CHAPTER VII MR. LINCOLN'S DOCTRINE MR. MADISON's doctrine,-which seeks to reconcile the historical facts at the basis of the Federal government with a Constitutional power of coercion, direct or indirect, over the States, or their people, therein appertaining,―carried into action, thus leads to a logical impasse. The doctrine under which war was successfully waged against secession, and which must therefore be accepted as the official anti-secession doctrine, is as absolutely opposed in its premises to those of Mr. Madison as it is in its conclusion to that which he denied. Mr. Lincoln, the official and actual head of the anti-secession party, must be accepted as its mouthpiece. According to this doctrine, the United States is, in its origin and government, a consolidated republic to be governed by the majority of the people of all the States considered as one people. "If the majority should not rule, who would be the judge? Where is such a judge to be found? We should all be bound by the majority of the American people; if not, then the minority must control. Would that be right? Would it be just or generous? Assuredly not. I reiterate that the majority should rule.” 84 * . . in what consists the special sacredness of a State? If a State and a county, in a given case, should be equal in extent of territory, and equal in number of inhabitants, in what, as a matter of principle is the State better than the county? ... On what rightful principle may a State, being not more than one-fiftieth part of the nation, in soil and population, break up the nation and then coerce a proportionally larger subdivision of itself, in the most arbitrary way? What * Lincoln's Address at Steubenville, Ohio, February 14, 1861. mysterious right to play tyrant is conferred on a district of country, with its people, by merely calling it a State?" 35 * "We shall again be able not to declare that 'all States as States are equal,' nor yet that 'all citizens as citizens are equal,' but to renew the broader, better declaration, including both these and much more, that 'all men are created equal.'" 36 † "This sophism derives much, perhaps the whole, of its currency from the assumption that there is some omnipotent and sacred supremacy pertaining to a State-to each State of our Federal Union. Our States have neither more nor less power than that reserved to them in the Union by the Constitution 37 -no one of them ever having been a State out of the Union. The original ones passed into the Union even before they cast off their British colonial dependence; 38 . . . Much is said about the 'sovereignty' of the States; but the word even is not in the National Constitution, nor, as is believed, in any of the State constitutions.39 Originally some dependent colonies made the Union, and, in turn, the union threw off their old dependence for them, and made them States, such as they are. Not one of them ever had a State constitution independent of the Union.40 . . " ‡ In view of facts already presented, it must be either futile or unnecessary, more fully to canvass these statements. If they are correct, Mr. Lincoln was not a Constitutional President of the United States, having been elected by much less than a majority of the people of those States. * Lincoln, in Indianapolis. Nicolay & Hay, Vol. III, p. 295. † At banquet in Chicago, December 29, 1856. Lincoln, July 4, 1861. Nicolay & Hay, Vol. II, pp. 61, 62. CHAPTER VIII THE ETHICAL QUESTION INVOLVED "SURELY," says old Sir Thomas Browne, "there goes a great deal of Conscience to the compiling of a history; there is no reproach to the scandal of a Story; it is such an authentic kind of falsehood that with authority belies our good name to all nations and Posterity." Yet too much conscience is dangerous. Consider the case of casuistry of Father Aldrovand and Wilkin Flammock. Honest Wilkin, being in a very tight place, diddled certain Welshmen out of certain beeves. Considering him as a "practical" politician, "confronted with a condition not a theory," (and if any "unpractical" man wishes a meaning put to the phrase, it means just what "art for art's sake" means), etc., a jury (of his own men) well fed up on the beeves, and hurrahing for the Welshmen's defeat, would undoubtedly have found for the defendant, without leaving their seats. In a case once almost as celebrated, of much later date and nearer home, Patrick Henry laughed the plaintiff out of court for daring to ask payment for some other beeves, which had been incorporated in good American soldiers. "But hark! what notes of discord are these which disturb the general joy, and silence the acclamations of victory-they are the notes of John Hook, hoarsely bawling through the camp, ‘Beef, beef, beef."" And all that poor John got was the hook; like Mr. Hampden in the ballad, "happy to escape so," without a patriotic garment of tar and feathers. In time of war truth had as well stay in her well; even so illfavoured a poor girl is liable in war to be roughly entreated. Yet, in truth, ill-favoured, ragged slut as she is, "L'eurent à l'instant recognüe A ses habits tout dechirés," Truth is most of all in danger after the fight is over. Father Aldrovand, being called upon to give thanks, cannot, hungry as he is (or rather was), condone Honest Wilkin's peccadillo on the ground that it was expedient, and eat his dinner without caring how it was come by. Honest Wilkin hits poor Truth a clout, and "Out of the way, wench!" The Reverend gentleman must needs prove his love for her, much indeed as Death loved Sin, and with the same fatal progeny. In the interests of morality, truth, and his more squeamish stomach, it is necessary for him that Honest Wilkin's act, far from being a peccadillo, a venial sin, should be a virtue; "a great moral law," indeed. To prove by the Scriptures that Welshmen were intended to be diddled, that Raymond Berenger was a fool (possibly a "traitor" and atheist) for refusing to break his compact with them, is a first necessity, a tonic, a pepsin, an apéritif, a chasse café, a grace before and after meals, without which his "conscience" will not let his stomach be at peace, any more than would the balsam of Fierabras that of poor Sancho. Frederick, "the Great" (was it not?) said: "When I want a province, I take it. I can always get a pedant to justify me." The process, as Montaigne describes it, still goes merrily on: "Je ne veulx pas croire qu'ils ayent rien changé quant au gros du faict; mais de contourner le jugement des événemens souvent contre raison à nostre advantage. . ils en font mes tier." e. g.: "In the decade preceding the Civil War, when the moral indignation of the people was roused by the hideous barbarities and political encroachments of slavery, one case arose which stands in our judicial records as a warning that the strongest constitutional or legal barriers cannot always stand against the settled moral convictions of a people.11 In the case of Ableman v. Booth and United States v. Booth, Booth had been arrested and held on the charge of aiding the escape of a fugitive slave. While so held by the United States marshal, he was released on a writ of habeas corpus by a judge of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. He was subsequently indicted and convicted upon the same charge, and while undergoing sentence of the United States court, was again released on writ of habeas corpus by the Supreme Court of the State. The cases were carried to the Supreme Court of the United States on writ of error, and gave occasion for one of the ablest and most permanently valuable decisions of Chief-Justice Taney. "I suppose no lawyer or statesman of standing would to-day undertake to defend the action or decisions of the court of Wisconsin on legal grounds. Those decisions were indeed without a shadow of support in law, and could never be defended except upon revolutionary grounds. They show impressively the dangers to every part of our political system involved in the protection afforded by the Constitution to that baleful and deadly foe to our national peace as well as to our great constitutional system and experiment,-warranting President Lincoln's brave and sagacious vaticination: "This government cannot endure permanently half-slave and halffree.' "The highest achievement of the English-speaking race is, I make no doubt, the subordination of all other powers and authorities to the power and authority of Law,—the enthronement over all, the apotheosis, of that idea and fact which is the nearest approach, the most faithful echo which human ears ever catch, of the voice of God, not the voice of the people as heard at any given moment, but the voice of incarnated Reason and Truth-of Justice and Authority,-Law: "Sovereign law, that state's collected will, How does Mr. Chamberlain reconcile his statement that "The highest achievement of the English-speaking race is, the subordination of all other powers and authorities to the power and authority of Law,-the enthronement over * Daniel H. Chamberlain, "The State Judiciary," "Constitutional History of the United States as seen in the Development of American Law," N. Y., |