Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/254

 248 Southern Historical Society Papers.

the political principle of State sovereignty more than a sentiment and a theory, and made it a practical question, essential to the South, in dealing wilh that institution.

We were so unfortunate as to permit the great underlying question at issue between the North and the South to turn, apparently, solely upon a matter on which the fanaticism of the world had been aroused. But I maintain, with Mr. Stephens, that while " slavery, so-called, that legal subordination of the black race to the white, which existed in all but one of the States when the Union was formed, and in fifteen of them when the war began, was unquestionably the occasion of the war the main exciiing proximate cause on both sides on the one as well as on the other, it was not the real, ultimate cause, the causa causans of it." (Volume I, p. 28.) Further, I believe and maintain that from the origin of our government the war was inevitable, had slavery never existed.

The war was not commenced in December, 1860, when this State seceded, nor in April, 1861, when we fired into Fort Sumter. Its seeds were in the Constitution, and it was declared in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in 1798. The Convention which framed the Constitution was itself divided into the two parties which, after sev- enty years of discussion in the Senate chamber, adjourned the debate to the battlefields of our late war. The one as the "National parly,'* under the leadership of General Hamilton and the elder Adams, and the other as the ' 'Federal party" under Jefferson, at that early day organized the forces for strife, and warred over the Virginia and Ken- tucky Resolutions and the Alien and Sedition Laws with a bitterness not exceeded in 1860.

As it is so often said that whatever may have been the nice theo- retical distinctions as to the forms of government, the North became in favor of a strong consolidated central government, because its interests were in manufactures and protection, while the South was State's Rights in the defense of slavery, and that thus the real cause of the war was the antagonism between free labor and slave labor, I would call attention to the fact that as early as 1796, a year before the first slave had been freed in the United States, when slavery still existed in every State in the Union, North as well as South, even then the different 'political theories of the government had already found for themselves more decidedly "local habitations" than names. Washington, in his farewell address, observes :

"In contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union, it occurs as a matter of serious concern that any ground should have