Buch lesen: «The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862»

'THE CONSTITUTION AS IT IS—THE UNION AS IT WAS.'

This has been a pet phrase, in certain quarters, ever since the rebellion broke out. The men who use it are doubtless well aware of the prodigious power of such cries adroitly raised. The history of their influence over the unreflecting masses in all ages would be one of the most curious chapters in the history of human nature.

The phrase has a grand air. Its words are brave words to conjure with. It is susceptible of a good and loyal sense. It may mean, restore the supremacy of the Constitution and the integrity of the Union by crushing this atrocious rebellion to utter extinction by force of arms. It may mean that all the revolted States are to be brought back into the Union and under the authority of the Constitution by military subjugation. It may mean this, though it is certainly not a short or strong way of expressing the only thing which patriotic men have now to think of, to wish done, and to help do; and I do not believe any man of strong, clear head or right loyal heart would take this way of expressing it. Still, it may mean this; but if it does not mean this, it means nothing pertinent to exigency, nothing patriotic, nothing loyal.

But is this what they mean who trade with it now? No—nothing of the sort. They use it to distract and perplex the public mind; to draw it off from the one paramount obligation which the times impose upon the nation—the obligation of saving the national existence by the military extinction of the rebellion, regardless of all other ends and aims. They trade upon the popular reverence for the Constitution—that sense of its sacredness which lies so deep in the heart of the North. They do it to mislead the honest masses, whose hearts are mainly right, but whose heads—some of them, but, thank God! not many now—are not so clear to see the miserable fallacy of its application. They make it a text and pretext for inveighing against the government, and so weakening its hold on the popular confidence and support; for raising seditious outcries against any restriction of the license to talk and print treason—what they call tyrannical oppression of the freedom of speech and of the press. They know perfectly well that not a thousandth part of the toleration which traitorous talking and printing enjoy at the North—through the extraordinary and amazing leniency of the Government—is for one moment granted to Union sympathizers by rebel authorities in the South. They never have a word to say against the way in which loyalty to the Union is there crushed down by imprisonment, banishment, confiscation, and hanging. They have never a word to say against the brutal and fiendish atrocities of cruelty perpetrated there upon all who are even suspected of Union sentiments. They reserve all their indignation for the moderate repression which our Administration has seen fit, in some cases, to apply to traitorous utterances. They have even risen to the sublime impudence of denouncing it as a monstrous outrage on the constitutional rights of Northern traitors, that our Government has declined, in a few instances, to allow the United States mail to be the agent for transporting and circulating treasonable newspapers. I have quite lately been edified with the tone of lofty, indignant scorn with which one of these papers—published in the city of New-York—cries shame on the Government for refusing to be its carrier; though no man knows better than the editor that a publication at the South as much in sympathy with the Union as his is with the rebellion, would not only not get carried in the rebel mails, but, before twenty-four hours, would be suppressed, and its editor in prison, or more probably hung, by the direction or with the approbation of the rebel authorities; and in such a case, our New-York editor would not have space for a line to chronicle the fact, or for a word to denounce it to Northern indignation. But for our Government to decline carrying his treasonable sheet—that is monstrous! Behold him, a confessor in the sacred cause of freedom of speech and of the press! He will not succumb to unconstitutional tyranny! He will continue to print in spite of Government, and to send his treason through the land by the express companies, until the millennial day of the restoration of 'the Constitution as it is, the Union as it was!'

The men who utter this phrase talk, too, about the constitutional rights of the rebels—just as if those who are waging war for the overthrow of the Constitution had any rights under it! Such talk is an outrage on common-sense and decency. What constitutional rights have rebels in arms to any thing, but to be fairly tried for treason, to the forfeiture of their lives, if they escape merited death on the battle-field?

These out-criers for the Constitution and the Union strive also to confuse the public mind with constitutional questions as to the end or purpose of the war. What has the Constitution to do with that? What constitutional object is there for the nation or the Government to have now in view? This, and this only: the extinction of the rebellion by force of arms. Conventions, negotiations, concessions to rebels in arms—even if they were in arms for rights under the Constitution—would be utterly unconstitutional; much more are they so when the rebels are in arms not to vindicate constitutional rights, but for the overthrow of the Constitution, the destruction of the Government, and the dismemberment of the nation. They must lay down their arms in unconditional submission before they can be constitutionally treated with. Any other doctrine would be subversive of the Constitution, of the principles that lie at its basis, of the principles of all government, all national existence, and all social order.

The Government may be driven, by the victorious pressure of rebel arms, to the overwhelming necessity of treating with them. Necessity has no laws. But until then, to talk of treating with armed rebels is as treasonable as it is absurd. Until then, there is no other object allowed by the Constitution, no other obligation imposed by it on the Government, but the military subjugation of the rebellion. The Constitution gives the Government this power, and no other—puts upon it this duty, and no other.

And as to constitutional modes of conducting the war: are the men who raise questions, and suggest scruples, so stupid as not to know that, so far as the rebels are concerned, such a way of talking is the sheerest of all possible absurdities? The war power is a power conferred by the Constitution; but it is a power which, in face of an enemy, is above all other constitutional powers. In granting the war power to Government, the Constitution grants to it, without qualification or limitation, all the powers necessary and proper to carry on war; this, of course, even if there were no plain delegation of them. But there is; and the only laws which limit the constitutional powers of Government in the conduct of the war, are the laws of war. These laws lie outside of the Constitution, in the consent and recognition of civilized nations. They are now the supreme laws. All this, for the sufficient reason that the constitutional grant of the war power under any other limitation than the laws of war, would be idle and nugatory; and this for the sufficient reason that the salvation of the republic is that to which every thing else must be sacrificed. The constitutional guaranties of State and personal rights were framed for a condition of union, order, peace—not for one of secession, rebellion, and war. In such a time, they must all give way to the supreme necessity of saving the national existence. Constitution or no Constitution, the nation must not be destroyed. Who but a fool would question the right of a man to strike a dagger to the heart of the assassin whose grasp was on his throat, because there is a law against the private use of deadly weapons? The clutch of a parricidal rebellion is grappling at the national existence, and what shall we think of those men who would stay the arm of Government from stabbing at its vitals by interposing constitutional scruples? Even if the Constitution did stand in the way, who but a fool or a traitor would hesitate to go around it or over it to save the national existence? Salus reipublicæ suprema lex. Was the nation made for the Constitution, or the Constitution for the nation? If both can not stand together, which shall go down? Will you stick to the Constitution, and let the nation be destroyed? Any thing more insanely preposterous than such a putting of the wrong thing foremost, such a preference of the means to the end, is hard to be imagined.

But the Constitution does not stand in the way. Neither in letter nor in spirit does it interpose a feather's resistance to the most summary and effectual extinction of the rebellion. On the contrary, it justifies the use of all the means sanctioned by the laws of war. It justifies, and, if need be, demands, the receiving, employing, and arming of all the loyal inhabitants of the South held in slavery under local laws, whether by rebel or by loyal masters. What the former might think or say, need not be asked or cared for; and the latter can not, in loyalty, object to the taking of their slaves for the defence of the nation, if military reasons make it needful or wise to do it. If employed, these slaves must be freed, and their masters must receive compensation at the hands of Government. To this, if their loyalty be any thing but an empty name, they will consent. If the extinction of slavery should be the ultimate result, what then? Is slavery so sacred and beneficent, that a triumphant rebellion and a dismembered country are to be preferred to its extinction? The loyal people of the North—the great body of the nation—are getting tired of that conditional Unionism, that Border State loyalty, which makes a paramount regard to the interests of slavery the price of adhering to the national cause. Conditional Unionism—what sort of Unionism is that? Loyalty with a price—what is such loyalty worth? The very terms imply threats, and involve the assertion of the very principle of secession itself. To treat with it, to concede to it, is to admit the principle. It has already cost the country too dearly to be longer endured. Six hundred millions of dollars and a hundred thousand lives vainly sacrificed to the foolish policy, are enough. It helps the cause of rebellion, it paralyzes the arm of Government. The people have become sternly impatient of it. The sooner President Lincoln, in his quality of Commander-in-Chief, understands this, and makes the Border State Unionists understand that every thing must give way to the necessity of putting an end to the rebellion forthwith by the employment of all the means which God and nature have put in our power, the better it will be for him, the better for the nation, and the better for the Border States themselves, if they are wise. I think that when firmly told there must be an end to this conditional Unionism, this loyalty with a price, those States will have the wisdom to see on which side their real interests lie. But, at all events, the question should be settled. Better they should go over to the rebels at once, than prevent the extinction of the rebellion through their conditional Unionism.

