Rensselaer Union, Volume 2, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 October 1869 — A Battle In the Air. [ARTICLE]

A Battle In the Air.

(Nothing could be more touching than the pertinacity with which Mr. Alexander H. Stephens insists that the war was unconstitutional, and that a true regard for the fundamental law would have resigned the United States to total destruction. lie continually argues at great length that the Constitution is merely a treaty between sovereign powers fr6m which each may withdraw at pleasure; and in utter contravention Bfahe peace and dignity o( Mr. George Tkwnor Curtis, the historian of the Constitution, the biographer of Webster, and a gentleman who believes to a degree that ought to console Mr. Stephens that the country has already arrived at the demnition bow-wows—in utter disregard, we say, of the peace and dignity aforesaid, Mr. Stephens stoutly asserts that Mr. Webster himself changed his views somewhat idler his famous speech in reply to Hsyne. Mr. Stephens quotes from a subsequent argument of Mr. Webster in the Supreme Court, in which he said: “I am not prepared to say that the States have no national sovereignty.” And he declares that Mr. Oalhoun reduced Mr. Webster to utter silence, crushed him, pulverised him, on the 26th of February, 1833. Upon that celebrated occasion Mr. Calhoun drew an argument in favor of the State sovereignty theory from the 7th article of the Constitution itself, which speaks of the establishment of the Constitution “ between the Slates so ratifying.” This blow, Mr. Stephens tells us, was overwhelming. It left Mr. Webster, so to speak, in a hopeless limp and flabby intellectual condition, and he “ never came back at his opponent.” That word “ between,” Mr. Stephens again informs us, is an argument in favor of the treaty view of Uie Constitution that never has been and never can be answered.

Mr. Curtis replies by hurling Mr. Madison at Mr. Calhoun, and demanding, through bis clenched teeth, as it were, whether Mr. Madison was not as good a Democrat, and might not be presumed to understand tbe Constitution quite as well as Mr. Calhoun. He shows Mr. Madison’s view of the subject to be identical with Mr. Webster’s, and he follows up Mr. Stephens’ airy speculations about “ delegated” or “alienated" sovereignty with the unction of a £erapliic Doctor pushing an Angelic Doctor upon the most recondite theological abstraction. Then he descends upon the cx-Confederate VicePresident, and asks by what right, upon his theory of the Constitution, he complains of the military despotism, the satrapic system, and the “ ruin at last,” which Mr. Webster predicted, which now weighs upon the country. Does it never occur to such disputants that the point upon which they differ was purpoeely left obscure in the Constitution, as the great, unexpressed compromise, that Mr. Webster and Mr. Calhoun, reasoning from the letter of the instrument merely, were both correct, because while the Constitution declares that “ we, the people ” ordain it, it also makes it subject to ratification “between the States,” and that such a radical difficulty could at last be settled in one way only, and that it has been settled? The people of the United States have declared with tho most appalling emphasis that they aSr and will remain one nation. The only final interpreters of the Constitution have inter - sreted.it. “ You are all wrong,” murmurs Ir. Stephens. “ Constitutionally you ought at this very moment to be a moist, . unpleasant body.” It is the most affect : ing illustration upon record of “ Scissors, if I die for it Harper't Weekly.