The Middle Period 1817-1858 Part 20

It was a good, stiff measure, but it was const.i.tutional at every point, and it was demanded by the exigencies of the situation. It was a complete answer to the Replevin Act of South Carolina, and it would inevitably throw the responsibility for committing the first act of violence upon the Commonwealth in any resistance to the collection of the duties. It p.r.i.c.ked the bubble completely of South Carolina's proposed legal resistance to the execution of the laws of the United States.

Of course the bill was denounced at once by the South Carolinians as a "Force Bill." Calhoun attacked it as a measure for coercing a sovereign "State," and offered a series of "States' rights"

propositions, which he declared to be indisputable, and which must, therefore, prevent the pa.s.sage of the bill. The discussion upon {235} these resolutions, and upon the bill which they were meant to destroy, dragged on from day to day in the Senate, while that upon the Verplanck bill in the House proceeded even more slowly.

[Sidenote: The postponement of the execution of nullification.]

The chiefs of the nullifiers, professing to feel that the Government was yielding, rea.s.sembled in convention in the last days of January, and postponed the execution of their Ordinance until the end of the existing Congressional session.

On February 8th, Mr. Bell, the chairman of the Judiciary committee of the House of Representatives, reported to that body that his committee did not recommend vesting the President with any further powers for the execution of the revenue laws than those already possessed by him, and that they could not approve of the employment of military force for the purpose.

[Sidenote: The Compromise Tariff.]

Such was the situation when, on February 12th, Mr. Clay astonished the Senate with the noted proposition for compromise. This was his bill for the gradual reduction of the duties to a revenue basis. The revenue basis was fixed in the bill at twenty per centum _ad valorem_ on all articles then paying a higher duty, and the excess was to be remitted in biennial instalments, and entirely abolished from and after June 30th, 1842. The free list was slightly extended, and cash payments, from and after June 30th, 1842, were provided.

[Sidenote: Mr. Clay on the situation.]

Mr. Clay said, in introducing this bill, that he had two purposes in view: one to save what could be saved of the protective tariff, and the other to allow South Carolina to withdraw with dignity from the position which she had rashly a.s.sumed. He claimed that his feeling toward the action of South Carolina had changed since her Representatives and Senators in Congress had disavowed rebellion and had {236} a.s.serted that they were only trying to invent legal methods for protecting themselves against the oppression of the tariff Acts.

He demonstrated very clearly the error of supposing that they could do any such thing, and then urged his brother Senators to join him in the proposed measure of conciliation.

[Sidenote: Mr. Calhoun's support of Mr. Clay's bill.]

Mr. Calhoun immediately indicated that the bill would have his support, and would solve the difficulties between South Carolina and the general Government. He professed to see in it the concession of about all that South Carolina had asked.

[Sidenote: The opposition to the bill.]

The opposition to the bill came from three quarters--from the protectionists, who clung to the existing law, from the strong nationalists, who were against any show of compromise with nullification, and from the strict parliamentarians, who held that any bill touching the tariff must originate in the House of Representatives.

The protectionists were answered, and many of them won over, by the argument that the Verplanck bill would pa.s.s if they did not accept Mr.

Clay's bill. The strong nationalists were told that if Congress should pa.s.s the Wilkins bill before the Clay bill a sufficient vindication of their position would be attained. They were inclined to accept that view, but the South Carolinians set themselves against this order of procedure with all their strength. Mr. Calhoun came forward again with his "States' sovereignty" exposition of the Const.i.tution, and denounced the Wilkins bill in the most vehement language as "utterly unconst.i.tutional, as an attempt to enforce robbery by murder, an attempt to decree the ma.s.sacre of the citizens of South Carolina," and declared that the citizens of South Carolina would, should it become law, resist its execution "at every hazard, even that of death itself."

{237} [Sidenote: Pa.s.sage of the "Force Bill" by the Senate.]

On the following day Mr. Webster answered Mr. Calhoun's argument, and demonstrated so clearly the nationality of the Const.i.tution, the supremacy of the laws of the United States, and the rebellious character of nullification, that the Senate was convinced of the necessity of pa.s.sing the Wilkins bill before voting upon Mr. Clay's bill. On the 20th of the month (February), the Senate pa.s.sed the Wilkins bill by a vote of thirty-two to one. The objections of the strong nationalists to Mr. Clay's bill were now substantially satisfied; but the high protectionists still held out in considerable number for some modification of the bill in their favor, and on the day after the pa.s.sage of the Wilkins bill by the Senate, Mr. Clay moved to amend his own bill by the proposition to base the duties on home valuation instead of on the foreign invoice. The protectionists were satisfied by this, but Mr. Calhoun immediately declared that South Carolina would not accept the bill with this change. The protectionists, in sufficient number to defeat the bill, declared that they would not accept it without the change. Mr. Calhoun had at last come to see the peril which lay in South Carolina's course, and to understand the feeling of the nation toward her. He wisely concluded to abandon his opposition to the amendment, and to vote for the bill.

[Sidenote: Pa.s.sage of the Compromise Tariff bill and the "Force Bill"

by Congress.]

The opposition of the strict parliamentarians, on the ground that the Senate could not originate a revenue bill, was overcome by the action of the House of Representatives in subst.i.tuting the Clay bill for the Verplanck bill, and pa.s.sing it on the 26th, and sending it to the Senate for concurrence. The Senate now pa.s.sed the House bill on March 1st, and the House immediately pa.s.sed the Wilkins bill, against the protest of {238} the South Carolinians that it could now have no purpose since every member of Congress from South Carolina had voted for the new Tariff Act.

[Sidenote: The nullification ordinance withdrawn.]

The President signed both bills at the same time, March 2nd, and South Carolina rescinded the Nullification Ordinance.

[Sidenote: Motives and general results.]

It is not easy to see what principles or what party finally triumphed in this contest, or to comprehend all the motives of the chief actors in it. It has been said, or hinted, that Mr. Calhoun, chagrined and disappointed at not gaining the presidency in 1832, was induced to take the course which he followed in reference to nullification by the hope of breaking up the Union and winning, thus, the presidency of a Southern confederacy; that President Jackson was largely influenced, in the decided att.i.tude which he a.s.sumed, by the desire to take revenge on Mr. Calhoun and South Carolina for Mr. Calhoun's attempt to court-martial him more than a dozen years before, and for South Carolina's slight upon him in the election of 1832; and that Mr. Clay was moved far more by his jealousy of President Jackson, and his fear of trusting him with extraordinary powers, than by any dread of the destruction of the Union.

There is probably some truth in certain, if not in all, of these speculations, but such things are not the matters of chief value in the search for the line of development of the const.i.tutional history of this country. They do indeed help us to appreciate the motives for the particular form of adjustment put upon that development at any stage of its course; but our chief concern must be with the advance or retrogression in principle of that development, our question must be whether the Union and the Const.i.tution were strengthened or weakened by {239} the events of 1832 and 1833, whether the political nationality of the country was cemented or suffered disintegration, and whether strength was gathered, or the seeds of weakness were sown, in the results attained.

From the point of view of the present, a point so much more national than any reached before 1860, the settlement of 1833 is usually regarded as a great misfortune, as a fateful error, which led the country finally into civil war. It is now usually said that the national cause lost everything in principle, and that nullification was virtually acknowledged by the Act of Congress in repealing the nullified laws, at the same moment that it enacted the measure for upholding the supremacy of the laws of the United States.

From a purely historical view of the development of the const.i.tutional law of the country, this proposition does not seem to be true, at least not without great modification. From such a point of view it seems more correct to say, that the doctrine formulated by Mr. Calhoun and his colleagues in South Carolina was only the exact logical statement of the principles advanced by Mr. Jefferson in 1798, principles through the advocacy of which Mr. Jefferson and the Republicans turned the Federalists out of power and captured the Government; that under the pressure of foreign war and through its results, the Republican practice in administering the Government had been driven into lines almost, if not quite, contradictory to the Republican doctrine; that in the gradual relapse, after 1815, into the humdrum of peace and business, the conditions were being revived for the rea.s.sertion of the principles of 1800; and that, under such conditions and in such a period, the doctrines advanced by President Jackson, doctrines of a far more completely national system of sovereignty, government, and liberty than were ever expressed {240} by any preceding President, certainly mark a great advance in the development of the national theory of the Const.i.tution.

