“No,” was the answer; “we belong to General Beauregard’s army.”
“Then ye tould me a lie, me boys, and thinking it might be so, I told you another. An’ now tell me the truth, an’ I’ll tell you the truth too.”
“Well, we belong to the State of South Carolina.”
“So do I,” promptly responded Pat, “and to all the other States uv the country, too, and there I am thinking, I hate the whole uv ye. Do ye think I would come all the way from Ireland to belong to one State when I have a right to belong to the whole of ’em?”
This logic was rather a stumper; but they took him up, as before said, and carried him for further examination.
This Irishman’s unionism is a fair sample of what sometimes passes in this country as broad patriotism. “We don’t believe in so much State and State’s right. We want a nation and we want it spelt with a big N.” This is the merest twaddle. From the very nature of the formation of our government there can be no organized Nation. Alexander Hamilton wrote, “The State governments are essentially necessary to the form and spirit of the general system. * * * They can never 250 lose their powers till the whole of America are robbed of their liberties.” It is a Union of States and can be made nothing else. Bancroft, the great historian, says: “But for Staterights the Union would perish from the paralysis of its limbs. The States, as they gave life to the Union, are necessary to the continuance of that life.”
Madison wrote as follows: “The assent and ratification of the people, not as individuals composing the entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they belong, are the sources of the Constitution. It is therefore not a National but a Federal compact.”
The Irishman could only belong to the “whole of ’em” by belonging to one of them. No man can love all the other States without loving his own State. A Swiss loves Schwyz or Unterwalden or some other canton before he loves the Confederation of Cantons. The loyal Scotchmen love Scotland before they love the British Empire. The Union man loves the Union through his immediate part of Union. Daniel Webster loved the Union, but his speeches show how he loved Massachusetts first. Calhoun loved the Union, but he loved it as a Federal Union with his beloved Carolina. Many of the best people of the North loved their several States and in loyalty to them took sides against the South.
The Southern people, Whigs and Democrats, were devoted to the Union of the fathers as long as it was a reality. But as soon as they realized that it had become only a confederation of the Northern majority States, with the protecting features of the old Constitution directly discarded, the love for their own States led them heart and soul into the Confederate cause. Our Irishman might be satisfied with A Union, but nothing but THE Union of the fathers could satisfy Southern men. They loved the definite Union of 1789; they fought the indefinite Union of 1861. The former was a union on a Constitution without a flag; the latter was a mere sentimental union under a flag without a Constitution. The Constitution had been thrown away.
The writer’s father, a plain old farmer-merchant of 251 Alabama, was a fair specimen of the staunchest Southern Union man. A Whig all his life, he almost adored Henry Clay and idolized the Union. The great old Union paper, the National Intelligencer, of Washington City, was his political Bible, and he made it follow his son all through school and college. Like all other Whigs, he believed in the right of secession, but did not think the time had come for such a step. He opposed with all his might the secession of Alabama. But when it was an accomplished fact, he wrote sadly to his son, who was then a student in a foreign land: