Page:The Cession of Louisana to the United States.pdf/4

 importance and Southern prosperity, as one of the secret springs of that deadly hostility and jealousy entertained by one section of the country against the other.

The whole drift of Mr. Adams’s argument on the subject shows that he also thought that Louisiana was not acquired as a dependent province. Mr. Griswold, of Connecticut, said in the House: “It is clear that it was intended to incorporate the inhabitants of the ceded Territory in the Union by the treaty itself, or to pledge the faith of the nation that such an incorporation should take place within a reasonable time.” He complained that it was the admission of a new partner in a firm without the consent of all the parties. “It was the incorporation of a foreign nation into the Union; it destroyed the perfect Union contemplated between the original parties, by interposing an alien and a stranger to share the powers of government with them.” He lamented that “a new world was to be thrown into the scale to weigh down the influence which the Northern States might otherwise possess in the national councils.” The other speakers on this side of the question, traveling over the same ground and paraphrasing the same arguments, asserted that if the United States could acquire territory, it was not to make it a part of the Confederacy as a State, but to hold it as a colony forever, or as a sort of subordinate dependency.

“It has been said,” observed one of the speakers, “that the treaty does not in fact incorporate the people of the ceded territory into the Union, but stipulates that they shall be incorporated and admitted according to the principles of the Federal Constitution; or, in other words, the treaty only pledges the faith of the nation that such an incorporation shall take place. On this point I will observe that there is no difference in principle between a direct incorporation by the words of a treaty, and a stipulation that an incorporation shall take place, because if the faith of the nation is pledged in the latter case, the incorporation must take place, and it is of no consequence whether the treaty gives the incorporation, or produces the law which gives it.”

Those on the other side, who thought that the United States had the Constitutional power to acquire Louisiana according to the stipulations of the treaty, did not differ, at least most of them, with their adversaries as to the interpretation put on the 3d Article. The paradoxical John Randolph, of Roanoke, was the only one who, as far as I am aware, interpreted the treaty with his characteristic eccentricity. He maintained that by the 3d Article, the Louisianians had only become entitled to the blessings of jury trial, liberty of conscience and a few other rights and immunities. But this construction of the treaty is evidently so erroneous that it scarcely deserves refutation, notwithstanding the respect due to the memory of its distinguished author.

From what precedes, it seems demonstrated that the treaty of cession had crested the State of Louisiana, and opened to her the doors of admission into the Union. The United States had no discretionary power left them to reject their new associate, and to do aught beyond the arrangement of those formalities which were to attend her introduction into the bosom of their great sisterhood of sovereignties. It wag nota dependent territory which they acquired, it was a State, or States. France had created the sovereignty of Louisiana, with the assent of the United States, who had assumed the merely ceremonial part of giving away the emblematic sceptre and the crown. But the pontiff who annoints the brows of royalty, only consecrates what already exists. Thus the act of Congress passed in 1811, to authorize the Territory of Orleans to form a Constitution and a State Government, and to enable it to be admitted into the Union on “an equal footing with the original States,” was merely the discharge of an obligation, and only the evidence, the recognition, the consecration of the sovereignty already secured to Louisiana. That colony, I say, became a sovereign and independent State by the fiat of France, with the assent of the United States, as completely as the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain had acquired their independence by their own achievements, backed by the assistance of that noble ally: and on the day of the admission of Louisiana into the Union, it was necessarily assumed that she also delegated, like the original States, those powers which the Federal Government was to exercise for the benefit of the whole Confederacy, and it necessarily followed that she could not have received from that Federal Government those which she retained. In that respect, she must accept no inferiority to the original States. She was not created by them, but incorporated into them, according to the principles of the Federal Constitution, in virtue of the stipulation of a benignant parent who emancipated her, and set her free forever from any human vassalage.

Now, it seems evident to my mind that the Constitution which became binding upon Louisiana on the day of her adoption, no more and no less than upon the original States, having been set aside by some of the contracting parties, in the name of a higher law invoked by them; that the equality of Louisiana in the Union having been disregarded; that her rights as one of its members having been trampled upon; that the property and lives of her citizens being put in peril by the action of a majority of her partners in the confederacy; that the Union itself being dissolved by systematic violations of the Constitution, and by the secession of one or more States, the sovereignty possessed by France in Louisiana, and transferred to the Unites States and to Louisiana herself on her incorporation into them, reverts in full to Louisiana and to the other States which were formed out of her territory, as soon as the United States no longer exist according to the principles of the Federal Constitution and the stipulations, the sense and spirit of the original compact. The sovereignty which emanated from the treaty of 1803, and which has been exercised since 1812, with the exception of certain delegated powers, can not perish, and must sit forever enthroned in Louisiana, whether the Union survives the present crisis, or is torn into premature destruction. Sovereignty once acquired can not be lost, except by complete and permanent subjugation, or by voluntary abdication.

Hoping that these crude remarks may be suggestive to your enlightened mind of thoughts more worthy of the subject, and more conducive to the facilitation of your labors in the Convention, I remain, with much respect, &c.,