death and an agreement with hell." Benton, in his Thirty Years in the Senate, aptly compared the efforts of these disturbers of the peace to the action of a pair of shears-without the opposition of each half the other would have been ineffectual to disturb the quiet of the country.

CHAPTER VI.

STATE RIGHTS-CONTINUED.

Causes Leading to Secession-Personal Liberty Bills-A Broken Constitution-Delusions of Southern Leaders-Objects of Secession Cherished for Thirty Years-Conservative Policy of President LincolnDifferent Significance of the Term "State Rights"-Application to General Citizenship, &c.

To relate all the events which terminated in the secession of the Southern States is not within

the scope of this article. The repeal of the "Missouri Restriction," the annexation of Texas and the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court already referred to, all contributed fresh food to the agitation, which finally culminated in the secession of the Southern States in 1861 and the attempted establishment of the Southern Confederacy. This was justified by their leaders on the ground that the Constitution, having been broken by most of the Northern States by the passage of the personal "liberty bills," was no longer of any binding effect on them. An examination of these laws would seem to confirm this position. The law of Vermont-1854-on this subject contained the following provisions:

"Every person who may have been held as a slave, who shall come or be brought, or be in this State shall be free. Every person who shall attempt to hold any free person in any

form, or for any time, under the pretense that such person has been, or is a slave, shall, on conviction thereof, be imprisoned, not less than five nor more than twenty years, and be fined not less than one nor more than ten thousand dollars."

Similar laws were passed in the same year, 1854, by Rhode Island and Connecticut, and by Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Michigan in 1855; by Wisconsin and Kansas in 1858, and by Ohio in 1859. These laws were in direct conflict with a plain provision of the Constitution of the United States, which is in the following words, Art. 4, Sec. 2: "No person held to labor or service in one State under the laws thereof escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor is due."

Not only did these personal liberty bills squarely violate the Constitution, but they were also in direct conflict with the decisions of the Supreme Court on the same subject. Yet no attempt was made by the general government, then under the administration of Mr. Buchanan, to enforce the authority of the Constitution against these States, though it has been since the regu lar practice of the Radical Republicans to accuse that President of "truckling to the South." Many similarly false accusations have been

indulged in to his discredit, from all of which however his friends have fully vindicated his reputation in a work entitled Buchanan's Administration. This exhibition of "State Rights," or the right of a State to disregard its Constitutional obligations, has never been exceeded by any Southern State.

In support of the Southern view cf a broken Constitution, the following extract of a speech of Daniel Webster in 1851 is given:

"I have not hesitated to say, and I repeat it, that if the Northern States refuse willfully and deliberately to carry into effect that part of the Constitution which requires the restoration of fugitive slaves, and Congress provide no remedy, the South would be no longer bound to observe the compact."

Mr. Webster's great reputation as an expounder of the Constitution, entitles his opinion to the weight of absolute law.

We have already seen that Mr. J. Q. Adams had expressed himself on the question of the annexation of Texas, "as a violation of our national compact, so injurious to the interests and feelings of the people of the free States as not only inevitably to result in a dissolution of the Union, but fully to justify it." Besides, it will be seen that not only Mr. Adams but Joshua R. Giddings and eleven other members of Congress signed the address from which the above extract is taken, and were thus of the same

opinion as Daniel Webster, quoted above, that a broken compact justified the dissolution of the Union.

It is yet perhaps too soon to impartially consider the question as to which of the two parties, the Northern or Southern Radicals, are responsible for the late civil war, with all its attendant horrors, of lives destroyed, homes ruined, property wasted, and morals perverted. But in either event, the Democratic party can point with pride to its past record and say: "Shake not your gory locks at me; thou cans't not say I did it." For the Democratic doctrine -the people to govern-as propounded by Douglas, would have eventually and peaceably settled the question of slavery, as the majority, rapidly inclining to anti-slavery sentiments, would have determined.

To relate all the incidents which led to and accompanied the secession of the Southern States, would require volumes. If the student of history will consult Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, Greeley's Great American Conflict, A. H. Stephens's Constitutional View of the War Between the States, and Benton's Thirty Years in the United States Senate, comparing each author's account of the events with the others, he cannot fail to form a pretty just conception of the subject under consideration. But enough is given in these pages to enable the general