NBF 5

"This Union is a lie! The American Union is an imposture – a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. I am for its overthrow! Up with the flag of disunion!"

These are the words of William Lloyd Garrison, the father of the abolition societies, who publicly, on the fourth day of July, inaugurated his movement by giving the Constitution of the United States to the flames.

So long as Garrison's disciples attempted purely political action on the question of abolition, they received a pitiably small hearing from the great body of American people. Garrison was burned in effigy all over the Northern states, and his radical followers bent on the destruction of the Union were informed very realistically with tar and feathers that the Union must stick together. This was in the days when Calhoun spoke for the South, Webster for the North, and Henry Clay for the West.

The abolitionists, by themselves, might have gone on for some time without effecting their ends; but unfortunately for the Union, after the dissolution of the Whig Party, the old Federalist-Hamiltonian element looked around for new allies. It was now more important than ever to destroy the rights of the states and form a powerful central government, for so long as the states remained autonomous, industrial capital was effectively controlled. Calhoun had whipped them out on the tariff and Andrew Jackson on the Federal bank. The cotton states were, therefore, able to sell their staple as free men bartering with other free men. But this new class of Hamiltonian-Industrialists growing up, particularly in Pennsylvania, was not willing to make a fair profit on their machines; and so long as the Southern states remained powerful and uncontrolled, they had to be content with such an arrangement.

If the South could be broken politically, it could be forced into a position of economic serfdom, depending on those who would control this strongly centralized government. The Black Republican Party was formed towards this end. William H. Seward, one-time Governor of New York, was its inspiration. He saw that the abolitionists had, by their thirty-year education of the popular mind, created a general antagonism in the North against the South and, over large areas, a great hatred; and he determined to use this to gain power for himself and his industrial supporters.

Since the Constitution recognized property in slaves, Mr. Seward made his first attack on this compact, but not as the abolitionists had attacked it. They did not dispute the constitutional guarantees; but admitting them, advised the disruption of the compact. Mr. Seward was more subtle. He began to institute a policy which would destroy the Union in fact but keep it in name and physical appearance. "You answer that the Constitution," he says, "recognizes property in slaves. It would be sufficient, then, to reply that the constitutional recognition must be void, because it is repugnant to the law of nature and of nations."

For the people to abrogate their articles of agreement in favor of the law of nature and of nations was for them to place their destiny in the hands of the party in power, which would interpret this very general law in the light of its interests.

It was this kind of argument that frightened old Calhoun and caused him to urge secession, which was thereupon soberly considered at the Nashville Convention of 1850. The Southern states did not heed his warning, for their strong emotional attachment to the Union clouded the force of Calhoun's logic. He could not teach them that the purpose of the Union was to sustain their independence, and that this was now possible only in a Southern Union, since the commercial and industrial states had upset the balance of power in their favor.

Calhoun saw that as time went on there would be less and less that was common between the two sections, and that any union to be actual must be a union of common interests, or a union of interests of equal power. This was no longer so. There was, as Mr. Seward announced, "an irrepressible conflict" between the two sections. He pretended that the conflict was a moral matter of slavery, but this was for strategic reasons. Nobody knew better than he that it was the conflict between a people living almost entirely on the land and a people loyal to a commercial and fast-growing industrialism which demanded that the duty of the citizen must be not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but a willing consumption of the produce of Northern manufacture.

-Andrew Lytle, Bedford Forrest and his Critter Company