CHAPTER EIGHT:
The Departure of the Southern States
"To Withdraw From the Union is a Solemn Act"
In a speech delivered in 1839 before the New York Historical Society, John Quincy Adams, himself an old school Abolitionist from Massachusetts, voiced a sentiment that would soon be forgotten by those who came after him:
Nations acknowledge no judge between them upon earth; and their governments, from necessity, must, in their intercourse with each other, decide when the failure of one part to a contract to perform its obligations absolves the other from the reciprocal fulfillment of its own. But this last of earthly powers is not necessary to the freedom or independence of States connected together by the immediate action of the people of whom they consist. To the people alone is there reserved as well the dissolving as the constituent power, and that power can be exercised by them only under the tie of conscience, binding them to the retributive justice of Heaven.
With these qualifications, we may admit the same right as vested in the people of every State in the Union, with reference to the General Government, which was exercised by the people of the united colonies with reference to the supreme head of the British Empire, of which they formed a part; and under these limitations have the people of each State in the Union a right to secede from the confederated Union itself.
Thus stands the right. But the indissoluble link of Union between the people of the several States of this confederated nation is, after all, not in the right, but in the heart. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other, when the fraternal spirit shall give way to cold indifference, or collision of interests shall fester into hatred, the bonds of political associations will no longer hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will it be for the people of the disunited States to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint. Then will be the time for reverting to the precedents which occurred at the formation and adoption of the Constitution, to form again a more perfect Union, by dissolving that which could no longer bind, and to leave the separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravitation to the center [emphasis in original].(1)
As was discussed in the previous chapter, secession was both an historically accepted and a constitutionally valid right retained by a sovereign State in the event that the compact made with the other States was violated to the peril of its people. Not only was this right at one time universally recognized, but it was actually threatened, and according to Stephen D. Carpenter, effectively exercised by three New England States in 1814. Furthermore, the right of the people of a State to separate from the federal Union was taught, with Government funding, to cadets at West Point from 1825 to 1826 in William Rawle's View of the Constitution — a book which remains in the library at West Point to this day. It was Rawle's assertion that "To withdraw from the Union is a solemn, serious act," and that "[w]henever it may appear expedient to the people of a state, it must be manifested in a direct and unequivocal manner." He stated further:
If a faction should attempt to subvert the government of a state for the purpose of destroying its republican form, the paternal power of the Union could thus be called forth to subdue it.
Yet it is not to be understood that its interposition would be justifiable, if the people of a state should determine to retire from the Union, whether they adopted another or retained the same form of government....(2)
Having established that the secession of the Southern States was not unlawful in and of itself, and that a faction (Abolitionism as absorbed by the Republican party) had for thirty years attempted to subvert, not just "the government of a state," but the general Government of the United States itself, destroy the Republican form of government in the several States, and instigate a massive civil war between them as the means to abolish slavery, the question which now must be addressed is this: Was the secession of the Southern States a "solemn and serious act" and was it manifested to the world "in a direct and unequivocal manner?" We have seen how the New England States threatened to dissolve their ties with the South during the conflict with Great Britain in which the protection of the Union was most needed by all its members, and that those who called for dissolution were by no means "solemn and serious," but were as fanatical as they were unreasonable in their railings against the Union. If it can be demonstrated that such fanaticism likewise characterized the State Conventions in the South following Lincoln's election, then the finger of criticism would appropriately point to the South as at least the co-agitators of an unnecessary war between the States.
In his address to Congress on the nineteenth of December 1859, President James Buchanan stated:
It ought never to be forgotten that however great may have been the political advantages resulting from the Union, these would all prove to be as nothing, should the time ever arrive when they cannot be enjoyed without serious danger to the personal safety of the people of fifteen members of the Confederacy.
If the peace of the domestic fireside throughout these States should ever be invaded, if the mothers of families within this extensive region should not be able to retire to rest at night without suffering dreadful apprehensions of what may be their own fate and that of their children before the morning, it would be in vain to account to such a people the political benefits which result to them from the Union.
Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and therefore any state of society in which the sword is all the time suspended over the heads of the people must at last become intolerable.(3)
The previously discussed sentiments and activities of the Republicans in the North were what sparked the Southern secession movement of 1860-1861. Southerners had seen what the fanatical ravings of the Abolitionists had accomplished and had begun to ready themselves for the "impending crisis" which the Radicals were threatening to bring upon them. The tension came to a head with the nomination of Abraham Lincoln, who had earlier denounced as treasonous a resolution introduced by Stephen Douglas that those inciting the insurrection of slaves should be punished.(4) It is a suppressed fact of history that Lincoln, though publicly opposing Abolitionism, privately donated $100 to John Brown's seditious mission(5) and openly stated that he had no “objections of a moral nature” to emancipation “in view of possible consequences of insurrection and massacre at the South.”(6) In his famous "House Divided" speech, Lincoln had stated that the Union could no longer remain "half-slave and half-free," and that it would have to become "all one thing or all the other." The people of the Southern States had no desire to force slavery on their Northern neighbors, despite the fact that some of the slaveholders believed that the institution was, in and of itself, beneficial for both master and slave.(7) They therefore perceived Lincoln's words as an open threat to destroy the social structure of their section, and, taking into account the atrocities committed by John Brown, the newly canonized patron saint of the Republican party, it is at least understandable why the slave States reacted as they did to Lincoln's election in 1860. Jefferson Davis noted, "...[T]he Southern States did not proceed, as has been unjustly charged, from chagrin at their defeat in the election, or from any personal hostility to the President-elect, but from the fact that they recognized in him the representative of a party professing principles destructive to 'their peace, their prosperity, and their domestic tranquility'... Still it was hoped, against hope, that some adjustment might be made to avert the calamities of a practical application of the theory of an 'irrepressible conflict.'"(8) What steps the South took to avert conflict with the North, and how the Northern leaders responded, will be the subject of the next chapter.
