And He Also Declared His Purpose - Not, We May Presume, Officially - Of Hanging Calhoun, If He Took That Step Toward Secession Which He Had Bound Himself To Take In The Event Of The Tariff Not Being Repealed.

As a result of all this Calhoun voted for the compromise, and secession for the time was beaten down.

That was in 1832, and may be regarded as the commencement of the secession movement. The tariff was then a convenient reason, a ground to be assigned with a color of justice because it was a tariff admitted to be bad. But the tariff has been modified again and again since that, and the tariff existing when South Carolina seceded in 1860 had been carried by votes from South Carolina. The absurd Morrill tariff could not have caused secession, for it was passed, without a struggle, in the collapse of Congress occasioned by secession.

The bounty to fishermen was given to create sailors, so that a marine might be provided for the nation. I need hardly show that the national benefit would accrue to the whole nation for whose protection such sailors were needed. Such a system of bounties may be bad; but if so, it was bad for the whole nation. It did not affect South Carolina otherwise than it affected Illinois, Pennsylvania, or even New York.

The navigation laws may also have been bad. According to my thinking such protective laws are bad; but they created no special hardship on the South. By any such a theory of complaint all sections of all nations have ground of complaint against any other section which receives special protection under any law. The drinkers of beer in England should secede because they pay a tax, whereas the consumers of paper pay none. The navigation laws of the States are no doubt injurious to the mercantile interests of the States. I at least have no doubt on the subject. But no one will think that secession is justified by the existence of a law of questionable expediency. Bad laws will go by the board if properly handled by those whom they pinch, as the navigation laws went by the board with us in England.

As to that Fugitive Slave Law, it should be explained that the grievance has not arisen from the loss of slaves. I have heard it stated that South Carolina, up to the time of the secession, had never lost a slave in this way - that is, by Northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law; and that the total number of slaves escaping successfully into the Northern States, and there remaining through the non-operation of this law, did not amount to five in the year. It has not been a question of property, but of feeling. It has been a political point; and the South has conceived - and probably conceived truly - that this resolution on the part of Northern States to defy the law with reference to slaves, even though in itself it might not be immediately injurious to Southern property, was an insertion of the narrow end of the wedge. It was an action taken against slavery - an action taken by men of the North against their fellow-countrymen in the South. Under such circumstances, the sooner such countrymen should cease to be their fellows the better it would be for them. That, I take it, was the argument of the South, or at any rate that was its feeling.

I have said that the reasons given for secession have been trifling, and among them have so estimated this matter of the Fugitive Slave Law. I mean to assert that the ground actually put forward is trifling - the loss, namely, of slaves to which the South has been subjected. But the true reason pointed at in this - the conviction, namely, that the North would not leave slavery alone, and would not allow it to remain as a settled institution - was by no means trifling. It has been this conviction on the part of the South that the North would not live in amity with slavery - would continue to fight it under this banner or under that, would still condemn it as disgraceful to men and rebuke it as impious before God - which has produced rebellion and civil war, and will ultimately produce that division for which the South is fighting and against which the North is fighting, and which, when accomplished, will give the North new wings, and will leave the South without political greatness or commercial success.

Under such circumstances I cannot think that rebellion on the part of the South was justified by wrongs endured, or made reasonable by the prospect of wrongs to be inflicted. It is disagreeable, that having to live with a wife who is always rebuking one for some special fault; but the outside world will not grant a divorce on that account, especially if the outside world is well aware that the fault so rebuked is of daily occurrence. "If you do not choose to be called a drunkard by your wife," the outside world will say, "it will be well that you should cease to drink." Ah! but that habit of drinking, when once acquired, cannot easily be laid aside. The brain will not work; the organs of the body will not perform their functions; the blood will not run. The drunkard must drink till he dies. All that may be a good ground for divorce, the outside world will say; but the plea should be put in by the sober wife, not by the intemperate husband. But what if the husband takes himself off without any divorce, and takes with him also his wife's property, her earnings, that on which he has lived and his children? It may be a good bargain still for her, the outside world will say; but she, if she be a woman of spirit, will not willingly put up with such wrongs. The South has been the husband drunk with slavery, and the North has been the ill-used wife.

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