The Southern confederacy is the organized protest of anarchy against law. It represents in politics that doctrine in religious thought which declares every man a law unto himself. It kicks against the restraints of constitutions and laws, declaring virtually that when a law, or a constitution ordaining laws, ceases to be agreeable, its binding force is gone. For a similar and equally valid reason, some men (and, alas! some women), disregarding the solemn sanctions of the marriage tie, have been willing to set aside this first law of the family and of home. The Southern confederacy also makes light of national agreements, disposing of them according to the facile doctrine of repudiation, which its perjured chief once adopted as the basis of a system of state finance. It is eminently in accordance with the fitness of things, that the man who could counsel his State to repudiate its bonds, should stand at the head of a confederacy which began its existence by repudiating the sacred agreement to which the faith and fortune of all its members were solemnly pledged, and under the broad shield of whose protection they had grown prosperous and powerful. If one may be permitted to express an opinion different from Mr. Stephens's, it might be said that the corner stone of the Southern confederacy is properly repudiation. On the other hand, the cause of the United States is the cause of order. It is also the cause of freedom.
It is important to note the union of these two forces of civilization; for hitherto, in the great wars of history, liberty has generally opposed itself to order, and has too often seemed to be synonymous with anarchy. The passions of the masses have too often burst forth, in great revolutions, like volcanic eruptions, carrying devastation and destruction in their path; The French Revolution stands for the type and instance of all these terrible catastrophes. This war of ours presents a different spectacle; for in the maintenance of it the two principles of freedom and order go hand in hand. It is this union of them which demands for the United States, in this contest, the support of both the great parties of civilization—the conservatives and the radicals. It is, therefore, preëminently a just war, because waged in the combined interests of liberty and order.
But, it is objected, you, in effect, deny the right of revolution. No; on the contrary, we establish it. For the right of revolution is no right for any people unless they have wrongs. The right of revolution is not an absolute, it is a relative right. Like all such rights, it has its limitations—the limitation of the public law and the public conscience. For neither the public law nor the public conscience sanctions revolution for the sole sake of revolution. That brave old revolutionist of early Rome, Brutus, understood this well, and though his country was groaning under the oppression of Tarquin, he sighed for 'a cause.' There must be a cause for revolution, and such a cause as will commend itself to men's consciences, as well as to the just principles of law and equity.
Some men seem to think that revolution is, of itself, a blessed thing. They love change in government for the sake of change. When Julius Cæsar invaded Gaul he found just such men, and he characterized them, in his terse military way, as those who 'studied new things,' that is, desired constantly a renewal of public affairs, or renovation of government. He found these men, moreover, his most ready tools, even in his designs against their country's liberties; and it would seem as though this revolutionary characteristic of the early inhabitants of Gaul had remained impressed upon their descendants ever since.
We repeat that the right of revolution is a limited right. An absolute and unlimited right of revolution would only be the other extreme of an absolute and unlimited government; and this is not the age of absolutism in matters of government. Just as absolute liberty is an impracticable thing, in the present constitution of human beings, so the absolute right of revolution, which derives its highest title from the sacred right of liberty, is equally impracticable. We must be careful how we use these words liberty and revolution. Words are things in a time of earnest work like the present. The war is settling the old scholastic dispute for us, and is making us all realists. Liberty and loyalty and law are no longer brave words merely: they are things, and things of tremendous power; and some men slink away from them. But we need to remember that liberty does not mean license. The political liberty of our time, testing the truth of our representative democracy, is constitutional liberty. It presupposes an organic law, giving force and effect to it: and without this organic law, liberty is a delusion and a dream—a vague unsubstantiality. Liberty is like the lightning. To be made an agent of man's political salvation, it must be brought down from its home in the clouds, and put under the restraints and checks of institutions. The institutions protect it; it sanctifies the institutions. In its unchecked power, like the lightning, it annihilates and overwhelms man. Unchecked, it becomes a reckless license, disgracing history and its own fair name with such scenes as the French Revolution, and causing the martyred defenders of its sacred majesty to cry out, in bitter agony of disappointment: 'O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!'
