Signing of Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union Between the States -Making the New Constitution-The First Eleven Amendments-Two Distinct Types of Early Settlers-John Brown's Raid and the Abolitionists at the North-The Tariff a Thorn-The Charleston Convention Utterances of Prominent Unionists-The Ordinance of Secession.

The Declaration of Independence was signed and issued July 4, 1776. Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the States, naming each of the original thirteen, and styling the Confederacy thus formed, the United States of America, were signed by the delegates from each State July 9, 1778.

It was a league of friendship for common defense and mutual benefit; but in less than ten years the Articles of Confederation proved to be defective, mainly in two of the essential powers of government. These were, first, that the Confederation itself had no power to enforce the collection of revenue for the execution of its own functions. The raising of revenue depended on the States, all of which did not act in harmony, and hence tax burdens were unequal, and the States by refusing to contribute their respective assessments could starve the Confederacy into dissolution. The second great defect was as to the regulation of commerce, a power which the Confederation did not have, and the conflict of this interest among and between the States was so great as to impair friendly relations and threaten the dissolution of the Confederacy.

The Congress called a convention of delegates from each State to assemble in Philadelphia for the purpose of amending the Articles of Confederation, and not to make a new constitution, yet the latter is what the convention did.

The convention when it assembled with George Washington at its head was composed of earnest, patriotic and capable delegates. To merely amend the Articles of Confederation, in their opinion, would be but a temporary makeshift. They therefore entered on the most complicated, difficult, and delicate task ever undertaken by any body of men, to frame a new constitution of government which would be acceptable to the States and withstand the tests of time.

When it was settled that the convention would frame a new constitution, there was patriotic unanimity in the desire to bring their work to the greatest perfection attainable. But when the delegates entered upon the details, differences of opinion were developed, and dissentions and contentions arose, tinged with a bitterness that for a time threatened the dissolution of the body without result.

It is not our purpose to enter into particulars, but to refer only to general results.

One wing of the convention favored a strong aristocratic republican government, with ample power to sustain itself independently of the States and with the power of the people minimized. The other was in favor of a government of limited and enumerated powers, leaving the States sovereign in all things, save the powers delegated by them, through the Constitution, and in which the people of the States would still retain the supreme power of control.

The first-named theory predominated in the work of the convention, as submitted to the States for ratification, and ratification was utterly impracticable until the adoption of the first eleven amendments to the Constitution was assured. The ninth and tenth of these articles are rules of Constitution to which the people of the Southern States always adhered. They are in these words:

Article IX. -The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Article X. -The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people.

Without these, some of the States never would have ratified the Constitution.

In Washington's Administration, it being the first under the new Constitution, it was quite natural, and in fact unavoidable, that out of the different constructions of the Constitution would arise two political parties. Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, and Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State, both in Washington's Cabinet, became the leaders. The former was an artful latitudinarian constructionist, who invoked implied powers and exploited the general welfare clause. He found authority in this way for all measures he advocated when there was no expressed power. He advocated a high protective tariff for manufactures at the expense of agriculture, and was the originator of this system of concealing from the taxpayer his contribution to the support of the Government which exists in full force today. He advocated a National bank and declared the power to establish and maintain it as a fiscal agency of the Government. He was constitutionally an aristocrat and had no faith in the people, and is quoted as saying, "The people is a great beast." He meant the common herd, and not the rich, the lords of the earth.

Jefferson held the contrary doctrine. He repudiated implied powers and denied that the general welfare was a power at all, holding that the powers not delegated by the Constitution to the United States, nor prohibited by it to the States, were reserved to the States respectively or to the people. He was opposed to indirect methods of taxation, to burdening some industries while by law fostering others. He respected the voice of the people and advocated equality of rights. The Federalists, or followers of the Hamiltonian theory, passed the alien and sedition laws. Jefferson and his followers, whom they called Republicans, opposed them as unconstitutional and tyrannical; they triumphed over Adams and the Federal party and elected Jefferson President. Parties changed names from time to time, but these same principles, with modifications in some instances, but always with the same basic principles, existed. As business interests and wealth increased they became more sectionalized and irritating. But the cause of quarrel, from this source alone, would never have eventuated in secession.

