would vote for the amendment of the report of the committee, prohibiting the trade, solely on the ground of public policy. Public policy had recommended the trade to our forefathers; public policy now condemned it. It would be necessary that the Congress should prohibit it to make prohibition effective. Mr. Smith, of Tuskaloosa, saw no reason for a declaration of "public policy" in the resolutions. He would prohibit the trade as the most brutal commerce men could engage in. Besides, he wanted to see the way left open to the white men to occupy the State. He had often been a candidate for office, and had seen much of the small, non-slaveholding farmers. They were good citizens, and nearly all were living happily and honestly. There could be no immorality in the transformation of character the negro had undergone on the plantations. The black race had been greatly advanced, being taught to live under a roof, to live on wholesome diet, had acquired a graceful, sinewy form and the stature of intellect had advanced with all. But he would have no more slaves in Alabama. Solon looked far into the future when he proposed laws; Lycurgus planned for a thousand years. "Sir (he said) you are not merely opening the womb of emergencies that great warriors, great orators, great poets, great statesmen may spring out. You are not merely creating an era—an age that may be an age of iron, an age of bronze, an age of gold, or an age of blood. You are here for the loftiest of all purposes-to build up a country for the lasting happiness and the permanent prosperity of the millions that inherit the land."

Mr. Yancey spoke to the resolution of Mr. Jones, at length. No subject had been brought before the Convention, save the question of secession, comparable to this resolution in importance, he said. No public man had ever been allowed so little benefit from his own well defined positions as he, himself, on this question. He was opposed to the trade. "Within the allotted time of a life (he continued) simple skill applied to cotton culture had amassed many a fortune. Within half a century a plant culture, beginning with a narrow belt of seaboard, has opened fields from the forests, extending in length 1,500 miles, and 500 in breadth, giving employment to the manufactures and commerce of the civilized world. Well, Mr. President, might the statesman pause before he undertakes to

meddle with the foundations upon which this magnificent and unparalleled prosperity rests. Well might visions of future political aggrandizement melt away before the reality of prosperity so grand and so amazing." The South, he continued, had been greatly embarrassed in determining its duty, on the question of maintaining its institutions against hostile interference, within the Union. There had never been a public opinion favorable to the African slave trade in the South, but some good men, seeing no hope of preserving their rights in competition with the organized rush of Europeans to the common domain, otherwise, had advised the trade. Not more than 500 negroes had been landed in the cotton States from Africa, to the best of his information. The people of the South, too, had been goaded to defy laws denouncing that trade to be piracy, which the framers of the Constitution had specially protected against all possible interference for twenty years. But, secession had determined a fixed policy. The Confederacy would need no additions to its slaves from fresh importations. The Mississippi Valley could produce, even, ten millions of bales of cotton, by the labor of the slaves already in the country. He would be glad to assure the border States of perfect freedom from African competition in the slave market. He would be glad to invite them into the Confederacy on those terms. He foresaw danger in the attitude of the border States towards the Confederacy. Should those States fail to secede, knowing the fate of slavery in the Union, they would hurry their slaves into the Confederacy, far in excess of any demand for them.

The Ordinance declaring prohibition of the slave trade with Africa, amended by Mr. Jones denouncing the trade as opposed to public policy and instructing the deputies from Alabama to the Congress to insist that a prohibitory provision be incorporated into the organic law of the Confederacy. passed, with three dissenting votes.

After three weeks' sessions, the Convention adjourned, until March 4. Meantime, the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America organized at Montgomery. Mr. Yancey resigned his seat in the Convention to enter the civil service of the Confederacy, and Mr. Mitchell was chosen to succeed him.

