Presidents; and when that was not the case, by Presidents possessing the confidence of the South. For a still longer period, the controlling influences of the Legislative and Judicial departments of the Government have centred in the same quarter. Of all the offices in the gift of the central power in every department, far more than her proportionate share has always been enjoyed by the South. She is at this moment revolting against a Government, not only admitted to be the mildest and most beneficent ever organized this side Utopia, but one of which she has herself from the first, almost monopolized the administration.

CAUSE OF THE REVOLUTION ALLEGED BY SOUTH CAROLINA.

But are there no wrongs, abuses, and oppressions, alleged to have been suffered by the South, which have rendered her longer submission to the Federal Government intolerable, and which are pleaded as the motive and justification of the revolt? Of course there are, but with such variation and uncertainty of statement as to render their examination difficult. The manifesto of South Carolina of the 20th of Dec. last, which led the way in this inauspicious movement, sets forth nothing but the passage of State laws to obstruct the surrender of fugitive slaves. The document does not state that South Carolina herself ever lost a slave in consequence of these laws, it is not probable she ever did, and yet she makes the existence of these laws, which are wholly inoperative as far as she is concerned, and which probably never caused to the entire South the loss of a dozen fugitives, the ground for breaking up the Union and plunging the country into a civil war. But I shall presently revert to this topic.

Other statements in other quarters enlarge the list of grievances. In the month of November last, after the result of the presidential election was ascertained, a very interesting discussion of the subject of secession took place at Milledgeville, before the members of the Legislature of Georgia and the citizens generally, between two gentlemen of great ability and eminence, since elected, the one Secretary of State, the other Vice-President of the new Confederacy; the former urging the necessity and duty of immediate secession;-the latter opposing it. I take the grievances and abuses of the Federal Government, which the South has suffered at the hands of the North, and which were urged by the former speaker as the grounds of secession, as I find them stated and to some extent answered by his friend and fellow-citizen (then opposed to secession) according to the report in the Milledgeville papers.

CAUSES ALLEGED BY GEORGIA: THE FISHING BOUNTIES.

And what, think you, was the grievance in the front rank of those oppressions on the part of the North, which have driven the long-suffering and patient South to open rebellion against "the best Government that the history of the world gives any account of"? It was not that upon which the Convention of South Carolina relied. You will hardly believe it; posterity will surely not believe it. "We listened," said Mr. Vice-President Stephens, in his reply, "to my honorable friend last night, (Mr. Toombs,) as he recounted the evils of this Government. The first was the fishing bounties paid mostly to the sailors of New England." The bounty paid by the Federal Government to encourage the deep-sea fisheries of the United States!

CAUSES ALLEGED BY GEORGIA: THE FISHING BOUNTIES.

25

You are aware that this laborious branch of industry has, by all maritime States, been ever regarded with special favor as the nursery of naval power. The fisheries of the American colonies before the American Revolution drew from Burke one of the most gorgeous bursts of eloquence in our language,-in any language. They were all but annihilated by the Revolution, but they furnished the men who followed Manly, and Tucker, and Biddle, and Paul Jones to the jaws of death. Reviving after the war, they attracted the notice of the First Congress, and were recommended to their favor by Mr. Jefferson, then Secretary of State. This favor was at first extended to them in the shape of a draw-back of the duty on the various imported articles employed in the building and outfit of the vessels and on the foreign salt used in preserving the fish. The complexity of this arrangement led to the substitution at first of a certain bounty on the quantity of the fish exported; afterwards on the tonnage of the vessels employed in the fisheries. All administrations have concurred in the measure; Presidents of all parties,-though there has not been much variety of party in that office,-have approved the appropriations. If the North had a local interest in these bounties, the South got the principal food of her laboring population so much the cheaper; and she had her common share in the protection which the navy afforded her coasts, and in the glory which it shed on the flag of the country. But since, unfortunately, the deep-sea fisheries do not exist in the Gulf of Mexico, nor, as in the " age of Pyrrha," on the top of the Blue Ridge, it has been discovered of late years that these bounties are a violation of the Constitution; a largess bestowed by the common treasury on one section of the country, and not shared by the other; one of the hundred ways, in a word, in which the rapacious North is fattening upon the oppressed and pillaged South. You will naturally wish to know the amount of this tyrannical and oppressive bounty. It is stated by a senator from Alabama (Mr. Clay) who has warred against it with perseverance and zeal, and succeeded in the last Congress in carrying a bill through the Senate for its repeal, to have amounted, on the average, to an annual sum of 200,005 dollars! Such is the portentous grievance which in Georgia stands at the head of the acts of oppression, for which, although repealed in one branch of Congress, the Union is to be broken up, and the country desolated by war. Switzerland revolted because an Austrian tyrant invaded the sanctity of her firesides, crushed out the eyes of aged patriots, and compelled her fathers to shoot apples from the heads of her sons; the Low Countries revolted against the fires of the Inquisition, and the infernal cruelties of Alva; our fathers revolted because they were taxed by a parliament in which they were not represented; the Cotton States revolt because a paltry subvention is paid to the hardy fishermen who form the nerve and muscle of the American Navy.

is not, we shall be told, the amount of the bounty, but the principle, as our fathers revolted against a three-penny tax on tea. But that was because it was laid by a parliament in which the Colonies were not represented, and which yet claimed the right to bind them in all cases. The Fishing Bounty is bestowed by a Government which has been from the first controlled by the South. Then how unreasonable to expect or to wish, that, in a country so vast as ours, no public expenditure should be made for the immediate benefit of one part or one interest that cannot be identically repeated in every other. A liberal policy, or rather the necessity of the case, demands, that what the public good, upon the whole, requires,

should under constitutional limitations be done where it is required, offsetting the local benefit which may accrue from the expenditure made in one place and for one object, with the local benefit from the same source, in some other place for some other object. More money was expended by the United States in removing the Indians from Georgia, eight or ten times as much was expended for the same object in Florida, as has been paid for Fishing Bounties in seventy years. For the last year, to pay for the expense of the post-office in the seceding States, and enable our fellow-citizens there to enjoy the comforts of a newspaper and letter mail to the same extent as they are enjoyed in the other States, three millions of dollars were paid from the common Treasury. The post-office bounty paid to the seceding States exceeded seventeen foid the annual average amount of the Fishing Bounty paid to the North. In four years that excess would equal the sum total of the amount paid since 1792 in bounties to the deep-sea fishery! This circumstance probably explains the fact, that the pride of the Southern Confederacy was not alarmed at having the mails still conveyed by the United States, three or four months after the forts had been seized, the arsenals emptied, and the mints plundered.

NAVIGATION LAWS.

The second of the grievances under which the South is laboring, and which, aecording to Mr. Stephens, was on the occasion alluded to pleaded by the Secretary of State of the new Confederacy as a ground for dissolving the Union, is the Navigation Laws, which give to American vessels the exclusive enjoyment of our own coasting trade. This also is a policy coeval with the Government of the United States, and universally adopted by maritime powers, though relaxed by England within the last few years. Like the fishing bounty, it is a policy adopted for the purpose of fostering the commercial and with that the naval marine of the United States. All administrations of all parties have favored it; under its influence our commercial tonnage has grown up to be second to no other in the world, and our navy has proved itself adequate to all the exigencies of peace and war. And are these no objects in a national point of view? Are the seceding politicians really insensible to interests of such paramount national importance? Can they, for the sake of an imaginary infinitesimal reduction of coastwise freights, be willing to run even the risk of impairing our naval prosperity? Are they insensible to the fact that nothing but the growth of the American commercial marine protects the entire freighting interest of the country, in which the South is more deeply interested than the North, from European monopoly? The South did not always take so narrow a view of the subject. When the Constitution was framed, and the American Merchant Marine was inconsiderable, the discrimination in favor of United States vessels, which then extended to the foreign trade, was an object of some apprehension on the part of the planting States. But there were statesmen in the South at that day, who did not regard the shipping interest as a local concern. "So far," said Mr. Edward Rutledge, in the South Carolina Convention of 1788, "from not preferring the Northern States by a navigation act, it would be politic to increase their strength by every means in our power; for we had no other resource in our day of danger than in the naval force of our Northern friends, nor could we ever expect to become a great nation till we were powerful on the waters." But "powerful

Elliott's Debates, vol. iv., p. 299.

on the waters" the South can never be. She has live oak, naval stores, and gallant officers; but her climate and its diseases, the bars at the mouth of nearly all her harbors, the Teredo, the want of a merchant marine and of fisheries, and the character of her laboring population, will forever prevent her becoming a great naval power. Without the protection of the Navy of the United States, of which the strength centres at the North, she would hold the ingress and egress of every port on her coast at the mercy, I will not say of the great maritime States of Europe, but of Holland, and Denmark, and Austria, and Spain-of any second or third-rate power, which can keep a few steam frigates at sea.

It must be confessed, however, that there is a sad congruity between the conduct of our seceding fellow-citizens and the motives which they assign for it. They attempt a suicidal separation of themselves from a great naval power, of which they are now an integral part, and they put forward, as the reason for this self-destructive course, the legislative measures which have contributed to the growth of the navy. A judicious policy designed to promote that end has built up the commercial and military marine of the Union to its present commanding stature and power; the South, though unable to contribute any thing to its prosperity but the service of her naval officers, enjoys her full share of the honor which it reflects on the country, and the protection which it extends to our flag, our coasts, and our commerce, but under the influence of a narrow-minded sectional jealousy, she is willing to abdicate the noble position which she now fills among the nations of the earth; to depend for her very existence on the exigencies of the cotton market, to live upon the tolerance of the navies of Europe, and she assigns as leading causes for this amazing fatuity, that the Northern fisheries have been encouraged by a trifling bounty, and that the Northern commercial marine has the monopoly of the coastwise trade. And the politicians, who, for reasons like these, almost too frivolous to merit the time we have devoted to their examination, are sapping a noble framework of government, and drenching a fair and but for them prosperous country in blood, appeal to the public opinion of mankind for the justice of their cause, and the purity of their motives, and lift their eyes to Heaven for a blessing on their arms!

THE TARIFF.

But the tariff is, with one exception, the alleged monster wrong-for which South Carolina in 1832 drove the Union to the verge of a civil war, and which, next to the slavery question, the South has been taught to regard as the most grievous of the oppressions which she suffers at the hands of the North, and that by which she seeks to win the sympathy of the manufacturing States of Europe. It was so treated in the debate referred to. I am certainly not going so far to abuse your patience, as to enter into a discussion of the constitutionality or expediency of the protective policy, on which I am aware that opinions at the North differ, nor do I deem it necessary to expose the utter fallacy of the monstrous paradox, that duties, enhancing the price of imported articles, are paid, not by the consumer of the merchandise imported, but by the producer of the last article of export given in exchange. It is sufficient to say that for this maxim, (the forty-bale theory so called,) which has grown into an article of faith at the South, not the slightest authority ever has been, to my knowledge, adduced from any political economist of any school. Indeed, it can be shown to be a shallow sophism, inasmuch as the consumer

must be, directly or indirectly, the producer of the equivalents given in exchange for the article he consumes. But without entering into this discussion, I shall make a few remarks to show the great injustice of representing the protective system as being in its origin an oppression, of which the South has to complain on the part of the North.

war.

Every such suggestion is a complete inversion of the truth of history. Some attempts at manufactures by machinery were made at the North before the Revolution, but to an inconsiderable extent. The manufacturing system as a great Northern interest is the child of the restrictive policy of 1807-1812, and of the That policy was pursued against the earnest opposition of the North, and to the temporary prostration of their commerce, navigation, and fisheries. Their capital was driven in this way into manufactures, and on the return of peace, the foundations of the protective system were laid in the square yard duty on cotton fabrics, in the support of which Mr. Calhoun, advised that the growth of the manufacture would open a new market for the staple of the South, took the lead. As late as 1821 the Legislature of South Carolina unanimously affirmed the constitutionality of protective duties, though denying their expediency,-and of all the States of the Union Louisiana has derived the greatest benefit from this policy; in fact, she owes the sugar culture to it, and has for that reason given it her steady support. In all the tariff battles while I was a member of Congress, few votes were surer for the policy than that of Louisiana. If the duty on an article imported is considered as added to its price in our market, (which, however, is far from being invariably the case,) the sugar duty, of late, has amounted to a tax of five millions of dollars annually paid by the consumer, for the benefit of the Louisiana planter.

As to its being an unconstitutional policy, it is perfectly well known that the protection of manufactures was a leading and avowed object for the formation of the Constitution. The second law, passed by Congress after its formation, was a revenue law. Its preamble is as follows: "Whereas it is necessary for the support of Government, for the discharge of the debts of the United States, and the encour agement and protection of manufactures, that duties be laid on goods, wares, and merchandise imported." That act was reported to the House of Representatives by Mr. Madison, who is entitled as much as any one to be called the father of the Constitution. While it was pending before the House, and in the first week of the first session of the first Congress, two memorials were presented praying for protective duties; and it is a matter of some curiosity to inquire, from what part of the country this first call came for that policy, now put forward as one of the acts of Northern oppression, which justify the South in flying to arms. The first of these petitions was from Baltimore. It implored the new Government to lay a protecting duty on all articles imported from abroad, which can be manufactured at home. The second was from the shipwrights, not of New York, not of Boston, not of Portland, but of Charleston, South Carolina, praying for "such a general regulation of trade and the establishment of such A NAVIGATION ACT, as will relieve the particular distresses of the petitioners, in common with those of their fellow-shipwrights throughout the Union"! and if South Carolina had always been willing to ke common cause with their fellow-citizens throughout the Union, it would not rent by civil war.