THE NORTHERN ARGUMENT AGAINST SECESSION.

" THE body politic known for seventy years as the United States of America not a Confederacy, not a compact of Sovereign States, not a copartnership; it is a Commonwealth, of which the constitution drawn up at Philadelphia by the Con- vention of 1787, over which Washington presided, is the organic fundamental law. We had already bad enough of a Confederacy. The thirteen rebel pro- vinces, afterwards the thirteen original independent States of America, had been united to each other during the revolutionary war by articles of Confederacy; • ?'he said States hereby enter into a firm league of friendship with each other.' Such was the language of 1781, and the league or treaty thus drawn up wa • ?'he said States hereby enter into a firm league of friendship with each other.' Such was the language of 1781, and the league or treaty thus drawn up wa

ratified, not by the people of the States, bat by the State Governments—the legislative and executive bodies, namely, in their corporate capacity.

" The continental Congress, which was the central administrative board during this epoch, was a diet of envoys from sovereign States. It had no power to act on individuals. It could not command the States. It could move only by requisitions and recommendations. Its functions were essentially diplomatic, like those of the States-General of the old Dutch Republic, like those of the modern Germanic Confederation.

" We were a league of petty sovereignties. When the war had ceased, when our independence had been acknowledged in 1783, we sank rapidly into a condition of utter impotence, imbecility, anarchy. We had achieved our independence, but we had not constructed a nation. We were not a body politic. No laws could be enforced, no insurrection suppressed, no debts collected. Neither property nor life was secure. Great Britain had made a treaty of peace with us, but shescornfully declined a treaty of commerce and amity ; not because we had been rebels, but because we were not a State—because we were a mere dissolving league of jarring provinces, incapable of guaranteeing the stipulations of any commercial treaty. We were unable even to fulfil the conditions of the treaty of peace, and enforce the stipulated collection of debts due to British subjects ; and Great Britain refused, in consequence, to give up the military posts which she held within our frontiers. For twelve years after the acknowledgment of our independence we were mortified by the spectacle of foreign soldiers occupying a long chain of fortresses south of the great lakes and upon our own soil We were a Confederacy. We were sovereign States. And these were the fruits of such a Confederacy and of such sove- reignty. It was, until the immediate present, the darkest hour of our history. But there were patriotic and sagacious men in those days, and their efforts at last rescued us from the condition of a Confederacy. The ' Constitution of the United States' was an organic law, enacted by the sovereign people of that whole territory which is commonly called in geographies and histories the United States of America. It was empowered to act directly, by its own legislative, judicial, and executive machinery upon every individual in the country. It could seize his property, it could take his life, for causes of which itself was the judge. The States were distinctly prohibited from opposing its decrees or from exercising any of the great functions of sovereignty. The Union alone was supreme, 'anything in the constitution and laws of the States to the contrary notwith- standing.' Of what significance, then, was the title of • sovereign' States, arrogated in later days by communities which had voluntarily abdicated the most vital attributes of sovereignty? But, indeed, the words 'sovereign' and 'sove- reignty' are purely inapplicable to the American system. In the Declaration of Independence the provinces declare themselves 'free and independent States,' but the men of those days knew that the word 'sovereign' was a term of feudal origin. When their connexion with a time-honoured feudal monarchy was abruptly severed the word sovereign' had no meaning for us. A sovereign is one who acknowledges no superior, who possesses the highest authority without con- trol, who is supreme in power. How could any one State of the United. States claim such characteristics at all, least of all after its inhabitants, in their primary assemblies, had voted to submit themselves, without limitation of time, to a consti- tution which was declared supreme? The only intelligible source of power in a country beginning its history de novo after a revolution, in a land never subjected to military or feudal conquest, is the will of the people of the whole laud as expressed by a majority. At the present moment, unless the Southern re- volution shall prove successful, the United States Government is a tact, an established authority. In the period between 1783 and 1787 we were in chaos. In May of 1787 the Convention met in. Philadelphia, and, after some months' deliberation, adopted with unprecedented unanimity the project of the great law, which, so soon as it should be accepted by the people, was to be known as the Constitution of the United States.

" It was not a compact. Who ever, heard of a compact to which there were no parties, or who ever heard of a compact made by a single party with himself? Yet the name of no State is mentioned in the whole document; the States themselves are only mentioned to receive commands or prohibitions, and the people of the United States' is the single party by whom alone the instrument is executed.

"The Constitution was not drawn up by the States, it was not promulgated in the name of the States, it was not ratified by the States. The States never acceded to it, and zisseas no power to secede from it. It was ordained and established' over the States by a power superior to the States—by the people of the whole land in their aggregate capacity, acting through conventions of delegates expressly chosen for the Rurpose within each State, independently of the State Governments, after the project had been framed.

" Had the Union thus established in 1787 been a Confederacy, it might have been argued, with more or less plausibility, that the States which peaceably acceded to it might at pleasure peaceably secede from it. It is none the less true that such a proceeding would have stamped the members of the Convention— Washington, Madison, Jay, Hamilton, and their colleagues—with utter incom- petence; for nothing can be historically more certain than that their object was to extricate us from the anarchy to which that principle had brought us.

"'However gross a heresy it may be (says the Federalist, recommending the new constitution) to maintain that a party to a compact has a right to revoke that compact, the doctrine has had respectable advocates. The possibility of such a question shows the necessity of laying the foundation of our national government deeper than in the mere sanction of delegated authority. The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of the consent of the people.'

