Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

THE

UNITED STATES REVIEW.

OCTOBER, 1855.

THE FEDERAL UNION-SHALL IT BE PRESERVED?

The federal government of the United States is an anomaly in the history of governments. It is literally a government of governments; a sovereignty of sovereignties; there being imparted to it some powers of a national character, without its being national in its organization. In its structure it has no parallel, either ancient or modern. It has within itself ample powers to execute its every law, within the limits of its clearly defined authority, but beyond that, it is impotent and powerless.

At the time of the formation and adoption of the Constitution, the thirteen original States were each, within itself, fully and completely sovereign, and held together by no stronger bonds than a league of confederation, without the power of executing its laws, or enforcing obedience to its authority. provide against these evils the Constitution was formed and adopted, and the powers of the federal government cautiously imparted and accurately defined, and all, not imparted, reserved to the States and the people.

To

This system, although esteemed so complex by many of our ablest and most learned statesmen, is by no means difficult to understand. If the statesmen of the country would examine

the Constitution as a system of imparted powers, and with a single eye to ascertain its real powers, and not with a view to find out how it might be evaded or violated, there will be found no complexity about it. The maxim that it is a system of imparted powers, and that all not imparted are reserved to the States or to the people, will always guide the honest inquirer after truth to a true interpretation of the legitimate powers of the federal government. The fact that the States are sovereign, and not provincial, is a conclusive argument that the general government is federal, and not national. Arguments to prove that the general government is federal, and not national, might be multiplied to an almost indefinite extent; but so often and so conclusively have they been iterated and reïterated, that it would be a work of supererogation to repeat them.

If the government be federal, and of a clearly defined limited jurisdiction, it necessarily follows that the exercise of any power not within this clearly-defined and limited jurisdiction is an aggression upon the sovereign rights of the States or of the people, which ought most studiously to be avoided, as every aggression strengthens the aggressive and weakens the assaulted power, unless instantly repaired. So well aware of this were the framers of the Constitution, that, to avoid collision between the federal and State jurisdictions, and aggression upon the reserved rights and liberties of the people, the Constitution clearly defining the federal powers, was reduced to writing with peculiar caution. If the federal government, from its formation, had been administered within its legitimate jurisdiction, as prescribed by the Constitution, many of those collisions between federal and State jurisdiction, which have shaken our republican institutions to their very centre, and threatened the integrity of the Union, would have been avoided; because the Constitution, having imparted to the federal government those powers only which were general in their character, and reserved those exclusively to the States which were local in their character, it is impossible that the operations of the federal government, confined within the limit of its powers, could come in contact with the jurisdiction of the States.

Upon the minds of American statesmen and American citizens no lesson should be more deeply impressed than that to secure, protect, and perpetuate the American Union, her republican institutions, and the liberty of the people, neither the federal nor State governments, under the slightest pretext, should be permitted to exercise the powers belonging to the

other; and that every attempt of the federal government to exercise powers not clearly and directly imparted to it should be promptly resisted and decisively repelled. To wise, reflecting, and sagacious men we need not say, that aggression once tolerated will, in the end, become irresistible.

The exercise of any deduced power, as primary, is dangerous, by any sort of agency, but particularly so in a government, which has no original, but merely derivative powers, and is, in substance, an agency. When once the work of interpolation has begun, it will not end until the whole Constitution is altered or repealed by legislative interpolation, and finally subverted. The statesman, who is engaged in the administration, and the citizen, who is watching over the operations of the government, should keep his eye, without the slightest intermission, upon the Constitution, and at every step inquire, first, Is the proposed measure clearly within the defined boundary of federal power? and, second, Is it wise and expedient? By such a course of administration by our statesmen, and such jealous and watchful vigilance by the people, the Union would be perpetual, our free institutions preserved, the rights and liberties of the people secured, and their prosperity and happiness promoted. The want of this strict adherence to the powers of the Constitution, and of this watchful vigilance on the part of the people, have been the cause of the many breaches of the Constitution, and usurpation of the State powers, that disgrace and disfigure our statute-book. In those countries where the gov ernment is absolute, and the people have no other duty than to obey, these excessive exercises of power are to be expected. Ambition unrestrained will run into these excesses; but in a government where the people are absolute, and the powers of the government limited by distinct boundaries, there is no apology for it.

