Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 / From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860

by James Gillespie Blaine

CHAPTER XI.

Congress during the Winter of 1860-61.—Leave-taking of Senators and Representatives.—South Carolina the First to secede.—Her Delegation in the House publish a Card withdrawing.—Other States follow.—Mr. Lamar of Mississippi.—Speeches of Seceding Senators. —Mr. Yulee and Mr. Mallory of Florida.—Mr. Clay and Mr. Fitzpatrick of Alabama.—Jefferson Davis.—His Distinction between Secession and Nullification.—Important Speech by Mr. Toombs.—He defines Conditions on which the Union might be allowed to survive.—Mr. Iverson's Speech.—Georgia Senators withdraw.—Insolent Speech of Mr. Slidell of Louisiana.—Mr. Judah P. Benjamin's Special Plea for his State.—His Doctrine of "A Sovereignty held in Trust."— Same Argument of Mr. Yulee for his State.—Principle of State Sovereignty.—Disproved by the Treaty of 1783.—Notable Omission by Secession Senators.—Grievances not stated.—Secession Conventions in States.—Failure to state Justifying Grounds of Action.— Confederate Government fail likewise to do it.—Contrast with the Course of the Colonies.—Congress had given no Cause.—Had not disturbed Slavery by Adverse Legislation.—List of Measures Favorable to Slavery.—Policy of Federal Government steadily in that Direction. —Mr. Davis quoted Menaces, not Acts.—Governing Class in the South. —Division of Society there.—Republic ruled by an Oligarchy.— Overthrown by Election of Lincoln.—South refuses to acquiesce.

No feature of the extraordinary winter of 1860-61 is more singular in retrospect than the formal leave-taking of the Southern senators and representatives in their respective Houses. Members of the House from the seceding States, with few exceptions, refrained from individual addresses, either of farewell or defiance, but adopted a less demonstrative and more becoming mode. The South-Carolina representatives withdrew on the 24th of December (1860), in a brief card laid before the House by Speaker Pennington. They announced that, as the people of their State had "in their sovereign capacity resumed the powers delegated by them to the Federal Government of the United States," their "connection with the House of Representatives was thereby dissolved." They "desired to take leave of those with whom they had been associated in a common agency, with mutual regard and respect for the rights of each other." They "cherished the hope" that in future relations they might "better enjoy the peace and harmony essential to the happiness of a free and enlightened people."

SOUTHERN REPRESENTATIVES WITHDRAW.

Other delegations retired from the House in the order in which their States seceded. The leave-taking, in the main, was not undignified. There was no defiance, no indulgence of bravado. The members from Mississippi "regretted the necessity" which impelled their State to the course adopted, but declared that it met "their unqualified approval." The card was no doubt written by Mr. L. Q. C. Lamar, and accurately described his emotions. He stood firmly by his State in accordance with the political creed in which he had been reared, but looked back with tender regret to the Union whose destiny he had wished to share and under the protection of whose broader nationality he had hoped to live and die. A few Southern representatives marked their retirement by speeches bitterly reproaching the Federal Government, and bitterly accusing the Republican party; but the large majority confined themselves to the simpler form of the card.

Whether the ease and confidence as to the future which these Southern representatives manifested was really felt or only assumed, can never be known. They were all men of intelligence, some of them conspicuously able; and it seems incredible that they could have persuaded themselves that a great government could be dissolved without shock and without resistance. They took leave with no more formality than that with which a private gentleman, aggrieved by discourteous treatment, withdraws from a company in which he feels that he can no longer find enjoyment. Their confidence was based on the declarations and admissions of Mr. Buchanan's message; but they had, in effect, constructed that document themselves, and the slightest reflection should have warned them that, with the change of administration to occur in a few weeks, there would be a different understanding of Executive duty, and a different appeal to the reason of the South.

The senators from the seceding States were more outspoken than the representatives. They took the opportunity of their retirement to say many things which, even for their own personal fame, should have been left unsaid. A clear analysis of these harangues is impossible. They lacked the unity and directness of the simple notifications with which the seceding representatives had withdrawn from the House. The valedictories in the Senate were a singular compound of defiance and pity, of justification and recrimination. Some of the speeches have an insincere and mock-heroic tone to the reader twenty years after the event. They appear to be the expressions of men who talked for effect, and who professed themselves ready for a shock of arms which they believed would never come. But the majority of the utterances were by men who meant all they said; who, if they did not anticipate a bloody conflict, were yet prepared for it, and who were too deeply stirred by resentment and passion to give due heed to consequences.

