It will be seen that we were treated by the Congress of the United States as holding the twofold relation of enemies and traitors, and that they used against us all the instruments of war, and all the penalties of municipal law which made the punishment of treason to be death. The practical operation, therefore, of these laws was that, under a Constitution which defined treason to consist in levying war against the United States, which would not suffer the traitor to be condemned except by the judgment of his peers, and, when condemned, would not forfeit his estate except during his life, the Government of the United States did proceed against six million people, without indictment, without trial by jury, without the proof of two witnesses, did adjudge our six millions of people guilty of treason in levying war, and decree to deprive us of all our estate, real and personal, for life, and in fee, being nearly five thousand million dollars. And, after we had been thus punished, without trial by jury, and by the loss in fee of our whole estate, the Government of the United States assumed the power, on the same charge of levying war, to try us and to hang us.
The first object to be secured by this act of confiscation was the emancipation of all our slaves. Upon his approval of the bill, President Lincoln sent a message to Congress, in which he said:
"It is startling to say that Congress can free a slave within a State, and yet, if it were said the ownership of the slave had first been transferred to the nation, and Congress had then liberated him, the difficulty would at once vanish. And this is the real case. The traitor against the General Government forfeits his slave at least as justly as he does any other property; and he forfeits both to the Government against which he offends. The Government, so far as there can be ownership, thus owns the forfeited slaves, and the question for Congress in regard to them is, 'Shall they be made free or sold to new masters?'"
It is amazing to see the utter forgetfulness of all constitutional obligations and the entire disregard of the conditions of the laws of nations manifested in these words of the President of the United States. Was he ignorant of their existence, or did he seek to cover up his violation of them by a deceptive use of language. It may not be unseasonable to repeat here the words of John Quincy Adams, in his letter of August 22, 1815, as above stated:
"Our object is the restoration of all the property, including slaves, which, by the usages of war among civilized nations, ought not to have been taken."
Let posterity answer the questions: Who were the revolutionists? Who were really destroying the Constitution of the United States?
The agitation of this subject brought out another still more alarming usurpation in Congress, and showed that the majority were ready to throw aside the last fragments of the Constitution in order to secure our subjugation. The argument for this usurpation was thus framed: Assuming that the state of the "nation" was one of general hostility, and that, being so involved, it possessed the power of self-defense, it was asserted that the supreme power of making and conducting war was expressly placed in Congress by the Constitution. "The whole powers of war are vested in Congress."—("United States Supreme Court, Brown vs. United States," 1 Cranch.) There is no such power in the judiciary, and the Executive is simply "commander-in-chief of the army and navy"; all other powers not necessarily implied in the command of the military and naval forces are expressly given to Congress.
The theory was that the contingency of actual hostilities suspended the Constitution and gave to Congress the sovereign power of a nation creating new relations and conferring new rights, imposing extraordinary obligations on the citizens, and subjecting them to extraordinary penalties. There is, under that view, therefore, no limit on the power of Congress; it is invested with the absolute powers of war—the civil functions of the Government are, for the time being, in abeyance when in conflict, and all State and "national" authority subordinated to the extreme authority of Congress, as the supreme power, in the peril of external or internal hostilities. The ordinary provisions of the Constitution peculiar to a state of peace, and all laws and municipal regulations, were to yield to the force of martial law, as resolved by Congress. This was designated as the "war power" of the United States Government.
I should deem an apology to be due to my readers, in offering for their perusal such insane extravagances, under a constitutional Government of limited powers, had not this doctrine been adopted by the United States Government, and subsequently made the basis of some most revolutionary measures for the emancipation of the African slaves and the enslavement of the free citizens of the South. One must allow that the Chamber of Deputies of the French National Assembly of 1798 had some claims to a respectable degree of political virtue when compared with the Thirty-seventh Congress and the Executive of the United States.
The specious argument for this tremendous and sweeping usurpation, designated as the "war power," as presented by its adherents, may be stated in a few words, thus: The Constitution confers on Congress all the specific powers incident to war, and then further authorizes it "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers." The words are these: