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De León positions Texas Mexicans as another people of color in the 19th century racial system, projected into coloredness through “spin-offs from racial attitudes developed and cultivated through repeated interaction with colored peoples on the western frontier,” and keyed to Anglo interpretation of mestizaje as forming a “mongrel” or “degraded” racial status. Emory, qtd. here, on “practical amalgamation of races of different color” and unions between the “cleaner race” or the “white” and “his darker partner.” In p. 112 n. 18 we have de León’s take on the 1845 constitutional convention debate (via Crisp), the first place I heard tell of it.

Manifestly, spin-offs from racial attitudes developed and cultivated through repeated interaction with colored peoples on the western frontier were being bestowed upon another caste in a different setting. As Olmsted reported in his notes on Texas society of the 1850s, Mexicans were regarded as “degenerate and degraded Spaniards” or, perhaps, “improved and Christianized Indians.” Generally, their tastes and social instincts were like those of Africans. “There are thousands in respectable social positions [in Mexico] whose color and physiognomy would subject them, in Texas, to be sold by the sheriff as negro-estrays who cannot be allowed at large without detriment to the commonwealth,” he concluded.^[18]

In view of the Southern presumption that individuals with any noticeable trace of African blood were blacks and given the contempt whites had for Indian “half-breeds,” it is not surprising that “niggers,” “redskins,” and “greasers” intimately intermingled in the Anglo-Texan mind. Moreover, whites considered racial mixing a violation of austere moralistic codes. According to Joseph Eve, U.S. chargé d’affaires to the Republic, the Texans regarded Mexicans as a race of “mongrels” composed of Spanish, Indian, and African blood.^[19] To Francis S. Latham, traveling in Texas in 1842, Mexicanos were nothing more than “the mongrel and illicit descendants of an Indian, Mexican and Spanish, pencilled with a growing feintline of the Anglo Saxon ancestry.”^[20] Such feelings about “mongrels” stemmed from the extensive lore American culture had developed concerning [17] the undesirability and supposed peril of miscegenation, especially between whites and blacks. Certainly, the mixed-blood nature of Tejanos concerned Anglo-Americans because of their cultural aversion to interracial passion, a subject upon which whites expressed themselves adeptly, albeit with no scientific basis. According to white beliefs, Mexicans resembled the degenerates from whom they descended. Although they inherited both the faults and the good qualities of their ancestors, unfortunately, the darker traits predominated, so that Mexicans by nature were superstitious, cowardly, treacherous, idle, avaricious, and inveterate gamblers. William H. Emory, surveying the boundary between the United States and Mexico, related this idea in an incidental remark included as part of his report, finished during the Franklin Pierce administration. Attributing the decline and fall of Spanish domination in Texas and the borderlands to a “baneful” cohabitation between whites and Indians, he continued:

Where practical amaglamation of races of different color is carried [out] to any extent, it is from the absence of the women of the cleaner race. The white makes his alliance with his darker partner for no other purpose than to satisfy a law of nature, or to acquire property, and when that is accomplished all affection ceases. Faithless to his vows, he passes from object to object with no other impulse than the gratification arising from novelty, ending at last in emasculation and disease, leaving no progeny at all, or if any, a very inferior and syphilitic race. Such are the favors extended to the white man by the lower and darker colored races, that this must always be the course of events, and the process of absorption can never work any beneficial change. One of the inevitable results of intermarrying between races of different color is infidelity. The offspring have a constant tendency to go back to one or the other of the original stock; that in a large family of children, where the parents are of mixed race but yet the same color, the children will be of every color, from dusky cinnamon to chalky white. This phenomenon, so easily explained without involving the fidelity of either party, nevertheless produces suspicion followed by unhappiness, and ending in open adultery.^[21]

This sort of pseudoscience dictated the status of mixed-blood Tejanos in a white state.

Arnoldo de León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983., 17-18.

 

1. ^[18]Olmsted, Journey Through Texas, p. 454.  In 1845, serious debate dealing with the Mexicans’ color arose at the state constitutional convention. Some of the delegates protested that limiting citizenship and franchise to free “white” males might exclude Tejanos (Crisp, “Anglo-Texan Attitudes toward the Mexican,” pp. 413-416). For another example in which whites questioned Mexicans’ right to citizenship because of their color, see Texas State Gazette, April 21, 1855, p. 4.↩
2. ^[19]Joseph Eve, “A Letter Book of Joseph Eve, United States Chargé d’Affaires to Texas,” ed. Joseph Nance, Southwestern Historical Quarterly 43 (October 1939): 218, (April 1940), 494, 506, 510.↩
3. ^[20]Francis S. Latham, Travels in Texas, 1840, or the Emigrant’s Guide to the New Republic, p. 227; Roemer, Texas, p. 11; [Wright and Wright?], Recollections of Western Texas, p. 32; McIntyre, Federals on the Frontier, p. 254. Miscegenation produced curious side effects in Mexicans, according to popular lore. According to border resident Jane Cazneau, “the stoic Mexican, true to his Indian nature, endures suffering himself in silent, passive fortitude, and has no tenderness or sympathy for suffering or anything else” (Eagle Pass: Or, Life on the Border, p. 68; see also pp. 53, 70), while the German Ferdinand Roemer believed the Mexicans had somehow inherited the same inclination and skill for stealing horses as their Indian ancestors (Texas, p. 150).↩
4. ^[21]House Exec. Doc. No. 135, 34th Cong., 1st Sess. (Ser. 861), I: 68-70. For a similar discourse on ethnology, see Vielé, “Following the Drum,” p. 158.↩

169. Practically, The Question of Slavery in the Territories

(Boston Daily Courier [Bell], December 11, 1860)

It does not lie in the power of Congress and the President to plant slavery in a single square mile of those Territories. Grant the right to do so, constitutionally, by unanimous act of both branches of Congress, with the consent of all the people,--give slavery every possible guaranty there for its protection and perpetuation--and yet not a slave would go there. It would require the act of a higher power--by change of climate--to make the conditions by which alone slaves can be taken and kept there. The reason simply is, because "it would not pay." What will not pay will not be done.

There are more than 30 million acres of good fertile land, in a state of nature, unimproved and untouched by labor, within the bounds of the Cotton growing slave States--capable of producing twenty million bales of cotton, or about four times the present crop of that staple, or reservation of land enough to supply food for all the laboring force required for its cultivation and its employers. The labor for such a production would require three or four times the present number of field slaves now employed in these crops in all the United States. With the world at peace, trade and manufactures prosperous, and the markets for these productions extending in a ratio like that of the last twenty years, the value of labor--that is, the price of slaves,--must increase in all that region. They have lately been profitably worked at a value of $1500 or $1800 for each able-bodied "field hand." Calculate the time required to supply this labor, and occupy this land with slaves, under the powerful stimulus of great profits. Not even the reopening of the slave trade under protection of the United States flag, aiding the natural increase of this class of labor, could supply it fast enough to prevent the five-fold greater stream of free labor pouring down from the Northwest, overflowing and possessing the country down to central Texas.

To talk of removing them from locations of such profitable use as this, and the still greater prospective profits, to a locality where they cannot be profitably used at any price--where they would be a tax and burthen to their owners to feed and clothe them, in comparison with the cost of hired labor, for any crops to which the soil and climate of the Territories are suited--is as absurd as to propose the reversal of the laws of matter, or the laws of trade. Slave labor, like all other [433] purchasable values, must follow economical laws.^[1] Its prolonged stay after it has ceased to be profitable, in localities where it has long been established, is exceptional in appearance, because feeling and habit and domestic ties made the change difficult and slow, but not the less sure.

Look at Missouri. Slavery is there established by law, and amply protected by the irritation of opposition, by prejudice, by alliance with other slave States. Yet it has wasted and faded with an accelerating rate before free labor--because slave labor was more profitable elsewhere, hired labor cheaper and more profitable in Missouri. It is now virtually and to all intents and purposes a free State. How futile then the attempt to plant slavery in any Territory of the same latitude and climate.

Look at Texas, a slave state with rights guarantied of subdividing it into three more States. Southern Texas has soil and climate admirably adapted for slave labor, suitable for the slave grown crops. Land is cheap, immigration invited and urged. Yet such is the demand for the value of this labor in other cotton States, that it is doubtful if Southern Texas will have population enough for two States, before Northern Texas will be occupied by a non-slaveholding population.

Practically, then, there is no earthly power can plant any more slave States, and the North and the south are guilty alike of the supremest folly. The one is denying what she cannot give if she would, the other demanding what she cannot accept, and each is ready to rush upon the destruction of itself and the other, for this empty privilege of being insanely obstinate, the victims of the political demagogues who play upon these jarring chords to work their own selfish ends.

Howard Cecil Perkins, ed. Northern Editorials on Secession, Volume I (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), 432-433.

1. ^[1]In the original the comma follows rather than precedes "like."↩

66. The Right of Secession

(Trenton Daily State Gazette and Republican [Lincoln], December 6, 1860)

The recent threat of South Carolina to secede from the Confederacy has called forth considerable discussion among the journals of the country as to whether a State has, or has not, a right to secede--some contending for, and others against, the right of secession. Those who contend for the right say, that each State is an independent sovereignty, and, as such, has a perfect right to do its own sovereign will and pleasure without regard to the wishes of any other State or sovereignty; while those who contend against the right of secession take the position, that, though each State is a sovereignty, yet it is not absolutely, but only conditionally, so--that is to say, it is sovereign so far as relates to its State regulations, but not sovereign as to any powers confided to the General Government by the Constitution of the country.

We are of those who believe that no State has the right to secede; nor do we believe in submitting to any measures of mere expediency, when the basis for such measures must be founded upon a wrong. South Carolina may secede, so far as words and paper resolutions go; but when Abraham Lincoln takes his seat on the 4th of March next, he will tell them in a language not to be misunderstood, that secession can not be, and will not be, permitted.

The nature of the American government is in many respects, different from any that has ever existed. It is a government of checks and balances; the federal government has its limits, and the States have their sovereign rights. The questions upon which our political parties have divided have generally been such as involved the consideration of these respective sovereignties--national and State.

When the thirteen provinces--all of them having less than three millions of people--fell like unripe fruit from the parent stem they had no permanent connection with each other; they were united only by consanguinity of race, common interests, and most of all, a common cause. They were independent States, in league through their congress, as the nations of europe may be to-day, for mutual protection. That congress proposed a convention to form a confederation, but it was not till more than a year after the Declaration of Independence that the articles of confederation were agreed to and submitted to the several States; and it was not till 1781, or nearly five years after the Declaration, [194] that Maryland, the last to accede, came into the league, and the confederation was perfected. The object of that confederation was declared to be a "perpetual union," but it was soon found that the States had not conceded sufficient powers for the general government properly to regulate the revenues and the public credit, and in 1787 congress adopted a proposition for a convention at Philadelphia, for the purpose of "revising" the articles of confederation, to render the federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of the government and the preservation of the Union.

The convention of 1787, instead of revising the old confederation, formed and submitted the constitution--which did not abrogate the "perpetual union" already existing, but proposed a "more perfect union,"--a union that should consolidate the States for specific purposes. This constitution did not provide for its own destruction, any more than God has provided man with the right and powers of suicide.

We may see the absurdity of peaceful secession, by examining its practical operations. We see Virginia, for instance, ceding to the National Government her vast interests in the Northwest, and even agreeing, with a generosity that it would be well for the North to remember and reciprocate, that it should be free forever, and formed into other States. Who believes that Virginia would thus have acted, if she had not thought the government permanent? Would she have said, here, take these lands and make of them five free States, if those States one and all of them, the day after their organization, would have the liberty of seceding from the Union, and become rivals of herself? Then we purchased Louis[i]ana and Florida, and paid large sums of money for Texas and California--for what?--that they might secede the next day? Proposterous proposition! What a fine idea it would be to pay a hundred millions of dollars for Cuba, as Mr. Buchanan proposed, and give to Cuba the right of becoming independent immediately, and that without a why or wherefore from us! And what wisdom we should show, to expend millions to clear the rivers and harbors of Michigan, or to build the Pacific railroad through Kansas, when to-morrow Michigan by her own will and against our wishes might be united to Canada, and Kansas set up independent under some military dictator! How could we ever declare war, or make peace, or have national revenue or credit under such an arrangement?

The right of secession, as the South term it, is a sham of shams, a humbug of humbugs, as gross a delusion as political insanity ever conjured up. We are one nation from many States; and for better or worse are we to remain so for ever, or till treason and revolution blot the stars [195] from our banner; and God grant that they may not fall as long as supernal powers hold the stars in the heavens.

Howard Cecil Perkins, ed. Northern Editorials on Secession, Volume I (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), 193-195.

215. Chivalry

(Columbus Daily Ohio State Journal [Lincoln], June 3, 1861)

Some of the best words in our language have been prostituted to the basest uses. What term is in such bad odor as "affinity," for instance, since its adoption into the vocabulary of the pestilent Free Lovers. Yet no more corrupt office does it perform than the word written above. "Chivalry" once had a noble meaning. We naturally associate with it the high tone of the ancient warriors, who disdained to strike an unarmed antagonist, and who would defend to the last even a foe who had eaten salt with them. But in the progress of time, with its changes, [536] we find the import of words accommodating itself to the habits, the thoughts and vices of men even. The civilization of slavery, which gilds treason into "peaceful separation," humiliating concessions into "compromises," and theft and robbery into an "accumulation of means," readily transforms cowardly ruffianism, simply, into "chivalry."

From the time Virginia first made negro-breeding her forte, South Carolina furnished a fine crop of poltroon tories for Marion's bullets, and Louisiana opened her arms to receive the harlots and cut-throats of France--our Southern brethren have monopolized all the chivalry of the entire Western Continent. They couldn't hear to the possession of a lingering spark of this element in the pleb[e]ian masses of the North, who work for a living, build churches and school-houses, construct railroads, pay their debts and fear God. These base Puritans never swagger. They have no servile population to bully. They consume a less amount of coarse tobacco and poor whisky, and have failed to reach the apex in brutal profanity and general beastliness. Hence their want of chivalry. Could these pitiable creatures be induced to embrace the saving grace of African slavery, repudiate their just debts, conspire against the Government, steal its property, the merchants turn their trading vessels into pirate ships, abolish the free school systems, devote themselves to dissipation, not forgetting the amusement, when maddened with "tangle-foot," to stab or shoot some unoffending, unarmed neighbor in the back, they might yet possibly redeem themselves.

This Southern chivalry takes on many shapes. It is as various as the different degrees of ignorance and brutality of its champions. To cudgel a United States Senator in his seat, of his guard and with no means of defence, beating him with a bludgeon within an inch of his life, while other armed ruffians stand near to see that the job is thoroughly executed, is the height of South Carolina chivalry and daring. It made no hero of the perpetrator of such a deed, and had not Providence so signally shown his hand, this same drunken bully would now doubtless be occupying a high seat in the rebel synagogue of the South.

The chivalry of Missouri assumed a form in Kansas which is yet fresh in the public mind. There Clark and Gardner, vieing [sic] with each other in the display of valor, stole behind one Barber, guilty of entertaining Free State notions, and fired their rifles at his back. He fell dead, but it was impossible to determine which hero had taken him off. A pro-slavery President got along with the matter, however, by appointing one Post Master and the other Purser in the Navy. In Kansas, too, was where Hopps, another Free State agitator, was scalped by Murphy, who was rewarded with an Indian Agency; where a Free State town was [537] battered down and pillaged, everything portable being carried off; where a son of the old martyr Brown, a prisoner and unarmed, was hacked to pieces by a hatchet in the hands of one Gibson--where, in short, butchering Free State men and laying waste their property was the chief employment of the Missouri braves for two or three years.

Later we find the chivalry of Texas--after that State has committed the most disgraceful treason, and resorted to the most dishonorable means to capture the loyal soldiers of the Federal Government--cropping out in the paying of respects to a Massachusetts woman. It was discovered by the chivalric citizens of San Antonio that this unprotected female was guilty of the heinous offense of having been born in Boston. It was inferrable from this, of course, that she did not regard the system of African slavery as a little ahead of the atonement in the regeneration of a fallen world, and she was surrounded by the daring sons of the South, who led her into the public streets, stripped her bare, applied a soothing, unctuous plaster of tar to her naked person, set off with an outer covering of down, rode her in state around the public square on an unpolished rail, with a secession flag on either side, the march accompanied by the musical yells of an excited mob. It is not uncommon for slave women to be stripped and lashed, in the South; and the above incident but shows that Southern character is progressing in the natural direction. We are constrained to believe there is yet some show for Sodom and Gamorrah in the last day.

After this chivalry has thieved and robbed until there was nothing else to lay its hands on, and plotted the most damnable treason, setting up its vileness against the Federal Government, it asks to be recognized as an independent power, and intimates a desire to carry on war after the civilized programme. It commences this war, however, by setting seven or eight thousands of its bullies on a starving garrison of seventy soldiers, and when discovered that the post the latter held was wrapped in flames, the braves plied the red-hot shot the more furiously. The Southern chivalric plan of warfare continues as it began, and is, in fact, but an expansion of its ruffianism and assassinations in time of peace. Bribes have been offered our faithful soldiers, who were guarding entrances to forts, and sentinels have been shot down at their posts by concealed foes. The lives of entire regiments have been attempted through poisoned liquors, dealt out as if from friendly hands.--The slaveholding Indians of Arkansas and North Carolina have been instigated to visit their savage atrocities upon the loyal citizens of the United States when fitting opportunity should offer.

The assassin's dagger and bullet, the savage's tomahawk and scalping [538]knife, arsenic, prus[s]ic acid and strychnine are to be the weapons of chivalry in this war. Oh Dahomey! Ye cannibal realms of the South Pacific! hold up your heads!

Howard Cecil Perkins, ed. Northern Editorials on Secession, Volume I (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), 535-538.

208. "Blood Will Tell"

(Detroit Daily Advertiser [Lincoln], April 4, 1861)

Until Texas was admitted into the Union, it was considered the Botany Bay of America--the chief difference between the former and the British penal colony being, that one was the compulsory, and the other the voluntary resort of criminals. Every horse thief, murderer, gambler, robber, and other rogue of high and low degree, fled to Texas when he found the United States too hot longer to hold him. The pioneers of that State were cut-throats of one kind or another, with some honorable exceptions. Those of them who have escaped hanging or the State prison, and their descendants, are the men who have led the secession movement in that State. It is not strange that, with such [525] antecedents, they should turn out traitors when all other crimes had been exhausted.

If the population of the State had not been of such an origin, we might have looked for some slight show of gratitude from them towards the United States, and even towards the North. But as it is, the world will hardly be disappointed, infamous as their ingratitude and treachery has been. In their war for independence, Northern men fought gallantly and contributed largely to its ultimate emancipation from Mexican rule. The United States government has not only indulged the people of Texas, but it has paid their debts and involved itself in a war which cost the country three hundred millions of dollars.

Since 1848 nearly three-fourths of our active army have been employed in protecting the State of Texas from the Indian and Mexican incursions. We have maintained forts and garrisons at an enormous expense, to protect Texan people, and the return which their potent demagogues make us is the confiscation or seizure of United States property, and the impudent declaration that Texas has seceded from the American Union. A hoary-headed old traitor, Gen. Twiggs, who had grown rich upon the favors of the National Government, tried to betray the army under his command in Texas; but there was not a man, and but few of his officers, mean enough to follow his dastardly example.

Howard Cecil Perkins, ed. Northern Editorials on Secession, Volume I (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), 524-525.

1920s: “I would not think of classifying Mexicans as whites.” / BB&W 50 (From Taylor interviews.)

Economic competition, although a significant force, does not sufficiently explain the history of anti-Mexican or anti-black mob violence. If mobs had considered only economics, they would have been just as likely to murder or expel any group standing in their way. But, in fact, mobs specially targeted Mexicans in the southwestern United States. Racism and prejudice, it is clear, played a fundamental role in encouraging mob violence against Mexicans. Mexicans were portrayed as a cruel and treacherous people with a natural proclivity toward criminal behavior. Racist stereotypes abounded in private correspondence, contemporary literature, and the popular media. “The lower class of Mexicans, on the west coast, appear to be a dark, Indian-looking race, with just enough of the Spanish blood, without its appropriate intelligence, to add a look of cunning to their gleaming, treacherous eyes, wrote Theodore T. Johnson in 1849.^[54] In April, 1872, the Weekly Arizona Miner exclaimed: “Bad Mexicans never tire of cutting throats, and we are sorry to be compelled to say that good Mexicans are rather scarce.”^[55] These assumptions, legitimated by pseudoscientific research, remained prevalent well into the twentieth century. A track foreman interviewed in the late 1920s in Dimmit County, Texas, observed: “They are an inferior race. I would not think of classing Mexicans as whites.”^[56]

William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, "Muerto por Unos Desconocidos (Killed by Persons Unknown): Mob Violence against Blacks and Mexicans," in Beyond Black & White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest, edited by Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 50.

 

 

1. ^[54]Theodore T. Johnson, Sights in the Gold Regions and Scenes by the Way (New York: Baker and Scriber, 1849), p. 240. Another early example of Anglo prejudice against Mexicans can be found in T. J. Farham, Life, Travels, and Adventures in California and Scenes in the Pacific Ocean (New York: William H. Graham, 1846), pp. 356-57.↩
2. ^[55]Weekly Arizona Miner, Apr. 26, 1872.↩
3. ^[56]Paul S. Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Dimmit County, Winter Garden District, South Texas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 446 (quote). For additional accounts of prejudicial views towards Mexicans, see Robert Lee Maril, Poorest of Americans: The Mexican Americans of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), pp. 10-11, 30, 33, 41-47, 49, 51-54, 79, 81, 151-55; Américo Paredes, “With His Pistol in His Hand,” in Chicano: The Evolution of a People, ed. by Renato Rosaldo, Robert A. Calvert, and Gustav L. Seligmann, Jr. (Malabar, Fla.: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1982), p. 101; Richard Griswold del Castillo and Arnoldo De León, North to Aztlán: A History of Mexican Americans in the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), p. 30; Frank W. Johnson, A History of Texas and Texans (Chicago: American Historical Society, 1914), vol. 1, p. 516; Mark Reisler, “Always the Laborer, Never the Citizen: Anglo Perceptions of the Mexican Immigrant during the 1920s,” in Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States, ed. by David G. Gutierrez (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1996), pp. 25-29.↩

60. The Secession Theory

(Madison Wisconsin Daily State Journal [Lincoln], November 17, 1860)

The present ebullition of disunion feeling at the South is reviving the old discussions, so general during nullification times when General Jackson issued his famous proclamation against the nullifiers of South Carolina, respecting the limits of State and federal authority under the Constitution.

Such discussions can only result in good. They lead to a study both [180] of the fundamental law, and of the early history of the Republic, too much neglected by a people who are themselves the source of all political power, and who, under the Constitution, are "the rightful masters of both Congress and courts."

Our whole system of Government is founded upon the supposition that the majority of the people are not only just and honest, but intelligent. Yet it must be conceded there are too many who exercise the right of suffrage without that knowledge of the government and its history essential to enable them to cast an intelligent vote.

Whatever tends therefore to turn the attention of the reading public in the direction of the Constitution and its history, must produce, in this respect at least, beneficial results.

The particular point which is now most discussed, is the right of a State to withdraw from the Union without the consent of the other States, and to set up an independent nation. It might in some cases be just and politic to permit such a secession. But this is not the question.--It is whether, upon some alleged grievance, or on account of some fancied good to be obtained, a State has the right to dissolve the bonds of the Union.

The great majority of the Northern press take ground against this right. Madison, who was better entitled, perhaps, to the name of the Constitution than any other man, denied it in the most explicit language. Such was Webster's interpretation. Such is the view taken by President Jackson in his proclamation already alluded to. That document contains an admirable summary of the argument against the alleged right. It is yet more fully argued in Webster's celebrated speech in reply to Hayne. The other side of the question is presented most fully and ably by the writings of John C. Calhoun.

The whole question depends for its solution upon the manner in which we understand the character of the Union. If it be a mere loose league of confederated sovereignties, the right to secede undoubtedly exists. If it be more than that, if it be a government, if the states are not complete sovereignties, the right to secede undoubtedly exists. If it be more than that, if it be a government, if the states are not complete sovereignties but have given up a portion of their sovereignty to a national government for the sake of mutual protection and benefit, then that right must be denied, although it would still remain a question of policy whether, in a particular case, force should be employed to restrain a state attempting to cut loose from the Union.

Some of the disadvantages which would result from the right of secession, if granted, will readily suggest themselves:

1. The people of the United States have bought and paid for Florida, Louisiana, and other states. Under the secession theory these may step [181] out of the Union to-morrow without any obligation to refund the money they have cost us.

2. Texas was an independent sovereignty. But she was overwhelmed with debt. She asked and was admitted into the Union. The Union has paid her debts; it has defended her territory at the sacrifice of both blood and treasure. Wisconsin contributed of her means and men; so did New York, Massachusetts, and every State in the Union. Having got rid of her debts, upon this theory of secession, Texas has the right, at any time, to cut loose and set up for herself again.

3. The Union may buy Cuba to-morrow, at a cost of $200,000,000, of the common treasure of the States. The next day she may assert her right of secession. Spain will have the $200,000,000. We shall have nothing but an illustration of the beautiful results of the Calhoun construction of the Constitution.

4. The Atlantic States may, under this doctrine, secede, and set up an independent confederacy, or confederacies, compelling the interior States to pay to them, for their sole benefit, a duty upon all their imports and exports, while Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the other interior States, now prone to suspect that they have some little interest in the Atlantic ports, must quietly submit.

