As a Nation, with a place in the family of nations, we have the powers of a nation, with corresponding responsibilities. Whether we regard these powers as naturally inhering in the nation, or as conferred upon it by those two title-deeds, the Declaration of Independence and the National Constitution, the conclusion is the same. From Nature, and also from its title-deeds, our nation must have all needful powers: first, for the national defence, foremost among which is the power to uphold and defend the national unity; secondly, for the safeguard of the citizen in all his rights of citizenship, foremost among which is equality, the first of rights, so that, as all owe equal allegiance, all shall enjoy equal protection; and, thirdly, for the support and maintenance of all the promises made by the nation, especially at its birth, being baptismal vows which cannot be disowned. These three powers are essentially national. They belong to our nation by the very law of its being and the terms of its creation. They cannot be neglected or abandoned. Every person, no matter what his birth, condition, or color, who can raise the cry, “I am an American citizen,” has a right to require at the hands of the nation, that it shall do its utmost, by all its central powers, to uphold the national unity, to protect the citizen in the rights of citizenship, and to perform the original promises of the nation. Failure here is apostasy and bankruptcy combined.
It is vain to say that these requirements are not expressly set down in the National Constitution. By a law existing before this title-deed, they belong to the essential conditions of national life. If not positively nominated in the Constitution, they are there in substance; and this is enough. Every word, from “We, the people,” to the signature, “George Washington,” is instinct with national life, and there is not a single expression taking from the National Government any inherent power. From this “nothing” in the Constitution there can come nothing adverse. But there has always been a positive injunction on the nation to guaranty “a republican form of government” to all the States; and who can doubt, that, in the execution of this guaranty, the nation may exercise all these powers, and provide especially for the protection of the citizen in all the rights of citizenship? There are also recent Amendments, abolishing slavery, and expressly securing “the privileges and immunities of citizens” against the pretensions of States. Then there is the Declaration of Independence itself, which is the earlier title-deed. By that sacred instrument we were declared “one people,” with liberty and equality for all, and then, fixing forever the rights of citizenship, it was announced that all just government was derived only from “the consent of the governed.” Come weal or woe, that great Declaration must stand forever. Other things may fail, but this cannot fail. It is immortal as the nation itself. It is part of the nation, and the part most worthy of immortality. By it the National Constitution must be interpreted; or rather, the two together are the Constitution,—as Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights together are the British Constitution. By the Declaration our nation was born and its vital principles were announced; by the Constitution the nation was born again and supplied with the machinery of government. The two together are our National Scriptures, each being a Testament.
Against this conclusion there has been from the beginning one perpetual pretension in the name of States. The same spirit which has been so hostile to national unity in other countries, which made each feudal chief a petty sovereign, which for a long time convulsed France, which for centuries divided Italy, and which, unhappily, still divides Germany, has appeared among us. Assuming that communities never “sovereign” while colonies, and independent only by the national power, had in some way, by some sudden hocus-pocus, leaped into local sovereignty, and forgetting also that two sovereignties cannot coexist in the same place, as, according to the early dramatist,
“Two kings in England cannot reign at once,”[75]
the States insisted upon sovereign powers justly belonging to the Nation. Long ago the duel began. The partisans of State pretensions, plausibly professing to decentralize the Government, have done everything possible to denationalize it. In the name of self-government, they have organized local lordships hostile to Human Rights; in the name of the States, they have sacrificed the Nation.
This pretension, constantly showing itself, has broken out on three principal occasions. The first was in the effort of Nullification, which occurred in 1832, where, under the lead of Mr. Calhoun, South Carolina attempted to nullify the Revenue Acts of Congress, or, in other words, to declare them void within her limits. After encountering the matchless argument of Daniel Webster, enforced by his best eloquence, Nullification was blasted by the thunderbolt of Andrew Jackson, who, in his Proclamation, as President, thus exposed it, even in the form of Secession, which it assumed at a later day: “Each State, having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute jointly with the other States a single nation, cannot from that period possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league, but destroys the unity of a nation.”[76] The pretension next showed itself in the Rebellion; and now that the Rebellion is crushed, it reappears in still another form, by insisting that each State at its own will may disregard the universal rights of the citizen, and apply a discrimination according to its own local prejudices,—thus within its borders nullifying the primal truths of the Declaration of Independence. Here again do State pretensions, in their anarchical egotism, interfere with the National Unity.
The pretensions of States have found their ablest and frankest upholder in John C. Calhoun. I take a single instance, on account of its explicitness. In reply to a Northern Senator, the defender of Slavery said:—
“Now let me tell the Senator that the doctrines which we advocate are the result of the fullest and most careful examination of our system of government, and that our conviction that we constitute an Union, and not a Nation, is as strong and as sincere as that of the Senator or any other in the opposite opinion.”