Chapter II: Part 2

It is no wonder that Congress, when it did assemble, in July, 1861, and found war a fact accomplished and armies already threatening Washington, should have made haste to validate the President's high-handed measures and strengthen his precarious position by an act of which section three is as follows: "That all the acts, proclamations, and orders, of the President of the United States, after the 4th of March, 1861, respecting the army and navy of the United States, and the calling out, or relating to the militia or volunteers from the States, are hereby approved and in all respects legalized and made valid to the same intent and with the same effect as if they had been issued and done under previous express authority and direction of the Congress of the United States." The marginal note of the printed laws points this act specially to the proclamation of April 15, 1861, calling out the militia.

In suppressing the Whiskey Insurrection Washington acted under the "previous express authority of Congress," then lately given, "cautiously in his delicate duty," while Hamilton "was pressing for the collection of the revenue," says history. The act under which the militia was then called out, passed in 1792, required a Federal judge to certify the fact of the insurrection, and Washington took care to arm himself with the certificate of a Supreme Court Justice. The act under which _Lincoln_ proceeded, an epitome of the former, shows on its face that it was also, when in force, in aid exclusively of court proceedings, and operative only when a Federal judge should call upon the President to assist the United States Marshals, who were purely court officers. Any other construction gives the President "the power to suppress insurrections," and the "power to declare war"; and, when war is declared the Constitution places him in command of the army and militia: so nothing would be left for Congress but to vote supplies and validate his acts, as it did Lincoln's usurpations!

Though the militia had often been needed, and sometimes called out for troubles, domestic and foreign, no President of the United States, until Lincoln, had ever issued such a call unless expressly authorized by Congress, in special acts of limited duration, which have usually specified the number of troops wanted and the term of service required. It is no wonder then that an act, treated as a dead letter since the suppression of the Whiskey Insurrection, should have been marked "obsolete" by the government publisher, with the sanction of Congress.

Unless Madison's refusal to recommend a policy of coercion against the New England States, successfully resisting the drafts for the defense of the nation in the War of 1812, be regarded as a precedent, Lincoln had but one, directly in point, and that was furnished by President Jackson in the case of South Carolina's nullification of Federal law in 1832. Jackson's zeal for the Union could not be doubted; and, in spite of his military training and arbitrary temper, he found a remedy which saved the Union without bloodshed.

On December 10, 1832, after South Carolina had nullified the tariff act, proceeded to provide a separate government, notified the President, and begun to arm and organize its militia for defense, Jackson issued a proclamation in which he besought, and threatened, and promised. Failing by such means to induce the tariff-plundered planters of the plucky little State to recede from their position, on the assembling of Congress he recommended the removal of the cause of the trouble, expressing his belief that such action would shortly put an end to resistance. Nullification still continuing, Jackson (a month later) wrote his famous message, in which he called attention to the magnitude of the opposition, and recommended to Congress to provide by law: "That in case of an attempt otherwise [than by process from the ordinary judicial tribunals of the United States] to take property [from the custody of the law] by a force too great to be overcome by the officers of the customs, it should be lawful to protect the possessions of the officers by the employment of the land and naval forces and militia under provisions similar to those authorized by the eleventh section of the Act of January 9, 1809." After recommending the revival of other expired acts to facilitate and protect the collection of the revenues and execution of Federal law, he said further: "Provisions less than these--consisting, as they do, for the most part, rather of a revival of the policy of former acts called for by the [then] existing emergency, than of the introduction of any unusual or rigorous enactments--would not cause the laws of the Union to be properly respected or enforced. It is believed that these would prove adequate unless the military forces of the State of South Carolina, authorized by the late act of the Legislature, should be actually embodied and called out in aid of their proceedings, and of the provisions of the ordinance generally. Even in that case, however, it is believed that no more will be necessary than a few modifications of its terms to adapt the Act of 1795 to the present emergency, as by that act the provisions of the Act of 1792 were accommodated to the crisis then existing; and, by conferring authority upon the President, to give it operation during the session of Congress, and without the ceremony of a proclamation, whenever it shall be officially made known to him by the authority of any State, or by the courts of the United States, that, within the limits of such State, the laws of the United States will be openly opposed and their execution obstructed by the actual employment of military force, or by any unlawful means, whatever, too great to be otherwise overcome."

Pursuant to these recommendations, Congress passed, March 2, 1833, the "force bill," or "bloody bill," as it was called; and the section which made it infamous in the unprotected States was as follows: "Sec. 5. And be it further enacted, that whenever the President of the United States shall be officially informed by the authorities of any State, or by a judge of any Circuit or District Court of the United States in the State, that within the limits of such State any law or laws of the United States, or the execution thereof, or of any process from the courts of the United States is obstructed by the employment of military force, or by any other unlawful means too great to be overcome by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the power vested in the marshals by existing laws, it shall be lawful for him, the President of the United States, forthwith to issue his proclamation declaring such fact or information, and requiring all such military or other force forthwith to disperse; and if, at any time after issuing such proclamation, any such opposition or obstruction shall be made in the manner or by the means aforesaid, the President shall be and hereby is authorized promptly to employ such means to suppress the same, and to cause said laws or process to be duly executed, as are authorized and provided in the cases therein mentioned by the Act of the 28th of February, 1795, entitled: 'An act to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, repel invasions, and repeal the act now in force for that purpose'; and also, by the Act of the 3d of March, 1807, entitled: 'An act authorizing the employment of the land and naval forces of the United States in cases of insurrection.'" Section 1 of the force bill authorized the President to call out the army, navy, and militia to aid in collecting the _customs_--a power which the Act of 1795 could not be construed to give. It was also provided in the act that the operation of said sections 5 and 1 should "continue until the next session of Congress, and no longer." Thus careful was Congress to limit the duration of the great powers delegated to the President, as it had usually done in other instances in which it had authorized the employment of military force. The Act of March 3, 1807, referred to in the force bill, simply gave the President authority to use the land and naval forces of the United States to assist in the execution of the laws whenever it should be lawful for him to call out the militia for the same purpose. The Act of 1795, referred to by Jackson, which he did not pretend he had a right to use against the nullifiers of the tariff act, unless it should be revived by Congress, and which he proposed should be revived, modified, and adapted to meet the emergency confronting him, in the same way Congress had formerly adapted and modified the Act of 1792 by the Act of 1795, to meet the emergency of the latter year, was the very act Lincoln used to cover his assumption of power to make war on the South without the authority of Congress! He had this precedent before him, in which the warrior Jackson, swift in defense of the nation's honor against her foreign foes, was slow to dye his hands in his brothers' blood. He had before him the act in which Congress had revived the provisions of the Act of 1795, and expressly limited the duration of that revival to the time intervening before its next session; and he was lawyer enough to know, though not learned in his profession, that the substantial reenactment and enlargement of the old act, and its repeal, or limitation to a definite period, was, after the expiration of that period, a practical repeal of both--especially when it may be seen that the one was to take the place the other took in its day. See _Tynen_ vs. _The United States_, 11 Wallace U. S. Reports, page 88; _Pana_ vs. _Bowles_, 107 U. S. Reports, page 529, and cases cited therein; _Norris_ vs. _Crocker_, 13 Howard, page 429.

Jackson, in spite of his camp association and military methods, was the embodiment of caution and conservatism, when compared to Lincoln and his "kitchen cabinet" of revenue-hunting Governors, who were as swift to declare war against their own people, under a forced construction of an old, unused, obsolete, special act, as those who now speculate in their names and fame are eager to seek treaties of partnership with our hereditary foreign foe.

They shall never, unchallenged, teach our children that Abraham Lincoln's usurpations were lawful, justified by necessity, or commended by God; lest "necessity, the plea of tyrants," or "divine right," the plea of kings and priests, or "implied powers," the plea of those who are powerful only to oppress the people and to collect and spend their revenues, should constitute the excuse for destroying the remaining safeguards of our liberties.

Those accustomed to analyze motive and conduct will note with attention that the Act of August 6, 1861, intended to legalize the call for troops, was passed after the "force bill" had been reenacted and amplified by the Acts of July 13, 29, and 31, 1861--after the President had been expressly authorized by these acts and another to accept the service of volunteers and to use the army, navy, and militia to make war upon _States and combinations of States_, as well as upon the inhabitants of districts therein--after Congress had in these acts twice gone out of its way to refer to the old Act of 1795 as still in force, and once expressly treated it as giving the authority, which had been assumed, to begin the war; and the legalizing act itself was covered under a caption which was calculated to excite as little attention as possible. The caption reads: "An act to increase the pay of privates in the regular army and in the volunteers, and for other purposes."

The Act of 1795, when in force, gave the President no authority to determine when a state of insurrection existed, even in a Federal district; Congress proved that it realized this defect of power by hastening (July 13 and 29, 1861) to supply it to Lincoln--in respect to States as well as districts--a double confession of the weakness of his position.

The Act of 1795 afforded no assistance to collect customs, for the Whiskey Insurrectionists, against whom it was passed, resisted only the internal revenue taxes; Congress practically acknowledged this limitation, by Act of July 13, 1861, expressly and separately authorizing the President to use the army, navy, and militia to "collect the customs" of the United States.

"Even our enemies themselves being judges," there were doubts everywhere, and these doubts were everywhere resolved in favor of absolute authority and against the received construction of law and the Constitution.

An executive who usurps powers ought to be placed on a moral plane as much lower than that of a treasurer who embezzles public funds as the love of liberty in the minds of the virtuous is higher than the love of money.

Those who would derive Lincoln's assumed power to declare war from the clause of the Constitution which requires that the "President shall see that the laws are faithfully executed" betray the flimsy foundation upon which they would erect the throne of an autocrat. The faithful execution of the laws is to be secured in a lawful manner, under such powers as the Constitution gives or Congress may lawfully give to the President. If he is the sole judge of the extent of the powers conferred and the appropriateness of the means of execution, he does not need any other clause to make him the field-overseer of both the other departments of government; and this the Supreme Court has decided he is not. _Tyndall_ vs. _The United States_, 12 Peters, p. 524. Lincoln did not rely upon this clause, but upon the Act of 1795, the language of which he quoted in his call for the militia of the States; and Congress, by the fifth section of the Act of July 13, 1861, showed very plainly that it recognized that he had professed to act under the Statute of 1795.

