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 16, 1862.
By John Jay, Esq.
THE CORNERSTONE OF THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY
We have glanced at the secret history of the conspiracy. Now, let me ask, on what ground does this usurping Confederacy ask to be recognized as independent and admitted to the family of nations?
In the convention of South Carolina, in reply to an objection that the declaration reported by the committee dwelt too much on the Fugitive Slave Law and personal liberty bills, as giving it the appearance of special pleading, Mr. Memminger said: "Allow me to say to the honorable gentleman, that when you take position that you have a right to break your faith, to destroy an agreement that yon have made, to tear off your seal from the document to which it is affixed, you are bound to justify yourself fully to all the nations of the world, for there is nothing that that casts such a stain upon the escutcheon of a nation as a breach of faith."
In this Mr. Memminger was clearly right, and the alleged breach of faith by the North, touching the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law was resorted to as affording a plausible pretext for seceding from the Union. But the debates show that this pretext was a sham, and Mr. Rhett frankly declared that he regarded the Fugitive Slave Law as unconstitutional, and that Mr. Webster and Mr. Keitt had expressed the same opinion.
You have seen, too, from Mr. Stephens, that all the constitutional rights of the South were protected within the Union—and that the South was indebted to the Union for her safety, prosperity and happiness.
What then is the real ground on which the breach of faith committed by the seceding states is to be justified, if it can be, justified at all; on what ground is it recommended to the prejudices of the South and to the impartial judgment of the world?'
After secession was an accomplished fact, so far as their conventions could manage it by usurped authority and fictitious majorities, and Mr. Stephens had become not only a member but a prominent leader of the conspiracy, he said at Atlanta:-
"The foundations of our new government are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and moral condition. This our new government is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth."
Mr. Stephens enlarged upon this distinguishing characteristic of the government, to establish which the union was to be dissolved, sneered at the principle that all men are equal, enunciated by our fathers in the declaration of independence "as the pestilent heresy of fancy politicians"—declared that "African inequality and the equality of white men were the chief cornerstone of the southern republic!" and claimed that with a government so founded "the world would recognize in theirs the the model nation of history."
Here we have their only apology for this rebellion, stripped of all shams and disguises, and thus at length in the latter half of the nineteenth century, stand face to face in deadly conflict the antagonist systems of the new world.
"All men," said the founders of the American republic, "are created free and equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." "Let it ever be remembered," said the Continental Congress, " that the rights for which we have contended were the rights of human nature," and on that foundation arose the fair fabric of our liberties.
The dark shadow arises of another confederacy which Davis and Keitt and Floyd and Toombs are striving to establish on the ruins of the republic erected by Washington and Franklin and Hamilton and Jefferson, and the one great plea with which this new power seeks to recommend itself to the Christian world, is the assumption that the white man was born to be the master and the black man was created to be his slave.
THE REBELS OF '76 AND THOSE OF '61.
The attempt of the slavery insurrectionists to bring into contempt the great principle of the Declaration of Independence and their characterizing the men who uttered it and the men who believe in it as "fancy politicians," shows how absolutely antagonist in their principles were those who rebelled in '76 against unconstitutional acts of parliament, and those who in '61 are rebelling against the constitution of the United States. Even in the august year which we are met to celebrate, the principles and reasonings of our fathers commanded the admiration of Europe, and called forth in the House of Lords that magnificent eulogy of Chatham, when he said that for himself he must declare that he had studied and admired the free states of antiquity, the master states of the world: but that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity and wisdom of conclusion, no body of men could stand in preference to the congress of Philadelphia.
Whatever may be the future of America the past is safe.
The Confederates of the slave republic, unrivaled as may be their skill in robbing us of material wealth and power, cannot rob the Founders of our Union of their glory—cannot filch from us the treasures we possess in their great principles, cannot lessen by the tithe of a hair, the truth of and force of their example.
On the contrary, the formation of the Southern Confederacy adds new proof to their farsighted and prophetic sagacity. Look at the rebel states, plunged into anarchy and war by Jefferson Davis, with a fettered press, free speech silenced, forced loans, and an army enlarged by conscription, and then listen to a single passage from William Pinckney, the great orator of Maryland, which occurs in a speech made in the Maryland House of Delegates, in 1789: and remember as you listen to it the proof I have already given you that the so-called Southern Confederacy is a military despotism, extemporized and precipitated on the people of the South, who have never been allowed to express their will in regard to the substitution of the Montgomery Constitution, for the ancient constitution and government which the Confederates are striving to destroy.
Said Mr. Pinckney:-
"That the dangerous consequences of the system of bondage have not as yet been felt does not prove that they never will be. * * To me, sir, nothing for which I have not the evidence of my senses is more clear than that it will one day destroy that reverence for liberty which is the vital principle of a republic. "While a majority of your citizens are accustomed to rule with the authority of despots within particular limits, while your youth are reared in the habit of thinking that the great rights of human nature are not so sacred but they may with innocence be trampled on, can it be expected that the public mind should glow with that generous ardor in the cause of freedom which can alone save a government like ours from the lurking demon of 'usurpation? Do you not dread contamination of principle? Have you no alarms for the continuance of that spirit, which once conducted us to victory and independence when the talons of power were unclasped for our destruction 1 Have you no apprehension that when the votaries of freedom sacrifice also at the gloomy altars of slavery, they will at length become apostates from the former? For my own part,I have no hope that the stream of general liberty will flow forever unpolluted through the foul mire of partial bondage, or that they who have been habituated to lord it over others, will not in time be base enough to let others lord it over them. If they resist it will be the struggle of pride and selfishness, not of principle."
The hour so philosophically predicted seventy-two years ago has come. The usurping hand is lifted against the most benignant government the world has ever seen. The usurpation is unresisted, the country is precipitated into war and popular government overthrown, and a military rule established, the people, it would seem, have cast to the world the historic memories we this day meet to celebrate. Mr. Russell, the correspondent of the London Times, now traveling at the South, treated with every attention, charmed with their courtesy, and evidently inclined to regard their rebel movement with a favorable eye, writes from South Carolina on the 30th April, and makes this sad disclosure: "From all quarters have come to my ears the echoes of the same voice ; it may be feigned, but there is no discord in the note, and it sounds in wonderful strength and monotony all over the country. Shades of George III., of North, of Johnson, of all who contended against the great rebellion which tore these colonies from England, can you hear the chorus which rings through the state of Marion, Sumpter and Pinckney and not clash your ghostly hands in triumph? that voice says ' If we could only get one of the royal race of England to rule over us we should be content.'"
HOW THE REBELS ACQUIRED THEIR STRENGTH
Let me say next a word of the means by which a conspiracy so contemptible in its origin, so destitute of moral weight and of popular support has attained to its present dimensions, ousting the federal government of its jurisdiction in more than half of our national territory to the east of the Rocky Mountains, and obtaining possession of arsenals and navy yards and fortresses, seventeen in number, which had cost the American people more than seven millions of dollars.
On the 29th October, 1860, before the presidential election, Lieut. General Scott wrote a letter to President Buchanan in which he referred to the secession excitement which the leaders of the conspiracy, were actively fanning at the South, and remarked, that if this glorious Union were broken by whatever line political madness might contrive, there would be no hope of reuniting the fragments, except by the laceration and despotism of the sword; pointing out the danger, he proceeded to point out the prevention:-
"From a knowledge of our southern population," he said, "it is my solemn conviction that there is some danger of an early act of rashness preliminary to secession, viz.: the seizure of some or all of the following posts: Forts Jackson and Philip in the Mississippi, below New Orleans, both without garrisons; Fort Morgan, below Mobile, without a garrison, Forts Pickens and McRae, Pensacola harbor, with an insufficient garrison for one; Fort Pulaski below Savannah, without a garrison; Forts Moultrie and Sumpter, Charleston harbor, the former with an insufficient garrison, and the latter without any, and Fort Monroe, Hampton Roads, without a sufficient garrison. In my opinion all these works should immediately be so garrisoned as to make any attempt to take any one of them, by surprise or coup de main, ridiculous. ""With an army, faithful to its allegiance and the navy probably equally so, and with a federal executive for the next twelve months of firmness and moderation, which the country has a right to expect—moderation being an element of power, not less than firmness—there is good reason to hope that the danger of secession may be made to pass away without one conflict of arms, one execution or one arrest for treason."
Gentlemen, Lieut. General Scott knew well, we all know, that what he recommended Mr. Buchanan to do an honest executive might have done. Again and again in the history of our country have attempts been made to resist the execution of the laws, and again and again has the federal government triumphantly vindicated its supremacy.
The first armed rebellion was that headed by Shay in Massachusetts in the Winter of 1787. The rebels attempted to seize the arsenal, and were met with cannon that killed three and wounded another of their number, and the state militia, under the command of Gen. Lincoln routed their forces, taking many prisoners, and peace was restored not by any compromise but by the enforcement of the laws.
As a Lincoln suppressed the first rebellion, so will a Lincoln suppress the last.
You will readily call to mind other similar occasions, where the federal government by prompt action maintained its supremacy unimpaired.
