ugh they did
not prevent ultimate secession--they caused a delay of ten years, which
enabled the North to gather sufficient strength to carry the civil war to a
successful conclusion. It is not difficult to show historically that the
policy of compromise between the national principle and unlawful opposition
to that principle was an entire mistake from the very outset, and that if
illegal and partisan State resistance had always been put down with a firm
hand, civil war might have been avoided. Nothing strengthened the general
government more than the well-judged and well-timed display of force by
which Washington and Hamilton crushed the Whiskey Rebellion, or than the
happy accident of peace in 1814, which brought the separatist movement in
New England to a sudden end. After that period Mr. Clay's policy of
compromise prevailed, and the result was that the separatist movement was
identified with the maintenance of slavery, and steadily gathered strength.
In 1819 the South threatened and blustered in order to prevent the complete
prohibition of slavery in the Louisiana purchase. In 1832 South Carolina
passed the nullification ordinance because she suffered by the operation of
a protective tariff. In 1850 a great advance had been made in their
pretensions. Secession was threatened because the South feared that the
Mexican conquests would not be devoted to the service of slavery. Nothing
had been done, nothing was proposed even, prejudicial to Southern
interests; but the inherent weakness of slavery, and the mild conciliatory
attitude of Northern statesmen, incited the South to make imperious demands
for favors, and seek for positive gains. They succeeded in 1850, and in
1860 they had reached the point at which they were ready to plunge the
country into the horrors of civil war solely because they lost an
election. They believed, first, that the North would yield everything for
the sake of union, and secondly, that if there was a limit to their
capacity for surrender in this direction, yet a people capable of so much
submission in the past would never fight to maintain the Union. The South
made a terrible mistake, and was severely punished for it; but the
compromises of 1820, 1833, and 1850 furnished some excuse for the wild idea
that the North would not and could not fight. Whether a strict adherence to
the strong, fearless policy of Hamilton, which was adopted by Jackson and
advocated by Webster in 1832-33, would have prev