Caleb William Loring

CALHOUN, JACKSON, AND NATIONAL GOVERNMENT.

In 1811, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a young man not of the age of thirty years, took his seat as a member of the national House of Representatives, and at once became a leader in public affairs. He was one of the Committee on Foreign Relations. On the 12th of December he said what was the road the nation should tread “to make it great and to produce in this country not the form but the real spirit of union.”[91] In March, 1815, he voted for a high tariff and said: “He believed the policy of the country required protection to our manufacturing establishments.”[92] He also reported the bill to incorporate a United States Bank, and supported it in a speech on its constitutionality.[93] Webster, on the contrary, opposed the tariff bills, not however on the ground of their unconstitutionality. In December, 1816, Calhoun moved “that a committee be appointed to inquire into the expediency of setting apart a permanent fund for internal improvement”; on December 23d, he reported a bill setting aside the bonus paid by the United States Bank, $1,500,000 and future dividends from bank stock, “as a fund for constructing roads and canals.”[94] In his speech supporting it he said: “that the extent of our republic exposes us to the greatest of all calamities, next to the loss of liberty, and even to that in its consequences, disunion.” “Probably not more than twenty-five or thirty members, in the total number of one hundred and seventy, regarded the constitutional difficulty as fatal to the bill.”[95] Madison, however, consistent and persistent in his strict construction of the Constitution, vetoed it.

In 1819 and 1820 came the admission of Missouri and the struggle over the extension or restriction of slavery. The Southern statesmen feared that the South was losing its relative importance in the Union. Even those of Virginia, who had formerly been opposed to slavery, now took the opposite view, and the Legislature of that State passed resolutions for the admission of Missouri with slavery. The increase in the production of cotton had made the raising of slaves profitable. The controversy was settled by the bill called the Missouri Compromise, admitting Missouri with slavery, and excluding slavery from all the rest of the country west of that State and north of 36° 30', the southern boundary of Missouri. This was the first important controversy dividing the States geographically. It was the division that Mason, Madison, and others foresaw in the convention that made the Constitution; not a combination of the great States against the small, but geographical, between the South and the North, the planting and commercial States, and, underlying this and more potent, the institution of slavery repugnant to the North and existing only in the South.

It was this difference of interest between the two sections that brought Calhoun to a change of opinion on the great industrial, commercial, and moral questions that had arisen. His convictions followed what he wished to believe: not an unusual temperament. From a protectionist he became the zealous advocate of extreme free trade, from a nationalist to the belief that the Union was nothing but a league any State could break at its will, from holding slavery to be a moral evil to the support of it as a divine institution. In 1837, after the nullification controversy, when he introduced resolutions in the Senate as to slavery, he said:

“This question has produced one happy effect, at least it has compelled us of the South to look into the nature and character of this great institution (slavery), and to correct many false impressions that even we had entertained in relation to it. Many in the South once believed that it was a moral and political evil. That folly and delusion are gone. We see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world. It is impossible with us that the conflict take place between labor and capital.”

He went so far as to say a mysterious Providence had brought together two races from different portions of the globe and placed them together in equal numbers in the southern portion of the Union. To which Clay forcibly replied, “to call a generation of slave-hunting pirates (who brought the negroes to this country) a mysterious Providence, was an insult to the Supreme Being.”[96]

Calhoun and many of the leaders and politicians of the cotton-raising States saw that they were losing their relative importance in population and wealth; they believed that, with free trade bringing to them everything they consumed at a lower price, their products and profits would be increased. South Carolina with Calhoun as the master spirit was the leader in this matter; the existing protective tariff bearing hardly on the plantation States was in their opinion the great hindrance to their prosperity. It was not difficult for them to come to the conclusion it was a tyrannical and palpable violation of the Constitution. Seeing that they could not bring the majority in Congress to their belief, the South Carolinian politicians revived and developed the doctrine of the Kentucky resolutions of the sovereignty of each State, and of its right as a sovereign to judge of the constitutionality of an act of the United States. A convention of the people of the State was called, and under the claimed right of sovereignty the convention, on the 24th of November, 1832, passed an ordinance in which it was declared the tariff laws of the United States were null and void, and that no duties imposed by the United States should be collected after the first of February, A. D. 1833. The convention further declared that they would resist any acts of the United States to collect its duties or to coerce the State into paying them, and that such acts of the United States would absolve the people of the State from any political connection with the people of the other States, and that the State would organize as a sovereign independent government.

Thus South Carolina, more than forty years after the adoption of the Constitution, was the first State that assumed to act as a distinct sovereign power. To such a degree did the confidence of the State in its own prowess and a spirit of rash defiance of the United States exist, that upon Governor Haynes’ return to Charleston from the State Capital, the horses were taken from his carriage and the citizens dragged him in triumph through the streets.

Few leaders have had more warm admirers than Calhoun. Oliver Dyer in his Great Senators, tells us he was tall and gaunt, his complexion dark and Indian-like. Eyes large, black, piercing, scintillant; his iron-gray hair hung down in thick masses. He was remarkable for the exceeding courtesy of his demeanor and for the sweetness and bell-like resonance of his voice. His private life, what could not be said of most of his contemporaries, was unimpeachable.

His followers are fond of praising his “inexorable logic.” They probably called it so because he did not hesitate to carry out his reasoning to the extremest extravagance of conclusions. In his speech in 1833, in reply to Webster, he admitted that this sovereignty of each State, there being four and twenty of them, did give each State a separate right to judge of a law of Congress, “four and twenty vetoes.” He instanced with approval the government of Rome, where the plebeians and patricians could check and overrule each other through the tribunes and the Senate. He knew “nowhere, no case in history where the power of arresting of government was too strong, except in Poland, where every freeman possessed a veto.” But even there he speaks of it with favor, as the source of “the highest and most lofty attachment to liberty.” He overlooked that Rome’s plebeian veto produced a Sulla and a CÆsar and ended in an absolute despotism over an abject people, and that the government of Poland, unstable as water, vanished from the face of the earth. He spoke of this country as sunken into avarice, intrigue, and electioneering, from which only an opposition like Carolina’s could arouse it. Afterwards, in 1850, he said: “What was once a constitutional federal republic is now converted, in reality, into one as absolute as that of the autocrat of Russia, and as despotic in its tendency as any absolute government that ever existed.” And yet many people of the South believed or brought themselves to believe this, and most of their writers now arguing for State sovereignty profess the same opinion.

Following up Calhoun’s “inexorable logic,” that each State has a right to pass its judgment on any act and law made by the United States, and to decide whether it is invalid and null, if it be of opinion that it exceeds the delegated authority, every citizen of South Carolina or of any other State has a right to judge whether any law of that State be invalid or null, as exceeding its delegated authority. For the State of South Carolina under its Constitution, like the United States under its Constitution, has only a limited delegated authority, and the sovereignty, according to all the political writers, remains in its people or voting citizens. Why cannot a voting citizen, or one of the people of the State, maintain that, possessing the sovereign right of all power, and being one of the parties who made the compact of the State constitution, he can judge as to whether he has delegated the power to make a certain law; and if he thinks he has not, why cannot he defy the court and the State that undertakes to execute it? This would at once put the State in the happy condition of Poland, and almost allow the freedom claimed by a Chicago anarchist. The answer is evident, the citizens owe an obedience to the laws that they establish over themselves. They have, for the benefit of all, given to the judiciary the right to judge of the extent of the delegated power. That the doctrine of State sovereignty was unknown at the time South Carolina promulgated it, is proved by Jackson’s proclamation. In it he speaks of the hardness and inequality of the excise law in Pennsylvania, the embargo and non-intercourse law in the Eastern States, the carriage tax in Virginia. All these laws and the war of 1812 in the commercial States were, he says, deemed unconstitutional, but yet they were submitted to, and this remedy of nullification and secession was not suggested. “The discovery of this important feature in our Constitution was reserved to the present day. To the statesmen of South Carolina belongs the invention.”[97] Indeed it was a question in South Carolina itself who first discovered this doctrine of nullification. Dr. Thomas Cooper, Jefferson’s old friend, was agreed upon as the author of its revival, and was toasted as the father of nullification at Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, at a Fourth of July dinner[98] in 1833. If the Kentucky resolutions and the doctrine of nullification had not been dead, and buried in oblivion, it is impossible that Chief-Justice Marshall should have announced in the case of McCulloch against the State of Maryland that there was a universal assent to the proposition that the government of the Union, though limited in its powers, was supreme in its sphere; that General Jackson, in a proclamation to the whole country, could have declared its discovery was made by the statesmen of South Carolina of that day; and that the nullifiers of South Carolina should have toasted Cooper as its author.

We have found nowhere any claim of a right of secession, not even the use of the word, until the threat of South Carolina’s nullification. Any separation before was considered as a disruption of the Union. Jefferson spoke of it as scission. While some hold that Jackson “with his iron heel crushed out secession,” numerous attempts have been made, even recently, to prove that Jackson was not opposed to nullification, that in reality the proclamation was not his but was Edward Livingston’s. Parton, Jefferson’s biographer, tells us, when a pamphlet containing the proceedings of South Carolina reached Jackson, he went to his office and began to dash off page after page of the proclamation. To this was added many more of notes and memoranda which he had been accumulating. The papers were given to Mr. Livingston to draw up in proper form. In three or four days Livingston gave to Jackson a draft of the proclamation for examination. Jackson said that Livingston had not correctly understood his notes and suggested alterations, and had them made.[99]

The proclamation, whoever wrote it, is a clear, strong statement of the nature of our Union and its nationality; an abler production than Edward Livingston’s speech, when as Senator he spoke on this matter in 1830. If Jackson did not write a line of it he was not totally wanting in knowledge and comprehension, and must have understood the most important question that had arisen in his administration or in any administration since the inception of the government.

Jackson, as well as Calhoun, was of the Protestant Scotch-Irish race, that famous strain of blood that settled around Belfast and has made its mark in this country. Those who knew him well said that he had the craftiness of his canny Scotch ancestors, which he often concealed under apparently unpremeditated and ungovernable bursts of temper. No one before who had been a duellist and had killed his opponent, and had been a participator in street brawls and encounters, had become President. He was a warm friend and a bitter enemy, and against Calhoun he had a lasting grievance. His declaration, “I take the responsibility,” was characteristic of the man and admired by his adherents. No one of a will so indomitable ever came to the presidency. A mere boy of fourteen he fought in the revolutionary war. He studied law in North Carolina and at the age of twenty-two years he commenced his professional life in Tennessee, and acquired at once a large practice throughout the State, that brought him into public notice. He was the district attorney of the territory, and a member of the convention that made the constitution of that State, and as its first representative in Congress opposed Washington’s administration, and was one of the twelve members who would not join in the vote of thanks to him when he retired from the presidency. He was elected Senator in 1797 and opposed the administration of John Adams, but soon resigned the senatorship and became a judge of the Supreme Court of Tennessee and held that office for six years. He was of the party of strict constructionists. As President he vetoed bills for the aid of the Maysville and Lexington Road, a re-charter of the Second Bank of the United States, and several bills for internal improvements for harbors and rivers.

However much Livingston may have improved the style of the proclamation, or contributed to its argument, there can be no doubt that the reasoning and principles were Jackson’s. The public seems to have forgotten that he was a lawyer of large experience in his younger days, and an active politician all his lifetime. The proclamation was on a subject of which he had full knowledge and had formed decided opinions. When he came to a conclusion he cared not what any other man thought.

It has been a disputed matter whether the General Government actually prevailed in its controversy with South Carolina. Though the State prepared munitions of war, increased its militia, passed laws to punish persons executing those of the United States, and declared its secession from the Union if the United States laws were attempted to be enforced, neither the State nor its citizens did actually commit any overt act of resistance. They claimed, however, that Clay’s compromise bill, gradually reducing duties, which became law March 2d, was a surrender to them.

On the other hand it is asserted that the bill was not at all what South Carolina had demanded. It is undisputed that the United States Government passed a force bill based on the ground that it could compel the exercise of its authority over the citizens of a State disputing it, and that no resistance was made to the collection of the import duties after February 1st, when the State declared its ordinance should be enforced, the reduction of the tariff being subsequently passed.[100]

It was in South Carolina alone that the right of nullification was sanctioned by a majority of its citizens. There were in the debates in Congress on that matter members from other States who maintained that doctrine, but Southern writers have apparently purposely omitted, and Von Holst, Greeley, and Benton, historians of that time, have overlooked the resolutions of the other Southern States condemning the doctrines of South Carolina, which are the more significant as those States agreed with her in opposing and denouncing the tariff.

Virginia’s position, though less decided than that of the other States, did not please Calhoun; in reply to her Senator, Mr. Rives, who had opposed the South Carolinian doctrine, he spoke of her as “a once” patriotic State. Virginia’s resolutions were, that the doctrines of State sovereignty and State rights as set forth in her resolutions of 1798, and sustained by the report thereon of 1799, were a true interpretation of the Constitution, but she did not consider them as sanctioning the proceedings of South Carolina in her said ordinances, nor as countenancing all the principles assumed by the President in his proclamation. Virginia sent Mr. Leigh as a commissioner to South Carolina, but without result.

Mississippi, Jefferson Davis’ State, declared “that, in the language of the father of his country, we will indignantly frown upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the ties which link together its various parts.” Nullification was condemned in the strongest terms, and it was declared they would support the President in maintaining the Union.

In the next year, Robert J. Walker canvassed the State for a seat in the Senate with Poindexter, his opponent; the issue was a question of nullification, and Walker, after a contest of three years, prevailed and became Senator at the election, January 8, 1836. General Jackson wrote a letter in his favor.[101]

Alabama declared nullification “is unsound in theory and dangerous in practice”; North Carolina, that it “is revolutionary in its character, and subversive of the Constitution, and leads to disunion”; Georgia, “that we abhor the doctrine of nullification as neither a peaceful nor a constitutional remedy,” and further declare, while they deplore the rash and revolutionary measures of South Carolina, they warn their citizens against adopting her mischievous policy.[102]

These were the opinions of the Southern States in 1833. So that at that time, as a matter of history, South Carolina alone claimed the right of nullification and secession.

We have before said it has been customary for the Legislatures of States to pass resolutions declaring acts and laws of the United States—that they are opposed to—unconstitutional, and therefore null and void; but that these State resolutions do not make them so; that they are merely the opinions of the Legislatures that pass them; that the decision, whether laws of the United States or acts of its government are null and void, rests solely with the judiciary of the United States.

On examination we find, from the inception of Washington’s administration until the inauguration of Lincoln, that, without exception, the authority and supremacy of the laws and government of the United States have been maintained and enforced by its courts over every State, and every State government and judiciary, and every individual therein:—Over Pennsylvania, as we have before set forth in the Gideon Olmstead case, when the representatives of the State officer who had disbursed prize money under the decision of the State Court were compelled to repay it to the United States.[103] Over Kentucky itself, in 1812, when the court maintained that a Kentucky State court had no jurisdiction to enjoin a judgment of a court of the United States.[104] Over Kentucky and Virginia, in a serious controversy about the validity of the grants of those States.[105] Over Maryland, when the State undertook to tax the branch of the United States Bank established in her territory, on the ground that no State could tax the instrument employed by the government in the exercise of its powers.[106] In this case Chief-Justice Marshall declared: “If any one proposition would command the universal assent of mankind, we might expect it to be this, that the government of the Union, though limited in its powers, is supreme within its sphere.” Even further, the United States Court interfered and took from the State court of Virginia jurisdiction of the prosecution by that great State of one of its own citizens for illegally selling tickets in a lottery, because the lottery had been authorized in the District of Columbia and brought in question the validity of a United States law.[107] Over Massachusetts, in declaring the embargo legal. Over New York, when it declared illegal the State’s grants to Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, of the exclusive right of navigation of the Hudson. Over Ohio, when the State insisted on taxing the branch of the Bank of the United States, the court issuing its mandamus and compelling the State’s Treasurer to obey its decree.[108] Over South Carolina, in 1829, not long before her threatened nullification, when the court annulled the taxation by the city of Charleston of the bonds of the United States, because it was an interference with the power of the General Government to borrow money.[109] The disputes of States about their boundaries often came before the Supreme Court and were settled, the States appearing as parties. Indeed, such interference and control were so frequent and so implicitly submitted to that Chief-Justice Marshall said: “Though it had been the unpleasant duty of the United States courts to reverse the judgments of many State courts in cases in which the strongest State feelings were engaged, the State judges have yielded without hesitation to their authority, while perhaps disapproving the judgment of reversal.”[110]