On the 21st of January the senators from Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi formally withdrew from the Senate. Their speeches showed little variety of thought, consisting chiefly of indictments against the free States for placing the government under the control of an anti-slavery administration. Mr. Yulee was the first to speak. He solemnly announced to the Senate that "the State of Florida, though a convention of her people, had decided to recall the powers which she had delegated to the Federal Government, and to assume the full exercise of all her sovereign rights as an independent and separate community." At what particular period in the history of the American continent Florida had enjoyed "sovereign rights," by what process she had ever "delegated powers to the Federal Government," or at what time she had ever been "an independent and separate community," Mr. Yulee evidently preferred not to inform the Senate. His colleague, Mr. Mallory, implored the people of the North not to repeat the fatal folly of the Bourbons by imagining that "the South would submit to the degradation of a constrained existence under a violated Constitution." Mr. Mallory regarded the subjugation of the South by war as impossible. He warned the North that they were dealing with "a nation, and not with a faction."

Mr. Clement C. Clay, Jr., of Alabama, boasted that in the convention which adopted the Ordinance of Secession in his State there was not one friend of the Union; and he resented with indignation what he termed the offensive calumny of the Republicans in denouncing slavery and polygamy as twin relics of barbarism. The action of Alabama, he said, was not from "sudden, spasmodic, and violent passion." It was the conclusion her people had reached "after years of enmity, injustice, and injury at the hands of their Northern brethren." Instead of causing surprise, "it is rather matter of reproach that they have endured so much and so long, and have deferred this act of self-defense until to-day." Mr. Clay's speech was insulting and exasperating to the last degree. His colleague, Mr. Fitzpatrick, a man of better tempter, showed reserve and an indisposition to discuss the situation. He contented himself with the expression of a general concurrence in the views of Mr. Clay, adding no word of bitterness himself. He said that he "acknowledged loyalty to no other power than to the sovereign State of Alabama." But for the pressure brought upon him, Mr. Fitzpatrick would have been glad to retain his seat in the Senate and wait the course of events. He was not in his heart a Disunionist, as his colleague was. He would have accepted the nomination for the Vice-Presidency on the ticket with Douglas the preceding year, if the whole political power of the Cotton States had not opposed his wishes and forced him into the support of Breckinridge.

VALEDICTORY OF JEFFERSON DAVIS.

Jefferson Davis expressed his concurrence in the action of the people of Mississippi. He believed that action was necessary and proper, but would "have felt himself equally bound if his belief had been otherwise." He presented an analysis of the difference between the remedies of nullification and secession. Nullification was a remedy inside of the Union; secession a remedy outside. He expressed himself as against the theory of nullification, and explained that, so far from being identified with secession, the two are antagonistic principles. Mr. Calhoun's mistake, according to Mr. Davis, was in trying to "nullify" the laws of the Union while continuing a member of it. He intimated that President Jackson would never have attempted to "execute the laws" in South Carolina as he did against the nullifiers in 1832, if the State had seceded, and that therefore his great example could not be quoted in favor of "coercion." It is not believed that Mr. Davis had the slightest authority for this aspersion upon the memory of Jackson. It seems rather to have been a disingenuous and unwarranted statement of the kind so plentifully used at the time for the purpose of "firing the Southern heart."

There had been an impression in the country that Mr. Davis was among the most reluctant of those who engaged in the secession movement; but in his speech he declared that he had conferred with the people of Mississippi before the step was taken, and counseled them to the course which they had adopted. This declaration was a great surprise to Northern Democrats, among whom Mr. Davis had many friends. For several years he had been growing in favor with a powerful element in the Democracy of the free States, and, but for the exasperating quarrel of 1860, he might have been selected as the Presidential candidate of his party. No man gave up more than Mr. Davis in joining the revolt against the Union. In his farewell words to the Senate, there was a tone of moderation and dignity not unmixed with regretful and tender emotions. There was also apparent a spirit of confidence and defiance. He evidently had full faith that he was going forth to victory and to power.

