Confederate Military History. Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry

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СКАЧАТЬ it absolute control on all questions which coincide with its views and interests. As the government has been centralized, nationalized, lost its original character as a constitutional federal republic, its power has grown by what it has fed upon and its patronage has become more tempting and wide spread. Proportionate with power and patronage, and increasing with their increase, will be the desire to possess the control over them, for the purpose of individual or sectional aggrandizement; and the stronger this desire, the less will be the regard for principles and the Constitution, and the greater the tendency, accompanied by increase of ability, to unite for sectional domination. (1 Calhoun, 241, 371.) The tariff system, framed in the interests and at the dictation of classes and persons that contribute liberally in elections; the taxation practically of agricultural exports, grown preponderantly in one section; the partial, inequitable appropriations for rivers, harbors, public buildings, the concentration of the financial operations of the government in one quarter of the Union; the theories of the latitudinous interpretation of the Constitution which dominated parties and dictated political and legislative action at the North, investing Congress with the right to determine what objects belong to the general welfare; have been most potential in enriching one section to the prejudice of the other and in enlarging the power, prestige and influence of the Union. The power of Congress to levy duties on imports for specific purposes has been enlarged into an unlimited authority to protect domestic manufactures against foreign competition. The effect of this has been ‘to impose the main burden of taxation upon the Southern people, who were consumers and not manufacturers, not only by the enhanced price of imports, but indirectly by the consequent depreciation of the value of exports, which were chiefly the products of the Southern States.’ The increase of price was not always paid into the public treasury, but accrued somewhat to the benefit of the manufacturer. What revenues went into the treasury were disbursed most unequally, and the sectional discrimination, enriching one portion to the injury and inequality of the other, tended to direct immigration to the North and to increase the functions and influence of the Federal government. The majority, doing the injustice, claim to be the sole judges of the rightness of their action and whether or not the power is lodged in their hands. The minority have no rights which the majority are bound to respect, or if they have, there are no means of asserting and vindicating them. The majority, which are sectional, possess the government, measure its powers and wield them without responsibility. Enriched by their own acts, becoming proud, insolent, greedy of power and gain, inflamed by cupidity, avarice, monopoly, they arrogate and usurp; and, with each succeeding day, what was very questionable becomes by force of unresisted precedent a principle, and self-conceit transmutes exercise of power into piety, and the judgment of parties and the interest of classes into a higher law, into the will of God. We find in England and other countries an aristocracy, the classes in the enjoyment of pensions, tithes, monopolies, vested rights, exclusive privileges until, with blunted sensibilities and beclouded intellects, they delude themselves into acquiescence in, and support of, such inequalities and wrongs. So in the United States, under powers granted in the Constitution, such as levying duties and taxes, regulating commerce, war, appropriating money, disposing of territory and other property, admitting new States, the government during the Confederate war incorporated banks, made fiat money or promises to pay a legal tender, constructed roads, granted bounties and monopolies, gave away the property of the people, prescribed State constitutions, emancipated slaves, fixed terms and conditions of suffrage, dictated manner of appointing and electing senators, assumed control over railways and industries and absorbed and exercised a sovereign power over interstate commerce, capital, labor, currency and property. We have seen an alliance between Congress and eleemosynarians, senators taking care of their private affairs in revenue bills, and manufacturers before sub-committees of ways and means and of finance dictating the subjects to be taxed and the amount of duties to be levied.

      One wonders how these revolutions and iniquities have been accomplished. Governor Morris wrote to Timothy Pickering that ‘the legislative lion will not be entangled in the meshes of a logical net. The legislature will always make the power which it wishes to exercise.’ One of the ablest expounders of the Constitution deplores ‘the science of verbality,’ the artifice of so verbalizing as to assail and destroy the plainest provisions. The instrumentality of inference has sapped and mined our political system. Acuteness of misinterpretation and construction has accomplished what the framers of the Constitution exerted all their faculties, by specifications and restrictions, to prevent, so that constructive powers have been as seed-bearing of mischief and usurpation as the doctrine of constructive treason. Alexander Hamilton believed honestly that nothing short of monarchical institutions would prove adequate to the wants of the country, and in the convention of 1787 he sought to conform the new government, while in process of construction, to the model of the British, which he regarded as the best ever devised by the wit of man. He had not a single supporter, and afterward, ably and effectively, with marked patriotism, he threw his pen and voice in favor of ratification. But this he did avowedly as a temporary bond of union and as the only avenue of escape from anarchy. Appointed to assist in carrying the government into effect and sincerely believing that with no other powers than those he so well knew it was intended to authorize, it must prove a failure, and the government must go to pieces, he decided unhesitatingly to do under it whatever he, in good faith, might think would promote the general welfare, without reference to the intention of the authors of the Constitution. The discussions to show that his principal measures were authorized by the instrument, were in deference to the prejudices and ideas of the people—nothing more. The principle of construction he espoused was to make good all laws which Congress might deem conducive to the general welfare, and which were not expressly prohibited, a power similar to that contained in the plan he proposed in the convention. He desired, in short, to make the Constitution a tablet of wax upon which each successive administration would be at liberty to impress its rescripts to be promulgated as constitutional edicts. （Van Buren's Pol. Parties in U. S., 211, 213.) Hamilton laid the foundation of his policy so deep and with so much skill that it has been impossible to reverse especially under conditions so favorable to centralization. He invoked in support of his measures the selfishness, the cupidity, the ambition of classes, and sought to make the strength of the government depend, as in England, on the interested support of an intelligent and combined few. An impulse in accordance with his theory was impressed, and has since been constantly strengthened. It is not uncommon to hear the Constitution ridiculed as an abstraction, or an effete formula. The government has grievously departed from its federal character, and reserved powers are so far removed from possible application in case of controversy, that State rights, when seriously mentioned, provoke contempt or ridicule. In 1824 Jefferson wrote to Van Buren: ‘General Washington was himself sincerely a friend to the republican principles of our Constitution. His faith might not, perhaps, have been as confident as mine, but he repeatedly declared to me that he was determined it should have a fair chance of success, and that he would lose the last drop of his blood in its support against any attempt which might be made to change it from its republican form.’

       Why the South resisted Federal encroachments.

      It can now be clearly seen why the South, being a minority section, with agriculture as the chief occupation and with the peculiar institution of African slavery fastened on her by Old England and New England, adhered to the State rights or Jeffersonian school of politics. Those doctrines contain the only principles or policy truly conservative of the Constitution. Apart from them, checks and limitations are of little avail, and the Federal government can increase its powers indefinitely. Without some adequate restraint or interposition, the whole character of the government is changed, and forms, if retained, will be, as they have been in other countries, merely the disguises for accomplishing what selfishness or ambition may dictate. The truest friends of the republic have been those who have insisted upon obedience to constitutional requirements. The real enemies, the true disunionists, have been those who, under the disguise of a deceptive name, have perverted the name and true functions of the government and have usurped, for selfish or partisan ends, or at the demand of crazy fanaticism, powers which States never surrendered. Those who contend most strenuously for the rights of the States and for a strict construction of the Constitution are the genuine lovers and friends of the Union. Their principles conserve law, good order, justice, established authority; and their unselfish purpose СКАЧАТЬ