5. If the Union is involved in war with some foreign power, and becomes plunged in debt by a heroic struggle for her existence--no matter how just her cause--any craven and selfish state, under the doctrine of the right of secession, may abandon the Union at the beginning and thus avoid the dangers which the others meet, or, at the close of the struggle, and thus avoid the payment of her proportion of the debt incurred.

These are but a few of the evil consequences which attend this theory. We believe it is alike without foundation in the Constitution or in common sense and we have no doubt but it will find in Abraham Lincoln as prompt and decided an opponent as it found in Andrew Jackson.

Howard Cecil Perkins, ed. Northern Editorials on Secession, Volume I (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), 179-181.

Second, positive law has created the racial meanings that attach to physical features. In a sense, this is the heart of the prerequisite cases, which at root embody the efforts of the courts to inscribe on the bodies of individual applicants the term “White” or “non-White.” These cases established as legal precedent the racial identities of the various faces and nationalities entering the United States at the turn of the century. Again, however, the racial prerequisites to naturalization are not the only laws that explicitly defined racial identities. Almost every state with racially discriminatory legislation also established legal definitions of race. It is no accident that the first legal ban on interracial marriage, a 1705 Virginia act, also constituted the first statutory effort to define who was Black.^[6] Regulating or criminalizing behavior in racial terms required legal definitions of race.^[7] Thus, in the years leading up to Brown, most states that made racial distinctions in their laws provided statutory racial definitions, almost always focusing on the boundaries of Black identity. Alabama and Arkansas defined anyone with one drop of “Negro” blood as Black; Florida had a one-eighth rule; Georgia referred to “ascertainable” non-White blood; Indiana used a one-eighth rule; Kentucky relied on a combination of any “appreciable admixture” of Black ancestry and a one-sixteenth rule; Louisiana did not statutorily define Blackness but did adopt via its Supreme Court an “appreciable mixture of negro blood” standard; Maryland used a “person of negro descent to the third generation” test; Mississippi combined an “appreciable amount of Negro blood” and a one-eighth rule; Missouri used a one-eighth test, as did Nebraska, North Carolina, and North Dakota; Oklahoma referred to “all persons of African descent,” [119] adding that the “term ‘white race’ shall include all other persons”; Oregon promulgated a one-fourth rule; South Carolina had a one-eighth standard; Tennessee defined Blacks in terms of “mulattoes, mestizos, and their descendants, having any blood of the African race in their veins”; Texas used an “all persons of mixed blood descended from negro ancestry” standard; Utah law referred to mulattos, quadroons, or octoroons; and Virginia defined Blacks as those in whom there was “ascertainable any Negro blood” with not more than one-sixteenth Native American ancestry.^[8]

The very practice of legally defining Black identity demonstrates the social, rather than the natural basis of race. Moreover, these competing definitions demonstrate that the many laws that discriminated on the basis of race more often than not defined, and thus helped to create, the categories they claimed only to elucidate. In defining Black and White, statutory and case law assisted in fashioning the racial significance that by themselves drops of blood, ascertainable amounts, and fractions never could have. In the name of racially regulating behavior, they created racial identities.

Ian F. Haney López, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996) Haney López, White By Law  , 118-119.

1. ^[6]Finkelman, supra, at 2088. According to Finkelman, “This act also made the first stab at defining who was actually black. The law declared that anyone who was a child, grandchild, or great grandchild of a black was a mulatto under the statute. this meant that persons who were of one-eighth African ancestry were black for purposes of Virginia law.” See generally A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., and Barbara K. Kopytoff, Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia, 77 GEO. L. J. 1967 (1989).↩
2. ^[7]See Raymond T. Diamond and Robert J. Cottrol, Codifying Caste: Louisiana’s Racial Classification Scheme and the Fourteenth Amendment, 29 LOY. L. REV. 255, 265 (1983) They argue that “[s]tate supported or initiated discrimination required racial definitions. The law could not separate what it failed to categorize.”↩
3. ^[8]Paul Finkelman, The Color of Law, 87 NW. U. L. REV. 937, 955 n. 96 (citing PAUL MURRAY, STATES’ LAWS ON RACE AND COLOR [1950]).↩

52. Peaceable Secession an Absurdity

(New York Evening Post [Lincoln], November 12, 1860)

In behalf of the treachery and imbecility of the Administration at Washington the new doctrine is invoked that each state has a right peacefully to secede--that nullification of any particular law of Congress is to be resisted and punished by the government, but that secession, i.e., the absolute nullification and defiance of all such laws, and of the Constitution and of the Union, is perfectly right and within the power, at all times, of each and every state. The faithless members of the cabinet seek thus to shelter themselves and their partisans in disunion from resistance by the general government, while the imbeciles aim in the same way to find an excuse from [sic] shrinking from their duty of affirmative and energetic action for which they lack courage if not principle.

A more monstrous and absurd doctrine than that of the right of any state at its pleasure to secede from the Union has never been put forth. the government in such case would indeed be a mere rope of sand. According to this dogma, Cuba, after we shall have paid $200,000,000 for her purchase, as a state may at once secede, and leave the United States Treasury to place that small item to the account of "profit and loss." Texas, when she came into the Union after we had paid many millions to discharge her debts, and other millions to go into her coffers, was and is entirely at liberty to secede with the booty. Each and all the states carved out of the Louisiana purchase, for which we also paid such an immense sum, may do the like.

