Belief 7 - Reading 11 of 13, The Reconstruction Convention

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Belief 7 - Reading 11 of 13

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CONSOLIDATION

Harper's Weekly, December 9, 1865, page 771 (Editorial)

The fear of consolidation or centralization which haunts some honest minds in this country curiously obscures them. They seem to suppose that in some inscrutable way the city of Washington and the national Government may play the same part among us that Paris and the central Government play in France. The bugbear of "centralization" vexes their sleep. "What," they cry, "would you touch the local governments, the municipal system which is the very palladium of our liberties?"

Here is a palpable confusion. The Government of the United States is the people of the United States. It is not a power independent of the people and hostile to it and maintaining itself by a standing army—it is the whole body of the people themselves; and no natural right, like that of personal liberty, for instance, is any where safe if it be not guaranteed by them. Indeed, if the principle of a popular government be sound, that the people ought to govern, because such a method is the surest pledge of popular liberty, why is that liberty endangered by confiding it to the whole people instead of a part of them?

If the national Government stood in the same relation to the States that a medieval feudal baron did to his dependents, or a prince to a circle of free cities, the fear of centralization or of some form of governmental tyranny would be more natural. But as it is, it is a misconception of the necessary character and tendency of our system. The counties of a State might as well fear the centralizing power of the State as the State fear that of the Union. The people are the source of power in all of them.

As a matter of fact the local State governments have never been the security of our personal and political rights. All the assaults upon the principles of our institutions, all the signal overthrow of personal and political rights have been the work of States. For the whole people is wiser and nobler than any portion of them. And hence the overpowering importance of the Emancipation Amendment. Its very object is to place the personal liberty of every American citizen beyond any local or subordinate power whatever, because such a responsibility can not be safely delegated. The population of a State has rights, but the people of the United States have rights, and the protection of a citizen of the United States can not be intrusted to any other authority than that of the government of which he is a part.

Harper's Weekly, December 9, 1865, page 771 (Editorial)

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