The frightful experiences of the civil war and the serpent-brood of evils which have since followed in its trail are plenary proof that the fathers were wise in not lodging the war power in the hands of any one man.

A summary of Lincoln's conduct, while there was yet peace in the land, brings out in startling relief the facts: that he dared at the behest of pampered privilege greedy for revenue, and partisan rancor thirsting for blood, without precedent, or the support of either of the other branches of the government, to place his own private interpretation upon a statute, in effect repealed, and thereby to make war on six millions of his fellow-citizens, whom he refused a right of opinion sustained by abundant authority and precedent and by some of his own acts and utterances. The idol of the "higher law" fanatics, the chief of whom he placed in his cabinet--nominated on a platform which denounced the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case as "a dangerous political heresy, revolutionary in its tendency and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country"--elected by States, many of which defied Federal authority attempting to execute the fugitive slave law, and none of which supported such authority, except New Jersey and California--and having never publicly or privately condemned the nullification of their constitutional obligations (Article IV, section 2, clause 3) by the States of Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Michigan, Maine, Wisconsin, Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania--he still proclaimed that his only motive in taking up the sword was to assert the paramount authority of Federal law!

His political campaign of 1864 was fought upon a platform which pledged its supporters to "bring to punishment due their crimes the rebels and traitors arrayed against the Government"; and be it remembered by all posterity that at the end of that campaign, almost at the close of a successful war, and in spite of military interference at the polls, one million eight hundred and eight thousand seven hundred and twenty-five citizens of his own section voted to condemn him, and endorsed a platform which declared that "under pretense of a military necessity for a war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part" by him, and that "justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of all the States; * * * that peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of all the States," * * * that the aim of their party was "to preserve the Federal Union and the rights of all the States unimpaired," and that they considered "the administrative usurpations of extraordinary and dangerous powers not granted by the Constitution * * * as calculated to prevent a restoration of the Union; that the shameful disregard of the administration of its duty to our fellow-citizens, * * * prisoners of war, deserves the severest reprobation."

As at the beginning, so at the end of the war, a vast majority of our nation was opposed to Lincoln's policy of coercion and blood; for his total vote, with the army and navy to back him, was only about four hundred thousand in excess of McClellan's, and this would have been far more than offset by the Southern vote.

The immediate cause of Lincoln's death was a sentence in his speech of April 11, 1865: "If universal amnesty is granted to the insurgents I cannot see how I can avoid exacting, in return, universal suffrage, or, at least, suffrage on a basis of intelligence and military service." "That means nigger citizenship," said his slayer to a witness. "Now, by God, I'll put him through!"--_Life of Lincoln_, by Herndon and Weik, Vol. III, p. 579.

It was a singular decree of Providence that, according to his own forebodings, Lincoln should have perished by the hand of violence, and that too on the fatal 15th of April, the anniversary of his proclamation for the seventy-five thousand volunteers to begin the dance of death. "He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword."

Let us be as thankful as we can that we are still one nation, that African slavery has ceased, and that the safeguards of liberty may be still sufficient if we are vigilant, unselfish, and brave.

The world has long respected the courage of the South; when the whole truth shall be well told it will equally respect her cause. One obvious effect of the civil war, clearly foreseen and foretold by Southern statesmen, was to Europeanize American institutions. This was a fearful price to pay even for keeping the sections under one government.

Let us hope that the present war with Spain may destroy the stock-in-trade of the speculator in past patriotism.

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An unoccupied field of investigation for a future historian is the part which Great Britain played in dissension, disunion, and war between the States, the sections, and the political parties. Her purpose has been accomplished. She has annihilated our foreign ocean-carrying trade--once threatening her own supremacy--and has thereby made us a third-rate naval power, for seamen, rather than ships, make a navy.

"Will your people divide?" General Clingman was frequently asked while in England in 1860. Never once was he asked if slavery would be abolished. The form of the question, in a land where abolition took its rise, struck him forcibly. Hear its explanation: "In this connection I remember a statement made to me by the late American Minister at Paris, Mr. Mason. He spoke of having had a conversation with one whose name I do not feel at liberty to mention, but whose influence on the opinion of continental Europe is considerable, who declared to him that if the Union of our States continued at no distant day we should control the world; and, therefore, as an European, he felt it to be his duty to press anti-slavery views as the only chance to divide us. I have many reasons to know that the monarchies of Europe, threatened with downfall from revolutionary movements, seek, through such channels as they control, to make similar impressions."--_Speeches and Writings of T. L. Clingman_, pp. 482, 483: extract from speech in United States Senate, delivered January 16, 1860.

To prove that democracy is a failure is among the chief aims of European monarchs.

Lloyd Garrison seems to have been a sincere fanatic, but all the better may have served British policy. Listen to a group of facts about him, appearing at random in a friendly encyclopedia: "In 1833" [the year the stars fell] "he visited Great Britain, and on his return organized 'The American Anti-slavery Society.' He visited England again in 1846, 1848, and 1867, in which last year he was publicly breakfasted in St. James' Hall."

An extract from the _London Telegraph_ of 1856 contains food for thought: "The aggressive spirit of the people of the United States requires an humbling, and it is for us to perform the task. England's mission is to complete the great work commenced by her in 1834, when she liberated her slaves. There are now over three million human beings in cruel bondage in the United States. If, therefore, the United States Government deny, and is resolved to question the right of Great Britain to her Central American possessions, we, the people of the British empire, are resolved to strike off the shackles from the feet of her three million slaves."

The _London News_, also of about the same time, encouraging its people against the possibility of rupture between England and this country, said: "However strong is the unprincipled appeal at present made to the anti-British feeling of the Northern States, that feeling is counterbalanced by another which has grown up within the last quarter of a century. _The abolitionists would be with us to a man. The best of them are so now._"

In 1798 the federalistic school of tax-gatherers, under the guidance of their founders, Rufus King and Hamilton, once actually lifted their eyes from the plunder of their own countrymen long enough to adopt an aggressive foreign policy, but it was a conspiracy with England, called the "Mirandy Plot," by which they sought to despoil our late allies in our war for independence, the French people, of their territory beyond the Mississippi, the honest and honorable purchase of which by Jefferson, a few years later, this school denounced as unconstitutional and void.

Better than any American statesman, General Clingman seems to have understood the motives and interests of Great Britain in fomenting the slavery agitation and the estrangement of the sections. Hear him, in his address to the people of the Eighth Congressional District of North Carolina, March 16, 1856: "The United States is the great republic of the earth, and the example of our free institutions was shaking the foundations of the monarchical and aristocratic governments of Europe. This was especially the case as respects the political system of Great Britain, owing to our common language, literature, and extended commercial intercourse. The aristocracy there hold the mass of the people in subjection, and under a condition so oppressive that large numbers of white men of their own race are liable to perish miserably by famine in years of scarcity. A knowledge of the successful working of our institutions was increasing the discontent of the common people, and, fearing the loss of its sway, the aristocracy, which controls the entire power of the government, began a crusade for the abolition of slavery in the United States. They expected, in the first place, by affected sympathy for the negroes here, to divert the minds of the people at home, to some extent, from the consideration of their own sufferings, and to create the impression that other laborers were much worse off than their own. And should they succeed in breaking up our system they would exultingly point to it as an evidence against the durability of free institutions.

"With a view, therefore, to effect these objects, more than twenty years ago the British press, and book-makers generally were stimulated to embark in a systematic war against negro slavery in the United States. Abolition lecturers were sent over and money furnished to establish papers and circulate pamphlets to inflame the minds of the citizens of the Northern States.

"Looking far ahead, they sought to incorporate their doctrines into the school-books and publications best calculated to influence the minds of the young and ignorant. Their views were most readily received in Massachusetts, where British influence has, for the last half century, been greatest. From this State these doctrines were gradually diffused to a great extent throughout the North."

At the time that the British politicians were taking so much interest in the slavery question of America, and deprecating with many crocodile tears our treatment of the negroes they had sold us, the _Edinburgh Review_ of January, 1856, charges the British Government with collecting rents and taxes from its subjects in India by means of the thumb-screw and other tortures as devilish as ingenuity could devise. See _Speeches and Writings of T. L. Clingman_.

According to some New England testimony, the work of the British emissaries who had been sent out to divide the Union was uphill at first. Hear the words of Representative Isaac Hill, from New Hampshire, speaking in Congress in 1836: "I have said the people of the North were more united in their opposition to the plans of the advocates of anti-slavery than on any other subject. This opposition is confined to no political party. It pervades every class of the community. They deprecate all interference with the subject of slavery because they believe such interference may involve the existence and welfare of the Union itself, and because they understand the obligations which the non-slaveholding States owe to the slaveholding States by the compact of confederation. It is the strong desire to perpetuate the Union; it is the determination which every patriotic and virtuous citizen has made in no event to abandon the 'ark of our safety' that now impels the united North to take its stand against the agitators of the anti-slavery project. So effectually has the strong public sentiment put down that agitation in New England that it is now kept alive only by the power of money which the agitators have collected and apply in the hiring of agents and in the issue from presses that are kept in their employ.

"The anti-slavery movement which brings in petitions from various parts of the country, asking Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, originates with a few persons who have been in the habit of making charitable religious institutions subservient to political purposes, and who have even controlled some of those charitable associations.

"Many of the clergymen who have been the instruments of the agitators have been such from no bad motive. Some of them, discovering the purpose of the agitators, discovering that their labors were calculated to make the condition of the slave worse, and to create animosity between the people of the North and the South, have paused in their course and desisted from the further application of a mistaken philanthropy."

