Uneasy Money

Many people – I don’t think that I need to mention names — are saying that the roughly 25% rise US stock prices in the 13 months since the last Presidential election shows that the economic nationalist America First policies adopted since then have been a roaring success.

Responding to those claims some people have pointed out that the increase in the S&P500 since November 8, 2016 or since January 20, 2017 has been very close to the average yearly rate of increase in the S&P 500 since January 20, 2009, when Barrack Obama took office. Here is a comparison of the year on year rate of increase in the S&P500 since January 20, 2010, one year after Obama took office.

Now the percent change in the S&P 500 for 2018 is just the change for the 10 and a half months between January 20, 2017 and December 5 2017, so if the current rate of increase in the S&P 500 since January 20 is maintained, the annual increase would be about 18% which would still be less than the year-on-year increase in the last year of the Obama administration. Over the entire 8 years of the Obama administration, the S&P 500 increased by about 220%, or an annual rate of increase of a little over 12% a year. So the S&P 500 in the first year since the adoption of the current economic nationalist America First policies has done better — but only slightly better — than it did on average in the eight years of the Obama administration.

But if we are trying to gauge the success of the economic nationalist America First policies of the current administration, it seems appropriate to take not just the performance of the S&P 500, which disproportionately represents US companies but also the performance of stocks in other countries. One such index is the MSCI EAFE index. (The MSCI EAFE Index is an index designed to measure the equity market performance of developed markets outside of the U.S. and Canada. It is maintained by MSCI Inc.,; the EAFE acronym stands for Europe, Australasia and Far East.)

The accompanying chart shows the performance of the S&P500 and the MSCI EAFE index since January 20, 2009. I have normalized both indices to equal 100 on November 8, 2016.

The two vertical lines are drawn at November 8, 2016 and January 20, 2017, the two dates of especial interest for comparison purposes. In the period between the election and the inauguration, the S&P 500 actually performed slightly better than did the MSCI EAFE. But the opposite has obviously been the case since the new administration actually came into power. Since the inauguration, the economic nationalist America First policies adopted by the administration have resulted in proportionately much greater increases in stock prices in Europe, Australia and the Far East than in the US (as reflected in the S&P 500).

Here are the year over year comparisons:

In fact, the MSCI EAFE has outperformed the S&P 500 in every year since 2013. But the gap in the rates of increase in the two indices has skyrocketed since last January 20. I have no doubt that inquiring minds will want to know why the the economic nationalist America First policies of the new administration have been allowing the rest of the world to outperforming the US by an increasingly wide margins. Is that really what winning looks like? Sad!

PS I also can’t help but observe that during the Obama administration, rising stock prices were routinely dismissed by the geniuses at places like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Heritage Foundation, and Freedomworks as evidence that Quantitative Easing was an elitist regressive policy aimed at enriching Wall Street and the one-percent at the expense of retirees living on fixed incomes, workers with stagnating wages, and all the others being left behind by the callous and elitist policies of the Fed and the previous administration. Under the current administration, it seems that rising stock prices are no longer evidence that the elites are exploiting the common people as used to be the case before the economic nationalist America First policies now being followed were adopted.

John Daniel Davidson in The Federalist (a more apt name might The Confederalist or The CON-Federalist) rises to the defense of General Kelly’s infamous remarks to Laura Ingraham about Robert E. Lee and the Civil War. General Kelly called Robert E. Lee “an honorable man,” as if fighting to ensure the perpetual enslavement of millions of human beings counts for nothing in an assessment of a person’s character, and further opined that the Civil War was caused by “a lack of an ability to compromise,” as if the lack of an ability to compromise were a genetic incapacity rather than a choice, and as if it were an incapacity with which both sides in the Civil War were equally afflicted. Following that well-known doctrine of verbal conflict that the best defense is a good offense, Davidson quickly turns his defense of General Kelly into an all-out assault on Ta-Nehisi Coates who delivered a widely read Twitter storm demolishing General Kelly’s tendentious characterization of the cause of the Civil War.