These decisions of the United States Supreme Court were made by judges appointed by all the political parties that had been in power, by those in favor of a strict as well as a liberal construction of the Constitution. Taney, a very eminent jurist, and his associates, judges appointed by the political party predominant in the States that attempted to disrupt the Union, held that the Constitution and the laws of the government were paramount, and announced and maintained their supremacy to the beginning of the rebellion over every State court and State law and constitution.[111]

The action of the State of Georgia in 1832, in a controversy between that State and the United States Supreme Court, has been cited in support of the theory that Georgia maintained the doctrine of State supremacy. In that case the matter never came to an actual conflict. Why the United States decision was not promptly enforced is a matter that it is not here worth while to enter into.[112] It is sufficient to quote the resolutions of the Legislature of the State in 1833, that she abhorred the doctrine of nullification and deplored the revolutionary measures of South Carolina and warned her citizens against adopting that mischievous policy, to show that the State, in her opposition to the christianizing of Cherokee Indians, did not question the supremacy of the United States Government.

It is often asserted by historical writers that the Supreme Court of the United States, under the guidance of Marshall, has built up, magnified, and extended the powers of the government. Undoubtedly the court has great power in deciding whether the laws of a State or the acts of a State officer are illegal, when the question is whether they infringe on the rights of the general government; it, however, cannot make laws and acts extending the national powers. Its authority is, for the most part, that of restraint over the acts of the executive and United State officers, and of annulling, as it often has, the laws of Congress adjudged to be beyond its powers. It is Congress that made the Alien and Sedition laws, United States banks, tariffs and embargoes; it was the President and Congress who freed the negroes. Even in the war of secession, the judiciary declared the President’s disregard of the habeas corpus in Milligan’s case illegal.[113]

The idea which has found favor that Judge Story yielded his early convictions as to the nationality of the government to the influence of Marshall, is founded on the erroneous theory that the doctrine of the Kentucky resolutions were, after their promulgation, held and believed in by Story and the republicans. Anyone who was personally acquainted with Story, or was taught by him in the law school at Cambridge, or heard the opinions of the eminent counsel who tried cases before him, knows that no judge of a more uncompromising confidence in his own conclusions and decisions ever sat on the bench. The great fault of this most learned of our judges was the quickness of his apprehension and of his arriving at a conclusion in the beginning of a case he was hearing, and the tenacity with which he held and enforced it, sometimes even to the detriment of justice itself. Story, though generally agreeing with the Chief Justice, at times gave dissenting opinions on constitutional questions.

The government, from the time of South Carolina’s earlier nullification ordinances to that of the civil war, excepting for very short periods, was in the hands of the South. Under it, and in the interest of the slave States, Polk made war with Mexico, an act of Congress declaring that it existed. Texas with its immense territory of over two hundred thousand square miles was annexed in Tyler’s administration, Calhoun becoming Secretary of State for that purpose. Laws interfering with the constitutional rights of Northern citizens of the black and mixed race, and for the protection of slavery, were passed and enforced by the Southern States.

