PORTRAITS.
| [DAVIE] | Frontispiece |
| [MACON] | facing p. 81 |
| [MURPHY] | facing p. 111 |
| [GASTON] | facing p. 150 |
| [BADGER] | facing p. 181 |
| [SWAIN] | facing p. 229 |
| [RUFFIN] | facing p. 284 |
| [BRAGG] | facing p. 306 |
| [GRAHAM] | facing p. 333 |
| [MOORE] | facing p. 378 |
| [PETTIGREW] | facing p. 413 |
| [PENDER] | facing p. 436 |
| [RAMSEUR] | facing p. 456 |
| [GRIMES] | facing p. 495 |
| [HILL] | facing p. 524 |
[PREFACE.]
The publication, in a permanent form, of the most valuable sketches and speeches which have been produced in our State will aid materially in laying the foundation for a distinctive literature. In the beginning, character only is essential; art is a development, and will assume its comely form in due season if it springs from virtue. The undeserving are the fearful and the unbelieving, and these are they who are morbidly anxious to graft borrowed ideals of literary culture upon the native stock.
The people are entitled to the sources of history (the knowledge of which, in this State, is confined to a very few), because from among the people must always arise the man who breaks the monopoly which sequesters the facts of public interest for private interpretation.
Failure in some writers to give the sources of information and of ideas, and to give credit or quote where these are already well expressed, has caused much confusion in the historical data of this State. This practice is fatal to any considerable literary reputation and an unwitting confession of incapacity.
The educational value of these sketches and speeches, and of such as may be published at a later period, is probably what will chiefly recommend this undertaking to the consideration of the public. A good course of home reading about worthy men close enough to the reader to stimulate his interest can hardly be overvalued, and it is the best substitute for the training of the schools as well as a powerful assistant in such training.
It will be remarked that some of the best sketches of our distinguished dead have been written to be spoken; but they are none the less effectual among North Carolinians, who have generally been hearers rather than readers: those, therefore, who have desired their attention have cultivated oratory. The style of the effective writer, however, is more condensed than that of the orator—freer from passion and local prejudice and fitter to paint for posterity pictures of the past.
To the ladies of the memorial associations of North Carolina, and to those who have generously responded to the honor of their calls, our people are indebted for the collection, in the form of addresses, and the consequent preservation of some valuable historical matter. This is especially true of the Ladies' Memorial Association of Raleigh, as the sketches of Grimes, Ramseur, Pender, and Hill, here published, will attest.
No less deserving are those who of their own accord, or at the request of others, have prepared sketches of such as have done deeds worthy of remembrance. Born of some patriotic North Carolina woman, a man will arise who will use the stubborn facts so preserved to bruise the serpent-head of false history.
It will not be understood, of course, that an attempt is made in this volume to publish the lives of all distinguished North Carolinians—there are others, perhaps, as worthy as any which here appear; and should this book be approved and sufficiently sustained by reading people, another volume may be added at some future time.
My main object will be attained if interest in those who have done something worthy of remembrance is stimulated.
Much of what is called biography and history is a tiresome chronicle of the successive advancement in office of some who have advanced little in better things. Service, not office, is the inspired test of greatness. He who would be greatest among you must be the servant of all.
In this materialistic age it is nothing strange that some North Carolina writers have praised such as have done well mainly for themselves; and while I do not remember that, in the collection here published, place and station are set forth as an end rather than a means to good, yet here, as elsewhere and everywhere, the thoughtful reader will be on his guard against any squint in favor of false ideals.
As Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses by the art of counterfeiting the symbols of Heaven's appointment, a devilish power, so this age suffers much from spurious greatness, persistently advertised, as bearing the image and superscription of virtue.
Human limitation is such that a character is sometimes worthy of study which only effectually illustrates one great virtue growing among defects; and human nature, unless morbid, instead of being contaminated, will be encouraged that weakness can deserve fame. The defects which criticism may discover in any character here portrayed may be used, under intelligent guidance, to gain the sympathy of the young rather than mar their ideals—which must be composite pictures of the virtues of many, or else imaged on the soul by contemplation of the life and work of One who was the Servant of all.
W. J. P.
[INTRODUCTION.]
This book is written of North Carolinians by North Carolinians. Many of the writers are no less distinguished than their subjects, and these together give it local color, distinctiveness, and personality which ought to make it interesting to ourselves and valuable to those who seek to know us through intrinsic evidence.
Wherever practicable the subjects are allowed also to speak for themselves. "Biography is the only true history," says Carlyle. The history of North Carolina has not yet been written, and never will be, until each pioneer investigator confines himself to a short period—say a decade. Then, eventually, perhaps, some genius for generalization and condensation will arise and in a single life-time combine the whole into one work. Meanwhile this generation may bind up and preserve the material.
There is not sufficient political homogeneity among North Carolinians at this time to enable us to endorse with unanimity the true theory of our history for the past seventy years—especially in our relation to the General Government.
This generation, too, is inundated with cheap and often insidiously false sectional literature from the North.
Such literature is gradually glozing over and reconciling our people to the sinister changes which are being subtly wrought in American institutions.
The innovators can now persuade the misinformed and careless that just criticism of themselves and their cupidity, and just defense of the principles and motives which actuated us in the late war between the States, is rank treason against the United States Government.
To publish what our sages and warriors have taught and fought for rises, therefore, to the dignity of a duty, as tending to correct erroneous impressions common among us and still more common among others, and as giving a particular account rendered by many witnesses, of men and times to be remembered by posterity, rightly or wrongly, forever.
This introduction is intended to present also a bird's-eye view of the field in which were cast the lives and labors of the subjects of this book. Incidentally, too, I indicate a theory of Southern history which, if not obvious enough upon its bare statement, or from the facts here briefly set forth, will one day be demonstrated to the satisfaction of the seeker after truth. It involves an analysis of the character, influence, and interests of the North acting on the South.
The inoculation of New England semi-foreign views of the Federal Constitution (for half New England is foreign born) goes on apace. With conceit, born of provincialism, these people have magnified their Mayflower scrap of local history into national importance; they have dinned it with such Codrus-like persistency into our ears that the average North Carolinian knows their story better than he does that of the settlement of Roanoke Island. We read their books, papers, and periodicals, though many reflect upon us, and nearly all are unfair to us; but they do not read ours. It would be a surprise to the publishers if one hundred copies of this book should be sold north of Mason and Dixon's line—a line which still exists against our literature, our ideas, and our construction of fundamental law. Most probably not one of their monthlies would publish what I am now writing.
The most un-American section of the Union is New England. Bounded on the west and north by British Canada and on the east by the Atlantic ocean (which may be said now to belong also to Great Britain), it is the hotbed of British ideas of government and society; and, in the event of a third war with the "mother country" (as it still affectionately terms the nation whose government has always been the enemy of our liberty, growth, and progress) it may be a hotbed for a hundred times more traitors than it had in the War of 1812. Like our great cities, this section is a danger-spot in the Union.
Many of its political and social leaders vie with those of New York in rushing over to England and Germany to get the foreign construction of our Federal Constitution, and foreign consent to proposed financial legislation by Congress, and foreign sanction of the orders, social preferences and privileges, and marriages of our "corner"-made aristocracy.
These leaders, too, are less and less the owners of the wealth they handle, and are becoming more and more the mere agents of English capitalists and the dupes and tools of foreign marriage-brokers. About three thousand million dollars of British capital is said to be invested in a section of the Union. This copartnership of foreign and domestic wealth gives to Great Britain a voice in our government—a representation in Congress from whole groups of States. How many Northeastern Senators and Representatives have differed in late years from British views of what our financial policy should be? Foreign and domestic monopolists and bondholders have the same interests, the same social sympathies and affinities, a common cause, the same victims and enemies, the same want of confidence in popular government; therefore, what doth hinder them from forming a treasonable alliance, offensive and defensive, against the people? They have already formed it: the money-kings in all nations, in control of all kings and governments, have an understanding with one another, and, by concentration, they can easily crush any movement, for amelioration, among the people of any one nation at a time. There is a brotherhood, too, of incorporated rate, fare, and tax collectors as well as of bondholders. United they stand.
The Hamiltonian theory of government has been in adoption, and the Hamiltonian school of politicians has been in control of the Union for nearly forty years, and they may now be judged by their fruits: they have given us a more corruptly administered government than that our fathers rebelled against in 1775; and they are fulfilling with startling fidelity and rapidity all the prophecies which Henry, Jefferson, Macon, and Randolph made about them.
It is a knowledge of these things which has organized a great rebellion in the United States, especially among those who live outside the great cities and homes of monopoly—a rebellion which has begun to control political parties, and which, in the last general election, mustered nearly six and a half million voters—voters who were hurled, for once, against the great international brotherhood of plunderers by legislation. Some, however, who were in it are not of it; these, when they comprehend it, will become offended and walk no more with it. A new declaration of independence is being formulated to voice its spirit, and it awaits its Jefferson, if, indeed, as some believe, he has not already come in the person of Bryan, a Western man descended from Southern ancestors, and seeming to have at heart the interests of all sections.
It is a significant fact, in this connection, that from two-thirds to three-fourths of the foreign voters in the Union marched under the allied leadership of foreign and domestic monopoly and ill-gotten wealth. Two-thirds, at least, of the native-born white voters were in this great rebellion, and the life and soul of it. The negro voted almost solidly with the foreigners and with his new masters, for he will have masters of some kind yet for many years. I note the status and attitude of the negro seriously (and let him that readeth understand), for if this ever-deepening conflict comes to bullets, those who now tell the old Federal soldier to vote as he shot, will tell the negro to shoot as he voted; and he will so shoot. The negro vote, under the easy control of a sectional faction of political manipulators, is as dangerous a menace to our institutions as our foreign population indoctrinated with European medievalism—kingcraft and priestcraft.
Much, if not most, of our foreign immigration now comes from cities, and pours itself into the already corrupted life of our own great cities. ("Syrian Orontes pours its filth into The Tiber."—Juv.) It does not buy land, it sells votes; it specifically performs the political contracts of its priests; it buys and sells political jobs; it officers ward politics. It is one of the arms—and the negro is the other—by which greed and monopoly, the twin devils which dance attendance upon national decline, are consolidating our government.
No great city has ever been fit for self-government and civil liberty. From Babylon to Nineveh, from Nineveh to Carthage, from Carthage to Rome, from Rome to Venice, and from Venice to New York and Chicago (neither of which can elect an honest board of aldermen), it is the same old story of avarice which finally overreaches itself. This is the sin which, when finished, brings forth the death of nations.
In vain did Virgil and Horace sing their deathless melodies of country homes to a people whose blood was already poisoned with the lust for gain and fevered with the excitement of artificial life.
The South, the rural South, in spite of many shortcomings, is the great conservator of our institutions. It is the distinctively American section of the Union, jealous of all foreign domination or interference, and stands firm in the patriot's faith that we as a nation can work out our own salvation without the aid of European capital or distinctively European ideas of finance, government or society.
Though contaminated by modern machine politics, and much hampered by the race question, the South still clings to local self-government and to the dignity of Statehood as the only sure foundation for civil liberty and perpetual Union. Long taxed unfairly, by the subtle operation of the Federal tariff and internal revenue and currency laws, out of money which has long enriched another section, in the shape of pensions, internal improvements, and "protection to home industries," the South is still the section most loyal to constitutional government, having infinitely more genuine affection for it than the pension-pampered patriotism of such as make merchandise out of "saving the Union."
These considerations are sufficient to inspire in us an effort to write our own histories, expound to our children the principles of fundamental law, and teach them the safeguards of our institutions. The collection and arrangement of the following sketches, with a few crude suggestions of my own, is what I have contributed towards this end.
Except in so far as "history is philosophy teaching by examples," I take little pleasure in it, and should be at no pains to preserve or popularize it. But seeing, as I think I see, the drift and tendencies of these times, and believing that a correct and widespread understanding of the lessons of recent events is the first postulate in determining the remedy for existing and prospective evils, I take an abiding interest in every earnest endeavor to marshal the facts and discover the theories which will explain them—for facts without theories are dead. The field of investigation is white unto harvest, but the laborers for love are few—the hirelings are many.
In order to illustrate the necessity of our reading and writing our own histories, I will undertake to show the main cause of the war between the States, indicating as I go along some of the errors called history, which are circulated and taught to the prejudice of the South.
Northern historians make the negro and the interest of their people in his welfare the underlying cause of the agitation which resulted in the war between the States. Some of them would have us believe that the Federal soldiers, a generation ago, fired with the love of liberty and humanity, came South on a great missionary tour to strike the fetters from the limbs of four million slaves. About fifty per cent. of these missionaries were foreigners, or foreign born, having but crude ideas of the nature of our government; many thousands of them could not even speak our language; some were Hessians, imported from foreign tyrannies expressly for the purpose of war. Many tens of thousands came for money, and hundreds of thousands were compelled to come by law. Not ten per cent. came to free the negro. Those acquainted with the esteem in which he is held at the North have never been deceived by this missionary theory of his emancipation. Listen to the words of De Tocqueville, written about 1835. This Frenchman certainly cannot be accused of having been biased against the Northern States. He says: "Whosoever has inhabited the United States must have perceived, that in those parts of the Union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in nowise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known. * * * *
"The electoral franchise has been conferred upon the negroes in almost all the States in which slavery has been abolished; but, if they come forward to vote, their lives are in danger. If oppressed, they may bring an action at law, but they will find none but whites amongst their judges; and, although they may legally serve as jurors, prejudice repulses them from that office. The same schools do not receive the child of the black and of the European. In the theatres gold cannot procure a seat for the servile race beside their former masters; in the hospitals they lie apart; and, although they are allowed to invoke the same Divinity as the whites, it must be at a different altar and in their own churches, with their own clergy. The gates of Heaven are not closed against these unhappy beings; but their inferiority is continued to the very confines of the other world; when the negro is defunct his bones are cast aside, and the distinction of condition prevails even in the equality of death. The negro is free, but he can share neither the rights, nor the pleasures, nor the labor, nor the afflictions, nor the tomb of him whose equal he has been declared to be; and he cannot meet him upon fair terms in life or in death."—Democracy in America, page 339.
The negro's freedom was accidental and merely incidental to the main purpose of the war. When the alternative was secession or war, the sentiment of the most rabid abolitionists was voiced by Horace Greeley, who was willing that the "erring sisters depart in peace." Many abolitionists were sincere, though fanatical, and they had too often invoked the doctrine of secession, for the North, to consistently object when the South invoked it. Abraham Lincoln (a shrewd, practical Western countryman, put into his high office to hold the agricultural West against the agricultural South) put the war exclusively upon the ground of saving the Union. He would save the Union, he said, whether it enslaved the negro or freed him. In his inaugural address, March, 1861, he said: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." Eight days before, Sumner, the abolition leader, had said in Congress: "I take this occasion to declare most explicitly that I do not think Congress has any right to interfere with slavery in a State." Neither Lincoln nor Sumner, if they are to be credited with any sincerity, had stumbled upon the policy of freeing the negro; and, if they had, it would have been very impolitic to have then disclosed it, for all the border States would then have joined the South.
The negro was freed as a means to an end. The emancipation proclamation was a "war measure," and, as such, a master-stroke, for it took two hundred and fifty thousand laborers out of the South and put muskets into the hands of nearly two hundred thousand colored troops. This was the difference between success and failure, and was the turning point in the war, as was admitted by Lincoln in his message to Congress, in which he said: * * * * "and for a long time it had been hoped that the rebellion could be suppressed without resorting to it [the policy of emancipation] as a military measure." The negro incidentally caused the defeat of the South; and he was also incidentally a cause of the war, but not the causing cause—that lies deeper, and must be rightly understood at the peril of the nation.
The war was about taxation—the usual cause of revolution. A century ago it was taxation without representation; a generation ago it was unequal, discriminating, sectional, and class taxation. Out of this still grows the political strife whose quadrennial flood rises higher and higher at each election: income taxes successfully resisted by the rich; rate, fare, and tariff taxes unsuccessfully resisted by the poor—these are the fruitful causes of war—fought with ballots first, and finally, if no remedy can be found, with bullets.
The truth must be told even if it diminishes the glory of those who "saved the Union"—and made money by it. The blood of the last generation was not shed in vain, if we, with the advantages we enjoy, learn and teach the lessons which all posterity will demand of us—both for the sake of those who perished and of those who may perish if we suffer them to believe a lie. Forewarned is forearmed.
Under our Federal revenue laws, those who have produced the export crops (in quantities sufficient to invite the exploits of political manufacturing and trade combinations) have long paid far more than their share of the expenses of government. They were not allowed to buy in the open market, where they sold their crops, but in the restricted "home market," at prices not fixed by open competition. But the said combinations bought these crops in a free market and sold their own products in a protected market. So they got more benefit than the government: first, in being relieved from Federal taxes, which the producers of the export crops paid; second, in incidental, then in avowed, protection; third, in the system of internal improvements which they were obliged to invent to dispose of the surplus revenues raised as an incident to giving them "protection"; and these "improvements" usually improved one section and impoverished the other.
So, early in the game, we find one class, the political combinations of manufacturers, growing rich, and another class, the ill-combined agriculturalists, growing correspondingly poor. Prior to 1860, even more than now, relatively, cotton was the great export crop of America, and was also the principal money crop of a section; so the tax suffered on account of it was sectional. Being also manufactured in a section, the benefits enjoyed on account of it were sectional. So we have the sections, as well as the classes, antagonistic, and made so by the operation of a Federal revenue law—one section growing richer and the other growing correspondingly poorer in the sight of all men.
Political parties aligned according to "geographical discriminations" (against which Washington warned but did not provide), arose and cursed each other, from 1816—the date of the first distinctively protective tariff (which, as increased in 1828 and 1830, provoked South Carolina's first acts of secession)—to 1861, the date of the Morrill tariff, with sixty per cent. protection in it, which, passed March 2d, and flaunted in the face of the seven already seceded States, rendered reconciliation impossible. The Confederate Constitution declaring in its very first article against even incidental protection, conveyed no hint to the wilfully blind revenue-hunters that the most oppressed of the agricultural States had formed their combination to resist the plunder of Federal tariff, as well as other sectional aggressions.
Lincoln's policy of reenforcing Federal forts in the South (the immediate cause of the war) was bottomed on a purpose to collect this odious tax (the tariff of 1861), a policy which Alexander H. Stephens says was not determined upon until the "seven war Governors" (from the seven most protected States) offered to furnish the troops requisite to subdue the States then seceded. The border States had decided for the Union before Lincoln's acts of aggression; and he, therefore, though erroneously, supposed that they all would either aid him or remain neutral until he could "strengthen the Government" by the conquest of the cotton States.
By means of the tariff the cotton crop had been made the scapegoat upon which, in relief of wealth and monopoly, was piled the huge iniquity of Federal taxes; but more than that, and worse than that, the tariff was the engine by which the political combination of spinners and shippers forced down the price of that crop.
As far back as 1791, Hamilton and those in charge of the revenue department of the General Government (a certain school of politicians has always had a Judas-like fondness for carrying the bag), finding the express powers under the Constitution too weak for the purposes of exploit, began to lay the foundation for a new government by implied powers under court construction; by means of which they and "their successors in office" have slowly but steadily amended the Constitution, consolidated our Federation, and undermined the rights of the States. While they were experimenting to discover which States it was most advantageous to form into a copartnership with the General Government, they invented an unequal and discriminating tax on carriages, which fell heaviest on New Jersey, where they were principally manufactured. Seeing the burden of half a dozen States fall on one, North Carolina and some others denounced it as infamous and unconstitutional.
After a few more such experiments, in which it was learned effectually that the purely agricultural States could not be seduced into taking advantage of their sisters, the manipulators of the Treasury induced the General Government to coquet with the States which were more or less under the control of the political combinations of merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and speculators; and with more success.
A copartnership was perfected between the General Government and the protected States by the tariff of 1816; and the mutual considerations passed were first named "incidental benefit" for one party to the contract and "liberal construction" of implied powers for the other. Angry protests and sectional incriminations and recriminations followed, and awakened Jefferson, like "an alarm-bell at night," out of the sleep of old age. The "peculiar institution" of one section gave the other a terrible advantage, which it was quick to see and to seize; and it was used remorselessly. Greed, suddenly joining philanthropy, religion, and fanaticism, organized and led a crusade against African slavery. The agitation about the negro, as a counter-irritant to distract attention from the injustice of Federal revenue laws, was more than a success: for the shallow politicians of both sections forgot the real issue; but the beneficiaries never lost sight of it. I will use a homely illustration: A and B are doing business on opposite sides of a street; B begins to undersell A; A becomes angry, but cannot afford to tell his customers the cause; he hears that B once cheated a negro out of a mule; he makes that charge; they fight; the court record of the trial shows that the fight was about the negro and the mule; but there is not a business man on the street who does not know that the record speaks a lie.
The first speech in this book opens with old Nat. Macon lecturing (in 1820) a Representative from Pennsylvania, the most protected State, for expressing a desire to see the Union dissolved rather than that slavery should be extended beyond the Mississippi.
Slavery, itself, while for several generations usually beneficial to the negro, was, doubtless, in many respects injurious to his masters. It made us provincial, of necessity, sensitive and intolerant of criticism, easily susceptible of misrepresentation, and cut us off from the sympathy of some who else had been our friends. It cramped thought, invention, progress, poetry, and literature. It enabled monopoly to divide and conquer the tillers of the soil. It tended to create caste and it degraded manual labor—as necessary as death after sin and decreed in the same Divine judgment. Skilled manual labor gutted the Confederacy by driving war-ships up its rivers: and the felt want of it, in late years, has established a great industrial institution at our State capital, the mother of many others, and destined to revolutionize education among us.
"Protection" and discrimination in the operation of the Federal revenue laws, though still potent for evil, will probably never again be the principal, causing cause of another revolution unto blood; because from three to ten per cent. of our Southern population will henceforward be directly benefited by such laws, and their interests will soften the sectional aspect of the tax. But the unequal and sectional operation of the currency laws, alienating the West as well as the South; the heaping up of nearly all the wealth of the country into one section, and most of it in a few great cities of that section; the plunder of agriculture by legislation and by the unchecked conspiracy of capital; the monopoly of the carrying trade by the wealth of the cities; the growing distrust between the urban and rural populations; the sullen and fickle temper of our foreign elements—the nucleus, perhaps, of a future Prætorian Guard; the mutterings against the now "vested right" of protected labor to be fed or assisted by the government—and capital hides behind such labor; machine politics and party spirit; the prostitution of the electoral system by the national nominating mob system, which treats sovereign States as the provinces of a party; the fine Italian hand of a certain religio-political corporation in getting offices and holding the balance of power between the factions contending for public plunder; the growing intimacy of sectional wealth with foreign governments and aristocracies—these are the dangers which together threaten a perpetual Union of the States and the liberties of the people.
Before 1860, Macaulay prophesied that our government would go to pieces over a presidential election. In the face of these dangers, it is well for us to consider and carefully teach our children the causes which have worked our injury in the past, in order that we and they may be the better able to recognize and grapple them when they reappear, under changed names or in the shape of new laws.
But a tariff tax as a causing cause of the late war shall not rest upon the foregoing testimony alone. "Let the South go," exclaimed Abraham Lincoln, in 1861, "where then shall we get our revenues?" This man was noted for hitting the bull's-eye, and Divine Inspiration had forestalled him with the prophecy that the love of revenue was the root of all evil.
Thomas H. Benton is a witness who will be heard. In a speech in the Senate, in 1828, he shows how the tariff (which, except for about twelve years, had been mainly levied for revenue) had plundered the South. He said: "I feel for the sad changes which have taken place in the South during the last fifty years. Before the Revolution it was the seat of wealth as well as hospitality. Money, and all it commanded, abounded there. But how is it now? All this is reversed. Wealth has fled from the South, and settled in the regions north of the Potomac; and this in the face of the fact that the South, in four staples alone, has exported produce since the Revolution to the value of eight hundred millions of dollars; and the North has exported comparatively nothing. Such an export would indicate unparalleled wealth, but what is the fact? In the place of wealth a universal pressure for money is felt—not enough for current expenses—the price of property all down—the country drooping and languishing—towns and cities decaying—and the frugal habits of the people pushed to the verge of universal self-denial for the preservation of their family estates. Such a result is a strange and wonderful phenomenon. It calls upon statesmen to inquire into the cause.
"Under Federal legislation the exports of the South have been the basis of the Federal revenue. * * * * Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia may be said to defray three-fourths of the annual expense of supporting the Federal Government; and of this great sum, annually furnished by them, nothing, or next to nothing, is returned to them in the shape of government expenditure. That expenditure flows in an opposite direction—it flows northwardly, in one uniform, uninterrupted, and perennial stream. This is the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up in the North. Federal legislation does all this. It does it by the simple process of eternally taking from the South and returning nothing to it. If it returned to the South the whole or even a good part of what it exacted the four States south of the Potomac might stand the action of the system, but the South must be exhausted of its money and its property by a course of legislation which is forever taking away and never returning anything. Every new tariff increases the force of this action. No tariff has ever yet included Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, except to increase the burdens imposed by them."—Benton's Thirty Years View, Vol. I, p. 98, quoted by Raphael Semmes in his Memoirs of Service Afloat.
In 1860 we find the South still furnished many millions more than two-thirds of the export crops, besides fifty millions to the North. In Colonial and Revolutionary times the South was the richest section, and so acknowledged to be in the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
No wonder that the South always insisted that the Federation was a limited partnership; and no wonder that her rapacious partners insisted on a government of unlimited powers, when they employed such powers for unequal taxation, sectional expenditures, and unlimited "protection." Those who have clamored most persistently for a "strong government" have never scrupled to sap its strength for purposes of private emolument. Those who have panted most for a consolidated republic have now fully disclosed their purpose of sequestering its assets. They have not consolidated the patriotism of the republic, but they have drawn a line of division from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes—a division of interests, division of sentiment, division of population, division of history, and a division of churches. Who can measure the hypocrisy of those writers and politicians who teach the people that the way to make the government strong is to give to one section "implied powers" to plunder the other? Having gotten their wealth by the craft of booming nationalism and centralization, they now perceive that in order to keep it they must hold themselves ready to "hedge" with the doctrine of States' rights and reserved powers. So, while college professors are confusing the mind of youth about "the two opposing theories of government," the facts of opposing interests are jarring the foundations of society and wrenching the fetters which bind the States in a "more perfect Union."
Robert Toombs said, in a speech before the Georgia Legislature, in November, 1860: "The instant the Government was organized, at the very first Congress, the Northern States evinced a general desire and purpose to use it for their own benefit, and to pervert its powers for sectional advantage, and they have steadily pursued that policy to this day. They demanded a monopoly of the business of ship-building, and got a prohibition against the sale of foreign ships to citizens of the United States, which exists to this day. They demanded a monopoly of the coasting trade, in order to get higher freights than they could get in open competition with the carriers of the world. Congress gave it to them, and they yet hold this monopoly. * * * These same shipping interests, with cormorant rapacity, have steadily burrowed their way through your legislative halls, until they have saddled the agricultural classes with a large portion of the legitimate expenses of their own business. We pay a million dollars per annum for the lights which guide them in and out of your ports. We have built, and keep up, at the cost of at least another million a year, hospitals for their sick and disabled seamen, when they wear them out and cast them ashore. We pay half a million to support and bring home those they cast away in foreign lands. They demand, and have received, millions of the public money to increase the safety of harbors and lessen the danger of navigating our rivers; all of which expenses legitimately fall upon their business, and should come out of their own pockets, instead of a common treasury.
"Even the fishermen of Massachusetts and New England demand and receive from the public treasury about half a million dollars per annum as a pure bounty in their business of catching codfish. The North, at the very first Congress, demanded and received bounties, under the name of protection, for every trade, craft and calling which its people pursue, and there is not an artisan in brass, or iron, or wood, or weaver or spinner in wool or cotton, or calico-maker, or iron-master, or a coal-owner, in all the Northern or Middle States, who has not received what he calls the protection of his government on his industry to the extent of from fifteen to two hundred per cent. from the year 1791 to this day. They will not strike a blow or stretch a muscle without bounties from the government. No wonder they cry aloud for the glorious Union. They have the same reason for praising it that the craftsmen of Ephesus had for shouting 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians!' By it they get their wealth, by it they levy tribute on honest labor."
The future historian will devote a long chapter to show how the slavery agitation "ebbed and flowed with the sinking and the swelling" in the voices of protest from the much-plundered South; voices which were keyed to the pitch of secession and revolution against the tariff of 1828, and which again, in 1861, shouted in warlike defiance until they were hushed in blood. That chapter will point also in shame to the dark record which shows that on March 2, 1861, after seven States had seceded and their Representatives in Congress had withdrawn, and while four other States were preparing to secede if found necessary, greed thrust its "lewd snout" into the purity of that chastening hour when many thousand patriots still prayed that the awful catastrophe might be averted, and got by force a tariff with sixty per cent. protection in it! Hear the effect of that measure from the lips of a North Carolinian, General Clingman, who was lingering in the Senate in the hope of reconciliation: "But, Mr. President, there is another difficulty in the way, and we might as well talk of this frankly. I know it is present to the minds of Senators on the other side, and they must see the difficulty. The honorable Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Simmons) particularly, who engineered the tariff bill through, of course sees the difficulty. * * * The revenues under that tariff bill cannot be collected anywhere, I think, if the declarations which gentlemen make are to be acted out. If they are to hold that all the Confederate States are in the Union, and that you are to have no custom-houses, on the line between them and the other States, what will be the result? Goods will come into New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, and other places; they will come in paying a low tariff, and merchants from Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Ohio, if they choose to go down there and buy goods, will take them home and pay no duties. No man from the Northwest will go to New York and pay a duty of fifty per cent. on goods that he can get at a fifteen or twenty per cent. duty at New Orleans. That will be the course of trade, of course. Senators must see that you cannot have two tariffs, one high and one low, in operation in the country at once, with any effect produced by the high tariff. If you go to a man and say: 'You may pay me a high price or a low price for an article,' you will never get the high price. When, therefore, you attempt to carry out the new tariff, which contains rates, I think, of fifty per cent., and some of one hundred per cent., and some even above one hundred per cent., you cannot collect those rates at Boston and New York and Philadelphia, while the men who want to consume the goods can get them by paying a duty of one-third as much. That is impossible. I presume the Senator from Rhode Island, and those who acted with him, did not intend the tariff, which has lately passed, to be a mere farce, a mere thing on paper, not to be acted out. Of course they mean to get duties under it some way or other. If you do not mean to have your line of custom-houses along the border of the Confederate States you must expect to stop importations there."—Speeches and Writings of T. L. Clingman, pp. 61, 62: extract from speech delivered in United States Senate, March 19, 1861.
Yes, and it was the armed attempt to "stop importations there" that brought on the war!
Why it was that the bombardment, on April 12, 1861, of a Federal fort about to be reenforced "fired the Northern heart" more than the bombardment, on January 9, 1861, of a Federal war-ship attempting to carry reinforcements to that fort, the Northern historians, like the Pharisees, "cannot tell." And they never tell that between the two bombardments sectional monopoly had brooded, and on March 2d hatched a cockatrice egg of sectional advantage; that its beneficiaries had had opportunity to touch noses with the "seven war Governors" and that the inspiration of such a touch accounts for the zeal with which they urged the President to war, when twenty-one States were trying to effect peace; that between the 15th and the 28th of March these Governors had a secret conference with the President in Washington, in which they pledged their States to support him in "collecting the revenues of the Government"; and that, thus assured, he had, to the astonishment of the South and most of his own constituents, suddenly sent the invading expedition to reenforce Fort Sumter! Did this same influence persuade Lincoln to refuse to allow the Supreme Court or even Congress to pass upon the much-mooted constitutional question of the right to secede? Of course it was familiar learning to him that all the States, especially the Northeastern, had from time to time asserted, acted on, or acquiesced in this right. Did the tariff Governors induce this man, reputed to be tender-hearted, to decide, on his own responsibility, a question of law which forced the issue of blood at a cost of a million lives, and a sinister change in the character and conduct of our government? Did they seduce him into fitting out an armament to collect the revenues at Charleston, and, at the same time, leave open for construction and equivocation his doubtful and inconsistent expressions about enforcing the Federal laws and Supreme Court decisions giving protection to Southern property in slaves? Why was it that, in this awful crisis, he refused to call Congress together until he had precipitated war by his invasion and his call for volunteers, unless it was because his extra-constitutional advisers feared to trust a body which passed a conciliatory resolution even after battles had been fought and blood had been shed? Why was it that by the very terms of his war proclamation he put off the assembling of Congress for two months and nineteen days after he had declared war, unless it was because he was willing to forestall its action, and preferred to rely on the conspiring war Governors and their protected constituents to sustain him, rather than on his constitutional advisers and the Representatives of the people? Monopoly could not then trust the Supreme Court, for the Dred Scott decision showed that it might again adhere to the original view of the Constitution; and its best members were zealous to effect compromise and peace. That Lincoln and his Cabinet were against the policy of coercion, until somebody influenced them, has been confessed by at least one of its members.
A valuable side-light on the mainsprings of Lincoln's policy is furnished by Dr. R. L. Dabney. He says that while Virginia, through her convention, sitting in April, 1861, was making a last effort to save the Union, Seward sent a confidential messenger, Allen B. McGruder, to Richmond, to urge that a representative be sent to Washington in all haste. McGruder stated that he was authorized by Seward to say that Fort Sumter would be evacuated on Friday of the ensuing week and that the Pawnee would sail on the following Monday for Charleston to effect the evacuation. Colonel Baldwin, an original Union man, was fixed upon as the best representative of the peace sentiment. "He and McGruder," continues Dabney, "set out on the night following and arrived in Washington early the next morning. Immediately after breakfast they drove to Mr. Seward's, when the latter took charge of Mr. Baldwin, and the two went directly to the White House, where they arrived about nine o'clock. They found Mr. Lincoln engaged, but, upon Mr. Seward's whispering in his ear, he excused himself and conducted Mr. Seward and Colonel Baldwin into a sleeping apartment and locked the door.
"After the usual formalities, Colonel Baldwin presented his credentials. After Lincoln had read the credentials, Colonel Baldwin proceeded to state to him what was the opinion of the great body of Virginians, both in the convention and out of it. This opinion was as follows, to wit: 'That although opposed to a Presidential election upon a sectional free-soil platform, which they deplored as most dangerous and unwise, Virginia did not approve of making that, evil as it was, a casus belli, or a ground for disrupting the Union. That much as Virginia disapproved of it, if Mr. Lincoln would only adhere faithfully to the Constitution and the laws, she would support him just as faithfully as though he was the man of her choice, and would wield her whole moral force to keep the border States in the Union, and to bring back the seven seceded States; but that, while much difference of opinion existed on the question whether the right of secession was a constitutional one, all Virginians were unanimous in believing that no right existed in the Federal Government to coerce a state by force of arms.' To this Mr. Lincoln replied: 'You are too late, sir; too late!' Colonel Baldwin understood this as a clear intimation that the policy of coercion had just been determined upon, and, as he discovered, "within four days." Impressed with the deep solemnity of the occasion, Colonel Baldwin made a final appeal, asking, among other things, that all questions at issue should be left for adjudication by the constitutional tribunals. Lincoln asked a few questions, the last of which was, "What will become of my tariff?" He put this question with such force of emphasis as clearly indicated that this consideration should decide the whole matter.
The peace ambassadors sent to Washington by the Virginia convention immediately upon Baldwin's return found the same difficulty. "They saw Mr. Lincoln. The tariff was still the burden of his complaint. They left the next day; and the same train which carried them to Virginia carried Lincoln's proclamation also for the seventy-five thousand troops." See North Carolina in the War Between the States, by Sloan, pp. 27, 28, 29, 30, quoting R. L. Dabney, in the Southern Historical Papers.
There was a subtle influence at Washington strong enough to veer Lincoln round from Seward, whose constituents dreaded war, to Thad. Stevens, who represented in Congress the Pennsylvania iron interest, and, in his character and person, the worst element of the worst politics that America ever saw.
Lincoln had no warrant in the Constitution for calling out the militia against the seceded States. "The Congress shall have power to declare war" (Article I, section 8, clause 11); and "The Congress shall have power to raise and support armies" (Article I, section 8, clause 12); and if, in violation of standard definition and contrary to the fact, it be said that what he inaugurated was not war, but was only an armed effort to put down insurrection, the Constitution, Article I, section 8, clause 15, replies: "The Congress shall have power to provide for the calling out of the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions." So the only warrant the President had was an old act of Congress, passed February 28, 1795, shortly after the Whiskey Insurrection. This act provided: "That whenever the laws of the United States shall be opposed in any State by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or the power vested in the marshals by this act, it shall be lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia of such State or of any other State or States, as may be necessary to suppress such combinations and cause the laws to be duly executed." No pretense of authority was given when a State or a combination of States opposed the United States. His construction forestalled Congress and robbed it of its exclusive right and power to "declare war," and made him the sole arbiter to dictate the nation's weal or woe.
As a matter of fact, this law, thus misconstrued, was obsolete, and so marked in the reprint of the United States Statutes at Large, in 1845, authorized by Congress. Lincoln, then, "by and with the advice and consent" of interested persons, utterly ignoring the two coordinate branches of government, unearthed for the purpose of inaugurating a most frightful war an old statute, unused from the time of its passage, and standing on the authoritative Revised Statutes marked "obsolete" for sixteen years—so received by the lawyers, and unchallenged by Congress or any member thereof.
It is no wonder that Congress, when it did assemble, in July, 1861, and found war a fact accomplished and armies already threatening Washington, should have made haste to validate the President's high-handed measures and strengthen his precarious position by an act of which section three is as follows: "That all the acts, proclamations, and orders, of the President of the United States, after the 4th of March, 1861, respecting the army and navy of the United States, and the calling out, or relating to the militia or volunteers from the States, are hereby approved and in all respects legalized and made valid to the same intent and with the same effect as if they had been issued and done under previous express authority and direction of the Congress of the United States." The marginal note of the printed laws points this act specially to the proclamation of April 15, 1861, calling out the militia.
In suppressing the Whiskey Insurrection Washington acted under the "previous express authority of Congress," then lately given, "cautiously in his delicate duty," while Hamilton "was pressing for the collection of the revenue," says history. The act under which the militia was then called out, passed in 1792, required a Federal judge to certify the fact of the insurrection, and Washington took care to arm himself with the certificate of a Supreme Court Justice. The act under which Lincoln proceeded, an epitome of the former, shows on its face that it was also, when in force, in aid exclusively of court proceedings, and operative only when a Federal judge should call upon the President to assist the United States Marshals, who were purely court officers. Any other construction gives the President "the power to suppress insurrections," and the "power to declare war"; and, when war is declared the Constitution places him in command of the army and militia: so nothing would be left for Congress but to vote supplies and validate his acts, as it did Lincoln's usurpations!
Though the militia had often been needed, and sometimes called out for troubles, domestic and foreign, no President of the United States, until Lincoln, had ever issued such a call unless expressly authorized by Congress, in special acts of limited duration, which have usually specified the number of troops wanted and the term of service required. It is no wonder then that an act, treated as a dead letter since the suppression of the Whiskey Insurrection, should have been marked "obsolete" by the government publisher, with the sanction of Congress.
Unless Madison's refusal to recommend a policy of coercion against the New England States, successfully resisting the drafts for the defense of the nation in the War of 1812, be regarded as a precedent, Lincoln had but one, directly in point, and that was furnished by President Jackson in the case of South Carolina's nullification of Federal law in 1832. Jackson's zeal for the Union could not be doubted; and, in spite of his military training and arbitrary temper, he found a remedy which saved the Union without bloodshed.
On December 10, 1832, after South Carolina had nullified the tariff act, proceeded to provide a separate government, notified the President, and begun to arm and organize its militia for defense, Jackson issued a proclamation in which he besought, and threatened, and promised. Failing by such means to induce the tariff-plundered planters of the plucky little State to recede from their position, on the assembling of Congress he recommended the removal of the cause of the trouble, expressing his belief that such action would shortly put an end to resistance. Nullification still continuing, Jackson (a month later) wrote his famous message, in which he called attention to the magnitude of the opposition, and recommended to Congress to provide by law: "That in case of an attempt otherwise [than by process from the ordinary judicial tribunals of the United States] to take property [from the custody of the law] by a force too great to be overcome by the officers of the customs, it should be lawful to protect the possessions of the officers by the employment of the land and naval forces and militia under provisions similar to those authorized by the eleventh section of the Act of January 9, 1809." After recommending the revival of other expired acts to facilitate and protect the collection of the revenues and execution of Federal law, he said further: "Provisions less than these—consisting, as they do, for the most part, rather of a revival of the policy of former acts called for by the [then] existing emergency, than of the introduction of any unusual or rigorous enactments—would not cause the laws of the Union to be properly respected or enforced. It is believed that these would prove adequate unless the military forces of the State of South Carolina, authorized by the late act of the Legislature, should be actually embodied and called out in aid of their proceedings, and of the provisions of the ordinance generally. Even in that case, however, it is believed that no more will be necessary than a few modifications of its terms to adapt the Act of 1795 to the present emergency, as by that act the provisions of the Act of 1792 were accommodated to the crisis then existing; and, by conferring authority upon the President, to give it operation during the session of Congress, and without the ceremony of a proclamation, whenever it shall be officially made known to him by the authority of any State, or by the courts of the United States, that, within the limits of such State, the laws of the United States will be openly opposed and their execution obstructed by the actual employment of military force, or by any unlawful means, whatever, too great to be otherwise overcome."
Pursuant to these recommendations, Congress passed, March 2, 1833, the "force bill," or "bloody bill," as it was called; and the section which made it infamous in the unprotected States was as follows: "Sec. 5. And be it further enacted, that whenever the President of the United States shall be officially informed by the authorities of any State, or by a judge of any Circuit or District Court of the United States in the State, that within the limits of such State any law or laws of the United States, or the execution thereof, or of any process from the courts of the United States is obstructed by the employment of military force, or by any other unlawful means too great to be overcome by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the power vested in the marshals by existing laws, it shall be lawful for him, the President of the United States, forthwith to issue his proclamation declaring such fact or information, and requiring all such military or other force forthwith to disperse; and if, at any time after issuing such proclamation, any such opposition or obstruction shall be made in the manner or by the means aforesaid, the President shall be and hereby is authorized promptly to employ such means to suppress the same, and to cause said laws or process to be duly executed, as are authorized and provided in the cases therein mentioned by the Act of the 28th of February, 1795, entitled: 'An act to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, repel invasions, and repeal the act now in force for that purpose'; and also, by the Act of the 3d of March, 1807, entitled: 'An act authorizing the employment of the land and naval forces of the United States in cases of insurrection.'" Section 1 of the force bill authorized the President to call out the army, navy, and militia to aid in collecting the customs—a power which the Act of 1795 could not be construed to give. It was also provided in the act that the operation of said sections 5 and 1 should "continue until the next session of Congress, and no longer." Thus careful was Congress to limit the duration of the great powers delegated to the President, as it had usually done in other instances in which it had authorized the employment of military force. The Act of March 3, 1807, referred to in the force bill, simply gave the President authority to use the land and naval forces of the United States to assist in the execution of the laws whenever it should be lawful for him to call out the militia for the same purpose. The Act of 1795, referred to by Jackson, which he did not pretend he had a right to use against the nullifiers of the tariff act, unless it should be revived by Congress, and which he proposed should be revived, modified, and adapted to meet the emergency confronting him, in the same way Congress had formerly adapted and modified the Act of 1792 by the Act of 1795, to meet the emergency of the latter year, was the very act Lincoln used to cover his assumption of power to make war on the South without the authority of Congress! He had this precedent before him, in which the warrior Jackson, swift in defense of the nation's honor against her foreign foes, was slow to dye his hands in his brothers' blood. He had before him the act in which Congress had revived the provisions of the Act of 1795, and expressly limited the duration of that revival to the time intervening before its next session; and he was lawyer enough to know, though not learned in his profession, that the substantial reenactment and enlargement of the old act, and its repeal, or limitation to a definite period, was, after the expiration of that period, a practical repeal of both—especially when it may be seen that the one was to take the place the other took in its day. See Tynen vs. The United States, 11 Wallace U. S. Reports, page 88; Pana vs. Bowles, 107 U. S. Reports, page 529, and cases cited therein; Norris vs. Crocker, 13 Howard, page 429.
Jackson, in spite of his camp association and military methods, was the embodiment of caution and conservatism, when compared to Lincoln and his "kitchen cabinet" of revenue-hunting Governors, who were as swift to declare war against their own people, under a forced construction of an old, unused, obsolete, special act, as those who now speculate in their names and fame are eager to seek treaties of partnership with our hereditary foreign foe.
They shall never, unchallenged, teach our children that Abraham Lincoln's usurpations were lawful, justified by necessity, or commended by God; lest "necessity, the plea of tyrants," or "divine right," the plea of kings and priests, or "implied powers," the plea of those who are powerful only to oppress the people and to collect and spend their revenues, should constitute the excuse for destroying the remaining safeguards of our liberties.
Those accustomed to analyze motive and conduct will note with attention that the Act of August 6, 1861, intended to legalize the call for troops, was passed after the "force bill" had been reenacted and amplified by the Acts of July 13, 29, and 31, 1861—after the President had been expressly authorized by these acts and another to accept the service of volunteers and to use the army, navy, and militia to make war upon States and combinations of States, as well as upon the inhabitants of districts therein—after Congress had in these acts twice gone out of its way to refer to the old Act of 1795 as still in force, and once expressly treated it as giving the authority, which had been assumed, to begin the war; and the legalizing act itself was covered under a caption which was calculated to excite as little attention as possible. The caption reads: "An act to increase the pay of privates in the regular army and in the volunteers, and for other purposes."
The Act of 1795, when in force, gave the President no authority to determine when a state of insurrection existed, even in a Federal district; Congress proved that it realized this defect of power by hastening (July 13 and 29, 1861) to supply it to Lincoln—in respect to States as well as districts—a double confession of the weakness of his position.
The Act of 1795 afforded no assistance to collect customs, for the Whiskey Insurrectionists, against whom it was passed, resisted only the internal revenue taxes; Congress practically acknowledged this limitation, by Act of July 13, 1861, expressly and separately authorizing the President to use the army, navy, and militia to "collect the customs" of the United States.
"Even our enemies themselves being judges," there were doubts everywhere, and these doubts were everywhere resolved in favor of absolute authority and against the received construction of law and the Constitution.
An executive who usurps powers ought to be placed on a moral plane as much lower than that of a treasurer who embezzles public funds as the love of liberty in the minds of the virtuous is higher than the love of money.
Those who would derive Lincoln's assumed power to declare war from the clause of the Constitution which requires that the "President shall see that the laws are faithfully executed" betray the flimsy foundation upon which they would erect the throne of an autocrat. The faithful execution of the laws is to be secured in a lawful manner, under such powers as the Constitution gives or Congress may lawfully give to the President. If he is the sole judge of the extent of the powers conferred and the appropriateness of the means of execution, he does not need any other clause to make him the field-overseer of both the other departments of government; and this the Supreme Court has decided he is not. Tyndall vs. The United States, 12 Peters, p. 524. Lincoln did not rely upon this clause, but upon the Act of 1795, the language of which he quoted in his call for the militia of the States; and Congress, by the fifth section of the Act of July 13, 1861, showed very plainly that it recognized that he had professed to act under the Statute of 1795.
The frightful experiences of the civil war and the serpent-brood of evils which have since followed in its trail are plenary proof that the fathers were wise in not lodging the war power in the hands of any one man.
A summary of Lincoln's conduct, while there was yet peace in the land, brings out in startling relief the facts: that he dared at the behest of pampered privilege greedy for revenue, and partisan rancor thirsting for blood, without precedent, or the support of either of the other branches of the government, to place his own private interpretation upon a statute, in effect repealed, and thereby to make war on six millions of his fellow-citizens, whom he refused a right of opinion sustained by abundant authority and precedent and by some of his own acts and utterances. The idol of the "higher law" fanatics, the chief of whom he placed in his cabinet—nominated on a platform which denounced the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case as "a dangerous political heresy, revolutionary in its tendency and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country"—elected by States, many of which defied Federal authority attempting to execute the fugitive slave law, and none of which supported such authority, except New Jersey and California—and having never publicly or privately condemned the nullification of their constitutional obligations (Article IV, section 2, clause 3) by the States of Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Michigan, Maine, Wisconsin, Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—he still proclaimed that his only motive in taking up the sword was to assert the paramount authority of Federal law!
His political campaign of 1864 was fought upon a platform which pledged its supporters to "bring to punishment due their crimes the rebels and traitors arrayed against the Government"; and be it remembered by all posterity that at the end of that campaign, almost at the close of a successful war, and in spite of military interference at the polls, one million eight hundred and eight thousand seven hundred and twenty-five citizens of his own section voted to condemn him, and endorsed a platform which declared that "under pretense of a military necessity for a war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part" by him, and that "justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of all the States; * * * that peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of all the States," * * * that the aim of their party was "to preserve the Federal Union and the rights of all the States unimpaired," and that they considered "the administrative usurpations of extraordinary and dangerous powers not granted by the Constitution * * * as calculated to prevent a restoration of the Union; that the shameful disregard of the administration of its duty to our fellow-citizens, * * * prisoners of war, deserves the severest reprobation."
As at the beginning, so at the end of the war, a vast majority of our nation was opposed to Lincoln's policy of coercion and blood; for his total vote, with the army and navy to back him, was only about four hundred thousand in excess of McClellan's, and this would have been far more than offset by the Southern vote.
The immediate cause of Lincoln's death was a sentence in his speech of April 11, 1865: "If universal amnesty is granted to the insurgents I cannot see how I can avoid exacting, in return, universal suffrage, or, at least, suffrage on a basis of intelligence and military service." "That means nigger citizenship," said his slayer to a witness. "Now, by God, I'll put him through!"—Life of Lincoln, by Herndon and Weik, Vol. III, p. 579.
It was a singular decree of Providence that, according to his own forebodings, Lincoln should have perished by the hand of violence, and that too on the fatal 15th of April, the anniversary of his proclamation for the seventy-five thousand volunteers to begin the dance of death. "He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword."
Let us be as thankful as we can that we are still one nation, that African slavery has ceased, and that the safeguards of liberty may be still sufficient if we are vigilant, unselfish, and brave.
The world has long respected the courage of the South; when the whole truth shall be well told it will equally respect her cause. One obvious effect of the civil war, clearly foreseen and foretold by Southern statesmen, was to Europeanize American institutions. This was a fearful price to pay even for keeping the sections under one government.
Let us hope that the present war with Spain may destroy the stock-in-trade of the speculator in past patriotism.
An unoccupied field of investigation for a future historian is the part which Great Britain played in dissension, disunion, and war between the States, the sections, and the political parties. Her purpose has been accomplished. She has annihilated our foreign ocean-carrying trade—once threatening her own supremacy—and has thereby made us a third-rate naval power, for seamen, rather than ships, make a navy.
"Will your people divide?" General Clingman was frequently asked while in England in 1860. Never once was he asked if slavery would be abolished. The form of the question, in a land where abolition took its rise, struck him forcibly. Hear its explanation: "In this connection I remember a statement made to me by the late American Minister at Paris, Mr. Mason. He spoke of having had a conversation with one whose name I do not feel at liberty to mention, but whose influence on the opinion of continental Europe is considerable, who declared to him that if the Union of our States continued at no distant day we should control the world; and, therefore, as an European, he felt it to be his duty to press anti-slavery views as the only chance to divide us. I have many reasons to know that the monarchies of Europe, threatened with downfall from revolutionary movements, seek, through such channels as they control, to make similar impressions."—Speeches and Writings of T. L. Clingman, pp. 482, 483: extract from speech in United States Senate, delivered January 16, 1860.
To prove that democracy is a failure is among the chief aims of European monarchs.
Lloyd Garrison seems to have been a sincere fanatic, but all the better may have served British policy. Listen to a group of facts about him, appearing at random in a friendly encyclopedia: "In 1833" [the year the stars fell] "he visited Great Britain, and on his return organized 'The American Anti-slavery Society.' He visited England again in 1846, 1848, and 1867, in which last year he was publicly breakfasted in St. James' Hall."
An extract from the London Telegraph of 1856 contains food for thought: "The aggressive spirit of the people of the United States requires an humbling, and it is for us to perform the task. England's mission is to complete the great work commenced by her in 1834, when she liberated her slaves. There are now over three million human beings in cruel bondage in the United States. If, therefore, the United States Government deny, and is resolved to question the right of Great Britain to her Central American possessions, we, the people of the British empire, are resolved to strike off the shackles from the feet of her three million slaves."
The London News, also of about the same time, encouraging its people against the possibility of rupture between England and this country, said: "However strong is the unprincipled appeal at present made to the anti-British feeling of the Northern States, that feeling is counterbalanced by another which has grown up within the last quarter of a century. The abolitionists would be with us to a man. The best of them are so now."
In 1798 the federalistic school of tax-gatherers, under the guidance of their founders, Rufus King and Hamilton, once actually lifted their eyes from the plunder of their own countrymen long enough to adopt an aggressive foreign policy, but it was a conspiracy with England, called the "Mirandy Plot," by which they sought to despoil our late allies in our war for independence, the French people, of their territory beyond the Mississippi, the honest and honorable purchase of which by Jefferson, a few years later, this school denounced as unconstitutional and void.
Better than any American statesman, General Clingman seems to have understood the motives and interests of Great Britain in fomenting the slavery agitation and the estrangement of the sections. Hear him, in his address to the people of the Eighth Congressional District of North Carolina, March 16, 1856: "The United States is the great republic of the earth, and the example of our free institutions was shaking the foundations of the monarchical and aristocratic governments of Europe. This was especially the case as respects the political system of Great Britain, owing to our common language, literature, and extended commercial intercourse. The aristocracy there hold the mass of the people in subjection, and under a condition so oppressive that large numbers of white men of their own race are liable to perish miserably by famine in years of scarcity. A knowledge of the successful working of our institutions was increasing the discontent of the common people, and, fearing the loss of its sway, the aristocracy, which controls the entire power of the government, began a crusade for the abolition of slavery in the United States. They expected, in the first place, by affected sympathy for the negroes here, to divert the minds of the people at home, to some extent, from the consideration of their own sufferings, and to create the impression that other laborers were much worse off than their own. And should they succeed in breaking up our system they would exultingly point to it as an evidence against the durability of free institutions.
"With a view, therefore, to effect these objects, more than twenty years ago the British press, and book-makers generally were stimulated to embark in a systematic war against negro slavery in the United States. Abolition lecturers were sent over and money furnished to establish papers and circulate pamphlets to inflame the minds of the citizens of the Northern States.
"Looking far ahead, they sought to incorporate their doctrines into the school-books and publications best calculated to influence the minds of the young and ignorant. Their views were most readily received in Massachusetts, where British influence has, for the last half century, been greatest. From this State these doctrines were gradually diffused to a great extent throughout the North."
At the time that the British politicians were taking so much interest in the slavery question of America, and deprecating with many crocodile tears our treatment of the negroes they had sold us, the Edinburgh Review of January, 1856, charges the British Government with collecting rents and taxes from its subjects in India by means of the thumb-screw and other tortures as devilish as ingenuity could devise. See Speeches and Writings of T. L. Clingman.
According to some New England testimony, the work of the British emissaries who had been sent out to divide the Union was uphill at first. Hear the words of Representative Isaac Hill, from New Hampshire, speaking in Congress in 1836: "I have said the people of the North were more united in their opposition to the plans of the advocates of anti-slavery than on any other subject. This opposition is confined to no political party. It pervades every class of the community. They deprecate all interference with the subject of slavery because they believe such interference may involve the existence and welfare of the Union itself, and because they understand the obligations which the non-slaveholding States owe to the slaveholding States by the compact of confederation. It is the strong desire to perpetuate the Union; it is the determination which every patriotic and virtuous citizen has made in no event to abandon the 'ark of our safety' that now impels the united North to take its stand against the agitators of the anti-slavery project. So effectually has the strong public sentiment put down that agitation in New England that it is now kept alive only by the power of money which the agitators have collected and apply in the hiring of agents and in the issue from presses that are kept in their employ.
"The anti-slavery movement which brings in petitions from various parts of the country, asking Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, originates with a few persons who have been in the habit of making charitable religious institutions subservient to political purposes, and who have even controlled some of those charitable associations.
"Many of the clergymen who have been the instruments of the agitators have been such from no bad motive. Some of them, discovering the purpose of the agitators, discovering that their labors were calculated to make the condition of the slave worse, and to create animosity between the people of the North and the South, have paused in their course and desisted from the further application of a mistaken philanthropy."
Even if it be admitted that, as early as the year 1836, the strongest elements in New England were united against the South, it is by no means true that they were then unanimous in selecting slavery as the most advantageous ground of battle. A cry of distress arose from Great Britain at the way some of the distributors of her secret service money were being treated; a paragraph from an English newspaper, the Leeds Mercury, read on the floor of the House of Representatives by Mr. King, of Georgia, in corroboration of what Mr. Hill had said, will serve as an illustration: "Letters of the most distressing nature have been received from Mr. George Thompson, the zealous and devoted missionary of slave emancipation, who has gone from this country to the United States, and who writes from Boston. He says that 'the North (that is, New England, where slavery does not exist) has universally sympathized with the South in opposition to the abolitionists; that the North has let fall the mask; that the merchants and mechanics, priests and politicians have alike stood forth the defenders of Southern despots and the furious denouncers of Northern philanthropy'; that all parties of politics, especially the supporters of the two rival candidates for the Presidential office (Van Buren and Webster) vie with each other in denouncing the abolitionists; and that even religious men shun them, except when the abolitionists can fairly gain a hearing from them. With regard to himself he speaks as follows: 'Rewards are offered for my abduction and assassination; and, in every direction, I meet with those who believe they would be doing God and their country service by depriving me of life. I have appeared in public, and some of my escapes from the hands of my foes have been truly providential. On Friday last I narrowly escaped losing my life in Concord, New Hampshire.' 'Boston, September 11.—This morning a short gallows was found standing opposite the door of my house, 23 Bay street, in this city, now occupied by Garrison. Two halters hung from the beam, with the words above them: By Order of Judge Lynch!'"
Responding to this, the New Hampshire Representative (Hill) said: "The present agitation in the North is kept up by the application of money; it is a state of things altogether forced. Agents are hired, disguised in the character of ministers of the gospel, to preach abolition of slavery where slavery does not exist; and presses are kept in constant employment to scatter abolition publications through the country."
Yes, and this constant "application" of money finally overcame the Yankee. The love of it has been the root of much evil with him. Then, too, eventually, his politicians and manufacturers found that the best use they could make of the negro was to hold him betwixt them and the fire of Southern indignation, kindled by their cupidity.
To show the dangerous reciprocity of feeling between old and New England long before it was intensified as it now is by the community of interest in untold millions of investments, the words uttered by John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, fall with the weight of state's evidence: "That their object (i. e. that of the New England States) was, and had been for several years, a dissolution of the Union and the establishment of a separate confederation, he knew from unequivocal evidence, although not provable in a court of law; and that in case of a civil war the aid of Great Britain to effect that purpose would as assuredly be resorted to as it would be indispensably necessary to their design."—Adams' letter in reply to Harrison Gray Otis and others, December 28, 1828, quoted by Raphael Semmes in his Memoirs of Service Afloat, p. 43. This attachment to British interests was so pronounced in 1812 that the New England States refused to furnish their quota of troops to help conduct our defense; and, while the nation was locked in deadly conflict with the ruthless invader, these States actually held a convention at Hartford looking to secession. The Governor of Massachusetts proclaimed a public fast day for deploring a war against a nation which had long been "the bulwark of the religion we profess"; its Supreme Court decided that neither the President nor Congress could control its State troops in time of war, and the Legislature declared the war to be unholy, and urged its people to do what they could to thwart it. These States forced a treaty of peace in which Great Britain was not even required to cease the outrages on account of which the war was undertaken—outrages which might have been begun again but for Jackson's victory with the Southern soldiers at New Orleans. Jefferson, in a letter to Lafayette, says: "During that war four of the Eastern States were only attached to the Union like so many inanimate bodies to living men."
That will be the saddest chapter of American history which faithfully compares the treasonable obstruction of these States to this war with their Cain-like swiftness to shed their brothers' blood because of an alleged difference of opinion on a question of constitutional law. It will be remembered, in this connection, that these States had their troops mobilized and waiting for the President's call before Fort Sumter was fired on. In four days after the call the troops of Massachusetts (the most protected State save one) had invaded the State of Maryland and were shooting down the astonished and outraged citizens of Baltimore.
The next saddest chapter of our national history will show that the section which has been greediest to gain power from the States and revenues from the people has been the readiest to use these powers and revenues against those from whom they were stolen, and the most reluctant to use them to defend the nation against foreign aggressions. "It is a principle of human nature," remarks Tacitus, "to hate those we have injured more than those who have injured us."
And who, now, but the beneficiaries of implied powers (which they fought a civil war to preserve and maintain in all their latitude), under real or affected dread of a foreign war, are zealous for the late proposed bondholders' treaty with England? As though that nation could afford to kill or even injure the goose which lays the golden egg in the shape of four hundred million dollars annual interest on British investments in this country! The sole purpose of this treaty is that this egg shall be golden and not bimetallic; and instead of preventing, it may be the cause of war, as soon as the people resume control of their government and feel the effects of an arbitration judgment on the financial question. I pause to remark, in this connection, that many well-meaning people who petitioned the Senate for the confirmation of this treaty had not read it with sufficient care to observe that it delegated to a commission, composed partly of foreigners and to a majority of the Senate, powers which have heretofore been only exercised by two-thirds of the Senate, as the Constitution provides. And this apparently slight though subtle change in the conduct of our government was sought to be inaugurated in the name of peace!
What a Southern statesman exclaimed, arguing against the adoption of the Federal Constitution, in 1787, may be appositely repeated here: "But the character of the partners (meaning the Northern States) causes me more alarm than the terms of the partnership." England's partnership with Australia, South Africa, and India has spread such a pall of universal indebtedness over the fairest portions of the globe that we may well hesitate before we make more permanent the stipulations in the "bond" of her blighting friendship.
Undoubtedly the seeds of the War of 1812 were sown by the treaty of 1794, negotiated by John Jay, who took "a mild and conciliatory part in the Revolutionary war," and by Lord Grenville, the son of the author of the Stamp Act. The "Jay treaty," as it was called, provided for the shameful curtailment of the American ocean-carrying trade, and for the free navigation of the Mississippi for Great Britain. And if the proposed arbitration treaty is not finally rejected by the Senate, the prominence given to the present British Minister at McKinley's inauguration, accidental though it may have been, will serve as a fine prototype of British influence in the administration of our government.
"Woe to the nation that trusts England's friendship," exclaimed the thoughtful Pettigrew, after studying her national character on the narrow island where it grew. What he says, given under the sketch of him in this book, is a valuable side-light upon the suggestion that her influence more than any other (except original sin) has changed the half of our nation nearest to her into a race of "dollar-hunters and breeders of dollar-hunters." The way to make England our ally is to show her that we are able to take care of ourselves. Her government fears nothing so much as the democratic spirit of America, and would fain bind that down by treaty; but when it serves her purposes, Old England, like New England, finds a "higher law" than a contract. Unity of interest and of purpose unites peoples—compacts often unite governments in a conspiracy to plunder.
In dwelling specially upon the main cause of our civil war, because of attempts to ignore it, I do not mean to encourage the student to neglect the other causes: the control by the Confederacy of the lower Mississippi—the ocean outlet of its headwater States; the fear of protected labor that the slaves would learn to manufacture, and reduce wages; the jealousy and friction in the newly-settled West, caused by the actual contact of the two systems of labor (for slavery was a practical and serious question there); the belief that slavery was at the bottom of the forty-four years of sectional political wrangling, and that this must cease or the Union be dissolved; the honest and the prejudiced opposition to the institution itself; the zeal and ambition of machine politicians, in both sections, anxious to get in "on the ground floor" of personal advantage—these together, acted on by the main cause, and reacting on each other, constitute the causes of the war.
And it must not be forgotten, too, that Calhoun, for the South, accepted the slavery issue as the gage of battle, though he knew for what purpose it was manufactured. Unity of the South against Northern aggression was what he was fighting for; and, having failed to present a solid front against the tariff because Clay's ambition and Louisiana's influence disintegrated his forces in the Southwest, he was the more easily betrayed into adopting a temporary expedient—the policy of shifting the issue from its high ground. In this way, too, he got "hay and stubble" in his foundation, and gave the enemies of civil liberty among the whites a chance to pose as the friends of civil liberty among the blacks.
Standing among the statutes at large, with but a page between, is the proclamation of Thomas Jefferson, thundering against the aggressions of Great Britain, and the proclamation of John Adams, breathing out threatenings and slaughter against his own countrymen for resisting the plunder of an unjust revenue tax. These two proclamations, looming up in the horizon of American history like the Mountains of Blessing and Cursing, are the embodiment of the two spirits which are contending for the mastery of this nation—the one the source of our independence gained by a foreign war and the territory on this side of the Mississippi, and of our independence maintained by a foreign war and the territory beyond the Mississippi—the other the source of our national debt in its monstrous cumulation, of Federal extravagance, of sectional expenditures of public funds, of class legislation for protected industries, of unequal taxes, and of a frightful civil war, unlawfully begun to collect them.
"To do justice" is the only way to "insure domestic tranquillity." A government is "strong" only when its foundations are laid deep in the affections and best interests of the people who support it and for whose benefit it was created. God's government is strong and will last forever because it is based upon the eternal principle of mutual affinity.
Through the long mystery of prehistoric ages the spirit of God's love brooded over the desolation of a void and formless world; continents laden with life were born out of the womb of the great deep—Life which still lives in the love of its Infinite Author—and the great deep which still with measured pulse is beating out the changes of our times and booming in our ears the faith that we, too, are somewhere in the sweep of Nature's mighty moving heart. So, statesmen and philosophers, deeply pondering in love of country over the dreary waste of failures and disasters lying thick along the track of History and Experience, have wrought out for us wise laws and constitutions, have rescued from the "bottomless deep of theory and possibility" the institutions under which we live, but the virtue to interpret and maintain them is not transmitted nor transmissible—that we must gain, as they did, from Heaven.
Sloping in a long, gradual sweep of undulating hills and valleys, overspread with the silver network of her myriad streams, from her lofty green-bannered battlements, erected by God, down to her shifting shore, where Hatteras lies in wait for her enemies by sea, North Carolina spreads out the peaceful lap of her bounteous land for her children and for all who cherish her.
Born before the Union, which is but an offspring of the States, and surviving disunion, the child of sectional advantage, unbroken by the shock of radical changes in the Constitutions of the State and nation, North Carolina stands among the firmest of the forty-five pillars of the national superstructure, will sustain it as long as it answers the purposes of its creation, and, if greed or necessity or the will of Heaven should destroy it, will stand above its wreck, the sure foundation and protection of her people's liberties and the sure support of a more perfect Union of the States which have been purified in the crucible of disaster.
W. J. Peele.
LIVES OF DISTINGUISHED NORTH CAROLINIANS.
[WILLIAM R. DAVIE.]
BY WALTER CLARK.
William Richardson Davie was born at Egremont, near Whitehaven, Cumberland county, in the north of England, on June 20, 1756. He was brought over to this country by his father, Archibald Davie, who, upon the peace of 1763, made a visit to America, and was left in the care of his maternal uncle, Rev. William Richardson, a Presbyterian clergyman residing in the Waxhaw settlement on the Catawba river, in South Carolina. Having no children, Mr. Richardson adopted his nephew and namesake, who became heir to his estate. At the usual age young Davie was sent to the "Queen's Museum," the well-known academy and high school in Charlotte. From thence he entered at Nassau Hall, Princeton College, New Jersey, of which the famous Dr. Witherspoon was then President. In the summer of 1776, with the consent of the President, a party of students, among whom Davie was one, was raised and served as volunteers in the patriot army. In the fall of that year he returned to college, and, passing his examinations, took his college degree of Bachelor of Arts with the first honors of the institution. His uncle died before his return home. Davie selected the profession of law and began his studies at Salisbury. In 1777 he joined a detachment of twelve hundred men under General Jones, ordered to be raised for the defense of Charleston, then threatened with another attack, but on reaching Camden it was found that the design was abandoned by the enemy, and the detachment returned home after a service of three months. In 1779 a troop of cavalry was raised in the Salisbury district. Of this William Barnett, of Mecklenburg, was chosen captain and Davie lieutenant. His commission, signed by Governor Caswell, is dated 5 April, 1779. With two hundred horse he was immediately sent into the back country to suppress a Tory rising, but it was quelled before their arrival. Soon afterward the troop joined the Southern Army and was attached to Pulaski's Legion.
Captain Barnett having resigned, Davie was promoted to captain, and shortly thereafter was made major. On June 20th of that year Davie took part in the battle of Stono, near Charleston. In this battle the North Carolina brigade was commanded by General Jethro Sumner. In a cavalry charge on that day Davie was wounded and fell from his horse, but retained hold of the bridle. The cavalry, dispirited by his fall, were in full retreat when a private in another company, whose horse had been shot under him and was carrying off his saddle, saw Major Davie standing by his horse unable to mount him, his thigh being disabled by his wound. Though the enemy were in a few yards, this man deliberately placed him on his horse and led him from the field. His deliverer then disappeared and resumed his place in the ranks, and Davie could find no trace of him. The wound was a severe one and kept Davie long in the hospital at Charleston, rendering him incapable of further service that year. At the siege of Ninety-Six, two years later, when Davie was present as Commissary-General of the Southern Army, on the morning of the attack a stranger came to his tent and introduced himself as the man who had saved his life at Stono. He promised to visit him again, but when the troops were recalled from the fruitless attempt to storm the fort the body of the gallant unknown was found among the dead. On his return from the Charleston hospital in September, 1779, Davie being unfit for service, applied for and received his County Court license and was sent by the Governor to attend the courts on the Holston river, then in North Carolina, that he might ascertain public sentiment in that section. In the spring of 1780 he received his Superior Court license. About the same time he obtained authority from the Legislature of North Carolina to raise a troop of cavalry and two companies of mounted infantry. The authority was all that the State could give, its funds being too low to provide the means. Major Davie, with a patriotism worthy of perpetual remembrance, disposed of the estate inherited from his uncle and thus raised the funds to equip his command.
The surrender of Charleston, 12th May, 1780, and the surprise and butchery of Buford's men by Colonel Tarleton on the 29th of the same month, completed the subjugation of South Carolina. Colonel Moore, with eleven hundred Tories, having collected at Ramsour's Mills, in the edge of the present town of Lincolnton, Colonel Francis Locke with three hundred militia of Burke, Lincoln, and Rowan, crossed the Catawba at Beattie's Ford, while General Rutherford, acting in concert with him with seven hundred troops, among whom was Davie and his command, crossed at Tuckaseege Ford. The two divisions were to meet in the night near the enemy and attack at break of day. Rutherford's march being circuitous, was delayed, but Colonel Locke, notwithstanding the disparity of force, attacked alone and won a complete victory. Rutherford arrived about an hour after the action and dispatched Major Davie in pursuit of the fugitives. Shortly after Major Davie was ordered to take post near the South Carolina line, opposite Hanging Rock, to prevent the enemy from foraging and to check the depredations of the Tories who infested that section. He was reenforced by some South Carolinians under Major Crawford, by thirty-five Catawba Indians under their chief, New River, and by part of the Mecklenburg militia. With part of his dragoons and some volunteers he left camp 20th July, 1780, to intercept a convoy of provisions and clothing destined for the enemy at Hanging Rock, eighteen miles distant. Marching all night, he turned the enemy's flank and fell into the Camden road five miles below Hanging Rock. Here he awaited the convoy, which appeared in the afternoon, and it was surprised and completely captured, with all the stores.
About the last of July, Colonel Sumter, with the South Carolina refugees, and Colonel Irwin, with the North Carolina troops, advanced to the attack of Rocky Mount, while Major Davie was to make a diversion to engage the attention of the enemy at Hanging Rock. His detachment consisted of eighty mounted men. In sight of the enemy's camp, he fell upon three companies of their mounted infantry returning from an excursion. Taken by surprise, they were literally cut to pieces almost before they were aware of his presence. Sixty valuable horses, with their furniture, and one hundred rifles and muskets, were carried off by Davie in safety without the loss of a man. On August 5th an attack was ordered upon Hanging Rock by Colonel Sumter, who commanded in person the eight hundred troops engaged in the expedition. Of these five hundred were North Carolinians, commanded by Colonel Irwin and Major Davie. The troops halted at midnight within two miles of the enemy's camp, which they attacked next morning at daylight. The British regulars were commanded by Major Carden, while among the auxiliaries were several Tory regiments. One was composed of Tories from the upper Yadkin, commanded by Colonel Bryan (whom Davie afterwards defended when tried for treason at Salisbury), and another, mostly of South Carolinians, was led by Colonel John Hamilton, of Halifax, who for many years after the war was British Consul at Norfolk. The attack at first was completely successful, but from lack of discipline many of the troops plundered the camps and became intoxicated. A part of the British troops remaining intact, formed a hollow square and necessitated a retreat, which, however, was made in good order, Davie's corps covering the rear. The wounded were safely convoyed by him to Charlotte, where, by his foresight, a hospital had been established. It is worthy of note that on this march to the attack at Hanging Rock, by Davie's side rode, as guides conversant with the roads and of undoubted courage and patriotism, two country lads, brothers, respectively aged thirteen and fifteen years. The younger of the two was destined to see many another field of carnage, and his name has filled long and well the sounding trump of fame—Andrew Jackson. Long years after, in the retirement of the Hermitage, he said that Davie was the best soldier he had ever known and that his best lessons in the art of war had been learned from him.
On Davie's return from Charlotte he hastened to the general rendezvous of Gates' army at Rugely's Mills. On August 16th, while proceeding to join General Gates at Camden, and ten miles from the battle-field, Major Davie met the defeated army with the General leading the retreat. He ordered Davie to fall back on Charlotte, but he replied that his men had formed the acquaintance of Tarleton's Legion and did not fear to meet them again. He continued his course towards the battle-ground, meeting the flying fragments of the routed army. He secured several wagons loaded with clothing and medicine, which had been abandoned. With characteristic thoughtfulness he immediately sent an officer to notify Colonel Sumter of the great disaster which had befallen our arms. He reached Sumter that evening, who at once began his retreat along the west bank of the Catawba, towards the up-country. Not taking sufficient precaution, however, Sumter was surprised on the 18th by Tarleton at Fishing Creek, and his entire command of eight hundred men was captured or put to flight with the loss of all his artillery, arms, and baggage. Colonel Sumter himself, who was asleep under a wagon when the attack was made, barely escaped, and the next day reached Davie's camp at Charlotte alone, riding on horseback, without saddle or bridle. The tidings carried consternation into the fragments of Gates' army which had rallied there, and in a few moments Davie and his command were the only force left in front of the enemy. Instead of retiring, he boldly advanced to the Waxhaws, and found that the enemy had fallen back to Camden.
On the 5th of September, 1780, Davie was appointed by Governor Nash Colonel Commandant of Cavalry in the Western District of North Carolina, with instructions to raise a regiment. When he had collected only about seventy men, with that force and two small companies of riflemen, commanded by Major George Davidson, he took post at Providence, twenty-five miles from the British camp. Cornwallis, after resting at Camden till the first week in September, had advanced to the Waxhaws, forty miles below Charlotte, while the fragments of the American army were slowly gathering at Hillsborough, two hundred miles distant. South Carolina was wholly subjugated, and North Carolina had not recovered from the shock of Gates' defeat. Under these circumstances, Colonel Davie, with unprecedented boldness, with a command not exceeding one hundred and fifty men all told, on the 20th of September, turning the right flank of the British army by a circuitous march, fell upon three or four hundred of the enemy at Wahab's plantation. The attack was made at daylight. The surprise was complete.
The enemy left fifteen or twenty dead on the field and had some forty wounded. Davie got off safely with the captured horses and had only one man wounded. The enemy at once caused the farm buildings which belonged to Captain Wahab, then a volunteer with Davie, to be laid in ashes. Davie brought off ninety-six horses and their furniture and one hundred and twenty stand of arms, and arrived in camp the same afternoon, having marched sixty miles in less than twenty-four hours, including the time employed in seeking and beating the enemy. That evening Generals Sumner and Davidson arrived at his camp with their force of one thousand badly equipped militia.
On the 24th of September the American patrols gave notice that the force of the enemy was in motion on the Steele Creek road, leading to Charlotte. Generals Sumner and Davidson retreated by Phifer's on the nearest road to Salisbury. Colonel Davie, with one hundred and fifty mounted men and some volunteers under Major Joseph Graham, was left alone in front of the British army, and he was ordered to observe the enemy and skirmish with his advance. On the afternoon and night of the 25th he took a number of prisoners, and at midnight took up his position at Charlotte, seven miles from the spot where Earl Cornwallis had encamped. Early on the 26th his patrols were driven in by the enemy's light troops, and in a few moments the Legion and light infantry were seen advancing, followed by the whole army. Charlotte was then a village of about twenty houses, built on two streets which crossed each other at right angles. At their intersection stood the court-house. Colonel Davie dismounted one company and stationed it under the court-house, where they were protected by a stone wall. The other two companies were advanced about eighty yards and posted behind some houses and gardens. The Legion formed at a distance of three hundred yards with a front to fill the street. On sounding the charge the enemy's cavalry advanced at full gallop, but at sixty yards from the court-house the Americans opened fire and drove them back with great precipitation. A second and third charge had the same result, but being outflanked by the Legion infantry, Davie withdrew his companies in good order, they successively covering each other, and retreated on the Salisbury road. The enemy followed with great caution and respect for some distance, when they at length ventured to charge the small rear guard. In this charge Lieutenant Locks and four privates were killed and Major Graham and five privates wounded. The coolness and skill of Davie in this ever-memorable combat, in which, with a mere handful of men, he held the whole British army for hours at bay and drove back repeatedly its best troops and finally brought off his command unbroken and in good order, stamp him as a soldier of no ordinary capacity. He was at this time twenty-four years of age. Governor Graham says of him: "He was prudent, vigilant, intrepid, and skillful in his movements against the enemy, and with a charming presence, a ready eloquence, and an undaunted spirit, he was among the young men of the day as was Harry Percy to the chivalry of England." He also terms him "one of the most accomplished and elegant gentlemen of the Revolutionary race." Besides his abilities as a leader he was an expert swordsman. It is said in Garden's Anecdotes of the Revolutionary War, that he had slain more men in personal encounters in battle than any man in the army.
The next day, after the brilliant affair at Charlotte, Colonel Davie joined the army at Salisbury, where, recruits having come in and Colonel Taylor from Granville having joined him, his force consisted of three hundred mounted infantry and a few dragoons. Generals Sumner and Davidson continued their retreat across the Yadkin, while Davie returned towards Charlotte, where he so vexed the British by cutting off the foraging parties and beating up their advanced posts that Cornwallis began to feel great distress for want of forage and supplies. (Tarleton's Campaigns, p. 184). The British officer declared he had "found a rebel in every bush outside his encampment." On October 7th occurred the disastrous defeat of Ferguson at King's Mountain, and on the night of October 14th, Cornwallis began his retreat to South Carolina, followed by Davie, who harassed his rear and captured part of his baggage. On the 19th the British crossed the Catawba at Land's Ford and completely evacuated the State of North Carolina. When General Greene took command of the Southern Army in December, 1780, he and Colonel Davie met for the first time. The commissary department became vacant by the resignation of Colonel Thomas Polk. The subsistence of the army had become very difficult, and Colonel Polk declared that it had become impossible. General Greene having formed a high estimate of Colonel Davie's abilities, earnestly, and in most flattering terms, solicited him to relinquish his hopes of brilliant service in the field and accept the vacant office. At the call of patriotism he abandoned the tempting career which lay before him and assumed the not less important but more unpleasant and arduous duties of a station which offered no distinctions. General Greene had himself set the example, having relinquished a brilliant career in the field to assume for years the duties of Quartermaster-General of the army. Colonel Davie assumed the duties of his new post in January, 1781, and continued with the army for the next five months. Hardly any combination of circumstances could exist presenting greater difficulties to the commissary of an army than those under which he began. With a depreciated, almost worthless, currency and an exhausted country, his only resource was to receive from the willing and extort from the reluctant such means of subsistence as they possessed, a service requiring promptness and vigor among the disaffected and skill and discretion among the friendly. These duties were well performed, and, while they make no display on the page of history, their efficient discharge was more really useful to the cause and contributed more to the success of the army than the most brilliant services of the most brilliant officer in the field. In that capacity he was present in the memorable battle at Guilford Court House. Though he had, of course, no command, he was a watchful observer of all the movements of the fight and distinguished himself by his efforts to rally the broken ranks and bring them again into the field. After Judge Schenck's vivid description of this battle it would be a twice-told tale to recount its incidents. It may be well to recall, however, that Eaton's Brigade was composed of men from Warren, Franklin, Nash, Halifax, and Northampton counties, while Butler's men were from the present counties of Wake, Durham, Orange, Alamance, Vance, Granville, Person, and Caswell. No race of people has changed less by infiltration of foreign immigration. It is in warp and woof the same it was a hundred years ago. Those who know them well, know that they are "the blue hen's own chickens," and it is not to be believed (if all other proof was wanting) that men of that stock ever left any fair field of fight in a body save in honor.
It was here that Colonel Davie, seeing the veteran First Maryland permit the enemy to approach to close quarters while it remained apparently inert and impassive, exclaimed with great emotion, "Great God! is it possible Colonel Gunby will surrender himself and his whole regiment to the British?" He had scarce spoken when, the command having been given, their fire, like a sheet of flame, swept off the enemy's first line. This was followed up by a bayonet charge from Gunby. The hostile lines became so intermingled and the moment so critical that Cornwallis, to save himself, caused his cannon to open upon the mass of struggling men and swept off friend and foe alike. This he did against the remonstrance of General O'Hara, who was lying wounded on the ground, and whose men were thus being destroyed at short range by the cannon of their own army.
Colonel Davie continued with the army and was present at Hobkirk's Hill on April 25th, and also at the evacuation of Camden and the siege of Ninety-Six. While the army lay before Ninety-Six, General Greene found it necessary to send him as a confidential messenger to the Legislature of North Carolina to represent to that body the wants of his army, and that his almost sole reliance for assistance was on them. Colonel Davie's knowledge of the members and his tact were such that he procured a most generous contribution from the General Assembly of men and supplies. The exigencies of the service and the equipment of the new levies required him to remain in North Carolina, and in July, 1781, he entered on his duties as Commissary-General of this State, which post he filled till the end of the war. The finances of the State were in a desperate condition, and the country was well-nigh exhausted by the requisitions of both hostile and friendly armies, and, besides, supplies had to be dispatched to our troops operating in South Carolina. No duties could be more arduous or more admirably performed than those which fell to Colonel Davie's lot at this stage of the war. Transportation was lacking even for the supplies which could be obtained. The future seemed uncertain as to everything. No post could more sorely have tried the patience of any man. It argues great versatility of talents that the brilliant cavalry officer should execute with patience the duties of such a station, and it required a rare self-denial to lay aside the opportunities of distinction for the humdrum exactions of his wearying post. To add to other troubles, he had to deal, during the year 1781, with three different Governors of entirely different views and dispositions. Governor Nash had resigned in disgust at the proceedings of the Legislature; Governor Burke had been taken prisoner, and Governor Martin completed the year. So feeble at times was the support of the government that some of the most pressing supplies were procured by Davie on his own credit. Complex and numerous as were his accounts, when he laid down his office he invited the severest legislative scrutiny, but no objection to them could be found.
The war being over, Colonel Davie resumed the practice of his profession in February, 1783. About the same time he married Miss Sarah Jones, the daughter of General Allen Jones, of Northampton, a niece of Willie Jones, and settled in the town of Halifax, which place he made his future residence. It was at that time practically the capital of the State. The sessions of the General Assembly had been frequently held at that place, and it was there that most of the executive business of the State was transacted. He was a brilliant advocate and possessed a natural aptitude for the practice of law. The State at that time was divided into seven judicial districts: Halifax, New Bern, Wilmington, Edenton, Hillsboro, Salisbury, and Morganton. To these, in 1787, Fayetteville was added. The Superior Courts were held only at these places, and not as now at a court-house in each county. Colonel Davie took the circuit and attended in turn all the Superior Courts of the State, except that held at Morganton. He soon commanded a leading practice in all these courts. At some places and at some terms the dockets show that he appeared without exception on one side or the other of every civil case. His practice was very lucrative and he quickly accumulated a large estate. An examination of our published Reports shows numerous cases of importance in which he was counsel. Probably the most important were Hamilton vs. Eaton, 1 N. C., 84, which held the State Confiscation Act repealed by the United States treaty of peace with England, and Bayard vs. Singleton, 1 N. C., 42, the first case in America which asserted the power and duty of the courts to declare an act of the Legislature unconstitutional. It also held the confiscation acts against the late Tories invalid. Iredell, Johnston, and Davie appeared for the successful plaintiff and Moore and Nash for the defendant.
With the chivalry of his nature, it was most natural that when the Tory, Colonel Bryan, with whom he had so often crossed swords, was arraigned and tried at Salisbury, in 1782, for treason, Colonel Davie was one of the counsel who conducted his defense. In this he displayed a courage of the forum no less brilliant and commendable than his conduct in the field. Indeed Davie, though the youngest, became in fact the principal counsel. Excitement ran so high that no lesser favorite than "the hero of Charlotte" could command attention. Bryan was convicted with several others, and was sentenced to be hanged the 14th of April, 1782, but was pardoned and exchanged. Judge Murphy, who had the opportunity of judging, and whose opinion is of high value, says: "Davie took Lord Bolingbroke for his model, and applied himself with so much diligence to the study of his master that literary men could easily recognize his lofty and flowing style. He was a tall, elegant man in his person; graceful and commanding in his manners. His voice was mellow and adapted to the expression of every passion. His style was magnificent and flowing. He had a greatness of manner in public speaking which suited his style and gave his speeches an imposing effect. He was a laborious student and arranged his discourses with care, and, when the subject suited his genius, poured forth a torrent of eloquence that astonished and delighted his audience. They looked upon him with delight, listened to his long, harmonious periods, caught his emotions, and indulged that ecstasy of feeling which fine speaking and powerful eloquence can alone produce. He is certainly to be ranked among the first orators whom the American nation has produced." It is said of him, with probably small exaggeration, that during fifteen years while he was at the bar there was not a capital trial in North Carolina in which he was not retained for the defense. Eminent as he was, it was not for the lack of worthy competitors. James Iredell and Alfred Moore, successively Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, François Xavier Martin, afterwards Chief Justice of Louisiana, and Judge John Haywood, afterwards of Tennessee, were his contemporaries. His brief-books, some of which are still in existence, are models of neatness and show a most careful summary of the evidence and citation of authority in each case. Among his law students were Governor and United Stales Senator David Stone, Mr. Justice Daniel, of our Supreme Court, and many others who became distinguished men. Judge Daniel said that he was the best lawyer and most accomplished man he had ever known. It is stated of him, in comparison with his great legal rival, John Haywood, that while the latter carefully prepared every point, Davie would seize the strong points of the case and throw his whole strength upon them. In this he seems to have retained the experience and instincts of his soldier-life. As a characteristic of his elegant tastes and attention to details it is said that an examination of his correspondence shows that his letters were invariably written upon gilt-edge paper.
When the Convention which formed our present Federal Constitution was called to meet at Philadelphia in May, 1787, he was elected one of the delegates. The delegates were the then Governor, Richard Caswell, ex-Governor Alexander Martin, Richard Dobbs Spaight, who, like Davie, was subsequently Governor, William Blount, afterwards United States Senator, and Hugh Williamson, afterwards a member of Congress and an historian. Governor Caswell did not attend. Colonel Davie was the junior member of the delegation, being then, notwithstanding his distinguished career as a soldier and his high standing at the bar, not yet thirty-one years of age. Still his eloquence and influence made a decided impression upon the Convention. The Constitution all through is the result of compromise; but the critical question was the equal representation of each State in the Senate. Upon this it seemed likely the Convention would be dissolved. The large States were firm for proportional representation. With the smaller States an equal voice in the Senate was a sine qua non. On that question North Carolina voted with the other large States against the demands of the smaller States, and this made the vote a tie, as Georgia, on purpose, evenly divided her vote. The friends of the Constitution, fearing a disruption, referred the question to a committee composed of one from each State. Davie was the member of the committee from North Carolina. When the committee made its report, Davie, acting for North Carolina, gave her vote with the smaller States, and thus, by one majority, was equal representation in the Senate secured. Without it the Convention would doubtless have adjourned after a useless session. The Constitution, without that wise concession, could not have been adopted, and if adopted by the Convention, its ratification by the smaller States could not have been expected. This act was certainly against the wishes of his own State, then the third, in point of population, in the Confederation, ranking next after Virginia and Massachusetts and ahead of New York. It was also apparently against the interests of his State, but the act was that of a statesman, and should be recalled to his lasting honor. It was a critical moment, for a narrow-minded man in his place, timid of responsibility and fearful of his own popularity at home, would have prevented or postponed for many years the American Union. He remained in Philadelphia till the deliberations of the Convention were virtually over and the adoption of the Constitution had become certain. Then, in obedience to his duty to his clients, as the fall circuit was about to begin, he left for home. Hence it is that his name does not appear among those appended to that instrument. The Constitution being the work of many hands and containing so many alterations and amendments, would naturally have been rough and ill-joined, containing a variety of styles. It is worthy of note that the Convention considerately referred it to a committee of one—Gouverneur Morris—an accomplished scholar, to make changes "of form, not of substance." Under his hand it was polished and put in shape, and hence the uniform flow and regularity of its language.
But the work was not yet done. The Constitution was yet to be ratified by the conventions of the several States. When the North Carolina Convention met at Hillsborough, July 21, 1788, a formidable opposition was arrayed against its adoption, headed by Willie Jones, David Caldwell, Judge Spencer, and others. The friends of adoption were led by James Iredell, a remarkably able man, and Colonel Davie, aided by Spaight, Maclaine, Steele, and others. The adoption of the Constitution was at that time defeated. After its subsequent adoption by North Carolina, President Washington tendered the appointment of United States District Judge to Davie, who declined it. Colonel Stokes was appointed, but, soon dying, John Sitgreaves was appointed, probably through Davie's influence. He had married his wife's sister.
By his wife he had acquired a valuable plantation near Halifax, which he took pleasure in cultivating, and he evinced a deep interest in introducing there a better system of farming. His enterprise and public spirit procured the organization of a company for the proposed drainage of Lake Scuppernong.
A friend of education, in 1786 he obtained from the General Assembly the charter of Warrenton Academy, and had himself, with Willie Jones, Thomas Person, Benjamin Hawkins, and other prominent men named as the board of trustees. He was chosen repeatedly, except when his private business constrained him to decline an election, to represent the borough of Halifax in the House of Commons. He served thus in the years 1786, 1787, 1789, 1791, 1793, 1794, 1796, and 1798. He was the real founder of the University of North Carolina, and is so styled in the journal of 1810 of that institution, and well deserved to be so called. Judge Murphy bears this testimony: "I was present in the House of Commons when Davie addressed that body (in 1789) for a loan of money to erect the buildings of the University, and, although more than thirty years have elapsed, I have the most vivid recollection of the greatness of his manner and the power of his eloquence upon that occasion. In the House of Commons he had no rival, and on all questions before that body his eloquence was irresistible." He procured the act of incorporation to be passed in 1789, and other aid, and was always a fostering friend.
The opposition to all the measures in favor of the University was great. The cry of "economy" and the fear expressed that the institution was one step towards the founding of an aristocracy made it difficult to carry any measure through. Gifted with less tact, with less eloquence or with less popularity, Davie must have failed. The institution is no less a monument also to his public spirit, boldness, and foresight. He was a member of the first board of trustees. The selection of a site for the University, the superintendence of the erection of the buildings, the choice of professors, the arrangement of a course of studies, the adoption of regulations, the maintenance of discipline engaged his personal and active attention. Truly he might have exclaimed "Exegi monumentum aere perennius." The course of studies adopted at Davie's instance in 1795 was the "optional" system which now generally obtains. In this he anticipated the course of other colleges full fifty years. When Dr. David Caldwell was elected President this was set aside and the old iron-bound curriculum was adopted and remained in force eighty years.
On December 9, 1787, in the town of Tarboro, the Free Masons of this State organized the Grand Lodge of North Carolina. At that meeting many of the most distinguished men of the State attended, Colonel Davie among them. Governor Johnston was elected the first Grand Master of North Carolina, and Governor Caswell the second. Davie was elected Grand Master in December, 1792, and was successively reelected for seven years. In that capacity he laid the cornerstone of the University, October 12, 1793 (the old East Building), and on April 14, 1798, he laid the cornerstone of the South Building at the same place.
The project of a digest of the laws was brought forward by him, and the appointment of Judge Iredell, the accomplished jurist, to do the work, was made at his suggestion. The cession of the territory which now forms the State of Tennessee was effected mainly by his influence. In 1791 he was appointed by the Legislature one of the three commissioners to establish the unsettled part of the boundary between this State and South Carolina. He was again elected for the same purpose in 1796, and again in 1803. None of these commissions, however, were successful.
In 1794 he was commissioned by Governor Spaight to be Major-General of the Third State Division, in view of the likelihood of war with France. Congress, by the Act of June 24, 1797, directed an embodiment of troops from the several States. The number to be raised by this State under the act was seven thousand two hundred and sixty-eight, and in September of that year Davie was appointed by Governor Ashe Major-General to command this detachment. As matters became more serious, Congress, in May, 1798, authorized a provisional army of the United States of ten thousand men, and in this he was appointed a brigadier-general by President Adams, July 17, 1798, and was confirmed by the Senate on July 19th. Of this army Washington was made commander-in-chief, and he, in effect, committed to General Davie the selection of the officers for that part of the troops which should be raised in this State. In the same year General Davie prepared a system of cavalry tactics which was adopted by the Legislature and ordered to be printed. A copy of this is now in our State Library.
General Davie came out of the war with the first military reputation in the State, and these successive appointments, so many years after, prove that North Carolina still turned to him as her greatest soldier.
Just at this time, singularly enough, when in the receipt of high honors, State and national, his election for the borough of Halifax was first endangered. The circumstance is thus stated in a private letter from that town, written in August, 1798: "The 'true whigs,' as they styled themselves, dined together under the oaks and toasted Mr. Jefferson. The other party, who were called 'aristocrats,' ate and drank in the house on entirely different principles. General Davie dined in the house with the 'aristocrats.' The 'true whigs' took offense at this and resolved to oppose his election, and it was only with much address that they were kept quiet." The writer adds: "If any person had had the impudence to dispute the election General Davie would certainly not have been returned. The rabble, which in all places is the majority, would have voted against him."
He took his seat when the Legislature met. By that body, under the then constitutional mode, he was, on joint ballot, elected Governor of the State on December 4th, 1798, over Benjamin Williams (afterwards Governor), and was inaugurated December 7th. Nothing of special note took place during his tenure of office. President Adams appointed an embassy to treat with the French Directory, consisting of Mr. Murray, then our Minister to Holland, Chief Justice Ellsworth, and Patrick Henry. The latter having declined on the ground of age and ill health, Governor Davie was appointed in his stead, June 1, 1799. On September 10th he resigned the office of Governor, and on the 22nd, left Halifax to join Mr. Ellsworth at Trenton. At his departure the people of Halifax and vicinity presented him with a complimentary address, which was written by a political adversary and signed by large numbers of the same party.
On November 3, 1799, Messrs. Ellsworth and Davie embarked in the frigate United States, from Newport, Rhode Island. Aware of the changes constantly taking place in the French government, they touched at Lisbon on the 27th of November. They left on the 21st of December, but being driven out of their course by a storm, they put into Corunna the 11th of January, 1800, which they left by land on the 27th, and on February 9th, at Burgos, in Spain, they met a courier from Talleyrand, the French Minister, inviting them, on the part of Bonaparte, who had become First Consul, to proceed to Paris, which place they reached on March 2d. These dates will show the vast difference which less than a century has made in the modes of traveling and the transmission of intelligence. On April 8th the Commissioners were received with marked politeness by the First Consul. Napoleon having left for Italy on the famous campaign of Marengo, the negotiations dragged till his return. On September 30, 1800, the treaty between the United States and France was signed by our Commissioners and by Joseph Bonaparte, Roederer, and Fleurieu, on the part of France. The conclusion of the treaty was celebrated with éclat at Morfontaine (the country-seat of Joseph Bonaparte), the First Consul and a brilliant staff attending. One who was then in Paris writes: "A man of his (Davie's) imposing appearance and dignified deportment could not fail to attract especial attention and remark wherever he went. I could not but remark that Bonaparte, in addressing the American legation at his levees, seemed for the time to forget that Governor Davie was second in the commission, his attention being more particularly directed to him." In the brilliant circles of the nascent empire of Napoleon he was distinguished by his elegance and his popular manners. His sojourn in Paris was very agreeable to him. He was an accomplished linguist and spoke French and Spanish fluently.
In the fall of that year Governor Davie returned directly home. It is significant that the very day after the treaty was signed, France, by the treaty of St. Ildefonso, reacquired Louisiana from Spain, which it so soon after sold to the United States.
On his return home Davie was solicited to become a candidate for Congress in 1801, but his private affairs, by reason of his long absence, required his attention, and he declined. Willis Alston, then a member of the same political party, was elected. In June of that year President Jefferson appointed Governor Davie head of a commission, with General Wilkinson and Benjamin Hawkins, to negotiate with the Creeks and other Indians for further cession of lands. This he declined for the same reason that he had refused an election to Congress. In 1802 he was appointed by President Jefferson a commissioner on the part of the United States in the treaty to be made between North Carolina and the Tuscaroras, most of whom had moved from this State, but had retained a valuable landed interest in Bertie county. He met the agents of the State and the chiefs of the Indians at Raleigh, and the treaty was signed December 4th, 1802, by virtue of which King Blount and the remainder of the tribe removed to New York in June, 1803. In the spring of 1803, Alston having gone over to the opposite political party, General Davie was again solicited by his friends to become a candidate for Congress. He accepted the nomination, but declined to make any canvass. He was charged with being an aristocrat and with being opposed to Mr. Jefferson, whose prestige was then all-powerful. He was defeated at the polls.
He had lost his wife not long after his return from France. This, together with his political defeat, determined him to withdraw altogether from public life. In November, 1805, he removed to an estate he possessed at Tivoli, near Landsford, in South Carolina, just across the line from Mecklenburg county in this State. Here he lived in dignified ease and leisure.
Many men, after the bufferings of a stormy or a busy life, have in like manner felt the need of rest before going hence. It was thus that the Emperor Charles V., at Juste, and Wolsey, who had "sounded all the depths and shoals of honor," at Leicester Abbey, had sought to put a space of contemplation between the active duties of life and the grave. Davie's country, however, did not forget him. During the second war with Great Britain, President Madison appointed him a major-general in the United States army, and he was confirmed by the Senate, March 2d, 1813. But "time steals fire from the mind as vigor from the limbs." Though not an old man, General Davie's early campaigns had told upon him. The sword which twenty-five years before had almost leapt of itself from the scabbard was now constrained to hang idly by his side, and he declined the appointment. General Harrison (afterwards President) was appointed in his stead and fought the battle of the Thames, October 5, 1813 in which Tecumseh was slain. The next year he in turn resigned and General Andrew Jackson was appointed to succeed him, and the battle of New Orleans followed on January 8, 1815.
General Davie's seat at Tivoli, on the Catawba, was the resort of many of the Revolutionary characters. In their journeys by private conveyance to Virginia or the North, the custom was to arrange to spend a day or two there with him, where he kept open house for his friends, and, sitting under an immense oak, from which there was a view of miles of the Catawba, they fought over the war together or discussed the workings of the new government and the Constitution they had established. This was all the more interesting, as much of his campaigning had taken place on and around this very spot. In this connection it is interesting to state that after his retirement to Tivoli he was much sought after in drawing wills. He drew some of the most famous wills in that State—indeed, it is said, all of them in that part in which he resided, not one of which, except his own, was ever assailed. In this respect he had the fortune of Sugden (Lord Saint Leonard's), Governor Tilden, and many other famous lawyers. The contest over Governor Davie's will has just been settled by a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, filed the 28th of March of this year (1892), in the case of Bedon vs. Davie, 144 U. S., 142, a very interesting case.
His correspondence and other materials for history must have been very large and very valuable. It was from his papers that the copy of the Mecklenburg Declaration of May 20th, 1775, was procured, which is known as the "Davie Copy." Unfortunately all his family papers and all the historical material which had been carefully preserved by him for publication at some future time were destroyed during Sherman's raid. The banks of the Catawba were said to have been strewn with them, and nothing of the collection now remains.
In retirement he displayed his accustomed public spirit by introducing improved methods of farming, and mainly at his instance a State Agricultural Society in South Carolina was formed, of which he was the first president. By his practice at the bar he had accumulated a large estate, which he dispensed with liberality and hospitality.
When the end came he met it with the firmness of a soldier. His sun of life went down in a cloudless sky. He passed away the 18th of November, 1820, in his sixty-fifth year.
"The hero lies still, while the dew-drooping willows,
Like fond weeping mourners, lean over his grave.
The lightnings may flash and the loud cannon rattle,
He heeds not, he hears not, he's free from all pain;
He sleeps his last sleep, he has fought his last battle,
No sound can awake him to glory again!"
He was buried at Waxhaw Church, Lancaster county, South Carolina, just across the Catawba river from his Tivoli plantation. The following modest and truthful inscription in his tomb is said to be from the pen of his friend, Governor Gaston, of South Carolina:
IN THIS GRAVE ARE DEPOSITED THE REMAINS OF
WILLIAM R. DAVIE,
THE SOLDIER, JURIST, STATESMAN, AND PATRIOT.
IN THE GLORIOUS WAR FOR
AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE
HE FOUGHT AMONG THE FOREMOST OF THE BRAVE.
AS AN ADVOCATE AT THE BAR,
HE WAS DILIGENT, SAGACIOUS, ZEALOUS,
INCORRUPTIBLY HONEST, OF COMMANDING ELOQUENCE.
IN THE LEGISLATIVE HALL
HE HAD NO SUPERIOR IN ENLARGED VISION
AND PROFOUND PLANS OF POLICY.
SINGLE IN HIS ENDS, VARIED IN HIS MEANS, INDEFATIGABLE
IN HIS EXERTIONS.
REPRESENTING HIS NATION IN AN IMPORTANT EMBASSY,
HE EVINCED HIS CHARACTERISTIC DEVOTION TO HER INTERESTS
AND MANIFESTED A PECULIAR FITNESS FOR DIPLOMACY.
POLISHED IN MANNERS, FIRM IN ACTION,
CANDID WITHOUT IMPRUDENCE, WISE ABOVE DECEIT.
A TRUE LOVER OF HIS COUNTRY,
ALWAYS PREFERRING THE PEOPLE'S GOOD TO THE PEOPLE'S FAVOR.
THOUGH HE DISDAINED TO FAWN FOR OFFICE,
HE FILLED MOST OF THE STATIONS TO WHICH AMBITION MIGHT ASPIRE,
AND DECLINING NO PUBLIC TRUST,
ENNOBLED WHATEVER HE ACCEPTED
BY TRUE DIGNITY AND TALENT,
WHICH HE BROUGHT INTO THE DISCHARGE OF ITS FUNCTIONS.
A GREAT MAN IN AN AGE OF GREAT MEN.
IN LIFE HE WAS ADMIRED AND BELOVED BY THE VIRTUOUS AND THE WISE,
IN DEATH HE HAS SILENCED CALUMNY AND CAUSED ENVY TO MOURN.
HE WAS BORN IN EDINBURGH,[1] 1756,
AND DIED IN SOUTH CAROLINA IN 1820.
[1] A mistake.
The foregoing is the main body and more strictly biographical part of an address delivered by Judge Clark, July 4th, 1892, at the celebration of the battle of Guilford Court House, on the battle-field.
Davie's life has been written more at length by Prof. Fordyce M. Hubbard and published in Sparks' American Biography; but I have used Judge Clark's sketch, and have slightly abbreviated it to suit the scope of my purpose.
I am reminded by Colonel Benehan Cameron, a member of the North Carolina Publishing Society, that the lovers of fine horses will be glad to have it noted here that General Davie was once the owner of the celebrated "Sir Archie"—the sire of American thoroughbreds—the Godolphin of the American turf. Like all great commanders, Davie was a fine judge of a horse; he readily paid five thousand dollars for "Sir Archie" as a colt, and only parted from him in deference to his friends, who urged him that such a price was very extravagant. Davie's judgment, however, was abundantly vindicated; for, many years afterwards, the commissioner of the court found that the horse had been worth to the estate of William Amis, his subsequent owner, the round sum of eighty thousand dollars.
Some idea may be gathered of the interest of the turfmen in this great horse—the great-grandsire of "Lexington"—from the fact that they are still disputing about the places of his birth and death.
The truth of the matter is, says Colonel Cameron, who takes interest in this controversy, he was born at Carter Hall, in Virginia, died in North Carolina, and was buried on the "Mowfield" plantation of Colonel Amis in Northampton county. The place of his burial is still pointed out by old people, for human nature is loath to allow the memory of great excellence to perish, even though exemplified in a dumb beast. It is said that some years ago his bones were taken up and carried to a museum in Philadelphia.
NATHANIEL MACON.
[NATHANIEL MACON.]
BY THOMAS H. BENTON.
