A Youth's History of the Great Civil War
Van Evrie, Horton & Co., ©1866
Revised edition, ©2006 www.ronie-mooney-encs.us
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CHAPTER VII. SECESSION
In the fall of 1860 Mr. Lincoln was elected president by a party and by men such as I have described in the last chapter. He carried every Northern State except New Jersey, and received a majority of the electoral votes, but not a majority of all the people. You know the President is elected by the States, not by the people - that is to say, each State gives as many votes for President as it has representatives and senators in Congress. Mr. Lincoln had a majority of these, but he was nearly a million and a half in the minority, counting the votes of all the people. But although Mr. Lincoln was elected by what is called State Rights, yet he went to work at once to destroy State Rights, as we shall soon see.
The Southern people were, of course, greatly alarmed when the result was known. The party coming into power had declared war against them. True the Chicago Platform was cautiously worded, but it is the spirit and temper of a political party which give the true meaning of its purposes. I have shown you fully what these were, from the mouths of its leading men.
And I may mention here as a singular fact that Joshua R. Giddings, of Ohio, who was known all his life as an out and out abolitionist, declared in the Chicago Convention that its nominees could not get the support of the abolitionists unless the resolutions pledged the party to carry out the doctrine that "all men are created equal." I have already mentioned that the abolitionists meant by this phrase to include negroes. The Chicago Convention, therefore, according to their own interpretation of its resolutions, was pledged to change Southern society, and make the negro the equal of the white man. How then can any Black Republican pretend that their own party platform was not an open declaration of war upon the south? Although they cunningly disguised their intentions by making a false use of a popular phrase, they did not deceive the Southern people. They instinctively knew that this party meant to overthrow their society, "peaceably, perhaps, if they were permitted to do so, but forcibly if they must." Mr. Seward himself avowed this sentiment in a speech in the United States Senate, March 11th, 1850.
The means which the Southern States resolved to resort to, in order, if possible, to save themselves from this calamity, was what has been called secession - that is, to withdraw from the Union or Confederacy. The States had all joined the Confederacy by their own act. There had been no compulsion used, and it had been held by the wisest and best men, both North and South, that the States, having only delegated the exercise of certain powers to the Federal Government, could resume them whenever they felt that their interests and welfare demanded it. If this was not the case it was held that it made the Federal Government the judge of its own powers, and that is the definition of a despotism.
I will now give you the opinions of some of the old Federalists, as well as others, on the right of secession. Josiah Quincy, of Massachusetts, was one of the bitterest of all the Federalists, and it only goes to show that the Black Republican party is a lineal descendant of old Tory Federalism, when I tell you that this man, Josiah Quincy, lived to a great age, and became a warm supporter of Mr. Lincoln and the abolitionists. He was a member of Congress during Mr. Jefferson's Administration, and violently opposed that great statesman. Mr. Jefferson saw the future greatness of this country, and purchased all the Louisiana Territory of France, which Mr. Quincy and the Federalists opposed. In a speech in 1811, against the bill to admit Louisiana into the Union, Mr. Quincy said that if it passed "it would be the right of all as well as the duty of some of the States to prepare for separation, amicably if they can, forcibly if they must." Some member called Mr. Quincy to order for making a treasonable utterance, but the House of Representatives sustained him.
One of the earliest as well as ablest constitutional lawyers in our country was Judge William Rawle of Pennsylvania. As a statesman and a patriot he ranked very high. General Washington appointed him District Attorney of the United States in 1791, and afterwards tendered him a seat in his Cabinet. In his work entitled "Views of the United States Constitution," Judge Rawle says:
"It depends on the State itself to retain or abolish the principle of representation, because it depends on itself whether it will continue a member of the Union. To deny this right would be inconsistent with the principle on which all our political systems were founded; which is, that the people have in all cases a right to determine how they will be governed. The States, then, may wholly withdraw from the Union, but while they continue, they must retain the character of representative republics."
The same sentiment was briefly expressed by President Jefferson in these words: "States may wholly withdraw their delegated powers." And again, in a letter to Dr. Priestly, in 1804, he said: "If the States west of the Alleghany declare themselves a separate people, we are incapable of a single effort to retain them. Our citizens can never be induced, either as militia or soldiers, to go there to cut the throats of their own brothers or sons, or to be themselves the subjects instead of the perpetrators of the parricide."
President Madison affirmed the same principle, when speaking of the States as the parties to the compact which formed the Union, he said: "The parties (i.e. the States) themselves must be the judges, in the last resort, whether the bargain made has been preserved or broken."
Such, indeed, is the meaning of the celebrated Resolutions of 1798, referred to in a previous chapter, and on which both Jefferson and Madison were elected to the Presidency.
