The Great Conspiracy and England's Neutrality (Part One) January, 1862

THE GREAT CONSPIRACY, and England's Neutrality. (Part One of Four)

An Address delivered at Mount Kisco, New York, on the Fourth of July, 1861, the Eighty-Sixth Anniversary of American Independence. 

Source: Pacific Commercial Advertiser. Honolulu: January 9, 1862.

By John Jay, Esq. 

My Fellow-Countrymen :—

We have assembled to celebrate the eighty-sixth birthday of American Independence, and we come together under circumstances that seem to make us contemporaries and co-actors as it were, with our fathers of the revolution. The crisis which they met, and which their heroism decided after a seven years' war with Great Britain, again meets us face to face. The early scenes of their struggle for constitutional liberty, have found in our recent experience an historic parallel of even chronological exactness.

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If ever the spirits of the departed are permitted to revisit the scenes they loved, and hover like angels around the steps of their successors, we may suppose that Hancock, and the Adamses, Sherman and Wolcott, Carroll and Livingston, Jefferson and Franklin, Eobert and Lewis Morris, Wilson and Rush, and all their noble compeers, look down from heaven in this hour upon the Congress at Washington; and God grant that the sturdy spirit which inspired the first Congress may equally inspire the last!

"Whatever may be our fate," said John Adams, with prophetic vision, after the adoption of the declaration,—" be assured that this declaration will stand. It may cost treasure and it may cost blood, but it will richly compensate for both. Through the thick gloom of the present I see the brightness of the future as the sun in heaven. We shall make this a glorious, an immortal day. When we are in our graves our children will honor it. They will celebrate it with thanksgiving, with festivities, with bon-fires with illuminations. On its annual return they will shed tears, not of subjection and slavery, not of agony and distress, but of exultation, of gratitude and of joy. Sir, before God, I believe the hour is come : all that I have, all that I am, all that I hope for in this life, I am now ready here to stake upon it, and I leave off as I began, that live or die, sink or swim, survive or perish, I am for the declaration. It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment,—Independence now, and independence forever!"

The integrity and independence of our country are again in peril, and to-day the issue is with us. We come together now, not as in past years, to rejoice over a national domain boundless in extent, peopled by countrymen differing, it may be in their views and institutions but united in loyalty and affection, at peace in their own borders, and with the great arm of the union protecting its citizens alike on sea or land, at home or in foreign climes. But we meet in sadness to overlook a divided nation, and to listen to trie tramp of martial forces larger than ever before trod the soil of America: the one army bearing proudly aloft the stars and stripes, and keeping stop to the music of the Union; the other grasping the banner of rebellion and the black flag of piracy, proclaiming death to the Constitution and the Union, and rum to the commerce of the Republic.

Several States, about one-fourth of our whole number, profess to have resumed their sovereignty and seceded, as they term it from the federal Union: and certain persons professing to act in their name, have extemporized w hat they call the Southern Confederacy, elected a president, Jefferson Davis, and a vice-president, Alexander H. Stephens, organized an army, issued letters of marque, and declared war on the people and the government of the United States: and they have publicly announced, through Walker, the secretary of Davis, their intention of speedily seizing our capital at Washington, with its national archives and muniments of title.

To meet the rebel force arrayed against the Capital, President Lincoln has called upon the loyal states, and at the word, fresh from the plow, the loom and the workshop, fresh from college seats and the professor's chair, from the bar, the pulpit, and the counting house, fresh from every department of American industry, the army of the union is in the field, and the world awaits the impending crisis. Europe looks on with undisguised and wondering interest, and while France and Germany seem instinctively to appreciate our situation, the British Cabinet and the British press have strangely blundered, and have muttered something we do not understand, about "rights of belligerents," "a wicked war," and the "bursting of the bubble of democracy."

