The Life of Lyman Trumbull. Horace White
in without the consent of all the old ones, and that the taking in of a new one without such consent would release the old ones.
Controversy on this theme was superseded a few years later by more acute sources of irritation—the Embargo and War of 1812. These events fell with great severity on the commerce of the Northern States, and led to the passage by the Massachusetts legislature of anti-Embargo resolutions, declaring that "when the national compact is violated and the citizens are oppressed by cruel and unauthorized law, this legislature is bound to interpose its power and wrest from the oppressor his victim." In this doctrine Daniel Webster concurred. In a speech in the House of Representatives, December 9, 1814, on the Conscription Bill, he said:
The operation of measures thus unconstitutional and illegal ought to be prevented by a resort to other measures which are both constitutional and legal. It will be the solemn duty of the State Governments to protect their own authority over their own militia and to interpose between their own citizens and arbitrary power.... With the same earnestness with which I now exhort you to forbear from these measures I shall exhort them to exercise their unquestionable right of providing for the security of their own liberties.2
The anti-Embargo resolutions were followed by the refusal of both Massachusetts and Connecticut to allow federal officers to take command of their militia and by the call for the Hartford Convention. The latter body recommended to the states represented in it the adoption of measures to protect their citizens against forcible drafts, conscriptions, or impressments not authorized by the Constitution—a phrase which certainly meant that the states were to judge of the constitutionality of the measures referred to. The conclusion of peace with Great Britain put an end to this crisis before it came to blows.
On February 26, 1833, Mr. Calhoun, following the Resolutions of '98, affirmed in the Senate the doctrine that the Government of the United States was a compact, by which the separate states delegated to it certain definite powers, reserving the rest; that whenever the general Government should assume the exercise of powers not so delegated, its acts would be void and of no effect; and that the said Government was not the sole judge of the powers delegated to it, but that, as in all other cases of compact among sovereign parties without any common judge, each had an equal right to judge for itself, as well of the infraction as of the mode and measures of redress. This was the stand which South Carolina took in opposition to the Force Bill of President Jackson's administration.3
A state convention of South Carolina was called which passed an ordinance nullifying the tariff law of the United States and declaring that, if any attempt were made to collect customs duties under it by force, that state would consider herself absolved from all allegiance to the Union and would proceed at once to organize a separate government. President Jackson was determined to exercise force, and would have done so had not Congress, under the lead of Henry Clay, passed a compromise tariff bill which enabled South Carolina to repeal her ordinance and say that she had gained the substantial part of her contention.
Despite the later speeches of Webster, the doctrine of nullification had a new birth in Massachusetts in 1845, the note of discord having been called forth by the proposed admission of Texas into the Union. In that year the legislature passed and the governor approved resolutions declaring that the powers of Congress did not embrace a case of the admission of a foreign state or a foreign territory into the Union by an act of legislation and "such an act would have no binding power whatever on the people of Massachusetts." This was a fresh outcropping of the bitterness which had prevailed in the New England States against the acquisition of Louisiana.
Thus it appears that, although the Constitution did create courts to decide all disputes arising under it, the particularism which previously prevailed continued to exist. Nationalism was an aftergrowth proceeding from the habit into which the people fell of finding their common centre of gravity at Washington City, and of viewing it as the place where the American name and fame were embodied and emblazoned to the world. During the first half-century the North and the South were changing coats from time to time on the subject of state sovereignty, but meanwhile the Constitution itself was working silently and imperceptibly in the North to undermine particularism and to strengthen nationalism. It had accomplished its educational work in the early thirties when it found its complete expression in Webster's reply to Hayne. But the South believed just as firmly that Hayne was the victor in that contest, as the North believed that Webster was. Hayne's speech was not generally read in the North either then or later. It was not inferior, in the essential qualities of dignity, courtesy, legal lore, and oratorical force, to that of his great antagonist. Webster here met a foeman worthy of his steel.
In the South the pecuniary interests bottomed on slavery offset and neutralized the unifying process that was ripening in the North. The slavery question entered into the debate between Webster and Calhoun in 1833 sufficiently to show that it lay underneath the other questions discussed. Calhoun, in the speech referred to, reproached Forsyth, of Georgia, for dullness in not seeing how state rights and slavery were dovetailed together and how the latter depended on the former.
That African slavery was the most direful curse that ever afflicted any civilized country may now be safely affirmed. It had its beginning in our country in the year 1619 at Jamestown, Virginia, where a Dutch warship short of provisions exchanged fourteen negroes for a supply thereof. Slavery of both Indians and negroes already existed in the West Indies and was regarded with favor by the colonists and their home governments. It began in Massachusetts in 1637 as a consequence of hostilities with the aborigines, the slaves being captives taken in war. They were looked upon by the whites as heathen and were treated according to precedents found in the Old Testament for dealing with the enemies of Jehovah. In order that they might not escape from servitude they were sent to the West Indies to be exchanged for negroes, and this slave trade was not restricted to captives taken in war, but was applied to any red men who could be safely seized and shipped away.
From these small beginnings slavery spread over all the colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia and lasted in all of them for a century and a half, i.e., until after the close of the Revolutionary War. Then it began to lose ground in the Northern States. Public sentiment turned against it in Massachusetts, but all attempts to abolish it there by act of the legislature failed. Its death-blow was given by a judicial decision in 1783 in a case where a master was prosecuted, convicted, and fined forty shillings for beating a slave.4
Public opinion sustained this judgment, although there had been no change in the law since the time when the Pequot Indians were sent by shiploads to the Bermudas to be exchanged for negroes. If masters could not punish their slaves in their discretion,—if slaves had any rights which white men were bound to respect,—slavery was virtually dead. No law could kill it more effectually.
In one way and another the emancipation movement extended southward to and including Pennsylvania in the later years of the eighteenth century. Nearly all the statesmen of the Revolution looked upon the institution with disfavor and desired its extinction. Thomas Jefferson favored gradual emancipation in Virginia, to be coupled with deportation of the emancipated blacks, because he feared trouble if the two races were placed upon an equality in the then slaveholding states. He labored to prevent the extension of slavery into the new territories, and he very nearly succeeded. In the year 1784 he reported an ordinance in the Congress of the Confederation to organize all the unoccupied territory, both north and south of the Ohio River, in ten subdivisions, in all of which slavery should be forever prohibited, and this ordinance failed of adoption by only one vote. Six states voted in the affirmative. Seven were necessary. Only one representative of New Jersey happened to be present, whereas two was the smallest number that could cast the vote of any state. If one other member from New Jersey had been there, the Jeffersonian ordinance of 1784 would have passed; slavery would have been restricted to the seaboard states which it then occupied, and would never have drawn the sword against the Union, and the Civil War would not have taken place.5
After the emancipation movement came to a pause, at the southern border of Pennsylvania, the fact became apparent that there was a dividing line between free states and slave states, and a feeling grew up in both sections that neither of them ought to acquire
Referring to this speech of Calhoun and to Webster's reply, Mr. Lodge says:
"Whatever the people of the United States understood the Constitution to mean in 1789, there can be no question that a majority in 1833 regarded it as a fundamental law and not a compact,—an opinion which has now become universal. But it was quite another thing to argue that what the Constitution had come to mean was what it meant when it was adopted."
See also Pendleton's
G. H. Moore's
Jefferson was cut to the heart by this failure. Commenting on an article entitled "États Unis" in the
"The voice of a single individual of the State which was divided, or one of those which were of the negative, would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country. Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment."