The Brothers' War - The Original Classic Edition. John Calvin

He was discussing the apprehension of the small States, New Jersey, Delaware, and Rhode Island, that under the union proposed they would be absorbed by the larger adjacent States. He affirmed there was no such danger; and that the only danger arose from the antagonism between the slave and the non-slave sections. To avert this danger he proposed to arm north

       and south each with defensive power against the other by conceding to the former the superiority it would get in one branch of the federal legislature by reason of its greater population if the members thereof came in equal numbers from every State, large or small, and at the same time giving the south superiority in the other branch by allowing it increased representation therein for all its slaves counted as free inhabitants. This prepares you for the language which we now give from the report, and which we would have you meditate:

       [Pg 57]"He [Madison] admitted that every peculiar interest, whether in any class of citizens, or any description of States, ought to be secured as far as possible. Wherever there is danger of attack, there ought to be given a constitutional power of defence. But he contended that the States were divided into different interests, not by their difference of size, but by other circumstances; the most material of which resulted partly from climate, but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the United States. It did not lie between the large and small States. It lay between the northern and southern; and if any defensive power were necessary, it ought to be mutually given to these two interests. He was so strongly impressed with this important truth, that he had been casting about in his mind for some expedient that would answer the purpose. The one which had occurred was that, instead of proportioning the votes of the States in both branches to their respective number of inhabitants, computing the slaves in the ratio of 5 to 3, they should be represented in one branch according to the number of free inhabitants only; and in the other according to their whole number, counting the slaves as free. By this arrangement the southern scale would have the advantage in one house and the northern in the other."

       Madison meant to say that the great danger of disunion was that--we emphasize his statement by repeating and italicizing the essential part--"the States were divided into different interests ... principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the United States."

       How truly he expresses the economical antagonism of the southern and northern States, although he hints nothing of the nationalizing tendency of the former which was bound in time to show itself as one of "the effects of their having slaves."

       It seems to me that Mr. Adams overeulogizes the[Pg 58] political instinct and prophecy evinced by Madison at this tune. I cannot see that the latter does anything more than merely recognize the fact then plain to all. Note as proof this other passage quoted by Mr. Adams from Madison in the convention, in which the material words are given by me in italics: "It seems now well understood that the real difference of interests lies, not between the large and small, but between the northern and southern States."

       If the historical expert but duly consider the important facts marshalled in the foregoing he must find them to be incontrovertible proofs that in 1787, when our fathers were making the federal constitution, and for some years before, southern nationalization

       was not simply inchoate, but that it was growing so rapidly its course could be stopped in but one way; that is, by the extirpation of slavery, which was both its germ and active principle. This was before the invention of the gin. After that the lower south and west quickly added a vast territory to the empire of slavery, and southern nationalization received throughout its whole domain a new, a lasting, and a far more powerful impetus. And when the cotton States, as we call them, had really developed their industry, the southern confederacy was inevitable.

       The fact of this nationalization is indisputable. When the confederates organized their government at Montgomery, everybody looking on felt and said that a new nation was born. Why ignore what is so plain and so important? Thus Mr. Adams most graphically contrasts the two widely different northern and southern civilizations which were flourishing side by side,[26] and with a momentary inadvertence he ascribes national development only to the civilization north of the Potomac[Pg 59] and Ohio, and treats State sovereignty as antinational. The fact is that a nationalization, the end of which was southern independence, had been long active, as we have perhaps too copiously shown, and the doctrine of State sovereignty was really nothing but its instrument, nurse, and organ. Every southern State that invoked State sovereignty and seceded was shortly afterwards found in the new southern nation. Had that nation prospered, the doctrine would soon have died a natural death even in the confederacy. Nationalization is the cardinal fact,

       the vis major, on each side. The free-labor nationalization of the north, purposing to appropriate and hold the continent, fashioned

       a self-preserving weapon of the assumption that the fathers made by the constitution an indissoluble union; the slave nationalization of the south, purposing to appropriate and hold that part of the continent suiting its special staples, assumed that the fathers preserved State sovereignty intact in the federal union.

       The closer you look the plainer you will see that the United States held within itself two nationalities so inveterately hostile to each

       22

       other that gemination was long imminent before it actually occurred. The hostility between the statesmen of Virginia and her daughter States and those of the north, and especially New England,--Jefferson on one side and Hamilton and Adams on the other,--the party following the former calling itself republican and that following the latter calling itself federalist, was really rooted in the hostility of the two nationalities; and a survival of this hostility is now unpleasantly vigorous between many northern and southern writers and lecturers, each class claiming too much of the good in our past history for its own section and ascribing too much of the bad

       to the other. As a lady friend, a native of Michigan who has lived in the south some[Pg 60] years, remarked to me not long since, as soon as one going north crosses the Ohio he feels that he has entered another country; behind him is a land of corn-pone, biscuit, three cooked meals a day, and houses tended untidily by darkey servants; before him is a land of bakers' bread of wheat, where there is hardly more than one warm meal a day, and the houses are kept as neat as a pin by the mothers and daughters of the family. Greater public activity of the county while there is hardly any at all of its subdivisions, the representative system almost everywhere in the municipalities, no government by town-meeting and no direct legislation except occasionally, a most crude and feeble rural common school system, distinguish and characterize the south; buoyant energy of the township in public affairs, government by town-meeting instead of by representatives, a common-school system energetically improving, distinguish and characterize the north. The manners and customs of southerners are peculiar. To use an expressive cant word, they "gush" more than northeners. In cars and public meetings they give their seats to ladies, while northerners do not. Southerners are quick to return a blow for insulting words, and in the consequent rencounter they are prone to use deadly weapons; while northerners are generally as averse to personal violence as were the Greeks and Romans in their palmiest time. The battle-cry of the confederates was a wild cheering--a fox-hunt yell, as we called it; that of the union soldiers was huzza! huzza! huzza! From the beginning to the end, even at Franklin and Bentonville, and at Farmville, just two days before I was surrendered at Appomattox, the confederates always, if possible, took the offensive; the union soldiers were like the sturdy Englishmen, whose tactics from Hastings to Waterloo have generally been defensive.

       [Pg 61]This battle yell, this impetuous charge after charge until the field is won, marks the fighting of the Americans at King's Mountain--all of them southerners; and it is another weighty proof of the early coalescence of the south as a community on its way to independence.

       Many other contrasts could be suggested. Think over the foregoing. They are the respective effects of two different causes,--a free-labor nationalization above, and a slave-labor nationalization below, Mason and Dixon's line. The latter--its origin and course--is the especial subject of this chapter. I believe that the proofs marshalled above demonstrate to the fair and unprejudiced reader that

       southern nationalization commenced before the making of the federal constitution,