In the Shadow of Our Founders: Part Three

northern states were, in some cases, violating the fugitive slave clause, but rather if these violations constituted a severe enough crisis for the South to justify secession.

The second claim by the cotton states is hardly worthy of contemplation. Victory at the polls, in a fair election, is not a constitutional violation. No matter what the platform and rhetoric of the Republican Party in 1860, it won the election fair and square. Lincoln very legitimately argued that to allow the southern states to secede because they cannot abide by the election's outcome would be undermining the very principle of popular government and could spell the end of the grand experiment that our Founders crafted with our Constitution.

The third grievance of the Deep South is tenuous at best. Not only is it morally reprehensible (even for that day) to regard black Americans as mere chattel, which is what the so-called property rights proponents in the cotton states were doing by making the demand for unadulterated slavery rights in the territories, they were engaged in bad constitutional jurisprudence. The infamous Dred Scott decision had paved the way for this interpretation of slavery's permissiveness in the territories, but it was inconsistent in every way with the words and actions of the Founding Fathers. It was, after all, the First Congress under the new Constitution that reaffirmed the ban on slavery in the Northwest Territory, and it did so under the signature of President George Washington. If the man who presided over the Constitutional Convention could, in good conscience, sign a ban on slavery in the territories, how could Chief Justice Roger Taney or Jefferson Davis argue that prohibiting slavery in the territories was unconstitutional? Were they actually saying that the Father of our Country and the president of the Constitutional Convention committed an unconstitutional act?

Measured together, these grievances hardly reach the level of the constitutional threat posed by the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. They most certainly do not approach the challenges to fundamental liberties and privileges encountered by our Founding Fathers in the years prior to the American Revolution. The claim by the cotton states that their constitutional rights were being trampled upon, even while President Lincoln repeatedly assured them full legal protection for their property and their "peculiar institution," is shakier and less credible than Lincoln's argument that the Union is older than the states and the Constitution.

The Upper South

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