Even if it be admitted that, as early as the year 1836, the strongest elements in New England were united against the South, it is by no means true that they were then unanimous in selecting slavery as the most advantageous ground of battle. A cry of distress arose from Great Britain at the way some of the distributors of her secret service money were being treated; a paragraph from an English newspaper, the _Leeds Mercury_, read on the floor of the House of Representatives by Mr. King, of Georgia, in corroboration of what Mr. Hill had said, will serve as an illustration: "Letters of the most distressing nature have been received from Mr. George Thompson, the zealous and devoted missionary of slave emancipation, who has gone from this country to the United States, and who writes from Boston. He says that 'the North (that is, New England, where slavery does not exist) has universally sympathized with the South in opposition to the abolitionists; that the North has let fall the mask; that the merchants and mechanics, priests and politicians have alike stood forth the defenders of Southern despots and the furious denouncers of Northern philanthropy'; that all parties of politics, especially the supporters of the two rival candidates for the Presidential office (Van Buren and Webster) vie with each other in denouncing the abolitionists; and that even religious men shun them, except when the abolitionists can fairly gain a hearing from them. With regard to himself he speaks as follows: 'Rewards are offered for my abduction and assassination; and, in every direction, I meet with those who believe they would be doing God and their country service by depriving me of life. I have appeared in public, and some of my escapes from the hands of my foes have been truly providential. On Friday last I narrowly escaped losing my life in Concord, New Hampshire.' 'Boston, September 11.--This morning a short gallows was found standing opposite the door of my house, 23 Bay street, in this city, now occupied by Garrison. Two halters hung from the beam, with the words above them: By Order of Judge Lynch!'"

Responding to this, the New Hampshire Representative (Hill) said: "The present agitation in the North is kept up by the application of money; it is a state of things altogether forced. Agents are hired, disguised in the character of ministers of the gospel, to preach abolition of slavery where slavery does not exist; and presses are kept in constant employment to scatter abolition publications through the country."

Yes, and this constant "application" of money finally overcame the Yankee. The love of it has been the root of much evil with him. Then, too, eventually, his politicians and manufacturers found that the best use they could make of the negro was to hold him betwixt them and the fire of Southern indignation, kindled by their cupidity.

To show the dangerous reciprocity of feeling between old and New England long before it was intensified as it now is by the community of interest in untold millions of investments, the words uttered by John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, fall with the weight of state's evidence: "That their object (_i. e._ that of the New England States) was, and had been for several years, a dissolution of the Union and the establishment of a separate confederation, he knew from unequivocal evidence, although not provable in a court of law; and that in case of a civil war the aid of Great Britain to effect that purpose would as assuredly be resorted to as it would be indispensably necessary to their design."--_Adams' letter in reply to Harrison Gray Otis and others_, December 28, 1828, quoted by Raphael Semmes in his _Memoirs of Service Afloat_, p. 43. This attachment to British interests was so pronounced in 1812 that the New England States refused to furnish their quota of troops to help conduct our defense; and, while the nation was locked in deadly conflict with the ruthless invader, these States actually held a convention at Hartford looking to secession. The Governor of Massachusetts proclaimed a public fast day for deploring a war against a nation which had long been "the bulwark of the religion we profess"; its Supreme Court decided that neither the President nor Congress could control its State troops in time of war, and the Legislature declared the war to be unholy, and urged its people to do what they could to thwart it. These States forced a treaty of peace in which Great Britain was not even required to cease the outrages on account of which the war was undertaken--outrages which might have been begun again but for Jackson's victory with the Southern soldiers at New Orleans. Jefferson, in a letter to Lafayette, says: "During that war four of the Eastern States were only attached to the Union like so many inanimate bodies to living men."

That will be the saddest chapter of American history which faithfully compares the treasonable obstruction of these States to this war with their Cain-like swiftness to shed their brothers' blood because of an alleged difference of opinion on a question of constitutional law. It will be remembered, in this connection, that these States had their troops mobilized and waiting for the President's call before Fort Sumter was fired on. In four days after the call the troops of Massachusetts (the most protected State save one) had invaded the State of Maryland and were shooting down the astonished and outraged citizens of Baltimore.

The next saddest chapter of our national history will show that the section which has been greediest to gain power from the States and revenues from the people has been the readiest to use these powers and revenues against those from whom they were stolen, and the most reluctant to use them to defend the nation against foreign aggressions. "It is a principle of human nature," remarks Tacitus, "to hate those we have injured more than those who have injured us."

And who, now, but the beneficiaries of implied powers (which they fought a civil war to preserve and maintain in all their latitude), under real or affected dread of a foreign war, are zealous for the late proposed bondholders' treaty with England? As though that nation could afford to kill or even injure the goose which lays the golden egg in the shape of four hundred million dollars annual interest on British investments in this country! The sole purpose of this treaty is that this egg shall be _golden_ and not _bimetallic_; and instead of preventing, it may be the cause of war, as soon as the people resume control of their government and feel the effects of an arbitration judgment on the financial question. I pause to remark, in this connection, that many well-meaning people who petitioned the Senate for the confirmation of this treaty had not read it with sufficient care to observe that it delegated to a commission, composed partly of foreigners and to a majority of the Senate, powers which have heretofore been only exercised by two-thirds of the Senate, as the Constitution provides. And this apparently slight though subtle change in the conduct of our government was sought to be inaugurated in the name of peace!

What a Southern statesman exclaimed, arguing against the adoption of the Federal Constitution, in 1787, may be appositely repeated here: "But the character of the partners (meaning the Northern States) causes me more alarm than the terms of the partnership." England's partnership with Australia, South Africa, and India has spread such a pall of universal indebtedness over the fairest portions of the globe that we may well hesitate before we make more permanent the stipulations in the "bond" of her blighting friendship.

Undoubtedly the seeds of the War of 1812 were sown by the treaty of 1794, negotiated by John Jay, who took "a mild and conciliatory part in the Revolutionary war," and by Lord Grenville, the son of the author of the Stamp Act. The "Jay treaty," as it was called, provided for the shameful curtailment of the American ocean-carrying trade, and for the free navigation of the Mississippi for Great Britain. And if the proposed arbitration treaty is not finally rejected by the Senate, the prominence given to the present British Minister at McKinley's inauguration, accidental though it may have been, will serve as a fine prototype of British influence in the administration of our government.

"Woe to the nation that trusts England's friendship," exclaimed the thoughtful Pettigrew, after studying her national character on the narrow island where it grew. What he says, given under the sketch of him in this book, is a valuable side-light upon the suggestion that her influence more than any other (except original sin) has changed the half of our nation nearest to her into a race of "dollar-hunters and breeders of dollar-hunters." The way to make England our ally is to show her that we are able to take care of ourselves. Her government fears nothing so much as the democratic spirit of America, and would fain bind that down by treaty; but when it serves her purposes, Old England, like New England, finds a "higher law" than a contract. Unity of interest and of purpose unites peoples--compacts often unite governments in a conspiracy to plunder.

In dwelling specially upon the main cause of our civil war, because of attempts to ignore it, I do not mean to encourage the student to neglect the other causes: the control by the Confederacy of the lower Mississippi--the ocean outlet of its headwater States; the fear of protected labor that the slaves would learn to manufacture, and reduce wages; the jealousy and friction in the newly-settled West, caused by the actual contact of the two systems of labor (for slavery was a practical and serious question there); the belief that slavery was at the bottom of the forty-four years of sectional political wrangling, and that this must cease or the Union be dissolved; the honest and the prejudiced opposition to the institution itself; the zeal and ambition of machine politicians, in both sections, anxious to get in "on the ground floor" of personal advantage--these together, acted on by the main cause, and reacting on each other, constitute the causes of the war.

And it must not be forgotten, too, that Calhoun, for the South, accepted the slavery issue as the gage of battle, though he knew for what purpose it was manufactured. Unity of the South against Northern aggression was what he was fighting for; and, having failed to present a solid front against the tariff because Clay's ambition and Louisiana's influence disintegrated his forces in the Southwest, he was the more easily betrayed into adopting a temporary expedient--the policy of shifting the issue from its high ground. In this way, too, he got "hay and stubble" in his foundation, and gave the enemies of civil liberty among the whites a chance to pose as the friends of civil liberty among the blacks.

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Standing among the statutes at large, with but a page between, is the proclamation of Thomas Jefferson, thundering against the aggressions of Great Britain, and the proclamation of John Adams, breathing out threatenings and slaughter against his own countrymen for resisting the plunder of an unjust revenue tax. These two proclamations, looming up in the horizon of American history like the Mountains of Blessing and Cursing, are the embodiment of the two spirits which are contending for the mastery of this nation--the one the source of our independence gained by a foreign war and the territory on this side of the Mississippi, and of our independence maintained by a foreign war and the territory beyond the Mississippi--the other the source of our national debt in its monstrous cumulation, of Federal extravagance, of sectional expenditures of public funds, of class legislation for protected industries, of unequal taxes, and of a frightful civil war, unlawfully begun to collect them.

"To do justice" is the only way to "insure domestic tranquillity." A government is "strong" only when its foundations are laid deep in the affections and best interests of the people who support it and for whose benefit it was created. God's government is strong and will last forever because it is based upon the eternal principle of mutual affinity.

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Through the long mystery of prehistoric ages the spirit of God's love brooded over the desolation of a void and formless world; continents laden with life were born out of the womb of the great deep--Life which still lives in the love of its Infinite Author--and the great deep which still with measured pulse is beating out the changes of our times and booming in our ears the faith that we, too, are somewhere in the sweep of Nature's mighty moving heart. So, statesmen and philosophers, deeply pondering in love of country over the dreary waste of failures and disasters lying thick along the track of History and Experience, have wrought out for us wise laws and constitutions, have rescued from the "bottomless deep of theory and possibility" the institutions under which we live, but the virtue to interpret and maintain them is not transmitted nor transmissible--that we must gain, as they did, from Heaven.

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Sloping in a long, gradual sweep of undulating hills and valleys, overspread with the silver network of her myriad streams, from her lofty green-bannered battlements, erected by God, down to her shifting shore, where Hatteras lies in wait for her enemies by sea, North Carolina spreads out the peaceful lap of her bounteous land for her children and for all who cherish her.

Born before the Union, which is but an offspring of the States, and surviving disunion, the child of sectional advantage, unbroken by the shock of radical changes in the Constitutions of the State and nation, North Carolina stands among the firmest of the forty-five pillars of the national superstructure, will sustain it as long as it answers the purposes of its creation, and, if greed or necessity or the will of Heaven should destroy it, will stand above its wreck, the sure foundation and protection of her people's liberties and the sure support of a more perfect Union of the States which have been purified in the crucible of disaster.

W. J. PEELE.

LIVES OF DISTINGUISHED NORTH CAROLINIANS.

WILLIAM R. DAVIE.

BY WALTER CLARK.

William Richardson Davie was born at Egremont, near Whitehaven, Cumberland county, in the north of England, on June 20, 1756. He was brought over to this country by his father, Archibald Davie, who, upon the peace of 1763, made a visit to America, and was left in the care of his maternal uncle, Rev. William Richardson, a Presbyterian clergyman residing in the Waxhaw settlement on the Catawba river, in South Carolina. Having no children, Mr. Richardson adopted his nephew and namesake, who became heir to his estate. At the usual age young Davie was sent to the "Queen's Museum," the well-known academy and high school in Charlotte. From thence he entered at Nassau Hall, Princeton College, New Jersey, of which the famous Dr. Witherspoon was then President. In the summer of 1776, with the consent of the President, a party of students, among whom Davie was one, was raised and served as volunteers in the patriot army. In the fall of that year he returned to college, and, passing his examinations, took his college degree of Bachelor of Arts with the first honors of the institution. His uncle died before his return home. Davie selected the profession of law and began his studies at Salisbury. In 1777 he joined a detachment of twelve hundred men under General Jones, ordered to be raised for the defense of Charleston, then threatened with another attack, but on reaching Camden it was found that the design was abandoned by the enemy, and the detachment returned home after a service of three months. In 1779 a troop of cavalry was raised in the Salisbury district. Of this William Barnett, of Mecklenburg, was chosen captain and Davie lieutenant. His commission, signed by Governor Caswell, is dated 5 April, 1779. With two hundred horse he was immediately sent into the back country to suppress a Tory rising, but it was quelled before their arrival. Soon afterward the troop joined the Southern Army and was attached to Pulaski's Legion.

Captain Barnett having resigned, Davie was promoted to captain, and shortly thereafter was made major. On June 20th of that year Davie took part in the battle of Stono, near Charleston. In this battle the North Carolina brigade was commanded by General Jethro Sumner. In a cavalry charge on that day Davie was wounded and fell from his horse, but retained hold of the bridle. The cavalry, dispirited by his fall, were in full retreat when a private in another company, whose horse had been shot under him and was carrying off his saddle, saw Major Davie standing by his horse unable to mount him, his thigh being disabled by his wound. Though the enemy were in a few yards, this man deliberately placed him on his horse and led him from the field. His deliverer then disappeared and resumed his place in the ranks, and Davie could find no trace of him. The wound was a severe one and kept Davie long in the hospital at Charleston, rendering him incapable of further service that year. At the siege of Ninety-Six, two years later, when Davie was present as Commissary-General of the Southern Army, on the morning of the attack a stranger came to his tent and introduced himself as the man who had saved his life at Stono. He promised to visit him again, but when the troops were recalled from the fruitless attempt to storm the fort the body of the gallant unknown was found among the dead. On his return from the Charleston hospital in September, 1779, Davie being unfit for service, applied for and received his County Court license and was sent by the Governor to attend the courts on the Holston river, then in North Carolina, that he might ascertain public sentiment in that section. In the spring of 1780 he received his Superior Court license. About the same time he obtained authority from the Legislature of North Carolina to raise a troop of cavalry and two companies of mounted infantry. The authority was all that the State could give, its funds being too low to provide the means. Major Davie, with a patriotism worthy of perpetual remembrance, disposed of the estate inherited from his uncle and thus raised the funds to equip his command.

The surrender of Charleston, 12th May, 1780, and the surprise and butchery of Buford's men by Colonel Tarleton on the 29th of the same month, completed the subjugation of South Carolina. Colonel Moore, with eleven hundred Tories, having collected at Ramsour's Mills, in the edge of the present town of Lincolnton, Colonel Francis Locke with three hundred militia of Burke, Lincoln, and Rowan, crossed the Catawba at Beattie's Ford, while General Rutherford, acting in concert with him with seven hundred troops, among whom was Davie and his command, crossed at Tuckaseege Ford. The two divisions were to meet in the night near the enemy and attack at break of day. Rutherford's march being circuitous, was delayed, but Colonel Locke, notwithstanding the disparity of force, attacked alone and won a complete victory. Rutherford arrived about an hour after the action and dispatched Major Davie in pursuit of the fugitives. Shortly after Major Davie was ordered to take post near the South Carolina line, opposite Hanging Rock, to prevent the enemy from foraging and to check the depredations of the Tories who infested that section. He was reenforced by some South Carolinians under Major Crawford, by thirty-five Catawba Indians under their chief, New River, and by part of the Mecklenburg militia. With part of his dragoons and some volunteers he left camp 20th July, 1780, to intercept a convoy of provisions and clothing destined for the enemy at Hanging Rock, eighteen miles distant. Marching all night, he turned the enemy's flank and fell into the Camden road five miles below Hanging Rock. Here he awaited the convoy, which appeared in the afternoon, and it was surprised and completely captured, with all the stores.

About the last of July, Colonel Sumter, with the South Carolina refugees, and Colonel Irwin, with the North Carolina troops, advanced to the attack of Rocky Mount, while Major Davie was to make a diversion to engage the attention of the enemy at Hanging Rock. His detachment consisted of eighty mounted men. In sight of the enemy's camp, he fell upon three companies of their mounted infantry returning from an excursion. Taken by surprise, they were literally cut to pieces almost before they were aware of his presence. Sixty valuable horses, with their furniture, and one hundred rifles and muskets, were carried off by Davie in safety without the loss of a man. On August 5th an attack was ordered upon Hanging Rock by Colonel Sumter, who commanded in person the eight hundred troops engaged in the expedition. Of these five hundred were North Carolinians, commanded by Colonel Irwin and Major Davie. The troops halted at midnight within two miles of the enemy's camp, which they attacked next morning at daylight. The British regulars were commanded by Major Carden, while among the auxiliaries were several Tory regiments. One was composed of Tories from the upper Yadkin, commanded by Colonel Bryan (whom Davie afterwards defended when tried for treason at Salisbury), and another, mostly of South Carolinians, was led by Colonel John Hamilton, of Halifax, who for many years after the war was British Consul at Norfolk. The attack at first was completely successful, but from lack of discipline many of the troops plundered the camps and became intoxicated. A part of the British troops remaining intact, formed a hollow square and necessitated a retreat, which, however, was made in good order, Davie's corps covering the rear. The wounded were safely convoyed by him to Charlotte, where, by his foresight, a hospital had been established. It is worthy of note that on this march to the attack at Hanging Rock, by Davie's side rode, as guides conversant with the roads and of undoubted courage and patriotism, two country lads, brothers, respectively aged thirteen and fifteen years. The younger of the two was destined to see many another field of carnage, and his name has filled long and well the sounding trump of fame--Andrew Jackson. Long years after, in the retirement of the Hermitage, he said that Davie was the best soldier he had ever known and that his best lessons in the art of war had been learned from him.

On Davie's return from Charlotte he hastened to the general rendezvous of Gates' army at Rugely's Mills. On August 16th, while proceeding to join General Gates at Camden, and ten miles from the battle-field, Major Davie met the defeated army with the General leading the retreat. He ordered Davie to fall back on Charlotte, but he replied that his men had formed the acquaintance of Tarleton's Legion and did not fear to meet them again. He continued his course towards the battle-ground, meeting the flying fragments of the routed army. He secured several wagons loaded with clothing and medicine, which had been abandoned. With characteristic thoughtfulness he immediately sent an officer to notify Colonel Sumter of the great disaster which had befallen our arms. He reached Sumter that evening, who at once began his retreat along the west bank of the Catawba, towards the up-country. Not taking sufficient precaution, however, Sumter was surprised on the 18th by Tarleton at Fishing Creek, and his entire command of eight hundred men was captured or put to flight with the loss of all his artillery, arms, and baggage. Colonel Sumter himself, who was asleep under a wagon when the attack was made, barely escaped, and the next day reached Davie's camp at Charlotte alone, riding on horseback, without saddle or bridle. The tidings carried consternation into the fragments of Gates' army which had rallied there, and in a few moments Davie and his command were the only force left in front of the enemy. Instead of retiring, he boldly advanced to the Waxhaws, and found that the enemy had fallen back to Camden.

On the 5th of September, 1780, Davie was appointed by Governor Nash Colonel Commandant of Cavalry in the Western District of North Carolina, with instructions to raise a regiment. When he had collected only about seventy men, with that force and two small companies of riflemen, commanded by Major George Davidson, he took post at Providence, twenty-five miles from the British camp. Cornwallis, after resting at Camden till the first week in September, had advanced to the Waxhaws, forty miles below Charlotte, while the fragments of the American army were slowly gathering at Hillsborough, two hundred miles distant. South Carolina was wholly subjugated, and North Carolina had not recovered from the shock of Gates' defeat. Under these circumstances, Colonel Davie, with unprecedented boldness, with a command not exceeding one hundred and fifty men all told, on the 20th of September, turning the right flank of the British army by a circuitous march, fell upon three or four hundred of the enemy at Wahab's plantation. The attack was made at daylight. The surprise was complete.

The enemy left fifteen or twenty dead on the field and had some forty wounded. Davie got off safely with the captured horses and had only one man wounded. The enemy at once caused the farm buildings which belonged to Captain Wahab, then a volunteer with Davie, to be laid in ashes. Davie brought off ninety-six horses and their furniture and one hundred and twenty stand of arms, and arrived in camp the same afternoon, having marched sixty miles in less than twenty-four hours, including the time employed in seeking and beating the enemy. That evening Generals Sumner and Davidson arrived at his camp with their force of one thousand badly equipped militia.