Mr. Toombs of Georgia did not take formal leave, but on the 7th of January delivered a speech which, though addressed to the Senate of the United States, was apparently intended to influence public sentiment in Georgia, where there was an uncomfortable halting in the progress of secession. The speech had special interest, not alone from Mr. Toombs's well-known ability, but because it was the only presentation of the conditions on which the scheme of Disunion might be arrested, and the Cotton States held fast in their loyalty to the government,—conditions which, in the language of Mr. Toombs, would "restore fraternity and peace and unity to all of us." It was not believed that Mr. Toombs had the faintest expectation that his proposition would receive favorable consideration in the free States. His point would be fully gained by showing that the free States would not accept conditions which Georgia had the right to exact as the basis of her remaining in the Union. Once firmly persuaded that she was deprived of her constitutional rights, Georgia could the more easily be led or forced into secession.

The first condition prescribed by Mr. Toombs was, that in all the territory owned or to be acquired by the United States, slave property should be securely protected until the period of the formation of a State government, when the people could determine the question for themselves. The second condition was, that property in slaves should be entitled to the same protection from the Government of the United States in all its departments everywhere, which is extended to other property, provided that there should be no interference with the liberty of a State to prohibit or establish slavery within its limits. The third condition was, that persons committing crimes against slave property in one State, and fleeing to another, should be delivered up in the same manner as persons committing crimes against other forms of property, and that the laws of the State from which such persons flee should be the test of the criminality of the act. The fourth condition was, that fugitive slaves should be surrendered under the Act of 1850 without being entitled to a writ of habeas corpus, or trial by jury, or other obstructions in the States to which they might flee. The fifth and last demand was, that Congress should pass efficient laws for the punishment of all persons in any of the States who should in any manner aid or abet invasion or insurrection in any other State, or commit any other act against the law of nations tending to disturb the tranquility of the people or government of any other State. Without the concession of these points Mr. Toombs said the Union could not be maintained. If some satisfactory arrangement should not be made, he was for immediate action. "We are," he said, "as ready to fight now as we ever shall be. I will have equality or war." He denounced Mr. Lincoln as "an enemy to the human race, deserving the execration of all mankind."

GEORGIA SENATORS WITHDRAW.

Three weeks later the Georgia senators withdrew. Georgia had on the 19th of January, after much dragooning, passed the Ordinance of Secession, and on the 28th, Mr. Alfred Iverson, the colleague of Mr. Toombs, communicated the fact to the Senate in a highly inflammatory speech. He proclaimed that Georgia was the sixth State to secede, that a seventh was about to follow, and that "a confederacy of their own would soon be established." Provision would be made "for the admission of other States," and Mr. Iverson assured the Senate that within a few months "all the slave-holding States of the late confederacy of the United States will be united together in a bond of union far more homogenous, and therefore more stable, than the one now being dissolved." His boasting was unrestrained, but his conception of the contest which he and his associates were inviting was pitiably inadequate. "Your conquest," said he, addressing the Union senators, "will cost you a hundred thousand lives and a hundred millions of dollars."

The conclusion of Mr. Iverson's harangue disclosed his fear that after all Georgia might prefer the old Union. "For myself," said he, "unless my opinions greatly change, I shall never consent to the reconstruction of the Federal Union. The Rubicon is passed, and with my consent shall never be recrossed." But these bold declarations were materially qualified by Mr. Iverson when he reflected on the powerful minority of Union men in Georgia, and the general feeling in that State against a conflict with the National Government. "In this sentiment," said he, "I may be overruled by the people of my State and of the other Southern States." . . . "Nothing, however, will bring Georgia back except a full and explicit recognition and guaranty of the safety and protection of the institution of domestic slavery." This was the final indication of the original weakness of the secession cause in Georgia, and of the extraordinary means which were taken to impress the people of that State with the belief that secession would lead to reconstruction on a basis of more efficient protection to the South and greater strength to the whole Union.

On the 4th of February Mr. Slidell and Mr. Benjamin delivered their valedictories as senators from Louisiana. Mr. Slidell was aggressively insolent. He informed the Senate that if any steps should be taken to enforce the authority of the Union in the seceded States, they would be resisted. "You may," he said, "under color of enforcing your laws and collecting your revenue, blockade our ports. This will be war, and we shall meet it with different but equally efficient weapons. We will not permit the consumption or introduction of any of your manufactures. Every sea will swarm with our privateers, the volunteer militia of the ocean." He confidently expected foreign aid. "How long," he asked, "will the great naval powers of Europe permit you to impede their free intercourse with their best customers, and to stop the supply of the great staple which is the most important basis of their manufacturing industry?" "You were," said he, adding taunt to argument, "with all the wealth of this once great confederacy, but a fourth or fifth rate naval power. What will you be when emasculated by the withdrawal of fifteen States, and warred upon by them with active and inveterate hostility?"

