Lives of Distinguished North Carolinians, with Illustrations and Speeches

by Unknown

The Act of 1795, when in force, gave the President no authority to determine when a state of insurrection existed, even in a Federal district; Congress proved that it realized this defect of power by hastening (July 13 and 29, 1861) to supply it to Lincoln—in respect to States as well as districts—a double confession of the weakness of his position.

The Act of 1795 afforded no assistance to collect customs, for the Whiskey Insurrectionists, against whom it was passed, resisted only the internal revenue taxes; Congress practically acknowledged this limitation, by Act of July 13, 1861, expressly and separately authorizing the President to use the army, navy, and militia to "collect the customs" of the United States.

"Even our enemies themselves being judges," there were doubts everywhere, and these doubts were everywhere resolved in favor of absolute authority and against the received construction of law and the Constitution.

An executive who usurps powers ought to be placed on a moral plane as much lower than that of a treasurer who embezzles public funds as the love of liberty in the minds of the virtuous is higher than the love of money.

Those who would derive Lincoln's assumed power to declare war from the clause of the Constitution which requires that the "President shall see that the laws are faithfully executed" betray the flimsy foundation upon which they would erect the throne of an autocrat. The faithful execution of the laws is to be secured in a lawful manner, under such powers as the Constitution gives or Congress may lawfully give to the President. If he is the sole judge of the extent of the powers conferred and the appropriateness of the means of execution, he does not need any other clause to make him the field-overseer of both the other departments of government; and this the Supreme Court has decided he is not. Tyndall vs. The United States, 12 Peters, p. 524. Lincoln did not rely upon this clause, but upon the Act of 1795, the language of which he quoted in his call for the militia of the States; and Congress, by the fifth section of the Act of July 13, 1861, showed very plainly that it recognized that he had professed to act under the Statute of 1795.

The frightful experiences of the civil war and the serpent-brood of evils which have since followed in its trail are plenary proof that the fathers were wise in not lodging the war power in the hands of any one man.

A summary of Lincoln's conduct, while there was yet peace in the land, brings out in startling relief the facts: that he dared at the behest of pampered privilege greedy for revenue, and partisan rancor thirsting for blood, without precedent, or the support of either of the other branches of the government, to place his own private interpretation upon a statute, in effect repealed, and thereby to make war on six millions of his fellow-citizens, whom he refused a right of opinion sustained by abundant authority and precedent and by some of his own acts and utterances. The idol of the "higher law" fanatics, the chief of whom he placed in his cabinet—nominated on a platform which denounced the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case as "a dangerous political heresy, revolutionary in its tendency and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country"—elected by States, many of which defied Federal authority attempting to execute the fugitive slave law, and none of which supported such authority, except New Jersey and California—and having never publicly or privately condemned the nullification of their constitutional obligations (Article IV, section 2, clause 3) by the States of Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Michigan, Maine, Wisconsin, Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—he still proclaimed that his only motive in taking up the sword was to assert the paramount authority of Federal law!

His political campaign of 1864 was fought upon a platform which pledged its supporters to "bring to punishment due their crimes the rebels and traitors arrayed against the Government"; and be it remembered by all posterity that at the end of that campaign, almost at the close of a successful war, and in spite of military interference at the polls, one million eight hundred and eight thousand seven hundred and twenty-five citizens of his own section voted to condemn him, and endorsed a platform which declared that "under pretense of a military necessity for a war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part" by him, and that "justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of all the States; * * * that peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of all the States," * * * that the aim of their party was "to preserve the Federal Union and the rights of all the States unimpaired," and that they considered "the administrative usurpations of extraordinary and dangerous powers not granted by the Constitution * * * as calculated to prevent a restoration of the Union; that the shameful disregard of the administration of its duty to our fellow-citizens, * * * prisoners of war, deserves the severest reprobation."

As at the beginning, so at the end of the war, a vast majority of our nation was opposed to Lincoln's policy of coercion and blood; for his total vote, with the army and navy to back him, was only about four hundred thousand in excess of McClellan's, and this would have been far more than offset by the Southern vote.