Philosophic in his temperament and wise in his conduct, governed in all his actions by reason and judgment, and deeply imbued with Bible images, this virtuous and patriotic man (whom Mr. Jefferson called "the last of the Romans") had long fixed the term of his political existence at the age which the Psalmist assigns for the limit of manly life: "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away." He touched that age in 1828; and, true to all his purposes, he was true to his resolve in this, and executed it with the quietude and indifference of an ordinary transaction. He was in the middle of a third senatorial term, and in the full possession of all his faculties of mind and body; but his time for retirement had come—the time fixed by himself; but fixed upon conviction and for well considered reasons, and as inexorable to him as if fixed by fate. To the friends who urged him to remain to the end of his term, and who insisted that his mind was as good as ever, he would answer that it was good enough yet to let him know that he ought to quit office before his mind quit him, and that he did not mean to risk the fate of the Archbishop of Grenada. He resigned his senatorial honors as he had worn them—meekly, unostentatiously, in a letter of thanks and gratitude to the General Assembly of his State, and gave to repose at home that interval of thought and quietude which every wise man would wish to place between the turmoil of strife and the stillness of eternity. He had nine years of this tranquil enjoyment, and died without pain or suffering, June 29, 1837—characteristic in death as in life. It was eight o'clock in the morning when he felt that the supreme hour had come, had himself full-dressed with his habitual neatness, walked in the room and lay upon the bed, by turns conversing kindly with those who were about him, and showing by his conduct that he was ready and waiting, but hurrying nothing. It was the death of Socrates, all but the hemlock, and in that full faith of which the Grecian sage had only a glimmering. He directed his own grave on a point of sterile ridge (where nobody would wish to plough), and covered with a pile of rough flint-stone (which nobody would wish to build with), deeming this sterility and the uselessness of this rock the best security for that undisturbed repose of the bones which is still desirable to those who are indifferent to monuments.
In almost all strongly marked characters there is usually some incident or sign, in early life, which shows that character and reveals to the close observer the type of the future man. So it was with Mr. Macon. His firmness, his patriotism, his self-denial, his devotion to duty, and disregard of office and emolument; his modesty, integrity, self-control, and subjection of conduct to the convictions of reason and the dictates of virtue, all so steadily exemplified in a long life, were all shown from the early age of eighteen, in the miniature representation of individual action, and only confirmed in the subsequent public exhibitions of a long, beautiful, and exalted career.
He was of that age, and a student at Princeton College, at the time of the Declaration of American Independence. A small volunteer corps was then on the Delaware. He quit his books, joined it, served a term, returned to Princeton, and resumed his studies. In the year 1778 the Southern States had become a battle-field, big with their own fate, and possibly involving the issue of the war. British fleets and armies appeared there, strongly supported by the friends of the British cause; and the conquest of the South was fully counted upon. Help was needed in these States; and Mr. Macon, quitting college, returned to his native county in North Carolina, joined a militia company as a private, and marched to South Carolina—then the theatre of the enemy's operations. He had his share in all the hardships and disasters of that trying time; was at the fall of Fort Moultrie, surrender of Charleston, defeat at Camden, and in the rapid winter retreat across the upper part of North Carolina. He was in the camp on the left bank of the Yadkin when the sudden flooding of that river, in the brief interval between the crossing of the Americans and the coming up of the British, arrested the pursuit of Cornwallis and enabled Greene to allow some rest to his wearied and exhausted men. In this camp, destitute of everything and with gloomy prospects ahead, a summons came to Mr. Macon from the Governor of North Carolina, requiring him to attend a meeting of the General Assembly, of which he had been elected a member, without his knowledge, by the people of his county. He refused to go, and the incident being talked of through the camp, came to the knowledge of the general. Greene was a man himself and able to know a man. He felt at once that, if this report was true, this young soldier was no common character, and determined to verify the fact. He sent for the young man, inquired of him, heard the truth, and then asked for the reason of this unexpected conduct—this preference for a suffering camp over a comfortable seat in the General Assembly. Mr. Macon answered him, in his quaint and sententious way, that he had seen the faces of the British many times, but had never seen their backs, and meant to stay in the army till he did. Greene instantly saw the material the young man was made of and the handle by which he was to be worked. That material was patriotism, that handle a sense of duty; and laying hold of this handle, he quickly worked the young soldier into a different conclusion from the one that he had arrived at. He told him he could do more good as a member of the General Assembly than as a soldier; that in the army he was but one man, and in the General Assembly he might obtain many, with the supplies they needed, by showing the destitution and suffering which he had seen in the camp; and that it was his duty to go. This view of duty and usefulness was decisive. Mr. Macon obeyed the Governor's summons, and by his representations contributed to obtain the supplier which enabled Greene to turn back and face Cornwallis—fight him, cripple him, drive him further back than he had advanced (for Wilmington is south of Camden), disable him from remaining in the South (of which, up to the battle of Guilford, he believed himself to be master), and sending him to Yorktown, where he was captured and the war ended.
The philosophy of history has not yet laid hold of the battle of Guilford, its consequences and effects. That battle made the capture of Yorktown. The events are told in every history: their connection and dependence in none. It broke up the plan of Cornwallis in the South, and changed the plan of Washington in the North. Cornwallis was to subdue the Southern States, and was doing it until Greene turned upon him at Guilford. Washington was occupied with Sir Henry Clinton, then in New York with twelve thousand British troops. He had formed the heroic design to capture Clinton and his army (the French fleet cooperating) in that city, and thereby putting an end to the war. All his preparations were going on for that grand consummation when he got news of the battle of Guilford, the retreat of Cornwallis to Wilmington, his inability to keep the field in the South, and his return northward through the lower part of Virginia. He saw his advantage—an easier prey—and the same result, if successful. Cornwallis or Clinton, either of them captured, would put an end to the war. Washington changed his plan, deceived Clinton, moved rapidly upon the weaker general, captured him and his seven thousand men, and ended the Revolutionary war. The battle of Guilford put that capture into Washington's hands; and thus Guilford and Yorktown became connected; and the philosophy of history shows their dependence, and that the lesser event was father to the greater. The State of North Carolina gave General Greene twenty-five thousand acres of western land for that day's work, now worth a million of dollars; but the day itself has not yet obtained its proper place in American history.
The military life of Mr. Macon finished with his departure from the camp on the Yadkin, and his civil public life commenced on his arrival at the General Assembly, to which he had been summoned—that civil public life in which he was continued above forty years by free elections—Representative in Congress under Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, and long the Speaker of the House; Senator in Congress under Madison, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams; and often elected President of the Senate, and until voluntarily declining; twice refusing to be Postmaster-General under Jefferson; never taking any office but that to which he was elected; and resigning his last senatorial term when it was only half run. But a characteristic trait remains to be told of his military life—one that has neither precedent nor imitation (the example of Washington being out of the line of comparison): he refused to receive pay or to accept promotion, and served three years as a private through mere devotion to his country. And all the long length of his life was conformable to this patriotic and disinterested beginning: and thus the patriotic principles of the future Senator were all revealed in early life and in the obscurity of an unknown situation. Conformably to this beginning, he refused to take anything under the modern acts of Congress for the benefit of the surviving officers and soldiers of the Revolution, and voted against them all, saying they had suffered alike (citizens and military), and all been rewarded together in the establishment of independence; that the debt to the army had been settled by pay, by pensions to the wounded, by half-pay and land to the officers: that no military claim could be founded on depreciated continental paper money, from which the civil functionaries who performed service, and farmers who furnished supplies, suffered as much as any. On this principle he voted against the bill for Lafayette, against all the modern Revolutionary pensions and land bounty acts, and refused to take anything under them (for many were applicable to himself).
His political principles were deep-rooted, innate, subject to no change and to no machinery of party. He was democratic in the broad sense of the word, as signifying a capacity in the people for self-government; and in its party sense, as in favor of a plain and economical administration of the Federal Government, and against latitudinarian constructions of the Constitution. He was a party man, not in the hackneyed sense of the word, but only where principle was concerned; and was independent of party in all his social relations, and in all the proceedings which he disapproved. Of this he gave a strong instance in the case of General Hamilton, whom he deemed honorable and patriotic; and utterly refused to be concerned in a movement proposed to affect him personally, though politically opposed to him. He venerated Washington, admired the varied abilities and high qualities of Hamilton, and esteemed and respected the eminent Federal gentlemen of his time. He had affectionate regard for Madison and Monroe; but Mr. Jefferson was to him the full and perfect exemplification of the republican statesman. His almost fifty years of personal and political friendship and association with Mr. Randolph is historical, and indissolubly connects their names and memories in the recollection of their friends, and in history, if it does them justice. He was the early friend of General Jackson, and intimate with him when he was a Senator in Congress under the administration of the elder Mr. Adams; and was able to tell Congress and the world who he was when he began to astonish Europe and America by his victories. He was the kind observer of the conduct of young men, encouraging them by judicious commendation when he saw them making efforts to become useful and respectable, and never noting their faults. He was just in all things, and in that most difficult of all things, judging political opponents, to whom he would do no wrong, not merely in word or act, but in thought. He spoke frequently in Congress, always to the point, and briefly and wisely; and was one of those speakers whom Mr. Jefferson described Dr. Franklin to have been—a speaker of no pretension and great performance, who spoke more good sense while he was getting up out of his chair, and getting back into it, than many others did in long discourses; and he suffered no reporter to dress up a speech for him.
He was above the pursuit of wealth, but also above dependence and idleness; and, like an old Roman of the elder Cato's time, worked in the fields at the head of his slaves in the intervals of public duty, and did not cease this labor until advancing age rendered him unable to stand the hot sun of summer—the only season of the year when senatorial duties left him at liberty to follow the plough or handle the hoe. I think it was the summer of 1817—that was the last time (he told me) he tried it, and found the sun too hot for him—then sixty years of age, a Senator, and the refuser of all office. How often I think of him when I see at Washington robustious men going through a scene of supplication, tribulation, and degradation, to obtain office, which the salvation of the soul does not impose upon the vilest sinner. His fields, his flocks and his herds yielded an ample supply of domestic productions. A small crop of tobacco—three hogsheads when the season was good, two when bad—purchased the exotics which comfort and necessity required and which the farm did not produce. He was not rich, but rich enough to dispense hospitality and charity, to receive all guests in his house, from the President to the day-laborer—no other title being necessary to enter his house but that of an honest man; rich enough to bring up his family (two daughters) as accomplished ladies, and marry them to accomplished gentlemen—one to William Martin, Esq., and the other to William Eaton, Esq., of Roanoke, my early schoolfellow and friend for more than half a century; and, above all, he was rich enough to pay as he went and never to owe a dollar to any man.
He was steadfast in his friendships and would stake himself for a friend, but would violate no point of public duty to please or oblige him. Of this his relations with Mr. Randolph gave a signal instance. He drew a knife to defend him in the theatre at Philadelphia, when menaced by some naval and military officers for words spoken in debate and deemed offensive to their professions; yet, when Speaker of the House of Representatives, he displaced Mr. Randolph from the head of the Committee of Ways and Means because the chairman of that committee should be on terms of political friendship with the administration—which Mr. Randolph had then ceased to be with Mr. Jefferson's. He was above executive office, even the highest the President could give; but not above the lowest the people could give, taking that of justice of the peace in his county, and refusing that of Postmaster-General at Washington. He was opposed to nepotism, and to all quartering of his connections on the government; and in the course of his forty-years' service, with the absolute friendship of many administrations and the perfect respect of all, he never had office or contract for any of his blood. He refused to be a candidate for the Vice-Presidency, but took the place of Elector on the Van Buren ticket in 1836. He was against paper money and the paper system, and was accustomed to present the strong argument against both, in the simple phrase that this was a hard-money government, made by hard-money men, who had seen the evil of paper money and meant to save their posterity from it. He was opposed to security-ships, and held that no man ought to be entangled in the affairs of another, and that the interested parties alone—those who expected to find their profit in the transaction—should bear the bad consequences, as well as enjoy the good ones, of their own dealings. He never called any one "friend" without being so, and never expressed faith in the honor and integrity of a man without acting up to the declaration when the occasion required it. Thus, in constituting his friend, Weldon N. Edwards, Esq., his testamentary and sole executor, with large discretionary powers, he left all to his honor, and forbade him to account to any court or power for the manner in which he should execute that trust. This prohibition was so characteristic, and so honorable to both parties, and has been so well justified by the event, that I give it in his own words, as copied from his will, to-wit:
"I subjoin the following, in my own handwriting, as a codicil to this my last will and testament, and direct that it be a part thereof—that is to say, having full faith in the honor and integrity of my executor above named, he shall not be held to account to any court or power whatever for the discharge of the trust confided by me to him in and by the foregoing will."
And the event has proved that his judgment, as always, committed no mistake when it bestowed that confidence. He had his peculiarities—idiosyncrasies, if any one pleases—but they were born with him, suited to him, constituting a part of his character, and necessary to its completeness. He never subscribed to charities, but gave, and freely, according to his means—the left hand not knowing what the right hand did. He never subscribed for new books, giving as a reason to the soliciting agent that nobody purchased his tobacco until it was inspected, and he could buy no book until he had examined it. He would not attend the Congress Presidential Caucus of 1824, although it was sure to nominate his own choice (Mr. Crawford); and, when a reason was wanted, he gave it in the brief answer that he attended one once and they cheated him, and he had said that he would never attend another. He always wore the same dress—that is to say, a suit of the same material, cut, and color superfine navy blue—the whole suit from the same piece, and in the fashion of the time of the Revolution; and always replaced by a new one before it showed age. He was neat in his person, always wore fine linen, a fine cambric stock, a fine fur hat with a brim to it, fair top-boots—the boot outside the pantaloons, on the principle that leather was stronger than cloth. He would wear no man's honors, and when complimented on the report on the Panama mission, which, as Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, he had presented to the Senate, he would answer, "Yes, it is a good report; Tazewell wrote it." Left to himself, he was ready to take the last place and the lowest seat anywhere; but, in his representative capacity he would suffer no derogation of a constitutional or of a popular right. Thus, when Speaker of the House, and a place behind the President's Secretaries had been assigned him in some ceremony, he disregarded the programme, and, as the elect of the elect of all the people, took his place next after those whom the national vote had elected. And in 1803, on the question to change the form of voting for President and Vice-President, and the vote wanting one of the constitutional number of two-thirds, he resisted the rule of the House which restricted the Speaker's vote to a tie, or to a vote which would make a tie—claimed his constitutional right to vote as a member, obtained it, gave the vote, made the two-thirds, and carried the amendment.
And, what may well be deemed idiosyncratic in these days, he was punctual in the performance of all his minor duties to the Senate, attending its sittings to the moment, attending all the committees to which he was appointed, attending all the funerals of the members and officers of the Houses, always in time at every place where duty required him; and refusing double mileage for one traveling when elected from the House of Representatives to the Senate or summoned to an extra session. He was an habitual reader and student of the Bible, a pious and religious man, and of the "Baptist persuasion," as he was accustomed to express it.
I have a pleasure in recalling the recollections of this wise, just and good man, and in writing them down, not without profit, I hope, to rising generations, and at least as extending the knowledge of the kind of men to whom we are indebted for our independence and for the form of government which they established for us. Mr. Macon was the real Cincinnatus of America, the pride and ornament of my native State, my hereditary friend through four generations, my mentor in the first seven years of my senatorial, and the last seven of his senatorial life; and a feeling of gratitude and of filial affection mingles itself with this discharge of historical duty to his memory.
Mr. Benton called his sketch, which appears in his Thirty-years' View, "Retiring of Mr. Macon." It is well done, and interesting also because it is what one great man said of another. Yet I confess with some mortification that I have never seen it in print in North Carolina except in Benton's book.
To the foregoing admirable sketch by Benton I subjoin the following copious extracts from the Memoir of Nathaniel Macon by Weldon N. Edwards, published in July, 1862:
Nathaniel Macon was born on the 17th of December, 1758, in the county of Bute, of the then province of North Carolina, in the part of it now Warren, within a few miles of the present village of Warrenton, of poor and respectable parents. His great-grandfather was a Huguenot and came over from France to escape the persecutions consequent upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685. His father, Gideon H. Macon, was born in Virginia, whence he came to North Carolina. His mother was a native of North Carolina and a daughter of Edward Jones, of Shocco. He lost his father in early boyhood, and was left, with many brothers and sisters, in the care of his widowed mother, with such moderate means of support as to require the utmost care and industry to get on even tolerably in the world. He assisted in all the domestic offices and labors common with boys at that day. He acquired the rudiments of education in the neighborhood, at what was called an "old-field school." The application, progress, and good habits of the boy gave such promise of the future man that it was resolved to make every effort to give him a thorough education, and he was accordingly sent to Princeton College, New Jersey. His own inclinations eagerly seconded the hopeful purpose of his friends. While there, he prosecuted his studies with fond diligence, and sought all the avenues to useful knowledge with unflagging zeal. Nor did he relax his efforts in this respect after his return home, devoting to such books as were within his reach all the time he could spare from the ordinary duties of life; but he met with great difficulties, owing to the scarcity of books and his own poverty. In the latter part of his life he was often heard to say that his eyesight failed him sooner than it otherwise would have done, in consequence of his reading so much by firelight in his youth and early manhood, being then too poor to buy candles, his small patrimony having been exhausted during his minority in his support and education.
His love for North Carolina was sincere and thorough. In all that concerned her character, her institutions, her welfare, he felt an ever-wakeful solicitude. Although he received his collegiate education in a distant State, he ever after gave a decided preference to the seminaries of his own loved North Carolina. When his son-in-law, William Eaton, Sr., in the year 1823 was about to send two of his sons to Cambridge, he dissuaded him from it and advised him to send them to the University of North Carolina, because, among other reasons, they would there make acquaintances of many of the future men of the State, and contract friendships that would be of service to them in the part they were destined to act in the great drama of life.
He studied law, but never applied for a license to practice. There is now in possession of his grandson, William Eaton, Jr. (who shared his confidences and affections, and is a worthy representative of his principles and virtues), an old London-bound edition of Blackstone's Commentaries, which was used by him, and which is highly valued as a family relic. Like all persons of taste, he admired the classic elegance of this celebrated work, but regarded its author as too subservient to power, and wanting in manliness and independence. He considered Sir Edward Coke a much better friend to English liberty. * * * * * * * * *
Stability and consistency were strong points in Mr. Macon's character, formed upon his uncompromising adherence to principle and unswerving fidelity to duty. In his conversation he was easy and unaffected, in his manners and dress a decided model of republican simplicity, pretentious in nothing; all who approached him felt conscious of receiving the civility and respect demanded by the nicest sense of propriety. To these characteristics did he owe much of that firm hold upon the confidence and esteem of his countrymen which sustained him in the severe trials always to be met in the great battle of life. His was an enduring popularity; it never waned; it existed in as much vigor and freshness at the close of his life as at any former period; it lived after him, and it is the source of the highest gratification to his numerous friends and admirers that he is still often quoted as the bright exemplar of "the honest man and the wise and virtuous statesman." * * * * * * * * *
Though so long honored, and so many years the depositary of public honors and public trusts, Mr. Macon's was the rare merit of never having solicited any one to vote for him, or even intimated a wish that he should; and though no one shared more fully the confidence of a large circle of influential friends, his is the praise of never having solicited the slightest interest for his own preferment. Public honors sought him; he prized them only as the reward of faithful and virtuous performance, and regarded place as the means merely of bringing him in nearer contact with public duty. He made no popular harangues, seeking to avoid temptation of being betrayed into promises which he could not or would not fulfill, or into protestations which his heart would not sanction. He was never found rambling through his Congressional District, seeking to engineer himself into popular favor by means which self-respect and a just sense of the rights of others forbade. His rule was to attend punctually, once a year, if health permitted, the first court held in each county in his district after his return from Congress. There he met his constituents, there he received their greetings and heard their complaints; there, without simulation, gave a full account of his stewardship. In his intercourse with them he was easy, frank, and communicative, never withholding his opinion upon matters of public concernment, and always inviting them to the exercise of the utmost freedom of thought and of speech as the highest privilege of freemen and the surest guard of liberty. He never attended what, in his own characteristic language, he called "a man-dinner," regarding all such political pageants as having too much deceptious exterior, and as being too little calculated to better the popular heart or enlighten the popular mind. And when, upon his retirement from Congress, a large portion of his old constituents tendered him the compliment of a public dinner, he declined it in a brief note, saying that "he had never been at such a show, and that he had already received the most gratifying proofs of their good-will and esteem."
To shun all ostentatious display and the emptiness of pride was, with him, a principle; and to do good to his fellow-men, and to society, a rule of action which he scrupulously observed, always abstaining, in the employment of his faculties, and in the use of the abundant goods with which frugal industry had blessed him, from the gratification of any passion, the indulgence of which prudence forbade to others less favored by fortune—thus teaching, by both precept and example, the necessity of temperance, frugality and industry, as the surest and best foundation for contentment and plenty.
Of generous and unsuspicious nature, he never looked with uncharitableness on the actions of his fellow-men, but, with the strength and armor of a well-balanced mind, gave to them the calmest consideration and assigned to each its appropriate place in the scale of good and evil. Of philosophic mind, subdued temper, and great self-command, he met the incidents and accidents of life, not with stoic indifference, but with quiet submission—yielding nothing to passion, less to despondency, and looking to passing events as to a school for instruction, and deducing from them useful lessons to guide him in the pathway of life.
Of him it may be emphatically said, that he thought for himself, but reposing, with confidence, on his discriminating sense of justice and integrity of purpose, he gave to all subjects the fullest deliberation, and never jumped to conclusions in advance of his judgment. But when he had formed an opinion he adhered to it with a fearless and virtuous inflexibility which yielded to no importunity or persuasion. This, with some, subjected him to the charge of obstinacy.
"Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes."
* * * * * * * * * * *
He was chary of promises, but always punctual and exact in performance; would give his bond or note to no man, contract no debts, would buy nothing without paying for it. "Pay as you go" was a law to him which he inflexibly observed. He mastered all his wants and kept them in strict subjection to reason. He would lend money to a friend, but never take interest. He classed labor among the virtues, never called for help in anything he could do himself, labored often in his fields at the head of his slaves, during the intervals allowed from public duties, and topped all his own tobacco, when at home at the proper season, till the infirmities of age rendered him unable to stand the heat of the sun. He was fond of the chase and indulged in his favorite amusement, the pursuit of the fox and the deer, as long as he lived.
He spoke often in Congress—seldom long. His speeches were always to the point, strong, practical, sententious, often furnishing materials for the rhetorical displays of others. A most distinguished member once characterized his speeches as "dishes of the best material served up in the best manner." Unless prevented by bad health, he was always in his seat, voted on every question, was punctual in attendance upon committees, and ever ready at the call of duty.
He was fond of reading, but his favorite study was man. "He made choice of human nature for the object of his thoughts." To this predilection did he owe that consummate knowledge of the human character, and those practical lessons of wisdom (of so much consequence in the conduct of life) which gave him rank among the "wisest and best."
There is no surer test of merit than is found in the favorable opinions of the wise and the good, formed in the unrestricted freedom of social intercourse, when the seal of reserve is unloosed, and neither the pride of ostentation nor the dread of criticism or censure invites to concealment. Impressed with this truth, with a view to impart deeper interest to this sketch, by stamping the seal of verity upon the high and noble traits it portrays, recourse is had to the correspondence of eminent and distinguished statesmen, to whom all the avenues of knowledge were opened by close intimacy and long association in public life. Thomas Jefferson, whose monument is to be found in the Declaration of Independence, and in the enduring popular veneration which he so largely shared, but a few weeks after his first inauguration as President of the United States, in 1801, thus writes to Mr. Macon: "And in all cases when an office becomes vacant in your State, as the distance would occasion a great delay, were you to wait to be regularly consulted, I shall be much obliged to you to recommend the best characters. There is nothing I am so anxious about as making the best possible appointments, and no case in which the best men are more liable to mislead us by yielding to the solicitations of applicants. For this reason your own spontaneous recommendation would be desirable." Thus did Mr. Jefferson stake an important portion of his administrative duties upon his high estimate of Mr. Macon's integrity and wisdom. Again, in another letter to Mr. Macon, the 24th of March, 1826, Mr. Jefferson says: "My grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the bearer of this letter, on a journey to the North, will pass two or three days, perhaps, in Washington. I cannot permit him to do this without presenting him to a friend of so long standing, whom I consider as the strictest of our models of genuine republicanism. Let him be able to say, when you are gone, but not forgotten, that he had seen Nathaniel Macon, upon whose tomb will be written, 'Ultimus Romanorum!' I only ask you to give him a hearty shake of the hand, on my account, as well as his own, assuring you he merits it as a citizen, to which I will add my unceasing affection to yourself." * * * * * * *
Of Mr. Macon's claims to distinction, and to take rank on the roll of fame among the first of those who embellish the pages of American history, that sagacious statesman, John Randolph of Roanoke, whose perception of character was rarely at fault, in a letter to Mr. Macon, 14th December, 1828, thus speaks: "Your kind letter of the 10th is just now received. Many, many thanks for it. I am truly concerned at the causes which justly occasion you uneasiness; yet, when I reflect, I know of no man in the United States whom I would so soon be as yourself. There is no one who stands so fair in the public estimation; and, with the single exception of General Washington, there is not one of your times who will stand so fair with posterity as yourself. There are various sorts of reputations in the world. Some are obtained by cringing and puffing, some are actually begged for and given as an alms to importunity, some are carried by sheer impudence. No one has had a better opportunity of observing this than yourself; and there is no keener observer."
Upon such testimonials as these, from such high and pure sources, the reputation of this just and virtuous man may safely repose. They bespeak a name and a fame which dignify humanity, and invest his memory with a usefulness scarcely less to be prized than his services while living.
This sketch would be imperfect did it not notice the suggestive fact that in his latter years Mr. Macon had painful misgivings for the future of his country. 'Tis true he did not parade his opinions before the public gaze, preferring rather to encourage, not to alarm, the popular mind; but often when his thoughts were turned on what he deemed the political distempers and proclivities of the times, did he say to a friend in his own pregnant language: "I am afraid of all my labors have been for nothing"—obviously referring to his hardships in the tented field and his arduous and well-directed labors in the councils of his country, having devoted to these patriotic offices the greater part of a long life, commencing before manhood and ending with its close. At one period he reposed with entire confidence on the conviction that popular rights and public liberty were effectually secured by the Constitution of the United States, but this hopeful reliance failed him as early as 1824. In a debate, at that period, in the Senate of the United States, on the bill for a subscription to the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal, Mr. Macon said: "I rise with a full heart to take my last farewell of an old friend that I have always admired and loved—the Constitution of the United States. * * * In times of old, whenever any question touching the Constitution was brought forward, it was discussed day after day; that time is now passed. * * * Do a little now and a little then, and by and by you will render the government as powerful and unlimited as the British government was. We go on deciding these things without looking at the Constitution; and I suppose we will, in a few years, do as was done in England. We shall appoint a committee to hunt for precedents. My heart is full when I think of all this; and what is to become of us I cannot say. * * * My fears may be groundless; they may be nothing but the suggestions of a worn-out old man; but they are sincere, and I am alarmed for the safety of this government."
