The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences: Four Periods of American History

by Hilary A. Herbert

But far and away above every other single element contributing to the development of Union sentiment was the wonderful speech of Daniel Webster, January 26, 1830, in his debate in the United States Senate with Hayne, of South Carolina. Hayne was eloquently defending States' rights, and his argument was unanswerable if his premise was admitted, that, as had been theretofore conceded, the Constitution was a compact between the States. Webster saw this and he took new ground; the Constitution was, he contended, not a compact, but the formation of a government. His arguments were like fruitful seed sown upon a soil prepared for their reception. No speech delivered in this country ever created so profound an impression. It was the foundation of a new school of political thought. It concluded with this eloquent peroration: "When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gracious ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as 'What is all this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and folly, 'Liberty first and Union afterwards,' but everywhere, spread all over with living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every American heart—'Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.'"

For many years every school-house in the land resounded with these words. By 1861 they had been imprinted on the minds and had sunk into the hearts of a whole generation. Their effect was incalculable.

It is perfectly true that the secession resolution of the Massachusetts legislature of 1844 was passed fourteen years after Webster's speech, but the Garrisonians had then been agitating the slavery question within her borders for fourteen years, and the old State was now beside herself with excitement.

There was another great factor in the rapid manufacture of Union sentiment at the North that had practically no existence at the South. It was immigration.

The new-comers from over the sea knew nothing, and cared less, about the history of the Constitution or the dialectics of secession. They had sought a land of liberty that to them was one nation, with one flag flying over it, and in their eyes secession was rebellion. Immigrants to America, practically all settling in Northern States, were during the thirty years, 1831-1860, 4,910,590; and these must, with their natural increase, have numbered at least six millions in 1860. In other words, far more than one-fourth of the people of the North in 1860 were not, themselves or their fathers, in the country in the early days when the doctrine of States' rights had been in the ascendant; and, as a rule, to these new people that old doctrine was folly.

In the South the situation was reversed. Slavery had kept immigrants away. The whites were nearly all of the old revolutionary stock, and had inherited the old ideas. Still, love of and pride in the Union had grown in them too. Nor were the Southerners all followers of Jefferson. From the earliest days much of the wealth and intelligence of the country, North and South, had opposed the Democracy, first as Federalists and later as Whigs. In the South the Whigs have been described as "a fine upstanding old party, a party of blue broadcloth, silver buttons, and a coach and four." It was not until anti-slavery sentiment had begun to array the North, as a section, against the South, that Southern Whigs began to look for protection to the doctrine of States' rights.

Woodrow Wilson says, in "Division and Reunion," p. 47, of Daniel Webster's great speech in 1830: "The North was now beginning to insist upon a national government; the South was continuing to insist upon the original understanding of the Constitution; that was all."

And in those attitudes the two sections stood in 1860-61, one upon the modern theory of an indestructible Union; the other upon the old idea that States had the right to secede from the Union.

In 1848 there occurred in Ireland the "Rebellion of the Young Irishmen." Among the leaders of that rebellion were Thomas F. Meagher and John Mitchel. Both were banished to Great Britain's penal colony. Both made their way, a few years later, to America. Both were devotees of liberty, both men of brilliant intellect and high culture. Meagher settled in the North, Mitchel in the South. This was about 1855. Each from his new stand-point studied the history and the Constitution of his adopted country. Meagher, when the war between the North and South came on, became a general in the Union army. Mitchel entered the civil service of the Confederacy and his son died a Confederate soldier.

The Union or Confederate partisan who has been taught that his side was "eternally right, and the other side eternally wrong," should consider the story of these two "Young Irishmen."