October 21, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
What Jefferson Davis
Has to Say to Us Today
And Why in the Midst
of Our Current Crisis it is Important
Friends,
In our
turbulent times it is increasingly evident that our government is disconnected
to the citizens of the republic. Rather, what we behold is a zealous managerial
caste, an elite buried deep in the aggressive bureaucracy which is,
essentially, a “government within a government.” It is an unelected,
self-perpetuating oligarchy that offers the illusion of popular participation,
and the chimerical mirage of two political parties which tussle back and forth,
each claiming to represent the wishes and views of the citizenry. Voting takes
place, of course; and then one party or the other claims victory to implement
its agenda. Yet, in Washington D.C. (and in many state capitals) the
administrators who actually run government and its agencies—those same dour
faces—remain the same, and very little changes at all.
In fact, for
some time now as detailed by acute observers, including most notably the late Dr.
Sam Francis (and before him James Burnham), and more recently by authors
such as Professor
Paul Gottfried, the current American political system has been largely a
charade, parading as a “democracy,” but in reality an insatiable and ruthless
oligarchic Behemoth...a caste system more severe, more self-aggrandizing, and
more domineering than anything traditional aristocracies ever envisaged or
dreamed of.
The
totally unexpected—and totally unplanned—election of Donald Trump in 2016
unleashed an immense revulsion and violent push-back by this Managerial State—by
what we are now accustomed to call the Deep State and its agents and minions in
both political parties, who saw that Trump in the White House might in some manner,
even in a small way, endanger their power and prerogatives. It could not stand,
and thus we have witnessed since November 2016 a steady attempt to reverse and
nullify the results of 2016, and by any means available expel the “rabble
rouser” from office. And return things back to normal.
The roots
of this situation go back some distance in our history. There have been
historical markers along the way—the enormous Federal seizures of power during
the Great Depression and during the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard
Nixon, or earlier, during the two terms of Woodrow Wilson. And the Federal courts have echoed and
canonized this growth by the managerial state by confirming its authority and
reach in such decisions as the Supreme Court’s Everson
decision (1947), which essentially perverted and abrogated the Framers’
intent in the Bill of Rights on the relations between church and state. Subsequent
serious
research has demonstrated just how ideological, ahistorical, and
anti-constitutional that decision was. But the critical damage was done,
inflicted, and chances for repairing it seem scarce to none.
Then
followed the Brown
v. the Board of Education ruling of 1954, which was a major blow against
the original understanding of the Constitution on the rights of the individual
states respecting education. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, in his volume The New
Color Line: How Quotas and Privileges Destroy Democracy, has
provided a detailed account of how this decision and others similar to it and
since it have all but destroyed what remained of the inherent and retained rights
of the states—creators of the American Constitution—as guaranteed to them.
These
more recent events, critical presidencies, and pivotal court actions, however,
all lead back to the War Between the States and its outcome which set our
republic on the road to the Managerial State. For there is a direct, if
sometimes partially obscured line from the defeat of the Southern Confederacy
in 1865 to the events swirling along the Potomac in our day. And it is something that all citizens of the
American republic should be deeply concerned about, not just traditional
Southerners devoted to their heritage and traditions, or honoring their
ancestors.
In a very
real sense all Americans, if they are truly exercised by what is happening to and
what has happened in the country should proudly proclaim themselves “Copperheads,”
for it was the arguments of the great Southern solons, writers, and authors
during those crucial years that indeed represented the Framers’ designs; they
were pledged to defend them, even at the cost of ending the precarious union
once so hopefully erected by those same Framers.
In June
2014 The Abbeville Review republished a remarkable essay which had been
originally published (posthumously) by President Jefferson Davis in the
distinguished journal, the North American
Review. The title of Davis’ long essay was “The Doctrine of State’s Rights,”
but it is far more than just a panegyric for the defeated Confederate cause or
a recapitulation of pro-Secessionist arguments. In it Davis, a veritable constitutional
scholar of evident profundity and first rank, examines in some detail both the
founding and nature of the American system, just how the Constitution came to
be, what the Framers explicitly intended, and why the concept of “states’ rights”—so
reviled today as “racist” or reactionary—was in fact the view on which this
country was founded.
