The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government | Page 7

and in the Union, retain their
sovereignty and independence as distinct communities, voluntarily
consenting to federation, but never becoming the fractional parts of a
nation? That such opinions should find adherents in our day, may be
attributable to the natural law of aggregation; surely not to a
conscientious regard for the terms of the compact for union by the
States.
In all free governments the constitution or organic law is supreme over
the government, and in our Federal Union this was most distinctly
marked by limitations and prohibitions against all which was beyond

the expressed grants of power to the General Government. In the
foreground, therefore, I take the position that those who resisted
violations of the compact were the true friends, and those who
maintained the usurpation of undelegated powers were the real enemies
of the constitutional Union.


PART I.

CHAPTER I.
African Servitude.--A Retrospect.--Early Legislation with Regard to the
Slave-Trade.--The Southern States foremost in prohibiting it.--A
Common Error corrected.--The Ethical Question never at Issue in
Sectional Controversies.--The Acquisition of Louisiana.--The Missouri
Compromise.--The Balance of Power.--Note.--The Indiana Case.
Inasmuch as questions growing out of the institution of negro servitude,
or connected with it, will occupy a conspicuous place in what is to
follow, it is important that the reader should have, in the very outset, a
right understanding of the true nature and character of those questions.
No subject has been more generally misunderstood or more persistently
misrepresented. The institution itself has ceased to exist in the United
States; the generation, comprising all who took part in the controversies
to which it gave rise, or for which it afforded a pretext, is passing away;
and the misconceptions which have prevailed in our own country, and
still more among foreigners remote from the field of contention, are
likely to be perpetuated in the mind of posterity, unless corrected
before they become crystallized by tacit acquiescence.
It is well known that, at the time of the adoption of the Federal
Constitution, African servitude existed in all the States that were parties
to that compact, unless with the single exception of Massachusetts, in

which it had, perhaps, very recently ceased to exist. The slaves,
however, were numerous in the Southern, and very few in the Northern,
States. This diversity was occasioned by differences of climate, soil,
and industrial interests--not in any degree by moral considerations,
which at that period were not recognized, as an element in the question.
It was simply because negro labor was more profitable in the South
than in the North that the importation of negro slaves had been, and
continued to be, chiefly directed to the Southern ports.[1] For the same
reason slavery was abolished by the States of the Northern section
(though it existed in several of them for more than fifty years after the
adoption of the Constitution), while the importation of slaves into the
South continued to be carried on by Northern merchants and Northern
ships, without interference in the traffic from any quarter, until it was
prohibited by the spontaneous action of the Southern States themselves.
The Constitution expressly forbade any interference by Congress with
the slave-trade--or, to use its own language, with the "migration or
importation of such persons" as any of the States should think proper to
admit--"prior to the year 1808." During the intervening period of more
than twenty years, the matter was exclusively under the control of the
respective States. Nevertheless, every Southern State, without
exception, either had already enacted, or proceeded to enact, laws
forbidding the importation of slaves.[2] Virginia was the first of all the
States, North or South, to prohibit it, and Georgia was the first to
incorporate such a prohibition in her organic Constitution.
Two petitions for the abolition of slavery and the slave-trade were
presented February 11 and 12, 1790, to the very first Congress
convened under the Constitution.[3] After full discussion in the House
of Representatives, it was determined, with regard to the
first-mentioned subject, "that Congress have no authority to interfere in
the emancipation of slaves, or in the treatment of them within any of
the States"; and, with regard to the other, that no authority existed to
prohibit the migration or importation of such persons as the States
might think proper to admit--"prior to the year 1808." So distinct and
final was this statement of the limitations of the authority of Congress
considered to be that, when a similar petition was presented two or

three years afterward, the Clerk of the House was instructed to return it
to the petitioner.[4]
In 1807, Congress, availing itself of the very earliest moment at which
the constitutional restriction ceased to be operative, passed an act
prohibiting the importation of slaves into any part of the United States
from and after the first day of January,