The Great Conspiracy, Complete - John Alexander Logan
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Allusion is also made to a letter written by Representative Nathan
Appleton, of Boston, December 15, 1860, in which that gentleman said
that when he was in Congress--in 1832-33--he had "made up his mind that
Messrs. Calhoun, Hayne, McDuffie, etc., were desirous of a separation of
the Slave States into a separate Confederacy, as more favorable to the
security of Slave Property."
After mentioning that "About 1835, some South Carolinians attempted a
Disunion demonstration," our authority says: It is thus described by
ex-Governor Francis Thomas of Maryland, in his speech in Baltimore,
October 29, 1861:
"Full twenty years ago, when occupying my seat in the House of
Representatives, I was surprised one morning, after the assembling of
the House, to observe that all the members from the Slaveholding States
were absent. Whilst reflecting on this strange occurrence, I was asked
why I was not in attendance on the Southern Caucus assembled in the room
of the Committee on Claims. I replied that I had received no
invitation.
"I then proposed to go to the Committee-room to see what was being done.
When I entered, I found that little cock-sparrow, Governor Pickens, of
South Carolina, addressing the meeting, and strutting about like a
rooster around a barn-yard coop, discussing the following resolution:
"' Resolved, That no member of Congress, representing a Southern
constituency, shall again take his seat until a resolution is passed
satisfactory to the South on the subject of Slavery.'
"I listened to his language, and when he had finished, I obtained the
floor, asking to be permitted to take part in the discussion. I
determined at once to kill the Treasonable plot hatched by John C.
Calhoun, the Catiline of America, by asking questions. I said to Mr.
Pickens, 'What next do you propose we shall do? are we to tell the
People that Republicanism is a failure? If you are for that, I am not.
I came here to sustain and uphold American institutions; to defend the
rights of the North as well as the South; to secure harmony and good
fellowship between all Sections of our common Country.' They dared not
answer these questions. The Southern temper had not then been gotten
up. As my questions were not answered, I moved an adjournment of the
Caucus /sine die/. Mr. Craig, of Virginia, seconded the motion, and the
company was broken up. We returned to the House, and Mr. Ingersoll, of
Pennsylvania, a glorious patriot then as now, introduced a resolution
which temporarily calmed the excitement."
The remarks upon this statement, made November 4, 1861, by the National
Intelligencer, were as follows:
"However busy Mr. Pickens may have been in the Caucus after it met, the
most active man in getting it up and pressing the Southern members to go
into it, was Mr. R. B. Rhett, also a member from South Carolina. The
occasion, or alleged cause of this withdrawal from the House into secret
deliberation was an anti-Slavery speech of Mr. Slade, of Vermont, which
Mr. Rhett violently denounced, and proposed to the Southern members to
leave the House and go into Conclave in one of the Committee-rooms,
which they generally did, if not all of them. We are able to state,
however, what may not have been known to Governor Thomas, that at least
three besides himself, of those who did attend it, went there with a
purpose very different from an intention to consent to any Treasonable
measure. These three men were Henry A. Wise, Balie Peyton, and William
Cost Johnson. Neither of them opened his lips in the Caucus; they went
to observe; and we can assure Governor Thomas, that if Mr. Pickens or
Mr. Calhoun, (whom he names) or any one else had presented a distinct
proposition looking to Disunion, or Revolt, or Secession, he would have
witnessed a scene not soon to be forgotten. The three whom we have
mentioned were as brave as they were determined. Fortunately, perhaps,
the man whom they went particularly to watch, remained silent and
passive."
Let us, however, pursue the inquiry a little further. On the 14th of
November, 1860, Alexander H. Stephens addressed the Legislature of
Georgia, and in a portion of that address--replying to a speech made
before the same Body the previous evening by Mr. Toombs, in which the
latter had "recounted the evils of this Government"--said:
"The first [of these evils] was the Fishing Bounties, paid mostly to the
sailors of New England. Our friend stated that forty-eight years of our
Government was under the administration of Southern Presidents. Well,
these Fishing Bounties began under the rule of a Southern President, I
believe. No one of them, during the whole forty-eight years, ever set
his Administration against the principle or policy of them. * * *
"The next evil which my friend complained of, was the Tariff. Well, let
us look at that for a moment. About the time I commenced noticing
public matters, this question was agitating the Country almost as
fearfully as the Slave question now is. In 1832, when I was in college,
South Carolina was ready to Nullify or Secede from the Union on this
account. And what have we seen? The Tariff no longer distracts the
public counsels. Reason has triumphed! The present Tariff was voted
for by Massachusetts and South Carolina. The lion and the lamb lay down
together--every man in the Senate and House from Massachusetts and South
Carolina, I think, voted for it, as did my honorable friend himself.
And if it be true, to use the figure of speech of my honorable friend,
that every man in the North that works in iron, and brass and wood, has
his muscle strengthened by the protection of the Government, that
stimulant was given by his vote and I believe (that of) every other
Southern man.
"Mr. TOOMBS--The Tariff lessened the duties.
"Mr. STEPHENS--Yes, and Massachusetts with unanimity voted with the
South to lessen them, and they were made just as low as Southern men
asked them to be, and that is the rate they are now at. If reason and
argument, with experience, produced such changes in the sentiments of
Massachusetts from 1832 to 1857, on the subject of the Tariff, may not
like changes be effected there by the same means--reason and argument,
and appeals to patriotism on the present vexed question? And who can
say that by 1875 or 1890, Massachusetts may not vote with South Carolina
and Georgia upon all those questions that now distract the Country and
threaten its peace and existence.
"Another matter of grievance alluded to by my honorable friend was the
Navigation Laws. This policy was also commenced under the
Administration of one of these Southern Presidents who ruled so well,
and has been continued through all of them since. * * * One of the
objects (of these) was to build up a commercial American marine by
giving American bottoms the exclusive Carrying Trade between our own
ports. This is a great arm of national power. This object was
accomplished. We have now an amount of shipping, not only coastwise,
but to foreign countries, which puts us in the front rank of the Nations
of the World. England can no longer be styled the Mistress of the Seas.
What American is not proud of the result? Whether those laws should be
continued is another question. But one thing is certain; no President,
Northern or Southern, has ever yet recommended their repeal. * * *
"These then were the true main grievances or grounds of complaint
against the general system of our Government and its workings--I mean
the administration of the Federal Government. As to the acts of the
federal States I shall speak presently: but these three were the main
ones used against the common head. Now, suppose it be admitted that all
of these are evils in the system; do they overbalance and outweigh the
advantages and great good which this same Government affords in a
thousand innumerable ways that cannot be estimated? Have we not at the
South, as well as the North, grown great, prosperous, and happy under
its operations? Has any part of the World ever shown such rapid
progress in the development of wealth, and all the material resources of
national power and greatness, as the Southern States have under the
General Government, notwithstanding all its defects?
"Mr. TOOMBS--In spite of it.
"Mr. STEPHENS--My honorable friend says we have, in spite of the General
Government; that without it, I suppose he thinks, we might have done as
well, or perhaps better, than we have done in spite of it. * * *
Whether we of the South would have been better off without the
Government, is, to say the least, problematical. On the one side we can
only put the fact, against speculation and conjecture on the other. * *
* The influence of the Government on us is like that of the atmosphere
around us. Its benefits are so silent and unseen that they are seldom
thought of or appreciated.
"We seldom think of the single element of oxygen in the air we breathe,
and yet let this simple, unseen and unfelt agent be withdrawn, this
life-giving element be taken away from this all-pervading fluid around
us, and what instant and appalling changes would take place in all
organic creation.
"It may be that we are all that we are 'in spite of the General
Government,' but it may be that without it we should have been far
different from what we are now. It is true that there is no equal part
of the Earth with natural resources superior perhaps to ours. That
portion of this Country known as the Southern States, stretching from
the Chesapeake to the Rio Grande, is fully equal to the picture drawn by
the honorable and eloquent Senator last night, in all natural
capacities. But how many ages and centuries passed before these
capacities were developed to reach this advanced age of civilization.
There these same hills, rich in ore, same rivers, same valleys and
plains, are as they have been since they came from the hand of the
Creator; uneducated and uncivilized man roamed over them for how long no
history informs us.
"It was only under our institutions that they could be developed. Their
development is the result of the enterprise of our people, under
operations of the Government and institutions under which we have lived.
Even our people, without these, never would have done it. The
organization of society has much to do with the development of the
natural resources of any Country or any Land. The institutions of a
People, political and moral, are the matrix in which the germ of their
organic structure quickens into life--takes root, and develops in form,
nature, and character. Our institutions constitute the basis, the
matrix, from which spring all our characteristics of development and
greatness. Look at Greece. There is the same fertile soil, the same
blue sky, the same inlets and harbors, the same AEgean, the same
Olympus; there is the same land where Homer sung, where Pericles spoke;
it is in nature the same old Greece--but it is living Greece no more.
"Descendants of the same people inhabit the country; yet what is the
reason of this vast difference? In the midst of present degradation we
see the glorious fragments of ancient works of art-temples, with
ornaments and inscriptions that excite wonder and admiration--the
remains of a once high order of civilization, which have outlived the
language they spoke--upon them all, Ichabod is written--their glory has
departed. Why is this so? I answer, their institutions have been
destroyed. These were but the fruits of their forms of government, the
matrix from which their great development sprang; and when once the
institutions of a People have been destroyed, there is no earthly power
that can bring back the Promethean spark to kindle them here again, any
more than in that ancient land of eloquence, poetry and song.
"The same may be said of Italy. Where is Rome, once the mistress of the
World? There are the same seven hills now, the same soil, the same
natural resources; the nature is the same, but what a ruin of human
greatness meets the eye of the traveler throughout the length and
breadth of that most down-trodden land! why have not the People of that
Heaven-favored clime, the spirit that animated their fathers? Why this
sad difference?
"It is the destruction of their institutions that has caused it; and, my
countrymen, if we shall in an evil hour rashly pull down and destroy
those institutions which the patriotic hand of our fathers labored so
long and so hard to build up, and which have done so much for us and the
World, who can venture the prediction that similar results will not
ensue? Let us avoid it if we can. I trust the spirit is among us that
will enable us to do it. Let us not rashly try the experiment, for, if
it fails, as it did in Greece and Italy, and in the South American
Republics, and in every other place wherever liberty is once destroyed,
it may never be restored to us again.
"There are defects in our government, errors in administration, and
short-comings of many kinds; but in spite of these defects and errors,
Georgia has grown to be a great State. Let us pause here a moment.
"When I look around and see our prosperity in everything, agriculture,
commerce, art, science, and every department of education, physical and
mental, as well as moral advancement--and our colleges--I think, in the
face of such an exhibition, if we can, without the loss of power, or any
essential right or interest, remain in the Union, it is our duty to
ourselves and to posterity--let us not too readily yield to this
temptation--to do so. Our first parents, the great progenitors of the
human race, were not without a like temptation, when in the Garden of
Eden. They were led to believe that their condition would be bettered
--that their eyes would be opened--and that they would become as gods.
They in an evil hour yielded--instead of becoming gods they only saw
their own nakedness.
"I look upon this Country, with our institutions, as the Eden of the
World, the Paradise of the Universe. It may be that out of it we may
become greater and more prosperous, but I am candid and sincere in
telling you that I fear if we rashly evince passion, and without
sufficient cause shall take that step, that instead of becoming greater
or more peaceful, prosperous, and happy--instead of becoming gods, we
will become demons, and at no distant day commence cutting one another's
throats. This is my apprehension.
"Let us, therefore, whatever we do, meet those difficulties, great as
they are, like wise and sensible men, and consider them in the light of
all the consequences which may attend our action. Let us see first
clearly where the path of duty leads, and then we may not fear to tread
therein."
Said Senator Wigfall, of Texas, March 4, 1861, in the United States
Senate, only a few hours before Mr. Lincoln's Inauguration:
"I desire to pour oil on the waters, to produce harmony, peace and quiet
here. It is early in the morning, and I hope I shall not say anything
that may be construed as offensive. I rise merely that we may have an
understanding of this question.
"It is not Slavery in the Territories, it is not expansion, which is the
difficulty. If the resolution which the Senator from Wisconsin
introduced here, denying the right of Secession, had been adopted by
two-thirds of each branch of this department of the Government, and had
been ratified by three-fourths of the States, I have no hesitation in
saying that, so far as the State in which I live and to which I owe my
allegiance is concerned, if she had no other cause for a disruption of
the Union taking place, she would undoubtedly have gone out.
[To insert as an additional article of amendment to the
Constitution, the following: "Under this Constitution, as
originally adopted, and as it now exists, no State has power to
withdraw from the jurisdiction of the United States: but this
Constitution, and all laws passed in pursuance of its delegated
powers, are the Supreme Law of the Land, anything contained in any
constitution, ordinance, or act of any State, to the contrary
notwithstanding."]
"The moment you deny the right of self-government to the free White men
of the South, they will leave the Government. They believe in the
Declaration of Independence. They believe that:
"'Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government
becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the People to
alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its
foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as
to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.'
"That principle of the Declaration of Independence is the one upon which
the free White men of the South predicated their devotion to the present
Constitution of the United States; and it was the denial of that, as
much as anything else, that has created the dissatisfaction in that
Section of the Country.
"There is no instrument of writing that has ever been written that has
been more misapprehended and misunderstood and misrepresented than this
same unfortunate Declaration of Independence, and no set of gentlemen
have ever been so slandered as the fathers who drew and signed that
Declaration.
"If there was a thing on earth that they did not intend to assert, it
was that a Negro was a White man. As I said here, a short time ago, one
of the greatest charges they made against the British Government was,
that old King George was attempting to establish the fact practically
that all men were created Free and Equal. They charged him in the
Declaration of Independence with inciting their Slaves to insurrection.
That is one of the grounds upon which they threw off their allegiance to
the British Parliament.
"Another great misapprehension is, that the men who drafted that
Declaration of Independence had any peculiar fancy for one form of
government rather than another. They were not fighting to establish a
Democracy in this country; they were not fighting to establish a
Republican form of government in this Country. Nothing was further from
their intention.
"Alexander Hamilton, after he had fought for seven years, declared that
the British form of government was the best that the ingenuity of man
had ever devised; and when John Adams said to him, 'without its
corruptions;' 'Why,' said he, 'its corruptions are its greatest
excellence; without the corruptions, it would be nothing.'
"In the Declaration of Independence, they speak of George III., after
this fashion. They say:
"'A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define
a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People.'
"Now, I ask any plain common-sense man what was the meaning of that?
Was it that they were opposed to a Monarchical form of government? Was
it that they believed a Monarchical form of government was incompatible
with civil liberty? No, sir; they entertained no such absurd idea.
None of them entertained it; but they say that George III, was a prince
whose character was 'marked by every act which may define a tyrant' and
that therefore he was 'unfit to be the ruler of a free People.' Had his
character not been so marked by every quality which would define a
tyrant, he might have been the fit ruler of a free People; ergo, a
monarchical form of Government was not incompatible with civil liberty.
"That was clearly the opinion of those men. I do not advocate it now;
for I have said frequently that we are wiser than our fathers, and our
children will be wiser than we are. One hundred years hence, men will
understand their own affairs much better than we do. We understand our
affairs better than those who preceded us one hundred years. But what I
assert is, that the men of the Revolution did not believe that a
Monarchical form of Government was incompatible with civil liberty.
"What I assert is, that when they spoke of 'all men being created
equal,' they were speaking of the White men who then had unsheathed
their swords--for what purpose? To establish the right of
self-government in themselves; and when they had achieved that, they
established, not Democracies, but Republican forms of Government in
the thirteen sovereign, separate and independent Colonies. Yet the
Declaration of Independence is constantly quoted to prove Negro
equality. It proves no such thing; it was intended to prove no such
thing.
"The 'glittering generalities' which a distinguished former Senator from
Massachusetts (Mr. Choate) spoke of, as contained in the Declaration of
Independence, one of them at least, about all men being created equal
--was not original with Mr. Jefferson. I recollect seeing a pamphlet
called the Principles of the Whigs and Jacobites, published about the
year 1745, when the last of the Stuarts, called 'the Pretender,' was
striking a blow that was fatal to himself, but a blow for his crown, in
which pamphlet the very phraseology is used, word for word and letter
for letter. I have not got it here to-night. I sent the other day to
the Library to try and find it, but could not find it; it was burnt, I
believe, with the pamphlets that were burnt some time ago.
"That Mr. Jefferson copied it or plagiarized it, is not true, I suppose,
any more than the charge that the distinguished Senator from New York
plagiarized from the Federalist in preparing his celebrated compromising
speech which was made here a short time ago. It was the cant phrase of
the day in 1745, which was only about thirty years previous to the
Declaration of Independence. This particular pamphlet, which I have
read, was published; others were published at the same time. That sort
of phraseology was used.
"There was a war of classes in England; there were men who were
contending for legitimacy; who were contending for the right of the
Crown being inherent and depending on the will of God, 'the divine right
of Kings,' for maintaining an hereditary landed-aristocracy; there was
another Party who were contending against this doctrine of legitimacy,
and the right of primogeniture. These were called the Whigs; they
established this general phraseology in denouncing the divine right and
the doctrine of legitimacy, and it became the common phraseology of the
Country; so that in the obscure county of Mecklenburg, in North
Carolina, a declaration containing the same assertions was found as in
this celebrated Declaration of Independence, written by the immortal
Jefferson.
"Which of us, I ask, is there upon this floor who has not read and
re-read whatever was written within the last twenty-five or thirty years
by the distinguished men of this country? But enough of that.
"As I said before, there ought not have been, and there did not
necessarily result from our form of Government, any irrepressible
conflict between the Slaveholding and the non-Slaveholding States.
Nothing of the sort was necessary.
"Strike out a single clause in the Constitution of the United States,
that which secures to each State a Republican form of Government, and
there is no reason why, under precisely such a Constitution as we have,
States that are Monarchical and States that are Republican, could not
live in peace and quiet. They confederate together for common defense
and general welfare, each State regulating its domestic concerns in its
own way; those which preferred a Republican form of Government
maintaining it, and those which preferred a Monarchical form of
Government maintaining it.
"But how long could small States, with different forms of Government,
live together, confederated for common defense and general welfare, if
the people of one Section were to come to the conclusion that their
institutions were better than those of the other, and thereupon
straightway set about subverting the institutions of the other?"
In the reply of the Rebel "Commissioners of the Southern Confederacy"
to Mr. Seward, April 9, 1861, they speak of our Government as being
"persistently wedded to those fatal theories of construction of the
Federal Constitution always rejected by the statesmen of the South, and
adhered to by those of the Administration school, until they have
produced their natural and often-predicted result of the destruction of
the Union, under which we might have continued to live happily and
gloriously together, had the spirit of the ancestry who framed the
common Constitution animated the hearts of all their sons."
In the "Address of the people of South Carolina, assembled in
Convention, to the people of the Slaveholding States of the United
States," by which the attempt was made to justify the passage of the
South Carolina Secession Ordinance of 1860, it is declared that:
"Discontent and contention have moved in the bosom of the Confederacy,
for the last thirty-five years. During this time South Carolina has
twice called her people together in solemn Convention, to take into
consideration, the aggressions and unconstitutional wrongs, perpetrated
by the people of the North on the people of the South. These wrongs
were submitted to by the people of the South, under the hope and
expectation that they would be final. But such hope and expectation
have proved to be vain. Instead of producing forbearance, our
acquiescence has only instigated to new forms of aggressions and
outrage; and South Carolina, having again assembled her people in
Convention, has this day dissolved her connection with the States
constituting the United States.