In vain did he then, as often before, raise his warning voice against the dangers of inroads upon the Constitution. And now that the direst calamities are upon us, resulting from its utter overthrow and its base prostitution by wicked men to the worst and most wicked purposes—how loudly do they proclaim the unerring sagacity of his gifted and far-reaching mind!
In person Macon was above the middle size, of florid but fair complexion, keen blue eyes, animated but kindly countenance, not very good-looking, but possessed of a symmetrical form and strength of body. His manners were simple and unostentatious, but not without sufficient dignity and firmness.
He was married early in life to Miss Hannah Plummer, of Warren, his own county.
A good story is told of the way he won her. He proposed in her presence to his rival that they should settle their claim to her hand by a game of cards. This was agreed to and Macon lost. He then raised up his hands, and with eyes fixed on the object of his affection, exclaimed: "Hannah, notwithstanding I have lost you fairly, love is superior to honesty: I cannot give you up." He won, and was married to her October 9th, 1783.
He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1791, and served continuously until 1815, when he was elected to the Senate. He was also a trustee of the University and a justice of the peace, both of which offices he gave up in 1828, at the time he resigned his seat in the Senate.
He was not a party man, but believed in true democracy. He complained often that some of the most vital parts of the Constitution had been construed or enacted away before he left Congress. He was a strict constructionist.
He presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1835, and took part in its deliberations upon the more important questions. With Gaston, he favored religious toleration, and made a speech against the clause in the old Constitution prohibiting all but those of the Protestant religion from holding any office of trust or profit in North Carolina.
He was averse to having his picture taken. This peculiarity grew on him, until in very old age he is said to have threatened a persistent picture-maker with libel if, as he had suggested, he should take his (Macon's) picture without his knowledge. Hardly a growth so strong and rugged without some gnarls and knots. The picture of him given in this book is from a portrait by Randall, and is pronounced a good likeness by Mr. J. A. Egerton (an old neighbor) and others who knew him intimately.
He paid his physician attending him in his last illness before he died, and directed the details of his burial.
The Life of Macon was written in 1840 by Edward R. Cotten; but in his book of two hundred and seventy-two pages, Cotten says comparatively little of Macon, and devotes most of his space to his own views on many subjects, Macon's opinions and acts sometimes furnishing the text. If the book was not entitled Life of Macon it would be more interesting. As indicating what a Warren county gentleman of much leisure and considerable reading, of good associates and ordinary capacity, was thinking about in 1840, the book ought to be preserved.
In order to give an idea of Macon's directness and simplicity, I offer an abbreviated report of one of his speeches made in the Senate, taken almost at random from the Abridgment of the Debates of Congress. The time was January 20, 1820. The question was the admission of Missouri, as well as Maine, into the Union. The protected States urged an amendment restricting slavery in Missouri before it should be admitted as a State, which amendment Mr. Macon opposed with his usual sound sense. The speech is imperfectly reported, but contains the germ of almost all that could have been said on the subject from his standpoint.
[SPEECH ON THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE.]
By Nathaniel Macon.
Mr. Macon, of North Carolina, said that he agreed in opinion with the gentleman who had declared this to be the greatest question ever debated in the Senate, and that it ought to be discussed in the calmest manner, without attempting to excite passion or prejudice. It was, however, to be regretted that while some of those who supported the motion were quite calm and cool they used a good many hard words, which had no tendency to continue the good humor which they recommended. He would endeavor to follow their advice, but must be pardoned for not following their example in the use of hard words. If, however, one should escape him, it would be contrary to his intention, and an act of indiscretion, not of design or premeditation. He hoped to examine the subject with great meekness and humility.
The debate had brought forcibly to his recollection the anxiety of the best patriots of the nation, when the present Constitution was examined by the State conventions which adopted it. The public mind was then greatly excited, and men in whom the people properly placed the utmost confidence were divided. There was then no whisper about disunion, for every one considered the Union as absolutely necessary for the good of all. But to-day we have been told by the honorable gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Lowrie) that he would prefer disunion rather than that slaves should be carried west of the Mississippi. Age, Mr. Macon said, may have rendered him timid, or education may have prevailed on him to attach greater blessings to the Union and the Constitution than they deserve. If this be the case, and it be an error, it was one he had no desire to be free from even after what he had heard in this debate. Get clear of this Union and it will be found vastly more difficult to unite again and form another. There were no parties in the country at the time it was formed, not even upon this question. The men who carried the nation through the Revolution were alive, and members of the Convention. Washington was at their head. Have we a Washington now? No. Is there one in the nation to fill his place? No. His like, if ever, has been rarely seen; nor can we, rationally, expect another in our day. Let us not speak of disunion as an easy thing. If ever it shall come, it will bring evils enough for the best men to encounter, and all good men, in every nation, lovers of freedom, will lament it. This Constitution is now as much an experiment as it was in the year 1789. It went into operation about the time the French Revolution commenced. The wars which grew out of that, and the difficulties and perplexities which we had to encounter, in consequence of the improper acts of belligerents, kept the people constantly attached to the government. It has stood well the trial of trouble and of war, and answered, in those times, the purposes for which it was formed and adopted; but now it is to be tried, in time of universal peace, whether a government within a government can sustain itself and preserve the liberty of the citizen. When we hear the exclamation "Disunion, rather than slaves be carried over the Mississippi," it ought not to be forgotten that the union of the people and the Confederation carried us through the Revolutionary war (a war of which no man can wish to see the like again in this country); but, as soon as peace came, the Confederation was found to be entirely unfit for it; so unfit that it was given up for the present Constitution. Destroy this Union, and what may be the condition of the country, no man, not the most sagacious, can even imagine. It will surely be much worse than it was before the Constitution was adopted; and that must be well remembered.
The proposed amendment is calculated to produce geographical parties, or why admonish us to discuss it with moderation and good temper? No man who has witnessed the effect of parties nearly geographical can wish to see them revived. Their acts formerly produced uneasiness, to say the least of them, to good men of every party. General Washington has warned us against them; but he is now dead, and his advice may soon be forgotten; form geographical parties and it will be discarded. Instead of forming sectional parties it would be more patriotic to do them away. But party and patriotism are not always the same. Town meetings and resolutions to inflame one part of the nation against another can never benefit the people, though they may gratify an individual. Leave the people to form their own opinions, without the aid of inflammatory speeches at town meetings, and they will always form them correctly. No town meeting was necessary to inform or inflame the public mind against the law giving members of Congress a salary instead of a daily allowance. The people formed their own opinions, disapproved it, and it was repealed. So they will always act if left to themselves. Let not parties formed at home for State purposes be brought into Congress to disturb and distract the Union. The general government hitherto has been productive enough of parties to satisfy those who most delight in them; so that they are not likely to be long wanted in it. Enough, and more than enough, has been produced by the difficulty of deciding what is and what is not within the limits of the Constitution. And, at this moment, we have difficulties enough to scuffle with without adding the present question. The dispute between the Bank of the United States and the State banks, the want of money by the government, the increase of taxes in the midst of increasing debts, and the dispute with Spain might serve for this session.
All the States now have equal rights and all are content. Deprive one of the least right which it now enjoys in common with the others, and it will no longer be content. So, if the Government had an unlimited power to put whatever conditions it pleased on the admission of a new State into the Union, a State admitted with a condition unknown to the others would not be content, no matter what might be the character of the condition, even though it was not to steal or commit murder. The difference in the terms of admission would not be acceptable. All the new States have the same rights that the old have, and why make Missouri an exception? She has not done a single act to deserve it, and why depart, in her case, from the great American principle that the people of each State can govern themselves? No reason has been assigned for the attempt at the departure, nor can one be assigned which would not apply as strongly to Louisiana. In every free country that ever existed the first violations of the principles of government were indirect and not well understood, or supported with great zeal by only a part of the people.
All the country west of the Mississippi was acquired by the same treaty, and on the same terms, and the people in every part have the same rights; but, if the amendment be adopted, Missouri will not have the same rights which Louisiana now enjoys. She has been admitted into the Union as a full sister, but her twin-sister, Missouri, under the proposed amendment, is to be admitted as a sister of the half-blood, or rather as a stepdaughter, under an unjust stepmother—for what? Because she, as well as Louisiana, performed well her part during the late war, and because she has never given the general government any trouble. The operation of the amendment is unjust as it relates to the people who have moved there from other States. They carried with them the property which was common in the States they left, secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States as well as by the treaty. There they purchased public lands and settled with their slaves, without a single objection to their owning and carrying them; but now, unfortunately for them, after they have been to the trouble and expense of building houses and clearing plantations in the new country it has been discovered that they had no right to carry their slaves with them and that they must now move and make room for those who are considered a better people. The country was bought with the money of all, slaveholders as well as those who are not; and every one knew when he bought land and moved with his property he had a perfect right to do so. And no one till last session ever said to the contrary or moved the restriction about slaves. The object now avowed is to pen up the slaves and their owners, and not permit them to cross the Mississippi to better their condition, where there is room enough for all and good range for man and beast. (And man is as much improved by moving and range as the beast of the field.) But what is still more unaccountable, a part of the land granted to the soldiers for their services in the late war was laid off in Missouri expressly for the soldiers who had enlisted in the Southern States, and would prefer living where they might have slaves. These too are now to leave the country of their choice and the land obtained by fighting the battles of the nation. Is this just in a government of law, supported only by opinion? for it is not pretended that it is a government of force. In the most alarming state of our affairs at home—and some of them have an ugly appearance—public opinion alone has corrected and changed that which seemed to threaten disorder and ill-will into order and good-will, except once, when the military was called out in 1791. Let this be compared to the case of individuals and it will not be found to be more favorable to the amendment than the real case just stated. A and B buy a tract of land large enough for both and for their children, and settle it, build houses and open plantations. When they have got it in good way to live comfortably, after ten or fifteen years, A thinks there is not too much for him and his children, and that they can, a long time hence, settle and cultivate the whole land. He then for the first time tells B that he has some property he does not like, and that he must get clear of it or move. B states the bargain. A answers that it is true he understood it so until of late, but that move he must or get clear of his property; for that property should not be in his way. The kind or quality of property cannot affect the question.
A wise legislature will always consider the character, condition and feelings of those to be legislated for. In a government and people like ours this is indispensable. The question now under debate demands this consideration. To a part of the United States, and that part which supports the amendment, it cannot be important except as it is made so by the circumstances of the time. In all questions like the present, in the United States, the strong may yield without disgrace even in their own opinion; the weak cannot. Hence the propriety of not attempting to impose this new condition on the people of Missouri. Their numbers are few compared to those of the whole United States. Let the United States then abandon this new scheme, let their magnanimity and not their power be felt by the people of Missouri. The attempt to govern too much has produced every civil war that ever has been, and probably every one that ever may be. All governments, no matter what their form, want more power and more authority, and all the governed want less government. Great Britain lost the United States by attempting to govern too much and to introduce new principles of governing. The United States would not submit to the attempt, and earnestly endeavored to persuade Great Britain to abandon it, but in vain. The United States would not yield, and the result is known to the world. The battle is not always to the strong nor the race to the swift. What reason have we to expect that we can persuade Missouri to yield to our opinion that did not apply as strongly to Great Britain? They are as near akin to us as we were to Great Britain. They are "flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone." But as to kin, when they fall out they do not make up sooner than other people. Great Britain attempted to govern us on a new principle, and we are attempting to establish a new principle for the people of Missouri on becoming a State. Great Britain attempted to collect a threepenny tax on the tea consumed in the then colonies, which were not represented in Parliament; and we to regulate what shall be property when Missouri becomes a State, when she has no vote in Congress. The great English principle of no tax without representation was violated in one case, and the great American principle, that people are able to govern themselves, will be violated if the amendment be adopted. Every free nation has had some principle in its government to which more importance was attached than to any other. The English principle was not to be taxed without the consent of the people given in Parliament; the American principle is the right of the people to form their State governments in their own way, provided they be not inconsistent with the Constitution of the United States. If the power in Congress to pass the restriction was expressly delegated, and so clear that no one could doubt it, in the present circumstances of the country, it would still not be wise or prudent to do so; especially against the consent of those who live in the territory. Their consent would be more important to the nation than a restriction which would not make one slave less, unless indeed they might be starved in the old States.
Let me not be understood as wishing or intending to create any alarm as to the intentions of the people of Missouri. I know nothing of them. But in examining the question, we ought not to forget our own history nor the character of those who settle on our frontiers. Your easy chimney-corner people, the timid and fearful, never move to them. They stay where there is no danger from an Indian or any wild beast. They have no desire to engage the panther or the bear. It is the bravest of the brave and the boldest of the bold who venture there. They go not to return.
The settling of Kentucky and Tennessee during the war of the Revolution proves in the most satisfactory manner what they can do and will undergo, and that they will not return. The few people who first settled there had to contend, without aid from the States, against all the Indians bordering on the United States except the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, and maintained their stations. The northern tribes, unaided by the southern, attacked the United States since the adoption of the Constitution and defeated two armies, and it required a third to conquer them. The frontier people in the Revolutionary war, as well as in the late, astonished everybody by their great exploits. Vermont, though claimed in the Revolutionary war by New Hampshire and New York, was not inferior to any of the States in her exertions to support independence.
The gentleman from Pennsylvania will pardon me for stating that that State had had some experience of its government managing a few people who would not yield obedience to its authority, though settled within its limits. They were obliged to compromise. I mean the Wyoming settlers. Again, since this government was in operation, a few people settled on the Indian lands: they were ordered to move from them, but did not obey: the military was sent to burn their cabins. The commanding officer told them his business, and very humanely advised them to move what property they had out of them. This they did, and their cabins were burnt. They waited till the troops marched, and very soon after built new cabins on the same places and to the same chimneys.
These facts are stated to show that a contest with a people who believe themselves right and one with a government are very different things. It would have been very gratifying to me to have been informed by some one of the gentlemen who support the amendment what is intended to be done if it be adopted, and the people of Missouri will not yield, but go on and form a State government (having the requisite number of inhabitants agreeably to the ordinance), as Tennessee did, and then apply for admission into the Union. Will she be admitted, as Tennessee was, on an equal footing with the original States, or will the application be rejected as the British government did the petitions of the old Congress?
If you do not admit her, and she will not return to the territorial government, will you declare the people rebels, as Great Britain did us, and then order them to be conquered for contending for the same rights that every State in the Union now enjoys? Will you for this, order the father to march against son and brother against brother? God forbid! It would be a terrible sight to behold these near relations plunging the bayonet into each other for no other reason than because the people of Missouri wish to be on equal footing with the people of Louisiana. When Territories they were equal. Those who remember the Revolution will not desire to see another civil war in our land. They know too well the wretched scenes it will produce. If you should declare them rebels and conquer them, will that attach them to the Union? No one can expect this. Then do not attempt to do that for them which was never done for others, and that which no State would consent for Congress to do for it. If the United States are to make conquests, do not let the first be at home. Nothing is to be got by American conquering American. Nor ought we to forget that we are not legislating for ourselves, and that the American character is not yielding when rights are concerned. But why depart from the old way, which has kept us in quiet, peace and harmony, every one living under his own vine and fig-tree and none to make him afraid? Why leave the road of experience, which has satisfied all and made all happy, to take this new way, of which we have no experience? This way leads to universal emancipation, of which we have no experience. The Eastern and Middle States furnish none. For years before these States emancipated their slaves they had but few, and of them a part were sold to the South. We have no more experience or book-learning on this subject than the French Convention had which turned the slaves of Santo Domingo loose. Nor can we foresee the consequences which may result from this new motion clearer than the Convention did in their decree.
A clause in the Declaration of Independence has been read declaring that "all men are created equal." Follow that sentiment, and does it not lead to universal emancipation? If it will justify putting an end to slavery in Missouri, will it not justify it in the old States? Suppose the plan followed and all the slaves turned loose, and the Union to continue, is it certain that the present Constitution would last long? The rich would in such circumstances want titles and hereditary distinctions, the negro food and raiment, and they would be as much or more degraded than in their present condition. The rich might hire these wretched people, and with them attempt to change the government by trampling on the rights of those who have only property enough to live comfortably. Opinions have greatly changed in some of the States in a few years. The time has been when those now called slaveholding States were thought to be the firm and steadfast friends of the people and of liberty. Then they were opposing an administration and a majority in Congress supported by a sedition law; then there was not a word heard, at least from one side, about those who actually did most toward changing the administration and the majority in Congress, and they were from slaveholding States. And now it would be curious to know how many members of Congress actually hold seats in consequence of their exertions at the time alluded to. Past services are always forgotten when new principles are to be introduced.
It is a fact that the people who move from the non-slaveholding to slaveholding States, when they became slaveholders, by purchase or marriage, expect more labor from them than those do who are brought up among them.
To the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Burrill) I tender my hearty thanks for his liberal and true statement of the treatment of slaves in the Southern States. His observations leave but little for me to add, which is this, that the slaves gained as much by independence as the free. The old ones are better taken care of than any poor in the world, and treated with decent respect by their white acquaintances. I sincerely wish that he and the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Roberts) would go home with me, or some other Southern member, and witness the meeting between slaves and owner and see the glad faces and hearty shaking of hands. This is well described in General Moultrie's Memoirs of the American Revolution, in which he gives the account of his reception by his slaves the first time he went home after he was exchanged. He was made prisoner at the surrender of Charleston. Could he (Mr. Macon) have procured the book in the city he intended to have read it to show the attachment of the slave to his owner. A fact shall be stated. An excellent friend of mine—he too, like the other characters which have been mentioned in the debate, was a Virginian—had business in England which made it necessary that he should go to that country himself or send a trusty agent. He could not go conveniently, so he sent one of his slaves, who remained there near a year. Upon his return he was asked by his owner how he liked the country, and if he would have liked to stay there? He replied that to oblige him he would have stayed; the country was the finest he ever saw; the land was worked as nice as a square in a garden; they had the finest horses and carriages, and houses, and everything; but that the white servants abused his country. What did they say? They said we owed them (the English) a heap of money, and would not pay; to which he added, their chief food was mutton; he saw very little bacon there. The owner can make more free in conversation with his slave and be more easy in his company than the rich man, where there is no slave, with the white hireling who drives his carriage. He has no expectation that the slave will, for the free and easy conversation, expect to call him fellow-citizen or act improperly.
Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia have been mentioned by Senators in this debate, and it has frequently been said that the two first had emancipated their slaves; from which an inference seems to be drawn that the other might have done so: emancipation to these gentlemen seems to be quite an easy task. It is so when there are but very few slaves; and would be more easy did not the color everywhere place the blacks in a degraded state. Where they enjoy the most freedom they are there degraded. The respectable whites do not permit them to associate with them or to be of their company when they have parties. But if it be so easy a task, how happens it that Virginia, which before the Revolution endeavored to put an end to the African slave-trade, has not attempted to emancipate? It will not be pretended that the great men of other States were superior or greater lovers of liberty than her Randolph, the first President of the first Congress, her Washington, her Henry, her Jefferson, or her Nelson. None of these ever made the attempt, and their voices ought to convince every one that it is not an easy task in that State. And is it not wonderful, that if the Declaration of Independence gave authority to emancipate, the patriots who made it never proposed any plan to carry it into execution? This motion, whatever is pretended by its friends, must lead to it. And is it not equally wonderful that if the Constitution gives the authority, this is the first attempt ever made, under either, by the Federal Government to exercise it? For if under either the power is given, it will apply as well to States as to Territories. If either intended to give it, is it not still more wonderful that it is not given in direct terms? The gentleman would not then be put to the trouble of searching the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution and the laws for a sentence or a word to form a few doubts. If the words of the Declaration of Independence be taken as part of the Constitution (and that they are no part of it is as true as that they are no part of any other book), what will be the condition of the Southern country when this shall be carried into execution? Take the most favorable view which can be supposed, that no convulsion ensue, that nothing like massacre or war of extermination take place as in Santo Domingo, but that whites and blacks do not marry and produce mulatto States, will not the whites be compelled to move and leave their lands and houses and abandon the country to the blacks? And are you willing to have black members of Congress? But if the scenes of Santo Domingo should be re-acted, would not the tomahawk and the scalping-knife be mercy?
ARCHIBALD D. MURPHY.
[ARCHIBALD D. MURPHY.]
BY WM. A. GRAHAM.
Archibald D. Murphy was, in the generation immediately preceding our own, one of the most eminent characters in North Carolina. In many of the attributes of a statesman and philosopher he excelled all his contemporaries in the State, and, in every department of exertion to which his mind was applied, he had few equals or seconds. As an advocate at the bar, a judge on the bench, a reporter of the decisions of the highest court of justice, a legislator of comprehensive intelligence, enterprise and patriotism, a literary man of classic taste, attainments and style in composition, his fame is a source of just pride to his friends and his country. But for the paucity of our information, and the pressure of time and circumstances in the preparation of this sketch, it would be a labor of love to review his earlier years and trace the development and progress of his career in youth. Neither materials nor leisure for this topic, however, are now at our command.
His father, Colonel Archibald Murphy, was a conspicuous citizen of the county of Caswell, and bore a part in the military service in the war of the Revolution, for which the citizens of that county, and especially of his vicinity, were greatly distinguished. The residence of his father was about two miles from Red House, in the congregation of Rev. Mr. McAden, a Presbyterian minister, whose son, the late Dr. John McAden, married the daughter of Colonel Murphy, by whom he left descendants who still survive. At this place, some seven miles from Milton, Archibald DeBow Murphy, the subject of our memoir, was born, we believe, in the year 1777. Of the other children of his parents there were two brothers and four sisters. His education, preparatory to admission into the infant University of the State at Chapel Hill, was received in the school of the Rev. Dr. David Caldwell, of Guilford county. Of the opportunities for education during his youth, Mr. Murphy himself informs us that before the University went into operation, in 1795, there were not more than three schools in the State in which the rudiments of a classical education could be acquired, and that the most prominent and useful of these was that of Dr. Caldwell; that the deficiency of books for literary instruction, except in the libraries of a few lawyers in the commercial towns, was still greater, and by way of illustration he relates that after completing his course of studies under Dr. Caldwell he spent nearly two years without finding any books to read except some old works on theological subjects, and that then chance threw in his way Voltaire's history of Charles XII. of Sweden, an odd volume of Roderick Random and an abridgment of Don Quixote. These constituted his whole stock of literary furniture when he entered college in 1796. When we remember that he afterwards became capable of writing like Goldsmith, and with an ease and rapidity that Goldsmith could not have equaled, we can but recall these reminiscences of earlier times and encourage the diligent student by his example. With a mind delighted by a consciousness of advancement in knowledge, and spirit of emulation, he profited greatly by three years of study in the University, and graduated with the highest distinction in 1799.
Such was the reputation acquired by him in this period that he was at once appointed Professor of Ancient Languages in his alma mater—a situation in which he continued the three succeeding years, and in which he matured that scholarship and taste for liberal studies which so much distinguished him among his professional brethren and the educated gentlemen of the State. His admission to the bar took place in 1802, after a course of professional reading so limited that the first judge to whom he applied (the signatures of two being then necessary for a license) refused to examine him; and (as he was accustomed to amuse his friends by relating) his success, only a few months later, in gaining admission to the practice in all the courts at once, was owing to the good fortune of bearing a letter from a friend, at the succeeding term of the Court of Conference, to one of the judges, a gentleman of proverbial benevolence and kindness, who conducted the examination, or interview, in his own chamber, and procured the signatures of his brethren without so much having been requested or expected—so little strictness was observed towards the few applicants then entering the profession.
But if he was allowed admission ex gratia, and without the requisite amount of learning, he was not long in supplying the deficiency. The powers of mind and eagerness in quest of knowledge which had been exhibited in his scholastic studies enabled him to make rapid progress in the law. His professional studies were directed by William Duffy, Esq., an eminent lawyer, then residing in Hillsborough, to whom he was ever afterwards affectionately attached, and to whose memory he paid a grateful tribute among his sketches of public and professional men of North Carolina, in an oration before the Literary Societies of the University in his latter years. Mr. Murphy advanced rapidly to the first rank of the advocates of his day, and notwithstanding his turning aside, to the indulgence of his tastes for general literature, his enlightened labors and bright career in legislation, his promotion and service on the bench for two years, his decayed health and irregular attendance on the courts in his latter days, he maintained his position in the public estimation, even to the end of his life. When it is remembered that among his competitors at one time or another, for more than a quarter of a century, were Archibald Henderson, Cameron, Norwood, Nash, Seawell, Yancey, Ruffin, Badger, Hawks, Mangum, and Morehead, it must be admitted that he was at a bar where the remark of Pinkney that "it was not a place where a false and fraudulent reputation for talents can be maintained," was fully justified. His practice for many years was not exceeded by that of any gentleman in the State, and his success corresponded with its extent. Both his examination of witnesses and argument of causes before juries on the circuit could not be excelled in skillfulness. He had a Quaker-like plainness of aspect, a scrupulous cleanness and neatness in an equally plain attire, an habitual politeness and a subdued simplicity of manner which at once won his way to the hearts of juries, while no Greek dialectician had a more ready and refined ingenuity or was more fertile in every resource of forensic gladiatorship. His manner of speaking was never declamatory or in any sense boisterous, but in the style of earnest and emphatic conversation, so simple and apparently undesigning that he seemed to the jury to be but interpreting their thoughts rather than enunciating his own, yet with a correctness and often elegance of diction which no severity of criticism could improve. A pattern of politeness in all his intercourse, public and private, he could torture an unwilling or corrupt witness into a full exposure of his falsehood, and often had him impaled before he was aware of his design; no advocate had at his command more effective raillery, wit, and ridicule to mingle with his arguments.
Many of his speeches in the nisi prius courts are still recollected by the profession and the people of middle age in the Fourth Circuit, and are spoken of with great admiration. One of the last of these in which, though he was then broken down by misfortune and enfeebled by disease, the fires of his genius and eloquence shone out in the lustre of his palmiest days, was made in the case of Burrow vs. Worth, in the Superior Court of Randolph in 1830 or 1831. It was an action for malicious prosecution against Dr. David Worth, a prominent physician, charging him with having falsely and maliciously caused the plaintiff, Burrow, to be presented for the murder of one Carter, of whose wife it was pretended he was the paramour. The plaintiff sought to show that not only was the accusation against him false, but that Worth was himself accessory to the murder which he alleged had been committed by the wife of Carter, by poison, which he (Worth) had furnished to her for that purpose, and he supported his complaint with a well-combined scheme of perjury and fraud which it required no ordinary skill and courage to baffle. His chief witness was a married woman who was found to be a member of a church, whose general character was vouched by her acquaintances to be good, and who deposed to a conversation between Worth and the wife of Carter, in which it was agreed that for a base motive he would provide her with arsenic with which she was to poison her husband. It was further shown, and this was true, that Worth had attended the deceased as a physician at the time of the alleged conspiracy against his life, so that the opportunity, at least, was not wanting. Such was the aspect worn by the case when this witness was tendered to Mr. Murphy, the defendant's counsel, for cross-examination. By a series of questions as to the time, place and circumstances, the furniture in the room in which the conversation was located, the relative positions of the parties and the witness, their previous acquaintanceship, the course of the dialogue between them, et cetera, he involved her in such a maze of inconsistencies, contradictions, and improbabilities as to expose the whole story as a base fabrication. The privilege of cross-examination is often abused, though there is a consistency in truth and incongruity in falsehood which, even in the case of the least resolute witnesses, rarely allows such abuse to do much harm. All perceived, in the case in question, that it was one of the great tests of truth which cannot safely be dispensed with in judicial proceedings. The evidence, as usually happens in such cases, was quite voluminous; we have but delineated its most prominent feature. Having for his client a personal friend, threatened to be victimized by a foul conspiracy for daring to perform one of the highest duties of a citizen, in bringing at least a supposed murderer to justice, Mr. Murphy in his defense, inspired by the theme, is said to have delivered a speech which has never been surpassed in the forensic displays of the State. Analysis, denunciation, wit, ridicule, pathos, invective were in turn poured forth with such telling effect that not only was the defendant triumphantly acquitted, but it would have been dangerous for the plaintiff had the question of his life or death been in the hands of the jury. The audience alternately convulsed with laughter, bathed in tears, or burning with indignation, were enraptured with his eloquence, and could not be restrained from demonstrations of applause.
Mr. Murphy delighted in the equity practice of his profession, and was accustomed to speak of this branch of our jurisprudence as the application of the rules of moral philosophy to the practical affairs of men. More of the pleadings in equity causes within the sphere and time of his practice will be found in his handwriting than in that of any other solicitor, and, with two or three exceptions, among those named above, he was by far the most adept as an equity pleader. He wrote with facility and accuracy, even amid the crowd of courts and confusion of clients, and his neat and peculiar chirography, to those a little accustomed to it, was as legible as print.
In the year 1818 he was elected by the General Assembly a judge of the Superior Courts, and rode the circuits in that capacity for two years, when he resigned and returned to the practice of his profession. Under a clause in the criminal law establishing the present Supreme Court system, passed that session, which authorized the Governor by special commission to detail a judge of the Superior Court to sit in stead of a judge of the Supreme Court, in causes where any one of their number had been of counsel or had an interest in the result, he was commissioned by the Governor for this service, and presided in the Supreme Court in several causes, in place of Judge Henderson, who had been recently elected from the bar. This provision of the law, being afterwards thought to be in conflict with that clause of the Constitution which requires the judges of the Supreme Court to be elected by the General Assembly, was repealed. In his office as a judge he well sustained his reputation for learning and ability, which had been so well established at the bar, and attracted the admiration of the profession and the people by the courtesy, patience, dignity and justice which characterized his administration of the laws. Before taking leave of his career as a lawyer it is proper to mention his tribute to his profession in three volumes of reports of the Supreme Court of the State, embracing the decisions of cases of interest from 1804 to 1819.
From 1812 to 1818, inclusive, Mr. Murphy was continually a Senator from the county of Orange in the General Assembly, and on this new theatre shone more conspicuously than he had done in his profession. He inaugurated a new era in the public policy of the State, and for many years exerted a greater influence in her counsels than any other citizen. Judging from the public documents which he has left behind him in advocacy of this policy, no man ever brought into our legislative halls a more ardent spirit of patriotism, a more thorough survey and comprehension of her situation and wants, or proposed bolder or more intelligent measures for her relief. Whether these measures failed from error in their conception or timidity in his contemporaries to meet and boldly sustain them, the historian must pronounce that his reports and other writings in regard to them are the noblest monuments of philosophic statesmanship to be found in our public archives since the days of the Revolution. From 1815 to 1823, either as chairman of a committee in the Legislature or of the Board of Internal Improvement, he annually prepared a report on the public policy of the State in relation to her improvement in the means of transportation, and in 1819 he published a memoir on improvements contemplated and the resources and finances of the State, dedicated to his friend John Branch, then her Governor; any one of which papers would have done honor to DeWitt Clinton or Calhoun, the champions of internal improvement in the State and Federal governments, respectively, during that period. Fully appreciating the condition of the world resulting from the general peace consequent on the battle of Waterloo and the overthrow of the first Napoleon (since which time there has been a greater advance in all the useful arts and diffusion of the comforts of life among mankind than in any five preceding centuries), he applied all the energies of his intrepid and well-furnished mind to the task of devising how his native State should most profit in this universal calm, confer the greatest good on the greatest number of her people, and resume her proper rank in the Union of which she was a member. His solution of this important problem he seems to have summed up in three propositions, namely: first by improving her means of transportation, in deepening her inlets from the ocean, opening her rivers for navigation, connecting these rivers by canals, and constructing turnpike or macadamized roads, so as to concentrate all her trade at two or three points within her own limits; second, by building up commercial cities of her own at these points, with a view to commercial independence of other States, to the better regulation and control of her currency and exchanges, and to cherish and stimulate a just State pride; third, by a system of education commensurate with the State's necessities, embracing primary schools, academies for instruction in the higher branches, the University by greatly enlarging its accommodations and course of instruction, and an asylum for the deaf and dumb. On this last subject of education he made a report to the General Assembly in 1817, comprehending these several topics, from which, since our limits will not permit us to recur to it again, we make one or two brief extracts as exhibitions of his style, his public spirit and his noble benevolence. The University then was, from causes which he details, in a state of extreme depression. He says: "When the pride of the State is awakening and an honorable ambition is cherished for her glory, an appeal is made to the patriotism and generous feelings of the Legislature in favor of an institution which in all civilized nations has been regarded as the nursery of moral greatness and the palladium of civil liberty. That people who cultivate the sciences and the arts with most success acquire a most enviable superiority over others. Learned men by their discussions and works give a lasting splendor to national character; and such is the enthusiasm of man that there is not an individual, however humble in life his lot may be, who does not feel proud to belong to a country honored with great men and magnificent institutions. It is due to North Carolina, it is due to the great men who first proposed the foundation of the University, to foster it with parental fondness, and to give to it an importance commensurate with the high destinies of the State." We may here remark that although much improvement has been made in the interim, yet even after the lapse of forty-odd years the outline of a system of studies in the University, which he therein proposed, has not been filled up. Of the necessity of public instruction for poor children he says: "Such has always been, and probably always will be, the allotment of human life, that the poor will form a large portion of every community; and it is the duty of those who manage the affairs of a State to extend relief to the unfortunate part of our species in every way in their power. Providence, in the impartial distribution of its favors, whilst it has denied to the poor many of the comforts of life, has generally bestowed upon them the blessing of intelligent children. Poverty is the school of genius; it is a school in which the active powers of man are developed and disciplined, and in which that moral courage is acquired which enables him to toil with difficulties, privations and want. From this school generally come forth those men who act the principal parts upon the theatre of life; men who impress a character upon the age in which they live. But it is a school which if left to itself runs wild; vice in all its depraved forms grows up in it. The State should take this school under her special charge, and nurturing the genius which there grows in rich luxuriance, give to it an honorable and profitable direction. Poor children are the peculiar property of the State, and by proper cultivation they will constitute a fund of intellectual and moral worth which will greatly subserve the public interest."
His greatest and most persevering exertions, however, were devoted to the subject of internal improvement. His reports and memoir on that and kindred topics were examined with high commendation in the year 1822, in an article in the North American Review, then under the editorial charge of the Hon. Edward Everett. It must be borne in mind that in that day the modern resource of the railroad for transportation at long distances had entered the contemplation of no one in Europe or America; sluices, canals and turnpike roads were the only improvements deemed to be practical. To effect these in the most approved methods, Mr. Hamilton Fulton, an engineer of much reputation, was brought into the service of the State from Europe, at a salary of twelve hundred pounds sterling ($6,000) per annum, who made surveys of all the harbors and rivers, and of many routes for roads in all sections of the State. The main features of the plan of Mr. Murphy, and to which he obtained the approbation of Mr. Fulton, after the improvement of inlets at Nag's Head (if practicable), Ocracoke, Beaufort, Swansborough, and Wilmington, consisted in opening for batteau navigation the rivers Roanoke, Tar, Neuse, Cape Fear, Yadkin, Catawba, Broad, and sundry tributaries, and by canals to join the Roanoke and Tar or Pamlico, and Neuse, so as to ship the productions of the country watered by each of them from Beaufort; and to unite by similar means the Cape Fear with Lumber River, and at a more northerly point with the Yadkin, and the Yadkin with the Catawba, so as to bring to the mouth of the Cape Fear the commerce of our whole watershed trending from the Blue Ridge, except that of Broad River (which was to be opened into South Carolina), and thus making commercial marts of Fayetteville and Wilmington. Places and sections more remote from these waters were to be supplied by roads. The boldness and comprehensiveness of this plan, providing, as it proposed to do, for the whole State, with the only facilities then known to science, must be seen by all. Whether it was practicable, and if so, at what cost, was a question for engineers. It was in all probability practicable at a cost not exceeding the amount which up to this time the State has invested in railroads, and if accomplished it would evidently have been a great advance beyond the cart and wagon, then the only means of transportation in use. Its very comprehensiveness, however, was probably the reason of its failure. To conciliate favor, inadequate appropriations for various parts of it in all sections of the State were made at once, and work was commenced under incompetent supervision, which resulted in failure. After a few years' trial the whole was abandoned, and the engineer, whose salary had at no time been less than twice that of the Governor of the State, was discharged. Its miscarriage is the less to be regretted since the iron rail and steam car, then undeveloped in the womb of time, would have superseded, if not supplanted, the most perfect works which it contemplated, so far as regards inland transportation at least. But the fame of its author as a patriot, statesman and sage should not be dimmed by mistakes or failures in the details of its execution or the advances made in the science of engineering in a subsequent age. The expenditures upon it from the State treasury, including the salaries of the principal engineer and assistants, did not exceed $50,000, and this was repaid tenfold in the topographical and statistical information which it elicited and caused to be published, and in the loyal and true North Carolina patriotism aroused by Mr. Murphy's discussions of the subject in the hearts of her people. We have recurred to this matter of expenditure with some care, for the reason that before the subject of internal improvement became popular in the State, it was the custom of its opponents to hold up Mr. Murphy's scheme of improvements as a kind of South Sea Bubble, from which the treasury had been well-nigh rendered bankrupt.
While immersed in endeavors to press forward those projects of improvement, and at the same time assiduously laboring in his profession, either as a judge on the bench or a lawyer at the bar, Mr. Murphy conceived the purpose of writing the history of his native State. He had studied her interests by every light of political economy and every record of the past within his reach, was personally acquainted with nearly every citizen of intelligence, and his talents, public spirit and engaging manners had rendered him a favorite among the surviving officers and soldiers of the Revolution. This latter circumstance had made him acquainted with the traditions of that period, and the great injustice by omission and commission which the State had suffered at the hands of the writers of history. He seems to have undertaken this task with the same motives of zealous patriotism which had inspired his legislative action. In a letter to General Joseph Graham, of Lincoln, dated July 20, 1821, he says:
"Your letter to Colonel Conner first suggested to me the plan of a work which I will execute if I live. It is a work on the history, soil, climate, legislation, civil institutions, literature, etc., of this State. Soon after reading your letter I turned my attention to the subject in the few hours which I could snatch from business, and was surprised to find what abundant materials could, with care and diligence, be collected—materials which if well disposed would furnish matter for one of the most interesting works that has been published in this country. We want such a work. We neither know ourselves nor are we known to others. Such a work, well executed, would add very much to our standing in the Union, and make our State respectable in our own eyes. Amidst the cares and anxieties which surround me, I cannot cherish a hope that I could do more than merely guide the labors of some man who would take up the work after me and prosecute it to perfection. I love North Carolina, and love her more because so much injustice has been done to her. We want pride. We want independence. We want magnanimity. Knowing nothing of ourselves, we have nothing in our history to which we can turn with conscious pride. We know nothing of our State and care nothing about it. We want some great stimulus to put us all in motion, and induce us to waive little jealousies, and combine in one general march to one great purpose."
His habits of labor, his readiness as a writer, and addiction to literary exercise as a pleasure, the philosophical cast of his mind, and above all, his sentiment of devotion to North Carolina, eminently fitted him for this enterprise; and he seems to have entered upon it with his characteristic industry and zeal. He gathered materials for the work from a great variety of sources, public and private, within and without the State. At his instance the Legislature, through the intervention of Mr. Gallatin, then the Minister of the United States in Great Britain, caused the office of the Board of Trade and Plantations and the State Paper Office in London to be explored, and an index of the documents therein, pertaining to our colonial history, to be furnished; literary men in other States, including Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson, readily seconded his efforts by supplying information sought of them; the families of deceased public men in the State, including those of Governor Burke, Governor Samuel Johnston, and Mr. Hooper, opened all their papers to his inspection; and many officers of the Revolution, then living, among whom were Colonel William Polk, General Lenoir, Major Donoho, of Caswell, General Graham, and divers others, undertook to contribute to him their personal reminiscences of the war. The memoranda of the gentleman last named, prepared in accordance with a request of Mr. Murphy, were given to the public in the pages of our University Magazine in the year 1856. Upon application of Mr. Murphy, by memorial, the General Assembly at the session of 1826 granted him authority to raise by lottery a sufficient sum for the publication of his contemplated history, the plan of which he set forth in detail. We regret that we have not at hand a copy of this memorial to lay before our readers the outline of the work as then prepared. It was more voluminous, and embraced a greater variety of topics than would have been preferred by the generality of readers, but its very magnitude showed the comprehension of his genius and the intrepidity of his mind. Beyond one or two chapters on the Indian tribes of the State, he appears to have done but little towards its composition, though his collection of materials, directing attention to the subject, and rescuing from oblivion much that was passing away, rendered the undertaking itself a great public benefit. Decayed health and a ruined fortune arrested him in mid-career, put a stop to his favorite enterprise, and clouded with poverty and adversity the evening of his days.
Among his public employments may be classed his mission to Tennessee as the representative of the University in 1822. The chief endowments of the University from the State consisted in escheats, or the estates of persons dying without heirs or next of kin, which passed to the State by a prerogative of sovereignty. In her deed of cession to the United States of her Tennessee territory, North Carolina had reserved the right to satisfy the claims of her citizens for military service in the army of the Revolution, by grants of land in the ceded territory, and where her soldiers had died leaving no heirs, or none who appeared and made claim within a limited period, their titles were considered as escheats, and vested by law in the Board of Trustees, and warrants were issued by the authorities of North Carolina, in the names of such soldiers for the benefit of the institution. The State of Tennessee took exception to these proceedings of North Carolina, alleging that they were in conflict with the provisions of the deed of cession, and, since her admission into the Union, with her sovereign rights as an independent State. The controversy became a serious one, and Mr. Murphy was sent to confer with the Legislature of Tennessee respecting it, in the year 1822. He was received with the courtesy due to his high character and the important interest he represented, and was heard upon the subject at the bar of the Legislature on two successive days. An adjustment of the dispute succeeded, by which a portion of the claims of the University were yielded for the benefit of a similar institution at Nashville, and the residue were confirmed. From the sales of the lands thus acquired have arisen a large portion of the investment in bank stocks, on which this institution is at present maintained.
As a literary character Mr. Murphy deserves to be classed among the first men of the State; and among those who, like himself, devoted their time laboriously to professional and public employments, he has had few superiors in literature in the nation. In the Latin, Greek, and French languages he attained such proficiency that till the close of his life he read the standard authors with pleasure and for amusement, and with the best of the English classics few were more familiar. To this, though self-taught, he added no inconsiderable attainments in science. As an epistolary writer he had no equal among his contemporaries, and in all his compositions there was an ease, simplicity, and at the same time an elegance of expression which showed him to be master of his native tongue. When it is known that a large part of his life was passed in taverns, on the circuit, where he was immersed in business—and when not so immersed, such was his proverbial urbanity and kindliness of nature that his rooms were the resort of all seeking advice and consultation, as well as of his circle of friends in every county, attracted by the charms of his conversation—his acquirements are a marvel to those less studious or less imbued with a true love of letters. His oration before the two Literary Societies of the University, in 1827, is a fair exponent of his style of writing, and also indicates his favorite studies, the subjects of his admiration, his enthusiastic American sentiment, his characteristic benevolence and kindness towards young men, and that unaffected modesty which was so remarkable a virtue in his character. Yet it is tinged with a vein of sadness, as if life for him was approaching its twilight and he was walking among the graves of the dead, some of them his comrades, whom he was soon to follow. Notwithstanding it was the first in the series of these discourses before the Societies, it has never been surpassed in appropriateness and interest by those of any of his successors, though among them have been many of the most distinguished scholars in the State. Its commendation by Chief Justice Marshall, in a letter to the author, published with the second edition, stamps its portraits of public characters with his approbation and renders it historical.
To the possession of genius in an eminent degree he united some of its infirmities. A sanguine temper, a daring confidence in results, a reliance on the apparent prosperity of the times, involved him in pecuniary obligations, many of them, perhaps, of a speculative character, which eventuated in disaster and swept away his estate. A little later came an attack of chronic rheumatism, from which he suffered much, and was often incapacitated for business during the last half-dozen years of his life. But during this season of adversity he struggled with a brave heart against the storms of fate. With a pallid cheek and disabled limbs he made his appearance in the courts, where, as we have seen, his gifted mind occasionally shone out in all its meridian splendor; and when this was not practicable, the hours of pain and misfortune were beguiled, if not solaced, by the pursuit of those noble studies which had been the delight of his leisure in the days of his prosperity.
He died in Hillsborough, then his place of residence, on February 3, 1832, and is interred in the graveyard of the town, a few feet from the door of the Presbyterian church, and nearly in front of it. No monument marks his resting-place. His sons, Dr. V. Moreau Murphy, of Macon, Mississippi, and Lieutenant P. U. Murphy, of the navy of the United States, are his only surviving children.
The work and worth and greatness of Murphy have never been duly appreciated even in his own State; and yet, when our history is written, if greatness is measured by the public benefit it confers, perhaps Macon, Murphy, and Vance will stand together as the three greatest men the State has yet produced.
In common-sense statecraft, in the choice and application of principles to existing conditions, and in the prophetic knowledge of the fruit they would bring forth after their kind, Macon was greatest. In scholarship and breadth of culture, combined with originality to conceive the most far-reaching policies of public welfare, Murphy was greatest. In the knowledge of men, in his boundless wealth of human sympathy, as the advocate and champion of the people's rights, Vance was greatest. But Graham had a far greater knowledge and grasp of the details of public business than any of them; and Badger, in his ability to rapidly acquire and assimilate law and learning, easily outstripped them all.
The sensibilities of Murphy were too refined for what is called success in practical politics. His love and enthusiasm for the public weal were so great that he forgot himself—but let us never forget him.
If Murphy had lived to write, as he intended, the history of North Carolina, he would have made all the world know and acknowledge that some of her people began the Revolution against British tyranny four years before the battle of Lexington. Perhaps he would have made it too plain for cavil that more than a year before Jefferson penned his immortal document, the spirit that resisted Tryon had formed a government at Charlotte independent of British rule, and that, in the strongest probability, the authors of that government had prepared the way for it by a declaration of independence.
Leavened by that spirit, the people of the whole State, through their convention at Halifax, on May 12, 1776, proposed, and on May 22 adopted, a resolution providing for "declaring independence" in concurrence with the "other colonies"—the first step taken in that direction by any of the colonies.
Perhaps his clear voice could have been heard above the conflicting jargon about the Regulators' War. The threadbare statement that the spirit of these people was so thoroughly crushed by Tryon's dress-parade campaign that they all took sides with the British in the Revolutionary war might have been thrashed a little thinner. Perhaps he would have found at King's Mountain some of the fifteen hundred families who fled west after the battle of Alamance.
Mrs. E. E. Moffitt of this city (a granddaughter of Judge Murphy's sister, Mrs. John Daniel) is my authority for the statement that Peter S. Ney—whom some believe to have been none other than the great Marshal Ney—was Murphy's amanuensis. It was a singular fate which drew these two peculiar men of genius together.
There is grim humor in his pathetic attempt to enkindle a love of history and education in this State by appealing to the love of gain. His other scheme, internal improvements, was equally chimerical; not because it lacked intrinsic merit, but because the times and people had changed. He had not calculated on the soporific effect of indirect taxes upon the unpreferred States. It was too early for any but a prophet to fully see that the States had dug the graves of their ultimate autonomy by adopting a Constitution which forbade them "to emit bills of credit"—a power of which they never stood in dire need until the General Government had monopolized all control of banking and currency.
No State, since the Union was formed, has, without Federal aid, direct or indirect, made any material progress in developing its resources!
ADDRESS AT THE UNIVERSITY.
BY ARCHIBALD D. MURPHY.
The Literary Societies of this institution have resolved that an address be delivered before them annually by some one of their members. This resolution, if carried into effect in the spirit in which it has been adopted, will be creditable to the Societies and favorable to the general literature of the State. It is now more than thirty years since these Societies were established, and all the alumni of this University have been members of one or the other of them. Upon these alumni, and upon others who shall go forth from this University, our hopes must chiefly rest for improvement in our literary character; and their zeal for such improvement cannot fail to be excited by being annually called together, and one of them selected to deliver a public discourse upon the progress and state of our literature, or some subject connected therewith. The Societies have conferred on me an unmerited honor by appointing me to deliver the first of these discourses. I accepted the appointment with pride, as it was an evidence of their esteem; yet with humility, from a conviction of my inability to meet public expectation—an inability of which I am conscious at all times, but particularly so after a painful and tedious illness.
Little that is interesting in the history of literature can be expected in the infancy of a colony planted on a continent three thousand miles distant from the mother-country, in the midst of a wilderness and surrounded by savages. Under such circumstances civilization declines, and manners and language degenerate. When the first patent was granted to Sir Walter Raleigh, in 1584, the English language had received considerable improvement. Spenser had published his Faerie Queene, Shakespeare his Plays, Sir Philip Sidney his Arcadia, Knolles his General History of the Turks, and our theology had been enriched by the eloquent writings of Hooker. This improvement was not confined to the learned; it had already extended itself to the common people, particularly in the towns and villages, and the language of the first colonists no doubt partook of this improvement. But these colonists were all adventurers; they joined in Sir Walter Raleigh's expedition only for the purpose of making fortunes, and their chief hope was that they would quickly find gold in abundance and return home to enjoy their wealth. This delusive hope continued for many years to beguile adventurers; who, not finding the treasure they came in quest of, became idle and profligate, and abandoned a country in which they had met with nothing but disappointment. Sir Walter Raleigh, after expending a large part of his estate in attempts to settle a colony, assigned to Thomas Smith, of London, and his associates, the privilege of trading to Virginia and of continuing the colony. Under the advice of Raleigh he directed his efforts to the waters of the Chesapeake, and there caused to be planted a colony which became permanent, and from which Virginia and Carolina were peopled. A new charter was granted to Thomas Smith and his associates in 1606, and enlarged in 1609. Their company continued with many vicissitudes of fortune until the year 1626, when it was dissolved. The history of the colony to the time of this dissolution was written by John Smith and also by Stith. They were contemporary with Lord Clarendon, who wrote the History of the Great Rebellion in England. Their style and manner of writing, and the public papers published by the President and Council of the Colony, during this period, evidence great improvement in our language. The chaos in which it lay in the early part of the reign of Elizabeth gradually gave way to the order and method which good sense introduced into every pursuit; the pedantry and conceits which disfigured our literature in the reign of James I. yielded to the influence of good taste. Sir Walter Raleigh published his History of the World, Lord Bacon his historical and philosophical works and moral essays, and our poetry was adorned by the writings of Milton, Dryden, Butler, and Otway. Shortly afterwards came Sir William Temple, Archbishop Tillotson and others, who gave facility and grace to composition. These were new beauties and pleased the nation more as they gave to style the charm of polished conversation.
Whilst the literary taste of the nation was thus improving, religious intolerance drove from England a great number of Quakers, Presbyterians and other sectarians, who sought refuge in the Virginia colony. They there soon met with the same persecution which had driven them from their native country. They were compelled to leave the colony; and Providence directing their course through the wilderness, they settled near Pasquotank and Perquimans, and formed the germ of the Carolina colony. Many of them were Quakers, and their descendants continue to occupy that district of country to this day.
In the year 1663, Charles II. granted the soil and seigniory of Carolina to eight Lords Proprietors, who, to encourage emigration, held out favorable terms. They promised to adventurers gratuities in land according to the number of their respective families, and the most perfect freedom in the exercise of religion. A civil government was established purely representative; a circumstance to which may be attributed, in a great degree, the republican feelings and opinions which soon characterized the colony, and which led to the plan of civil polity under which we now live. When the Lords Proprietors discovered that the colony was likely to become numerous and powerful they endeavored to restrain the civil and religious liberty which they had promised to emigrants: they established a new form of government, declaring their object to be "to make the government of the colony agree as nearly as possible with the monarchy of which it was a part, and to avoid erecting a numerous democracy." This plan of government was the joint work of Lord Ashley and the celebrated John Locke; and its chief aim was to appoint orders of nobility, establish a powerful aristocracy and check the progress of republican opinions and manners. A more ridiculous plan for the government of the colony could not have been devised. The people were accustomed to equality and self-government; a rank of nobility was odious to them, and they disregarded laws which they had not been consulted in making. The prosperity of the colony declined, public morals relaxed, the laws lost their energy, a general spirit of discontent grew up and ripened into rebellion; the Governors became corrupt, and the people idle and vicious. The attempt to give effect to the new plan of government entirely failed, and the Lords Proprietors abolished it as unsuited to the condition of the colony. Two factions then arose; one that wished to establish a high-toned prerogative government; the other consisted of High-churchmen, who gained the ascendency, and by their violence brought the government into contempt. Their object was to deprive all dissenters of the right of suffrage, to curtail their civil rights, and render their situation so oppressive as to compel them to leave the colony. A party of French Huguenots had emigrated to the colony to enjoy that liberty of conscience and of worship which was denied to them in their native country. These people, entitled by their sufferings no less than by their Protestantism to the friendship and hospitality of the colonists, were treated with a cruelty that disgraced the High-church party. Being aliens, they were incapable of holding lands until they were naturalized; and this party having the ascendency in the Assembly, not only refused to naturalize them, but declared their marriages by ministers not ordained by Episcopal Bishops illegal and their children illegitimate. The progress of this violent, persecuting spirit was checked by the wise and conciliating measures adopted by Governor Archdale. He assumed the government of the colony in 1695; he was a Quaker, and possessed in an eminent degree the philanthropy and command of temper for which this sect has been distinguished. He was one of the Proprietors of the province, and by the mere force of his character overawed the turbulent and restored good order. To this excellent man our ancestors are indebted for that tolerant provision in their militia law which we still retain as part of our code, for granting exemption to men who were restrained by religious principles from bearing arms.