"Certainly, the most venerated expounders of the Constitution—Jay, Mar- shall, Hamilton, Kent, Story, Webster—were of opinion that the intention of the Convention to establish a permanent consolidated Government, a single common- wealth, had been completely successful. " ' The great and fundamental defect of the Confederation of 1781 (says Chancellor Kent), which led to its eventual overthrow, was that, in imitation of all former confederacies, it carried the decrees of the Federal Council to the States in their sovereign capacity. The great and incurable defect of all former Federal Governments, such as the Amphictyonic, Achtean, and Lycian Con- federacies, and the Germanic, Helvetic, Hanseatic, and Dutch Republics, is that they were sovereignties over sovereignties. The first effort to relieve the people of the country from this state of national degradation and ruin came from Vir- ginia. The General Convention afterwards met at Philadelphia in May, 1787. The plan was submitted to a convention of delegates chosen by the people at large in each State for assent and ratification. Such a measure was laying the foundations of the fabric of our national policy where alone they ought to be laid —on the broad consent of the people.'-1 Kent, 225. "It is true that the consent of the people was given by the inhabitants voting is each State c but in what other conceivable way could the people of the whole country have voted? They assembled in the several States,' says Story ; but where else could they assemble ?' " Secession is, in brief, the return to chaos from which we emerged three- 9narters of a century since. No logical sequence can be more perfect. If one State has a right to secede today, asserting what it calls its sovereignty. another may, and probably will, do the same to-morrow, a third on the next day, and so en, until there are none left to secede from. Granted the premises that each State may peaceably secede from the Union, it follows that a county may peaceably secede from a State, and a town from a county, until there is nothing left but a horde of individuals all seceding from each other. The theory that the people of a whole country in their aggregate capacity are supreme is intelligible; and it has been a fact, also, in America for seventy years. But it is impossible to show, if the people of a State be sovereign, that the people of a county, or of a village, and the individuals of the village, are not equally sovereign, and justified in resuming their sovereignty' when their interest or their caprice seems to impel them. The process of disintegration brings back the community to barbarism, precisely as its converse has built up commonwealths—whether empires, kingdoms, or republics—out of original barbarism. Established authority, whatever the theory of its origin, is a fact. It should never be lightly or capriciously overturned. They who venture on the attempt should weigh well the responsibility that is upon them. Above all, they must expect to be arraigned

for their deeds before the tribunal of the civilized world and of future ages--a court of last appeal, the code of which is based ou the divine principles of right and reason, which are dispassionate and eternal. No man, on either side of the Atlantic, with Anglo-Saxon blood in his veins, will dispute the right of a people or of any portion of a people to rise against oppression, to demand redress of grievances, and in case of denial of justice to take up arms to vindicate the sacred principle of liberty. Few Englishmen or Americans will deny that the

source of government is the consent of the governed, or that every nation has the right to govern itself according to its will. When the silent consent is changed tofterce remonstrance the revolution is impending. The right of revo- lution is indisputable. It is written on the whole record of our race. British and American history is made tip of rebellion and revolution. Many of the crowned kings were rebels or usurpers; Hampden, Pyrn,and Oliver Cromwell; Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, all were rebels. It is no word of reproach; but these men all knew the work they had set themselves to do. They never called their rebellion peaceable secession." They were sustained by the eon- sciousness of right when they overthrew established authority, but they meant bo overthrow it. They meant rebellion, civil war, bloodshed, infinite suffering for themselves and their whole generation, for they accounted them welcome substi- tutes for insulted liberty and violated right. There can be nothing plainer, then, than the American right of revolution. But then it should be called revolution...

Secession, as a revolutionary right,' said Daniel Webster in the Senate, nearly thirty years ago, in words that now sound prophetic, Is intelligible. As a right

to be proclaimed in the midst of civil commotion*, and asserted at the head of armies, 1 can understand it. But as a practical right, existing under the Coristi- tution, and in conformity with its provisions, it seems to be nothing but an absurdity, for it supposes resistance to Government under authority of Govern- ment itself; it supposes dismemberment without violating the principles of Union; it supposes opposition to law without crime; it supposes the violation of oaths without responsibility ; it supposes the total overthrow of Government without revolution.'

" A Constitution can only be subverted by revolution, or by foreign conquest of the land. The revolution may be the result of a successful rebellion. A peaceful revolution is also conceivable in the ease of the United States. The

same power which established the Constitution may justly destroy it. The people of the whole land may meet, by delegates, in a great national convention, as they

did in 1787, and declare that the Constitution no longer answers the purpose for which it was ordained; that it no longer can secure the blessings of liberty for the people in present and future generations, and that it is therefore for ever

abolished. When that project has been submitted again to the people voting in their primary assemblies, not influenced by fraud or force, the revolution is lawfully accomplished, and the Union is no more.

" Such a proceeding is conceivable, although attended with innumerable dif- ficulties and dangers. But these are not so great as those of the civil war into which the action of the seceding States has plunged the country. The division of the national domain and other property, the navigation and police of the great rivers, the arrangement and fortification of frontiers, time transit of the isthrons, the mouth of the Mississippi, the control of the Gulf of Mexico, these are sig- nificant phrases which have an appalling sound; for there is not one of them that does not contain the seeds of war. In say separation, however accomplished, these difficulties must be dealt with, but there would seem less hope of arriving at a peaceful settlement of them now that the action of the seceding States has been so precipitate and lawless. For a single State, one after another, to resume those functions of sovereignty which it had unconditionally abdicated when its people ratified the Constitution of 1787, to seize forts, arsenals, custom-houses, post- offices, mints, and other valuable property of the Union, paid for by the treasure of the Union, was not the exercise of a legal function, but it was rebellion, treason, and plunder."