Excerpt from The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences: Four Periods of American History by Hilary Abner Herbert, 1912.
PREFATORY NOTE
BY JAMES FORD RHODES
“Livy extolled Pompey in such a panegyric that Augustus called him Pompeian, and yet this was no obstacle to their friendship.” That we find in Tacitus. We may therefore picture to ourselves Augustus reading Livy’s “History of the Civil Wars” (in which the historian’s republican sympathies were freely expressed), and learning therefrom that there were two sides to the strife which rent Rome. As we are more than forty-six years distant from our own Civil War, is it not incumbent on Northerners to endeavor to see the Southern side? We may be certain that the historian a hundred years hence, when he contemplates the lining-up of five and one-half million people against twenty-two millions, their equal in religion, morals, regard for law, and devotion to the common Constitution, will, as matter of course, aver that the question over which they fought for four years had two sides; that all the right was not on one side and all the wrong on the other. The North should welcome, therefore, accounts of the conflict written by candid Southern men.
Mr. Herbert, reared and educated in the South, believing in the moral and economical right of slavery, served as a Confederate soldier during the war, but after Appomattox, when thirty-one years old, he told his father he had arrived at the conviction that slavery was wrong. Twelve years later, when home-rule was completely restored to the South (1877), he went into public life as a Member of Congress, sitting in the House for sixteen years. At the end of his last term, in 1893, he was appointed Secretary of the Navy by President Cleveland, whom he faithfully served during his second administration.
Such an experience is an excellent training for the treatment of any aspect of the Civil War. Mr. Herbert’s devotion to the Constitution, the Union, and the flag now equals that of any soldier of the North who fought against him. We should expect therefore that his work would be pervaded by practical knowledge and candor.
After a careful reading of the manuscript I have no hesitation in saying that the expectation is realized. Naturally unable to agree entirely with his presentation of the subject, I believe that his work exhibits a side that entitles it to a large hearing. I hope that it will be placed before the younger generation, who, unaffected by any memory of the heat of the conflict, may truly say:
Tros Tyriusve, mihi nullo discrimine agetur [Trojan and Tyrian shall be treated by me impartial]
Secession and Its Doctrine
John Fiske has said in his school history: “Under the government of England before the Revolution the thirteen commonwealths were independent of one another, and were held together juxtaposed, rather than united, only through their allegiance to the British Crown. Had that allegiance been maintained there is no telling how long they might have gone on thus disunited.”
They won their independence under a very imperfect union, a government improvised for the occasion. The “Articles of Confederation,” the first formal constitution of the United States of America, were not ratified by Maryland, the last to ratify, until in 1781, shortly before Yorktown. In 1787 the thirteen States, each claiming to be still sovereign, came together in convention at Philadelphia and formed the present Constitution, looking to “a more perfect union.” The Constitution that created this new government has been rightly said to be “the most wonderful work ever struck off, at a given time, by the brain and purpose of man.” And so it was, but it left unsettled the great question whether a State, if it believed that its rights were denied to it by the general government, could peaceably withdraw from the Union.
The Federal Government was given by the Constitution only limited powers, powers that it could not transcend. Nowhere on the face of that Constitution was any right expressly conferred on the general government to decide exclusively and finally upon the extent of the powers granted to it. If any such right had been clearly given, it is certain that many of the States would not have entered into the Union. As it was, the Constitution was only adopted by eleven of the States after months of discussion. Then the new government was inaugurated, with two of the States, Rhode Island and North Carolina, still out of the Union. They remained outside, one of them for eighteen months and the other for a year.
The States were reluctant to adopt the Constitution, because they were jealous of, and did not mean to give up, the right of self-government.
The framers of the Constitution knew that the question of the right of a State to secede was thus left unsettled. They knew, too, that this might give trouble in the future. Their hope was that, as the advantages of the Union became, in process of time, more and more apparent, the Union would grow in favor and come to be regarded in the minds and hearts of the people as indissoluble.