The Convention was an assembly of earnest men accustomed to business. They quite realized that they were expected to do those things for which they would be held answerable in the latest pages of history. Nothing of utterance availed on the floor, save a native and vigorous eloquence turned upon the present situation of affairs. Speculation or sophistry would not be tolerated. Mr. Yancey was tried, as never before, and never before did the solid foundation of his intellectual prowess so manifest itself. Every utterance of his was fraught with argument; he was master of every subject which the most able and astute opponent or the most appreciative ally brought forward; he was, himself, already convinced of the wisdom of all things recommended by him to others. No delegate was so listened to as he. He went into the Convention with both the matter and the argument of the situation in perfect command. He accepted with unfeigned alarm and openly confessed premonitions of evil, his failure to arrest the tacit purpose of the Convention to disqualify for service in the Congress two hundred and thirtythree citizens of the State, upon whom had been bestowed the first choice of the people in the direction of the crisis then upon them. He beheld the influence of Alabama, in the new Confederacy, taken away from those supporters of his through the long years of his maturing purpose, to be entrusted to others whose wisdom he did not believe to be equal to the momentous issue of the times. He was profoundly impressed with the premonition that, a first false step had been taken, in the crisis for which he was to be held responsible in all time.

CHAPTER 25.

Confederate Diplomacy.

1861.

The Jeffersonian doctrine of State interposition to arrest unconstitutional acts of the federal government had given way to the presumptively more effective self-defense of secession, preliminary to federal re-organization of homogeneous States. The speculations of statesmanship will not avoid, because of the awful consequences of the course the slave States adopted, to consider the hypothesis of the Jeffersonian doctrine in the original circumstances. If, instead of formal secession and simultaneous federal re-organization, the imperiled States thus seeking safety, had merely suspended their relations with the Union, to the extent of peaceable and quiet withdrawal from all participation in its government, they would have thrown the revolutionary States upon their own resources of government. Had the members of the Supreme Court, from the South, the cabinet officers, the foreign ministers, the officers of the army and navy and all civil officers of the federal government, of Southern birth and associations, retired, leaving their places to be filled by the Republican party from its own section, the full force of the revolution would have developed at once in the free States. Up to 1861, the slave States had contributed the President of thirteen Administrations, and the free States of five. The Speakers of the House, Presidents of the Senate, Justices of the Supreme Court, foreign ministers, military officers had been, in far the greater number,

taken

from the slave States. The slave States had demonstrated their ability to preserve the government. The free States were in a condition of open revolution against the government. War was timely, if not necessary, to establish, in the free States, the cohesiveness of society essential to the united action of those States under whatever form of government might follow, there, the deposed Constitutional Union. A hypothetical policy of unbroken peace at the South presented, at least, the presumption that, amidst the great changes through which the free States must pass when thrown upon themselves for government, the slave States would see their prospects for relief brighten. But it was evident, in 1861, that the Jeffersonian doctrine of arrest of oppressive government, by refusal to participate in it, would not be accepted at the South, with that degree of unanimity necessary to the experiment. The question of accepting the government, under the Republican party, already divided the people. Alexander H. Stephens had advised the Southern aspirants for office to stickle not at serving under any legally commissioned Chief Executive, while there were other evidences that nullification could not be brought to the relief of the imperiled States.*

When Governor Letcher found an invitation at the door of every slave State, sent by South Carolina already withdrawn from the Union, to meet in Congress to form a Southern Confederacy, the Legislature of Virginia was hastily summoned in extra session to devise a plan of reconciliation of the sections. So it came to pass that, on the same Fourth day of February, 1861, on which seven seceded States convened by their deputies in Provisional Congress at Montgomery, the delegates of twenty-one States, by invitation of Virginia, met in Peace Congress at Washington. No explanation of the motives of the two colliding Confederacies will be more satisfactory to history than that which follows an inquiry into the temper dominating these two Congresses.

* Considering the fact of revolution in the free States, within the first twenty years of ascendency of the Republican party, two Presidents were assassinated, a third was virtually impeached, and a fourth was seated in the office, to which he was not elected, by the threat of the use of the army. The revolution was further evidenced in the act of Congress (where the Southern States were not represented, who composed the Confederate States) approved June 19, 1862, which arbitrarily annulled the Constitutional principles determined in the Dred Scott decree. The provisions annexed to the Constitution, by the Republican party, changed the government in its

sources.