Such, in brief, is our. position at home and abroad, and this day is destined to be memorable-—perhaps as memorable in history as that which we have met to celebrate. The action of the Congress now assembled will decide whether the national independence established against the united strength of the British Empire in '76 is to fall ignominiously before the attacks of a rebel minority of our own countrymen in '61.

It is to decide the question whether in the next century our descendants shall refer to the fourth of July as the forgotten birth-day of an extinct republic, or whether, when we shall sleep with our fathers and our children shall slumber by our side, their grandsons shall meet as we do this day to bless our memories as we bless those of our revolutionary sires: to spread to the breeze from the Atlantic to the Pacific, on every hill side and in every valley, the flag of our Union, the Stars and Stripes that we so proudly love, and join their voices in swelling theory of Adams—" Independence now, and independence forever!"

While the great issue, the success or failure of the American experiment, the continuance of our union or its disintegration rests immediately with the President and with Congress, it rests in an almost equal degree upon each one of us. The American people are at once citizens and sovereigns—the fountain and source of the supreme authority of the land, and to us the people, will our servants in congress naturally and properly look for guidance in this extremity. Already have you seen how fairly an honest executive represents the sentiments of the majority'of his countrymen, availing himself of their counsels, gathering, strength from their energy and determination, and for directing-the "government that its action keeps time to the beating of the national pulse. Already in response to the nation's call has the national government arisen in gigantic strength from the depths of imbecility to which it had fallen, to a position of grandeur, dignity and power, which has silenced the half uttered sarcasms of European declaimers about, the internal weakness of popular institutions.

Most of you—perhaps all of you- have made up your minds deliberately,, intelligently and! dispassionately in regard to your duty; and it is a general and proper sentiment among us that this is a time for energetic action, not for discussion. But still as I am here, honored by your appointment, to say something befitting the occasion, I think you will permit me, if indeed you do not regard it, as my especial province, to speak frankly of our present duty; to say something of the great theme which engrosses the nation; of which we think when, we rise, in the morning and when we retire at night, as we go to, our work and return to our meals, when we open the morning paper for news and close it for reflection, when we kneel at the. family altar and by our own bed sides,—the one great overwhelming subject, the issue of this rebellion, the destiny of our country.

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UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF SECESSION.

You are familiar also with the history of our Constitution, and with those marked lines of distinction between the authority of the States and that of the Federal government, which to some of the statesmen and authors of England seem so difficult of comprehension, and in regard to which perhaps naturally enough, they occasionally fall into blunders, which unfortunately are not always as harmless as the droll liberties they are accustomed to take with our history, our geography, and our nomenclature.

If ever the constitutional history of America shall receive in the education of English gentlemen a tithe of the attention bestowed on,the constitutions of Greece and Rome, or a share of that devoted to the fabulous heroes, the gods and goddesses of classic mythology, the British senate may occasionally find a familiarity with our institutions of no slight value, especially if it shall save them from rashly interrupting the cordial friendship of a kindred people.

The universality of such knowledge here, makes us perhaps more ready to remark the want of it in foreign critics. Dr. Franklin said during the last century, and the progress of education and improvements in our newspapers have made the remark more true of the present than of the past,—" we are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with regard to our political interests than perhaps any other under heaven."

You remember that in 1774 the members of the first Congress at Philadelphia, on behalf of the colonies which they represented, entered into certain articles of association "under the sacred ties of virtue, honor and love of country." That in 1778 the States united in a confederacy, or what they called "a firm league of friendship with each other," under the title of the United States, and that under this league made by the states, they continued until 1789, when, " in order to form a more perfect union"—not the states—but "We the people of the United States" ordained and established the present Federal Constitution. You remember that from the date of the peace in '83, when we were a mere league of petty sovereignties, we sank rapidly, in the words of Mr. Motley, whose conclusive essay in the London Times has enlightened Europe, "into a condition of utter impotence, imbecility and anarchy," which continued until we were rescued from it by "The Constitution of the United States," which made us, in every sense, one nation—with one supreme government, although for convenience, we retained the plural title under which we had achieved our independence of "The United States."