From the beginning of the government there were many, including statesmen of great influence, who continued to be jealous of the right of self-government, and insisted that no powers should be exercised by the Federal Government except such as were very clearly granted in the Constitution. These soon became a party and called themselves Republicans. Some thirty years later they called themselves Democrats. Those, on the other hand, who believed in construing the grants of power in the Constitution liberally or broadly, called themselves Federalists.
Washington was a Federalist, but such was his influence that the dispute between the Republicans and the Federalists about the meaning of the Constitution did not, during his administration, assume a serious aspect; but when a new president, John Adams, also a Federalist, came in with a congress in harmony with him, the Republicans made bitter war upon them. France, then at war with England, was even waging what has been denominated a “quasi war” upon us, to compel the United States, under the old treaty of the Revolution, to take her part against England; and England was also threatening us. Plots to force the government into the war as an ally of France were in the air.
Adams and his followers believed in a strong and spirited government. To strike a fatal blow at the plotters against the public peace, and to crush the Republicans at the same time, Congress now passed the famous alien and sedition laws.
One of the alien laws, June 25,1798, gave the President, for two years from its passage, power to order out of the country, at his own will, and without “trial by jury” or other “process of law” any alien he deemed dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.
The sedition law, July 14, 1798, made criminal any unlawful conspiracy to oppose any measure of the government of the United States “which was directed by proper authority,” as well as also any “false and scandalous accusations against the Government, the President, or the Congress.”
The opportunity of the Republicans had come. They determined to call upon the country to condemn the alien and sedition laws, and at the presidential election in 1800 the Federalists received their deathblow. The party as an organization survived that election only a few years, and in localities the very name, Federalist, later became a reproach.
The Republicans began their campaign against the alien and sedition laws by a series of resolutions, which, drawn by Jefferson, were passed by the Kentucky legislature in November, 1798. Other quite similar resolutions, drawn by Madison, passed the Virginia assembly the next year; and these together became the celebrated Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798-9.1 The alien and sedition laws were denounced in these resolutions for the exercise of powers not delegated to the general government. Adverting to the sedition law, it was declared that no power over the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of the press had been given. On the contrary, it had been expressly provided by the Constitution that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
The first of the Kentucky resolutions was as follows:
“Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government, but that by compact, under the style and title of a constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for specific purposes, delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no effect: That to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: That the government created by this compact, was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its direction, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has a right to judge for itself as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.”
Undoubtedly it is from the famous resolutions of 1798-9 that the secessionists of a later date drew their arguments. The authors of these celebrated resolutions were, both of them, devoted friends of the Union they had helped to construct. Why should they announce a theory of the Constitution that was so full of dangerous possibilities?
The answer is, they were announcing the theory upon which the States, or at least many of the States, had ten years before ratified the Constitution. A crisis in the life of the new government had now come. Congress had usurped powers not given; it had exercised powers that had been prohibited, and the government was enforcing the obnoxious statutes with a high hand. Dissatisfaction was intense.
Jefferson and Madison were undoubtedly Republican partisans, Jefferson especially; but it is equally certain that they were both friends of the Union, and as such they concluded, with the lights before them, that the wise course would be to submit to the people, in ample time for full consideration, before the then coming presidential election, a full, clear, and comprehensive exposition of the Constitution precisely as they, and as the people, then understood it. This they did in the resolutions of 1798 and 1799, and the very same voters who had created the Constitution of 1789, now, with their sons to aid them, endorsed these resolutions in the election of 1800, which had been laid before them by the legislatures of two Republican States as a correct construction of that instrument.
The Republicans under Jefferson came into power with an immense majority. The people were satisfied with the Constitution as it had been construed in the election of 1800, and the country under control of the Republicans was happy and prosperous for three decades. Then the party in power began to split into National Republicans and Democratic Republicans. The National Republicans favored a liberal construction of the Constitution and became Whigs; the Democratic Republicans dropped the name Republican and became Democrats.
The foregoing sketch has been given with no intent to write a political history, but only to show with what emphasis the American people condemned all violations of the Constitution up to the time when, in 1831, our story of the Abolitionists is to begin. The sketch has also served to explain the theory of State-rights, as it was held in early days, and later, by the Southern people.
Whether the union of the States under the Constitution as expounded by the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions would survive every trial that was to come, remained to be seen. The question was destined to perplex Mr. Jefferson himself, more than once.
Indeed, even while Washington was President there had been disunion sentiment in Congress. In 1794 the celebrated Virginian, John Taylor, of Caroline, shortly after he had expressed an intention of publicly resigning from the United States Senate, was approached in the privacy of a committee room by Rufus King, senator from New York, and Oliver Ellsworth, a senator from Massachusetts, both Federalists, with a proposition for a dissolution of the Union by mutual consent, the line of division to be somewhere from the Potomac to the Hudson. This was on the ground “that it was utterly impossible for the Union to continue. That the Southern and the Eastern people thought quite differently,” etc. Taylor contended for the Union, and nothing came of the conference, the story of which remained a secret for over a hundred years.
“In the winter of 1803-4, immediately after, and as a consequence of, the acquisition of Louisiana, certain leaders of the Federal party conceived the project of the dissolution of the Union and the establishment of a Northern Confederacy, the justifying causes to those who entertained it, that the acquisition of Louisiana to the Union transcended the constitutional powers of the government of the United States; that it created, in fact, a new confederacy to which the States, united by the former compact, were not bound to adhere; that it was oppressive of the interests and destructive of the influence of the northern section of the Confederacy, whose right and duty it was therefore to secede from the new body politic, and to constitute one of their own.”
This project did not assume serious proportions.
John Fiske in his school history says: “John Quincy Adams, a supporter of the embargo act of 1807, privately informed President Jefferson (in February, 1809) that further attempts to enforce it in the New England States would be likely to drive them to secession. Accordingly, the embargo was repealed, and the non-intercourse act substituted for it.”
The spirit of nationality was yet in its infancy, threats of secession were common, and they came then mostly from New England. These threats were in no wise connected with slavery; agitators had not then made slavery a national issue; the idea of separation was prompted by the fear that power in the councils of the Union would pass into the hands of other sections.
Massachusetts was heard from again in 1811, when the State of Louisiana, the first to be carved from the Louisiana purchase, asked to come into the Union. In discussing the bill for her admission, Josiah Quincy said: “Why, sir, I have already heard of six States, and some say there will be at no great distance of time more. I have also heard that the mouth of the Ohio will be far to the east of the contemplated empire. . . . It is impossible that such a power could be granted. It was not for these men that our fathers fought. It was not for them this Constitution was adopted. You have no authority to throw the rights and liberties and property of this people into hotchpot with the wild men on the Missouri, or with the mixed, though more respectable, race of Anglo-Hispano-Gallo-Americans who bask in the sands in the mouth of the Mississippi. … I am compelled to declare it as my deliberate opinion that, if this bill passes, the bonds of the Union are virtually dissolved; that the States which compose it are free from their moral obligations; and that, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, to prepare definitely for a separation—amicably, if they can; violently, if they must.”
June 15, 1813, the Massachusetts legislature endorsed the position taken in this speech.
Later, in 1814, a convention of representative New England statesmen met at Hartford, to consider of secession unless the nonintercourse act, which also bore hard on New England, should be repealed; but the war then pending was soon to close, and the danger from that quarter was over.
But secession was not exclusively a New England doctrine. “When the Constitution was adopted by the votes of States in popular conventions, it is safe to say there was not a man in the country, from Washington and Hamilton, on the one side, to George Clinton and George Mason, on the other, who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment, entered into by the States, and from which each and every State had the right to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised.”
As late as 1844 the threat of secession was to come again from Massachusetts. The great State of Texas was applying for admission to the Union. But Texas was a slave State; Abolitionists had now for thirteen years been arousing in the old Bay State a spirit of hostility against the existence of slavery in her sister States of the South, and in 1844 the Massachusetts legislature resolved that “the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, faithful to the compact between the people of the United States, according to the plain meaning and intent in which it was understood by them, is sincerely anxious for its preservation; but that it is determined, as it doubts not other States are, to submit to undelegated powers in no body of men on earth,” and that “the project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested at the threshold, may tend to drive these States into a dissolution of the Union.”
