Slavery -- United States; United States -- Politics and government -- 1861-1865; United States -- Race relations
But there is something else pertinent to be learned here. That the north
generally found out only what Webster said in the debate for his side, and
never even heard of what was said on the other, and that the south became
at once familiar with both speeches, proves that each section had already
formed its own belonging and independent public, and that the southern
public kept attentive watch upon all affairs of fact or opinion
interesting the other, while the northern public knew hardly anything at
all of the south. A large percentage of the southern leaders had studied
in northern schools and colleges. In this and many other ways they had
been instructed as to the north. Such instruction contributed very greatly
to southern supremacy in the federal government until the election of
Lincoln. We can now see that the powers in charge, as a part of their
work, made the great northern public, which, as Lincoln observed, was to
be the savior of the union, stop its ears to all anti-union sentiments or
arguments. How else can you understand it that the ante-bellum notices of
Webster, the memoir by Everett, the different utterances of Choate, and
many, many other sketches, are so utterly dumb as to Calhoun's great
reply? And is not the same dumbness of Curtis, Von Holst, and McMaster,
writing after the war, due to the survival in the north of the old
constraint? a constraint so powerful that, while Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, in
1883, did concede just a little to Calhoun, he stopped far short of the
full justice that I believe he would now render were he to traverse the
ground again.
We must now go beyond what we have already hinted, and show you plainly
how both the union men and the State-rights men assumed untenable
premises, and how the south, maintaining a cause foredoomed, vanquished in
the forum of discussion her adversary, maintaining the side which fate had
decreed must win. In no other way can the reader be better made to
understand the incalculable potency of the forces which preserved the
American union after its orators and advocates had all been discomfited;
and in no other way can he better learn what principles are to be invoked
if he would grasp the real essence of the union.
We emphasize the material and cardinal mistake of the union men, thus
phrased by Webster in the speech we have discussed: "Whether the
constitution be a compact between States in their sovereign capacities, is
a question which must be mainly argued from what is contained in the
instrument itself."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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