B OOKS.

DR. LEMPRIERE ON THE AMERICAN CRISIS.* Ws have read this work with extreme surprise; so much so, that at times we have inclined to the conclusion that Dr. Lempriere must have lent his name to some person who has grossly abused his confi- dence. The supposition may not be very creditable to a D.C.L., Law Fellow of an Oxford College; but it would seem almost more credible and more creditable at. once than that such a personage should have penned sentences of such grammar as the following, which we extract from a single page (176) on the subject of Kansas :

"Two cabals were formed, one the Bogus, the other Topeka legislature ; but an end was put to the rivals by force in 1856."

Observe the mis-spellins., " Topeke" (for Topeka). So "Judge Tarney" (for Taney) ; "aGreely" (for Greeley) ; "Edmore" (for Fillmore), &c.

"A new convention, held in November, 1857, formed the Lecompton Con- stitution as a compromise, and in April, 1858, Congress admitted the State into the Union, with liberty to accept or reject the Lecompton Constitution. It was rejected, and the Leavenworth Constitution" [not before mentioned] " passed both" [What?).

Again :

"The constitution of the Federal States provided that the Federal Government, while it had the right to levy taxes upon all the property of the country for its own use, only conferred upon it the exclusive right to levy taxes upon imports." (P. 185.) Far more discreditable still is the tone of the following note (p. 193) : " There is extant a pamphlet, written by a very respectable but very damaged spinster, whose millennium arguments I have not found necessary to notice, as she adheres strictly to the moral ground where I could not follow her, as elderly cserulean maidens both demand and deserve more delicate handling than the stern nature of the inquiry allows ; besides, I cannot disguise from myself that most of it is in the style of what vulgar boys call My eye and Betty Martin 0,' " &c.

Whether written by Dr. Lempriere himself or not, however, with the name of a D.C.L., it may do mischief; and only on that account deserves to be noticed.

The volume, we must premise, consists of two portions; much paste-and-scissors work, and a small quantity of original matter, chiefly declamatory, in behalf of Southern rights and against "Northern aggression."

About 100 of the 224 pages of text consist of extracts ; add to these 70 odd pages of appendices, and that a note to the single chapter, of 45 pages (III.) containing really instructive matter, tells us that " for almost the whole details of this subject" the author is indebted "to the kindness of J. P. Kettell, Esq., author of "Southern Wealth and Northern Profits," and it will be seen how small is the original portion of the volume. The contents of the chapter in ques- tion referred to excepted, the extracts are generally such as could be cut out from any American, and many English, newspapers—such as Governor Ackson's Proclamation to the People of Missouri (nearly 6 pages); The Times on the Negro (7 pages), and passim; President Lincoln's Inaugural Address (16 pages of appendix); President Davis's Ditto (2); with slips from the appendix to the "Congres- sional Globe," &c. The only two original works that we can discover referred to are "Helper" and "Ellison," the titles to neither being given, though after repeated quotations it appears that Mr. Helper is author of the "Land of Gold?' The constitution of the United States is construed ex cathedra, without more than a single mention of Story, and none of any other constitutional writer, whilst not the least reference is made to Benton's "Thirty Years' View," Olmsted's invaluable volumes, or, in short, any standard work whatsoever. Almost all the facts and figures quoted are on the Southern side, whilst almost all the declamation reproduced is carefully culled from Northern sources, eschewing the far more plentiful supplies of the South. Whether his witnesses be good, bad, or indifferent, appears to trouble the writer but, little. A person whose personal honesty he impugns by insinuation, Mr. Helper, is put forward repeatedly as a sufficient representative of Northern views. A Times leader is quoted as " a very late authority" for asserting that the tariff question and not slavery is the cause of disruption. A proclamation of President Pierce, the notorious imbecility of whose administration and his un- scrupulous partisanship for the pro-slavery party in Kansas, were only surpassed by those of his successor, Mr. Buchanan, is quoted as "an authority which cannot be impugned." But let us consider the writer's reasoning.

