Thursday, July 23, 2015

Francis Lieber to Senator Charles Sumner, June 1, 1864

New York, June 1, 1864.

I think I wholly agree with you, dear Sumner, as to your resolution that no members of rebel States ought to come back without the consent of both houses. The very fact of your being judges of the qualification of each member, &c, would almost alone prove it. Who else should decide? Certainly not the President alone. Of course you will have all theorists against you; and every political wrong-doer in America is a theorist. Nothing is easier, and it is necessary for the ignorant masses whose votes are wanted. Men of a certain stamp become always more abstract the more they are in the wrong and the lower their hearers. The whole State-rights doctrine, the very term doctrine, in this sense is purely American. It struck my ear very forcibly when, in 1835, General Hamilton of South Carolina said to me, “Such a man was an excellent hand at indoctrinating the people of South Carolina with nullification.”  . . . I did not agree with you some time ago, when you said in the senate that the Constitution gives dictatorial power to Congress in cases like the present war. God and necessitas, sense, and the holy command that men shall live in society, and have countries to cling to and to pray for, and that they shall love, work out, and sustain liberty, and beat down treason against humanity — these may do it, but the Constitution? The simple fact is, the Constitution stops short some five hundred miles this side of civil war like ours. . . .

The last half of your letter, telling me about Chase's desire to see the Winter Davis resolution brought forward, surprised me a little. Not that he is for the Monroe doctrine, &c. That has become an almost universal American fixed idea — that is to say, the misunderstood Monroe doctrine; for President Monroe only held to a declaration that colonizing or appropriating unappropriated portions of America is at an end. What then is to be done? I believe the answer, with reference to you, is simply one of wisdom. You have done all you can to stem this business. If you find you cannot, let it go before the senate. You cannot throw yourself single against a stream. . . .

SOURCE: Thomas Sergeant Perry, Editor, The Life and Letters of Francis Lieber, p. 346-7

No comments: