tional quarrel which had already threatened the existence of the Union in the question of taxation, was to verify the prophecy of Channing. Webster, who had been the foremost antagonist of nullification in the affair of the tariff, lived to acknowledge that even secession was being provoked by the insane aggression of the North. In one of his latest speeches, in that which is known as his speech for the Union, 7th March 1850, he denounced the policy of the abolitionists: "I do not mean to impute gross motives even to the leaders of these societies, but I am not blind to the consequences of their proceedings. I cannot but see what mischiefs their interference with the South has produced. And is it not plain to every man? Let any gentleman who entertains doubts on this point recur to the debates in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1832, and he will see with what freedom a proposition made by Mr. J. Randolph for the gradual abolition of slavery was discussed in that body. Public opinion, which in Virginia had begun to be exhibited against slavery, and was opening out for the discussion of the question, drew back and shut itself up in its castle. . We all know the fact, and we all know the cause; and every thing that these agitating people have done has been, not to enlarge, but to restrain, not to set free, but to bind faster, the slavepopulation of the South."* Howe, the Virginian historian, in principle though not in policy an abolitionist, says: "That a question so vitally important would have been renewed with more success at an early subsequent period, seems more than probable, if the current opinions of the day can be relied on; but there were obvious causes in operation which paralysed the friends of abolition, and have had the effect of silencing all agitation on the subject. The abolitionists in the Northern and Eastern States, gradually increasing their strength as a party, became louder in their denunciations of slavery, and more and more reckless in the means adopted for assailing the constitutional rights of the South."+ Story writes, 19th January 1839: "The question of slavery is becoming more and more an absorbing one, and will, if it continues to extend its influence, lead to a dissolution of the Union. At least there are many of our soundest statesmen who look to this as a highly probable event."+ At that time the abolitionist party was yet in its infancy, and had not succeeded in combining together in a single party all the interests that were hostile to the slave States. * Works, v. 357. + Historical Collections of Virginia, p. 128. Lord Carlisle, describing a conversation he had in 1841 with the present Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, says, "I find that I noted at the time that he was the first person I had met who did not speak slightingly of the abolitionists; he thought they were gradually gaining ground."* But in the following year the abolitionist policy rapidly grew up into a great danger to the Union, which the great rivals, Webster and Calhoun, united to resist at the close of their lives. Commercially speaking, it is not certain that the North would gain by the abolition of slavery. It would increase the Southern market by encouraging white emigration from the North; but the commerce of New England depends largely on the cotton-crop, and the New-England merchants are not for abolition. Calhoun did not attribute the movement to a desire of gain: "The crusade against our domestic institution does not originate in hostility of interests. .. The rabid fanatics regard slavery as a sin, and thus regarding it deem it their highest duty to destroy it, even should it involve the destruction of the constitution and the Union."† In this view he is fully supported by Webster: "Under the cry of universal freedom, and that other cry that there is a rule for the government of public men and private men which is of superior obligation to the constitution of the country, several of the States have enacted laws to hinder, obstruct, and defeat the enactments in this act of Congress to the utmost of their power. . . . . I suspect all this to be the effect of that wandering and vagrant philanthropy which disturbs and annoys all that is present, in time or place, by heating the imagination on subjects distant, remote, and uncertain."‡ Webster justly considered that the real enemies of the constitution were the abolitionists, not the slave-owners, who threatened to secede. To appeal from the constitution to a higher law, to denounce as sinful and contrary to natural right an institution expressly recognised by it, is manifestly an assault upon the Union itself. The South have the letter and the spirit of the law in their favour. The consistent abolitionists must be ready to sacrifice the Union to their theory. If the objection to slavery is on moral grounds, paramount to all political rights and interests, abolition is a peremptory duty, to which the Union itself, whose law is opposed to compulsory abolition, must succumb. It was therefore perfectly just to remind Mr. Seward, that in attack * Lecture on America, p. 27. + Works, iv. 386. Ibid. vi. 556, 561. ing slavery, and denying that it could be tolerated, he was assailing the law to which he owed his seat in Congress. "No man," said Webster, "is at liberty to set up, or affect to set up, his own conscience as above the law, in a matter which respects the rights of others, and the obligations, civil, social, and political, due to others from him."