First came the whiskey rebellion in Pennsylvania during the administration of Washington, to suppress which the president called out fifteen thousand men from three different states led by their governors and general Morgan, whom Washington at first proposed himself to accompany across the Alleghanies.
Next president Jefferson crushed in the bud the opening conspiracy of Aaron Burr.
President Madison during the war of 1816, when doubts were entertained of the loyalty of the Hartford conventionists, who were falsely reported to be in correspondence with the enemy, stationed major Jessup, of Kentucky, at Hartford with a regiment to suppress any sudden outbreak. Gen. Jackson, about the same time in New Orleans, proclaimed martial law in consequence of attempts by the civil authorities to embarrass the necessary measures of defense.
President Jackson, in 1832, repressed by the arm of General Scott, and amid the hearty applause of the nation, the defiant nullification of South Carolina, and President Tyler, in 1843, with the approval of his secretary, Mr. John C. Calhoun, sent United States troops to Rhode Island to suppress the state revolution organized by a majority of the people of the state, but in violation of the existing state constitution, under the leadership of Governor Thomas W. Dorr.
When, in 1860, General Scott, in advance of any outbreak, recommended President Buchanan to reinforce the forts instead of recommending active measures of interference, such as his predecessors whom I have named did not hesitate to take, he simply asked of the president to do what any intelligent school boy could see was absolutely proper and essential—and what he could accomplish by a single word.—Mr. Buchanan guided by his secretary of war, the traitor and thief John B. Floyd, refused to order the reinforcement of the fortresses; all the forts named by General Scott, excepting Fort Pickens, were seized by the Confederates; and on the fact of their quiet possession, and the aid and comfort thus given to the rebels by the federal cabinet, was based the secession of the traitorous states and the formation of the new Confederacy.
The fact thus becomes clear as day, that not simply all the strength the rebel Confederacy originally possessed but its very organization and existence, were due not to the people of the South on whom without their sanction it was precipitated, nor to the leaders, skillful as they may have been, who had neither arms nor armies to overpower the government, but they were due to the federal executive and his advisers of the cabinet. This fact is so interesting as a matter of history, it is so important to a right understanding of the whole subject, and bears so clearly upon the question, what is our duty as citizens and what the policy of our government, as regards the tolerance or suppression of this rebellion, that you will allow me to quote one authority upon the point from among the rebels themselves.
The Baltimore Examiner in an elaborate eulogy of Floyd, who in the extent and infamy of his treachery certainly excelled his fellow traitors in the cabinet, makes this plain avowal: "All who have attended to the developments of the last three months and knew aught of the movements of the Buchanan administration up to the time of Floyd's resignation, will justify the assertion that the Southern Confederacy would not and could not be in existence at this hour, but for the action of the late Secretary of War.
"The plan invented by General Scott to stop secession was like all campaigns devised by him, very able in its details and nearly certain of general success. The Southern states are full of arsenals and forts commanding their rivers and strategic points: General Scott desired to transfer the army of the United States to these forts as speedily and as quietly as possible. The Southern states could not cut off communication between the government and the fortresses without a great fleet, which they can not build for years; or take them by land without one hundred thousand men, many hundred millions of dollars, several campaigns, and many a bloody siege. Had Scott been able to have got these forts in the condition he desired them to be, the Southern Confederacy would not now exist."
THE TRAITORS WHO HAVE BETRAYED US
Such is the truth fairly stated by the Baltimore Examiner, in the interest of the rebels. The union has been severed, not by violence from, without, but by treachery within. It has been convulsed from its centre to its circumference, not from any internal weakness in our federal system, but by the infernal villainy of our federal rulers.
Traitors have betrayed the union, traitors have betrayed our forts; and the betrayal no more proves moral weakness in the one case than it does material weakness in the other. There is no fortification so impregnable but that a traitorous governor may yield it without a blow—neither is there any government on God's earth, that secret treachery may not enfeeble or temporarily overthrow.
"If," said Webster, "those appointed to defend the castle shall betray it, woe betide those within. Let us hope," he added, and how vain the hope as regards ourselves, "that we shall never see the time when the government shall be found in opposition to the constitution, and when the guardians of the Union shall become its betrayers."
I do not mean to say, gentlemen, that President Buchanan, who, at the close of his administration partially redeemed its character, by calling to his counsels those brave men and true patriots, Mr. Holt and General Dix, was personally privy to the designs of the false secretaries whom they replaced : but it is nevertheless true that he is the man who, under the Constitution is directly responsible to the American people for the acts of his administration.
