The Sun.
London, England, 1861-05-23 00:00:00

CAUSES OF THE
WM AERICAN CIVIL
AR.

(From the limes.)
The de facto question in America has been re-
ferred at last to the dread arbitrament of civil war.

Time and events must determine whether the

,4 great Republic" is to disappear from the roll of

nations, or whether it is destined to survive the

storm which has gathered over its head. There is,
perhaps, a readiness in England to prejudge the
cese ; a disposition not to exult in our downfall, but
to accept the fact ; for nations, as well as indivi-

duals, may often be addressed in the pathetic lan-

gunge of the poet,—

-
. • .
"Donee ens fella, multos numerable amicos,
Tempora cum fuerint nubile, nullus erit."
Yet the trial by the ordeal of battle has hardly

commenced, and it would be presumptuous to affect

to penetrate the veil of even the immediate future.
But the question de jure is a different one. The
right and the wrong belong to the past, are hidden
by no veil, and may easily be read by all who are
_ _

not wilfully blind. Yet it is often asked why have
the Americans taken up arms ? Why has the United
States Government plunged into what is sometimes
called " this wicked war ?" Especially it is thought
amazing in England that the President should have
recently called for a great army of volunteers and
regulars, and that the inhabitants of the Free
States should have sprung forward as one man at
his call, like men suddenly relieved from a spell.
It would have been amazing had the call been

_ .
longer delayed. The national flag, insulted and
defied for many months, had at last been
lowered, after the most astonishing kind of siege

recorded in history, to an armed and organised
rebellion ; and a prominent personage in the Go-
vernment of the Southern " Confederacy" is re-
ported to have proclaimed amid the exultations
of victory that before the Ist of May the same
cherished emblem of our nationality should be
struck from the capital at Washington. An advance
of the " Confederate troops" upon that city ; the
flight or captivity of the President and his Cabinet ;

the seizure of the national archives, the nationa

title deeds, and the whole national machinery o;

foreign intercourse and internal administration by
the Uonfederatea i and the Proclamation from the
American palladium itself of the Montgomery Con-

stitution in place of the one devised by Washing.
ton, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay—a Constitution
in which slavery should be the universal law of the
land, the cornerstone of the political edifice—were
events which seemed for a few days of intense
anxiety almost probable.
Had this really been the result, without a blow
struck in defence of the national Government and
the old Constitution, it is certain that the contumely
poured forth upon the free States by their domestic
enemies, and by the world at large, would have
been as richly deserved as it would have been am-
ply bestowed. At present such a catastrophe seems
to have been averted. But the levy in mass of such
a vast number of armed men in the Free States, in
swift response to the call of the President, shows
how deep and pervading is the attachment to the
Constitution and to the flag of Union in the hearts
of the 19,000,000 who inhabit those States. It is
confidently believed, too, that the sentiment is not
wholly extinguished in the 9,000,000 white men
who dwell in the Slave States, and that, on the
contrary, there exists a large party throughout that
country who believe that the Union furnishes a
better protection for life, property, law, civilization,
and liberty than even the indefinite extension of
African slavery can do.
At any rate, the loyalty of the Free States has
proved more intense and passionate than it had ever
been supposed to be before. It is recognised
throughout their whole people that the Constitu-
tion of 1787 had made us a nation. The efforts of
a certain class of politicians for a long period had
been to reduce our Commonwealth to a Confede-
racy. So long as their efforts had been confined to
argument, it was considered sufficient to answer the
argument; but, now that secession, instead of re-
maining a topic of vehement and subtle discussion,
has expanded into armed and fierce rebellion and
revolution, civil war is the inevitable result. It is
the result foretold by sagacious statesmen almost a
generation ago, in the days of the tariff " nullifica-
tion." "To begin with nullification," said Daniel
Webster in 1833, " with the avowed intention,
nevertheless, not to proceed to secession, dismem-
berment, and general revolution, is as if one were
to take the plunge of Niagara, and cry out that he
would stop half-way down." And now the plunge
of secession has been taken, and we are all

struggling in the vortex of general revolution.
The body politic known for 70 years as the
United States of America is not a Confederacy, not
a compact of Sovereign States, not a copartnership ;
it is a Commonwealth, of which the constitution
drawn up at Philadelphia by the Convention of
1787, over which Washington presided, is the or-
ganic, fundamental law. We had already had
enough of a Confederacy. The thirteen rebel pro-
vinces, afterwards the thirteen original independent
States of America, bad been united to each other
during the revolutionary war by articles of confe-
deracy. " The said States hereby enter into a firm
league of friendship with each other." Such was
the language of 1781, and the league or treaty thus
drawn up was ratified, not by the people of the
States, but by the State Governments,—the legisla-
tive and executive bodies, namely, in their corpo-
rate capacity.
The continental Congress, which was the central
administrative Board during this epoch, was a diet

of envoys from sovereign States. It had no power
to act on individuals. It could not command the
States. It could move only by requisitions and

recommendations. Its functions were essentially
diplomatic, like those of the States-General of the
old Dutch Republic, like those of the modern Ger-
manic Confederation.

We were a league of petty sovereignties. When
the war had ceased, when our independence had
been acknowledged in 1783, we sank rapidly into a '
condition of utter impotence, imbecility, anarchy.
We had achieved our independence, but we had not
constructed a nation. We were not a body politic.
No laws could be enforced, no insurrections sup-
pressed, no debts collected. Neither property nor
life was secure. Great Britain had made a treaty of
peace with us, but she scornfully declined a treaty
of commerce and amity; not because we had been
rebels, but because we were not a State—because
we were a mere dissolving league of jarring pro-
vinces, incapable of guaranteeing the stipulations of
any commercial treaty. We were unable even to
fulfil the conditions of the treaty of peace and en-
force the stipulated collection of debts due to British
subjects; and Great Britain refused in consequence
up the military posts
to givewhich she held
within our frontiers. For twelve years after the
acknowledgment of our independence we were
mortified by the spectacle of foreign soldiers oc-
cupying a long chain of fortresses south of the
great lakes and upon our own soil. We were a
Confederacy. We were sovereign States. And
these were the fruits of such a Confederacy and of
such sovereignty. It was, until the immediate pre-
sent, the darkest hour of our history. But there
were patriotic and sagacious men in those days, and
their efforts at last rescued us from the condition of
a Confederacy. The " Constitution of the United
States" was an organic law, enacted by the sove-
reign people of that whole territory which is com-
monly called in geographies and histories the United
States of America. It was empowered to act di-
rectly, by its own legislative, judicial, and execu-
tive machinery upon every individual in the coun-
try. It could seize his property, it could take his
life, for causes of which itself was the judge. The
States were distinctly prohibited from opposing its
dmreei or from exercising any of the great func-
tions of sovereignty. The Union alone was supreme,
" anything in the -constitution and laws of the
States to the contrary notwithstanding." Of what
significance, then, was the title of " sovereign" States,
arrogated in later days by communities which had
voluntarily abdicated the most vital attributes of
sovereignty ? But, indeed, the words " sovereign"
and " sovereignty" are purely inapplicable to the
American system. In the Declaration of Independ-
ence the provinces declare themselves" free and in-
dependent States,'' but the men of those days knew
that the word " sovereign" was a term of feudalori-
7ith a
gin, When their connexion timeshonoured