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To His Excellency the Governor, and to
the Honorable the members of the General Assembly of the State of
North Carolina:
The General Assembly of the State of
Alabama, on the 11th
day of January, A. D. 1860, by joint resolutions, made it the
duty of His Excellency the Governor of Alabama, upon the election
of a President of the United States advocating the principles and
action of the party in the Northern States calling itself the
Republican party, to issue his writs of election for delegates to
a Convention of the State, "to consider, determine and do
whatever, in the opinion of said Convention, the rights,
interests and honor of the State of Alabama require to be done
for their protection."
In consequence of the results of the
late Presidential election, the Governor of Alabama his issued
the writs of election required. The election is to be held on the
twenty-fourth day of this month, and the Convention is to
assemble on the seventh day of January next.
North Carolina and Alabama have been
true and loyal to the Constitution and to the Union. There is no
plighted faith which each has not kept. They have stood together
in fidelity to the Government, and to each of the States
composing the Confederacy. They are bound together by a common
duty, a common interest, a common danger and a common honor.
North-Carolina has largely contributed to the population of our
State, and her sons have brought along with them those principles
of integrity, honor, obedience to law, and love of well-regulated
liberty, for which she is known and admired, and which have
imparted so much of worth and prosperity to the States in which
her children have settled. It is therefore fit, that now, in this
their hour of trial, North-Carolina and Alabama should consult
and advise together; and his Excellency the Governor of Alabama,
has charged us with a commission to this our native State,
"to consult and advise with his Excellency the Governor, and
with the members of this Legislature, as to what is best to be
done to protect the rights, interests and honor of the
slave-holding States, and to report the result of such
consultation." We feel complimented in accepting the
invitation of this General Assembly, to appear before them in
discharge of the duties imposed upon us.
We believe that the exhibitions of
public opinion in Alabama are so marked and distinct, as to
justify us in declaring that her approaching Convention will
withdraw her from the Federal Union. A result so sad, and so
pregnant with consequences to herself and to her sister States,
requires that she should have grave and conclusive reasons for
the step. Light and transient causes will not justify it; much
less should restlessness, passion or ambition influence her
action. Her obligations to the other States, to the cause of Free
Government, and to the civilized world forbid it. Her hopes of
reconstructing, with the other States of the South, a
well-regulated Government, which shall "establish justice,
insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense,
promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty
to ourselves and our posterity," alike forbid it.
Our people consider that the
Constitution of the United States is the charter of our national
rights and duties, by which our fathers bound us to the Union,
and under which, in its integrity, our people would be content to
live, and would envy none the prosperity it brings; but they
think that the past and present conduct, and apparently settled
rule of action of the non-slave-holding States, are violative of
its plain letter and spirit—and the people of Alabama, we
believe, will no longer be bound by its obligations while
deprived of its benefits.
They think the history of the country
shows, that some of the non-slave-holding States have, throughout
our political existence, proven themselves sectional, and hostile
to the rights and interest of the common country. Some of them
have opposed every war in which we have been involved, from that
of 1812, with Great Britain, to the war with Mexico; have opposed
the acquisition of the rich territories we have
obtained—even that which gave us the Mississippi river and
the vast plains watered by it; and yet these States, with the
other non-slave-holding States, have adopted and are acting on
the settled policy that we of the South shall be excluded from
the Territories, obtained by the common exertions and treasures
of the nation ; and that to maintain this sectional policy, the
Constitution of the United States, as expounded by the grave,
well and earnestly considered decision of the Supreme Court of
the United States, is to be set at naught, and the Court itself,
which made the decision, is to be reformed, not only for general
partizan purposes, but for the particular purpose of obtaining a
reversal of that decision. A party which announces, as a cardinal
article of its creed, the degradation of the highest Court in the
world, does, in the opinion of the people of Alabama, offer no
rule of Government consistent with well-regulated, Constitutional
freedom. Beyond this, is the fact that the plain letter of the
Constitution, providing for the rendition of fugitive slaves, has
not only been annulled by the non-slave-holding States, but
several of them have, by their so-called "personal-liberty
bills," made it a highly penal offense for a master to
attempt the enforcement of the Fugitive-Slave Law of Congress. So
it has come to this, that degrading punishment is the consequence
of a citizen of the South going into these States, with the
Constitution of the United States in his hand, asking simply for
the performance of the guarantees therein provided. Nor are those
non-slave-holding States that have not passed such bills, behind
their cooperators in practically annulling the clause of the
Constitution referred to—for it is well known that in most,
if not all of the non-slave-holding States, the rights of the
master of the slave are defied and set at naught, and that public
opinion, aided by mobs, has as effectively overthrown the
Constitution and the Law, as though neither had any existence.