Jefferson
Davis is often pilloried and criticized in our time for his actions as
president of the Confederacy, in particular for his military decisions. Much of
this criticism is unfair. But in his profound understanding of the nature of
the American confederation as the Framers devised it and of the doctrine of
states’ rights, so essential to the successful and beneficial operation of the
country, he was in many ways unparalleled and prescient.
As with
authors such as Robert Lewis Dabney, Davis’ writings demand our attention, for
they have much to say to us, much to teach us in an era when the demonic Deep
State, unleashed on the battlefield upon the corpses of hundreds of thousands
of young men 158 years ago, threatens to completely overwhelm us.
*****
I pass on Davis’ superb 1890 essay, and I urge you to read it
and share it.
The
Doctrine of State’s Rights
Jefferson
Davis (Jun 6, 2014)
This
piece originally appeared in the North American Review, February 1890.
To DO justice to the motives which
actuated the soldiers of the Confederacy, it is needful that the cause for
which they fought should be fairly understood; for no degree of skill, valor,
and devotion can sanctify service in an unrighteous cause.
We revere the memory of Washington, not
so much for his achievements in arms as for his self-abnegation and the
unfaltering devotion with which he defended the inalienable rights of the
people of all the United States. This made him first in peace, first in war,
and first in the hearts of his countrymen, and for this the great English poet
wrote: “But one were worthy of the name of Washington.” Yet he was what no
Southern soldier in the War Between the States could, with truth, be called–a
rebel–and, without much extravagance in the figure, was said to have fought the
battles of the Revolution with a halter round his neck. Had there been no
inalienable rights, or had they not been violated, he could not rightfully have
been absolved from his allegiance to the crown, or conscientiously have felt
that he had not broken his faith as subject to the lawful powers of the British
Government, in taking up arms against it.
In 1776 thirteen of the British colonies
in America sent delegates to a general congress, who there, for the colonies
they represented, made the declaration “that these united colonies are, and of
right ought to be, free and independent states.” Therefore these, like other British
colonies in America, were dependencies of Great Britain; and to justify their
declaration of independence, a formidable arraignment of the king for his
violation of their mutual obligations and rights was submitted to the judgment
of mankind. It has been customary among us annually to read this declaration to
admiring audiences; and what American has raised his voice against the
conclusion deduced? The permeating principle was that every people had the
right to alter or abolish their government when it ceased to answer the ends
for which it was instituted. Each State decided to exercise that right, and all
of the thirteen united to sustain it. Great Britain denied the existence of the
asserted right and a long war ensued. After a heavy sacrifice of life and
treasure, the Treaty of Paris was negotiated in 1783, by which Great Britain
recognized the independence of the States separately, not as one body politic,
but severally, each one being named in the act of recognition.
In the year succeeding the Declaration
of Independence,–i.e., 1777,–the thirteen States by which it had been made sent
delegates to a general congress, and they agreed to “certain articles of
confederation and perpetual union between the States” they represented, and
that “the style of the confederacy shall be the United States of America.” That
no purpose existed to consolidate the States into one body politic is manifest
from the terms of the second article, which was: “Each State retains its
sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and
right which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United
States in congress assembled.” The meaning of this article is quite plain, if
it be borne in mind that under the confederation the congress was of States,
each having one vote only, irrespective of population or the number of
delegates in attendance, and the expressly-delegated powers were such as it was
agreed that the congress of the States might use, all else being reserved to
the States separately. Under these Articles of Confederation the war of the
Revolution was conducted.
In the face of the Declaration of
Independence, and of the Articles of Confederation, and of the Treaty of Paris,
he who denies that in 1783 each State was a sovereign, free, and independent
community must have much hardihood or little historical knowledge.
After the independence had been gained
for which so much was risked and no little lost, when the condensing pressure
of war was removed, the fact became apparent that it was impracticable to
administer the general affairs of the Union without the possession of
additional powers. In 1787 a convention met to amend the Articles of
Confederation, and ended by proposing a new form of government which was to be
submitted to the States, and, if ratified by nine of them, should go into
effect as between the States so ratifying it. If only nine consented, what was
to become of the other four, and what of the plighted faith to a perpetual
union? We are not left to speculation with different numbers; the case did
actually occur. Eleven States ratified; two refused: what was to be done? The
expedient of raising an army to coerce North Carolina and Rhode Island into an
acceptance of the Constitution or new form of government seems not to have
occurred to any one of that day, and the situation was especially embarrassing
because the thirteenth article provided that the union should be perpetual, and
that no alteration should be made in any of the Articles of Confederation,
“unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress of the United States, and be
afterwards confirmed by the legislature of every State.”
An easy escape from the dilemma was
found; it was to disregard the pledges and prohibitions of Article Thirteen,
secede from the confederation styled the United States of America, and form a
new government with the same style as the old one. It was anticipated that some
of the State legislatures would not confirm this procedure; therefore it was
provided by the last article of the proposed new Constitution that the
“ratification of the conventions of nine States” should suffice for its
establishment “between the States so ratifying the same.” It will be observed
that the new Constitution was to be submitted for ratification to a higher
authority than the Congress and State legislatures, viz., to conventions of the
people of the States, the recognized form in which State sovereignty was
represented. Mr. Madison, in the forty-third number of The Federalist,
notices as a defect of the confederation that it had received no higher
sanction than legislative ratification; hence, as provided in the last article
of the new Constitution, it was to be submitted to our highest political
authority–conventions of the people of the respective States.
That was the supreme authority which,
according to the American theory, could alter or abolish their government, and
by which, nine States concurring, it was proposed to dissolve the “perpetual
union” of the confederation and establish a new one among themselves. In this
connection the distinguished member from Massachusetts remarked: “If nine out
of thirteen [States] can dissolve the compact, six out of nine will be just as
able to dissolve the future one hereafter.”
Mr. Madison, in The Federalist,
to the question: On what principle the confederation, which stands in the
solemn form of a compact among the States, can be superseded without the
unanimous consent of the parties to it? answers: “By recurring to the absolute
necessity of the case; to the great principle of self-preservation; to the
transcendent law of nature and of nature’s God, which declares that the safety
and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions
aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed.”
Thus the matter stood when the
Constitution to form a more perfect union was adopted, not, as has been most
unjustifiably asserted, by the people of the United States in mass, but by the people of the States, each acting in its
own convention and ratifying at different dates, the first being December 7,
1787, the last May 29, 1790. In view of facts so generally known, or (if not
so) accessible to every reader of American history, it is surprising that some
have contended that the Union was formed by the people of the United States as
one body politic.
Though the States by a voluntary compact
created a general government and delegated to it enumerated powers, reserving
all else to themselves, it has been attempted to deduce from these limited
grants a supremacy for the agent over the States, and, consequently, to deny to
the States of the Union the sovereignty they possessed as States of the
confederation. No one has attempted to show by what grant of the Constitution
it can be claimed that the States have surrendered their sovereignty, and it
seems absurd to assume that by implication the great object for which our
fathers staked all save honor could have been lost. But they were too watchful
to leave the question open for argument. Therefore, though the body of the instrument
was thought by its framers to be sufficiently explicit in its limitation of the
powers of the general government to those expressly delegated, yet, in an
abundance of caution, almost contemporaneously with the ratification of the
compact, two amendments were proposed and adopted in the following words:
“Article IX. The enumeration in the
constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage
others retained by the people.”
“Article X. The powers not delegated to
the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are
reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Consolidationists, with more zeal than
reason, have argued that the last two words in the tenth amendment referred to
the whole people. But this is surely untenable; the only people known to the
system were the people of a State or commonwealth; they only had been
represented in the Congress or in the convention which framed the Constitution.
To them that instrument had been submitted; by them it had been ratified. The
expression fairly construed must mean the State governments, and the people of
each State who held rights they had reserved from the control of their State
government. Furthermore, the obvious purpose being to guard against the
usurpation of undelegated power, it would have been worse than superfluous by
reservation to provide protection for the whole people against themselves.
In claiming sovereignty for the States I
must not be understood as meaning the State governments. When the word State is
used, it means the people of an organized community. The founders of the
American Republic never conferred or intended to confer sovereignty upon either
State or Federal governments.
If the people of the States, in forming
a Federal Union, transferred their sovereignty, or any part of it; to whom was
the transfer made? Not to the people of the United States in the aggregate, for
there was no such political body. The Articles of Confederation in their front
declared that each State retained its sovereignty, freedom, and independence;
that could only mean the people in their organic character. In like manner the
original constitution of Massachusetts declared: “The people inhabiting the
territory formerly called the Province of Massachusetts Bay do hereby solemnly
and mutually agree with each other to form themselves into a free, sovereign,
and independent body politic, or State, by the name of The Commonwealth of
Massachusetts.” In the debates of the convention which formed the Constitution,
as they are found reported in “Elliott’s Debates,” there is abundant proof that
the men who prepared the instrument recognized sovereignty as belonging to the
people of the individual States; that there was no purpose to transfer it to
the Federal Government, or to regard it as being divisible. The States
intrusted to the Federal Government, as their agent, some of the functions of
sovereignty, but the performance of these by authority of the people of the
States did not involve a violation of a cardinal feature in the American
theory; that sovereignty belonged alone to the people [of the respective
states], and the resolutions of ratification of the Constitution by the States
show whether the purpose was to transfer the power or only to authorize its use.
The usual form of ratification was as in
the following examples: “The delegates of the people of the State of New
Hampshire, in the name and behalf of the people of the State of New Hampshire,”
etc., and “the delegates of the people of Virginia, for and in behalf of the
people of Virginia,” etc., do assent to and ratify the said Constitution for
the United States of America.
As had been done by Massachusetts, New
Hampshire, and South Carolina in ratifying the Constitution, Virginia required certain
amendments as a more explicit guarantee against consolidation, and accompanied
the proposition with the following declaration: “That the powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the
people of the United States, may be resumed by them whenever the same shall be
perverted to their injury or oppression, and that every power not granted
thereby remains with them,” etc., etc. For whom were the delegates
commissioned to speak? Only for the people of Virginia. By whom had grants been
made? By the States severally, and the assertion could only mean that to each
of them all undelegated power remained. Indeed, there was no other repository
from which it could have been drawn; therefore no other in which it could have
been said to remain.
New York was the eleventh State to
assent to the compact of union, and her ratification was made more than seven
months after that of Delaware, and was accompanied by a declaration of the
principles on which her assent was given, from which the following extract is
made: “That the powers of government may
be reassumed by the people whensoever it shall become necessary to their
happiness; that every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not, by the said
Constitution, clearly delegated to the Congress of the United States, or the
departments of the government thereof, remains to the people of the several
States, or to their respective State governments, to whom they may have granted
the same,” etc.
Here, even more distinctly than before,
is answered the question as to who were THE PEOPLE by whom the powers might be
reassumed. Provision had been made for several modes of amending the
Constitution by the joint action of the States, and if it had been the will of
all the States to reform, or even to dissolve, the government, they would not
have been obstructed, as they were under the Confederation, by a pledge to
perpetual union or by a prohibition against any alteration of the Constitution
except by unanimous consent of the States. Therefore, unless the right to
reassume was asserted as belonging to any State being a party to the compact,
the declaration was useless and seemingly without an object. Reassumption is
the correlative of delegation.
By the published debates of the general
convention of 1787 which prepared the Constitution, and of the State
conventions to which it was severally submitted for approval or rejection as
each should decide, and by the resolutions of ratification, it is clearly
demonstrated that they did not surrender their dearly bought, most prized
sovereignty, freedom, and independence, or commit the absurdity of attempting
to delegate inalienable rights.
At that early period sectional rivalry
was manifested, and some of the most influential advocates of the new Union
felt the lurking danger of faction and sought to provide against it by means
consistent with the perpetuity of the Union. Faction, with the tendency of
majorities to oppress minorities, was the recognized cause of failure in former
federations and republics. To protect the United States from that evil, it was
sought to secure a balance of power between the North and the South, by so
organizing the two houses of Congress that neither section would have a
majority in both. The purpose was good, but the calculation was bad, so that in
a not-distant future the North, as a section, had a majority in both houses of
Congress and in the electoral colleges for the choice of the President. Party
did for many years control faction; and principles, independent of latitude and
longitude, formed the cement of political parties. Thus it was, as late as
1853, that the true patriot and friend of the Constitution, Franklin Pierce,
could conscientiously say that, politically, he knew no North, no South, no
East, no West.
The wise statesmen who formed the plan
for the new Union of 1787-90, with admirable caution, required a material
barrier to check majorities from aggression under the influence of
self-interest and lust of dominion. They could not have been certain that their
method of preserving the balance of power between the sections would be
permanently successful. What, then, was the remedy in case of violated compact
and aggression upon reserved rights? None was stated, but the proposition to
authorize the employment of force against a delinquent State was denounced on
all sides of the convention and rejected without a division. In the original
draft of the Constitution the term “national government” was written: to this
expression Mr. Ellsworth objected, and moved to drop the word “national”
and retain the proper title, “the United States“; which motion was
unanimously adopted by the convention. Both the coercion of a State and the use
of the term “national government” were emphatically condemned by the framers of
the Constitution.
A compact was made between independent
States by which expressly enumerated powers were delegated to a government
instituted for their common benefit, which was a partnership without
limitation. No mode of terminating it was specified, but Mr. Madison, than whom
none was better informed of the opinions and purposes of the members of the
convention, in the number of The Federalist heretofore
quoted (which was an argument to justify secession from the confederation)
wrote:
It is an established doctrine on the
subject of treaties that all articles are mutually conditions of each other;
that a breach of any one article is a breach of the whole treaty; and that a
breach committed by either of the parties absolves the others, and authorizes
them, if they please, to pronounce the compact violated and void. Should it
unhappily be necessary to appeal to these delicate truths for a justification
for dispensing with the consent of particular States to a dissolution of the
Federal pact, will not the complaining parties find it a difficult task to
answer the multiplied and important infractions with which they may be
confronted? The time has been when it was incumbent on us all to veil the ideas
which this paragraph exhibits.
It is unfortunate that the convention
should have thought proper to veil the delicate truth and did not in plain
terms announce the right of a State to secede from the Union whenever it should
cease to answer the ends for which it was established, viz., to insure domestic
tranquility and promote the general welfare. Our past history distinctly shows
how reluctant any State would be to sever her connection with the Union; and
may it not reasonably be inferred that, if the right to withdraw had been
recognized, there would have been additional care not to give just cause for
the exercise of that right?
Though not expressed, the existence of
the right was often asserted and rarely, if ever, denied anterior to 1861. It
cannot be said that it was then for the first time formally asserted and
therefore for the first time denied. The acquisition of Louisiana in 1803
created much dissatisfaction in the New England States, the reason of which was
expressed by an eminent citizen of Massachusetts, who said that the influence
of our part of the Union must be diminished by the acquisition of more weight
at the other extremity. (“Life of Cabot,” by Lodge, page 334.)
In 1811, on the bill for the admission
of Louisiana as a State of the Union, the Hon. Josiah Quincy, member of
Congress from Massachusetts, said: “If this bill passes, it is my deliberate
opinion that it is virtually a dissolution of this Union; that it will free the
States from their moral obligation; and as it will be the right of all, so it
will be the duty of some, definitely to prepare for a separation–amicably if
they can, violently if they must.”
The Hartford Convention assembled in
December, 1814. From their published report the following extract is made: “If
the Union be destined to dissolution by reason of the multiplied abuses of bad
administration, it should, if possible, be the work of peaceable times and
deliberate consent. . . . Whenever it shall appear that the causes are radical
and permanent, a separation by equitable arrangement will be preferable to an
alliance by constraint among nominal friends, but real enemies.”
In 1844 the measures taken for the
annexation of Texas evoked threats of a dissolution of the Union. The
Legislature of Massachusetts adopted a resolution declaring 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 the 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 on the threshold, may tend to drive these States into a
dissolution of the Union.”
The examples cited are sufficient to
show that secession was not a new idea in 1861, and that its assertion was not
of Southern origin. Before leaving the subject, it may in general terms be
stated that the doctrine of State rights is not that of a section, but is that
of a minority, seeking the protection of State sovereignty from the real or
supposed aggression of a usurping majority. In vain have we asked by what
clause of the Constitution the States surrendered their sovereignty and, by
consequence, a State lost its right to secede; and the nearest approach we have
had to an answer has been the inquiry, “Where is the right of a State to secede
set forth in the Constitution?” This marks either an evasion of the issue or
extreme ignorance of the history of the Union. The States delegated all the rights
and powers which the general government possesses, and they agreed with each
other that no State should exercise certain functions which were intrusted to
the Federal Government as their agent; therefore it seems not less than puerile
to ask from what part of the Constitution the right or power of a State was
derived. Every power, function, or right which the States did not agree to
delegate to their common agent remained with them. No one of ordinary
information and intelligence can deny that the States were sovereign, free, and
independent when they entered into the compact of Union. If they had not been
sovereigns, they would not have been competent to form that treaty; and as none
have even attempted to show where or how their sovereignty was lost, it must be
regarded as among the reserved powers of the States, and hence, still being
sovereigns, they had the same legal power and right to
secede from the Union which they had exercised in acceding to it.
The declared purpose of the Union was to
promote the GENERAL WELFARE, and to secure to posterity the BLESSINGS OF
LIBERTY, which the States had achieved by the sacrifices of the Revolution. The
men who negotiated the compact for a more perfect union of the States were not
visionaries or optimists, but profound students of the worlds history, from
which they had learned the tendency of free government to breed faction and of
majorities to oppress minorities, resulting in the lamentable wreck of past
federations and the loss of the liberty they were formed to secure. To guard
against that danger, the representation of the States in the two houses of
Congress was to be apportioned so as to secure a balance of power–i. e., so as
to prevent either the North or the South from having a majority in both houses.
The plan failed; the North got a majority in both houses, and history repeated
itself. Under the power of Congress to levy duties on imports “to pay the debts
and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States,”
duties were levied not merely for revenue, but avowedly to protect domestic
manufactures from foreign competition. As the manufactories were mainly at the
North and the exports from the South, this measure to increase the price of
imports for the benefit of domestic manufacturers at the North was usurping an
undelegated power, by sectional discrimination, in disregard of the obligation
to establish justice and promote the general welfare. It was a twofold
injustice to the South, by increasing the cost of its imports and diminishing
the value of its exports in the markets of exchange. In this connection I will
quote from Mr. Benton, a statesman of long experience and close observation,
and not particularly friendly to the South. He says Under Federal legislation
the exports of the South have been the basis of the Federal revenue. He names
four Southern States as contributing three-fourths of the annual expense of the
Federal Government, and adds:
“Of this great sum annually furnished by
them, nothing, or next to nothing, is returned to them in the shape of
government expenditures. That expenditure flows in an opposite direction–it
flows northwardly in one uniform, uninterrupted, and perennial stream. This is
the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up from the North.
Federal legislation does all this. . . . No tariff has ever yet included
Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, except to increase the burdens
imposed upon them.”
It has, in modern times, been asserted
by some in high position, if not of high authority, that the will of the
majority was the law of the land. Not so thought the men who formed the
Constitution. They sought through every conceivable device to protect
minorities from the despotism which majorities are ever prone to inflict, and I
must insist that while each State retained its sovereignty it had a shield
against the despotism of a majority in its power to withdraw to the precincts
of its own dominion; and this, if the majority were heedless of every appeal to
justice and their compact, was the only remedy which seems to have been left.
De Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, Vol. I., page 301,
writes:
“The majority in that country exercise a
prodigious actual authority and a moral influence which is scarcely less
preponderant; no obstacles exist which can impede or so much as retard its
progress, or which induce it to heed the complaints of those whom it crushes
upon its path.”
Mr. Madison, in the Virginia Convention
of 1788, said:
“Turbulence, violence, and abuse of
power by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority have produced
factions and commotions which in republics have, more frequently than any other
cause, produced despotism. If we go over the whole history of ancient and
modern republics, we shall find their destruction to have generally resulted
from these causes.”
In 1861 all the plans proposed to
restrain the majority had failed. The dangers which had been described as
belonging to the condition we were in had to be met. The South, by her
representatives in the two houses of Congress, tried, by select committees, to
find some possible means of giving security to the Southern States short of
adopting the last resort, secession.
The committee of the Senate organized in
January, 1861, of which the writer of this article was a member, sought
diligently to find some basis of adjustment on which a majority of the members
representing the three political divisions of the Senate could agree. These
divisions were known as the Radicals of the North, the Conservatives of the
Middle States, and the Ultras of the South. The venerable Senator of Kentucky,
Mr. Crittenden, had offered the resolutions which were referred to the
committee. Mr. Douglas, Senator from Illinois, after the failure of the
committee to agree upon anything, called the attention of the Senate to the
fact that it was not the Southern members, naming particularly Toombs and
Davis, who obstructed measures for pacification, but the Northern men, who had
objected to everything, and on whom he then called for a statement of what they
proposed to do, to which no answer was made. Exulting in the result of their
recent election, feeling power and forgetting right, they yet dared not avow
the evil purpose which they contemplated. One State had already withdrawn from
the Union, and events in others were moving with accelerated velocity to the
same conclusion; yet the men who were soon to be most vociferous in
declarations of love for the Union were silent when words might have been
effectual to save it. It had been but a few years since a hearing had been
refused to abolitionist lecturers in New England; but now the eminent orator,
Wendell Phillips, exulting in the terrible faction which was ruling in the
North, said: “It does not know its own face and calls itself national; but it
is not national–it is sectional. The Republican party is a party of the North,
pledged against the South.”
Mr. Seward, he of the irrepressible
conflict, who was regarded as the power behind the throne of the incoming
administration, was a member of the committee above referred to; but he sat in
the Senate silent under the challenge of Mr. Douglas, and allowed the language
of Mr. Phillips to go for what it was worth.
For the first time in the history of the
country a sectional candidate for the Presidency had been elected. A majority
of the Presidents had been Southern men, but none of them had been elected as
such. They had always been nominated by a party co-extensive with the Union,
and voted for in all the States; but Mr. Lincoln had been put forth on purely
sectional grounds and did not receive a single Southern vote. He had announced
that the Union could not continue to exist half slave and half free. What then?
Was the Union to be dissolved? Was slavery to be introduced into the Northern
or to be abolished in the Southern States? The declaration was an offence
against the Constitution, and neither branch of the proposition could be
executed without a palpable violation of it. Many of the States had passed what
were called personal-liberty laws, in direct violation of the constitutional
obligation to return fugitives held to service or labor under the laws of
another State, which Mr. Webster in his great oration in Virginia said, if
persisted in, would be destructive to the compact of Union.
The right of the South equally with the
people of other sections to occupy, with every species of property known to any
State, the common territory of the United States, was denied by the North,
under the specious and wholly untenable plea that to take slaves to the
territories would be the extension of slavery. Though the argument was upon a
false basis, it served the purpose of inflaming the Northern mind. At the South
the proposition to forbid a citizen who should migrate to the common territory
of the United States from taking his slave with him was considered an offensive
and unjust denial of equality in the Union, and as such, but not because of any
money interest in the question, an intense excitement was created by it.
The serious troubles in Kansas were
followed by the double-dyed crime of John Browns invasion of Virginia. He came
fresh from the Kansas school, and was fulfilling Mr. Seward’s prophecy that
abolitionism would invade the South. Though the avowed purpose of the invasion
was to disturb domestic tranquility, which it was one of the proclaimed objects
of the Union to secure, arson and murder were its accompaniments. When Brown
was tried with due formality, sentenced, and executed according to the laws of
the land, inasmuch as his crimes had been committed with open hostility to the
South, he was canonized at the North and a hymn to his memory became the
marching song of the declared enemies of the South. For some years the
abolition faction had borne upon its banner “No union with slave-holders,”
though, as has been before stated, when the first Union was formed all of the
States recognized slave property by their laws. It was common among demagogues
in later times to excite prejudice against that species of property by
describing it as a chattel, though it never was more than a life-long right to
service and labor, and that, with the right of increase, was all which could be
the subject of purchase and sale. Without further reciting violations of the compact
which rendered it void, suffice it to say that seven of the States,
deliberately acting in the highest form of procedure,–i. e., by convention of
the people,–did pass ordinances of secession just as they had formerly passed
ordinances of accession by resolutions of ratification of the Constitution of
the United States.
Now we have reached the point of inquiry
as to what was the moral duty of a citizen of a seceding State in 1861.
It is not proposed to discuss any
question arising out of subsequent events. It had, so far as I know, in all the
earlier periods of our history been uniformly held that allegiance was
primarily due to the State of which the individual was a citizen, and that
allegiance to the United States resulted from the fact that the State to which
each individual belonged was by compact a member of the Union.
When the Southern States had, in the
recognized mode of expressing their sovereign will,–that is, by convention of
the people of the State,–resumed the grants made by them as parties to the
Federal compact, they, following the precedent of 1787, formed a new union
styled the Confederate States of America.
The wish of all, and the general
expectation, was that the separation should be peaceable. For this purpose one
of the first acts of the Confederate Government was to send commissioners to
the United States Government to adjust all questions which would naturally
arise in a dissolution of partnership. Our overtures were rejected, as I feared
they would be, for the question was ever ringing in my ears, “If we let the
South go, where will we get a revenue?” With continued assurance of peaceful
intention the Federal Government made ready for war.
At the call of their States, the people
of the South, with unexampled unanimity, volunteered to defend their hearths,
their altars, and their inalienable rights. Gray-haired sires and beardless
sons were in the same ranks; but preparation had not been made to arm and equip
them, and they had little more than their brave breasts to offer for defence
against threatened invasion. Vainly had the South relied on the Constitution as
a shield; it was crushed by the mailed hand of a factious majority–the evil
which Mr. Madison, in the tenth number of the Federalist,
described as that which had covered with opprobrium federation as a form of
government.
I make no excusatory plea that the men
“thought they were right when,” at the call of their sovereign State, they
staked all save honor in defence of the rights their fathers left them. If they
were not right, then patriotism is an empty name, and he who looks death in the
face under its sacred inspiration may be a traitor. If it be treason for a
citizen to defend the State under whose protection he lives, even against the
Federal Government, the Constitution has placed him in the cruel dilemma of
being, in the event of conflict between his State and the United States,
necessarily compelled to commit treason against one or the other. This surely
cannot be the condition to which our fathers reduced us when they entered into
the compact of union. Allegiance is everywhere due to the sovereign only. That
sovereign, under the American system, is the People–the People of the State to
which the individual belongs; the People who constitute the State government
which he obeys; the People who alone, as far as he is concerned, ordained and
established the Federal Constitution: the People who never delegated their
sovereignty, and therefore retain the power to revoke all agencies created by
them.
If the sovereign abolishes the State
government and ordains and establishes a new one, the obligation of obedience
requires the citizen to transfer his allegiance accordingly: there may be
joint, but cannot be divided, allegiance; and this fact controlled the action
of officers of the army and navy of the United States when continuance in the
Federal service came in conflict with the ultimate allegiance due from each to
the sovereign State to which he belonged.
About Jefferson Davis
Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) was a
soldier, statesman, author, and President of the Confederate States of America
from 1861-1865. Born in Kentucky, he served as a Representative and United
States Senator from Mississippi and as Secretary of War in the Franklin Pierce
administration.
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