Any argument, therefore, addressed to you upon the constitutional right alleged by the rebels, of a State to secede from the Union would be quite superfluous. Men have been allowed to talk of state sovereignty as it liked them, because ours is a free country and in ordinary times the utmost liberty of speech is permissible, but the doctrine has not even a respectable foothold. Washington, as if foreseeing the evil it has assisted to bring forth, denounced it as "that monster, state sovereignty." Webster and Jackson successively demolished it, and the argument now insolently advanced by leaders of the rebel states, that in seceding from the Union and seizing its property, they are only exercising their reserved rights under the Constitution, is one which to every intelligent and loyal American carries with it its own refutation. The man who attaches to it the weight of a feather, is either singularly ignorant of American history, or his reasoning powers are hopelessly perverted.

FALSE PRETENSE OF THE REBELS

The rebels, despite their pretended plea of constitutional right, virtually admit its groundlessness, and fall back on the right of revolution. That is a right which no American can deny, when the causes of justification are sufficient. The simple cry of rebel and revolutionist. has ho terror for us who remember that Washington and our ancestors occupied the position of both the one and the other.

All then depends upon the reality and sufficiency of the assigned causes of this attempt at revolution. Are they such as to justify the effort to break in pieces the American union? to destroy this last experiment of popular government?

The arguments offered by the insurrectionists and their friends, to show that the Federal Government and the loyal states should quietly allow them to depart and form a separate confederacy are these:-

-That the rebellion or revolution is the act of the people of those states exercising their sovereign will.

-That they have been compelled to this step in self defense by the election of Mr. Lincoln, and the refusal of certain Northern states to fulfill the Constitutional obligation of returning fugitive slaves.

-That the present position of the rebels, and the fact of their having ousted the federal government from its forts, and other property, exhibit their strength, make the revolution an accomplished fact, and render the attempt to subjugate the Southern people utterly hopeless.

-That even if they were subjugated, harmonious feeling could never be restored, and that for these reasons, and. especially the last, a war to maintain the integrity of the Union would be alike wicked and foolish.

These, I believe, are their strong points fairly stated, and I will briefly state some of the grounds on which we believe them to be, one and ail, erroneous and delusive.

SECESSION NOT A MOVEMENT OF THE PEOPLE.

In the first place, the fact is clear that the rebellion at the South was not in its inception like the rebellion of the American colonies,—a calm, deliberate, determined, movement of the people; but that it was a conspiracy originating with a few ambitious politicians, and was by them suddenly precipitated upon the people, whose right to pass upon their acts of secession has been purposely, systematically and practically denied. "There is," said Webster,—and his words were never before so fearfully illustrated,—"no usurpation so dangerous as that which cornea in the borrowed name of the people; which calling itself their servant, exercises their power without legal right or constitutional sanction."

You all remember the stern rebukes uttered by the Southern press, of the rash precipitancy of South Carolina, and the efforts made by their prominent statesmen, among whom Mr. Stephens was one, to stay the efforts of the rebel leaders to plunge the South into rebellion. Even after several states had by their conventions,—and the convention of Louisiana was elected by a minority of the people—been declared out of the Union; and after delegates from those conventions had met in Congress at Montgomery, and extemporized their new confederacy, the bolder part of the Southern press did not hesitate to denounce the usurpation.

The Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel—a leading paper of Georgia—openly declared that the result had been produced by "wheedling, coaxing and bullying, and all the arts of deception." It said:

"We know as well as any one living that the whole movement for secession and the formation of a new government, so far at least as Georgia is concerned, proceeded only on a quasi consent of the people, and was pushed through under circumstances of great excitement and frenzy by a fictitious majority." And then passing to the Montgomery Congress, it added:

"The Georgia convention and the Confederate Congress have gone forward in their work, as none can deny, without explicit and direct authority from the people." * * * "It is time that this assumption of power should cease, and that the people should be heard. Sooner or later they must be heard. * * * Before the convention assumes to ratify the permanent constitution let them submit it to a vote of the people—or else, let us have an election for a new convention. For Union—for harmony—for strength—we ask this simple act of justice."