Were this state of things the result of some sudden gleam of
passion, the people of Alabama might hope, that a returning sense
of justice would bring obedience to duty; but, unhappily, the
past and present prove that such a hope is illusory. The
violations of their obligations to us, have been so long
continued, and so oft repeated, that the principle has
incorporated itself into their education and religion, until the
doctrine of the law of conscience has been set up over the
supreme law of the land, and hatred to the South and her
institutions has usurped the teachings of the Bible. The spirit
of sectional animosity has so "grown with their growth and
strengthened with their strength," that their matured,
cultivated, and trusted statesmen have proclaimed, that the
conflict between the sections is "irrepressible," and
their people have, in the late Presidential election, responded
affirmatively to that announcement.
The election of a President of the
United States, of any opinion, however heretical, and however
much calculated to disturb the public mind, would, of itself, we
think, be considered by our people is of secondary importance;
but the recent Presidential election is the inauguration of a
system of Government as opposed to the Constitution as it is to
our rights and safety. It ushers in, as a settled policy, not
only the exclusion of the people of the South from the common
Territories of the country, but proposes to impair the value of
slave property in the States by unfriendly legislation; to
prevent the further spread of slavery by surrounding us with free
States; to refuse admission into the Union of another slave
State, and by these means to render the institution itself
dangerous to us, and to compel us, as slaves increase, to abandon
it, or be doomed to a servile war. The establishment alone of the
policy of the Republican party, that no more slave States are to
be admitted into the Union, and that slavery is to be forever
prohibited in the Territories (the common property of the United
States), must, of itself, at no distant day, result in the utter
ruin and degradation of most, if not all of the Gulf States.
Alabama has at least eight slaves to every square mile of her
tillable soil. This population outstrips any race on the globe in
the rapidity of its increase; and if the slaves now in Alabama
are to be restricted within her present limits, doubling as they
do once in less than thirty years, the children are now born who
will be compelled to flee from the land of their birth, and from
the slaves their parents have toiled to acquire as an inheritance
for them, or to submit to the degradation of being reduced to an
equality with them, and all its attendant horrors. Our people and
institutions Must be secured the right of expansion, and they can
never submit to a denial of that which is essential to their very
existence.
The non-slave-holding States, while
declaring that we shall not expand, and that thereby we shall be
crushed by our slave population, are charging upon us a design to
reopen the African slave trade, and seize upon two or three
ineffectual attempts, by Northern vessels to import Africans into
Southern ports, as an evidence of the fact. The charge is a
slander upon our people, and a reflection upon their
intelligence. There may be, here and there, found an advocate for
the measure, as there may in every community be found individual
advocates of any heresy; but our people, with almost entire
unanimity, would reject the proposition as offensive to their
sense of propriety and averse to their interests. They feel no
desire to depreciate the value of their own property, nor to
demoralize their slaves by throwing among them savages and
cannibals. They will look, as heretofore, to the redundant slave
population of the more Northern of their associated sister States
of the South for such additions to their negroes as their wants
may require.
The state of opinion and of conduct in
the non-slave-holding States, finds no justification or apology,
in any general or special direction of Federal Legislation to
their injury. On the contrary, such legislation has been greatly
to their advantage and prosperity. The benefits that have been
conferred upon them in the shape of tariff laws, navigation laws,
fishing bounties, land laws, and internal improvement laws, have
been important aids to their material prosperity—a
prosperity which is, in fact, to a great extent, the result of
burdens upon the agricultural interests of the South.
The apologists of the present state of
public mind at the North, sometimes maintain that it finds
palliation, at least, in the repeal of the Act of 1820, known as
the Missouri Compromise—which, in other words, is a
complaint that the North can no longer keep in force a law which
the Supreme Court of the United States have declared to be
unconstitutional. But the well-remembered history of recent
events teaches us, that it was the South which, a few years
since, endeavored, in a spirit of concessions to extend the line
of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes to the Pacific Ocean, and
the North who refused the offer.
The sectional strife has now been
conducted with increasing rancor for more than twenty years,
until every question of Government furnishes a theme for its
discussion. The Halls of Congress have ceased to be places for
statesmen, and have degenerated into arenas for strife. Our
people have grown tired of the controversy and can see no good in
prolonging the quarrel, and no way to end it in the Union.
Submission would but invite new and greater aggressions, until
Alabama would become a despised and degraded province. Our people
see little hope for the adjustment, within the Union, of
questions upon which the public mind of the sections has been
driven so wide apart, and discern in the present temper and
conduct of the non-slave-holding States, no spirit of atonement
for their wrongs, which could offer peace to the country. Indeed,
when the plain letter of the law has been so long and
persistently violated, they would not rely upon any adjustment
short of farther Constitutional guaranties.
Alabama hopes that, among other evils
which public affairs have brought, and are bringing upon her,
there may not be added that of a divided South. She sets up no
rule of action for her sister States, but hopes to obtain their
consultation, advice and assistance; and she repeats, through us,
her Commissioners, the expression of her fervid desire that
North-Carolina may be with her in counsel and in action, and with
her in attempting to uphold the principles of liberty which are
engrafted into the Constitution of the United States, and in the
hearts of her people, and that the States of the South may be
enabled to snatch that Constitution, and those principles, from
the desecrating touch of fanatical "higher law."
I.W. GARROTT.
ROB’T H. SMITH.
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