The South Carolina Convention Votes For Secession
It has been customary for the history book writers since the war to refer to the "fire-eaters" of South Carolina as having, for all intents and purposes, highjacked the reins of power in that State, leading her people in a direction that was not generally desired. However, "the calmness and deliberation, with which the measures requisite for withdrawal were adopted and executed, afford the best refutation of the charge that they were the result of haste, passion, or precipitation."(9) To the contrary, the State Convention of South Carolina stated in its "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union":
We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties, the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences....
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction....
On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.
The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.
Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy is rendered vain, by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanction of more erroneous religious belief.
We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State; with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do [emphasis in original].
The ordinances and declarations of the causes of secession produced by the other Southern States were similar in content and were written in the same solemn tone.(10) There is no hint in these documents of the fanaticism which permeated the public statements and documents of the Northern Abolitionists. Furthermore, in the cases of Texas, Virginia, and Tennessee, the secession ordinances were submitted directly to a referendum in those States and subsequently ratified by overwhelming majorities by the people themselves.
Lincoln resolved in his first Inaugural Address to hold the Southern States in the Union unless his "rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means or in some authoritative manner direct the contrary." However, when the people of the South did just that, he declared their secession ordinances to be “legally void,” and denounced their lawfully organized conventions as insurrectionary “combinations.” As will be seen in the next chapter, Lincoln repulsed all Southern overtures for peace in 1861 and deliberately forced the Confederates to fire the first shot of the war at Fort Sumter. He again refused to enter into peace negotiations with the Confederate Government four years later at the Hampton Roads Peace Conference, stating that he would accept nothing less from the Southern States than unconditional surrender. Clearly, the true purpose of the war was, as Luther Martin had warned over seventy years before, "the total abolition and destruction of all state governments,"(11) not the restoration of the Union and not the abolition of slavery.
On at least one occasion, Lincoln revealed his "rightful masters" to be, not the American people, but the private financial interests and political aristocrats who controlled him from behind the cover of the slavery agitation.(12) In spite of this, he had the blasphemous audacity in his second Inaugural Address to attribute the continuation of the carnage he had initiated to the prescriptive will of a just and holy God.(13) It will become increasingly evident to the reader of this book that the pagan bloodlust of the Northern politicians of the Nineteenth Century doomed not only themselves and their young sons, but future generations of Americans yet unborn, to utter ruin. Matthew Carey's warning to the public agitators during the war of 1812 about the serious consequences of an unjustified revolution was long forgotten — or ignored — by the agitators in the 1850s and 1860s:
It is an easy process to raise commotions, and provoke seditions. But to allay them is always arduous; often impossible. Ten men may create an insurrection; which one hundred, of equal talents and influence, may be utterly unable to suppress. The weapon of popular discontent, easily wielded at the outset, becomes, after it has arrived at maturity, too potent for the feeble grasp of the agents by whom it has been called into existence. It hurls them and those against whom it was first employed, into the same profound abyss of misery and destruction. Whoever requires illustration of this theory, has only to open any page of the history of France from the era of the national convention till the commencement of the reign of Bonaparte. If he be not convinced by the perusal, "he would not be convinced, though one were to rise from the dead."(14)
Endnotes
1. John Quincy Adams, The Jubilee of the Constitution (New York: Samuel Coman, 1839), pages 66-69.
2. Rawle, View of the Constitution, page 296.
3. James Buchanan, in Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume VII, Page 3085.
4. Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln: Complete Works, Volume I, page 611.
5. William H. Herndon and Jesse William Weik, Life of Lincoln (Chicago, Illinois: Bedford, Clark and Company, 1889), Volume II, page 380.
6. Lincoln, in Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln: Complete Works, Volume II, page 234.
7. As demonstrated in Chapter Three, this sentiment was not universal in the South. A large number of slaveholders, especially in Virginia, viewed the institution as a curse and the presence of the Black race in America as inimical to White civilization. Thomas Jefferson summarized this prevalent feeling in the following:
I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property — for so it is misnamed — is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually, and with due sacrifice, I think it might be; but as it is, we have the wolf by the ears and can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other ((22 April 1820 letter to John Holmes; in Peterson, Thomas Jefferson: Writings, page 1435).
8. Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume I, page 53.
9. Davis, op. cit., page 199.
10. Ordinances of Secession of the Southern States and Declarations of the Causes of Secession of the Southern States.
11. Luther Martin, quoted by Rutland, Ordeal of the Constitution, page 29.
12. See Testimony of Col. John B. Baldwin.
13. Lincoln's words were as follows: "Yet, if God will that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, still it must be said, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." In his book entitled Why Was Lincoln Murdered? (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1937), Otto Eisenschiml offered extensive evidence to show that it was, in fact, Lincoln and his fellow Republicans themselves whose will it was that the war continue as long as it did until subjugation of the South was certain.
14. Carey, Olive Branch, page 327.
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