Lincoln's Plan of Reconstruction

by Charles H. McCarthy

Long before slavery became a subject of embittered controversy the doctrine of State Rights had agitated the country. As early as the summer of 1793 it had found in Justice Iredell an able advocate on the bench of the United States Supreme Court. For party purposes it was adopted five years later by Madison and Jefferson in the celebrated Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, and during the second war with Great Britain these statesmen were startled to find New England Federalism vindicating its unpatriotic, if not treacherous, conduct in the exact language which they had invented to embarrass a former administration. With this instrument, too, Calhoun in 1832 shook the foundations of the Union. Both Northern and Southern statesmen of that generation, however, pushed the principle of State sovereignty as far only as their immediate object seemed to require.

It is a popular mistake to suppose that beyond the limits of the South this erroneous doctrine found little favor in the minds of men; for on the eve of the War of 1812 a Governor of conservative Pennsylvania had armed her citizen-soldiers against Federal power.

The illustrious Marshall could relate how, before the highest tribunal in the land, its champions with unwearied zeal renewed the battle for a hopeless cause. The eloquent voice of Webster hushed for a time the fretful agitation of South Carolina statesmen, and his genius fixed in imperishable literary form that interpretation of the Constitution which called forth the abundant resources of both the Nation and the States. In his conquering words lived those elevated thoughts that in future years sustained the defenders of the Republic.

President Jackson, for the energy and promptness by which he defeated the projects of the Nullifiers, has been justly eulogized; but, when the excitement of the hour had passed away, the calmer judgment of even his admirers perceived that victory inclined rather to the side of Calhoun.

Discussion of the abstract question of State sovereignty might, probably, have long continued without endangering the Union had the principle not been invoked to defend the institution of human servitude; yoked to that powerful interest it was inevitable that both should go down together in undistinguishable ruin.

From the Protean fount of slavery flowed an hundred various streams coloring almost every important question in the tide of events. In the generation between the election of General Jackson and the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln its defeats were few, its triumphs numerous and important. Prosperity revealed its weaknesses and encouraged its experiments. The fruits of its greatest victory, the dismemberment of Mexico, revived those stormy scenes which thirty years before had for the first time been witnessed in an American legislative hall. Dissolution of the Union was once more threatened, and again averted by the genius and patriotism of the venerable triumvirate, who scarce outlived their noble work; but the compromise from which Clay, Calhoun and Webster expected a restoration of former tranquillity contained within itself the very seed-plot of even graver troubles.

After 1850 the attachment of Southern men to their industrial system was played upon by ambitious politicians more and more, until the final overthrow of themselves and the government which they sought to establish for its preservation. It could be shown how before that time one war was prolonged for the protection, and another undertaken chiefly for the extension, of that aggressive institution; how its existence was supposed to require Federal interference with the mails and an abridgment of even the ancient right of petition. Every power of the national Government and all the resources of the cotton States had been employed for its advantage.

The United States Supreme Court was the last agent within the Union by which its advocates sought to dignify and perpetuate human servitude, and so successful were their efforts that an enlightened and humane Chief Justice was but little misrepresented in language or in sentiment when political opponents ascribed to him the doctrine that “the negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect.”

The moral progress of the United States during the last forty years finds, probably, in no single event a better illustration than the change in public opinion upon the interesting question of human rights. When the majority opinion was delivered in the Dred Scott case it excited among members of the dominant political party but little surprise. The shock which a judicial utterance of such sentiments would give in our time to the ethical notions of the American people affords at once both a measure of the advance that has been made in the interval and an undoubted proof that progress has not been, as is commonly supposed, exclusively or even mainly along material lines. It is singular, too, that the first serious attempt of the Federal Supreme Court to set at rest a dangerous political question should have been followed by effects of so alarming a tendency.

It is not intended to relate in these pages the origin or the fate of those compromises designed to avoid the inevitable conflict already in the closing months of President Buchanan’s administration casting ominous shadows in the pathway of the nation, nor to describe the uncertain policy of the General Government or attempt to determine the measure of its responsibility for the fearful rebellion which that hesitation encouraged.