The President, feeling the force of such appeals, and urged by the earnest entreaties of the suffering people on the frontiers, recommended to Congress, through the War Department, to raise five additional regiments.[[72]] This, like all other recommendations to place the country in a proper state of defence, was disregarded. From what has been stated it is manifest that it was impossible to garrison the numerous forts of the United States with regular

troops. This will account for the destitute condition of the nine forts enumerated by General Scott, as well as of all the rest.

When our system of fortifications was planned and carried into execution, it was never contemplated to provide garrisons for them in time of peace. This would have required a large standing army, against which the American people have ever evinced a wise and wholesome jealousy. Every great republic, from the days of Cæsar to Cromwell, and from Cromwell to Bonaparte, has been destroyed by armies composed of free citizens, who had been converted by military discipline into veteran soldiers. Our fortifications, therefore, when completed, were generally left in the custody of a sergeant and a few soldiers. No fear was entertained that they would ever be seized by the States for whose defence against a foreign enemy they had been erected.

Under these circumstances it became the plain duty of the President, destitute as he was of military force, not only to refrain from any act which might provoke or encourage the cotton States into secession, but to smooth the way for such a Congressional compromise as had in times past happily averted danger from the Union. There was good reason to hope this might still be accomplished. The people of the slaveholding States must have known there could be no danger of an actual invasion of their constitutional rights over slave property from any hostile action of Mr. Lincoln’s administration. For the protection of these, they could rely both on the judicial and the legislative branches of the Government. The Supreme Court had already decided the Territorial question in their favor, and it was also ascertained that there would be a majority in both Houses of the first Congress of Mr. Lincoln’s term, sufficient to prevent any legislation to their injury. Thus protected, it would be madness for them to rush into secession.

Besides, they were often warned and must have known that by their separation from the free States, these very rights over slave property, of which they were so jealous, would be in greater jeopardy than they had ever been under the Government of the Union. Theirs would then be the only government in Christendom which had not abolished, or was not in progress to abolish, slavery. There would be a strong pressure from abroad against this institution. To resist this effectually would require the power and moral influence of the Government of the whole United States. They ought, also, to have foreseen that, if their secession should end in civil war, whatever might be the event, slavery would receive a blow from which it could never recover. The true policy, even in regard to the safety of their domestic institution, was to cling to the Union.

CHAPTER XV.
1860—November.

ELECTION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN—THE SECESSION OF SOUTH CAROLINA—NATURE OF THE DOCTRINE OF SECESSION—PRESIDENT BUCHANAN PREPARES TO ENCOUNTER THE SECESSION MOVEMENT—DISTINCTION BETWEEN MAKING WAR ON A STATE AND ENFORCING THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES.

On the 6th of November, 1860, one hundred and eighty Republican electors of President were chosen by the people of eighteen of the free states. This determined that Abraham Lincoln was to be President of the United States for four years from the 4th of March, 1861. As soon as the result of the election was known, the legislature of South Carolina passed a law for the assembling of a convention of the people of the State on the 17th of December. The delegates to the convention were promptly chosen; and when they had been elected, it was manifest that the assumed right of secession was about to be exercised by that one of the Southern States in which attachment to the Union had been for more than thirty years confined to a few of the wiser and more considerate of her people. The great man whose political teachings had indoctrinated a generation with views of the Federal Constitution which, when logically carried out, would reduce it to a mere league between independent States dissoluble at the pleasure of its separate members for causes of which they were separately to judge, had passed away. I have already had occasion to observe that, while Mr. Calhoun did not at any time contemplate secession, and while he was strongly attached to the Union as he understood its fundamental principle, his political doctrines, assuming the correctness of his premises, led logically and correctly to the conclusion that the people of any State could absolve themselves from the obligation to obey the laws, and to submit to the authority of the United States. He and those who acted with him in South Carolina during the period of “Nullification” proposed to apply this State dispensing power to a single obnoxious law of the United States, without breaking the whole bond which connected South Carolina with her sister States. But it was the inevitable result of his political principles that, if a State convention could absolve its people from the duty of obeying one law of the United States, by pronouncing it to be unconstitutional, the same authority could withdraw the State wholly from the Union, upon her judgment that to remain in it longer was incompatible with her safety or her interests. The radical vice of this whole theory was that it assumed the cession of political powers of legislation and government, made by the people of a State when they ratified the Constitution of the United States, to be revocable, not by a State power or right expressly contained in the instrument, but by a right resulting from the assumed nature of the Constitution as a compact between sovereign States. The Secession Ordinance of South Carolina, adopted on the 20th of December, 1860, which became the model of all the other similar ordinances, exhibits in a striking manner the character of the theory. It professed to “repeal” the ordinance of the State which in 1788 had ratified the Constitution of the United States, and all the subsequent acts of the legislature which had ratified the amendments of that Constitution, and to dissolve the union then subsisting between South Carolina and other States under the name of the “United States of America.” In other words, the people of South Carolina, assembled in convention, determined that a cession or grant of political sovereignty, which they had made to the Government of the United States in 1788, in an irrevocable form, and without any reservation save of the powers of government which they did not grant, could yet be revoked and annulled, not by the right of revolution, but by a right resulting as a constitutional principle from a compact made between sovereign and independent political communities. This method of regarding the Government of the United States as the depositary of certain powers to be held and exercised so long as the sovereign parties to the agreement should see fit to allow them to remain, and to be withdrawn whenever one of the parties should determine to withdraw them, constituted the whole basis of the doctrine of secession. If the premises were correct, the deduction was sound. If, on the other hand, the cession of certain powers of political sovereignty made by the people of a State when they ratified the Constitution of the United States constituted a Government, with a right to rule over the individual inhabitants of that State in the exercise of the powers conceded, the individuals could no more absolve themselves collectively, than they could separately, from the political duty and obligation to obey the laws and submit to the authority of that Government, especially when that Government contained within itself, by one of the provisions of its Constitution, both the means and the right of determining for the people of every State, whether the laws enacted by Congress were in conformity with the grants of political power embraced in the instrument which created it. The grant of the judicial power of the United States estopped the people of every State from claiming a right to pass upon the constitutional validity of any exercise of its legislative or executive authority. Such are the contrasted theories of the Constitution which were now to come into collision, after the Constitution had long been administered and acted upon as an instrument of government embracing a true and rightful sovereignty over the people of every State in the exercise of certain enumerated powers.

It is important to observe, however, that this claim of rightful sovereignty over the inhabitants of every State was not a denial of the inherent right of revolution, or the right to renounce a political allegiance, and to make that right available by physical force, in case of intolerable oppression or arbitrary assumption of power. The political institutions of this country had their origin in the exercise of the right of revolution, and however shaped or administered, they can never be made to exclude it. It is difficult, in studying the political principles on which individuals or masses of men acted, or on which they supposed themselves to be acting, during the period at which I have now arrived, to discriminate between the right of revolution and the right of secession, as distinct principles governing their personal conduct. In many minds they became blended; in many there was but little attention paid to any such distinction; in many there was nothing more than a state of excitement, worked into an uncontrollable apprehension of danger which was stimulated by the political leaders of a section peculiarly exposed to such apprehensions by what had long been occurring on the dangerous subject of their social and domestic condition. But on the threshold of the secession movement, there are certain things to be carefully noted. The first is, that in the public proceedings of South Carolina, and of the other States which followed her example, it was the alleged constitutional right of secession from the Union, and not the inherent right of revolution, on which the action was professedly based. The second is, that the State of South Carolina led the way, in the hope and belief that she might compel the other cotton States to follow, while it was at least doubtful whether they would do so, and while it was manifest that their course would depend very much upon events that could not be foreseen. This condition of affairs in the months of November and December imposed upon President Buchanan two imperative duties. In the first place, he had to encounter the alleged right of secession asserted, or about to be asserted, by the State of South Carolina; to meet her public proceedings by a denial of any such right, and to exercise all the powers with which he then was, or with which he might thereafter be, clothed by Congress, to prevent any obstruction to the execution of the laws of the United States within her borders. In the next place, he had, so far as the Executive of the United States could so act, to isolate the State of South Carolina from the other States of that region, and to prevent, if possible, the spread of the secession movement. What he might be able to do in this regard would depend, of course, upon future events, and upon a careful adaptation of his means to his ends. If, notwithstanding all he could do, the fury of secession was to rapidly sweep through the cotton States, he could not prevent the formation of some kind of Southern confederacy. But the very first duty which he had to perform he proceeded promptly to execute, as soon as it was apparent that South Carolina was about to adopt an ordinance of secession. This was to encounter publicly and officially the alleged right of secession, to define clearly and explicitly to Congress and to the country the powers which he possessed, or did not possess, for meeting this exigency; and to announce his policy. By so doing, he might prevent the spread of the secession movement, if Congress would aid him by adopting his recommendations. Preparatory to what he was about to say in his annual message to the Congress which was to assemble in the early part of December, he required from the Attorney General (Mr. Black) an official answer to the following questions:[[73]]

1. In case of a conflict between the authorities of any State and those of the United States, can there be any doubt that the laws of the Federal Government, if constitutionally passed, are supreme?