will agree that the convention was a mistake as a mode of political agitation, and that the time of holding it was inopportune. In the midst of a war which had never been popular, and was still of doubtful issue, the convention put forth a statement of the grievances of a portion of the country because of the war, and proposed certain changes in the Constitution. But the convention never approached the idea of separating New England from the Union. Mr. Webster, who knew well the motives and aims of the old Federalist party, and had studied this question with his usual care, in his speech in the Senate, in reply to Mr. Hayne of South Carolina,' said, "There never was a time, under any degree of excitement, in which the Hartford Convention, or any other convention, could have maintained itself one moment in New England, if assembled for any such purpose as breaking up the Union because they thought unconstitutional laws had been passed, or to consult on that subject, or to calculate the value of the Union." ... Just after the Hartford Convention, Jefferson wrote to Lafayette, "They have not been able to make themselves even a subject of conversation, either of public or private societies. . . . The yeomanry of the United States are not the canaille of Paris. The cement of this Union is in the heart-blood of every American. I do not believe there is on earth a government established on so immovable a basis. Let them in any State, even in Massachusetts itself, raise the standard of separation, and its citizens will rise in mass, and do justice themselves on their own incendiaries." 2 Nothing in the geographical position nor in the historical antecedents of any portion of the United States, nor any occasional grievance or injustice inflicted on a part by the whole, could provoke sectionalism to a degree that might threaten the disruption of the Union. As a rule, party-lines would overrun and divide all sectional barriers, and specific grievances would be met by political agitation and party combination and change. Sectionalism could become a power only when a section should have some cher 1 Jan. 26, 1830. Works, vol. iii. p. 315. a sec ished interest of its own, apart from, and perhaps alien to, the interest of the nation, and should set this local concern above all distinctions of party and all benefits of organic union. For a long period, the peril of sectionalism from such a cause was serious, and at times alarming, tionalism not defined by physical geography, nor degrees of latitude, but by the surveyor's line of Mason and Dixon, and social institutions contrasted by that artificial boundary. This peril, which had aroused the country in 1820, and was then seemingly averted by the Missouri Compromise, took on the positive and formidable aspect of nullification in 1832, when a convention of South Carolina resolved to resist the collection of duties by the UnitedStates Government, and, should their collection be enforced, to withdraw from the Union, and organize a separate government. The champion of nullification was one of the most sincere, upright, and able statesmen the country has produced, a man who, given his premises, would hold you as in a vice by the relentless screw of his logic. No American can fail to accord to John C. Calhoun the respect due to the highest order of intellect and to perfect sincerity of character; but when he assumed the false premise, that the Constitution was not the fundamental and inalienable law of the nation, but a voidable compact of sovereign States, then the very strength of his logic, and the downright earnestness and sincerity of his character, drove him on to destroy the Union for what he believed to be the right of his State. The first stand was made at the tariff; but this point was too weak to be tenable; and the strong reasoning and burning eloquence of Webster in the Senate, the soldierly decision of Jackson in the presidency, and the spontaneous uprising of the people, put down nullification with the watchword, "The Union, it must, it shall, be preserved." In truth, with the everchanging phases of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, and the mobility of political parties upon economical questions, a tariff act of a single Congress could hardly form the nucleus of a sectional contest against the General 1 By this compromise, Missouri was admitted into the Union as a slave State, on the pledge that slavery should be thereafter prohibited in new States north of 36° 30′ north latitude. Government. Calhoun had the honesty to avow that the prime importance of his doctrine of State-rights and secession lay in the preservation of slavery: and that was an interest which the South had in common, to the exclusion of the rest of the Union, an interest that entered into the whole constitution of society, domestic, industrial, political; into the personal habits of the people, their local laws, their ties of property, marriage, and inheritance. To the protection of this system Mr. Calhoun brought his doctrines of State-rights and secession, and devoted the strength and energy of his remarkable powers through the long period of his public career. I respect Mr. Calhoun none the less, that, in the circumstances of his training, he was a slaveholder; and none the less that he maintained with such manful persistency that state of society with which his own life was involved. He had the courage to say in the Senate, that the doctrine of human equality and liberty proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence was a grave political error; and that "the laws of the slaveholding States for the protection of their domestic