So, too, states in which the largest amounts of the public property may be situated may at any time secede with that property. When the Pacific Railroad shall be constructed, at an expense of countless millions, paid from the common treasure, the two or three states through which it will run may decamp with the plunder and plant a custom-house on the site of our storehouses. Vermont, New Hampshire, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the other inland states, which will have contributed to these great disbursements, and in which states hardly a dollar of the public treasure is even [ever?] expended, are to look quietly and approvingly on the exodus of those which have been thus purchased and enriched at their expense, and to recognize the right of each of them to secede and take the property with them.

Again, if this right exists it exists at all times, until no two states remain united. What, then, would become of the national debt and the national credit? To whom would the creditors of the government look for payment? Should the government be, as it may at any time be, indebted on its stocks hundreds of millions of dollars, its creditors could look, in case of secession, only to the states which should remain united. Those which should have seceded and established independent governments could not be reached. The creditor could claim of them no percentage of liability. They would plead that they had never contracted, and that they had been only stockholders in a corporation in which there was no individual liability.

Nor could the continuing government of the United States compel the payment by the seceding state of a portion of the public debt. There would be no data from which a definite percentage could be assigned to it, nor would it have the ability to pay. If South Carolina finds it [161] necessary to repudiate at the outset by suspending specie payments, and (as already foreshadowed) by annulling even private debts due by its citizens to those of other states, it is plain that both ability and principle will be lacking for payment of her share (if it could be allotted) of the public debt. There is no court by which any fixed amount could be established as due from her on account of that debt, or which could issue execution for its payment. It results therefore that the seceding state could only be compelled to pay any share of the national debt (contracted on her account, as well as that of the other states) by war and reprisals by the general government. This puts an end to the idea of peaceable secession and the right of secession.

But can any of the democratic book-keepers tell us how (if payment could be compelled) they could make out the account current between the seceding state and the government, so as to strike a balance between the debit and the credit sides? Large amounts have been expended by the government on her account and within her borders. Forts for her harbors, light-houses, court-houses, coast-surveys, custom-houses, nonpaying postoffices and post routes, and salaries of the swarms of officers and leeches attendent upon all these, in addition to her undefinable share of the public debt, have all been paid. But then she has a credit side of the account also, which it will be impossible to adjust. How are we to ascertain the values and the proportions thereof to which she is entitled of the public arms and ammunitions of war, arsenals, ceded places, public edifices, ships of war, and of the public lands? Is there any court, or is there any form of action by which partition can be made of the territories? This last item is a very material one, for the only point of principle on which the secessionists take issue with the Republicans as to the platform of the latter (adopted at Chicago) is that of carrying slavery into the territories. What foothold or property in the territories will the seceders retain on leaving the Union? They will be foreign states, and we believe it has not yet been claimed, even by Judge Taney, that the laws of foreign states extend proprio vigore over the territories.

Another difficulty in making up the account with South Carolina would result from her claiming an almost incalculable credit for the disproportion of the public burdens which she fancies she has borne in the confederacy, by reason of what she considered the unequal operation of the various revenue laws.

Now, this right of secession, if it exist at all, is an absolute one, and a state has as much right to exercise it at one time as at another. If she may secede at will, she may do so in anticipation of war, or in time of [162] war. If she can secede when she chooses, she owes no allegiance to the government an hour after she decides to secede, but will then be just as independent of the government as she is of any other nation. In the midst of war, then, it will be the right of any state not only to desert our own government, but at the same time to ally herself with the enemy. The Hartford Convention complained that New England was heavily taxed, but not defended by the general government, and merely proposed to ask the consent of the government to expend in the defence of New England the taxes raised in New England. This was not claimed as a right, but the consent of the government was to be sought. This was hardly an approach to secession, but the democracy of that day did not tolerate even the proposition, and the Hartford Convention was execrated.

But the absurdity of this new doctrine of the right of secession is too palpable for serious argument. The government under such a principle could not have twenty-four hours of assured existence. Neither other nations, nor its own citizens, could have confidence in its permanence. It would lack the vital principle of existence, because it would wholly lack credit. Nobody would lend it a dollar, for nobody could be sure that it would hold together long enough to pay a six months' loan, to say nothing of loans for long terms of years. The public faith, on which alone all who deal with governments can repose, would be utterly lacking. Business could have no security or stability, for men would not embark either their industry or their capital, unless under the shelter of laws and institutions not liable to change.

No--if a state secedes it is revolution, and the seceders are traitors. Those who are charged with the executive branch of the government are recreant to their oaths if they fail to use all lawful means to put down such rebellion. The people of no party base any confidence either in the fidelity or nerve of the Administration in Washington, but fear they will prove, some of them from inclination and others from timidity, practical allies of the revolutionists. They and their partisans have done all in their power to inflame and mislead the South, by charging upon the northern states the design of interfering with the rights of the people of the South, and the mercenaries here have co-operated in this false clamor and deception. The Administration, in relinquishing the government will endeavor to leave all possible embarrassments in the way of its successors, but we much mistake if those of its partisans here who have been foremost in the false work, will not be the first with whom the consequent mischief will come home to roost.

