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

SOUTHERN GRIEVANCES NOT STATED.

In all the speeches delivered by the senators from the seceding States, there was no presentation of the grievances which, in their own minds, justified secession. This fact elicited less notice at the time than it calls forth in retrospect. Those senators held in their hands in the beginning, the fate of the secession movement. If they had advised the Southern States that it was wiser and better to abide in the Union, and at least to wait for some overt act of wrong against the slave States, the whole movement would have collapsed. But they evidently felt that this would be a shrinking and cowardly policy after the numerous manifestoes they had issued. South Carolina had taken the fatal step, and to fail in sustaining her would be to co-operate in crushing her. While these motives and aims are intelligible, it seems utterly incredible that not one of the senators gave a specification of the wrongs which led the South to her rash step. Mr. Toombs recounted the concessions on which the South would agree to remain; but these were new provisions and new conditions, never intended by the framers of the Federal Constitution; and they were abhorrent to the civilization of the nineteenth century.

Mr. Toombs, Mr. Jefferson Davis, and Mr. Benjamin were the three ablest senators who spoke in favor of secession. Not one of them deemed it necessary to justify his conduct by a recital of the grounds on which so momentous a step could bear the test of historic examination. They dealt wholly in generalities as to the past, and apparently based their action on something that was to happen in the future. Mr. John Slidell sought to give a strong reason for the movement, in the statement that, if Lincoln should be inaugurated with Southern assent, the 4th of March would witness, in various quarters, outbreaks among the slaves which, although they would be promptly suppressed, would carry ruin and devastation to many a Southern home. It was from Mr. Slidell that Mr. Buchanan received the information which induced him to dwell at length in his annual message on this painful feature of the situation. But it was probably an invention of Mr. Slidell's fertile brain—imposed upon the President and intended to influence public sentiment in the North. It was in flat contradiction of the general faith in the personal fealty of their slaves, so constantly boasted by the Southern men,—a faith abundantly justified by the subsequent fact that four years of war passed without a single attempt to servile insurrection. At the time of the John Brown disturbance the South resented the imputation of fear, made upon it by the North. If now the danger was especially imminent, Southern leaders were solely to blame. They would not accept the honorable assurance of the Republican party and of the President-elect that no interference with slavery in the States was designed. They insisted in all their public addresses that Mr. Lincoln was determined to uproot slavery everywhere, and they might well fear that these repeated declarations had been heard and might be accepted by their slaves.

The omission by individual senators to present the grievances which justified secession is perhaps less notable then the same omission by the conventions which ordained secession in the several States. South Carolina presented, as a special outrage, the enactment of personal-liberty bills in the free States, and yet, from the foundation of the Federal Government, she had probably never lost a slave in consequence of these enactments. In Georgia the attempt at justification reached the ludicrous when solemn charge was made that a bounty had been paid from the Federal Treasury to New-England fishermen. The tariff was complained of, the navigation laws were sneered at. But these were all public policies which had been in operation with Southern consent and largely with Southern support, throughout the existence of the Republic. When South Carolina attempted, somewhat after the illustrious model of the Declaration of Independence, to present justifying reasons for her course, the very authors of the document must have seen that it amounted only to a parody.

Finding no satisfactory exhibit of grievances, either in the speeches of senators or in the declarations of conventions, one naturally infers that the Confederate Government, when formally organized at Montgomery in February, must have given a full and lucid statement to the world of the reasons for this extraordinary movement. When our fathers were impelled to break their loyalty to the English king, and to establish an independent government, they declared in the very fore-front of the document which contained their reasons, that "when it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." They followed this assertion with an exhibit of causes which, in the judgment of the world, has been and ever will be, a complete justification of their revolutionary movement.

THOMAS JEFFERSON AND JEFFERSON DAVIS.

The Confederate Government saw fit to do nothing of the kind. Their Congress put forth no declaration or manifesto, and Jefferson Davis in his Inaugural as President utterly failed—did not even attempt—to enumerate the grounds of complaint upon which the destruction of the American Union was based. He said that "the declared compact of the Union from which we have withdrawn was to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. And when, in the judgment of the sovereign States now composing this confederacy, it has been perverted from the purposes for which it was ordained, and ceases to answer the ends for which it was established, a peaceful appeal to the ballot-box declared, that, so far as they were concerned, the government created by that compact should cease to exist. In this they merely assert the right which the Declaration of Independence of 1776 defined to be inalienable." But in what manner, at what time, by what measure, "justice, domestic tranquillity, common defense, the general welfare," had been destroyed by the government of the Union, Mr. Jefferson Davis did not deign to inform the world to whose opinion he appealed.

Mr. Jefferson, in draughting the Declaration of Independence which Davis quotes as his model, said "the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States." What would have been thought of Mr. Jefferson if he had stopped there and adduced no instance and given no proof of his serious indictment against George III.? But Mr. Jefferson and his fellow-patriots in that great Act proceeded to submit their proof to the judgment of a candid world. They recited twenty-eight distinct charges of oppression and tyranny, depriving them of rights to which they were entitled as subjects of the Crown under the British Constitution. From that hour to this, there has been no disproval of the truth of these charges or of the righteousness of the resistance to which our forefathers resorted. It would have been well for the dignity of the Southern Confederacy in history if one of its many able men had placed on record, in an authentic form, the grounds upon which, and the grievances for which, destruction of the Union could be justified.

In his message to the Confederate Congress, Mr. Davis apparently attempted to cure the defects of his Inaugural address, and to give a list of measures which he declared to have been hostile to Southern interests. But it is to be observed that not one of these measures had been completed. They were merely menaced or foreshadowed. As matter of fact, emphasized by Mr. Buchanan in his message, and known to no one better than to Mr. Davis, not a single measure adverse to the interests of slavery had been passed by the Congress of the United States from the foundation of the government. If the Missouri Compromise of 1820 be alleged as an exception to this sweeping assertion, it must be remembered that that compromise was a Southern and not a Northern measure, and was a triumph of the pro-slavery members of Congress over the anti-slavery members; and that its constitutionality was upheld by the unanimous voice of the Cabinet in which Mr. Crawford of Georgia and Mr. Calhoun of South Carolina were leading members.

On the other hand, the policy of the government had been steadily in favor of slavery; and the measures of Congress which would strengthen it were not only numerous, but momentous in character. They are familiar to every one who knows the simplest elements of our national history. The acquisition of Louisiana, the purchase of Florida, the Mexican war, were all great national movements which resulted in strengthening the slave power. Every demand which the South made for protection had been conceded. More stringent provisions for the return of fugitive slaves were asked, and a law was enacted trampling under foot the very spirit of liberty, and putting in peril the freedom of men who were citizens of Northern States. The Missouri Compromise, passed with the consent and support of the South, was repealed by Southern dictation the moment its operation was found to be hostile to the spread of slavery. The rights of slavery in the Territories required judicial confirmation, and the Supreme Court complied by rendering the famous decision in the case of Dred Scott. Against all these guaranties and concessions for the support of slavery, Mr. Davis could quote, not anti-slavery aggressions which had been made, but only those which might be made in the future.

SOUTHERN RESISTANCE TO LAW.

This position disclosed the real though not the avowed cause of the secession movement. Its authors were not afraid of an immediate invasion of the rights of the slave-holder in the States, but they were conscious that the growth of the country, the progress of civilization, and the expansion of our population, were all hostile to their continued supremacy as the governing element in the Republic. The South was the only section in which there was distinctively a governing class. The slave-holders ruled their States more positively than ever the aristocratic classes ruled England. Besides the distinction of free and slave, or black and white, there was another line of demarcation between white men that was as absolute as the division between patrician and plebeian. The nobles of Poland who dictated the policy of the kingdom were as numerous in proportion to the whole population as the rich class of slave-holders whose decrees governed the policy of their States. It was, in short, an oligarchy which by its combined power ruled the Republic. No President of any party had ever been elected who was opposed to its supremacy. The political revolution of 1860 had given to the Republic an anti-slavery President, and the Southern men refused to accept the result. They had been too long accustomed to power to surrender it to an adverse majority, however lawful or constitutional that majority might be. They had been trained to lead and not to follow. They were not disciplined to submission. They had been so long in command that they had become incapable of obedience. Unwillingness to submit to Constitutional authority was the controlling consideration which drove the Southern States to the desperate design of a revolution, peaceful they hoped it would be, but to a revolution even if it should be one of blood.