In his position timidity was treason and inaction was crime. He alone could execute the laws, he had the power to execute them, and he did not execute them; and for the simple want of their non-execution the country drifted rapidly towards destruction. This was a case which the founders of our republic had not anticipated. As Mr. Sherman, of Ohio, aptly said, "the Constitution provided against every probable vacancy in the Office of President, but did not provide for utter imbecility."
I am aware that Mr. Buchanan's friends attribute his conduct in the whole matter to an amiable credulity and a humane desire to avoid the shedding of a drop of blood. I am sure that none of us would wish to deprive him of whatever benefit he may derive from the plea of virtuous motives, but allowing them all the force they are entitled to, we must still exclaim:-
"Curse on his virtues, they've undone his country!"
For no other of the confederates in this great villainy will the candid historian venture with success, the apology of mental imbecility or moral cowardice. They are men who make the boast that for long years it has been the aim of their existence to overthrow, not by open and honorable opposition, but secretly, traitorously and by subornation of treason, the most benignant government in the world, and one to which they were bound by solemn oaths and by sacred honor. They are men who, pretending to be gentlemen, have made conspiracy a trade and perjury a habit. They have blended professions of patriotism with the practice of treason, linked the duties of a senator with the position of a spy, and made a seat in the cabinet the office of a thief. With a refinement of meanness that could belong to no chivalry but that of slaveholding, and would be practiced by no knights save those of " the golden circle," they have to the last moment drawn their official salaries from the nation they were betraying; they have perfected their schemes of plunder in the very capital which they were seeking to cripple, and beneath the folds of the flag that they were swearing to support and plotting to humble. They are men in brief—for the subject is a revolting one—who, imitating Judas and rivalling Arnold, have made their daily life simply and purely a daily lie.
PROGRESS OF THE PLOT AND RISING OF THE PEOPLE
Did time permit me, I would like briefly to refer to the national events that, following in quick succession, have interrupted what Mr. Seward happily calls "the majestic march of our national progress;" the successive seizure of Southern forts in obedience to telegrams from the senate chamber, the spread of Southern treason like the wild fire of the prairies, the consternation of the people, the apathy of the executive, the plot to seize the capitol, intended to be executed in January and repeatedly postponed till the attempt involved too serious danger, the systematic efforts in the departments of the Treasury, of the Interior of War, and I fear also, of the Navy, to cripple the United States, to strengthen the rebels, and to close the term of the administration by a coup d'etat, that should give to the new Confederacy the power and the prestige of the old government, and the preparations made by northern confederates whom the rebels had been taught to believe represented the great northern democracy, for assisting the plot and joining at the right moment in a general revolution.
Lost themselves to a sense of honor, they ceased to believe in its existence at the North. They seem to have been unable to distinguish between a defense of the Constitutional rights of slaveholders within the union and under the constitution, and a war in behalf of slavery for the severance of the Union, the overthrow of the Constitution, the desecration of our flag, and the humiliation of our country. Then came the interruption of their plans by the premature discovery of the theft of the Indian bonds and other villanies, compelling the retirement of the traitorous secretaries Cobb, Thompson and Floyd: the advent of Holt and Dix reviving the hopes of the nation, and the immortal order of the latter, which rung like a trumpet through the land, "If any man shall attempt to pull down the national flag shoot him on the spot."
Then came the official announcement to the country, by the counting of the electoral votes, of the people's choice, next the safe arrival of Mr. Lincoln in Washington, unharmed by the assassins who had sworn to take his life ; then the inauguration, simple and imposing, the oath administered by the chief justice of the United States, and the quiet transfer of such remnants of the federal property as had not been stolen from the people under the retiring administration.
A month of apparent inaction on the part of the new administration, engaged in disentangling the web of treachery, and learning how much of treason lingered in the departments—a month of active preparation by the rebel confederates, and we began to hear the bitter taunts of England at the spiritless people of the great North who were being driven to dissolution and infamy without an effort at resistance, and relinquishing their nationality to a rebellion without striking a blow in its defense.
We had a brief foretaste of the ignominy that awaits a nation which basely surrenders its integrity and its independence, and we heard the prelude of the shout that would greet the downfall of the Union, and the epitaph that should record:-
* * "But yesterday it might
Have stood against the world ; now lies it there,
And none so poor to do it reverence."
Assured of the integrity and patriotism of the President and the wisdom of his cabinet, the North waited as only a brave people, conscious of their strength and of the justice of their cause could afford to wait. The strength of the government was gradually developed, the war and navy departments began to exhibit signs of life—and the great statesman of the West, who sacrificing political ambition and personal preferences, had consented to preside over a depleted Treasury, renewed the miracle attributed by Webster to Alexander Hamilton: "He smote the rock of tho national resources, and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead body of the public credit, and it sprang upon its feet."
Desperate as our situation seemed, capitalists demanded no other security than the name of Chase, and when he asked for a loan of eight millions, more than thirty millions were instantly offered.
Gentlemen, I have not time to dwell on the attack on Sumpter, the attack of ten thousand men on one hundred men, and tho ill-judged boast of Governor Pickens that they had humbled the Star-Spangled Banner for the first time in seventy years. They themselves by that act and that boast initiated an irresistible conflict that will hardly cease till the Stars and Stripes again float in their beauty from every fortress in our land.
That bombardment, as was remarked by one of the Judges of the Supreme Court, "blew all the plots of the traitors into the air, and inaugurated a change in the sentiment of the country that seemed all but miraculous." It awoke the deep love of country which had slumbered beneath the platforms of party and commercial interest. It ended at once the absurd cry of "no coercion," as applicable to a government in enforcing its laws, and protecting its existence. The rebels by that act closed the door of compromise and reconciliation which had thus far been kept open. They rejected the appeal to a convention of the American people, to which the president in his inaugural had assented—they selected instead the arbitrament of force, the great trial by battle. They struck at the very heart of the nation when they sought to humble the flag of our union that had protected them from infancy, and which from childhood we have loved. They themselves inaugurated war. They imposed upon us the most sacred duty that can devolve it; on a people of protecting their nationality, and the world that had wondered at a forbearance which they could not understand, now wondered again at the spontaneous uprising of a mighty nation.
The threatened attack on Washington, the disloyalty of Baltimore, the cutting off of all communication by railroad and telegraph between the national capital and the great North, completed the work begun at Sumpter.
Party lines grew faint and vanished as completely as though they had never existed. Washington has been described as leaning in the darkest hour of the revolution, with one arm resting on Massachusetts, and the other on North Carolina. The faithlessness of tho latter to her historic memories, prevents the parallel being now complete, but we may say of Lincoln what can be said of no other president since Washington, that in this dark hour he rests with one great arm upon his political friends, and the other on his political opponents, and that, as he looks abroad over the country whose destinies are in his keeping, he sees neither republicans, nor democrats—neither nativists, nor aliens, he sees but two classes, loyal citizens on the one side, and traitors on the other.
The feeling exhibited throughout the loyal states is not as some Europeans have supposed, an ebulition of enthusiasm, based upon sudden and evanescent passion, but tho expression of a profound conviction gradually forced upon them by a long train of facts that culminated at Sumpter, that both duty and honor imperatively demand that they shall crush this gigantic conspiracy against the integrity of the country.
THE ARMY OF THE UNION.
It was this that, within six weeks, called forth, as if by magic, an army of 200,000, converting our cities into camps and making the repression of this rebellion the one great business of the American people.
The scene has been one which, day by day, has thrilled us with emotion, one upon which the Bancroft and the Motley of the next century will linger with admiration.
Massachusetts first in the field, as in the olden days of trial, shedding the first blood at Baltimore, first to occupy and protect the capital, where her great senator was stricken down, against the traitors, whose hatred to him foreshadowed their hatred towards the American Constitution, of which he had been the faithful and eloquent expounder.
New York, "herself the noblest eulogium on the Union," following close behind with her gallant Seventh, reaching Washington by a march already famous, and insuring by their presence the safety of Washington. The New England states, Pennsylvania and the great west, pouring in their quotas with generous rivalry, and our foreign population rising instantly to the grandeur of the occasion, and hastening to the defense of their adopted country, present features of strength in the American Republic of which the most ardent of its eulogists had hardly dreamed.
If any man has regarded our large foreign element as one that threatened danger to the perpetuity of popular institutions, let him glance at the regiments now gathering to battle in their behalf. He will find among them men who have fought for freedom in other lands, and who have pined for their love of it in continental dungeons. He will find scholars from far-famed universities, and graduates of the military schools of Europe who have emerged from positions in which they were gaining an independency to proffer to their country their dear bought experience, and guide and instruct the military ardour that sweeps like a whirlwind over the land. Call the roll of nationalities and you will have responses from England and Ireland, Scotland and Wales, from natives of Catholic France and Protestant Germany—you will have replies from Poles who yet dream of an independent Poland, from Hungarians in whose ears still linger the eloquence of Kossuth, from Italians rejoicing in a regenerated Italy, and who are fresh from executing the policy of the lamented Cavour and from fighting by the side of Garibaldi. Every people of Christendom has its representatives in the army of the Union that has gone forth to fight for national unity, national independence and the rights of human nature, against the confederated forces of slavery and treason.
[To be Continued]
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