The South Carolinians said that John Quincy Adams invented these doctrines, and that Jackson first essayed their application. Even Clay declared that they were an advance upon his own views. And some of Jackson's friends undertook, it was said with authority from Jackson himself, to explain them away, so startled were they by their strong nationalism.

But the spoken word cannot be recalled. It had gone forth, and the nation had approved it. The politicians might split hairs in its interpretation, but the people had heard from the highest authority which they recognized that the United States was a sovereign nation, and that the attempt of any combination of persons, whether calling themselves a "State" or not, to resist by violence the execution of the laws of the United States, or to withdraw themselves from their operation, was rebellion, which the President was empowered and required by the Const.i.tution to suppress with the whole physical power of the nation.

And besides the Proclamation there was the "Force Bill," which rested upon the same theory of the political system of the country as the Proclamation. The Congress as well as the President was now inculcating the national doctrine. Calhoun and his friends knew what an influence this would exert. He said that he and they would never rest content until this measure was expunged from among the Acts of Congress.

It is true that the pa.s.sage of the new Tariff Act appeared to take the virtue out of the Proclamation and the "Force Bill;" but it is not at all probable that the nullifiers would have retreated from their ground so promptly, to say the least, except for the determined {241} words of the President and the Congress, and the popular approval with which they were received; and it is almost certain that, when it came to the great crisis, twenty-eight years later, the people would not have understood and supported the great principle that the general Government has the right of self-preservation, in the exercise of all its powers, throughout the whole territory of the Union, against everything and everybody but the sovereign nation itself, except for the great education in national principles which they received from the Proclamation, and through the enactment of the law which gave the sanction of Congress to the enforcement of its principles.

{242}

CHAPTER XI.

ABOLITION

The Philosophy of Abolition--William Lloyd Garrison--The Civil Status under the Const.i.tution of 1787--Points at which Slavery Could be Legally Attacked--Garrison's Methods--The Southampton Ma.s.sacre--The Attempt to Suppress the Abolition Movement at the North--Growth of the Abolition Movement--The Methods of the Moderate Abolitionists--The Abolition Pet.i.tions--The Earlier Method of Dealing with the Pet.i.tions--Beginning of the Conflict over the Abolition Pet.i.tions--The New Method for Dealing with Pet.i.tions in the House of Representatives--True View of the Right of Pet.i.tion--Mr. Polk's Fatal Error in Regard to the Right of Pet.i.tion--The Pinckney Resolutions--The New Rule of the House of Representatives in Regard to the Abolition Pet.i.tions--The Increase of Pet.i.tions, and the Denunciation of the Pinckney Rule--The Final Denial of the Right of Pet.i.tion on the Subject of Slavery by the House of Representatives--The Abolition Pet.i.tions in the Senate--Mr. Rives and Mr. Calhoun in Regard to the Morality of Slavery--Mr. Calhoun's Resolutions in Regard to the Political Relations of Slavery--The Anti-Slavery Pet.i.tion from the Vermont Legislature--The Abolition Doc.u.ments and the United States Mails--The Postmaster-General's Ruling in Regard to the Abolition Doc.u.ments in the Mails--Jackson on the Use of the Mails by the Abolitionists--Mr. Calhoun's Report and Bill on the Subject--Clay's Criticism of Calhoun's Proposition--The Act of Congress Protecting the Abolition Doc.u.ments in the Mails--General Results of the Struggle over the Right of Pet.i.tion and the Freedom of the Mails.

[Sidenote: The ends of the state.]

When a state has fairly accomplished the primal end of establis.h.i.+ng its governmental system, its {243} public policy will be found to be pursuing, in ultimate generalization, two great all-comprehending purposes, namely, national development and universal human progress.