The writer of the American Crisis Considered starts from the con- venient Southern position that the consent of the separate States not having been given to the presidency of Mr. Lincoln, but fourteen States having openly dissolved the Union, there is no government re- maining; and that no one "who has the slightest acquaintance with the political action of history would term the present movement rebellion." To which the answer is, simply : Every one of the four- teen States in question did consent to the constitution, in strict accordance with the terms of which Mr. Lincoln was elected. Such consent was renewed from time to time, by every election of Presi- dent, or of senators or representatives, and finally by the voting at the last presidential election itself, when it is not pretended by any one that the success of a pro-slavery candidate would not have been accepted and maintained as legal by the whole of the seceding States. And as to the right of any such State to secede, it is not we, but President Andrew Jackson, of the Slave State of Tennessee, a demo- crat and a slave-owner, and the father-in-law (if we mistake not) of

• The American Crisis Considerod. By Charles Lempriere, D.C.L., of the Inner Temple, Law Fellow of St. John's College in the University of Oxford. LODV1112111

Mr. Jefferson Davis, who shall answer for us, through his famous " Nullification Message" of January 16, 1833, which the writer of The American Crisis, or rather probably his Southern crammer, of course does not refer to :

"The right of the people of a single State to absolve themselves at will and without the consent of the other States, from the most solemn obligations, and hazard the liberties and life of the millions composing this Union, cannot be acknowledged. Without adverting to the particular theories to which the Federal compact has given rise, . . . it is sufficient that it must be admitted to be a compact, and to possess the obligations implied in a compact. . . . To this compact, in whatever mode it may have been done, the people of South Carolina have freely and voluntarily given their assent, and to the whole and every plat of it they are, upon every principle of good faith, indissolubly bound. . . The duty of the Government seems to be plain. It inculcates a recognition of that State as a member of the Union, and subject to its authority ; a vindication of the just powers of the constitution ; the preservation of the integrity of the Union, and the execution of the Union by all constitutional means. . . . In all cases similar to the present, the duties of the Government became the measure of its powers ; and whenever it fails to exert a power necessary and proper to the discharge of the duties prescribed by the constitution, it violates the public trust not less than it would in transcending its proper limits."

"Constitutionally speaking," says our author, "according to the law of the United States, the Southern Confederation had an inde- feasible right to withdravi from the Union." A,ciain we quote Pre- sident Jackson, of now seceding Tennessee, in his proclamation of 10th December, 1832:

"To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union, is to say that the United States are not a nation ; because it would be a solecism to contend that any part of a nation might dissolve its connexion with the other parts to their injury or ruin, without committing any offence. Secession, like any other revolutionary act, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression ; but to call it a constitutional right is confusing the meaning of terns, and can only be done through gross error, or to deceive those who are willing to assert a right, but would pause before they made a revolution, or incurred the penalties conse- quent on a failure."

Of course the question, whether there is a constitutional right of secession, whether there is a constitutional right to repress secession, is entirely distinct from the question whether or not secession, consi- dered as a revolutionary movement, is morally justified. The author of The American Crisis finds such justification for the present dis- ruption in what he calls a " constant Northern aggression upon Southern interests." This time, let the facts of history answer him. The Declaration of Independence in 1777—a document generally relied on by the partisans of State rights—in asserting that " all men are created equal," and are endowed by their Creator with "inalienable rights," including that of "liberty," in the eyes of all thinking men impliedly abolished slavery, as indeed similar words in the Massa- chusetts Constitution were judicially construed to have done by the Supreme Court of that State. The Declaration of Independence was penned by a Southern slave-owner, Mr. Jefferson, and contained in its original draft two clauses making of the slave-trade and slavery actual grievances against England. The Constitution of the United States in 1787, although never recognizing slavery by that name, never terming the slave a property, but a person, yet provided for the delivery up of persons "held to service or labour in one State and escaping into another"—a provision not contained in the previous "Articles of Confederation," and insisted on by the Southern States.— Northern Aggression !

The Constitution, by means of what the author of The American Crisis strangely terms " Black representation," allows the slave to reckon for three-fifths of a freeman in determining the number of representatives. Alone, therefore, amongst all species of property, slave-property gives political power. The non-slaveholdi g States were only reconciled to the allowance of this privilege to tie slave- holding interest, by the extension of the same rule to the apportion- ment of direct taxation. The immediate consequence of this was, that two-fifths of all slave property must escape direct taxation. But direct taxation has always been very slight and unfrequent ; so that the South has enjoyed the privilege without the burden, that burden itself being a lighter one.--Northern Aggression !

