Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/244

 234 C. F. Adams head of the army, and its abolition continues to be law to this day. It was abolished by the laws of war, and not by municipal enactments ; the power was exercised by military commanders under instructions, of course, from their respective Governments. And here I recur again to the e.xample of General Jackson. What are you now about in Congress ? You are passing a grant to refund to General Jackson the amount of a certain fine imposed upon him by a Judge under the laws of the State of Louisiana. You are going to refund him the money, with interest ; and this you are going to do because the imposition of the fine was unjust. And why was it unjust ? Because General Jackson was acting under the laws of war, and because the moment you place a military commander in a district which is the theatre of war, the laws of war apply to that district. . . . "I might furnish a thousand proofs to show that the pretensions of gentlemen to the sanctity of their municipal institutions under a state of actual invasion and of actual war, whether servile, civil, or foreign, is wholly unfounded, and that the laws of war do, in all such cases, take the precedence. I lay this down as the law of nations. I say that the military authority takes for the time the place of all municipal institu- tions, and slavery among the rest ; and that, under that state of things, so far from its being true that the .States where slavery exists ^have the exclusive management of the subject, not only the President of the United States but the commander of the army has power to order the universal emancipation of the slaves. I have given here more in detail a principle which I have asserted on this floor before now, and of which I have no more doubt, than that you, Sir, occupy that Chair. I give it in its development, in order that any gentleman from any part of the Union may, if he thinks proper, deny the truth of the position, and may maintain his denial ; not by indignation, not by passion and fury, but by sound and sober reasoning from the laws of nations and the laws of war. And if my position can be answered and refuted, I shall receive the refutation with pleasure ; I shall be glad to listen to reason, aside, as I say, from indignation and passion. And if by the force of reasoning my understanding can be convinced, I here pledge myself to recant what I have asserted. " Let my position be answered ; let. me be told, let my constituents be told, the people of my State be told, — a State whose soil tolerates not the foot of a slave, — -that they are bound by the Constitution to a long and toilsome march under burning summer suns and a deadly Southern clime for the suppression of a servile war ; that they are bound to leave their bodies to rot upon the sands of Carolina, to leave their wives and their children orphans ; that those who cannot march are bound to pour out their treasures while their sons or brothers are pouring out their blood to suppress a servile, combined with a civil or a foreign war, and yet there exists no power beyond the limits of the slave State where such war is raging to emancipate the slaves. I say, let this be proved — I am open to conviction ; but until that conviction comes I put it forth not as a dictate of feeling, but as a settled maxim of the laws of nations, that in such a case the military supersedes the civil power. ' ' The only comment on this utterance made by Mr. Adams in his diary was the following: — "My speech on this day stung the slave- ocracy to madness. ' ' Here the proposition rested until 1861, when the course of events brought into forcible application the principles abstractly enunciated twenty years before by Mr. Adams.