Nullification, Secession, Webster's Argument, and the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions / Considered in Reference to the Constitution and Historically

by Caleb William Loring

Lord Wolseley, in his article in Macmillan’s Magazine on the life of Lee, extolling him as the greatest general of his age and the most perfect man,[2] informs us that each State possessed the right both historically and legally under the Constitution to leave the Union at its will. Apparently he did not know that January 23, 1861, Lee wrote to his son: “Secession is nothing but revolution.” “It” (the Constitution) “is intended for perpetual union, so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government not a compact, and which can only be dissolved by revolution or the assent of all the people in convention assembled. It is idle to talk of secession.”[2]

Possibly in time the North may be of the same opinion as to Lee’s transcendent ability as a general. No one doubts now his great soldierly attainments and the worth of his private character, but for the sake of the existence of our nation, may it never believe he fought for the right.

Very generally and very fortunately for the country our Southern fellow-citizens, except their historians, some of their politicians, and a few whom they call unreconstructed rebels, concede that the right of secession has been put to the arbitrament of war and decided against the South forever. Now they tell us that none are more loyal and will march more willingly under the Stars and Stripes than those who fought so bravely to the bitter end under the flag of the Confederacy. Even Jefferson Davis, in the conclusion of his history, concedes that the result of the war has shown that secession is impracticable. It is difficult, however, to understand how might has made right, and the conquest of the richer and more populous North over the weaker South has settled forever the right or wrong of the matter. The North does not believe in the sneering maxim of Frederick the Great, that the Almighty is on the side of the heavier battalions.

Nor need we go to the South or to our English military critics for this opinion as to the Northern right. In a recent short life of Webster written for the American Statesmen series, a distinguished Republican politician and historian, Henry Cabot Lodge, in criticising the greatest speech of our greatest orator, Webster’s in reply to Hayne, on South Carolina’s nullification doctrines, makes these astounding statements:

“That it was probably necessary, at all events Mr. Webster felt it to be so, to argue that the Constitution at the outset was not a compact between States, but a national instrument.... When the Constitution was adopted, it is safe to say that there was not a man in the country, from Washington and Hamilton on the one side, to George Clinton and George Mason on the other, who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment entered upon by the States, and from which each and every State had the right peaceably to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised.”

This is a declaration of the right of secession at the inception of our government and that every one held that belief. If this be correct, with such a right the Union was no enduring tie, but was a mere rope of sand.

He adds that the weak places in Webster’s armor were historical in nature. In support of this opinion, he instances the Virginia and Kentucky resolves in 1799, and the Hartford convention of 1814; a few disloyal, some might say treasonable, acts and declarations; and then tells us a confederacy had grown into a nation, and that Mr. Webster set forth the national conception of the Union; and the principles, which he made clear and definite, went on broadening and deepening and carried the North through the civil war and preserved the national life. A singular result from a speech, if it were so fundamentally and historically wrong.

If Mr. Lodge, and those who agree with him, and there are some at the North who do, be right, and Hayne got the better of Webster in that celebrated contest, the nullification doctrines and acts of South Carolina were constitutionally sound and legal; and if South Carolina were right in her nullification, the secession of the South, thirty years afterwards, was also right.

We do not concede that nullification and secession have been barred because the course of events has been such that independent sovereign States have grown into a nation; nor do we admit that the Union and its indissolubility depend only on the result of an appeal to arms. We claim with Webster that nullification and secession were entirely indefensible constitutionally, and also in the light of history at the time of the foundation of our Constitution, and ever since.