But, whether a State had of had not the right to secede, there never had been scarcely a difference of opinion as to the right and the policy of resorting to coercion. Ex-President John Quincy Adams, in 1833, speaking of secession, said that whenever that time arrived "it would be better for the people of these disunited States to part in friendship from each other rather than to be held together by constraint." In 1850, Mr. S.P. Chase, now Chief Justice, in a speech in the United States Senate, declared that in "the case of a State resuming her powers, he knew of no remedy to prevent it." Even Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward avowed this doctrine as late as April, 1861. In a dispatch to Mr. Dayton, out minister to France, dated April 10th, 1861, Mr. Lincoln instructed Mr. Seward to say: "That he (the President) was not disposed to reject a cardinal dogma of theirs (the seceders), namely, that the Federal Government could not reduce the seceding States to obedience by conquest ,even although he were disposed to question the proposition. But in fact, the President willingly accepts it as true."
The late Mr. Edward Everett, Feb 2d, 1861, said: "To expect to hold fifteen States in the Union by force is preposterous. * * * If our sister States must leave us, in the name of heaven let them go in peace."
Again said Mr. Everett: "The suggestion that the Union can be maintained by numerical predominance and military prowess of one section, Exerted to coerce the other into submission, is, in my judgment, as self-contradictory as it is dangerous. It comes loaded with the death-smell from fields wet with brothers' blood. If the vital principle of all republican governments is the "consent of the governed," much more does a union of co-equal sovereign States require, as its basis, the harmony of its members, and their voluntary co-operation in its organic functions."
The leading newspaper organs of the Black Republican party held to the same views. The New York Tribune, only three days before South Carolina seceded, said "that the Declaration of Independence justified her in doing so." Feb. 23d, 1861, the editor of the same paper, acknowledged to be the exponent of the Black Republican party, said: "If the cotton States desire to form an independent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so."
In the face of all this history, how could the South imagine that the North would construe its withdrawal to be an act of treason? Much less could it reasonably suppose that the North would wage a relentless and exterminating war for an act which our own leading statesmen and politicians have always admitted to be, in the last resort, a right. No fair-minded person can doubt that the Southern States honestly believed that they had a right- in the language both of Washington and Jefferson- "to resume their delegated powers." They wished and intended to do so in peace. Their act of withdrawal was, in no sense, a declaration of war upon the Federal Government. But the Federal Government made war on them to have them remain, as the history soon to be related will clearly show. They offered and entreated peaceful negotiation in relation to all the property claimed by the Federal Government, located within the jurisdiction of the withdrawing States. The forts which they seized , but which they expressed a willingness to pay for, were originally built for the protection of the harbors and cities of those States. They could not have been built without the consent and co-operation of the States within whose limits they were erected.
They were, indeed, partnership property; and each of the States was an equal party in the ownership. The Federal Government, strictly speaking, was not a party in this ownership at all, but was only the general agent of the real parties, that is, the several States composing the compact of the Union. These forts were the joint property of all the States; but as they were designed each for the protection of the States where they were located, it was held that such forts necessarily went with the withdrawing States to which they belonged. If South Carolina deprived New York of its share of the ownership in the forts in Charleston harbor, South Carolina also relinquished its share of ownership in the forts in the harbor of New York.
But the seceding States expressed a desire to settle all these matters by a mutual and friendly agreement. They avowed their determination to inflict no wrong upon others, but only to resume the powers they had delegated, and govern themselves without the interference of the States which they honestly believed had broken the compact made by our forefathers. They were neither rebels by law nor by intention. They were neither rebels by law nor by intention. They acted upon what they believed to be their right, and upon what had been the understanding of a very great number of the ablest statesmen and patriots our country has produced- and upon what was the unanimous understanding of the States when they adopted the Constitution. Not a single State would have become a member of the Union had it imagined that the Federal Government would ever attempt to hold them in it by war and bloodshed. Indeed when the States are held together by the bayonet, the government is no longer a Union, but a Despotism. It ceases to be the government our fathers made, and becomes a tyranny like that of Austria or Russia.
The South, you see then, made no war on the North by separating from us. They simply exercised what they sincerely believed to be their right, and what the ablest statesmen of the North, and the wise founders of our Government, admitted to be such So far from imagining themselves traitors, they religiously believed themselves patriots.
Nor did the leaders of the party which opened war upon them, believe them traitors. These leaders, you have seen, were old disunionists. Some of them had been talking and threatening secession themselves for more than thirty years, as their predecessors had for more than forty years before. It was not love for the Union that caused them to wage the war. It was hatred of the South in some, a foolish, fanatical love of negroes in others, and still in others a traitorous desire to overthrow the free Government of the United States, and establish a consolidated or single government, after annihilating the sovereignty of the States.
I am speaking of the leaders. The mass of the soldiers were drawn into it, some by patriotic motives, and some without a definite motive of any kind. There was a wild and senseless excitement, which drove the whole community mad. Men did not reason-they raved. The men who attempted to reason were knocked down. This was all a necessary part of the machinery for working up the war. The cunning instigators knew well that if the people were permitted to reason, and to talk dispassionately on the matter, the war fever could not be kept up a single hour. When men know they have a bad cause, they do not permit discussion, if they can help it. So the Black Republican leaders contrived to have every man in the North mobbed, who attempted to think and argue on the subject of the war. Men were hurried or driven into the army like sheep into a slaughter-pen. The least intelligent were actually made to believe that the South was making war on the North, when all the time it was the North which was waging war upon the South, as you will see when we come to trace the conflict step by step.
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