There can be no doubt that the belief had been growing in those States, that they would be better off out of the Union than in it. The opposition to slavery was increasing at the North; no works were so widely read there as those setting forth its iniquities. The South, then, as in the time of the making of the Constitution, was an agricultural country, depending for its prosperity on a cheap, forced labor, and the exportation of its cotton and other products. It was strong in men, and no longer required the protection of the Eastern States, as in the days of the National Convention. In 1854, by the laws enacted by Congress, the whole territory of the United States was thrown open to the introduction of slavery, giving to the Southern States the right to carry into it their “peculiar property,” and taking away their great grievance. Then also came the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, that all laws excluding slavery from the territories were unconstitutional, and asserting that the inhabitants of those territories could not interfere with that right. The only matter the South could complain of was the hostility of the Northern States to slavery, and that some of them would not comply with the laws for the rendition of their slaves, and had passed State laws and committed acts interfering with their legal and constitutional right of seizing them on Northern territory. There was no pretence that there was any tyrannical usurpation of undelegated authority by the United States, such as the Virginia resolutions referred to. Prof. Bazil L. Gildersleeve, a confederate soldier, in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine, says in a paper called “The Creed of the old South,” that the cause of secession was, that “the extreme Southern States considered their rights menaced by the issue of the presidential election.”[114]

Upon the choice of Lincoln, and while Buchanan was President, preparations were made by the South for a disruption of the Union. Reuben Davis, a distinguished lawyer and a member of Congress from Mississippi, in his autobiography, informs us that he spent much time with Floyd, the Secretary of War, who had been for twelve months sending arms to Southern arsenals and had put the forts in condition to be captured. He estimated that one half of the munitions of war was in the South.[115] South Carolina again took the initiative and seceded on the ground that as a sovereign State she had the right to withdraw from the compact she had entered into; and for the second time in our history did a State, and the same State, assert its sovereign right against the supreme authority of the United States. The other plantation States quickly followed South Carolina; generally there was no elaborate statement by them of their grievances, nor did they explain why the doctrines they abhorred less than thirty years before, they now asserted and so courageously fought for. Virginia joined the Southern Confederacy without passing any formal act of secession. Her convention, called for the purpose of considering the matter, voted not to secede. In an address delivered in October, 1887, at Richmond, on the dedication of a statue to Lee, the orator, a descendant of the great Chief-Justice Marshall, undertakes to explain and defend Virginia’s course in joining the South. He does not claim the right of secession and apparently agrees with Lee, and puts in italics what Lee wrote on the 23d of January, 1861, that “Secession is nothing but revolution.” He states also that secession was unjustifiable, because the opponents of Lincoln had the majority in the National House of Representatives and Senate; but that the method of Lincoln of composing the troubles of the country brought Virginia into the contest. Following, as Southern writers and speakers do, the extravagant denunciations of Calhoun, he says: “Instead of maintaining the honor, the integrity of our National Union, it destroyed that Union in all but a territorial sense, as effectually as secession, by substituting conquered provinces for free States, and repeating in America the shameful history of Russia and Poland.” As our Poland when he spoke had an executive of its own choice and a majority of the House of Representatives, it was its own fault, if its inhabitants were in that abject condition. Is it not absurd to talk in this way, when no secessionist has been hung for treason, and a silver crown a short time since, at a public meeting, was prepared by some admirer for the dethroned autocrat of our Poland? At any rate we have no sedition law now, and freedom of speech against the government passes without comment. An unsuccessful revolution is rebellion, generally punished in other countries by death. It has not been so in our Russia. Jefferson Davis was indicted for treason; his trial never took place, as President Johnson issued a general amnesty proclamation.

Undoubtedly the confidence of the South in its assumed superiority in courage and fighting qualities had great influence in inducing its attempted secession. Jefferson Davis in his history gives instances of advantages gained at the outset by the Southern soldiers through their skill in the use of firearms. He did not tell us, and it seems to have escaped notice generally, that the Southern States had also the great benefit of the military academies they had established, which furnished at once trained officers for their troops. Their renowned general, Stonewall Jackson, was a professor in that of Virginia, and went from the academy to the Confederate army.[116]

The seceding States in forming their new compact, in article after article followed the Constitution they rejected, prefacing it with the declaration, “We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a more permanent Federal Government,” instead of “We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, for ourselves and our posterity.” They took particular care, however, by their new “Compact,” to provide for the perpetuity of slavery in their Confederacy,—and, looking to conquests, in any new territory that might be acquired.

