Caleb William Loring
Nullification, Secession, Webster's Argument, and the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions
Considered in Reference to the Constitution and Historically
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4064066204587
Table of Contents
NULLIFICATION, SECESSION, WEBSTER.
PREFACE.
I was much shocked a few years ago, in reading a Life of Webster, by the statement of its able and distinguished author that really Hayne had the right of the argument in the renowned debate on nullification. In reply I prepared a statement of Webster’s argument. Besides what Webster had so ably said, I found in the Constitution itself other proofs of the nationality of our government, of the intent of those who made it to establish a nation, of their full belief that they had done so, and that, historically, there was no contention as to this.
The vital question is whether a national union was established by the States, or a confederacy of independent nations formed with the right of each to decide upon the validity of the acts of the General Government and leave it at its pleasure.
The superiority in men and wealth that gave the North the victory did not decide the right or wrong of secession: it may have shown its impracticability; but if the right ever existed it remains to-day.
There are many authors who have at great length discussed this matter on the side of the South, but the case of the North, it seems to me, has not been fully set forth. The idea appears to be creeping into history, a recent fad of some Northern writers and commentators, that the nationality of our government was a question from its inception, and that the United States Judiciary and Congress by assumptions have largely extended its powers.
The nation, as Pallas Athene full grown and armed from the brain of Zeus, sprang to life from the Constitution with the sovereign authority necessary for its existence and the power to enforce its rule. In the beginning there was no debate, no question of its nationality. The early commentators on the Constitution (and Story wrote three volumes upon that matter) did not even mention that there was a doubt of it.
To those who so often quote the Kentucky resolutions, it will perhaps be a matter of surprise to learn that their purport and existence were forgotten from the time they were promulgated until South Carolina’s threat in 1830 of nullification.
That Virginian of Virginians, Patrick Henry, who so strenuously opposed his State’s adoption of the Constitution, struck the keynote, when he objected that it was “We, the people,” and not “We, the States,” that made the government. Later, when convinced of the wisdom of the adoption, and Virginia had shown by its resolutions its objections to the Alien and Sedition laws, and discontent at the rule of John Adams and the Federalists, he no less forcibly declared that Virginia owed an obedience to the laws of the United States.
It will be new to many that the Virginia resolutions do not in the least countenance the doctrine of secession and nullification: that the resolutions and explanations of them by the Virginia Legislature testify to an attachment and love of the Union, and a professed intent to strengthen and perpetuate it, and are, as they declare, only a protest against the assumption by the government of undelegated power.
In the belief that the right and might both prevailed in our civil war, and in full trust in that faith, these remarks are submitted to the people of our whole country.
Caleb William Loring.
NULLIFICATION, SECESSION, WEBSTER.
CHAPTER I.
WEBSTER AND HAYNE.
In the renewed friendly relations at the dinner-table and in the lecture-room, the North of late has had the pleasure of listening to the speeches and discourses of Southern orators, soldiers, and politicians, who, while asserting their loyalty to the Union, claim that that Union was a compact between independent sovereign States, from which each of these independent sovereign States had an undoubted right to secede; our Southern brethren, beaten in the trial of arms, persistently insist that they fought for the right.
Besides Jefferson Davis’ History of the Confederacy, as bitter to some of its generals as to the North, the Vice-President of that government, of high repute for ability and reasoning powers, Alexander H. Stephens, published two ponderous volumes to prove not only that the South could secede, but that it was obligatory, if it wished to retain its equality and freedom, alleging as the principal reason the wrongful infringement of the right of the South to take its “peculiar property,” slaves, into all the territories of the Union, the common property of all the States. Recently was published Semmes’ Career of the Sumter and Alabama, abusive of the Yankee and of Northern friends like Buchanan, insisting on the justice and necessity of secession, and asserting the tyranny and mean oppression of the North. We have had also a republication of Governor Tazewell’s Review of President Jackson’s Proclamation against Nullification; and generally the dedication of statues and decorating of the graves of the soldiers of the Confederacy have been taken as occasions to show the justice of the lost cause.
It is to be hoped that few agree with General Early’s declamation at Winchester as to those of the South who changed their opinion as to secession: “The Confederate who has deserted since the war is infinitely worse than the one who deserted during the war.”
The same opinion as to the right of secession has been very generally held by British politicians; and that opinion to a great extent prevailed, and to-day prevails, in the English army and navy. Mr. John Morley, in his life of Burke, in reference to Burke’s speeches denouncing the conduct of Great Britain towards us as colonies, says that “the current of opinion was then precisely similar in England in the struggle to which the United States owed its existence, as in the great civil war between the Northern and Southern States of the American Union”; “people in England convinced themselves, some after careful examination, others on hearsay, that the