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CHAP. IV.

SOUTH CAROLINA ORDINANCE OF SECESSION.

1431

The Convention proceeded to business by appointing several committees to consider various subjects, such as the relations of South Carolina to the United States in regard to public property within the limits of that State, and commercial relations; also their connection with the people of other slave-holding States. A committee was also chosen, with John A. Inglis as chairman, to report the form of an ordinance of secession. After debating some questions, and proposing a provisional government for the States that might follow the example of South Carolina in seceding; to send commissioners to Washington city to negotiate with the National Government for the cession of its property within the State of South Carolina, and to elect delegates to meet others from slave-labor States for the purpose of forming a Southern Confederacy, the proper committee reported an ordinance of secession in the following words, in accordance with the theory of State supremacy :

"We, the people of the State of South Carolina, in convention assembled, do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained, that the ordinance adopted by us in convention, on the 23d day of May, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, whereby the Constitution of the United States was ratified, and also all acts and parts of acts of the General Assembly of the State, ratifying amendments of the said Constitution, are hereby repealed, and the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved."

It was noon on the 20th of December, 1860, when this ordinance was submitted. At a quarter before one o'clock, it was adopted by the unanimous voice of the Convention, one hundred and sixty-nine delegates voting in the affirmative. They were then assembled in St. Andrew's Hall. It was proposed that the members should walk in procession to Institute Hall, and there, at seven o'clock in the evening, in the presence of the constituted authorities of the State and of the people, to sign it "the great Act of Deliverance and Liberty."

The cry at once went forth, "The Union is dissolved!" It was echoed and re-echoed in the streets of Charleston, and was sent upon the wings of the lightning all over the Republic. Placards announcing the fact were posted throughout the city of Charleston, and again the people of that town were almost wild with excitement. All business was suspended, and huzzas for a "Southern Confederacy" filled the air. Women appeared in the streets with secession bonnets, the invention of a Northern milliner in Charleston. Flags waved; church-bells pealed merrily, and cannon boomed; and some enthusiastic young men went to the grave of John C. Calhoun, in

St. Philip's church-yard, and forming a circle around it, made a solemn vow to devote their "lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor" to the cause of "South Carolina independence."

Before night the ordinance of secession was engrossed on a sheet of parchment; and at the appointed time, in the evening, Institute Hall was crowded with eager spectators to witness the signing of the instrument. Back of the president's chair was suspended a banner of cotton cloth, on which was painted a significant device. At the bottom was a mass of broken and discolored blocks of hewn stones, on each of which were the name and arms of a free-labor State. Rising from this mass were two columns made of perfect blocks of stone, each bearing the name and arms of a slave-labor State. The keystone of an arch that crowned the two columns had the name and arms of South Carolina upon it, and it bore a figure of Calhoun. In the space between the columns was a palmetto tree, with a rattlesnake coiled around its trunk, and on a ribbon the words, "Southern Republic." Beneath all, in large letters, were the significant words, "Built from the Ruins."

This flag foreshadowed the designs of the Secessionists to overthrow the Republic and build an empire upon its ruins whose corner-stone should be slavery. To that end the members of the Convention proceeded to sign the ordinance in the presence of the governor of the State, the members of the Legislature, and other dignitaries of the land. When the act was finished there was deep silence. Then the Rev. Dr. Bachman, with white, flowing locks, advanced on the platform whereon the president sat, and with uplifted hands implored Almighty God to bless the people engaged in the act and to favor the undertaking. Then President Jamison exhibited the instrument to the people, read it, and said: "The Ordinance of Secession has been signed and ratified, and I proclaim the State of South Carolina an independent commonwealth." The people shouted their approval; and so closed the first great act in the terrible drama of the late Civil War. A few months afterward, every building in Charleston in which public movements for the destruction of the Union had taken place were accidentally destroyed by fire; and late one evening in 1866, after the "Confederate States of America," organized in Montgomery early in 1861, had become a thing of the past, I heard the mournful voice of a screech-owl in the blackened tower of the Circular Church which stood within a few rods of the grave of Calhoun in St. Philip's church-yard.

In the meantime, the National capital had become the theatre of stirring events. The proceedings of the Southern politicians had been watched by the loyal people of the country with intens; interest and anxiety, especially by

CHAP. IV.

AN UNFAITHFUL PUBLIC OFFICER.

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the mercantile and manufacturing classes. To these the Southern planters and merchants were indebted to the amount of full two hundred million dollars, and at the middle of November, remittances from the South had almost ceased, owing to various causes. Howell Cobb, one of the most active of the secret enemies of the Republic, was then Mr. Buchanan's Secretary of the Treasury, and had adroitly managed to strike a paralyzing blow at the public credit, months before Mr. Lincoln's election. When he entered the cabinet in 1857, he found the Government coffers so overflowing, that the treasury notes next due were bought in; in the autumn of 1860, the treasury was empty, and he was in the market as a borrower of money to carry on the ordinary operations of the Government. His management had created such distrust in financial circles, that he was compelled to pay ruinous premiums at a time when money was never more abundant in the country.

This wrecking of the Government by destroying its credit was a part of Cobb's financial scheme for the benefit of his associate Secessionists. Another of his schemes for the supposed benefit of the South was foreshadowed in a letter (the original is before me), written by William H. Trescott, then Assistant Secretary of State, to the editor of the Charleston Mercury, dated "Washington, Nov. 1, 1860." In that letter, by permission of Mr. Cobb, Mr. Trescott gives that gentleman's views concerning the situation. After some remarks about deferring overt acts of rebellion until the 4th of March following, Mr. Trescott wrote: "Mr. Cobb desires me to impress upon you his conviction that any attempt to precipitate the actual issue upon this Administration will be most mischievous-calculated to produce differences of opinion and destroy unanimity. He thinks it of great importance that the cotton crop should go forward at once, and that the money should be in the hands of the people, that the cry of popular distress shall not be heard at the outset of this move." Mr. Cobb's motive for his recommendation is made apparent by the fact that it was a common practice for the cotton planter to receive pay for his crops in advance. The crop then to "go forward" was already paid for. The money to be received on its delivery was for the next year's crop, which would never be delivered. It was a deliberate scheme to cheat Northern men out of many millions of dollars-a scheme which the honest cotton-growers would not have sanctioned had they been aware of it. But in this, as in all other plans then ripening for a rebellion, the politicians would not trust the people with their secrets.

The meeting of the Thirty-sixth Congress on the 3d of December, drew the attention of the whole people to the National capital. It was an event of solemn interest to the nation. To the Annual Message of the President

the public looked eagerly for a definite expression of the views of the Government on the all-absorbing topic. The people sat down to read it with hope, and arose from its perusal with grievous disappointment. Faintheartedness and indecision appeared in almost every paragraph. After arguing that the election of a President who was distasteful to the people of one section of the country afforded no excuse for the offended ones to rebel, he declared that certain acts of Northern State Legislatures in opposition to the Fugitive-Slave Law, were violations of the Constitution, and if not repealed "the injured States, after having first used all peaceful and Constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the Government of the Union." The Secessionists could ask

no more.

The President then considered the right of secession, and the relative powers of the National Government. Before preparing this portion of his message, he turned to the Attorney-General (Jeremiah S. Black) for advice. It was given in ample measure on the 20th of November, in not less than three thousand words. It gave much "aid and comfort" to the enemies of the Union, for it yielded everything to them. It declared, in substance, that any State possessed an inherent right to secede, and when it had seceded, there was no power known to the Constitution to compel it to return to the Union. He argued that by an act of secession a State had virtually disappeared as a part of the Republic; and the power of the National Government being only auxiliary to State life and force, National troops would certainly "be out of place, and their use wholly illegal." It seemed to the Attorney-General that an attempt to force the people of a State into submission to the laws of the Republic and to desist from attempts. to destroy it, would be making war upon them, by which they would be converted into alien enemies, and would "be compelled to act accordingly." He counselled the President, virtually, to suffer this concrete Republic to become disintegrated by the fires of faction, or the blows of actual rebellion, rather than to use force legitimately at his disposal, for the preservation of its integrity and life. The weak President, accepting the advice of the Attorney-General, incorporated the doctrine into a portion of his Message; but, apparently conscious of its dangerous tendency, he uttered some brave words against secession as a crime, and State Supremacy as a heresy dangerous to the nationality of the Republic-a doctrine which, if practically carried out, would make “the Confederacy a rope of sand, to be penetrated and dissolved by the first adverse wave of public opinion in any of the States. In this manner," he truly said, "our thirty-three States may resolve themselves into so many jarring and hostile republics, each one retir

CHAP. IV.

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE UNSATISFACTORY.

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ing from the Union without responsibility, whenever any sudden excitement might impel them to such a course. By this process a Union might be entirely broken into fragments in a few weeks, which cost our fathers many years of toil, privation, and blood to establish."

Seemingly alarmed at his own outspoken convictions, and the offence it might give his Southern friends, the perplexed President proposed to conciliate them by allowing them to infuse deadly poison into the blood of their intended victim, which would more slowly but as surely accomplish their purpose. To do this he proposed an "explanatory amendment" to the Constitution on the subject of slavery, which would give to the enemies of the Union everything which they demanded, namely, the elevation of the slavesystem to the dignity of a National institution, and thus sap the very foundations of our free Government. This amendment was to consist of an express recognition of the right of property in slaves in the States where slavery then existed or might thereafter exist; of the recognition of the duty of the National Government to protect that right in all the Territories throughout their territorial existence; the recognition of the right of the slave-owner to every privilege and advantage given him in the FugitiveSlave Law; and a declaration that all the State laws impairing or defeating that law were violations of the Constitution, and consequently null and void. This Message, so indecisive and inconsistent, alarmed the people and pleased nobody. When a motion was made in the National Senate for its reference, it was spoken lightly of by the friends and foes of the Union. Senator Clingman, of North Carolina, who first sounded the trumpet of disunion in the Upper House, declared that it fell short of stating the case then before the country. Senator Wigfall, of Texas, said he could not understand it; and in the course of debate a few weeks afterward, Senator Jefferson Davis said that it had "all the characteristics of a diplomatic paper, for diplomacy is said to abhor certainty, as nature abhors a vacuum; and," he continued, "it is not within the power of man to reach any fixed conclusion from that Message. When the country was agitated, when opinions are being formed, when we are drifting beyond the power ever to return," he said, "this is not what we have the right to expect from a Chief Magistrate. One policy or the other he ought to have taken.

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either of a Federalist, that every State is subordinate to the Federal Government, and he was bound to enforce its authority; or as a State Rights Democrat, which he professed to be, holding that the Constitution gave no power to the Federal Government to coerce a State. The President should have brought his opinion to one conclusion or another, and, to-day, our country would have been safer than it is."

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