Simple justice was not the aim of Jefferson Davis and his co-conspirators. To this day the people of the South have been allowed no opportunity of passing upon the profoundest question that can affect a nation—the preservation or overthrow of its institutions; and the rebel government is an usurpation of the grossest kind, not only against the people of the United States in their sovereign capacity, but against the people of the States in whose name it assumes to act, and by whose will it pretends to have been established.

A CONSPIRACY OF LONG YEARS.

The declaration, so solemnly made by the seceding conventions, appealing to the world for the justice of their cause, that Mr. Lincoln's election, the non-execution of the fugitive slave law, and the personal liberty laws of northern States, compelled them to separate from a government that threatened their dearest rights, is equally disproven out of their own mouths. Listen to the following utterances from the very leaders of the rebellion:

Mr. Rhett said :—" The secession of South Carolina is not the event of a day. It is not anything produced by Mr. Lincoln or by the non-execution of the fugitive slave law. It is a matter which has been gathering head for years."
Mr. Parker.—"It is no spasmodic effort that lias come suddenly upon us, but it has been gradually culminating for a long series of years."
Mr. Keitt.—"I have been engaged in this movement ever since I entered political life."
Mr. Inglis.—"Most of us have had this matter under consideration for the the last twenty years."

That these declarations had a broad basis of truth, and that a plot to destroy the Union has been hatching for a long period and has been deferred only until a convenient opportunity, is no longer a matter of speculation. The election of Mr. Lincoln was not the cause but only the occasion. Mr. Everett, in a recent letter said, that he was "well aware, partly from facts within his personal knowledge, that leading Southern politicians had for thirty years been resolved to break up the union as soon as they ceased to control the United States government, and that the slavery question was but a pretext for keeping up agitation and rallying the South."

The Richmond Enquirer in 1856, declared, "If Fremont is elected the Union will not last an hour after Mr. Pierce's term expires," and a careful examination will show that from the attempt at nullification by South Carolina in 1832, which was defeated by the stern determination of General Jackson that the "Union must and shall be preserved," a sentiment that was enthusiastically responded to by the country at large the design has been secretly cherished, by a knot of conspirators at the South, of destroying the union whenever the men entertaining this design should no longer be able to control its government. So long as they could enjoy its honors and emoluments, and use its prestige, its treasury, its army and its navy for their own purposes, they were content that it should stand; but the moment these were wrested from their grasp by the will of the people, that moment the union was to be destroyed.

So long ago as the year 1799 Judge Marshall in a letter to Washington, dated at Richmond, remarked:-

"To me it seems that there arc men who will hold power by any means rather than not hold it, and who would prefer a dissolution of the union to the continuance of an administration not of their own party." And Mr. Stephens declared in regard to the present conspiracy that the ambition of disappointed office-seekers constituted "a great part of the trouble."

General Jackson, after the South Carolina rebellion of 1832 was suppressed, foretold its attempted revival at no distant period, remarking that "the first time the pretense was the tariff, and that next it would be the negro question."

In 1836, twenty-five years ago, a political novel called the "Partisan Leader," was published by Professor Beverly Tucker, of William and Mary College, in Virginia. It excited no sensation then, but it possesses a singular interest now. It proceeds upon the theory that the events it describes as then happening would happen twenty years after, that is, in 1856, when Fremont would have probably been elected but for the frauds in Pennsylvania ; and it gives, with singular accuracy, the program of the conspiracy which is now in progress. The author describes the southern states as seceding "by a movement nearly simultaneous," and immediately forming a Southern Confederacy. Let me quote a single paragraph:

"The suddenness of these measures was less remarkable than the prudence with which they had been conducted. The two together left little doubt that there had been a preconcert among the loading men of the several states, arranging previously what should be done. * * Nor was it confined to the seceding states alone. In Virginia also there were men who entered into the same views. * * Not only had they sketched provisionally the plan of a southern confederacy, but they had taken measures to regulate their relations with foreign powers."

