It is a grotesque and sad bit of history that while patriots like Crittenden, of Kentucky, Bayard, of Delaware, Black, of Pennsylvania and Seymour, of New York, were anxiously trying to avert war and save the old Union, while the whole world was watching with bated breath the storm gathering around Fort Sumter, the party of frenzied finance, now in control of Congress, defiantly discarded all propositions of peace compromise and concentrated all its mighty energies on the passage of its darling Morrill Tariff Bill. The Morrill tariff bill was enacted April 2, 1861. Fort Sumter fell April 14, 1861. There is the record of cold-blood-money worship. It was not Nero “fiddling while Rome was burning” but it was the legislators of the great American Republic fiddling on a scheme for the financial gain of private business while the glorious Union that we loved and our fathers loved was falling to pieces! The laborer’s groans, the widow’s sobs, the roar of cannon and the crash of States could not drown the mad New England cry for private subsidy from the public treasury.
THE RIGHT OF SECESSION
[In Southern Historical Papers, Volume 31, pages 87-88.]
It may not be amiss, however, to call attention to the fact that the North already admits that the people of the 261 South were honest in their contentions, and that they at least thought they were right. Furthermore, it is even conceded that the South was not without great support for its contentions from legal, moral and historical points of view. For instance, Professor Goldwin, of Canada, an Englishman, a distinguished historian, resident of and sympathizing with the North during the civil war, recently said:
Few who have looked into the history can doubt that the Union originally was, and was generally taken by the parties to it to be, a compact; dissoluble, perhaps most of them would have said, at pleasure, dissoluble certainly on breach of the articles of Union.
To the same effect, but in even stronger terms, are the words of Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, now a Senator from Massachusetts, who said in one of his historic works:
When the Constitution was adopted by the votes of States at Philadelphia, and accepted by the votes of States in popular conventions, it is safe to say that there was not a man in the country from Washington and Hamilton on the one side to George Clinton and George Mason on the other, who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment entered upon by the States and from which each and every State had the right peaceably to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised.
As far back as 1887, General Thomas C. Ewing, of Ohio, said in a speech in New York:
The North craves a living and lasting peace with the South; it also asks no humiliating conditions; it recognizes the fact that the proximate cause of the war was the constitutional question of the right of secession—a question which, until it was settled by the war, had neither a right side nor a wrong side to it. Our forefathers in framing the Constitution purposely left the question unsettled; to have settled it distinctly in the Constitution would have been to prevent the formation of the Union of the thirteen States. They, therefore, committed that question to the future, and the war came on and settled it forever. And, right here, let me say that the South has accepted that settlement in good faith, and will forever abide by it as loyally as the North, although we will never admit that our people were wrong in making the contest.