Part 1099

In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert, that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused for years past to fulfil their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof. The Constitution of the United States, in its 4th Article, provides as follows: 'No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.' This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio river. The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States. The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from the service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constitutional compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation. The ends for which this Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be 'to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.' These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor. We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen other States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery; they have permitted the open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to claim the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection. For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the Common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the Common Government, because he has declared that that 'Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,' and that the public mind must rest in the belief that Slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the subversion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons, who, by the Supreme Law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its peace and safety. On the 4th March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced, that the South shall be excluded from the common Territory; that the Judicial Tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States. The Guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy. Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy is rendered vain, by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanctions of a more erroneous religious belief. We, therefore, the people of South Carolina, by our delegates, in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State; with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do."

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1860 (December). President Buchanan's surrender. His disunion message and its evil effects.

Congress met on the first Monday of December and received from President Buchanan "his mischievous and deplorable message … —a message whose evil effect can never be estimated, and whose evil character can hardly be exaggerated. The President informed Congress that 'the long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States has at last produced its natural effect.' … The President found that the chief grievance of the South was in the enactments of the Free States known as 'personal liberty laws' [designed to protect free citizens, black or white, in their right to trial by jury, which the fugitive slave law denied to a black man claimed as a slave]. … Very likely these enactments, inspired by an earnest spirit of liberty, went in many cases too far, and tended to produce conflicts between National and State authority. That was a question to be determined finally and exclusively by the Federal Judiciary. Unfortunately Mr. Buchanan carried his argument beyond that point. … After reciting the statutes which he regarded as objectionable and hostile to the constitutional rights of the South, and after urging their unconditional repeal upon the North, the President said: 'The Southern States, standing on the basis of the Constitution, have a right to demand this act of justice from the States of the North. Should it be refused, then the Constitution, to which all the States are parties, will have been willfully violated. … In that event, the injured States, after having used all peaceful and constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the government of the Union.' By this declaration the President justified, and in effect advised, an appeal from the constitutional tribunals of the country to a popular judgment in the aggrieved States, and recognized the right of those States, upon such popular judgment, to destroy the Constitution and the Union. … Mr. Buchanan proceeded to argue ably and earnestly against the assumption by any State of an inherent right to secede from the government at its own will and pleasure. But he utterly destroyed the force of his reasoning by declaring that, 'after much serious reflection' he had arrived at 'the conclusion that no power has been delegated to Congress, or to any other department of the Federal Government, to coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw, or has actually withdrawn,' from the Union. … Under these doctrines the Government of the United States was shorn of all power to preserve its own existence, and the Union might crumble and fall while its constituted authorities stood paralyzed and impotent. This construction was all that the extremists of the South desired. With so much conceded, they had every thing in their own hands. … Men who, under the wholesome restraint of executive power, would have refrained from taking aggressive steps against the National Government, were by Mr. Buchanan's action forced into a position of hostility. Men in the South, who were disposed to avoid extreme measures, were by taunt and reproach driven into the ranks of Secession. … The evil effects of Mr. Buchanan's message were not confined to the slave States. It did incalculable harm in the free States. It fixed in the minds of tens of thousands of Northern men who were opposed to the Republican party, the belief that the South was justified in taking steps to break up the government, if what they termed a war on Southern institutions should be continued. This feeling had in turn a most injurious influence in the South."

_J. G. Blaine, Twenty Years in Congress, volume 1, chapter 10. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21128_

ALSO IN: _G. T. Curtis, Life of James Buchanan, volume 2, chapters 16-17._

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1860 (December). Vain concessions and humiliations of the North proposed. The Crittenden compromise.

"When, in the House of Representatives, Mr. Boteler, of Virginia, proposed to refer so much of the President's Message as related to the perilous condition of the country to a committee of thirty-three—one from each state—not less than 52 members from the Slave States refused to vote. 'I pay no attention to any action taken in this body,' said one. 'I am not sent here to patch up difficulties,' said another. The Democratic members from the Free States did their utmost to compose the dissension—some of them who subsequently became conspicuous in the war—suggesting concessions which doubtless they looked back upon with regret. It was proposed that persons of African blood should never be considered as citizens of the United States; that there should never be any interference with slavery in the Territories, nor with the interstate slave-trade; that the doctrine of state-rights should be admitted, and power of coercion denied to the government. Among the dissatisfied members, one would allow any state at pleasure to secede, and allot it a fair share of the public property and territory. Another would divide the Union into four republics; another would abolish the office of President, and have in its stead a council of three, each of whom should have a veto on every public act. Propositions such as these show to what length the allies of the slave power would have gone to preserve it and give it perpetuity. At this stage, Mr. Crittenden [Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky], proposed in the Senate certain amendments of the Constitution, and resolutions known subsequently as the Crittenden Compromise. The essential features of his plan were the re-establishing of the Missouri Compromise: that in all territory of the United States north of 36° 30' slavery should be prohibited; in all south of that line, not only permitted, but protected; that from such territory north or south states might be admitted with or without slavery, as the Constitution of each might determine; that Congress should have no power to abolish slavery in places under its jurisdiction in a slave state, nor in the District of Columbia, without the consent of the adjoining states, nor without compensation to the slaveholders, nor to prevent persons connected with the government bringing their slaves into the District; that Congress should have no power to hinder the interstate or territorial transport of slaves; that the national government should pay a full value to the owner of a fugitive slave who might have been rescued from the officers; that no amendments of the Constitution should ever be made which might affect these amendments, or other slave compromises already existing in the Constitution. {3411} He also recommended to the states that had enacted laws in conflict with the existing fugitive slave acts, their repeal; and in four resolutions made provision for the more perfect execution of those acts. But the dissension was too deep to be closed by such a measure as Mr. Crittenden's, which contained nothing that could satisfy the North. The South was resolved not to be satisfied with any thing. It had taken what was plainly an irreversible step. According]y, Mr. Crittenden's proposition was eventually lost."

_J. W. Draper, History of the American Civil War, chapter 31 (section 6, volume 1)._

ALSO IN: _H. Greeley, The American Conflict, volume 1, chapter 24._

_E. McPherson, Political History of the United States during the Great Rebellion, pages 48-90._

_J. A. Logan, The Great Conspiracy, chapter 8._

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1860 (December). Major Anderson at Fort Sumter. Floyd's treachery in the War Department. Cabinet rupture. Loyalty reinstated in the national government.