DeBows

The Southern Confederacy: Our Cause Before the Civilized World,

DeBow’s Review 30 (1861)

This example of Civil War journalism is taken from DeBow's Review, a southern periodical originally published in New Orleans.

ART. XVII.—The Southern Confederacy.

1.—Our Cause Before The Civilized World.

In his first annual message President Davis, with great ability, presents the questions involved in our great political revolution:

During the war waged against Great Britain by her colonies on this con­tinent, a common danger impelled them to a close alliance, and to the formation of a Confederation, by the terms of which the colonies, styling themselves States, entered "severally into a firm league of friendship with each other for their common defence the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretence whatever.”

In order to guard against any misconstruction of their compact, the sev­eral States made explicit declaration, in a distinct article, that “each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, juris­diction and right which is not by this Confederation, expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled.”

Under this contract of alliance, the War of the Revolution was success­fully waged, and resulted in the treaty of peace with Great Britain in 1788, by the terms of which the several States were, each by name, recognized to be independent.

The articles of confederation contained a clause whereby all alterations were prohibited, unless confirmed by the Legislatures of every State, after being agreed to by the Congress; and in obedience to this provision, under the resolution of Congress of the 21st February, 1787, the several States appointed delegates, who attended a Convention "for the sole and express purpose of revising the articles of confederation, and reporting to Congress and the several Legislatures such alterations and provisions therein as shall, when agreed to in Congress, and confirmed by the States, render the Federal Constitution adequate to the exigencies of Gov6rument and the preserva­tion of the Union."

It was, by the delegates chosen by the several States, under the resolu­tion just quoted, that the Constitution of the United States was framed in 1787, and submitted to the several States for ratification, as shown by the seventh article, which is in these words:

“The ratification of the Conventions of nine States shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution BETWEEN the States so ratifying the same.”

I have italicized certain words in the quotations just made, for the pur­pose of attracting attention to the singular and marked caution with which the States endeavored, in every possible form, to exclude the idea that the separate and independent sovereignty of each State was merged into one common government and nation; and the earnest desire they evinced to impress on the Constitution its true character—that of a compact BETWEEN independent States.

The Constitution of 1787 having, how ever, omitted the clause already recited from the articles of confederation, which provided, in explicit terms, that each State retained its sovereignty and independence, some alarm was felt in the States when invited to ratify the Constitution, lest this omission should be construed into an abandonment of their cherished principle, and they refused to be satisfied until amendments were added to the Constitu­tion, placing beyond any pretence of doubt the reservation by the States of all their sovereign rights and powers—not expressly delegated to the United States by the Constitution.

Strange, indeed, must it appear to the impartial observer, but it is none the less true, that all these carefully worded clauses proved unavailing to prevent the rise and growth in the Northern States of a political school which has persistently claimed that the Government thus formed was not a compact between States, but was in effect a national Government, set up above and over the States. An organization, created by the States to secure ‘the blessings of liberty and independence against foreign aggression, has been gradually perverted into a machine for their control in their domestic affairs: the creature has been exalted above its creators; the principals have been made subordinate to the agent appointed by them­selves.

The people of the Southern States, whose almost exclusive occupation was agriculture, early perceived a tendency in the Northern States to ren­der the common Government subservient to their own purposes, by impos­ing burthens on commerce as a protection to their manufacturing and shipping interests. Long and angry controversy grew out of these at-’tempts, often successful, to benefit one section of the country at the expense of the other. And the danger of disruption, arising from this cause, was enhanced by the fact that the Northern population was increased by immigration and other causes in a greater ratio than the population of, the South. By degrees, as the Northern States gained preponderance in the National Congress, self-interest taught their people to yield ready assent to any plausible advocacy of their right as a majority to govern the minor­ity without control; they learned to listen with impatience to the sugges­tion of any constitutional impediment to the exercise of their will; and so utterly have the principles of the Constitution been corrupted in the North­ern mind, that in the Inaugural Address delivered by President Lincoln in March last, be asserts as an axiom which he plainly deems to be undeniable, that the theory of the Constitution requires that in all eases the majority shall govern; and in another memorable instance, the same Chief Magis­trate did not hesitate to liken the relations between a State and the United States to those which exist between a county and a State in which it is sit­uated and by which it was created. This is the lamentable and funda­mental error on which rests the policy that has culminated in his declaration of war against these Confederate States.

In addition to the long-continued and deep seated resentment felt by the Southern States at the persistent abuse of the powers they had delegated to the Congress, for the purpose of enriching the manufacturing and shipping classes of the North at the expense of the South, there has existed for nearly half a century another subject of discord, involving interests of such transcendent magnitude as at all times to create the apprehension in the minds of many devoted lovers of the Union that its permanence was impos­sible.

When the several States delegated certain powers to the United States Congress, a large portion of the laboring population consisted of African slaves imported into the colonies by the mother country. In twelve out of the thirteen States negro slavery existed, and the right of property in slaves was protected by law. This property was recognized in the Consti­tution, and provision was made against its loss by the escape of the slave. The increase in the number of slaves by further importation from Africa was also secured by a clause forbidding Congress to prohibit the slave trade anterior to a certain date; and in no clause can there be found any delega­tion of power to the Congress authorizing it in any manner to legislate to the prejudice, detriment or discouragement of the owners of that species of property, or excluding it from the protection of the Government.

The climate and soil of the Northern States soon proved unpropitious to the continuance of slave labor, whilst the converse was the case at the South. Under the unrestricted free intercourse between the two sections, the North­ern States consulted their own interest by selling their slaves to the South, and prohibiting slavery within their limits. The South were willing pur­chasers of a property suitable to their wants, and paid the price of the acquisition without harboring a suspicion that their quiet possession was to be disturbed by those who were inhibited, not only by want of constitutional authority, but by good faith as vendors, from disquieting a title emanating from themselves.

As soon, however, as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representa­tion a controlling voice in the Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated and gradually extended. A continuous series of measures was devised and prosecuted for the purpose oP rendering insecure the tenure of property in slaves; fanatical organizations, supplied with money by voluntary subscriptions, were assiduously engaged in exciting amongst the slaves a spirit of discontent and revolt; means were furnished for their escape from their owners, and agents secretly employed to entice them to abscond; the constitutional provision for their rendition to their owners was first evaded, then openly denounced as a violation of conscien­tious obligation and religious duty; men were taught that it was a merit to elude, disobey and violently oppose the execution of the laws enacted to secure the performance of the promise contained in the constitutional com­pact; owners of slaves were mobbed and even murdered in open day, solely for applying to a magistrate for the arrest of a fugitive slave; the dogmas of these voluntary organizations soon obtained control of the legis­latures of many of the Northern States, and laws were passed providing for the punishment by ruinous fines and long continued imprisonment in jails and penitentiaries of citizens of the Southern States who should dare to ask aid of the officers of the law for the recovery of their property. Em­boldened by success, the theatre of agitation and aggression against the clearly expressed constitutional rights of the Southern States was transferred to the Congress; Senators and Representatives were sent to the common councils of the nation, whose chief title to this distinction consisted in the display of a spirit of ultra fanaticism, and whose business was, not “to pro­mote the general welfare or ensure domestic tranquility,” but to awaken the bitterest hatred against the citizens of sister States by violent denuncia­tion of their institutions; the transaction of public affairs was impeded by repeated efforts to usurp powers not delegated by the Constitution, for the purpose of impairing the security of property in slaves, and reducing those States which held slaves to a condition of inferiority. Finally, a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Govern­ment, with the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public domain, acquired by all the States in common, whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be prohibited; of thus rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. This party, thus organized, succeeded in the month of November last in the election of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States.

In the meantime, under the mild and genial climate of the Southern States, and the increasing care and attention or he well-being and comfort of the laboring class, dictated alike by interest and humanity, the African slaves had augmented in number from about six hundred thousand—at the date of the constitutional compact—to upwards of four millions. In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily com­forts but with careful religious instruction. Under the supervision of a superior race, their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of the wilderness into cultivated lands, covered with a prosperous people; towns and cities had sprung into existence, and had rapidly increased in wealth and population under the social system of the South; the white population of the Southern slaveholding States had augmented from about one million two hundred and fifty thousand, at the date of the adoption of the Constitution, to more than eight millions five hun­dred thousand in 1860; and the productions of the South in cotton, rice, sugar and tobacco, for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was, and is, indispensable, had swollen to an amount which formed nearly three-fourths of the exports of the whole United States, and had become absolutely necessary to the wants of civilized man.

With interests of such overwhelming, magnitude imperilled, the people of the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North to the adop­tion of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced. With this view the Legislatures of the several States invited the people to select delegates to Conventions to be held for the pur­pose of determining for themselves what measures were best adapted to meet so alarming a crisis in their history.

Here it may be proper to observe that, from a period as early as 1 798, there had existed in all of the States of the Union a party, almost uninter­ruptedly in the majority, based upon the creed that each State was, in the last resort, the sole judge as well of its wrongs as of the mode and measure of redress. Indeed, it is obvious that, under the law of nations, this principle is an axiom as applied to the relations of independent sovereign States, such as those which had united themselves under the constitutional compact. The Democratic party of the United States repeated in its successful canvass in 1856 the declaration made in numerous previous political contests, that it would “faithfully abide by and uphold the principles laid down in the Ken­tucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798, and in the report of Mr. Madison to the Virginia Legislature in 1799; and that it adopts those principles as con­stituting one of the main foundations of its political creed.”

The principles thus emphatically announced embrace that to which I have already adverted—the right of each State to judge of and redress the wrongs of which it complains. These principles were maintained by overwhelming majorities of the people of all the States of the Union at different elections, especially in the elections of Mr. Jefferson in 1805, Mr. Madison in 1809, and Mr. Pierce in 1852.

In the exercise of a right so ancient, so well established, and so neces­sary for self-preservation, the people of the Confederate States, in their Conventions, determined that the wrongs which they had suffered, and the evils with which they were menaced, required that they should revoke the delegation of powers to the Federal Government, which they had ratified in their several Conventions. They consequently passed ordinances resum­ing all their rights as sovereign and independent States, and dissolved their connection with the other States of the Union.