In dwelling specially upon the main cause of our civil war, because of attempts to ignore it, I do not mean to encourage the student to neglect the other causes: the control by the Confederacy of the lower Mississippi—the ocean outlet of its headwater States; the fear of protected labor that the slaves would learn to manufacture, and reduce wages; the jealousy and friction in the newly-settled West, caused by the actual contact of the two systems of labor (for slavery was a practical and serious question there); the belief that slavery was at the bottom of the forty-four years of sectional political wrangling, and that this must cease or the Union be dissolved; the honest and the prejudiced opposition to the institution itself; the zeal and ambition of machine politicians, in both sections, anxious to get in "on the ground floor" of personal advantage—these together, acted on by the main cause, and reacting on each other, constitute the causes of the war.
And it must not be forgotten, too, that Calhoun, for the South, accepted the slavery issue as the gage of battle, though he knew for what purpose it was manufactured. Unity of the South against Northern aggression was what he was fighting for; and, having failed to present a solid front against the tariff because Clay's ambition and Louisiana's influence disintegrated his forces in the Southwest, he was the more easily betrayed into adopting a temporary expedient—the policy of shifting the issue from its high ground. In this way, too, he got "hay and stubble" in his foundation, and gave the enemies of civil liberty among the whites a chance to pose as the friends of civil liberty among the blacks.
Standing among the statutes at large, with but a page between, is the proclamation of Thomas Jefferson, thundering against the aggressions of Great Britain, and the proclamation of John Adams, breathing out threatenings and slaughter against his own countrymen for resisting the plunder of an unjust revenue tax. These two proclamations, looming up in the horizon of American history like the Mountains of Blessing and Cursing, are the embodiment of the two spirits which are contending for the mastery of this nation—the one the source of our independence gained by a foreign war and the territory on this side of the Mississippi, and of our independence maintained by a foreign war and the territory beyond the Mississippi—the other the source of our national debt in its monstrous cumulation, of Federal extravagance, of sectional expenditures of public funds, of class legislation for protected industries, of unequal taxes, and of a frightful civil war, unlawfully begun to collect them.
"To do justice" is the only way to "insure domestic tranquillity." A government is "strong" only when its foundations are laid deep in the affections and best interests of the people who support it and for whose benefit it was created. God's government is strong and will last forever because it is based upon the eternal principle of mutual affinity.
Through the long mystery of prehistoric ages the spirit of God's love brooded over the desolation of a void and formless world; continents laden with life were born out of the womb of the great deep—Life which still lives in the love of its Infinite Author—and the great deep which still with measured pulse is beating out the changes of our times and booming in our ears the faith that we, too, are somewhere in the sweep of Nature's mighty moving heart. So, statesmen and philosophers, deeply pondering in love of country over the dreary waste of failures and disasters lying thick along the track of History and Experience, have wrought out for us wise laws and constitutions, have rescued from the "bottomless deep of theory and possibility" the institutions under which we live, but the virtue to interpret and maintain them is not transmitted nor transmissible—that we must gain, as they did, from Heaven.
Sloping in a long, gradual sweep of undulating hills and valleys, overspread with the silver network of her myriad streams, from her lofty green-bannered battlements, erected by God, down to her shifting shore, where Hatteras lies in wait for her enemies by sea, North Carolina spreads out the peaceful lap of her bounteous land for her children and for all who cherish her.
Born before the Union, which is but an offspring of the States, and surviving disunion, the child of sectional advantage, unbroken by the shock of radical changes in the Constitutions of the State and nation, North Carolina stands among the firmest of the forty-five pillars of the national superstructure, will sustain it as long as it answers the purposes of its creation, and, if greed or necessity or the will of Heaven should destroy it, will stand above its wreck, the sure foundation and protection of her people's liberties and the sure support of a more perfect Union of the States which have been purified in the crucible of disaster.