Rarely, if ever, will any state be found to have succeeded in so balancing these two princ.i.p.al objects of its public policy as to make the resultant of its two main lines of progress follow an unchanging angle. At one period, the principle of national development will prevail, even to the point of national exclusiveness; at another, an enthusiastic humanism will almost threaten the existence of national distinctions. But in all the convulsions of political history, described as advance and reaction, the scientific student of history is able to discover that the zigzags of progress are ever bearing in the general direction which the combined impulses toward nationalism and humanism compel.

[Sidenote: The purposes of the state, as seen in the history of the United States.]

After the humanitarian outburst of the revolutionary period in the latter part of the eighteenth century had expended its force, the states of the world veered in their policies toward the line of national development. The United States, which had been excessively humanitarian during that period, both in its doctrine of rights and in its policy, became, in the succeeding period, the first three decades of the nineteenth century, more and more national in disposition and in practice, until industrial exclusiveness and race domination appeared, at the close of the period, to be the sole principles of the policy of the country.

Had the two elements of this policy been equally, or almost equally, sustained throughout the whole country, there is little question that the human purpose, the world-purpose, as Hegel calls it, of state existence, would have been ignored to a higher degree, and for a {244} longer period, than it was. But curiously and fortunately, the race domination in the South produced economic conditions which demanded trade and commerce with the world, and which finally forced upon the North the conviction that the cause of those conditions--race domination, slavery--must be removed, in order to secure the industrial interests of the North against the compet.i.tion of the world's markets. The destruction of that domination must proceed, however, upon a humanitarian principle, namely, the right of man to personal liberty. Thus it clearly appears that the two elements of the national exclusiveness of the United States in 1830 were, in the peculiar relation which finally obtained between them, preparing the nation for a new advance in the direction of world intercourse and human rights.

[Sidenote: The Revolution of 1830.]

In the summer of 1830 the wave of revolution rolled again over Europe.

The rights of man, the brotherhood of man, and the sovereignty of the people, were the principles which pressed again to the front. While no actual connection can be established between the Revolution of 1830 in Europe and the rise of Abolition in the United States, yet they belong to the same period of time, and harmonize in principle. The impulses which move the human race, or those parts of the human race which stand upon the same plane of civilization, are not broken by mountain heights or broad seas. Their manifestations appear spontaneously and coetaneously in widely separated places.

Before 1830, indeed, as we have so often seen, slavery in the United States had been regarded as a grievous evil by most of the great spirits of the age and country, and schemes for gradual emanc.i.p.ation had been invented, and, in some slight degree, had been put into {245} operation. It was, however, the humanitarian outburst of 1830, and the succeeding years, which represented slavery as a sin and a crime against the universal principle of human liberty and the rights of man, a sin which called for immediate expiation by instantaneous, unqualified, and uncompensated abolition.

[Sidenote: The philosophy of Abolition.]

There is nothing strange about the philosophy of Abolition. It is simply the idealistic view of the beginning and the progress of human history. It a.s.sumes liberty as the original state of man, condemns every species of modification of liberty suffered by any human being, or any cla.s.s of human beings, as resulting from the unrighteous act of some other human being, or cla.s.s or race of human beings, and demands the immediate discontinuance of the tyranny as the only approximately adequate satisfaction which can be made to those who have suffered that tyranny. It is the orthodox, paradisaical view of the origin, unity, and primal perfection of the human race. It is the literal interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. It is thorough-going, radical humanitarianism. Its political principle, in the language of its chief exponent, was: "The world our country, and all mankind our countrymen."

Over against it stands the pessimistic view of man and of civilization, which divides the human race into the few intelligent and good, and the great ma.s.s of the ignorant and vicious, and considers the permanent subjection of the latter to the former as the divinely const.i.tuted, and therefore the permanent, order of the world.

And between the two lies the true historical view, which regards liberty, equality, and brotherhood as the products of civilization, as the final, not the primal, status of the human race, and determines the character of every stage of development from barbarism to {246} civilization, not by its distance from the perfect condition, but by the fact of its advance upon, or its retrogression from, the stage immediately antecedent.