institutions are paramount to the laws of the General Government in regulation of commerce and the mail; that the latter must yield to the former in the event of conflict; and that, if the government should refuse to yield, the States have a right to interpose.' "2 This determination to renounce the Union, rather than suffer slavery to be restricted, meddled with, or even discussed, was largely the burden of Calhoun's speeches for twenty years. He was honest, and I respect him for that; he was consistent, and I respect him for that; he was courageous, and I respect him for that; just as I respect Pius IX. for saying"Non possumus "to every proposal that he "should reconcile himself to progress, liberalism, and civilization, as lately introduced." I find in Mr. Calhoun no tokens of political envy, of disappointed ambition, or of mean demagogism; but his system made him sectional, dwarfed his vision from the grand scope of nationality, freedom, humanity, for which such powers as his were given, and 1 Speech on the Oregon Bill, June 27, 1848: Works, iv. 506. 2 Speech on Suppressing Incendiary Publications, April 12, 1836, vol. ii. 532, 533. concentrated it one interest of his one State, upon "There is my family and connections; there I drew my first breath; there are all my hopes.' The South was never sectional upon geographical or political grounds. Slavery, an heirloom of the civilization that preceded the era of independence, fostered by her climate and intwined with her growth, made economically valuable through the invention of the cotton-gin, made politically important through the three-fifths rule of apportionment and the expansion of territory, — this gave to the South a community of interest in and for herself separate from the general interests of the country, and made her a unit whenever that interest was endangered. It is but just to the patriotism of the South to say that slavery alone made her sectional, intensified her faith in State-rights, and drove her into the fallacy of secession. The war of sectionalism was fought out grandly in the arena of argument, was fought out bravely on the field of battle; and slavery, the cause of sectionalism, fell. What now remains? Hostile sections, imbittered by war, biding their time for a new struggle for ascendency? Let the reception given to the soldiers of Virginia and South Carolina at the celebration of Bunker Hill in June, 1875, answer. Let the late Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy answer. In his speech at Atlanta, July 4, 1875, Mr. Alexander H. Stephens said, "The grand demonstrations in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the destruction of tea at Boston and Baltimore, of the battles of Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill, and of the Mecklenburg Declaration, which have brought the different sections into more harmonious accord, are but a prelude to the celebration of the anniversary of the Declaration which is to come off next year in Philadelphia. The great cause of strife being now removed forever, why cannot all true friends of constitutional liberty cordially unite in the future for the perpetuation of the principles set forth in the common Declaration of Independence? I insist that we of the South shall never, from any cause, lose our full share of the glories of the ever-memorable 4th of July, 1776." And once more: let Gov. Kemper 1 Speech of Feb. 19, 1847: Works, iv. 347. of Virginia answer, whose message of Dec. 1, 1875, advocates the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in these patriotic and eloquent words: "The people of Virginia yielded as brave men to the verdict of war; and, giving their parole of honor to be thenceforward faithful citizens of a re-united common country, they at once and cheerfully accepted the results of emancipation, as well as the arbitrament which ended the question of peaceable secession forever, and made the Union constitutionally indissoluble. The United States is our country; and it is destined to be the only country for ourselves and our children forever. . . It were suicidal in us to hold back from any effort which can conduce to the common welfare. ... Let not Virginia stand aloof from this gathering of her sister States on the spot which gave birth to free. government, and where her illustrious sons, a hundred years ago, took so grand a part in rearing the pillars of American liberty. Let her stand there, hand in hand with her sister States, around the hallowed spot, and, uniting with them, give her potent aid in laying deep and strong the foundations of a reconstructed Union, made perpetual by good-will, equal laws, equal rights, and equal liberties for all." Since sectionalism as between the North and the South was abnormal, and the cause of that old unnatural strife is forever removed, where shall one find on the map of the United States, geographical or political, a basis or suggestion of sectional division? Nature has provided no line of territorial division from east to west. No Alps there lift their everlasting barriers; no Mississippi rolls eastward from the Rocky Mountains to the Alantic coast. The basin of the Mississippi, notwithstanding its enormous dimensions, is marked by Nature for the home of a people having community of interests, and identity of aims. From the westward watershed of Pennsylvania to the eastward watershed of Colorado, the central river drains into itself the entire circulation of the basin; and the farmers and miners of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, have a property in the free outlet of the Mississippi as vital as the planters and graziers |
