89. A South erner's plea for union, 1860 rail - out of the three thousand split by 'honest Old Abe' thirty years ago on the Sangamon River bottoms. On the inside were two more, brilliantly hung with tapers. I left the city on the night train on the Fort Wayne and Chicago road. The train consisted of eleven cars, every seat full and people standing in the aisles and corners. . . . At every station where there was a village until after two o'clock there were tar barrels burning, drums beating, boys carrying rails; and guns, great and small, banging away. Honorable Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, later Vice President of the Confederacy, was the last of the November 14, distinguished Southern statesmen to give up hope for the peaceful adjustment of the differences between North and South. In a speech before the Georgia legislature, a week after Lincoln's election, he said: [326] The first question that presents itself is, Shall the people of Georgia secede from the Union in consequence of the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States? My countrymen, I tell you frankly, candidly, and earnestly, that I do not think they ought. In my judgment, the election of no man, constitutionally chosen to that high office, is sufficient cause to justify any State to separate from the Union. It ought to stand by and aid still in maintaining the Constitution of the country. If all our hopes are to be blasted, if the Republic is to go down, let us be found to the last moment standing on the deck with the Constitution of the United States waving over our heads. Let the fanatics of the North break the Constitution, if such is their fell purpose. Let the responsibility be with them. . . . We went into the election with this people. The result was different from what we wished; but the election has been constitutionally held. Were we to make a point of resistance to the Government, and go out of the Union merely on that account, the record would be made up hereafter against us. But it is said Mr. Lincoln's policy and principles are against the Constitution, and that, if he carries them out, it will be destructive of our rights. Let us not anticipate a threatened evil. If he violates the Constitution, then will come our time to act... I do not anticipate that Mr. Lincoln will do anything to jeopard our safety or security, whatever may be his spirit to do it; for he is bound by the Constitutional checks which are thrown around him, which at this time render him powerless to do any great mischief. This shows the wisdom of our system. The President of the United States is no Emperor -no Dictator. He is clothed with no absolute power. He can do nothing unless he is backed by power in Congress. The House of Representatives is largely in a majority against him. ... The gains in the Democratic party in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Indiana, and other States . . . have been enough to make a majority of near thirty in the next House against Mr. Lincoln. . . . In the Senate he will also be powerless. There will be a majority of four against him. . . . Mr. Lincoln cannot appoint an officer without the consent of the Senate, he cannot form a Cabinet without the same consent. . . . Why then, I say, should we disrupt the ties of this Union, when his hands are tied — when he can do nothing against us? My honorable friend who addressed you last night [Mr. Toombs]1 and to whom I listened with the profoundest attention, 1 Senator Robert Toombs, a Union man in 1850, had given up hope of preserving the Union. He went back to Washington in December, 1860, but after the failure of the Crittenden amendments he telegraphed to the citizens of Georgia, December 23, 1860: "I came here to secure your constitutional rights or to demonstrate to you that you can get no guarantees for these rights from your Northern confederates. The whole subject was referred to a committee of 13 in the Senate yesterday. I was appointed . . . I submitted propositions which were all treated with derision or contempt. . . . The committee is controlled by Black Republicans, your enemies, who only seek to amuse you with delusive hope until your election [to a state convention] in order that you may defeat the friends of secession. . . . I tell you upon the faith of a true man, that all further looking to the North for security for your constitutional rights in this Union ought to be instantly abandoned. . . . Secession by the 4th of March next should be thundered from the ballot-box by the unanimous voice of Georgia.”—U. B. Phillips, Correspondence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1911, Vol. II, p. 525. asks if we would submit to Black Republican rule? I say to you and to him, as a Georgian, I never would submit to any Black Republican aggression upon our Constitutional rights...; and if they cannot be maintained in the Union standing on the Georgia Platform [see No. 81, p. 352], where I have stood from the time of its adoption, I would be in favor of disrupting every tie which binds the States together. I will have equality for Georgia, and for the citizens of Georgia, in this Union, or I will look for new safeguards elsewhere. This is my position. The only question now is, Can this be secured in the Union?... In my judgment, it may yet be. . . . My countrymen, I am not of those who believe this Union has been a curse up to this time. True men, men of integrity, entertain different views from me on this subject. . . . Nor will I undertake to say that this Government of our Fathers is perfect. There is nothing perfect in this world of human origin.... But that this Government of our Fathers, with all its defects, comes nearer the objects of all good governments than any other on the face of the earth, is my settled conviction. . . When I look around and see our prosperity in everythingagriculture, commerce, art, science, and every department of progress physical, mental, and moral-certainly in the face of such an exhibition, if we can, without the loss of power or any essential right or interest, remain in the Union, it is our duty to ourselves and posterity to do so.... Should Georgia determine to go out of the Union . . . I shall bow to the will of her people. Their cause is my cause, and their destiny is my destiny; and I trust this will be the ultimate course of all. The greatest curse that can befall a free people is civil war. . . . I am for exhausting all that patriotism demands, before taking the last step. I would invite, therefore, South Carolina to a conference. I would ask the same of all the other Southern States, so that if the evil has got beyond our control, which God in his mercy grant may not be the case, we may not be divided among ourselves. . . . In this way, our sister Southern States can be induced to act with us; and I have but little doubt that the States of New York, and Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and the other Western States, will compel their Legislatures to recede from their hostile attitude. . . . I am, as you clearly perceive, for maintaining the Union as it is, if possible. I will exhaust every means thus to maintain it with an equality in it. My position, then, in conclusion, is for the maintenance of the honor, the rights, the equality, the security, and the glory of my native State in the Union, if possible. But if all this fails, we shall at least have the satisfaction of knowing that we have done our duty, and all that patriotism could require. THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY crime of the That each succeeding census marked the increasing 90. "The preponderance of population in the free states, with their North," Jancorrespondingly increasing majorities in the presidential uary, 1861 electoral columns and the House of Representatives, was [330] the ultimate offense of the North in the eyes of the South. It was also a "crime of the North," in the eyes of stern antislavery men, that the nerveless administration at Washington should encourage a statesman of Georgia to "have but little doubt that the States of New York, and Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and the other Western States would compel their Legislatures to recede from their hostile attitude" toward slavery. In an article in the Atlantic Monthly for January, 1861, James Russell Lowell scourges Buchanan with scorpions for his subserviency to the slavery interests. Mr. Buchanan seems to have no opinion, or, if he has one it is a halting between two, a bat-like cross of sparrow and mouse, that gives timidity its choice between flight and skulking.... Mr. Buchanan, by his training in a system of politics without a parallel for intrigue, personality, and partisanship, would have unfitted himself from taking a statesmanlike view of anything, even if he had ever been capable of it. . . . We could not have expected from him a Message1 around which the spirit, the intelligence and the character of the country would have rallied. But he might have saved himself from the evil fame of being the first of our Presidents who could never forget himself into a feeling of the dignity of the place he occupied. He has always seemed to consider the Presidency as a retaining-fee paid him by the slavery-propagandists, and his Message to the present Congress looks like the last juiceless squeeze of the orange which the South is tossing contemptuously away. Mr. Buchanan admits as real the assumed wrongs of the South Carolina revolutionists, and even, if we understand him, allows that they are great enough to justify revolution. But he advises the secessionists to pause and try what can be done by negotiation.... In 1832, General Jackson bluntly called the South Carolina doctrines treason, and the country sustained him. That they are not characterized in the same way now does not prove any difference in the thing, but only in the times and the men. They are none the less treason because James Buchanan is less than Andrew Jackson, but they are all the more dangerous. . . The subservience on the question of Slavery, which has hitherto characterized both the great parties of the country, has strengthened the hands of the extremists at the South, and has enabled them to get control of public opinion there by fostering false notions of Southern superiority and Northern want of principle. We have done so much to make them believe in their importance to us, and given them so little occasion 1 Referring to Buchanan's last annual message of December 4, 1860, in which, after saying: "The framers of this government never intended to implant in its bosom the seeds of its own destruction," and, "Secession is neither more nor less than revolution," the President goes on to comfort the South by the doctrine that Congress had no power under the Constitution to compel a State to remain in the Union. Seward in a letter to his wife, December 5, summed up the case with humorous indignation: "The message shows conclusively that it is the duty of the President to execute the laws - unless somebody opposes him; and that no State has a right to go out of the Union - unless it wants to." F. W. Seward, Life of Seward, Vol. II, p. 480 |