This was the spirit in which the National Government was formed. It was intended to be a government for external and communal purposes only. By every provision which the ingenuity of statesmanship could devise the General Government was restrained from trespassing upon the sovereign right of each state to regulate in its own way and by its own devices all matters not distinctly delegated to the General Government by the express terms of the Constitution.
For half a century after the adoption of the Constitution, this view everywhere prevailed and was everywhere recognized as authoritative. When, during the War of 1812–15, New England found that the course of the General Government antagonized the local interests of that region, the states in that quarter of the country opposed the national policy even to the extent of threatening a withdrawal from the Union—secession in other words, and nullification. It was Daniel Webster—afterwards the apostle of "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable"—who drew and championed the Rockingham Memorial in 1812, in which his New England constituency formally protested against the war then existing with England and by unmistakable implication threatened secession and a separate peace with England on the part of the maritime states in the northeastern part of the country. And immediately afterwards Webster was elected to Congress where, with the approval of that part of the country, he opposed all measures designed to encourage enlistments at a time when the country was engaged in foreign war. He even went so far as to vote against the appropriations for the national military defense against the country's ancient foe, at that time engaged in an effort to undo and reverse the results of the Revolutionary war itself.
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, writing of this incident, expresses the opinion that it was an extreme stretch of the liberty of legislative opposition to the administration in a time of war and public danger and that it carried the right of opposition to the utmost limit to which it could go without treason.
Yet at the time nothing very serious was thought of the matter for the reason that at that time the individual state and not the National Government was regarded as the primary and ultimate object of men's allegiance.
The states felt themselves to be still only conditionally and tentatively members of the Union. They were still intensely jealous of their individual sovereignty, and they were still indisposed to make serious sacrifice of their own interests in behalf of the common weal of a union which they regarded doubtfully as an experiment. They still felt themselves entitled to reject the experiment and withdraw from the Union if at any time they should see fit to do so.
It would be easy to multiply historical illustrations of this attitude of mind, extending, though with diminishing frequency and force, to that time just before the outbreak of the Confederate war when N. P. Banks's cry of "Let the Union slide" was accepted as the slogan of the anti-slavery party. But the multiplication of such illustrations is unnecessary. Every instructed mind is aware of the fact that at the first the Union was regarded as a doubtful experiment into which the states had entered with misgiving and from which each state felt itself at liberty to withdraw whenever it should find the yoke of the Union a galling one.
Writing of Webster's replies to Hayne, Senator Lodge frankly admits that the historical argument was all against Webster; that there is no room for doubt that at the first the Union was held to be an experiment and withdrawal from it was everywhere regarded as a reserved right of the states.
And even the right of a state while remaining in the Union to nullify a national statute obnoxious to its prosperity or to its moral sense was as directly asserted in the personal liberty bills with which, just before the war, many states sought to render the National Fugitive Slave Law inoperative, as it had been asserted by South Carolina in that state's attempt a generation earlier to annul and resist a law imposing tariff restrictions upon trade.
But there are some other historical facts that must be borne in mind if we would justly understand the war catastrophe of 1861.
It must be remembered that before the beginning of that year twenty new states had been created out of territories that at the time of the Union's formation were wildernesses. These new states had none of that jealousy of their sovereignty which gave pause to the original thirteen. They had entered the Union not reluctantly, as states hesitatingly surrendering a previously cherished independence, but eagerly as communities upon which the dignity of statehood and all the sovereignty that statehood implies had been conferred by gracious gift of the Union. Those communities had been suppliants for the favor of admission to the Union and not, as the original states were, the creators of the Union, surrendering to it with more or less reluctance some share of an absolute sovereignty previously enjoyed by themselves. These new states were not benefactors of the Union but its beneficiaries. They had surrendered no rights of self-government to it, but on the contrary had received from it as a gracious gift all the rights and dignities of states, where before they had had no rights and dignities whatsoever.
These new states had grown populous and prosperous under that Union to which they had surrendered nothing of independence and from which they had received all they had of statehood and sovereignty. Very naturally, then, their attitude toward the Union was quite different from that of the older states. That Union which the older states had always regarded as their creature, owing its very existence to their grace, the new states looked upon as their creator to whom they owed all that they enjoyed of liberty-giving autonomy.
In the newer states particularly, but in the older states also, there had grown up a new conception of the dignity and permanence of the National Union. That which had been originally regarded as a doubtful venture had little by little come to be looked upon as a thing established and glorious. The national idea had taken a new and deeper hold upon men's minds and affections. Vast material and moral interests had grown into sturdy self-consciousness under its beneficent rule. That Union which had been entered upon with so much doubt and hesitation and with so many precautionary stipulations had become one of the great nations of the earth, strong at home and everywhere respected abroad. It had a history in war and peace which was a precious possession of all the people alike.
Proud, loving memories clustered about the story of its career. The victories of New Orleans, and Buena Vista, and Chapultepec, the sea conquests of Porter and Perry and the rest, had been added to the stories of Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, Trenton, Camden and Yorktown, as fireside tales with which the grandfathers made the eyes of a younger generation of Americans glisten with patriotism. And achievements of peace equally notable—stories of what Morse, Henry, Fulton, Peter Cooper, Daniel Boone, Bowie, Kit Carson, Fremont, Sam Houston, General Gaines and a multitude of others had accomplished—were equally stimulating to the pride and patriotism of the youth of the thirty-three states.
And there were heroic tales told of Indian wars in which Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison, Sam Dale, the Mississippi Yagers, Col. Dick Johnson, and other veritable heroes of romantic daring had figured. All these and scores and hundreds of other tales of patriotic heroism were then familiars of the fireside as illustrations of American pluck and American achievement.
There was the country's expansion, too, to glory in. The Louisiana purchase had added an empire of vast extent and of inestimable productive possibilities to the national domain, the development of which, even before 1861, was a romantic wonder story of history. The Mexican war had brought with it another accession of incalculably rich territory such as no nation in all history except our own had ever added at a single stroke to its domain.
Where the Spanish gold-seekers had galloped for centuries in search of the precious metal, finding it not, an American had quickly discovered a new Golconda, an Ophir, an Eldorado so rich in its productiveness as for a time to threaten the stability of gold as an accepted measure of values among men. Vast regions that had remained for generations the haunt of savages and wild beasts, with only here and there a mission station of adobe huts to offer hope of better things in some far distant future time, became, within a brief while populous territories ready to take their place in the Union as important American states. Better still, a new and matchless fruitfulness had been discovered