CHAPTER III

CONFEDERACY OR NATION

IN marshalling the reasons and causes which impelled them to secede from the Union, the authors of the South Carolina Declaration and Address claimed that the States were sovereign; that the Constitution of the United States was a compact between sovereign States; that in the administration of the government under the Constitution the North by power of its majority vote in Congress had imposed an obnoxious and injurious tariff on the country, grievously affecting the South, and had in other ways violated the principles of the compact. In addition to the defense of slavery and the desire to found a slaveholding Confederacy, the South, complaining of the attitude of the North toward slavery, rested its cause on State sovereignty, hostility to a protective tariff, preference for an agricultural to a commercial or manufacturing state of society, and the right of secession. Eliminating slavery as a cause for civil war, in 1860, there remain two other causes: antagonistic interpretations of the nature of the government of the United States, and antagonistic interpretations of its just and equitable administration. The tariff involved questions of administration, but the doctrine of State sovereignty went directly to the very nature and life of the General government.

In the message quoted in part in the preceding chapter President Jackson spoke of the United States as a Confederacy, and the word was in common use in that sense before

him and down to the time of the secession of South Carolina. Lincoln, in his debates with Douglas, in 1858, thus spoke of the Union, and again, as we have seen, in the Cooper Institute speech, in February, 1860. James Russell Lowell, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, for February, 1861, declared, "The United States are a nation, and not a massmeeting. In the present case (the secession of South Carolina and the question of maintaining Federal authority there) the only coercion called for is the protection of the public property and the collection of the Federal revenues. If it be necessary to send troops to do this, they will not be sectional-but Federal troops, representing the will and power of the whole Confederacy.". Lincoln, speaking at Peoria, October 16, 1854, on the proposed repeal of the Missouri Compromise by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill said, "I wish to be no less than national in all the positions I may take." "For myself," said Charles Sumner, in his speech on The Crime Against Kansas, in the Senate, May 20, 1856, “I care little for names; but since the question has been raised here, I affirm that the Republican party of the Union is in no just sense sectional, but, more than any other party, national, and that it now goes forth to dislodge from the high places of the government the tyrannical sectionalism of which the senator from South Carolina (Butler) is one of the maddest zealots." In seceding, South Carolina proclaimed itself a free and independent nation and invited the slave States to join with it in forming a Slaveholding Confederacy. The terms Confederacy and Nation were used as synonyms down to the Civil War. Were they strictly synonymous, or did they stand for two antagonistic conceptions of the nature of the government of the United States?

On the day when the Continental Congress instructed one of its special committees to report a Declaration of Independence, it instructed another to bring in Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union between the Colonies, but these Articles were not adopted by Congress until November 15, 1777, and were not ratified by the States until