“I have myself seen that most distinguished man, Charles Francis Adams, subjected in society to treatment which, if he had resented it, might have seriously imperilled the relations of the two countries.... But in this critical state of things, in and out of Parliament, Mr. Disraeli and Sir Stafford Northcote on one side, and the Duke of Argyll and Sir George Cornewall Lewis on the other, mainly contributed to keep this country neutral, and to save us from the serious mistake of taking part with the South.”
Even Mr. Bryce, a most learned author, whose opinion in this matter has great weight, intimates that the seceding States legally may have been right.[1]
Lord Wolseley, in his article in Macmillan’s Magazine on the life of Lee, extolling him as the greatest general of his age and the most perfect man,[2] informs us that each State possessed the right both historically and legally under the Constitution to leave the Union at its will. Apparently he did not know that January 23, 1861, Lee wrote to his son: “Secession is nothing but revolution.” “It” (the Constitution) “is intended for perpetual union, so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government not a compact, and which can only be dissolved by revolution or the assent of all the people in convention assembled. It is idle to talk of secession.”[2]
Possibly in time the North may be of the same opinion as to Lee’s transcendent ability as a general. No one doubts now his great soldierly attainments and the worth of his private character, but for the sake of the existence of our nation, may it never believe he fought for the right.
Very generally and very fortunately for the country our Southern fellow-citizens, except their historians, some of their politicians, and a few whom they call unreconstructed rebels, concede that the right of secession has been put to the arbitrament of war and decided against the South forever. Now they tell us that none are more loyal and will march more willingly under the Stars and Stripes than those who fought so bravely to the bitter end under the flag of the Confederacy. Even Jefferson Davis, in the conclusion of his history, concedes that the result of the war has shown that secession is impracticable. It is difficult, however, to understand how might has made right, and the conquest of the richer and more populous North over the weaker South has settled forever the right or wrong of the matter. The North does not believe in the sneering maxim of Frederick the Great, that the Almighty is on the side of the heavier battalions.
Nor need we go to the South or to our English military critics for this opinion as to the Northern right. In a recent short life of Webster written for the American Statesmen series, a distinguished Republican politician and historian, Henry Cabot Lodge, in criticising the greatest speech of our greatest orator, Webster’s in reply to Hayne, on South Carolina’s nullification doctrines, makes these astounding statements:
“That it was probably necessary, at all events Mr. Webster felt it to be so, to argue that the Constitution at the outset was not a compact between States, but a national instrument.... When the Constitution was adopted, it is safe to say that there was not a man in the country, from Washington and Hamilton on the one side, to George Clinton and George Mason on the other, who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment entered upon by the States, and from which each and every State had the right peaceably to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised.”
This is a declaration of the right of secession at the inception of our government and that every one held that belief. If this be correct, with such a right the Union was no enduring tie, but was a mere rope of sand.
He adds that the weak places in Webster’s armor were historical in nature. In support of this opinion, he instances the Virginia and Kentucky resolves in 1799, and the Hartford convention of 1814; a few disloyal, some might say treasonable, acts and declarations; and then tells us a confederacy had grown into a nation, and that Mr. Webster set forth the national conception of the Union; and the principles, which he made clear and definite, went on broadening and deepening and carried the North through the civil war and preserved the national life. A singular result from a speech, if it were so fundamentally and historically wrong.
If Mr. Lodge, and those who agree with him, and there are some at the North who do, be right, and Hayne got the better of Webster in that celebrated contest, the nullification doctrines and acts of South Carolina were constitutionally sound and legal; and if South Carolina were right in her nullification, the secession of the South, thirty years afterwards, was also right.
We do not concede that nullification and secession have been barred because the course of events has been such that independent sovereign States have grown into a nation; nor do we admit that the Union and its indissolubility depend only on the result of an appeal to arms. We claim with Webster that nullification and secession were entirely indefensible constitutionally, and also in the light of history at the time of the foundation of our Constitution, and ever since.
There can be no doubt of the effect of Webster’s speeches at the time of their delivery; they aroused the national pride of the people, and the whole country, except portions of the South, responded.
It was in this nullification controversy that Webster won the title of the Great Expounder of the Constitution; he was then at his prime, physically and mentally. Always carefully dressed, when he made his speeches, in the blue coat with brass buttons, buff waistcoat, and white cravat of the Whigs of Fox’s time; his large frame, his massive head with dark, straight hair, and deep set and, in debate, luminous black eyes; his superb swarthy complexion brightened with brilliant color that is even in women so handsome; his grand and rich voice; his emphatic delivery;—all served to make him the most impressive of orators.
It was often said by his contemporaries at the bar that unless Webster wholly believed in the justice of the cause he was maintaining he could not argue well. He was not like some of the greatest advocates, whose ability and ingenuity are only fully brought forth when they have to contend with the difficulties of a weak and almost desperate case.
Hayne, his antagonist, was an able, eloquent, and accomplished orator. His speech did not create that enthusiasm at the South that Webster’s did at the North; but his own State pertinaciously adhered to its doctrine of nullification and saw no defeat to its champion.
There were no less than three speeches of Hayne’s—one of them, the second, running through two days—and the same number of replies by Webster. The debate took place in the Senate in January, 1830; it arose on an amended resolution originally offered by Mr. Foote as to the expediency of limiting or hastening the sales of the public lands. South Carolina was then threatening to declare the existing tariff null and void, and to pass laws preventing the United States from collecting duties in its ports. Hayne urged that the government should dispose of the public lands and after paying the national debt with the proceeds should get rid of the remainder, so that there should not be a shilling of permanent revenue; he looked with alarm on the consolidation of the government. To get the support of the West against the East, he accused the East of a narrow policy towards the West as to the public lands and the tariff, “the accursed tariff,” as he termed it, which kept multitudes of laborers in the East to the detriment of the West. In his second speech, Hayne not only attacked the East and its policy as to the public lands and support of the tariff, but went further and “carried the war into Africa,” as he styled it, reading speeches, pamphlets, and sermons, showing, as he claimed, the disloyalty of New England in the war of 1812.
He maintained that the United States had exceeded the powers granted to it by the Constitution in making the existing tariff, which protected the manufacturing industry of the East, only a section of the country, and compelled the non-manufacturing States to pay tribute to it; that the United States government was a compact between independent sovereign States; that each of the States, being an independent sovereign, had a right in its own sovereign capacity to decide whether laws made by the United States exceeded the powers given it by the Constitution, and if a State held a law made by the United States was not authorized by the Constitution, it could treat it as null and void; that the existing