Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

1 We find in 1866, even after the experience of the war, President Johnson declaring that the authours of the Constitution were divinely inspired; that “they needed and obtained a wisdom superiour to experience.” This is silly extravagance, if not worse. We shall see that there was one element of originality and of great virtue in the Constitution; but apart from this, the sober student of history, looking over three generations of fierce political conflict in America, must be struck by the enormous defects and omissions of an instrument that has shared so much the undue admiration of mankind.

In another work the authour has enumerated in the paragraphs quoted below the defective texts of the Constitution:

It is impossible to resist the thought, that the framers of the Constitution were so much occupied with the controversy of jealousy between the large and the small States that they overlooked many great and obvious questions of government, which have since been fearfully developed in the political history of America. Beyond the results and compromises of that jealousy, the debates and the work of the Convention show one of the most wonderful blanks that has, perhaps, ever occurred in the political inventions of civilized mankind. They left behind them a list of imperfections in political prescience, a want of provision for the exigencies of their country, such as has seldom been known in the history of mankind.

A system of negro servitude existed in some of the States. It was an object of no solicitude in the Convention. The only references in the Constitution to it are to be found in a provision in relation to the rendition of fugitives “ held to service or labour,” and in a mixed and empirical rule of Popular representation. However these provisions may imply the true status of slavery, how much is it to be regretted that the Convention did not make (what might have been made so easily) an explicit declaration on the subject, that would have put it beyond the possibility of dispute, and re moved it from even the plausibility of party controversy!

For many years the very obvious question of the power of the General Government to make internal improvements' has agitated the councils of America: and yet there is no text in the Constitution to regulate a matter which should have stared its authours in the face, but what may be derived, by the most forced and distant construction, from the powers of Congress “to regulate commerce,” and to “ declare war,” and “ raise and support armies.”

For a longer period, and with a fierceness once almost fatal to the Union, has figured in the politics of America “ the tariff question,” a contest between a party for revenue and a party for protective prohibitions. Both parties have fought over that vague platitude of the Constitution, the power of Congress “ to regulate commerce; ” and in the want of a more distinct language on a subject of such vast concern, there has been engendered a controversy which has progressed from the threshold of the history of the Union up to the period of its dissolution.

With the territorial possessions of America, even at the date of the Convention, and with all that the future promised in the expansion of a system that yet scarcely occupied more than the water-slopes of a continent, it might be supposed that the men who formed the Constitution would have prepared a full and explicit article for the government of the territories. That vast and intricate subject — the power of the General Government over the territories, the true nature of these establishments, the status and political privileges of their inhabitants — is absolutely dismissed with this bald provision in the Constitution of the United States:

New States may be admitted by Congress into this Union. Art. IV., Sec. 3.

In addition to these flagrant omissions of the Constitution may be observed a fault, which it was sought to correct in the Constitution of the Confederate States, and which has latterly grown much upon public attention. It is that defective construction of the Cabinet, which excludes all the ministers of the government from any participation in the legislative councils. The practical consequences of this defective organization of the government is, that the relations between the Executive and Congress have gradually descended to a back-door communication, in which the Executive has lost its dignity, and American politics been severely scandalized. The relations of the British ministry to Parliament are such that a vote of censure, any night, may change the administration of public affairs. There is no such faculty of adaptation in the American system. If there is a variance between the Executive and Congress, the former communicates with its partisans in that body through the back-door and lobby, and the practical consequences are bribery, corruption, and all sorts of devious and unworthy appliances to the legislation of the country.