On March 1st, 1784, the Virginian slaveowner Jefferson proposed that after the year 1800 there should be "neither slavery nor in- voluntary servitude" hi any of the States into which the territory of the United States should be thereafter formed. The resolution only failed to pass through the fortuitous absence of a single delegate. In 1787, an ordinance was passed prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude only in States to be formed north-west of the Ohio river. —Northern Aggression ! From the Constitution in 1787 to the year 1819, nine States were admitted, of which four were Free, and fine Slave, giving thus ten addi- tional senators' votes against eight. Among the slave States was Louisiana, a foreign territory, purchased by the money of free and slave States alike, without any discoverable sanction in the Constitu- tion for the transaction. The slave territory of Florida was equally purchased out of the common treasury.—Northern Aggression ! The ordinance of 1787 forbade slavery north-west of the Ohio. The State of Missouri, by its constitution, not only established slavery, but forbade its own legislature from interfering with it. About half its territory extended on a line some 120 miles deep north and west of the Ohio. It was nevertheless admitted, in spite of the opposition of many Northern States, and the Missouri compromise, devised by Clay, the Kentucky slaveholder (Calhoun being privy to the measure, and the South generally supporting it), according to which slavery was to be prohibited in future in all Louisiana territory north of 36.30 N. latitude.—Northern aggression !

In 1836, the same slave State of Missouri, already one of the largest in the Union, was increased by the addition of a triangle be- tween the then existing boundary line and the Missouri river, as large as the States of Delaware or, Rhode Island, and containing space

for seven counties. Free soil was thus changed into slave, and this, as Colonel Benton, the Missouri senator, author of the measure, tells us, by the assistance of the Northern men.—Northern aggression!` The Constitution expressly provides that Congress shall have power "to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever" over the district of Columbia. Petitions having been presented for the abolition of slavery within such district, Calhoun, the South Ca- rolinian, took, what his brother slaveholder Benton calls, the " new and extreme ground" of maintaining that Congress had no power to do so. Eventually, a resolution was passed (1839), that "all petitions, memorials, and papers touching the abolition of slavery, or the buy- ing, selling, or transferring of slaves, in any State, district, or terri- tory, of the United States, be laid on the table without being debated, printed, read, or referred to, and that no further action whatever be had thereon."—Northern aggression !

By the removal of the Indian tribes, almost all located within the sparsely peopled Slave States, from the interior, the area of slave population, Colonel Benton tells us, had been almost doubled by the commencement of 1836-7. Money was paid on almost every such removal out of the common funds ; troops had, more than once, to he sent at the last ; every measure of the kind was supported by the North.—Northern aggression!

The United States had recognized the independence of Mexico, and were at peace with it. Slavery had been abolished by Mexico in 1823, and the abolition had been ratified for itself by the province of Texas. Bat Texas was overrun by American adventurers ; it re- volted against Mexico, declared its independence, re-established slavery, and was finally admitted as a Slave State (up to lat. 36.30) into the Union on the 22nd December, 1845. The measure was carried in spite of the earnest opposition of the North, by the threat that if Texas were not received into the Union, the Southern States would secede, and form a new confederacy with it ; " Texas and Disunion" being a common toast at the South.—Northern ag- gression !

The admission of Texas was, of course, a virtual declaration of war against Mexico. The result of the war was to tear away from free Mexico the vast provinces of New Mexico and Upper California, besides largely extending the boundary of Texas (1848). New Mexico now, by her constitution, not only establishes slavery, but forbids emancipation ; so that the result of the Mexican war, carried on at the cost of common blood and treasure, has been to restore slavery over vast tracts of country where it had been abolished for years. Even the admission of California in .1850 as a Free State under its own constitution was protested against by Mr. Jefferson Davis and other Southern senators, on the ground that slavery was not extended to its free soil.—Northern aggression !

On the formation of the Oregon territorial Government in 1848, a resolution was passed to extend the Missouri compromise line to the Pacific. Although the effect of this would be, Benton tells us, to plant slavery where there was none, this was violently opposed by Calhoun. But this was repealed by the Nebraska Bill, brought in by Douglas, of Illinois, in 1853, which attributed to the people of this territory (now, indeed, a Free State), although situate entirely north of 36.30, the right to decide whether they would or not admit slavery. —Northern aggression !

The Constitution provides that " the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States." The constitutions of several Northern States expressly ensure the rights of citizenship of coloured people. The famous Dred Scott case (1856) decides, or is supposed to decide, that coloured people have no rights of citizenship except within States which expressly assure such to them ; that Congress has no power to forbid slavery in the territories of the United States, and that a slaveholder may go with his property wherever he pleases ; in other words, that property in coloured man is the rule, and his citizenship the exception, under the Constitution. Yet at the time of the Mis- souri compromise it was held that a provision in a State constitution empowering the Legislature to forbid its borders to free coloured people was unconstitutional.—Northern aggression!

The territory of Kansas, after a desperate struggle, during which the whole powers of the Federal Government were exerted in favour of slavery by governor after governor, until each in turn, even to R. J. Walker, of Mississippi, revolted against his mission, remained in the hands of a free-soil population. It knocked at the door of the Constitution together with Oregon, whose laws—a disgrace to a free country—forbid free coloured people to live or hold property in its territory, or to sue in its courts. Oregon was admitted as a State (1858) with little more than 10,000 inIabitants ; Kansas, with a far more numerous population, was refused admission till she should have 93,000 ; or rather, she was literally sought to be bribed into accepting a pro-slavery constitution by the offer of immediate admis- sion, and three millions of acres of public lands for schools and rail- ways, but refused the bribe, and has only obtained admission within the last twelvemonth. The main effort to coerce Kansas into accept. ing slavery was made by the Pennsylvanian Buchanan, whose pro- ceedings were at last condemned by Crittenden, of slave-holding Ken- tucky, and Bell, of slave-holding Tennessee.—Northern aggression ! Mr. Brooks, of South Carolina, very nearly murders Senator Sumner, of Massachusetts, for having called Senator Butler and Douglas the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of slavery. He escapes with a trifling fine, dies January, 1857, and is compared on the floor of'Congress, by his colleague, to Brutus.—Northern aggression ! Whilst in 1790 the whites of the Slave States (alone entitled to the rights of citizenship) were nearly as 13 to 19 of those in the Free, in

1860 they were less than 1 to 2, and at the last census they were about as 74 to 194. Yet, by 1845, this one-third or less of the white popula-

tion had elected 11 presidents from itself out of 15, and had held the actual presidential authority during four-fifths of the time, besides securing to itself an overwhelming majority of the appointments to judicial and other offices. Since that time—although it may have allowed its Northern instruments, like Pierce, of New Hampshire, and Buchanan, of Pennsylvania, to fill the presidential chair—it has continued to carry every election till that of Mr. Lincoln. After long vehemently contending with Mr. Calhoun that Congress had no power whatsoever to legislate on slavery for the territories, it has come to contend that Congress is bound to legislate to protect slavery in them ; and its last claimed terms have been a double Congress and double President, each with the same powers of necessary consent and permissive veto.—Northern aggression !

We could multiply these instances ad infinitum. Are there none on the other side ? Yes, if we like to call them such. There is no doubt that the North never cared to execute that provision of the Constitution—framed by men of whom all whose names one cares to hear looked upon slavery only as a temporary evil, to be extirpated as soon as possible—which provides for the recovery of fugitive slaves, —that both before the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law and after, the Northern States set it often at nought by rescues, and in some cases by "personal liberty" acts (most of which, however, were lately repealed). There is no doubt that certain abolitionists have endea- voured to instruct, more or less practically, the black man of the South as to his human status with reference to the Declaration of Independence, and have been hung, burned, tarred and feathered, flogged, or Otherwise maltreated -for doing so, whenever caught. There is no doubt that one John Brown (amongst others), whose house had been burnt and his property destroyed, two of his sons driven in chains under a hot sun till one of them went mad, another murdered while walking, unarmed, by Missouri border ruffians, did, in the course of the Kansas struggle, forcibly or otherwise, set free divers articles of slave property in Kansas and Missouri, and that the said John Brown did, on the 17th of October, 1859, with seventeen men, seize the arsenal and railway bridge at Harper's Ferry in Vir- ginia, with a view to the setting free on a still larger scale of coloured human chattels, and was hung accordingly with his chief accomplices. And there is no doubt that the Slave States which have made most noise about the evasion of the Fugitive Slave Law and the escape of slaves, from South Carolina downwards, are precisely those which have least to fear escapes, as not bordering on free territory ; and that precisely those which have been driven the most reluctantly into secesssion, or yet stand aloof from it more or less—as Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri—are precisely those border States which have most to suffer from such a cause. Which surely disposes sufficiently of the severity of that Northern aggression.

But the tariff ! The author of The American Crisis quotes the Times as his authority for saying that it is not slavery, but protec- tion, which has caused the disruption of the republic. This is, no doubt, what Southern politicians invariably put forward as the plea to enlist European sympathy. And no doubt, also, that the indecent haste with which the Morrill tariff was enacted during the very throe of separation has contributed more than anything else to suppo such a plea. But let us look at facts.

The South is an.oricultural, and, therefore, a consumer of manufa6- tures. The North is manufacturing. Undoubtedly the revenue of the United States is chiefly derived from import duties ; undoubtedly high import duties, whether paid mainly by the South or not, must tend to fetter its production by limiting the market for exchangeable articles. But, on the one hand, it is little likely that direct taxation would ever be highly favoured by the nation at large—least of all by the North, when it knows that the South will, under the Constitu- tion, escape two-fifths of the burden ; and, on the other hand, it is evident that the tariff, although made the ground of South Carolina nullification in 1832, has never been used by the South since that time but as a bait or a threat to the North. Benton, in his " Thirty Years' View," explains this change of policy, telling us how, in 1833, Calhoun had declared that the Southern Slave States could never be united to the Northern on the tariff question, and that the basis of Southern union must be shifted to the slavery question. This policy was well understood at the South, so that Mr. R. J. Walker, of Mississippi (the same who was found fault with subsequently by Mr. Buchanan for not forcing slavery down the throats of the people of Kansas),in a somewhat celebrated letter of his, quoted by Mr. Palfrey in his "Five Years of the Slave-Power," wrote on the subject of Texas, when its admission was in debate : " Let it be known and proclaimed as a certain truth, and as a result which can never here- after be changed or recalled, that upon the refusal of reannexation" (i. e. of Texas), " now, and in all time to come, the tariff, as a prac- tical measure, falls wholly and for ever." Which did not, as Mr. Palfrey observes, prevent the high tariff bill of 1842 from being re- pealed by a majority made up of two senators from newly admitted Texas. The very Southern State documents put forth in The American Crisis Considered, nowhere allege the tariff, or the fear of the tariff, as the ground of secession ; and the embargo laid, or threatened to be laid, by the South on the export of its own staple, shows sufficiently that the tariff is not such a ground, nor is free trade in any wise the bond of union at the South. No further comment need be made on the unscrupulous advocacy, to use no harsher word, which marks The American Crisis Considered. But when the writer concludes his volume by assuming that secession, as a fact, is consummated from henceforth, and by declaring that a glorious career is open to both sections of the once united nation,

he may be referred once more to tough old President Jackson of Tennessee, in his " Farewell Address" of December 21, 1836 :

"The first line of separation would not last for a single generation ; new fragments would be torn off, new leaders would spring up, and this great and glorious republic would be broken into a multitude of petty States, without com- merce, without credit, jealous of one another, armed for mutual aggression, loaded with taxes to pay armies and leaders, seeking aid against each other from foreign Powers . . . . until, harassed with conflicts, and troubled and abased in spirit, they would be ready to submit to the absolute domination of any military adventurer, and surrender their liberty for the sake of repose."

On which memorable words, if the history of Mexico and the South American republics do not sufficiently illustrate their truth, let the growing dissensions between the Confederate States themselves, and the accusations levelled already by the Governor of Georgia against Mr. Davis, supply the comment. [J. M. Linnow.j