CHAPTER XIX.

MR. BENTON'S VIEWS.

It is natural for most readers to suspect that a Southerner who has taken a lively interest during the last fifty years in the controversy between the North and the South, is unable to discuss with fairness and impartiality the causes of Southern discontent; and that in the preceding chapters the motives of men have been unjustly impugned, if not misunderstood, and the consequences of their acts exaggerated.

To allay this suspicion as far as the corroborative testimony of an undoubtedly impartial writer can do it, the views of Mr. Benton are here presented. What he says is valuable in another respect; it shows that even Thomas H. Benton often voted for measures which "his judgment disapproved and his feelings condemned.”

The following extracts are taken from Chapter XXXII, vol. 2, of his THIRTY YEARS IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE. After stating in general terms the causes of Southern discontent, he says:

"The writer of this view sympathized with that complaint; believed it to be, to much extent, well founded; saw with concern the corroding effect it had on the feelings of patriotic men of the South; and often had to lament that a sense of duty to his own constituents required him to give votes which his judgment disapproved and his feelings condemned. This complaint existed when he came into the Senate (1821); it had, in fact, commenced in the first years of the Federal Government (i. e., under the Constitution), at the time of the assumption of the State debts, the incorporation of the first national bank, and the adoption of the funding system; all of which drew capital from the South to the

North. It continued to increase; and, at the period (1838) to which this chapter relates, it had reached the stage of an organized sectional expression in a voluntary convention of the Southern States. It had often been expressed in Congress, and in the State Legislatures, and habitually in the discussions of the people; but now it took the more serious form of joint action, and exhibited the spectacle of a part of the States assembling sectionally to complain formally of the unequal, and to them, injurious operation of the common government, established by common consent for the common good, and now frustrating its object by departing from the purposes of its creation.

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"It (the convention) met at Augusta, Georgia, and afterwards at Charleston, South Carolina; and the evil complained of and the remedy proposed were strongly set forth in the proceedings of the body, and in addresses to the people of the Southern and Southwestern States. The changed relative condition of the two sections of the country, before and since the Union, was shown in their general relative depression or prosperity since that event, and especially in the reversed condition of their respective foreign import trade.1 The convention referred the effect to a course of Federal legislation unwarranted by the grants of the Constitution and the objects of the Union, which subtracted capital from one section and accumulated it in the other: protective tariff, internal improvements, pensions, national debt, two national banks, the funding system and the paper system; the multiplication of offices, profuse and extravagant expenditure, the conversion of a limited into an almost unlimited government; and the substitution of power and splendor for what was intended to

'The reader is requested to bear in mind that "slavery" and ‘freedom" cut no figure in this convention.

be a simple and economical administration of that part of their affairs which required a general head.

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"These were the points of complaint-abuses—which had led to the collection of an enormous revenue, chiefly levied on the products of one section of the Union and mainly disbursed in another Unhappily there was some foundation for this view of the case; and in this lies the root of the discontent of the South and its dissatisfaction with the Union.

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"What has been published in the South and adverted to in this view goes to show that an incompatibility of interest between the two sections, though not inherent, has been produced by the working of the government— not its fair and legitimate, but its perverted and unequal working.

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1

"The conventions of Augusta and Charleston proposed their remedy for the Southern depression, and the comparative decay of which they complained. It was a fair and patriotic remedy-that of becoming their own exporters, and opening a direct trade in their own staples between Southern and foreign ports. It was recommended-attempted-failed. Superior advantages for navigation in the North-greater aptitude of its people for commerce-established course of business-accumulated capital-continued unequal legislation in Congress; and increasing expenditures of the government, chiefly disbursed in the North, and defect of seamen in the South (for mariners can not be made of slaves), all combined to retain the foreign trade in the channel which had absorbed it; and to increase it there with the increasing wealth and population of the country, and the still faster increasing extravagance and profusion of the government.

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1 This was proposed after the adoption of the compromise tariff, and when it was supposed that "protection” was dead.

"This is what the dry and naked figures show. To the memory and imagination it is worse; for it is a tradition of the colonies that the South had been the seat of wealth and happiness, of power and opulence; that a rich population covered the land, dispensing a baronial hospitality, and diffusing the felicity which themselves enjoyed; that all was life, and joy, and affluence then. And this tradition was not without similitude to the reality, as this writer can testify; for he was old enough (born 1782) to have seen (after the Revolution) the still surviving state of Southern colonial manners, when no traveler was allowed to go to a tavern, but was handed over from family to family through entire States; when holidays were days of festivity and expectation, long prepared for, and celebrated by master and slave with music and feasting, and great concourse of friends and relatives; when gold was kept in desks or chests (after the downfall of continental paper) and weighed in scales, and lent to neighbors for short terms without note, interest, witness, or security; and on bond and land security for long years and lawful usage; and when petty litigation was at so low an ebb that it required a fine of forty pounds of tobacco' to make a man serve as constable.

"The reverse of all this was now seen and felt. *

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"Separation is no remedy for these evils, but the parent of far greater than either just discontent or restless ambition would fly from. To the South the Union is a political blessing; to the North it is both a political and a pecuniary blessing. Both sections should

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cherish it, and the North most," etc.

It was fifty shillings in North Carolina.-Laws, page 132.

CHAPTER XX.

THE CAUSES AND THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR FOR THE SUBJUGATION OF THE SOUTHERN STATES.

"A great man is great, and he is a man: what makes him great is his relation to the spirit of his times, and to his people; what makes him a man is his individuality; but separate these two elements, consider the man in the great man, and the greatest of men appears small enough. Every individuality, when it is detached from the general spirit which it expresses, is full of what is pitiful. When we read the secret memoirs which we have of some great men, and when we follow them into the details of their life and conduct, we are always quite confounded to find them not only small, but, I am compelled to say, often vicious and almost despicable.". Victor Cousin, Hist. Mod. Phil.

The causes of the war between the two sections of the Union, the responsibility for its inauguration, and the rightfulness of the invasion of the Southern States have been so consistently and so persistently misrepresented to the world during the last thirty-six years that it seems a daring enterprise to attempt to remove the resulting false impressions. But truth and justice demand the attempt; and it is here made.

In the first Constitution of the United States there were three Articles which embodied all that the South. ern States ever contended for during all the years of sectional strife. '

It is worth while to remind the reader that even the most unscrupulous traducers of the Southern States never charged them with infidelity to the obligations they assumed on entering into the Union. Mr. Blaine and the statesmen of his school magnified what he called unfaithfulness to the Union; but he did not dare to accuse them of the crime of which his own party was guilty-unfaithfulness to the Constitution.