The American Republic | Page 8

be questioned that either the constitution of the United
States is very defective or it has been very grossly misinterpreted by all
parties. If the slave States had not held that the States are severally
sovereign, and the Constitution of the United States a simple agreement
or compact, they would never have seceded; and if the Free States had
not confounded the Union with the General government, and shown a
tendency to make it the entire national government, no occasion or
pretext for secession would have been given. The great problem of our
statesmen has been from the first, How to assert union without
consolidation, and State rights without disintegration? Have they, as yet,
solved that problem? The war has silenced the State sovereignty
doctrine, indeed, but has it done so without lesion to State rights? Has it
done it without asserting the General government as the supreme,
central, or national government? Has it done it without striking a
dangerous blow at the federal element of the constitution? In
suppressing by armed force the doctrine that the States are severally
sovereign, what barrier is left against consolidation? Has not one
danger been removed only to give place to another?
But perhaps the constitution itself, if rightly understood, solves the
problem; and perhaps the problem itself is raised precisely through
misunderstanding of the constitution. Our statesmen have recognized
no constitution of the American people themselves; they have confined
their views to the written constitution, as if that constituted the
American people a state or nation, instead of being, as it is, only a law
ordained by the nation already existing and constituted. Perhaps, if they

had recognized and studied the constitution which preceded that drawn
up by the Convention of 1787, and which is intrinsic, inherent in the
republic itself, they would have seen that it solves the problem, and
asserts national unity without consolidation, and the rights of the
several States without danger of disintegration. The whole controversy,
possibly, has originated in a misunderstanding of the real constitution
of the United States, and that misunderstanding itself in the
misunderstanding of the origin and constitution of government in
general. The constitution, as will appear in the course of this essay is
not defective; and all that is necessary to guard against either danger is
to discard all our theories of the constitution, and return and adhere to
the constitution itself, as it really is and always has been.
There is no doubt that the question of Slavery had much to do with the
rebellion, but it was not its sole cause. The real cause must be sought in
the program that had been made, especially in the States themselves, in
forming and administering their respective governments, as well as the
General government, in accordance with political theories borrowed
from European speculators on government, the socalled Liberals and
Revolutionists, which have and can have no legitimate application in
the United States. The tendency of American politics, for the last thirty
or forty years, has been, within the several States themselves, in the
direction of centralized democracy, as if the American people had for
their mission only the reproduction of ancient Athens. The American
system is not that of any of the simple forms of government, nor any
combination of them. The attempt to bring it under any of the simple or
mixed forms of government recognized by political writers, is an
attempt to clothe the future in the cast-off garments of the past. The
American system, wherever practicable, is better than monarchy, better
than aristocracy, better than simple democracy, better than any possible
combination of these several forms, because it accords more nearly
with the principles of things, the real order of the universe.
But American statesmen have studied the constitutions of other states
more than that of their own, and have succeeded in obscuring the
American system in the minds of the people, and giving them in its
place pure and simple democracy, which is its false development or

corruption. Under the influence of this false development, the people
were fast losing sight of the political truth that, though the people are
sovereign, it is the organic, not the inorganic people, the territorial
people, not the people as simple population, and were beginning to
assert the absolute God-given right of the majority to govern. All the
changes made in the bosom of the States themselves have consisted in
removing all obstacles to the irresponsible will of the majority, leaving
minorities and individuals at their mercy. This tendency to a centralized
democracy had more to do with provoking secession and rebellion than
the anti-slavery sentiments of the Northern, Central, and Western
States.
The failure of secession and the triumph of the National cause, in spite
of the short-sightedness and blundering of the Administration, have