In transitioning from a defense of General Kelly to an attack on Coates, Davidson relies greatly on the authority of Shelby Foote, the Southern novelist and author of an acclaimed 3-volume history of the Civil War, who was featured extensively in Ken Burns’s award-winning PBS series on the Civil War in 1990. Invoking Foote’s narrative history — “a masterpiece” and “a triumph of American history and literature” – Davidson scorns Jonathan Chait for daring to question the historical veracity of Foote’s work and of Burns’s remarkable documentary. Davidson offers an extended paean to Foote’s achievement:

The volumes, published between 1958 and 1974, were almost immediately hailed as a seminal contribution to American letters. Writing in the New Republic, literary scholar and critic Louis D. Rubin Jr. said Foote’s trilogy “is a model of what military history can be.” The New York Times Book Review called it “a remarkable achievement, prodigiously researched, vigorous, detailed, absorbing.” (Presumably by today’s standards these reviewers would be upbraided for praising Foote.)

Davidson might have been less inclined to insert his snide parenthetical remark had he taken the trouble to identify Louis D. Rubin Jr. as a prominent Southern literary figure and the unnamed Times reviewer (Nash K. Burger) as a native Mississippian, who despite a long tenure as an editor of the New York Times Book Review, was unabashed in avowing his Confederate ideology. Despite their emotional attachments to the South, neither reviewer was a racist or a blindly pro-Confederate partisans, but neither was a professional historian, and their praise of Foote’s work owed at least as much to its literary merits as to its historical analytical merits.

So even if one grants that Foote wrote a splendid book on the Civil War, his evaluation of Lee’s character and the role played by “the lack of an ability to compromise” can hardly be accepted as authoritative. I am not a historian, so I am not going to try to pass judgment on Foote’s magnum opus or on Burns’s classic documentary. But facts are facts, and Shelby Foote’s high opinion of him notwithstanding, the facts about Lee are:

(1) that he fought to defend the enslavement of millions of human beings and to ensure that the enslavement would continue in perpetuity,

(2) that he approved the capture and enslavement of free black citizens of the United States by his invading army,

(3) that he refused to allow black Union soldiers captured by the Confederate army to be exchanged for captured Confederate soldiers.

None of those facts supports a claim that Lee was an honorable man.

But Davidson is just getting warmed up:

[N]oting that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Kelly’s comments by citing the Burns documentary, Chait writes that Burns relies heavily on Foote, and “Foote presented Lee and other Confederate fighters as largely driven by motives other than preserving human property, and bemoaned the failure of the North and South to compromise (a compromise that would inevitably have preserved slavery).”

This should be dismissed as a simple case of historical ignorance. . . . Even someone with a cursory knowledge of the Civil War should know that the war came about, as all wars do, because of a failure to compromise.

Instead of making a historical argument, Davidson repeats a truism. Obviously, a compromise on some terms could avoid any war. In the context of the Civil War, however, the relevant question is who was — and who was not — willing to compromise. The answer is clear. The Union was, and always was, willing to make a compromise by allowing those states in which slavery had been legal upon entry into the Union to continue to enforce the rights of slave-holders . The long list of compromises is well-known and in most instances they involved concessions to Southern slave-holding interests. In the run-up to the Civil War, Republicans, so demonized by the South, never threatened to terminate slavery in states in which it remained legal, advocating only that a line be drawn beyond which the extension of slavery be would forbidden, leaving it to the discretion of slave states to decide when, or whether, to terminate that social evil within their own borders. But that compromise was rejected by the South. Of course, Confederate partisans, in characteristic confusion or bad faith, cite the willingness of Lincoln and the Republicans to compromise over slavery to avoid a Civil War as evidence that the Civil War was not really about slavery.

Here is how Lincoln described the prospects for compromise with the South in his Cooper Union speech in February 1860, a speech that Mr. Davidson, if he has a smidgen of intellectual honesty, could read with profit.

It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy [i.e., the Union] shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.

Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them, if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

I am quite aware they do not state their case precisely in this way. Most of them would probably say to us, “Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about slavery.” But we do let them alone – have never disturbed them – so that, after all, it is what we say, which dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying.

But Davidson holds a rather different view of the situation in 1861 from that of Lincoln of the situation in 1861

In our case, the entire history of the United States prior to outbreak of war in 1861 was full of compromises on the question of slavery. It began with the Three-Fifths Compromise written into the U.S. Constitution and was followed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which prohibited slavery north of the 36°30’ parallel, excluding Missouri), the Compromise of 1850, then the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and eventually led to the election of Abraham Lincoln and the subsequent secession of the southern states. Through all this, we inched toward emancipation, albeit slowly.

Really? What is the evidence of slow inching toward emancipation detected by Davidson? The Dred Scott decision (unmentioned by Davidson for obvious reasons)? The Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act were clearly major steps in the opposite direction, so Davidson’s assertion of progress toward emancipation is refuted by his own examples and omissions. Any inching toward emancipation served only to inflame Southern recalcitrance and extremism on slavery. Unwilling or unable to offer a shred of evidence that the South was prepared to compromise in 1861, Davidson attacks Kelly’s critics for being opposed to compromise on principle, accusing Ta-Nehisi Coates of hating America because of the earlier compromises that preserved slavery and the Union, as if opposition to compromise were not characteristic of only one side in the Civil War.

The breakdown of all those decades of compromise did indeed lead to the Civil War. This is a point that Foote and other historians have made many times and that Kelly tried his best to paraphrase. Compromising on slavery had been part of how American stayed together, and staved off war, from the beginning. No historian disputes this.

What is the “this” that Davidson believes is not disputed? That until 1861 the Union had been preserved through compromise, almost all being concession to placate Southern slave-holding interests? But in 1861, as Lincoln made so devastatingly clear, the South was dead-set against any further compromises of the sort that had kept the Union together. The South flatly refused to tolerate the election of a Republican President who said explicitly that slavery was wrong, even though he disclaimed any intention to emancipate a single slave legally held under the laws of any sovereign state. Unable to abide an honest statement of moral disapprobation of slavery by the newly elected President, the South chose Civil War as a preemptive measure, because the South refused to coexist in a Union whose chief executive took seriously the proposition that all men are created equal. The Southern idea of compromise was simply: give me whatever I want or I will dissolve the Union.

Neither General Kelly nor Mr. Davidson will tell us exactly what further compromise they think could or should have prevented the War and preserved the Union. They won’t, because to do so they would have to acknowledge that the Civil War came, because the South would never be satisfied unless their view of slavery was adopted and enshrined in the US Constitution. Again read Lincoln’s words:

I am also aware they have not, as yet, in terms, demanded the overthrow of our Free-State Constitutions. Yet those Constitutions declare the wrong of slavery, with more solemn emphasis, than do all other sayings against it; and when all these other sayings shall have been silenced, the overthrow of these Constitutions will be demanded, and nothing be left to resist the demand. It is nothing to the contrary, that they do not demand the whole of this just now. Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing.

Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality – its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension – its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?

Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored – contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man – such as a policy of “don’t care” on a question about which all true men do care – such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance – such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.

Davidson describes Coates as anti-American because he decries the compromises that were made to preserve the Union literally on the backs of brutally oppressed black slaves (see the picture above).

For Coates and his ilk, the entire idea of America is indefensible. Our original sin of slavery can never be extirpated—not by the Civil War, not by the civil rights movement, not even by the remarkable fact that a black man became president of the United States, even as he has become one of the most celebrated and influential writers in America. Coates’ entire project is fundamentally anti-American. To speak of compromises that could have prevented or delayed the war is to speak of a great crime—slavery—for which there is no suitable punishment, except maybe extinction.

In Coates’ reading of history, even Lincoln is culpable. “Lincoln’s own platform was a compromise,” he writes. “Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He proposed to limit slavery’s expansion, not end it.”

And the South chose secession because they would not tolerate his platform of compromise!

Of course, Coates is wrong in a larger sense about Lincoln’s view of the matter. In his famous 1858 House Divided speech, Lincoln said the United States “cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Davidson obviously believes that he is having a gotcha moment here by finding that Coates believes slavery to be a great crime for which there is no suitable punishment, a crime in which Lincoln himself was complicit. Even if that is what Coates really believes – and Davidson is projecting views onto Coates, not quoting him directly — how different would that belief be from what Lincoln himself said in his Second Inaugural address?

The Almighty has his own purposes.  “Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.”  If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him?  Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray–that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” [My emphasis]

Was there ever a more eloquent, more devastating indictment of the crime of American slavery — a crime for which, Lincoln clearly states, both sides in the War bore their share of blame and moral culpability?

Davidson goes onto quote Foote’s opposition to taking down monuments to the Confederacy as if Foote’s views on the preservation of history provide moral justification for preserving the public displays of monuments celebrating Confederate war heroes as a sort of historical imperative. Evidently insensitive to how insipid Foote sounds in the interviews, Davidson is unembarrassed to quote Foote’s cringe-worthy comparisons of war memorials erected by white Southerners celebrating Confederate war heroes to Jewish religious and ritual commemorations of their deliverance from Egyptian bondage and to memorials documenting the atrocities perpetrated against Jews in the Holocaust. If preserving the historical record is the object, then the picture above is worth a thousand Confederate statues.

Yesterday General John Kelly, U. S. Marine Corps (retired) appeared on the Laura Ingraham Show on Fox News and made the following assertion.

I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.

General Kelly’s assertion that the cause of the Civil War was “a lack of an ability to compromise” was quickly subjected to severe criticism. But I actually think he made an excellent point. The problem is that he did not say who lacked the ability to compromise. But his subsequent reference to “men and women of good faith on both sides” and his praise for Robert E. Lee suggest that he holds that both sides were lacking “an ability to compromise.” The ability – and willingness — to compromise, the ability – and willingness — to engage in a dialogue with one’s adversaries rather than resort to a civil war to achieve the political objectives animating one section of the country was actually addressed at length by Abraham Lincoln in his magnificent Cooper Union Speech (watch Sam Waterston’s marvelous rendering of that speech at the Cooper Union on the 150^th anniversary of the speech in 2010 here), which I have previously quoted from on this blog. Herewith is Lincoln’s take on the subject starting at about the half-way point in the speech.

And now, if they would listen – as I suppose they will not – I would address a few words to the Southern people.

I would say to them: – You consider yourselves a reasonable and a just people; and I consider that in the general qualities of reason and justice you are not inferior to any other people. Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us a reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to “Black Republicans.” In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of “Black Republicanism” as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite – license, so to speak – among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.

You say we are sectional. We deny it. That makes an issue; and the burden of proof is upon you. You produce your proof; and what is it? Why, that our party has no existence in your section – gets no votes in your section. The fact is substantially true; but does it prove the issue? If it does, then in case we should, without change of principle, begin to get votes in your section, we should thereby cease to be sectional. You cannot escape this conclusion; and yet, are you willing to abide by it? If you are, you will probably soon find that we have ceased to be sectional, for we shall get votes in your section this very year. You will then begin to discover, as the truth plainly is, that your proof does not touch the issue. The fact that we get no votes in your section, is a fact of your making, and not of ours. And if there be fault in that fact, that fault is primarily yours, and remains until you show that we repel you by some wrong principle or practice. If we do repel you by any wrong principle or practice, the fault is ours; but this brings you to where you ought to have started – to a discussion of the right or wrong of our principle. If our principle, put in practice, would wrong your section for the benefit of ours, or for any other object, then our principle, and we with it, are sectional, and are justly opposed and denounced as such. Meet us, then, on the question of whether our principle, put in practice, would wrong your section; and so meet it as if it were possible that something may be said on our side. Do you accept the challenge? No! Then you really believe that the principle which “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live” thought so clearly right as to adopt it, and indorse it again and again, upon their official oaths, is in fact so clearly wrong as to demand your condemnation without a moment’s consideration.

Some of you delight to flaunt in our faces the warning against sectional parties given by Washington in his Farewell Address. Less than eight years before Washington gave that warning, he had, as President of the United States, approved and signed an act of Congress, enforcing the prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern Territory, which act embodied the policy of the Government upon that subject up to and at the very moment he penned that warning; and about one year after he penned it, he wrote LaFayette that he considered that prohibition a wise measure, expressing in the same connection his hope that we should at some time have a confederacy of free States.

