to manage their domestic institutions in their own way. As sovereign States they alone were responsible for slavery. In spite of the Dred Scott decision, the territorial legislature of Kansas had prohibited slavery in the territory, thus plainly setting the Constitution at defiance. Only in a convention forming a State Constitution could such a thing be done. And, one by one, Buchanan took up the complaints of the seceding States, and repeated them. The "personal liberty bills" violated the Constitution. The North was in duty bound to return fugitive slaves. In case the North persisted, the South was justified in its "revolutionary resistance." But the constitutionality of secession the President doubted and he quoted at length from Jackson's special message of 1833, directed to the people of South Carolina, to prove that no clause in the Constitution gave countenance to the theory. But what was the Chief Executive to do if the performance of his duty had "been rendered impracticable by events over which, in whole or in part, he could have exer1 See pp. 564-570. |