charge this duty there is no power delegated to the general government, either through the judicial department or any other department, to use any coercive means to compel him.'

99 1

If these two governors had defied the Federal Constitution, so had eleven State legislatures. From 1854 to 1860, inclusive, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, had all passed new "personal liberty laws" to abrogate the new fugitive slave law of 1850. Of these laws Professor Alexander Johnston said:

"There is absolutely no excuse for the personal liberty laws. If the rendition of fugitive slaves was a federal obligation, the personal liberty laws were flat disobedience to the law; if the obligation was upon the States, they were a gross breach of good faith, for they were intended and operated to prevent rendition; and, in either case, they were in violation of the Constitution." "

And now came the State of Wisconsin. Its Supreme Court intervened and took from "Virginia's Attitude on Slavery and Secession," Mumford, Pp. 211-12.

1

2

Alexander Johnston, "Lalor's Encyclopædia," vol. III, p. 163.

the hands of the federal authorities an alleged fugitive slave. The Supreme Court of the United States reversed the case and ordered the slave back into the custody of the United States marshal;1 and thereupon the General Assembly of Wisconsin expressly repudiated the authority of the United States Supreme Court. The Wisconsin assembly asserted its right to nullify the Federal law, basing its action on the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-a recrudescence of a doctrine long since abandoned even in the South.

In reality all this defiance of the Constitution of the United States by State executives, State legislatures, and a State court, was on the ground that whatever was dictated by conscience to these officials was a "higher law than the Constitution of the United States"; and modern historians recognize, as Tilden did, the leadership of the statesman who in 1850 announced that startling doctrine. It is Alexander Johnston who says, "Seward's speeches in the Senate made him the leader of the Republican party from its first organization."

2

1 Ableman v. Booth, 21 How.

707.

992

Alexander Johnston, "Lalor's Encyclopædia," vol. III, p.

To the minds of Southerners it seemed clear that if the Southern States desired to preserve for themselves the Constitution of the fathers, they must secede and set it up over a government of their own. This eleven of these States did. Many of them were reluctant to take the step; all their people had loved the old Union, but they passed their ordinances of secession, united as the Confederate States of America, and their officials took an oath to maintain inviolate the old Constitution, which, with unimportant changes in it, they had adopted.

The new government sent delegates to ask that the separation should be peaceful. The application was denied and the war followed. Attempts to secede were made in Kentucky and Missouri. In neither of these States did the seceders get full control. They were represented, however, in the Confederate Congress by senators and representatives elected by the troops from those States that were serving in the Confederate army.

TH

CHAPTER IX

FOUR YEARS OF WAR

HE bitter fruits of anti-slavery agitation were secession and four years of bloody war. The Federal Government waged war to coerce the seceding States to remain in the Union. With the North it was a war for the Union; the South was fighting for independence-denominated by Northern writers as "the Civil War." It was in reality a war between the eleven States which had seceded, as autonomous States, and were fighting for independence, as the Confederate States of America, against the other twenty-two States, which, as the United States of America, fought against secession and for the Union of all the States. It is true the States remaining in the Union had with them the army and the navy and the old government, but that government could not, and did not, exercise its functions within the borders of the seceded States until by force of arms in the war

that was now waged it had conquered a control. It was a war between the States for such control; for independence on the one hand, and for the Union on the other. It was not, save in exceptional cases, a war between neighbor and neighbor; it was a war between States as entities, and therefore not properly a civil war. The result of the war did not change the principles upon which it was fought, though it did decide finally the issues that were involved, the right of secession primarily, and slavery incidentally.

Jefferson Davis, afterward the muchloved President of the Confederacy, in his farewell speech in the United States Senate, March 21, 1861, thus stated the case of the South: "Then, senators, we recur to the compact which binds us together. We recur to the principles upon which this government was founded, and when you deny them, and when you deny to us the right to withdraw from a Union which thus perverted threatens to be destructive of our rights, we but tread in the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence and take the hazard. This is done not in hostility to