In fact, the liberty that is valuable is the liberty that is regulated by law; just as the law that is valuable is the law that has the spirit of liberty. This is the American doctrine of constitutional liberty, as it has ever been expounded by our great statesmen and orators; and it commends itself to the sound sense of all reflecting men.
In seeking, therefore, to subvert our Constitution, the South attack the principle of liberty, which is the basis of it, and which it guarantees. More than this, they attack the principle of constitutional liberty; for their secession is in virtue of that unchecked liberty which is license, that absolute liberty which is anarchy. They are not contending for the sacred right of revolution. It is treason against that majestic principle to apply it to the cause of the South. They were not oppressed; they were not even controlled by a dominant party opposed to them; their will was almost law, for it made our laws. According to the theory of our Constitution, they possessed equal rights with all other sections of the Union; under the practice of it, and in fact, they had gradually come to possess and were actually wielding greater power than all other sections. It is thus seen how vain and absurd is the plea that they were driven into revolution to redress wrongs, or that they revolted and seceded for the purpose of preserving rights. Their rights were neither actually assailed, nor were likely to be assailed. The protest of that eminent statesman of the South who afterward ('oh, what a fall was there, my countrymen!') became the second officer of its traitorous government, is conclusive evidence on this point. The Southern rebellion is simply and entirely the effort to secure exclusive control where formerly the South had a joint control. Robert Toombs said, in a conversation, in Georgia, in the winter of 1860-'61: 'We intend, sir, to have a government of our own and we won't have any compromises.' To the same import is the letter of Mason to Davis, in 1856, which has lately seen the light. To one not blinded by prejudice, indeed, the evidences are overwhelming of a long-plotted conspiracy on the part of certain leading politicians, without the knowledge and contrary to the known intentions of the Southern people. The Southern rebellion is simply the attempt to break up a constitutional government, by politicians who had become dissatisfied with the natural and inevitable workings and tendencies of it, even though administered by themselves. It is simply, therefore, the question of anarchy that we have to deal with. Therefore, we say that the North is fighting for the idea of government.
We are not seeking to perpetuate oppressive power. On the other hand, the rebellion is a flagrant attempt to organize oppression. We are seeking to perpetuate power, it is true, but a power which has stood for nearly a hundred years, and must continue to stand, if it stand at all, as a bulwark against oppression. We are vindicating our right to be, as a nation. We are proving our title to rank among the powers of the earth. We are vindicating the majesty of our supreme organic law. That supreme organic law is the Constitution. It ordains for itself a method of amendment, so as to leave no right of revolution against it. It admits no right of revolution, because in ordaining and establishing it the parties to it expressly merged that right in another principle, adopted to avoid the necessity of a resort to revolution. In other words, the right of revolution is in our Constitution exalted into the peaceful principle of amendment. Instead, therefore, of really being denied, the right of revolution is, indeed, enlarged and consecrated in our system of government, which rests upon that right. In vindicating and maintaining, therefore, that system, we vindicate and maintain with it the right of revolution. But we deny any such thing as a right of revolution for the sole sake of revolution; because it leads to anarchy. We deny the right of revolution for the sake of oppression; because it leads to absolutism. Revolution in the interests of order, justice, and freedom, we hold to be the only right worthy of the name, and God help our nation never to oppose such a revolution!
Since the foregoing was written, an article in Frazer's Magazine, for last October, has fallen under the writer's notice, which discusses the point under consideration, and expresses similar views with those here stated. An extract from it is given to show how the question is viewed from a British stand-point:
'The principle of American independence was, that when a considerable body of men are badly governed and oppressed by a government under which they live, they have a right to resist and withdraw from it; and unless everything in the history of England of which we have been accustomed to boast, from Magna Charta to the Reform Bill, was a crime, this principle is perfectly true. To deny to the United States, as most of our public writers did deny to them, the right of putting down resistance not justified by oppression, and to impose upon them the duty of submitting at once to any resistance whatsoever, whether justified or not, was equivalent to maintaining that chronic anarchy was the only state of things which could exist in North America.'