In the early settlement of the colonies two distinct types of civilization were imported from the mother country. A majority of those who made their homes in New England and the Northern States were Puritans, and a majority of those who settled in Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia were Cavaliers or of that stock.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the Stuarts the dissenters from the Church of England who advocated a higher life and purer doctrine and assumed to possess all the Godliness and virtue, the right to think for others, and in a Pharisaical spirit thanked God that they were not as other men, were Puritans; in other words, they were a class who habitually were running their noses into the business of other people which did not concern them. The Mayflower landed a cargo of them on Plymouth Rock.

The adherents of the established church and the Parliament were called Cavaliers. They were noted for conservatism. They were never rigidly righteous, but liberal, generous, brave, and disposed to mind their own business and let that of other people alone.

They fought each other repeatedly in England and were never thoroughly in accord in America. As the country grew and developed the interests in the two sections in which they lived sharpened the dislike of each other.

The New England and Northern States as they settled up found that the institution of negro slavery, which existed in all of them, was not profitable, and as soon as that was ascertained they pretended that it was a great moral wrong, and three-fourths of the slaves were sent into the Southern States and sold; the other fourth was then emancipated by State action, which was the proper legal authority to abolish the institution.

The labor of the slaves in the Southern States, with their warmer climate, in the production of tobacco, rice, cotton, hemp and sugar was very valuable. Southern plantation owners became rich and lived in princely munificence.

This aroused the envy and the fervid Puritanic zeal of certain Northern people to have abolished the ungodly institution; but not as had been done with them, by State action. They preached against it from their pulpits, and denounced it politically from the stump and in the fanatical press as "the sum total of all villainy, slavery and polygamy as twin relics of barbarism;" as if in league with death and a covenant with hell," until their doctrine incited a band of fanatics to believe that they were inspired by Heaven to light the torch of revolution in Southern homes, to invade a Southern State for the purpose of inciting the slaves to insurrection, arson, and indiscriminate murder of the white people; and when the chief of these malefactors, "Old John Brown," was executed by Virginia, church bells were tolled in some of the Northern cities to canonize him as a martyr.

Brown was born in Connecticut in 1800, and descended from a carpenter who was a Puritan and came over in the Mayflower. Brown was called "Captain" because he went to the territory of Kansas with a lawless band to keep slaveholders from settling therein. At Ossawattornie his band of ruffians fought a battle with pro-slavery men and Brown's son was killed, which infuriated him. Brown had been educated for the Christian ministry, and he traveled in the Northern States preaching against slavery and the people among whom it existed. Whenever a preacher of Christianity takes to politics and becomes fanatical he is always radical and dangerous to the community. Brown was extremely so.

In October 1859, he raised a band of seventeen white men and five negroes to invade the South, to incite the slaves to insurrection and bloodshed. He attacked and captured Harper's Ferry, Va., a town Of 4,000 people, situated at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. He captured the United States Arsenal with thousands of guns and ammunition; killed two or three people in doing it, and took many citizens prisoners. The Governor caused 1,500 militia to be assembled the next day, when Brown with his band was captured. They were then tried and executed.

The more moderate Abolitionists said slavery was a national disgrace, and appealed to Congress, which had no legal power in the premises, to abolish it.

Utter lawlessness characterized the radical element of the Abolitionists at the North. As an illustration, I will cite a case which occurred in Linn County, Kansas, in 1860. A slave escaped from his master in Missouri and was arrested by a man named Hinds, under the fugitive-slave law of Congress, and returned to his owner, for which Hinds received a reward for his trouble. Thereupon a fanatic called "Colonel" Jim Montgomery, and a mob of his kind, hanged Hinds for doing what the lay authorized him to do. Montgomery published the following boastful account of his lawless act:

Russ Hinds was hung the 12th of November, 1860, for man-stealing. He was a drunken border ruffian, worth a good deal to hang, but good for nothing else. He caught a fugitive slave and carried him back to Missouri for the sake of a reward. He was condemned by a jury of twelve men, the law being found in the 16th verse of Exodus XXI.

Misconstruction and misapplication of the Scripture was made to justify this cold-blooded murder. We might cite other instances, all of which were applauded by the rabid Abolitionists.

The Northern Puritan Abolitionists professed to believe that men owned the flesh, blood and souls of their slaves, treating them and disposing Of them with no more regard for their welfare than if they had been lifeless or inanimate chattels; when in truth the owner of the slave had only a right to control and dispose of his labor, and to inflict upon him for cause reasonable corporal punishment as was allowable at the common law, and had a pecuniary interest in his health and welfare. In return for these rights over the person of the slave, the law in every State where the institution existed obliged the master by penal statutes to provide the slave with a sufficiency of healthful food and clothing, medical attention in case of sickness, not to work him on the Sabbath, and that he be allowed to attend Divine worship on that day; and to kill him was murder.

When they were sold the law required that husband and wife, parent and child should not be separated whenever it was practicable to keep them together. Interest and humanity united in making the master careful of the health and life of his slaves.

The Southern people largely descended from the Cavaliers, were naturally conservative, or at least a majority were, and hence, notwithstanding the above enumerated and many other causes of irritation, they were not yet in favor of secession.

The North's successful rivalry of the South in trade and commerce, aided by partial legislation, bounties and discriminations of tariff laws, gave just cause of complaint, but never would have caused a Southern State to attempt secession from the Union.

In 1832 South Carolina, under the lead of Calhoun, attempted nullification by way of protest against the unjust tariff laws, but this was far short of secession. Nullification was to resist the execution of a law of Congress within the Union; secession was to withdraw from it.

A large majority of the people in the Eastern and Northern States of the Union were, and are today, engaged in commercial and manufacturing pursuits, while three-fourths of the Southern people were then engaged in agriculture.

Tariff duties on goods, wares and merchandise imported from abroad are added to the price which the consumer has to pay for them, and this enables the American manufacturer to compete with the foreign manufacturer and if the duties be high to shut him out and give the American market exclusively to the American manufacturer.

This was all right as between him and the foreigner, if it did not discriminate among our own people, favoring one class at the expense of all others. One entire section of the country being agricultural, not engaged in manufacturing, were consumers and hence had to pay the price of protection to the manufacturers resident in the Northern section, thus enabling them to grow rich on the facilities afforded them by the taxes indirectly paid by the agricultural section. This has always been a source of complaint-a just grievance to the Southern people. It still exists. An overgrown tariff-a tariff for protection, so called, instead of for revenue only-is the parent of trusts of the most mischievous and dangerous character.

The vast emigration which flocked to our shores from 1840 to 1860, by the activity of the people North through emigration societies, filled the Northwestern territories with Germans and Scandinavians by the thousands and hundreds of thousands, and Congress admitted new States, all of anti-slavery and pro-tariff sentiment, until the Northern section controlled the Congress, though the Democrats continued in power and had the President until March, 18th

Mr. Buchanan was old and unfitted to wield the executive power advantageously in such a perilous time. He was passive; he did nothing.

Richard Taylor, a son of ex-President Taylor, a gentleman of great ability, who subsequently rose to the rank of lieutenant general in the Confederate army, wrote a book in 1878-79, in which he described the Charleston Convention, to which he was a delegate, in such a concise and graphic manner that we extract from it the following:

THE CHARLESTON CONVENTION.

Under these conditions the National Democratic Convention met at Charleston, South Carolina, in the spring of 1860, to declare the principles on which the ensuing presidential campaign was to be conducted, and select candidates for the offices of President and Vice-President. Appointed a delegate by the Democracy of my State, Louisiana, in company with others I reached Charleston two days in advance of the time. We were at once met by an invitation to join in council delegates from the Gulf States, to agree upon some common ground of action in the convention, but declined for the reason that we were accredited to the National Convention, and had no authority to participate in other deliberations. This invitation and the terms in which it was conveyed augured badly for the harmony of the convention itself, and for the preservation of the unity of the Democracy, then the only organization supported in all quarters of the country.

It may be interesting to recall the impression created at the time by the tone and temper of different delegations. New England adhered to the old tenets of the Jefferson school. Two leaders from Massachusetts, Messrs. Caleb Cushing and Benjamin F. Butler, of whom the former was chosen President of the convention, warmly supported the candidacy of Mr. Jefferson Davis. New York, under the direction of Mr. Dean Richmond, gave its influence to Douglas. Of a combative temperament, Mr. Richmond was impressed with a belief that "Secession" was but a bugbear to frighten the Northern wing of the party. Thus he failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation, and impaired the value of unusual common sense and unselfish patriotism, qualities he possessed to an eminent degree. The anxieties of Pennsylvania as to candidates were accompanied by a philosophic indifference as to principles. The Northwest was ardent for Douglas, who divided with Guthrie. Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana held moderate opinions and were ready to adopt any honorable means to preserve the unity of the party and country. The conduct of the South Carolina delegates was admirable. Representing the most advanced constituency in the convention, they were singularly reticent and abstained from adding fuel to the flames. They limited their role to that of dignified, courteous hosts and played it as Carolina gentlemen are wont to do. From Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas came the fiery spirits, led by Mr. William L. Yancey, of Alabama, an able rhetorician. This gentleman had persuaded his State Convention to pass a resolution directing its delegates to withdraw from Charleston if the Democracy there assembled refused to adopt the extreme Southern view as to the rights of citizens in the territories. In this he was opposed by ex-Governor Winston, a man of conservative tendencies and long the rival of Mr. Yancey in State politics. Both gentlemen were sent to Charleston, but the majority of their codelegates sustained Mr. Yancey.

Several days after its organization the National Convention reached a point Which made the withdrawal of Alabama imminent. Filled with anxious forebodings, I sought after nightfall the lodgings of Messrs. Slidell, Bayard, and Bright, United States Senators, who had come to Charleston, not as delegates, but under the impulse of hostility to the principles and candidacy of Mr. Douglas. There, after pointing out the certain consequences of Alabama's impending action, I made an earnest appeal for peace and harmony and with success. Mr. Yancey was sent for, came into our views after some discussion, and undertook to call his people together at that late hour and secure their consent to disregard instructions. We waited until near dawn for Yancey's return, but his efforts failed of success. Governor Winston, originally opposed to instructions as unwise and dangerous, now insisted that they should be obeyed to the letter, and carried a majority of the Alabama delegates with him. Thus the last hope of preserving the unity of the National Democracy was destroyed and by one who was its earnest advocate.

Nothing more forcibly illustrates the lack of wisdom of sending two men who have widely differed on a matter of principle, as delegates by way of personal compliment to the defeated one. Winston was right in opposing the resolution of instruction in the Alabama Convention. It was ill-tempered and radical. But Yancey caused its adoption and should have had a delegation in complete accord with him. Had that been the case the delegation would have agreed with Yancey to forego instructions and remain in the convention, which would have saved it from dissolution and have continued the Democracy in power for at least four years longer. That would have been in exact accord with Governor Winston's contention in the Alabama Convention. But he desired to punish Yancey and those who agreed with him by holding him and them down to the instructions they had invoked and obtained against his objection. That was unfortunately selfish and reckless of consequences. Ex-Governor Winston, of Alabama, thus drove the entering wedge which cleaved the National Democracy asunder and brought upon his country untold misery. Yancey's fiery eloquence had filled the hearts of many Southerners with a disposition to applaud radical Southern sentiments, which opened wide a great field for Winston's conservatism to have brought to the Democracy a sober second thought and have saved it from disintegration and defeat; but on this great occasion his ill-temper caused him to lose his head and ruin his party. Then the platform adopted by the convention-although it did not endorse squatter-sovereignty, it did not explicitly condemn it, and Yancey made his great factional speech and seceded from the convention, followed by the Alabama delegates and a majority of those of the Southern States. Thus was consummated the first act of secession. Winston and Yancey were the leaders in its consummation. The great Democratic party was divided into factions. One wing ran Douglas and Johnson and the other Breckenridge and Lane. The American party ran Bell and Everett and the Republican Abolition party ran Lincoln and Hamlin for President and Vice-President, and the latter were elected by the electoral college, notwithstanding that ticket received only a minority of the popular vote. The only security to the institution of slavery was the Democratic party, because it was the only party which observed the limitations of the Constitution. With it destroyed, or put out of power, slavery was doomed; yet the most avowed proslavery Democrats took the lead in its evisceration. The Southern people, if left to themselves and allowed to do their own thinking, are conservative enough, but are patriotic and easily moved by eloquence and wounded pride. They are Frenchy-excitable and impulsive.