What a flood of light is thrown upon the conspiracy by these few words from one of the earliest of the conspirators, who seems to have anticipated in part the role to be played by his own State of Virginia.

There being indications of her ultimate accession to the Confederacy, the author says:-

"The leading men" referred to " had determined to wait for her no longer, but to proceed to the execution of their plans, leaving her to follow."

Could the acute novelist have anticipated the proceedings of the pseudo-peace convention and the conduct of Virginia traitors, headed by an ex-President Tyler and an ex-Governor Wise, he might have eulogized the leaders of the ancient dominion for their treacherous skill in deluding the country with schemes of compromise while the preparations of the rebels were advancing to completion.

Mr. Everett, who was a warm advocate for the peace convention, has told us that li those conciliatory demonstrations had no effect in staying the progress of secession, because the leaders of that revolution were determined not to be satisfied."

In reference to the measures referred to by Professor Tucker, looking towards the relations of the now confederacy with foreign powers, it maybe worth while to allude to a recent statement, that in the days of Mr. Calhoun a plan for the dissolution of the Union and tho formation of a great slaveholding power, was presented by his friends to Lord Aberdeen, and that some words attributed to that statesman, are supposed to have given rise to the hopes of British sympathy, in which southern politicians have so frequently indulged. It is said on high authority that at different times, and especially in 1851, these projects have been broached to members of the British ministry, and that on that occasion they were disclosed by Lord Palmerston to our minister, Mr. Abbott Lawrence, and that the Southern commissioners disheartened by the coolness with which their overtures were received, and also by the fate of the Lopez expedition, returned discomfited to the United States.

In 1857 Mr. Mason, of Virginia, announced as a fact, on the floor of the Senate, that the British government had changed its opinion on the slavery question, but an early occasion was taken by that government to contradict the assertion of Mr. Mason, the Duke of Argyll declaring that he was instructed by Her Majesty's ministers to do so.

Blind as we have all been to the catastrophe that awaited us, unconscious as were the people, both at the north and at the south, of this preconcert among a few leaders in the different states, we can now trace step by step the progress of the conspiracy and read the history of the last thirty years without an interpreter; we can understand the motive of the Texan rebellion, the war with Mexico, the persistent efforts to secure Cuba, the fillibustering expeditions to Central America and the determination to re-open the African slave trade. We can appreciate, too, the caution with which the plan of the rebellion was concealed, and especially the adroitness with which the people were allowed no time for reflection, no opportunity for action, their consent assumed on the plea of necessary haste, and the acts of secession pushed through the conventions, as charged by the Georgian editor, with no regard to popular rights and under circumstances of excitement and frenzy by fictitious majorities.

The doctrine of secession, earnestly as it had been advocated, failed to convince the capitalists, the planters, and the common-sense statesmen of the South—even in South Carolina.

A few years since Mr. Boyce of that State, late a member of the House of Representatives, in an address to the people, after shewing that by secession they would lose the vitality of a state, that they would exist only by tolerance, a painful and humiliating spectacle, that it would involve a sacrifice of the present without in anywise gaining in the future, emphatically declared, " such is the intensity of my conviction on the subject, that if secession should take place, of which I have no idea, for I cannot believe in such stupendous madness, I shall consider the institution of slavery as doomed, and that the great God in our blindness has made us the instrument of its destruction."

TESTIMONY OF ALEX. H. STEPHENS.

Even so late as the autumn of 1860, and after the presidential election that announced the defeat of the slave power which had so long ruled the country, the leading men of the South who had not been in the plot battled manfully against it. On the 14th of November last [1860], Mr. Stephens of Georgia, now the vice-president of the rebel Confederacy, delivered a long and able speech in the Georgia house of representatives in which, in answer to the question whether the Southern states should secede in consequence of Mr. Lincoln's election, he said:-

"My countrymen, I tell you frankly, candidly, and earnestly, that I do not think that they ought."

