Secession Convention in South Carolina: Slave Law and Union

The meeting of the Thirty-sixth Congress on the 3d of December, drew the attention of the whole people to the National capital. It was an event of solemn interest to the nation. To the Annual Message of the President the public looked eagerly for a definite expression of the views of the Government on the all-absorbing topic. The people sat down to read it with hope, and arose from its perusal with grievous disappointment. Faintheartedness and indecision appeared in almost every paragraph. After arguing that the election of a President who was distasteful to the people of one section of the country afforded no excuse for the offended ones to rebel, he declared that certain acts of Northern State Legislatures in opposition to the Fugitive-Slave Law, were violations of the Constitution, and if not repealed "the injured States, after having first used all peaceful and Constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the Government of the Union." The Secessionists could ask no more.

The President then considered the right of secession, and the relative powers of the National Government. Before preparing this portion of his message, he turned to the Attorney-General (Jeremiah S. Black) for advice. It was given in ample measure on the 20th of November, in not less than three thousand words. It gave much "aid and comfort" to the enemies of the Union, for it yielded everything to them. It declared, in substance, that any State possessed an inherent right to secede, and when it had seceded, there was no power known to the Constitution to compel it to return to the Union. He argued that by an act of secession a State had virtually disappeared as a part of the Republic; and the power of the National Government being only auxiliary to State life and force, National troops would certainly "be out of place, and their use wholly illegal." It seemed to the Attorney-General that an attempt to force the people of a State into submission to the laws of the Republic and to desist from attempts to destroy it, would be making war upon them, by which they would be converted into alien enemies, and would "be compelled to act accordingly." He counselled the President, virtually, to suffer this concrete Republic to become disintegrated by the fires of faction, or the blows of actual rebellion, rather than to use force legitimately at his disposal, for the preservation of its integrity and life. The weak President, accepting the advice of the Attorney-General, incorporated the doctrine into a portion of his Message; but, apparently conscious of its dangerous tendency, he uttered some brave words against secession as a crime, and State Supremacy as a heresy dangerous to the nationality of the Republic--a doctrine which, if practically carried out, would make "the Confederacy a rope of sand, to be penetrated and dissolved by the first adverse wave of public opinion in any of the States. In this manner," he truly said, "our thirty-three States may resolve themselves into so many jarring and hostile republics, each one retiring from the Union without responsibility, whenever any sudden excitement might impel them to such a course. By this process a Union might be entirely broken into fragments in a few weeks, which cost our fathers many years of toil, privation, and blood to establish."

Seemingly alarmed at his own outspoken convictions, and the offence it might give his Southern friends, the perplexed President proposed to conciliate them by allowing them to infuse deadly poison into the blood of their intended victim, which would more slowly but as surely accomplish their purpose. To do this he proposed an "explanatory amendment" to the Constitution on the subject of slavery, which would give to the enemies of the Union everything which they demanded, namely, the elevation of the slave-system to the dignity of a National institution, and thus sap the very foundations of our free Government. This amendment was to consist of an express recognition of the right of property in slaves in the States where slavery then existed or might thereafter exist; of the recognition of the duty of the National Government to protect that right in all the Territories throughout their territorial existence; the recognition of the right of the slave-owner to every privilege and advantage given him in the Fugitive-Slave Law; and a declaration that all the State laws impairing or defeating that law were violations of the Constitution, and consequently null and void.