When a great and growing political party, which existed alone in the Northern States, whose slogan was opposition to slavery, an institution confined alone to the South (which had existed there as a State institution for many generations) and whose orators and newspapers were full of vituperation and denunciation of Southern people, succeeded in electing a President who had proclaimed an irrepressible conflict between the North and the South, that all this country must be slave or free labor, the apprehensions of the people of the South were awakened to a common danger, not about slavery alone, but that their ancient and well-defined right to govern and regulate their own internal and domestic affairs in their own way would be overturned and denied to them. They did not apprehend that these things would be done in a direct and revolutionary manner under Lincoln's administration, but by attrition-gradual approaches-under the guise of law and constitutional authority.

One extreme in public affairs invariably begets another in antagonism. The relentless war which had been made on slavery in the North had caused the people in the South to look up authority in the Bible to justify it. The politicians on the rostrum and the preachers in their pulpits justified it and proclaimed the institution a good thing for the slave as well as the master. It should have been conceded that no man by the laws of Nature had the right to own or control the labor of another, except for a just compensation, but in this case the compensation was not so much to him individually as to his race, which never would have found its way into the sunlight of civilization except through the institution of slavery. That was, and is, with all its hardships and stripes inflicted, an ample compensation to the race as a whole. The light of this theory had never dawned upon the Northern mind and never could enter the cranium of a Puritanical Yankee.

There was a difference of opinion among Southern leaders after Mr. Lincoln's election in November as to whether there should be a conference and co-operation among the Southern States as to the course to be pursued and thus to secure unanimity of action. Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, was the most prominent man who advocated this "co-operation," as it was called, but he and those who agreed with him were too conservative and cautious to suit the fiery advocates of secession by separate State action. Co-operation was wise. Virginia acted on it, but divided counsels prevailed in the South.

The co-operationists were characterized by many as "Submissionists." They were in the minority and failed to secure co-operation. Under these circumstances conventions were called at different dates in December, 1860, January and February 1861, each to decide for itself what the State should do.

Seven of these conventions acted at once, and holding that the Union was a voluntary one, and that it was no longer a safeguard and protection, but a menace to their rights, resolved to withdraw from it and form another Union, in which it was believed there would be peace, harmony and security of rights resulting from homogeneity of interests.

They did not stop to consider collateral questions, nor what might logically follow their action in case of success or failure.

They reasoned syllogistically thus: If the Union was a voluntary one, entered into by the States for their mutual benefit and protection, then when in the opinion of the State such security was no longer guaranteed, but jeopardized or denied, it had the right to withdraw from such a Union; and if a State had the right to withdraw or secede, it followed as a logical sequence that the Union had no right to coerce such State to remain within it, or to return after having withdrawn from it. But the Union, contrary to undisputed facts of history, denied that it was a voluntary one and asserted a paramount and perpetual nationality, and claimed the right to coerce the States to remain within it. However illogical and untrue, this was the doctrine of the Unionists.

Thus was presented a great issue, one which unfortunately our Constitution did not provide an umpire to peaceably adjudicate, and hence the question was necessarily submitted to the arbitranient of arms-the court of last resort among nations.

To show more clearly the views and contentions of the Unionists, we quote from the utterances of the most prominent. President Lincoln's great oration on the field of Gettysburg at the dedication in November 1863, proceeded entirely on the erroneous hypothesis that the life of the nation was at stake. A proper analysis of his speech was that if the Confederates succeeded that the nation was destroyed-that it would prove not only that American Government was a failure, but would accomplish its destruction as well. He assumed that if the South was divorced from the North it would prove the death of each. How fallacious and deceptive. The secession of a part of the States did not, could not, and never did put the life of the nation in jeopardy. In all of his letters and messages he asserted that the life of the nation was at issue, when no one knew better than he that the seceding States united in a Confederacy sought peaceable separation and were anxious to treat with the Union still composed of twenty-one States. He considered a slump in a body of one-third of the States of which the Union was composed would kill the Union, or the nation, as he called it, which would still after the secession have been composed of twenty-one of the most wealthy and populous States. The assumption that the Confederates sought the destruction of the Union was preposterous.