The religious intolerance of the High-church party was exerted with new energy after the departure of Governor Archdale from the province. This party passed laws, which the Lords Proprietors ratified, to establish the Church of England and to disable dissenters from being members of the Assembly. This was in direct violation of the chartered rights of the colonists. The dissenters remonstrated to the House of Lords; and Queen Anne, upon the advice of that body, caused these laws to be repealed. But the High-church party, steady to their purpose, varied their mode of attack; the spirit of intolerance grew with the growth of the province; emigrations from the Virginia colony and the patronage of the Lords Proprietors gave to this party a decided majority in the Assembly; they levied a tax on each precinct for the support of a minister, and built churches. Protestant dissenters were only permitted to worship in public, and there to be subject to the rules and restrictions contained in the several acts of Parliament. Quakers were permitted to affirm instead of swearing; but they could not hold an office of profit or trust, serve as jurors, or give evidence by affirmation in any criminal case. This contest between the High-church party and the dissenters produced an hostility of feeling which time has softened, but which the lapse of more than a century has been insufficient to allay. This contest, however, promoted freedom of thought and inquiry among the people; it sharpened their understandings, and in a great degree supplied the place of books for instruction. At that time there were few books in the colony: the library of a common man consisted of a Bible and a spelling-book; the lawyers had a few books on law, and the ministers a few on theological subjects, and sometimes a few of the Greek and Roman classics: for they, particularly the Presbyterian ministers, were generally school-masters—and from them the poor young men of the colony, who wished to preach the gospel or plead law, received their humble education. The turbulent spirit of the colonists, their leaning towards republicanism and sectarianism, had induced the Lords Proprietors to forbid the establishment of printing presses in the colony; and Sir William Berkeley, who had the superintendence of this colony in 1661, gave thanks to heaven that there was not a printing office in any of the Southern provinces.
What improvement in literature could be expected among a people who were thus distracted by faction, destitute of books, and denied the use of the press? Notwithstanding all these discouragements and disadvantages, however, the literature of the colony evidently advanced. The public papers of that period are written in a conspicuous, nervous style, corresponding in force of expression, purity of language and perspicuity of arrangement, with similar writings in the reigns of Charles II., King William, and Queen Anne. The intelligence of the common people and the ability and learning of the men who managed the affairs of the colony in that period are matters of surprise and astonishment to any one acquainted with the disadvantages under which the colony labored. The Assembly and the courts of justice sat in private houses; the acts passed by the Assembly were not printed; they were read aloud to the people at the first court after they were passed; they were in force for only two years, and every biennial Assembly was under the necessity of reenacting all that were thought useful. There was no printing press in the colony before the year 1746, at which time the condition of the statute-book required a revisal, and the public interest called aloud for the printing of it. The learning and literature of the colony were confined to the lawyers and ministers of the gospel, most of whom were educated in England; and it was owing to this circumstance chiefly that the literature of the colony advanced so steadily with that of the mother-country.
The legislation of the colony began to assume form and system in the reign of Queen Anne; and in the year after her death, 1715, the Assembly passed sixty-six acts, most of which had been frequently reenacted before. Many of those acts remain in force to this day, and are monuments of the political wisdom and legal learning of that time. In style and composition they are equal to any part of our statute-book; they are the first statutes of the colony that have come down to our time.
In the year 1729 the Lords Proprietors, with the exception of Lord Granville, surrendered to the Crown their right to the soil and seigniory of North Carolina; and from that time the population and prosperity of the colony rapidly increased. But in a few years the great contest commenced between the prerogative of the Crown and the liberty of the colonial subject, which contest eventually terminated in the American Revolution. This contest gradually introduced into North Carolina, and into all the British colonies which took part in it, a style in composition which distinguishes this period from all others in English or American literature: a style founded upon and expressive of exalted feeling. Education embellished it and gave to it new beauties; but its force and impressive character were perceptible in the writings and speeches of ordinary men. What age or nation ever produced compositions superior to the addresses of the Continental Congress? When or where shall we find a parallel to the correspondence of General Washington and the general officers of the American army? The style of these addresses and of the correspondence is the style of high thought and of lofty, yet chastened feeling, and reminds the reader of the finest specimens of composition in Tacitus, and of the correspondence of Cicero and his friends after the death of Pompey.
There is something in the style and sentiment of the writings of this period which gives to them a magic charm, and seems to consecrate the subjects on which it is employed—a something connected with the finest perceptions of our nature. The reader is every moment conscious of it, yet knows not how to explain it. The high moral feeling and virtuous sympathy which characterized the American Revolution have given to it a hallowedness of character. It is fortunate for us that Chief Justice Marshall has written the history of this Revolution. Whatever may be the defects of this work, the history of our Revolution will never be so well written again: no work on that subject so well calculated to produce an useful effect upon its readers will ever appear. Marshall was a soldier of the Revolution, and possessed the finest genius; he was the personal friend of the Commander-in-chief; partook of all the feelings of the officers of the army; and he has transfused into his work that exalted sentiment which animated his compatriots in arms. This sentiment is strongly portrayed in the writings of the Marquis de Chastellux and Count Rochambeau, two French general officers in the American service, and in the correspondence of the Commander-in-chief and the American general officers. But it can never be embodied into an historical work by a man who did not feel it in all its force in the American camp. Literary elegance disappears before such moral beauty. There is no historical work in any language that can be read with so much advantage, such moral effect, by American youth, as Marshall's Life of George Washington. They should read it with diligence, and read it often. They will never rise from the perusal of it without feeling fresh incentives both to public and private virtue.
The progress of the style which marked the period of the American Revolution may be traced in North Carolina from the administration of Governor Dobbs. It had become the common style of the leading men of the colony before the meeting of the Continental Congress in 1774. The correspondence and public papers of Samuel Johnston and Joseph Hewes, of Edenton; of William Hooper and Archibald Maclaine, of Wilmington; of Richard Caswell, of Kinston; of Thomas Burke, of Hillsborough; of Francis and Abner Nash of New Bern, upon the great subjects which then engrossed the public attention, do honor to the literature of North Carolina at that time. They wrote upon matters of business—business which concerned the welfare of the nation; they wrote as they felt; and their compositions, coming warm from the heart, are free from affectation or pedantry, and equally free from that prolixity which is the vice of modern composition.
When these men disappeared, our literature, in a great degree, disappeared with them. The war had exhausted the resources of the State and ruined the fortunes of many individuals; we had no schools for the education of our youth; few of our citizens were able to send their sons to the Northern colleges or to Europe to be educated. Two individuals, who received their education during the war, were destined to keep alive the remnant of our literature and prepare the public mind for the establishment of this University. These were William R. Davie and Alfred Moore. Each of them had endeared himself to his country by taking an active part in the latter scenes of the war; and when public order was restored and the courts of justice were opened they appeared at the bar, where they quickly rose to eminence, and for many years shone like meteors in North Carolina. They adorned the courts in which they practiced, gave energy to the laws, and dignity to the administration of justice. Their genius was different and so was their eloquence. Davie took Lord Bolingbroke for his model, and Moore, Dean Swift; and each applied himself with so much diligence to the study of his model that literary men could easily recognize in the eloquence of Davie the lofty, flowing style of Bolingbroke; and in that of Moore, the plainness and precision of Swift —they roused the ambition of parents and their sons; they excited emulation among ingenuous youth; they depicted in glowing colors the necessity of establishing a public school or university in which the young men of the State could be educated. The General Assembly resolved to found an university. I was present in the House of Commons when Davie addressed that body upon the bill granting a loan of money to the trustees for erecting the buildings of this University; and although more than thirty years have since elapsed, I have the most vivid recollections of the greatness of his manner and the power of his eloquence upon that occasion. In the House of Commons he had no rival, and upon all great questions which came before that body his eloquence was irresistible. The genius and intellectual habits of Moore fitted him for the bar rather than a deliberative assembly. Public opinion was divided upon the question whether he or Davie excelled at the bar. Moore was a small man, neat in his dress and graceful in his manners; his voice was clear and sonorous, his perceptions quick, and his judgment almost intuitive; his style was chaste and his manner of speaking animated. Having adopted Swift for his model, his language was always plain. The clearness and energy of his mind enabled him, almost without an effort, to disentangle the most intricate subject and expose it in all its parts to the simplest understanding. He spoke with ease and with force, enlivened his discourses with flashes of wit, and where the subject required it, with all the bitterness of sarcasm. His speeches were short and impressive: when he sat down every one thought he had said everything that he ought to have said. Davie was in his person tall and elegant, graceful and commanding in his manners; his voice was mellow and adapted to the expression of every passion; his mind was comprehensive, yet slow in its operations, when compared with his great rival. His style was magnificent and flowing, and he had a greatness of manner in public speaking which suited his style and gave to his speeches an imposing effect. He was a laborious student, arranged his discourses with care, and, where the subject suited his genius, poured forth a torrent of eloquence that astonished and enraptured his audience. They looked upon him with delight, listened to his long, harmonious periods, caught his emotions, and indulged that ecstasy of feeling which fine speaking and powerful eloquence alone can produce. He is certainly to be ranked among the first orators, and his rival, Moore, among the first advocates, which the American nation has produced.
Whilst these two men were in the zenith of their glory, another man arose at the bar in North Carolina who surpassed them both in profoundness of legal learning, and, on many occasions, successfully contended with them for the palm of forensic eloquence. This was the late John Haywood. He had few advantages from nature; his person was indifferent, his voice harsh, his manners uncouth, his education limited. He was a stranger to the graces, and had few of the accomplishments of an orator. But he had a powerful and intrepid mind, which he cultivated by the most laborious study. The fame of Davie and Moore inspired his ambition, and he was tortured by a desire of entering the lists with these champions of the bar. He was conscious of his defects, and sought to gain the ascendency by superior legal learning. He came to the bar with confidence of high intellectual powers and profound knowledge of the law; and in a little time acquired a reputation that placed him at the head of his profession in this State and gave him rank among the ablest common-law lawyers in the Union.
Contemporary with Haywood were several gentlemen of the bar now living and several who are dead who have sustained the character of their profession for legal learning and general literature. Among the latter were William Duffy and Archibald Henderson. Duffy was the child of misfortune. Thrown upon the world without friends and without fortune, accident introduced him, in his early youth, to the acquaintance of John Haywood, Esq., the venerable Treasurer of this State, who, in the exercise of that benevolence for which his whole life has been conspicuous, gave him employment and enabled him to prosecute his studies and prepare himself for the bar. Duffy had an opportunity of witnessing the splendid displays of Davie and Moore and he profited by their example. He devoted a large portion of his time to polite literature, and acquired a more elegant style in composition than any of his contemporaries in North Carolina. He had a slight impediment in his speech, but by laborious perseverance he succeeded in regulating the tones and modulations of his voice in such a way that his impediment seemed to be an ornament to his delivery. He was one of the few men of our country who could read well; he studied the art of reading, and his friends will long remember the pleasure they have received from hearing him read. In his addresses at the bar he was always impressive, particularly upon topics connected with virtuous and benevolent feeling. He had a vigorous mind and feelings attuned to the finest emotions. I remember him with fond affection. He was my friend, my preceptor, my patron. He instructed me in the science of the law, in the art of managing causes at the bar, and in the still more difficult art of reading books to advantage. I wish it were in my power to render to his memory a more permanent honor than this passing tribute of respect and gratitude!
Henderson survived Duffy many years, and obtained the first standing at the bar of this State. He was devoted to his profession, and, upon the whole, was the most perfect model of a lawyer that our bar has produced. It was late in life before he turned his attention to polite literature, and he never acquired a good style in composition. Yet his style and manner of speaking at the bar were extremely impressive. I shall here speak of him as I did in a sketch of his character published shortly after his death. In him the faculties of a fine mind were blended with exalted moral feelings. Although he was at all times accessible, he seemed to live and move in an atmosphere of dignity. He exacted nothing by his manner, yet all approached him with reverence and left him with respect. The little quarrels and contests of men were beneath him; his was the region of high sentiment, and there he occupied a standing that was preeminent. The Constitution and jurisprudence of his country were his favorite studies. Profound reflection had generalized his ideas and given to his political and legal learning a scientific cast. No man better understood the theory of our government; no man more admired it, and no man gave more practical proofs of his admiration. The sublime idea that he lived under a government of laws was forever uppermost in his mind, and seemed to give a coloring to all his actions. As he acknowledged no dominion but that of the laws, he bowed with reverence to their authority, and taught obedience no less by his example than his precept. To the humble officer of justice he was respectful; the vices of private character were overlooked when the individual stood before him clothed with judicial authority. In the County Courts, where the justices of the peace administer the law, he was no less respectful in his deportment than in the highest tribunal of the State. He considered obedience to the laws to be the first duty of a citizen, and it seemed to be the great object of his professional life to inculcate a sense of this duty and give to the administration of the laws an impressive character. He was conscious of his high standing, and never committed himself nor put his reputation at risk. He always came to the trial of his causes well prepared; and if the state of his health or his want of preparation were likely to jeopardize his reputation in the management of his client's cause he would decline the trial until a more favorable time. The courts in which he practiced, and his brother lawyers, understood the delicacy of his feelings upon this point so well that they extended to him the indulgence he required, and a knowledge of this part of his character gave confidence to his clients and attracted crowds of people to hear his speeches. When he rose at the bar no one expected to hear common-place matter; no one looked for a cold, vapid, or phlegmatic harangue. His great excellence as a speaker consisted in an earnestness and dignity of manner and strong powers of reasoning. He seized one or two strong points, and these he illustrated and enforced. His exordium was short and appropriate; he quickly marched up to the great point in controversy, making no manœuvre as if he were afraid to approach it, or was desirous of attacking it by surprise. The confidence he exhibited of success he gradually imparted to his hearers; he grew more warm and earnest as he advanced in his argument, and seizing the critical moment for enforcing conviction, he brought forth his main argument, pressed it home and sat down. As he advanced in life he seemed more and more anxious that the laws should be interpreted and administered by the rules of common sense. He lost his reverence for artificial rules; he said the laws were made for the people, and they should be interpreted and administered by rules which the people understood, whenever it was practicable; that common sense belonged to the people in a higher degree than to learned men, and that to interpret laws by rules which were at variance with the rules of common sense necessarily lessened the respect of the people for the laws, and induced them to believe that courts and lawyers contrived mysteries in the science merely for the purpose of supporting the profession of lawyers. He said the rules of pedantry did not suit this country nor this age; that common sense had acquired dominion in politics and religion, and was gaining it in the law; that judges and lawyers should have the independence and magnanimity to strip off the veil of mystery from every branch of the science, and simplify and make it intelligible, as far as possible, to the understanding of the common people.
In all free States eloquence has preceded poetry, history, and philosophy. By opening the road to wealth and fame it subserves the purposes of avarice and ambition; society is led captive by its charms, and sometimes bound in fetters by its powers. In this State the bar and the General Assembly have been thus far the theatres for its display. Oratory is the branch of literature which we have cultivated with most success, and in which we have not been far behind any of our sister States.
Not long after Davie left the House of Commons there appeared in that body another man whose genius we have all admired and whose misfortune we all deplore. I hope I may be permitted to speak of him, although he be still living. Providence has withdrawn him from public view, and he has been followed by the regrets and tears of his countrymen. I speak of John Stanly, Esq. For more than twenty years he has been the ornament of the bar and of the House of Commons. Small in stature, neat in dress, graceful in manner, with a voice well modulated, and a mind intrepid, disciplined and rich in knowledge, he became the most accomplished orator of the State. His style of eloquence was more varied than that of any of his predecessors. Such were the versatility of his genius and the extent of his acquirements that he could at pleasure adopt the lofty, flowing style of Davie, or the plain, simple, energetic style of Moore. He could rouse the noble passions, or amuse by his wit and pleasantry. He excelled in appropriate pauses, emphasis and gesticulation. No speaker was ever more fortunate in accommodating his manner to his subject; and on all important subjects he had a greatness of manner which small men seldom acquire. He resembled Moore in the quickness of his perceptions and the intuition of his judgment. His talents and knowledge were always at command, and he could bring them to bear with force and effect as occasion required, without any preparation. His mind was so well disciplined and so happily toned that it was always ready for action. He possessed the rare talent of conversing well; his conversation was the perpetual flow of sober thought or pleasant humor, and was heightened in its effect by his happy style and gracefulness of manner. He was among the few orators of this or any country, whose style and manner in conversation equaled his style and manner in public speaking.
Few of the men whom I have named had the advantage of a liberal education; they rose to eminence by the force of genius and a diligent application to their studies. The number of our literary men has been small, when compared with our population; but this is not a matter of surprise when we look to the condition of the State since the close of the Revolutionary war. When the war ended the people were in poverty, society in disorder, morals and manners almost prostrate. Order was to be restored to society and energy to the laws before industry could repair the fortunes of the people; schools were to be established for the education of youth and congregations formed for preaching the gospel before the public morals could be amended. Time was required to effect these objects; and the most important of them, the education of youth, was the longest neglected. Before this University went into operation, in 1795, there were not more than three schools in the State in which the rudiments of a classical education could be acquired. The most prominent and useful of these schools was kept by Dr. David Caldwell, of Guilford county. He instituted it shortly after the close of the war and continued it for more than thirty years. The usefulness of Dr. Caldwell to the literature of North Carolina will never be sufficiently appreciated; but the opportunities of instruction in his school were very limited. There was no library attached to it; his students were supplied with a few of the Greek and Latin classics, Euclid's Elements of Mathematics, and Martin's Natural Philosophy. Moral philosophy was taught from a syllabus of lectures delivered by Dr. Witherspoon at Princeton College. The students had no books on history or miscellaneous literature. There were indeed very few in the State, except in the libraries of lawyers who lived in the commercial towns. I well remember that after completing my course of studies under Dr. Caldwell, I spent nearly two years without finding any books to read except some old works on theological subjects. At length, I accidentally met with Voltaire's history of Charles XII. of Sweden, an odd volume of Smollett's Roderick Random, and an abridgment of Don Quixote. These books gave me a taste for reading, which I had no opportunity of gratifying until I became a student in this University in the year 1796. Few of Dr. Caldwell's students had better opportunities for getting books than myself; and with these slender opportunities of instruction, it is not surprising that so few became eminent in the liberal professions. At this day, when libraries are established in all our towns, when every professional man and every respectable gentleman has a collection of books, it is difficult to conceive the inconveniences under which young men labored thirty or forty years ago.
But has the number of our distinguished men increased as the facilities of instruction have increased? They certainly have not. Of the number of young men who have been educated at this University, how few have risen to eminence in any branch of literature! Their number bears no proportion to the increased means of instruction which they have had. To what causes is this to be attributed? The causes are numerous, but we will notice only a few of the most operative. In the first place the plan of education in all our schools, particularly in our preparatory schools, is radically defective; too much time is spent upon syntax and etymology; the time of the student is wasted, and his genius frittered away upon words instead of being developed and polished by the spirit of the writer. Instead of directing the study of the Greek and Latin classics to the development of his faculties and the improvement of his taste, his time is taken up in nice attention to words, arrangement of clauses and construction of periods. With his mind thus injured, he enters upon the study of the physical and moral sciences, and long accustomed to frivolous investigation, he never rises to the dignity of those sciences nor understands the methods by which their truths are illustrated. In the next place, too many studies are crowded upon the student at once; studies which have no analogy or connection. In the third place, the time allotted for completing a course of scientific study is too short; the student's mind flags under the severe labors imposed upon it. The elasticity of the mind ought never to be weakened; if it be, the student thenceforward hobbles through his course, and is often broken down before he gets to the end of it. In the fourth place, too many studies are pursued, and none are pursued well; the student acquires a smattering of languages and sciences, and understands none of them. This encyclopedical kind of learning is destructive of the powers of the mind, and unfits it for deep and severe investigation. In the last place, the multitude of books is a serious injury to most students. They despair of reading many of them, and content themselves with reading reviews of the most celebrated. At length the valuable books are placed away carefully in a library, and newspapers, pamphlets and other fugitive productions take up all their time for reading. There is nothing in this course which teaches youth how to think and investigate. The great object of education is to give to the mind activity and energy: this object can never be attained by a course of studies which distracts its attention and impairs its elasticity.
The evils which I have mentioned are not confined to the schools of North Carolina; they exist in nearly all the schools of the Union. Massachusetts has taken the lead in correcting them and introducing methods of instruction founded upon the philosophy of the mind. The state of science and literature among her people shows the happy effect of these changes. The Trustees of this University have resolved to make similar changes, to remodel the plan of studies, and introduce new methods of instruction. But whatever changes may be made in our plan of education, young men, who are desirous of being either useful or eminent in active life, should recollect this truth, that the education received at a college or university is intended only as a preparation of the mind for receiving the rich stores of science and general knowledge which subsequent industry is to acquire. He who depends upon this preparation alone will be like a farmer who ploughs his land and sows no grain. The period of useful study commences when a young man finishes his collegiate course. At that time his faculties have acquired some maturity from age and some discipline from exercise; and if he enter with diligence upon the study of a branch of science, and confines his attention to that branch, he soon becomes astonished at his progress and at the increase of his intellectual powers. Let him avoid reading or even looking into a variety of books. Nine-tenths of them are worse than useless; the reading of them produces a positive injury to the mind; they not only distract his attention, but blunt his faculties. Let him read only works of men of genius—read but few books, and read them often. Take two young men of equal minds and similar genius; put into the hands of one Shakespeare's Plays, Milton's Paradise Lost, Don Quixote and Gil Blas; and into the hands of the other all the hundred volumes of dullness which fill our libraries; and at the end of twelve months mark the difference between them. The first will be like the high-spirited steed that is ready for the course; the other will be encumbered with a load of useless ideas, his faculties weakened, and the bright tints of his genius obscured.
The next great object, after the improvement of the intellectual faculties, is the forming of a moral character. This is by far the most difficult part of education: it depends upon the doctrines of morals and the philosophy of the passions and feelings. Little success has heretofore attended it, either in the schools of Europe or this country. The moral character of youth has been generally formed by their parents, by friends who gained their confidence, or by their pursuits in active life. The morality thus taught is purely practical; it has reference to no abstract truths; it looks only to the passions and feelings of our nature under the variety of circumstances in which we may be placed in society, and the duties which thence result. The science of ethics taught in our schools is a cold, speculative science; and our youth are misled by substituting this for practical morality. It is to be regretted that we have no work on moral philosophy which treats of ethics purely as a practical science; and it is remarkable that, notwithstanding the great improvement that has been made within the last century in metaphysical and physical science, and the liberal turn of philosophical inquiry which has been introduced, the science of ethics remains stationary. The question, "What is the foundation of moral obligation?" is not more satisfactorily answered now than it was two centuries ago. And until the principles of ethics shall be disentangled from the speculative doctrines of theology, interwoven by the schoolmen and monks in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and those principles be traced to the constitution and condition of man, having for their object the development of his social rights and duties, we shall have to regret that the most sublime of all the sciences remains imperfect. It seems to be reserved for the philosophers of Scotland to trace those principles and make this development; and we wait with impatience for the promised work of Dugald Stewart on this subject. But any system of morals which we may study as a science will never have much effect in forming our moral character. We must look to our constitutional temperament, to our passions and feelings as influenced by external circumstances; and for rules of conduct we must look to the sermons and parables of Christ: they are worth more than all the books which have been written on morals; they explain and at the same time apply that pure morality which is founded upon virtuous feeling.
Young Gentlemen of the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies:
As you have conferred on me the honor of delivering this first public address under your joint resolution, I hope you will permit me before I sit down to say a few words upon a subject connected with the usefulness of your Societies and the interests of the University. I speak to you in the spirit of fellowship, and a long acquaintance with your Societies enables me to speak with confidence. I well know the influence which your Societies can exercise in maintaining the good order of this Institution, in sustaining the authority of the faculty, in suppressing vice and promoting a gentlemanly deportment among the students. Every respectable student of proper age is a member of one or the other of your Societies, and feels more mortification at incurring its censure than that of the faculty. This feeling is the fulcrum on which the power of the Societies ought to be exerted. Let me entreat you then, more particularly as you propose hereafter to occupy a higher ground than you have heretofore done, to exert that power in sustaining the discipline of the University, in encouraging industry and good manners, and in suppressing vice. The united efforts of the two Societies can do more in effecting these objects than the authority of the Trustees or faculty. A high responsibility rests upon you; your honor and the welfare of the University demand its faithful discharge.
In a short time you will complete your course of studies at this place and bid adieu to these halls, to act your parts upon the great theatre of active life. Your friends and your country have much to hope, much to expect from you. Devote yourselves with diligence to your studies. When you shall have finished your course here, remember that your education is just commencing; I mean that education which is to fit you for acting a distinguished part upon the theatre of your country. The pursuits and the honors of literature lie in the same road with those of ambition; and he who aspires to fame or distinction must rest his hopes upon the improvement of his intellect. Julius Caesar was one of the most accomplished scholars of Rome, and Napoleon Bonaparte of France. In our own country we lately have seen one of our most eminent scholars raised to the chief magistracy of the nation, and the greatest orator of the age made his prime minister. I speak not here of politics: literature has no factions; good taste no parties. Remember, my young friends, that most of the men who thus far have shed a lustre upon our country had not one-half the opportunities of education which you have enjoyed. They had to rely upon their genius and industry. Genius delights to toil with difficulties: they discipline its powers and animate its courage; it contemns the honors which can be obtained without labor, and prizes only those which are purchased by noble exertion. Wish not, therefore, for a life of ease; but go forth with stout hearts and determined resolution. As yet you little know what labor and perseverance can effect, nor the exalted pleasures which honorable exertion gives to an ingenious mind. May God take charge of you; lead you in the ways of uprightness and honor; make you all useful men, and ornaments to your country!