Howard Cecil Perkins, ed. Northern Editorials on Secession, Volume I (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), 158-162.

37. The Practical Difficulties of Secession

(Philadelphia Press [Douglas], December 21, 1860)

The members of the South Carolina Disunion Convention, as they approach the consideration of the practical questions involved in a faithful and thorough-going execution of their secession project, are beginning to realize some of the difficulties they will be compelled to encounter. It is a comparatively easy matter to burn down a house if no one attempts to arrest the flames, but it requires much laborious toil to erect a new one. Even if the efforts of the States which propose to secede should prove successful, they will not soon be able to erect a new Government which will be as useful and beneficent to them as the present Confederacy, notwithstanding their loud complaints against it.

If, by secession, they do not mean anything more than the adoption of empty resolves and pronunciamientos--the passage of ordinances repealing their ratification of the Federal Constitution, the resignation of leading Federal office-holders, and the virtual abolition of the Federal courts, they will certainly do much to alarm and agitate the American people, and to bring discredit upon the nation; but they will still virtually be in the Union. The convenience of the present Post Office system is acknowledged even now in South Carolina. They are not prepared to furnish a sufficient substitute for it. The best plan they have yet devised is to form some sort of an amicable arrangement with the powers that be at Washington, by which the postmasters of the Palmetto State will perform their duties as usual, while they refuse to recognize in any way the authority of the Federal Government, and consider their own local rulers the only ones they are obliged to respect and obey! If Mr. Buchanan adheres to the programme laid down in his message [123] and to the doctrines enunciated in the elaborate opinion prepared for him by the late Attorney General Black, he cannot well avoid collecting the Federal revenues at all Southern ports, even after the passage of secession ordinances; and if this duty is discharged, any State which assumes a rebellious attitude will still be obliged to contribute revenue to the support of the Federal Government or have her foreign commerce entirely destroyed. There will be no necessity for a collision unless some of the American forts are attacked, or the collection of duties meets with resolute and determined opposition. In either of these events, the National Government of this country will still have full power to vindicate its authority and to enforce compliance and respect, if those who rule its councils shall deem it expedient to avail themselves of the ample resources at its command.

All these obstacles must be entirely overcome, either by force, or by the connivance of the Federal Government, or by the consent of the States which remain in the present Confederacy, before any effort at secession can become completely successful, and before South Carolina or any of her discontented sisters can fully assume, among the Powers of the earth, a free and independent position. Many of the ablest men of our country have ridiculed the idea of "peaceable secession" as preposterous, and although it probably meets now with more favor than at any former period, it will be a singular event if we should fail to settle our existing quarrels within the Union, when we have common tribunals to appeal to, and yet preserve amicable relations during the progress of a dissolution of the Confederacy, and after so dire a calamity was consummated.

But, even supposing that a peaceable secession policy should prevail, and that the Gulf States should have but to declare their desire for independence to secure it, they could not rationally expect to form a new Government which would be more useful and advantageous to them than the present one has, up to this time, proved itself to be. No section of our country has derived greater benefits from the American Union heretofore than the very States in which the secession sentiment is most formidable--South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The anxiety of the latter to enter our Confederacy was a striking evidence of her appreciation of the advantages it could confer upon her, and certainly her anticipations must have been more than realized when we consider that we not only assumed and finally disposed of her long-standing quarrel with Mexico, by defeating and humiliating the latter, but that we paid off all her heavy old debts, and that, in wealth and prosperity, she has constantly [124] been increasing, with wonderful rapidity, since her annexation. Louisiana and Florida were purchased outright from foreign Governments, and owe to the power of the American Union not only the freedom they enjoy, but nearly all their prosperity. It required all the energy, and much of the treasure, of the Federal Government to finally subdue in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, the powerful Indian tribes which once inhabited them. The rich plantations, which now send forth their large annual products of cotton, would probably still be under the control of their aboriginal owners, if the forces of the United States had not driven them from their native haunts, and if the white settlers had not relied upon the support and protection of a great nation. South Carolina has always exercised in the councils of the nation quite as much, if not more, influence than any State of equal population, and has reaped her full proportion of all the benefits it has conferred. She complains that she has been onerously taxed, but she will find it utterly impossible, if her secession ordinance should really sever her connection with the Republic, to secure advantages equal to those she has heretofore enjoyed, without incurring a much larger expenditure than she has heretofore been subjected to. In what new Confederacy, or under what new system, can she be as well protected from foreign invasion and domestic insurrection, and have her rights at home and abroad as well secured, as under the one from which she appears so anxious to escape? The expense of our army and navy, of our diplomatic system, of our whole machinery of National Government, weighs but lightly on thirty-three States, but any new organization which approaches it in efficiency would be exceedingly burdensome to any small Confederacy.

Viewing the secession experiment in the most favorable light that its authors can possibly consider it, it is still full of embarrassments and perils; and while we trust that the Representatives of the North will be ready to do all in their power to remove every just cause of complaint, and to destroy every plausible pretext for a dissolution of the Union, we trust that when the prevailing excitement in the Cotton States subsides, their citizens will coolly and calmly consider this subject, in all its aspects, to ascertain whether it is not even better to bear the ills they have than to fly to others that they know not of.

Howard Cecil Perkins, ed. Northern Editorials on Secession, Volume I (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), 122-124.