Instead of slavery being perpetuated, the whole system was annihilated under and within the Constitution. The amendment abolishing it forever was passed in the manner required in the Constitution by all the States that had refused an obedience to the United States laws. No longer is the declaration of independence that all men are born free and equal, in the language of Calhoun, “a glittering generality.”

The seceding States were not without their internal trouble, and the authority of the Confederate Government was questioned by Georgia.

We all know how patiently and assiduously Lincoln tried to keep the Southern States in the Union and how ineffectually; and when he found that his effort was of no avail, with how firm a hand he wielded the powers of the Executive. In Merriam’s case, he maintained his suspension of the habeas corpus, although Chief-Justice Taney held it was illegal. His decreeing freedom to the slaves of those in rebellion, as a war measure, was an act of imperial power seldom surpassed. Our whole history, as well as the epoch of the civil war, has proved how unfounded was Hamilton’s fear that the government was not strong enough.

How wonderfully well the founders of our Constitution did their work, is shown by the fact that so few amendments have been made, while the constitutions of the different States have been changed again and again. The ten articles declaring certain rights to be in the people were adopted in 1791, then in 1798 the article taking away from the United States the jurisdiction of suits of individuals against a State; afterwards in 1804 two articles changing the manner of electing the President and Vice-President. The theory of the founders of the Constitution, that it would be best to leave to men of prominence as electors to confer and choose those most fit for President and Vice-President, has failed. The electors chosen by the people are pledged to vote for candidates nominated at party conventions. After these few amendments, none were passed until those as to slavery, following the civil war.

A strict construction of the powers granted by the Constitution is a “State’s rights” that those who believe in the supremacy of the National Union can well favor. It is beyond human wisdom to enact laws of which there can be no question; the decisions of the Supreme Court show how hard it is to make a law whose constitutionality is not disputed. Government would have been impossible, if the power had been in each State to decide for itself as to the validity of every law passed and every act of the General Government, and to secede at its will whenever it chose. Yet this is the government that the South claimed our forefathers established.

In forming the Confederacy of the Revolution, it was declared in its articles that it was indissoluble; the same declaration is in the Constitution when the States “formed a more perfect Union” than that of the Confederacy “for ourselves and our posterity,” and were merged into one Nation. This Constitution and the laws of the United States are declared there, “as the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.” Supreme over what, if not over the States that should adopt it? Historically that supremacy has been maintained and enforced by the United States Courts and Executive and Legislature.

In resisting the supremacy of this Constitution no State, dismembered Virginia perhaps excepted, has suffered more than South Carolina. It is truly pathetic in passing through the streets of Charleston, the home of the great planters and politicians that shaped the destinies of the State, to hear the names of the foreign bankers and merchants that have taken the place and the homes of the old leaders or who have built more pretentious abodes, to see the buildings with walls cracked and fissured by the earthquake mended by contributions cheerfully given by Northern friends, to read the newspapers lamenting the loss of their trade to Savannah and calling on the United States for larger appropriations to deepen the channels of their harbor. Then to look upon their statues of those distinguished at different periods: the mutilated one of the great Earl of Chatham, the friend of American freedom in Colony times; those of the heroes of the Revolution and the war of 1812; and in the square opposite the barracks of her Military Academy, the great glittering bronze of Calhoun,[117] who brought so much misery to them all. But as we go Westward, where the sandy soil of the plains yields to the clay of the foothills, and find the streams turning the wheels of the factory, and hear the whirl of the spindle tended by white operatives, and see the plough, generally followed by a white man, turning over the soil amidst the stumps of trees in fields newly reclaimed; and come at last to Spartanburg and read the inscription there on the monument recently raised to those who fell at Cowpens, by the old thirteen States and Tennessee, bringing to memory the days of Greene and Morgan, we cannot but believe instead of four and forty sovereign States, we shall, in Webster’s words, have for all time, “one Nation, one Union, one Destiny.”