* Dr. Brownson says, with great truth, as only a Catholic can, "No civil government can exist, none is conceivable even, where every individual is free to disobey its orders, whenever they do not happen to square with his private convictions of what is the law of God. . . . To appeal from the government to private judgment, is to place private judgment above public authority, the individual above the state."t Calhoun was entirely justified in saying that, in the presence of these tendencies, "the conservative power is in the slave-holding States. They are the conservative portion of the country." His own political doctrines, as we have described them, fully bear out this view. But the conservative, anti-revolutionary character of the South depended on other causes than the influence of its master mind. Slavery is itself in contradiction with the equal rights of man, as they are laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Slave-owners are incapacitated from interpreting that instrument with literal consistency, for it would contradict both their interests and their daily experience. But as there are advanced democrats at the South as well as at the North, and as, indeed, they succeeded in resisting so long the Northern politicians, by using the jealousy of the Northern people against the wealthy capitalists, and the appearance of aristocracy, they find means of escaping from this dilemma. This is supplied by the theory of the original inferiority of the African race to the rest of mankind, for which the authority of the greatest naturalist in America is quoted. "The result of my researches," says Agassiz, "is, that Negroes are intellectually children; physically one of the lowest races; inclining with the other blacks, especially the South-Sea Negroes, most of all to the monkey type, though with a tendency, even in the extremes, towards the real human form. This opinion I have repeatedly expressed, without drawing from it any objectionable consequence, unless, perhaps, that no coloured race, least of all the Negroes, can have a common origin with ourselves." If this theory were not the property of the infidel science of Europe, one would suppose it must have been invented for the Americans, whom it suits so well. * Works, vi. 578. † Essays and Reviews, pp. 357, 359. Works, iv, 360. Webster spoke with great power against the projects of the North: "There is kept up a general cry of one party against the other, that its rights are invaded, its honour insulted, its character assailed, and its just participation in political power denied. Sagacious men cannot but suspect from all this, that more is intended than is avowed; and that there lies at the bottom a purpose of the separation of the States, for reasons avowed or disavowed, or for grievances redressed or unredressed." "In the South, the separation of the States is openly professed, discussed, and recommended, absolutely or conditionally, in legislative halls, and in conventions called together by the authority of the law. "In the North, the State governments have not run into such excess, and the purpose of overturning the government shows itself more clearly in resolutions agreed to in voluntary assemblies of individuals, denouncing the laws of the land, and declaring a fixed intent to disobey them. . . . . It is evident that, if this spirit be not checked, it will endanger the government; if it spread far and wide, it will overthrow the government."* The language of Calhoun about the same period is almost identical with Webster's. "The danger is of a characterwhether we regard our safety or the preservation of the Union-which cannot be safely tampered with. If not met promptly and decidedly, the two portions of the Union will become thoroughly alienated, when no alternative will be left to us, as the weaker of the two, but to sever all political ties, or sink down into abject submission."+ His last great speech, delivered March 4, 1850, a few days before his death, opened with the words, "I have believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion." And he went on to say: " If something is not done to avert it, the South will be forced to choose between abolition and secession. Indeed, as events are now moving, it will not require the South to secede in order to dissolve the Union."‡ The calamity which these eminent men agreed in apprehending and in endeavouring to avert, was brought on after their death by the rise of the republican party,-a party in its aims and principles quite revolutionary, and not only inconsistent with the existence of the Union, but ready from the first to give it up. "I do not see," said the New-England Speech of 17th June 1850; Works, vi. 567, 582. † Works, iv. 395. Ibid. 542, 556. philosopher Emerson, "how a barbarous community and a civilised community can constitute one State." In order to estimate the extravagance of this party declaration, we will only quote two unexceptionable witnesses, who visited the South at an interval of about forty years from each other; one a Boston divine, the other an eager abolitionist. "How different from our Northern manners! There, avarice and ceremony, at the age of twenty, graft the coldness and unfeelingness of age on the disinterested ardour of youth. I blush for my own people when I compare the selfish prudence of the Yankee with the generous confidence of a Virginian. Here I find great vices, but greater virtues than I left behind me. There is one single trait which attaches me to the people I live with more than all the virtues of New England, they love money less than we do."* Lord Carlisle says, in the lecture already referred to, "It would be uncandid to deny that the planter in the Southern States has much more in his manner and mode of intercourse that resembles the English country gentleman than any other class of his countrymen."+ Emerson's saying is a sign of the extent to which rapid abolitionists were ready to go. Declaring that the Federal Government was devoted to Southern interests, against Northern doctrines, they openly defied it. Disunion societies started up at the North for the purpose of bringing about separation. Several States passed laws against the South. and against the constitution, and there were loud demands for separation. This was the disposition of the North at the presidential election of a successor to Pierce. The North threatened to part company, and if it carried its candidate, it threatened the Southern institutions. The South proclaimed the intention of seceding if Fremont should be elected, and threatened to march upon Washington and burn the archives of the Union. Buchanan's election pacified the South; but it was evident, from the growing strength of the republican party, that it was their last victory. They accordingly made use of their friends in office to take advantage of the time that remained to them to be in readiness when the next election came. Secession was resolved upon and prepared from the time when the strength of the republicans was exhibited in 1856. In spite of all the horrors of American slavery, it is impossible for us to have any sympathy with the party of which Mr. Seward is the chief. His politics are not only revolutionary, but aggressive; he is not only for absolutism but for annexation. In a speech on January 26, * Memoir of Channing, p. 43. † p. 35. |