Reminding them of the sacred obligation resting on them to be true to their national engagements, he exclaimed-

"If the Republic is to go down, let us be found to the last moment standing on the deck, with the Constitution of the United States waving over our heads." And this sentiment was greeted with applause.

He expressed his belief that Mr. Lincoln would do nothing to jeopard their safety or security, and showed them the wisdom of our system with its checks and guards. He reminded them that the president was powerless unless backed by Congress—that the house of representatives was largely against him, and that there would be a majority of four against him in the senate, and referring to a remark that no Georgian, who was true to his state, could consistently hold office under Mr. Lincoln, reminded them that such office could be honorably held, for it would be conferred by the approval of a democratic senate—and this exposition was received with "prolonged applause."

Mr. Stephens frankly avowed that he would never submit to any republican aggression on their constitutional rights to preserve the Union, but insisted that all their rights could be secured in the union, and emphatically declared, "That this government of our fathers with all its defects, comes nearer the objects of all good governments than any other on the face of the earth, is my settled conviction." * * "Have we not at the South, as well as at the North, grown great, prosperous, and happy under its operation? Has any part of the world ever shown such rapid progress in the development of wealth, and all the material resources of national power and greatness as the Southern States have under the general government, notwithstand- all its defects?"

Mr. Stephens then, with philosophic skill, showed that the institutions of a people constitute the matrix from which spring all their characteristics of development and greatness. "Look," he said, "at Greece. There is the same fertile soil, the same blue sky, the same inlets and harbors, the same Egean, the same Olympus; there is the same land where Homer sung, where Pericles spoke; it is the same old Greece—but it is living Greece no more." He pictured its ruin of art and civilization, and traced that ruin to the downfall of their institutions. He drew the same lesson from Italy and Rome, once mistress of the world, and solemnly warned them that where liberty is once destroyed it may never return again.

Coming back to the State of Georgia he referred to the anxiety of many there in 1850 to secede from the Union—and showed that since 1860 the material wealth of Georgia, as a member of the Union, had nearly if not quite doubled.

He spoke of the prosperity in agriculture, commerce, art, science, and every department of education, physical and mental, and warned them against listening to the like temptation as that offered to our progenitors in the Garden of Eden—when they were led to believe that they would become as gods, and yielding in an evil hour saw only their own nakedness.

"I look," he said, "upon this country, with its institutions, as the Eden of the world, the paradise of the universe. It maybe that out of it we may become greater and more prosperous; but I am candid and sincere in telling you, that I fear if we rashly evince passion and without sufficient cause shall take that step, that instead of becoming greater or more peaceful, prosperous and happy —instead of becoming gods, we will become demons, and at no distant day commence cutting one another's throats."

Then, my countrymen, we have the testimony of the Vice-President of the rebel Confederacy, and the fact that Mr. Stephens, like our progenitors of whom he spoke, yielded to temptation and became a chief abettor of the scheme of ruin which he so strongly deprecated, detracts nothing from the value of this remarkable speech.' His treachery proves only his own weakness, it impeaches neither the truth of his facts—the aptness of his illustrations nor the conclusions to which he was led by his historic experience and irresistible logic.

Already in South Carolina, first and chiefest of the seceding States, have men professing to be respectable, men whose names connect them in past generations, with Englishmen of gentle blood and Huguenots of heroic fame, men who for years have borne in foreign climes the proud title of American citizens, and who know the simple dignity of the American republic among the nations of the earth,—'already are these men, since they discarded the protection of the federal government, so lost to self respect that they are not only ready to submit to a foreign yoke but, according to their eulogist, Mr. Russell, in a paragraph I will presently quote, they actually whimper like children for the privilege of becoming the vassals of an European princelet.

[To be Continued]