This was just seventeen years before the Commonwealth of Massachusetts began to arm her sons to put down secession in the South!
The Southern reader must not, however, conclude from this startling about-face on the question of secession, that the people of Massachusetts, and of the North, did not, in 1861, honestly believe that under the Constitution the Union was indissoluble, or that the North went to war simply for the purpose of perpetuating its power over the South. Such a conclusion would be grossly unjust. The spirit of nationality, veneration of the Union, was a growth, and, after it had fairly begun, a rapid growth. It grew, as our country grew in prestige and power. The splendid triumphs of our ships at sea, in the War of 1812, and our victory at New Orleans over British regulars, added to it; the masterful decisions of our great Chief Justice John Marshall, pointing out how beneficently our Federal Constitution was adapted to the preservation not only of local self-government but of the liberties of the citizen as well; peace with, and the respect of, foreign nations; free trade between the people of all sections, and abounding prosperity—all these things created a deep impression, and Americans began to hark back to the words of Washington in his farewell address: “The unity of our government, which now constitutes you one people, is also dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquillity at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize.”
But far and away above every other single element contributing to the development of Union sentiment was the wonderful speech of Daniel Webster, January 26, 1830, in his debate in the United States Senate with Hayne, of South Carolina. Hayne was eloquently defending States’ rights, and his argument was unanswerable if his premise was admitted, that, as had been theretofore conceded, the Constitution was a compact between the States. Webster saw this and he took new ground; the Constitution was, he contended, not a compact, but the formation of a government. His arguments were like fruitful seed sown upon a soil prepared for their reception. No speech delivered in this country ever created so profound an impression. It was the foundation of a new school of political thought. It concluded with this eloquent peroration: “When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gracious ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as ‘What is all this worth?’ nor those other words of delusion and folly, ‘Liberty first and Union afterwards,’ but everywhere, spread all over with living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every American heart— ‘Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.’”
For many years every school-house in the land resounded with these words. By 1861 they had been imprinted on the minds and had sunk into the hearts of a whole generation. Their effect was incalculable.
It is perfectly true that the secession resolution of the Massachusetts legislature of 1844 was passed fourteen years after Webster’s speech, but the Garrisonians had then been agitating the slavery question within her borders for fourteen years, and the old State was now beside herself with excitement.
There was another great factor in the rapid manufacture of Union sentiment at the North that had practically no existence at the South. It was immigration.
The new-comers from over the sea knew nothing, and cared less, about the history of the Constitution or the dialectics of secession. They had sought a land of liberty that to them was one nation, with one flag flying over it, and in their eyes secession was rebellion. Immigrants to America, practically all settling in Northern States, were during the thirty years, 1831-1860, 4,910,590; and these must, with their natural increase, have numbered at least six millions in 1860. In other words, far more than one-fourth of the people of the North in 1860 were not, themselves or their fathers, in the country in the early days when the doctrine of States’ rights had been in the ascendant; and, as a rule, to these new people that old doctrine was folly.
In the South the situation was reversed. Slavery had kept immigrants away. The whites were nearly all of the old revolutionary stock, and had inherited the old ideas. Still, love of and pride in the Union had grown in them too. Nor were the Southerners all followers of Jefferson. From the earliest days much of the wealth and intelligence of the country, North and South, had opposed the Democracy, first as Federalists and later as Whigs. In the South the Whigs have been described as “a fine upstanding old party, a party of blue broadcloth, silver buttons, and a coach and four.” It was not until anti-slavery sentiment had begun to array the North, as a section, against the South, that Southern Whigs began to look for protection to the doctrine of States’ rights.
Woodrow Wilson says, in “Division and Reunion,” p. 47, of Daniel Webster’s great speech in 1830: “The North was now beginning to insist upon a national government; the South was continuing to insist upon the original understanding of the Constitution; that was all.”
And in those attitudes the two sections stood in 1860-61, one upon the modern theory of an indestructible Union; the other upon the old idea that States had the right to secede from the Union.
In 1848 there occurred in Ireland the “Rebellion of the Young Irishmen.” Among the leaders of that rebellion were Thomas F. Meagher and John Mitchel. Both were banished to Great Britain’s penal colony. Both made their way, a few years later, to America. Both were devotees of liberty, both men of brilliant intellect and high culture. Meagher settled in the North, Mitchel in the South. This was about 1855. Each from his new stand-point studied the history and the Constitution of his adopted country. Meagher, when the war between the North and South came on, became a general in the Union army. Mitchel entered the civil service of the Confederacy and his son died a Confederate soldier.
The Union or Confederate partisan who has been taught that his side was “eternally right, and the other side eternally wrong,” should consider the story of these two “Young Irishmen.”
How fortunate it is that the ugly question of secession has been settled, and will never again divide Americans, or those who come to America!
Flummoxed. Totally. That’s what I am. I guess my IQ is too low to follow this thinking and understand it. To me, this is a hodgepodge of cherrypicked opinions, assertions of facts without evidence, interspersed with name drops that meanders its way around, across and though American history and leaves me saying ‘Huh?!’. Heck, I’m so dumb I can’t quite figure out who is writing this!! Is it Herbert, Rhodes, Washington, Webster, someone else? Extra coffee did not help me. My dim, low wat gray matter concluded that the point of this column is to tell us that when Virginia, Rhode Island and New York – and they are never wrong on anything are they[?] – reserved the right to secede, for whatever reason(s) they chose, upon ratification of the Constitution that they didn’t really mean it or later took it back, unannounced, because of all the union kumbaya bon homie expressed here and there over the years. Dang, I can’t even figure out what this column is doing on this site. Help … anybody?
‘in pursuance thereof’ seems to clear it up along with the 10th amendment. seems rather clear to me.
I would say “a hodgepodge of cherrypicked opinions, assertions of facts without evidence, interspersed with name drops that meanders its way around” goes for most of what goes on here.
were there international slave ships departing from Boston near or post 1844?
The “ugly question of secession” is far from settled to this day.
The question of secession is not “ugly” at all and reveals the lack of understanding by the immigrants and centralist mentality that self government IS Liberty. Once a body politic begins to intervene in the self determination, rights, self government and Liberty of others, then oppression tramples Liberty and the intention of our Founders and Framers for Liberty and self government is eradicated.
Jefferson expected that the Louisiana Purchase would eventually form its own union according to its own interests.
From the time that Cain slew Abel, people have rationalized that they have the right to take another’s life. The Ten Commandments classify this as murder.
As a psychotherapist, I both teach clients about the importance of boundaries and help others whose boundaries have been violated to recover their dignity, self-identity and respect.
Centralization of power eradicates Christ’s Great Commandment, depersonalizing others into mere puppets without value. Never more evident is this today in the despotic Marxism which has infected our republican form of government. It is interesting to note that Marxism is void of the Presence of God, the systemic Cain, blinded by his own ego, who is hell bent on eradicating the life God gave to Abel, who by birth was born in Freedom. God help us all.
I find Mr Herbert to be far too reconstructed to be a reliable guide on constitutional matters.
Secession is not an “ugly question” any more than a safety valve on a boiler be an “ugly vent”. They both serve a purpose to provide a means of relief to avoid catastrophic explosion.
Also, I find Herbert’s fawning over Daniel Webster’s speech and its mendacious aspirations to national govt to be more than I can stomach.
“How fortunate it is that the ugly question of secession has been settled, and will never again divide Americans, or those who come to America!” – time has proven Mr Herbert to be a fool when it comes to political prophecy and he should have known better. There had been a long, consistent track record of sectional discord arising from the historic socio-economic differences between New England and the South and Herbert was naive to think that those had been erased.