But it is with Northern out-criers for the Constitution and the Union that the present inquiry is chiefly concerned. These men want the Union 'as it was.' What was it? What was it, in the only thing that is in their thoughts and wishes when they raise the cry? It was a Union controlled by the South through alliance with a Northern party styling itself Democratic. It was the whole power of the Federal Government wielded for the aggrandizement of slavery, its extension and perpetual maintenance as an element of political domination. This is what the Union was. This is what these Democrats want again—in order that they may again enjoy such a share (never an equal one) in the honors and emoluments of office as their oligarchic masters may allow them. This is all they think of or desire when they cry for the Union as it was—a chance for loaves and fishes again at the hands of those who for thirty years have used them and despised them. They want to be used and despised again. Hence, though they talk about putting an end to the rebellion, they want it put an end to only in such a way as shall secure the restoration of the slave power to its old position, and of themselves to their old relations with it. This would set them up in their business again. They are out of business now.

Hence, while Governor Stanly, in North-Carolina, is telling the people there that the rebellion must be crushed though it involve the destruction 'of every Southern institution,' and that the maintenance of the supremacy of the National Government and the integrity of the national domain is worth more than all the lives and all the property of rebels of whatever sort; and while Andrew Johnson is declaring the same thing in Tennessee, these Northern traitors are speaking tenderly of the rebellion as an 'irregular opposition'—excited and almost justified by Northern aggressions on Southern rights—which ought to be so met on our part as not to preclude the South from a return to its ancient domination. They insist that the struggle shall be conducted with the least possible 'irritation' of rebel feelings and with a sacred regard to their slave rights. They bewail the enormities perpetrated by Congress and the President against the rebels, the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the receiving and feeding of fugitive slaves, the employment of negroes as Government teamsters, the repeal in the Senate of the law prohibiting free negroes to carry the mail, the legalizing of the testimony of blacks, the attempt 'to create an Abolition party in the Border States' by the offer of compensation to the owners in such States as may adopt the policy of emancipation, and lastly, the Confiscation Act, which takes away the property of rebels and sets free their slaves. These things they denounce in the bitterest terms—some of them as 'wounding to the sensibilities of the South,' and some of them as atrocious outrages on the rights of the rebels, calculated to drive them to such 'desperation' that they will never consent, on any entreaty of their Northern friends, to accept their old position of political control in the 'Union as it was.'

Some of these men talk, indeed, of putting down the rebellion by the strong arm; but they talk a great deal more of putting down Abolitionism—which with them means not only hostility to slavery, but even the disposition to acquiesce in the military necessity of its extinction. They sometimes go to the length of talking of 'hanging the secessionists;' but then, you will observe, they always talk of hanging the 'Abolitionists' along with them. They want them to dangle at the other end of the same rope. It is easy, however, to perceive that the hanging of the secessionists is not the emphatic thing—with many not even the real thing, but only an ebullition of vexation at them for having spoiled the old Democratic trade—a figurative hanging—often, indeed, only a rhetorical tub thrown out prudentially to the popular whale, who might not be quite content to hear them talk of hanging only on one side: but the hanging of the Abolitionists, there is no mistaking their feelings about that; there is a hearty smack of malignant relish on their lips when they speak of it.

These men are as foolish as they are traitorous in their cry for the Union as it was. The Union 'as it was' is a thing that never can be again. They say the South wants nothing but guarantee for the security of its constitutional slave rights—if that had been given they would never have taken up arms; give them that and they will lay them down. Nothing more false. Just before the secession of South-Carolina, Pryor telegraphed from Washington: 'We can get the Crittenden Compromise, but we don't want it.' 'No matter what compromise the North offers,' said Mason, 'the South must find a way to defeat it.' These are facts undeniable and undenied. They demonstrate the falsehood and folly of the men who talk of bringing the rebels back into the Union by concessions. The South did not want guarantees; it wanted separation. It determined to set up an independent slave empire, and no concession you can make will lead them to abandon their determination. Undo the recent legislation of Congress, reëstablish slavery in the District of Columbia, and repeal the prohibition of slavery in the Territories, and you make the Union 'as it was,' so far as the North is concerned; but will that bring back the South? No. Go still further, and make the Union more than 'it was' for them; yield them the principle of the Lemmon Case, and so allow them to call the roll of their slaves under the shadow of Bunker Hill, and to convert New-York Battery into a slave-mart for the convenience of slave-breeding Virginia and the slave-buying Gulf States; and will these concessions lead the rebels to lay down their arms and return into the Union? No. They will never lay down their arms until they are conquered by overwhelming military force. They will never be in the Union until subjugated. And I think the rebellion will never be extinguished without extinguishing slavery. Then, and not before, will the conditions begin to exist of lasting peace and true union between the South and the North. Then, and not before, will there be genuine prosperity, a true social order, and a decent civilization in the South.

And since 'the Union as it was' is a thing that never can be again, it is not worth while to concern ourselves overmuch about 'the Constitution as it is,' so far as those who raise the outcry for it have any determinate meaning in their cry. For here, too, the reëstablishment of the political power of slavery is the only point in their view.

The Constitution—in its great substance, in its essential principles, in the general frame of government it establishes, in its organization of powers, in its main provisions, and in most of its details—is an instrument which probably few wise and patriotic Americans would care to see altered, and none would wish to see subverted. But the constitutions of all governments, written or unwritten, (and each sort has its special advantages and disadvantages,) are more or less subject to change—must change and should change—with the progress of society. The Constitution of the United States provides for its own amendment by the people by whom and for whom it was framed. Many amendments have already been made; more are likely in time to be found needful. And no one but a fool will swear blindly by 'the Constitution as it is,' if he is thereby to be precluded from voting for such improvements as time and circumstances may make important and desirable.

But these traitorous traders in the phrase have (as before said) but one single point in view. In the whole compass of the Constitution their devotion embraces nothing in their vows for its unchangeable sacredness except its recognition of slavery, its provisions for the rendition of fugitive slaves, and for counting five Southern chattels as three white citizens in the basis for Federal representation. These are provisions that must not be changed. This is what they mean, and all they mean, when they shout for 'the Constitution as it is.' So sacred is the Constitution in this one sole respect, that they have rung every change of protest—from solemn remonstrance to frantic howls of wrath—against the recent law for taking from rebels the slaves that dig trenches and grow food for them while they are fighting for the overthrow of the Constitution. And the only vision of a Constitution 'as it is' which looms up to their views and wishes in the future—'the Mecca of their hearts' fond dream'—is the overthrow of this legislation, and the reinstatement of slaveholders in their old rights fortified and extended by Supreme Court decisions carrying slavery and their slave laws into all the Territories, with the right of transit and sale for slaves in all the free States.

But most wise men believe that in the end of the war there is not likely to be much slavery to need constitutional protection. And since our nation at its very birth solemnly proclaimed the doctrine that of right 'all men are born free and equal' as before the law, and have an equal right 'to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' perhaps these Democrats may be willing to let these provisions in behalf of slavery be dropped out of the Constitution when they shall have become no longer any thing but a dead letter—with no power of political victory and reward in them. As a living contradiction to the Declaration of Independence they have been the source of all our woes. It is not necessary to blame the framers of our Constitution for introducing them. They did it for the best, as they thought. They themselves hoped and believed the necessity for such provisions would long before this time cease to exist. They little dreamed what mighty mischiefs, what long contentions, what bitterness, what crimes, what bloody horrors they were entailing on their descendants. They little dreamed what a terrible Nemesis would so soon avenge the expedient and temporary introduction (as they thought) of a contradiction to the principles of liberty into the organic law of a free nation whose first foundations they themselves had laid in the solemn proclamation of man's inalienable rights.

Is it too much to hope that, by and by, when there shall (as God grant) no longer be any slavery to need protection, these Democrats will be willing that this contradiction should be removed, by making a slight alteration in 'the Constitution as it is'? Let us trust they will. It is true the Democratic party for twenty years has had but one single principle. Its whole life, activity, object, and occupation has centred and turned on the one sole point of upholding slavery, echoing its doctrines, asserting its rights, obeying its behests, extending its area, and aggrandizing its power; and so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of their Southern masters became the members of the party, that in ten years past I have found but few men calling themselves Democrats and acting with the party who were not in mind and heart, in principle and feeling, pro-slavery men! Pro-slavery Democrats! Four-cornered triangles! Square circles! So the sense of contradiction always struck me. Yet for most of them I could not feel any thing of that intense scorn with which John Randolph of Roanoke more than thirty years ago branded the Northern 'doughface' in Congress, when pointing his skinny finger at his sneaking victim, he exclaimed: 'Mr. Speaker, I envy neither the head nor the heart of the Northern man who rises here to defend slavery on principle.' I remembered the prodigiously demoralizing effect of slavery on the moral sense and sentiments. I remembered that the present generation of Democrats have been subjected to the influence of Southern masters who long ago out-grew and renounced the sentiments prevalent in the early days of John Randolph: and I have been charitable in most cases (not in all) to their inability to see the contradiction between the ideas of Democracy and Pro-Slaveryism. Let us hope for better things in time to come. With their bondage, their love of bondage will go. It has been passing from the hearts of the great, honest masses of them ever since Saint Sumter's Day.