How Southern men must have felt this it is almost impossible for us to appreciate today. It was not only an indictment of the South at a bar where there was no provision for a trial; but it ended in a hypocritical falsehood; for slavery had not been, “tolerated solely as a thing of inexorable necessity.” Existing in every State except Massachusetts, the question whether the existing condition could be affected by permission to increase the slaves for a period by importation was committed with the clauses relating to taxes on exports and to a Navigation Act, that these things might “form a bargain between the Northern and Southern States.”
This motion by Gouverneur Morris, of Pennsylvania, was adopted by the vote of seven of the eleven States in Convention, against three opposing and one abstaining from voting, one of the delegates whereof seconded the motion of Pinckney to increase the period permitting importation, which he with one of the opponents of commitment voted for; so that actually slavery, with the right to increase it by the Slave Trade, was voted for by nine out of eleven States participating.
The Vermont resolution accomplished nothing; but to no individual in Congress could it have inflicted such a wound as it dealt to Calhoun. To him resolutions were of enormous importance, and yet he never seemed quite ready to follow them up with acts. He was at last in the grasp of that power which overcomes all things except God. Twelve years had elapsed since he had been called upon to decide between the policy of Hayne, based upon the effort to bind together in close commercial intercourse the leading Western and Southern States, by a railroad from Ohio to South Carolina, and the resolution of Rhett, to amend the Constitution or dissolve the Union.
To neither could he agree. For Hayne’s connection with Ohio through North Carolina, he substituted a connection with Arkansas through Georgia.
To the warning of his closest intimate that it was “better to part peaceably than to live in the state of indecision we do,” he could only reply with the vague allusion to:
“The many bleeding pores which must be taken up in passing the knife through a body politic, in order to make two of one, which had been so long bound together by so many ties, political, social and commercial.”[77]
In this declaration there is unmistakably intense feeling for the Union; but also some indecision; for what could have been a more practical application of Calhoun’s teaching than Rhett’s amendment to Slade’s bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia? That was a resolution upon which some strong action could be erected. Twelve years had passed, nothing had been done, and now came the resolution of the Vermont Legislature. In the first shock which it gave him, Calhoun was unjust to his own following. He said:
“Mr. President, I intended not to say a word on this subject. I have long labored faithfully to repress the encroachments of the North, at the commencement I saw where it would end and must end; and I despair of ever seeing it ended in Congress. It will go to its end, for gentlemen have already yielded to the current of the North which they admit they cannot resist, Sir, what the South will do is not for me to say. They will meet it, in my opinion, as it ought to be met.”[78]
A month later he reviewed the political situation in a most elaborate and searching analysis, his last great speech, read for him by Senator Mason, of Virginia. “How Can the Union be Preserved?” In endeavoring to give an “answer to this great question,” he asserted that the discontent of the South was due to the fact that political power had been taken from that section and transferred to the North, not through natural causes, but by legislation which could be classed under three heads, the first of which was exclusion from common territory; second a system of revenue under which an undue portion of the burden of taxation had been imposed upon the South, and the proceeds appropriated to the North; third a system of measures changing the original character of the government. The result, he claimed, had been a change from a Constitutional Federal Republic to the despotism of a numerical majority in which a question of vital importance to the minority was threatened:
“The relation between the races in the Southern section ... which cannot be destroyed without subjecting the two races to the greatest calamity, and the section to poverty, desolation and wretchedness.”[79]