Ignorance and credulity have enabled unscrupulous partisans so to mislead public opinion, both at home and abroad, as to create the belief that the institution of African slavery was the chief cause, instead of being a mere incident in the group of causes, which led to war. In keeping with the first misrepresentation was that of the position assigned to the belligerent parties. Thus, the North is represented as having fought for the emancipation of the African slaves, and the South for the increase and extension of the institution of African servitude as it existed in the Southern States. Therein is a twofold fallacy. First, the dominant party at the North, in 1861, through their exponent, President Lincoln, declared, in his inaugural message, as follows:
“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so; and I have no inclination to do so.”
This declaration was reinforced by quoting from the platform of the political convention which nominated him, an emphatic resolution, in these words:
“Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends; and we denounce the lawless invasion, by armed force, of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.”
Fitly, as to time and occasion, was the armed invasion of a State denounced as among the gravest of crimes, and so it remains, whether or not a State’s secession should be an accomplished fact. If the State were still in the Union, it was a crime against the Constitution, which did not grant power to coerce a State (indeed the convention which formed that Constitution refused to give that power); if a State had withdrawn from the Union, it was a crime against humanity and justice to make war upon a neighbor’s late associate for the exercise of that sovereign right: in either case it was a crime against the hopes of mankind in destroying the fairest prospect for the success of federative government and substituting the theory of force for that of consent.
When Mr. Lincoln endorsed that resolution and incorporated it in his inaugural the effect was like a rift in the cloud while the storm and darkness were gathering, and the words closely following were the more cheering because of the prevalent belief in his rugged honesty. Pity that the confidence should have been impaired by subsequent passages in his address, and that the past and passing acts and avowals of his party gave no reasonable expectation that he would be able to execute his declared policy!
Federation had so generally proved a failure that the world had become distrustful of it; but its success in the United States had revived the hopes of those who saw in it the best mode of securing community welfare and happiness. It was therefore most proper to denounce as among the gravest of crimes the armed invasion of any State; for their conquest would be the extinguishment of the beacon which was illuminating the world by the rays of federal liberty.
If additional evidence be needed to prove that “emancipation” was not an original purpose, it may be found not only in the inaugural, but also in the fact that President Lincoln subsequently defended the issuance of his emancipation proclamation, in 1863, on the ground of “military necessity.” Therefore, the North could not have entered upon the war to abolish Slavery. Developments in the course of the war cannot be transplanted to its beginning, and then be made to do duty as the cause.
The Southern States could not have contemplated war as a means of defending her citizens against the evasion of their duty by the Northern States in the matter of fugitives from service or labor, nor because of lawless criminals who were secretly instigated to disturb the peace and property of border residents. Equally unfounded is any accusation that the South desired to increase the number of African slaves by importation. Her whole history from the colonial times, when Southern colonies opposed the slave-trade, in which Old England and New England were engaged, refutes the base and baseless reflection. The Constitution of the Confederate States gave no years of grace to the slave-trade, but forbade it immediately, from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States and Territories of the United States, and gave to Congress the power to prohibit the introduction of slaves from the Federal States or Territories. No more need be said as to increase.
The next point is extension. This is based on the assertion of the equal right of all citizens in and to the territory belonging to the United States. This equality, it was contended, carried with it the right of such citizen, migrating to a territory, to take with him any kind of property lawfully held in the State from which he migrated. This was a claim reasonably deduced from the fact that the Territories belonged to the States in common, and the denial of it was resisted because of its unequality and was an offensive discrimination. There could have been little, if any, pecuniary inducement to take slaves into the Northwest Territory. Persons migrating from the Southern States would probably desire to take with them their domestics, to whom they were personally attached; but the same climatic causes which had led to the transfer of African slaves from the Northeast to the South would have prevented the permanent establishment of the institution of Slavery in the States which might arise out of its Western Territories. What, then, was the objection? The transfer from a Southern State to a Western Territory would certainly not increase the number, and dispersion could only lead to comfort and harmony. If the purpose was, as some extremists asserted, to confine the institution until, by its density, slaves should become unprofitable — that is, until their labor should no longer enable the master adequately to provide for them, and want should compel emancipation — the humane man, looking at all the progressive stages of suffering and consequent crime to which this programme inevitably would tend, might ask, Is this the feast which philanthropy has spread for us?