Gen. U. S. Grant, the most renowned general of the Union armies, after he had been President eight years, wrote a book, and in Vol. 2, P. 506, said:

The Constitution was not framed with a view to any such rebellion as that of 1861-5. While it did not authorize rebellion, it made no provision against it.

This is quite true, but Article 10 of the amendments to that instrument is in the following language:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people.

If, therefore, the assertion of General Grant above quoted be true, the right of secession was one of the powers reserved to the States, and the war against the Southern States for exercising that right was unjust.

On the same page General Grant asserted that:

The right to resist or suppress rebellion is as inherent as the right of self defense, and as natural as the right of an individual to preserve his life when in jeopardy.

This assumption of the great general and ex-President I s too absurd to be met by argument. The argument the Unionists employed, and which he attempted to thus justify, was simply force of numbers and appliances of war.

In refutation of the assertion of Lincoln, Grant, and all the Unionists, that the Confederates jeopardized the life of the nation. suppose there had been no war, that the Confederate States had been recognized and allowed a peaceable separate existence. Would the Government of the United States-the Union, the nation-have continued to exist, or would that have killed it?

The cry that the life of the nation was in jeopardy was a false cry to cover the double purpose of abolishing slavery and to make the government practically a consolidated nationality.

General Grant further said:

The Constitution was therefore in abeyance for the time being, so far as it in any way affected the progress of the war.

It was not in abeyance except as it was disregarded or ignored by the Administration and its generals in the field. They treated that great instrument as the Irish member of Congress revered and obeyed it. He applied to the President for a job for his friend and was told that it could not be done, as it would violate the Constitution. The Honorable Tim replied: "Mr. President, all we Democrats have great respect for the Constitution, but I don't intend to let it come between me and my friend."

The Constitution was not allowed to come in the way of the Unionists. It was suspended or disregarded by them.

On the 20th of December South Carolina passed her ordinance of secession withdrawing from the Union; Mississippi followed January 9, 1861; Florida the 10th, Alabama the 11th, Georgia the 18th, Louisiana the 26th, and Texas soon after.

The following is an exact copy of Alabama's ordinance, with the names of all the delegates who signed it, to wit:

AN ORDINANCE

SEC. 2. Be it further declared and ordained by the PEOPLE of the STATE of ALABAMA in convention assembled, That all the power over the Territory of said State and over the people thereof, heretofore delegated to the Government of the United States of America, be and they are hereby withdrawn from said Government and are hereby resumed and vested in the PEOPLE of the STATE of ALABAMA-And as it is the desire and purpose of the PEOPLE of ALABAMA to meet the Slaveholding States of the SOUTH, who may approve such purpose, in order to frame a Provisional as well as permanent Government upon the principles of the Constitution of the United States-Be it resolved by the PEOPLE of ALABAMA in Convention assembled, That the people of the States of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri, be and are hereby invited to meet the PEOPLE of the STATE of ALABAMA, by their Delegates, in Convention, on the Fourth day of February, A. D., 1861, at the City of MONTGOMERY in the STATE of ALABAMA, for the purpose of consulting with each other as to the most effectual mode of securing concerted and harmonious action in whatever measure may be deemed desirable for our common peace and security.

AND be it further resolved, That the President of the Convention, be and is hereby instructed to transmit forthwith a copy of the foregoing Preamble, Ordinance and Resolution to the Governors of the several States named in said resolutions-Done by the PEOPLE of the STATE of ALABAMA, in Convention assembled, at MONTGOMERY, on the Eleventh day of January 4. 1861.

A. G. Horn, Secretary of the Convention.
Frank L. Smith, of Montgomery, Assistant Secretary of the Convention.

A true copy from the original, P. H. Brittan, Sec. of State.