In a tone of patronizing liberality, Mr. Slidell gave assurance that the new confederacy would recognize the rights of the inhabitants of the valley of the Mississippi and its tributaries to free navigation, and would guarantee to them "a free interchange of agricultural production without impost, and the free transit from foreign countries of every species of merchandise, subjected only to such regulations as may be necessary for a protection of the revenue system which we may establish." Had Mr. Slidell been less inspired by insolence, and more largely endowed with wisdom, he would have remembered that when the Union contained but six millions of people, they were willing to fight any one of three great European powers for freedom of access to the sea for the inhabitants of the valley of the Mississippi, and that it was from the first a physical impossibility to close it or in any way restrict it against the rights of the North-West. The people of that section, even without the prestige of the national flag, were immeasurably stronger than the people of the South-West, and were, unaided, fully competent to fight their way to the ocean over any obstacles which the powers behind Mr. Slidell could interpose. In the mere matching of local strength, it was sheer folly for the States of the lower Mississippi to attempt to control the mouth of that river.

SPEECHES OF BENJAMIN AND SLIDELL.

Mr. Judah P. Benjamin spoke in a tone of moderation as contrasted with the offensive dictation of Mr. Slidell. He devoted himself mainly to answering an argument which came instinctively to every man's mind, and which bore with particular severity upon the action of Louisiana. Mr. Benjamin brought his eminent legal ability to the discussion, but failed even to satisfy himself. The State of Louisiana was formed from territory which had been bought and paid for by the United States out of the common treasury of the whole people. Whatever specious plea might be made for the independent and separate sovereignty of the old thirteen States, the argument could not apply to Louisiana. No one could maintain that Louisiana had ever enjoyed a separate sovereignty of any kind, nominal or real. She had been originally owned by France, had been sold to Spain, had been sold back again to France, and had been bought by the United States. These sales had been made without protest from any one, and the title conferred at each transfer was undisputed, the sovereignty of the purchasing power undeniable.

Confronting these facts, and realizing the difficulty they presented, Mr. Benjamin was reduced to desperate straits for argument. "Without entering into the details of the negotiation," he said, "the archives of our State Department show the fact to be that although the domain, the public lands and other property of France in the ceded province, were conveyed by absolute title to the United States, the sovereignty was not conveyed otherwise than in trust." This peculiar statement of a sovereignty that was "conveyed in trust" Mr. Benjamin attempted to sustain by quoting the clause in the treaty which gave the right of the people of Louisiana to be incorporated into the Union "on terms of equality with the other States." From this he argued that the sovereignty of the Territory of Louisiana held in trust by the Federal Government, and conveyed to the State of Louisiana on her admission to the Union, was necessarily greater than the National sovereignty. Indeed, Mr. Benjamin recognized no "Nation" in the United States and no real sovereignty in the General Government which was but the agent of the sovereign States. It properly and logically followed, according to Mr. Benjamin, that the "sovereignty held in trust," might, when conferred, be immediately and rightfully employed to destroy the life of the trustee. The United States might or might not admit Louisiana to the Union, for the General Government was sole judge as to time and expediency—but when once admitted, the power of the State was greater than the power of the Government which permitted the State to come into existence. Such were the contradictions and absurdities which the creed of the Secessionists inevitably involved, and in which so clever a man as Mr. Benjamin was compelled to blunder and flounder.

Pursuing his argument, Mr. Benjamin wished to know whether those who asserted that Louisiana had been bought by the United States meant that the United States had the right based on that fact to sell Louisiana? He denied in every form that there had ever been such a purchase of Louisiana as carried with it the right of sale. "I deny," said he, "the fact on which the argument is founded. I deny that the Province of Louisiana or the people of Louisiana were ever conveyed to the United States for a price as property that could be bought or sold at will." However learned Mr. Benjamin may have been in the law, he was evidently ill informed as to the history of the transaction of which he spoke so confidently. He should have known that the United States, sixteen years after it bought Louisiana from France, actually sold or exchanged a large part of that province to the King of Spain as part of the consideration in the purchase of the Floridas. He should have known that at the time the Government of the United States disposed of a part of Louisiana, there was not an intelligent man in the world who did not recognize its right and power to dispose of the whole. The theory that the United States acquired a less degree of sovereignty over Louisiana than was held by France when she transferred it, or by Spain when she owned it, was never dreamed of when the negotiation was made. It was an afterthought on the part of the hard-pressed defenders of the right of secession. It was the ingenious but lame device of an able lawyer who undertook to defend what was indefensible.

Mr. Yulee of Florida had endeavored to make the same argument on behalf of his State, feeling the embarrassment as did Mr. Benjamin, and relying, as Mr. Benjamin did, upon the clause in the treaty with Spain entitling Florida to admission to the Union. Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Yulee should both have known that the guaranty which they quoted was nothing more and nothing less than the ordinary condition which every enlightened nation makes in parting with its subjects or citizens, that they shall enter into the new relation without discrimination against them and with no lower degree of civil rights than had already been enjoyed by those who form the nation to which they are about to be annexed. Louisiana, when she was transferred to the United States, received no further guaranty than Napoleon in effect gave to Spain at the treaty of San Ildefonso, or than the Spanish Bourbons had given to the French Bourbons in the treaty of 1763 at the close of the Seven Years' War. In each of the three transfers of the sovereignty of Louisiana, the same condition was perfectly understood as to the rights of the inhabitants. Mr. Benjamin drew the conclusion which was not only diametrically wrong in morals, but diametrically erroneous in logic. Instead of inferring that a State, situated as Louisiana was, should necessarily become greater than the power which purchased it, simply because other States in the Union which she joined had assumed such power, a discriminating mind of Mr. Benjamin's acuteness should have seen that the very position proved the reverse of what he stated, and demonstrated, in the absurdity of Louisiana's secession, the equal absurdity of the secession of South Carolina and Georgia.

THE ARGUMENT OF MR. BENJAMIN.

It seemed impossible for Mr. Benjamin or for any other leader of Southern opinion to argue the question of State rights fairly or dispassionately. They had been so persistently trained in the heresy that they could give no weight to the conclusive reasoning of the other side. The original thirteen, they averred, were "free, sovereign, and independent States," acknowledged to be such by the King of Great Britain in the Treaty of peace in 1783. The new States, so the argument ran, were all admitted to the Union of terms of equality with the old. Hence all were alike endowed with sovereignty. Even the historical part of this argument was strained and fallacious. Much was made in the South of Mr. Toombs's declaration that "the original thirteen" were as "independent of each other as Australia and Jamaica." So indeed they were as long as they remained British Colonies. Their only connection in that condition was in their common dependence on the Crown. But the first step towards independence of the Crown was to unite. From that day onward they were never separate. Nor did the King of Great Britain acknowledge the "independence and sovereignty" of the thirteen individual and separate States. The Treaty of peace declares that "His Majesty acknowledges the said United States [naming them] to be free, sovereign, and independent States."—not separately and individually, but the "said United States." The King then agrees that "the following are and shall be the boundaries of the said United States,"—proceeding to give, not the boundaries of each State, but the boundaries of the whole as one unit, one sovereignty, one nationality. Last of all, the commissioners who signed the treaty with the King's commissioner were not acting for the individual States, but for the United States. Three of them, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay, were from the North, and Henry Laurens from the South. The separate sovereignties whose existence was so persistently alleged by Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Toombs were not represented when independence was conceded. Mr. Benjamin's conclusion, therefore, was not only illogical, but was completely disproved by plain historical facts.

It seems never to have occurred to Mr. Benjamin, or to Mr. Yulee, or to the Texas senators, or to the Arkansas senators, that the money paid from a common treasury of the nation gave any claim to National sovereignty. Their philosophy seems to have been that the General Government had been paid in full by the privilege of nurturing new States, of improving their rivers and harbors, of building their fortifications, of protecting them in peace, of defending them in war. The privilege of leading the new communities through the condition of Territorial existence up to the full majesty of States, was, according to secession argument, sufficient compensation, and removed all shadow of the title or the sovereignty of the National Government, the moment the inhabitants thus benefitted announced their desire to form new connections. Louisiana had cost fifteen millions of dollars at a time when that was a vast sum of money. It had cost five millions of money and the surrender of a province, to purchase Florida, and nearly a hundred millions more to extinguish the Indian title, and make the State habitable for white men. Texas cost the National Treasury ninety millions of dollars in the war which was precipitated by her annexation, and ten millions more paid to her in 1850, in adjustment of her boundary trouble. All these States apparently regarded the tie that bound them to the National Government as in no degree mutual, as imposing no duty upon them. By some mysterious process still unexplained, the more they gained from connection with the National authority, the less was their obligation thereto, the more perfect their right to disregard and destroy the beneficent government which had created them and fostered them.