Bearing this in mind, and seeing that sectionalism has since arisen upon this same subject, is that warning a weapon in your hands against us, or in our hands against you? Could Washington himself speak, would he cast the blame of that sectionalism upon us, who sustain his policy, or upon you who repudiate it? We respect that warning of Washington, and we commend it to you, together with his example pointing to the right application of it.

But you say you are conservative – eminently conservative – while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;” while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. You are divided on new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers. Some of you are for reviving the foreign slave trade; some for a Congressional Slave-Code for the Territories; some for Congress forbidding the Territories to prohibit Slavery within their limits; some for maintaining Slavery in the Territories through the judiciary; some for the “gur-reat pur-rinciple” that “if one man would enslave another, no third man should object,” fantastically called “Popular Sovereignty;” but never a man among you is in favor of federal prohibition of slavery in federal territories, according to the practice of “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live.” Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated. Consider, then, whether your claim of conservatism for yourselves, and your charge or destructiveness against us, are based on the most clear and stable foundations.

Again, you say we have made the slavery question more prominent than it formerly was. We deny it. We admit that it is more prominent, but we deny that we made it so. It was not we, but you, who discarded the old policy of the fathers. We resisted, and still resist, your innovation; and thence comes the greater prominence of the question. Would you have that question reduced to its former proportions? Go back to that old policy. What has been will be again, under the same conditions. If you would have the peace of the old times, readopt the precepts and policy of the old times.

You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper’s Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise. If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it, and especially for persisting in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need to be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander.

Some of you admit that no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the Harper’s Ferry affair, but still insist that our doctrines and declarations necessarily lead to such results. We do not believe it. We know we hold to no doctrine, and make no declaration, which were not held to and made by “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live.” You never dealt fairly by us in relation to this affair. When it occurred, some important State elections were near at hand, and you were in evident glee with the belief that, by charging the blame upon us, you could get an advantage of us in those elections. The elections came, and your expectations were not quite fulfilled. Every Republican man knew that, as to himself at least, your charge was a slander, and he was not much inclined by it to cast his vote in your favor. Republican doctrines and declarations are accompanied with a continual protest against any interference whatever with your slaves, or with you about your slaves. Surely, this does not encourage them to revolt. True, we do, in common with “our fathers, who framed the Government under which we live,” declare our belief that slavery is wrong; but the slaves do not hear us declare even this. For anything we say or do, the slaves would scarcely know there is a Republican party. I believe they would not, in fact, generally know it but for your misrepresentations of us, in their hearing. In your political contests among yourselves, each faction charges the other with sympathy with Black Republicanism; and then, to give point to the charge, defines Black Republicanism to simply be insurrection, blood and thunder among the slaves.

Slave insurrections are no more common now than they were before the Republican party was organized. What induced the Southampton insurrection, twenty-eight years ago, in which, at least three times as many lives were lost as at Harper’s Ferry? You can scarcely stretch your very elastic fancy to the conclusion that Southampton was “got up by Black Republicanism.” In the present state of things in the United States, I do not think a general, or even a very extensive slave insurrection is possible. The indispensable concert of action cannot be attained. The slaves have no means of rapid communication; nor can incendiary freemen, black or white, supply it. The explosive materials are everywhere in parcels; but there neither are, nor can be supplied, the indispensable connecting trains.

Much is said by Southern people about the affection of slaves for their masters and mistresses; and a part of it, at least, is true. A plot for an uprising could scarcely be devised and communicated to twenty individuals before some one of them, to save the life of a favorite master or mistress, would divulge it. This is the rule; and the slave revolution in Hayti was not an exception to it, but a case occurring under peculiar circumstances. The gunpowder plot of British history, though not connected with slaves, was more in point. In that case, only about twenty were admitted to the secret; and yet one of them, in his anxiety to save a friend, betrayed the plot to that friend, and, by consequence, averted the calamity. Occasional poisonings from the kitchen, and open or stealthy assassinations in the field, and local revolts extending to a score or so, will continue to occur as the natural results of slavery; but no general insurrection of slaves, as I think, can happen in this country for a long time. Whoever much fears, or much hopes for such an event, will be alike disappointed.

In the language of Mr. Jefferson, uttered many years ago, “It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation, and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degrees, as that the evil will wear off insensibly; and their places be, pari passu, filled up by free white laborers. If, on the contrary, it is left to force itself on, human nature must shudder at the prospect held up.”

Mr. Jefferson did not mean to say, nor do I, that the power of emancipation is in the Federal Government. He spoke of Virginia; and, as to the power of emancipation, I speak of the slaveholding States only. The Federal Government, however, as we insist, has the power of restraining the extension of the institution – the power to insure that a slave insurrection shall never occur on any American soil which is now free from slavery.

John Brown’s effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed. That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini’s attempt on Louis Napoleon, and John Brown’s attempt at Harper’s Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same. The eagerness to cast blame on old England in the one case, and on New England in the other, does not disprove the sameness of the two things.

And how much would it avail you, if you could, by the use of John Brown, Helper’s Book, and the like, break up the Republican organization? Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed. There is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this nation, which cast at least a million and a half of votes. You cannot destroy that judgment and feeling – that sentiment – by breaking up the political organization which rallies around it. You can scarcely scatter and disperse an army which has been formed into order in the face of your heaviest fire; but if you could, how much would you gain by forcing the sentiment which created it out of the peaceful channel of the ballot-box, into some other channel? What would that other channel probably be? Would the number of John Browns be lessened or enlarged by the operation?

But you will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights.

That has a somewhat reckless sound; but it would be palliated, if not fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to deprive you of some right, plainly written down in the Constitution. But we are proposing no such thing.

When you make these declarations, you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional right of yours, to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication.

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

This, plainly stated, is your language. Perhaps you will say the Supreme Court has decided the disputed Constitutional question in your favor. Not quite so. But waiving the lawyer’s distinction between dictum and decision, the Court have decided the question for you in a sort of way. The Court have substantially said, it is your Constitutional right to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. When I say the decision was made in a sort of way, I mean it was made in a divided Court, by a bare majority of the Judges, and they not quite agreeing with one another in the reasons for making it; that it is so made as that its avowed supporters disagree with one another about its meaning, and that it was mainly based upon a mistaken statement of fact – the statement in the opinion that “the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.”

An inspection of the Constitution will show that the right of property in a slave is not “distinctly and expressly affirmed” in it. Bear in mind, the Judges do not pledge their judicial opinion that such right is impliedly affirmed in the Constitution; but they pledge their veracity that it is “distinctly and expressly” affirmed there – “distinctly,” that is, not mingled with anything else – “expressly,” that is, in words meaning just that, without the aid of any inference, and susceptible of no other meaning.

If they had only pledged their judicial opinion that such right is affirmed in the instrument by implication, it would be open to others to show that neither the word “slave” nor “slavery” is to be found in the Constitution, nor the word “property” even, in any connection with language alluding to the things slave, or slavery; and that wherever in that instrument the slave is alluded to, he is called a “person;” – and wherever his master’s legal right in relation to him is alluded to, it is spoken of as “service or labor which may be due,” – as a debt payable in service or labor. Also, it would be open to show, by contemporaneous history, that this mode of alluding to slaves and slavery, instead of speaking of them, was employed on purpose to exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.

To show all this, is easy and certain.

When this obvious mistake of the Judges shall be brought to their notice, is it not reasonable to expect that they will withdraw the mistaken statement, and reconsider the conclusion based upon it?

And then it is to be remembered that “our fathers, who framed the Government under which we live” – the men who made the Constitution – decided this same Constitutional question in our favor, long ago – decided it without division among themselves, when making the decision; without division among themselves about the meaning of it after it was made, and, so far as any evidence is left, without basing it upon any mistaken statement of facts.

Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me – my money – was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

“The lack of an ability to compromise” was clearly a deficiency of one — and only one — party to the Civil War, the side for which Robert E. Lee chose to do battle. That point was conclusively demonstrated by Lincoln in his Cooper Union Speech. General Kelly, read the speech.