The constitutional government had run but a brief career, before the influences of ambition, cupidity, religious bigotry, and a selfish, domineering spirit, on the part of the North, began to display themselves in violations of the Constitution, and aggressions upon the rights of the States and the liberties of the people. They first broke out in the establishment of a national bank, and the enactment of those celebrated alien and sedition laws which aroused the indignant and withering rebuke of the distinguished republicans of that day. These were followed, in the progress of the government, by a second national bank, with increased means of corruption, the protective tariff laws, the internal improvement system, bankrupt

laws, and the various schemes for giving away, in a variety of forms, the public lands. All these measures, adopted or proposed, were manifest violations of the Constitution, simply because they had no warrant in the Constitution. All these measures, although by their combined action transferring from the South to the North, power, commerce, and wealth, were borne with patriotic patience, until repealed by the justice of the country, and without having produced any serious prejudice to the Union. They, however, laid the foundation of a series of measures, which were palpably without warrant from the letter or spirit of the Constitution, and which, if persisted in to consummation, will dissolve this Union, and lay the fair fabric of our liberty in ruins-an event which would consolidate the odious despotism of the old world, and establish it, in all the hideousness of its deformity, here. The measures to which we refer are the various enactments and attempted enactments against the slave States and the slaveholders of the slave States of the Union.

That the subject of slavery, as it existed in a majority of the States at the formation of the Constitution, was placed, or was intended to be placed, under the power or control of the federal government is what no one, familiar with the history of the proceedings of the body which formed the Constitution, will pretend to deny. It would have been madness and folly in the slave States to have ratified the Constitution, had it been otherwise. That the federal government, by the Constitution, has any power to establish or abolish slavery in any of the States, or to forestall its adoption by any State that might thereafter seek admission into the Union, by a prohibitory act, is what no candid inquirer after truth can claim. That the slave States intended to impart to the federal government a power by which the institution of slavery might be crippled, restricted, or destroyed, is what no sane or impartial man can believe, and what the history of the proceedings of the convention that framed the Constitution contradicts. There is no power in the federal government, by the Constitution, to interfere with slavery in the States in any way, save for the reclamation of fugitives; and it would have been the height of madness in the slave States to have invested the federal government with any such power. While the convention was measuring out to the federal government, with so much jealousy and caution, its powers, it is very unreasonable that they should have conferred a power of such imminent peril to the slave States, over a subject so entirely domestic, without limit

ation or restriction; for if the federal government has power over the subject of slavery in the territories, it has it in the States, and may abolish it at pleasure. The idea that the federal government has any original power over the territories is at war with the theory of our system; or that this power is deducible from the power of passing such laws as may be necessary for the regulation of the territories. A power which the convention refused to impart in express terms was scarcely intended to be imparted indirectly, or by remote and far-fetched deduction. The sages who framed the Constitution were too wise, too sagacious, too cautious and too jealous for that. Judging from the state of things, as they then existed, and the determined purpose of the slave States to withhold from the federal government any jurisdiction over the institution of slavery, and to keep it, where the Constitution found it, under their own exclusive control, it can not be misunderstood that the Constitution would never have been adopted by the convention, or ratified by the people of the slave States, if any single particle of power over the institution of slavery had been lurking in any clause of that instrument; and it is perfidious in the non-slaveholding States to attempt to exercise it by deduction, knowing, as they must, that it was never intended to be imparted. Intention is the cardinal principle by which to test all compacts and statutes, and cotemporaneous exposition is the surest guide to that intention. By these rules we can not well misunderstand the powers of the federal government as to this subject.

The compact of the Constitution, by which the federal Union was formed, is of higher and more sacred obligation than any legislative compact; and every legislative compromise of constitutional rights is utterly null and void, and of no binding obligation, and calculated to subject the Constitution to repeal, alteration, or amendment, by legislative enactment, which would ultimately subvert it.

The first of that series of adopted and proposed measures which the Constitution did not authorize, and which invaded the rights of the slaveholding States, and of the citizens of the slaveholding States, and of the States which might apply for admission into the Union formed out of the territories, was the so-called Missouri restriction, established by act of Congress in 1820-21. This restriction was, that, as a condition of the admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave State, slavery should be for ever prohibited in all the then territory north of Missouri, and of the latitude 36° 30' from the western bound

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »