H

E who would deny courage to Federal soldiers and belittle their valor disparages the prowess and the most brilliant achievements of our Confederate soldiers and detracts from their courage and their valor.

The arbitrament of arms, to which we appealed our cause, was decided against us, and as true and honorable people we of the South have, in good faith, abided the result, have loyally supported the Federal Constitution, and have always stood ready and willing to do our part in maintaining and defending the dignity, the honor, and the integrity of the government of the United States. This was most forcibly illustrated in the prompt response made by the South to the call for soldiers to rally around the stars and stripes for duty in Cuba and the Philippine Islands, and

the soldiers from the South whose conspicuous gallantry and noble daring contributed most in carrying that flag to victory; while among the leaders, none displayed more consummate skill, chivalric dash and intrepidity, and covered themselves with such glory as grand, superb "Fighting Joe wheeler" of Confederate fame.

If, however, loyalty to the United States government means or demands that we of the South are by our thoughts, words, acts, or deeds to consider and brand the glorious men who constituted the peerless armies of the Southern Confederacy as cut-throats, outlaws, or felons deserving to be swung from the gallows or incarcerated in dungeons, then I voice the sentiment of our beautiful and loved Southland when I declare with all the emphasis of my nature, that we never have and, God sustaining us, we never will sub

our

scribe to such loyalty as that; for sooner would the bright stars be swept from the blue dome of heaven than the revered recollections of the heroic achievements of our intrepid Confederate soldiers be obliterated from minds and our hearts, or the principles hallowed with their blood be renounced by us. While hills and vales exist, while mountains and valleys survive, until the rivers, seas, gulfs, and oceans go dry, and time itself ceases, so long will the principles for which the South. fought be by us of the South maintained as right and the sweet remembrances and tender associations that cluster around that cause survive and be by us cherished as a priceless heritage and our dearest and most valued treasures.

We have no regrets to express except that we did not succeed. We have no pardons to ask or beg and no apologies to make for having struggled and battled to establish the Southern Confederacy. We knew we were right then and we know it now, and feel a contempt for the craven-hearted who are so lost to shame and honor, as to feel called upon to render excuses for the Confederate war and who characterize our efforts as a criminal blunder.

It was the North that trampled under foot, nullified and destroyed the Constitution which guaranteed our rights and protected our liberties. John

C. Fremont, the first Republican presidental nominee, was on June 17th, 1856, nominated on a secession platform and one which avowedly assailed the Constitution, demanded its repudiation and proclaimed war against it and the people of the South. In March, 1857, under the leadership of Schuyler Colfax, afterwards thrice chosen Speaker of the House of Representatives and elected Vice-President of the United States, a proclamation was issued by prominent Republican leaders including sixty-eight members of Congress, declaring the "ineligibility of all slave owners for every office; no co-operation with them in religion or society; no patronage to their manufactures or merchants; no pay or fees to their lawyers, physicians, preachers, teachers or editors." In a word, the South was outlawed and her people ex-communicated from all things political, educational, social and religious and stigmatized as being unfit for State or Church.

At a large celebration at Framingham, Massachusetts, on July 4tn, 1854, was witnessed a most shameful political tragedy, when William Lloyd Garrison, the orator or the day, deliberately struck a match and applied it to a copy of the Constitution which he characterized as a lie as he held it up in his hand, and as the burning particles were wafted into the air, amidst much pomp and ceremony and the enthusiastic applause of the assembled multitude he exclaimed: "So let the Constitution of the United States be destroyed; it is nothing but a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. Null and void before God from the first moment of its inception."

H. C. Wright, a prominent Northern politician, denounced the Union as an unmitigated curse and its dissolution only a question of time.

Horace Greeley declared that the free and slave States ought to be separated and advocated the right of a State to secede. On February 23rd, 1861, he

said the South had the right to secede and that one section of the Republic should not be pinned to another by bayonets.

Samuel J. May favored the overthrow of the Constitution and the establishment of another government.

Joshua R. Giddings advised the insurrection of the slaves and the extermination by them of their masters.

Charles Sumner strenuously warred against the Constitution.

In 1848, Abraham Lincoln publicly asserted that "any people whatever have the right to abolish the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right.”

William H. Seward declared there was a higher law than the Constitution.

Wendell Phillips, an abolitionist leader, declared "The Republican Party is not national, it is sectional. It is the North arrayed against the South. All hail! then, disunion. The Republican 'arty is a party of the North pledged against the South." Referring to the Constitution he said "It is a mistake, let us tear it up and make another."

Anson Burlingame, another prominent abolitionist leader, proclaimed to an approving constituency that, "The times demand an anti-slavery Constitution, an anti-slavery Bible and an antislavery God."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the noted Northern writer, made the blasphemous declaration that "The gallows on which John Brown was executed is as glorious as the cross of Jesus Christ."

Such was the attitude of the North towards the Constitution, our only safeguard. Such were the feelings of bitterness and hate entertained towards us of the South, that the assassination of our citizens by negroes was strenuously urged; the diabolical murderer, John Brown who dragged innocent men and helpless children from their beds at night and brutally massacred them in his atrocious efforts to exterminate

those who entertained Southern sentiments was declared the equal of our pure and holy Saviour, and to satiate the enmity felt against us, they committed the soul killing crime of demanding that God Himself be changed to a South-hating God.

Waiving the causes enumerated, I place the secession of the South upon a higher plane and assert without the slightest fear of successful refutation that she had the Constitutional right to secede. That secession was a Constitu

tional right was recognized and publicly declared in conventions and otherwise for over seventy years before the Civil War, not only by the Southern States, but by those of the North, East and West. In support of this assertion, I cite the following facts: As early as 1793 Georgia, in the exercise of her powers as a free, sovereign and independent State, by the Legislature, passed an Act making it a felony for any Federal officer to levy or attempt to levy upon any part of her territory to prevent the enforcement of a judgment obtained by Chisholm against the State of Georgia in the United States Supreme Court. In 1825 George M. Troup, as Governor, defied the administration of John Quincy Adams and called out the State Militia to resist Federal interference with the treaty that the State had made with the Creek Indians. In 1798-9 the Legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky passed nullification resolutions; those of Kentucky were drafted by Thomas Jefferson, afterwards twice elected President of the United States and those of Virginia by James Madison who was also thereafter twice elected President. In 1803, 1804, 1808 and in 1814 at the Hartford Convention the Eastern States clamoreu for secession from the Union and the formation of a Northern Confederacy, and their right to secede was not questioned, nor were they charged with rebellion or treason. In 1809, the Governor of Pennsylvania ordered out the

State Militia to prevent the service of process issued from the Supreme Court of the United States. Other instances of the assertion of State sovereignty were by Maine in 1831, South Carolina in 1832, Massachusetts from 1843 to 1845, and in fact by a majority of all the States, for fourteen of the Northern tates enacted laws to prevent the execution of the laws of Congress within their boundaries.

The first Article of the Confederation entered into by the several colonies, in 1778, expressly declared that each State retained its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction and right which was not by the States expressly delegated to the Confederacy formed.

In the treaty of peace entered into between the Colonies and Great Britain in 1783 Great Britain mentioned the thirteen colonies by name and acknowleuged them to be free sovereign and independent States.

In 1781, 1783 and 1784 the United States Congress recognized the sovereignty of the several States by asking of them the right and power to levy duties.

In 1787, when the States sent delegates to the Philadelphia Convention to revise the Federal Constitution, and form a more perfect union, each State, with the exception of South Carolina and Massachusetts, set out in the commissions to the delegates that they were issued in the eleventh year of the Independence of the Free Sovereign and Independent State issuing the same without mentioning the year of Independence of the United States as the date of issuing the same.

That convention was a secession convention pure and simple. It was called for the express purpose of seceding Irom the Union established by the Articles of Confederation which declared that the Union should be perpetual. On the 17th day of September, 1787, the convention adopted the present Consti

tution other than the amendments thereto, and a new Union was formed and a new Constitution framed which is absolutely silent as to the perpetuity of the Union formed and this omission was intentional, for the perpetuity of the Union then being formed was discussed and considered by the Convention. If the several States could secede from a Union which they had entered into and declared should be perpetual, as was done at the Philadelphia Secession Convention in 1787, it irresistibly follows that at the Montgomery Secession Convention in 1861 the States of the South had the same indisputable legal right to secede from the Union whose Constitution makes no reference whatever as to its duration, thereby leaving to each State the right to withdraw from the Union whenever the State saw fit to exercise this right. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was in itself a decisive declaration by all the States that notwithstanding the confederation entered into by them in 1778, each State had retained its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and its right to withdraw from the Confederation whenever it desired to do so.

If

The Constitutional right of the South to secede from the Union depends upon the construction of the Constitution framed by the convention in 1787. the Constitution then adopted established a nation—a national government the Constitutional right to secede did not exist; otherwise it did exist. That the Constitution did not and never was intended to establish a national government was settled beyond controversy by the convention itself. The very first resolution that came up before the convention was "that a national government ought to be established" when established" when Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut made a motion to expunge the word "national" and alter the language used so as to run "that the government of the United States ought to consist," etc., he then and there stating that this alteration

would drop the word "national" and retain the proper title. This motion was seconded by Mr. Gorham and the motion was unanimously adopted by the Convention. The contention that a national government was established has no basis of fact to rest upon and is in direct and irreconcilable conflict with the real fact, the truth of the matter.

It has never been questioned that if the Southern States acceded to the Union they had the right to secede therefrom. It has never been questioned that if the Constitution was a compact, secession was a Constitutional right. It has never been questioned that if the framing of the Constitution and the formation of the Union was a compact between the States, each State had the right to withdraw therefrom at will.

The records of the Convention and the unequivocal the unequivocal declarations of the members of the Convention establish beyond controversy that the States acceded to the Union. The following members of that Convention, while the Constitution was being framed and the Union formed, expressly declared that the Union was an accession of the States: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Wilson. Gerry, Randolph, Innes, King and Morris.

Eminent contemporary statesmen and writers asserted that the States acceded to the Union, to-wit: John C. Celhoun, Patrick Henry, Chief Justice Marshall, Grayson and a great many others.

Everyone must admit that "the same power which established the Constitution may justly destroy it." and the Constitution having been established by the accession or consent of the several States each acting separately and independently it inevitably follows that the States had the right to dissolve the Union by seceding from it, whenever they deemed it advisable and to their interest to do so,

Was the Constitution a compact? Gouverneur Morris, a member of the Convention, asserted "that he was there to form a compact for the good of America and was ready to do so with all the States, and hoped that all would enter into the compact." He further asserted that the compact was to be a voluntary one. Mr. Gerry, the representative of Massachusetts, spoke of it as a compact. Mr. Madison of Virginia, the father of the Constitution, calls it "a compact among the States in their highest sovereign capacity." In 1830, Daniel Webster in his speech on Foot's resolutions said it was a compact. Chief Justice Jay of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Christian vs. State of Georgia, expressly declares that the Constitution of the United States is a compact. John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, said it was a compact. Edmund Pendleton, President of the ratifying Convention of Virginia in 1788, declared it was a government founded in "real compact." Judge Tucker in his excellent commentaries on Blackstone repeatedly calls the Constitution of the United States a compact between the States. Thomas Jefferson, father of the Declaration of Independence, says the States entered into a compact which is called the Constitution of the United States. The Massachusetts Convention which ratified the Constitution speaks of it as an explicit and solemn compact. The Federalist, that great political periodical, in submitting the Constitution to the people for ratification sets it before them as "the compact." From the viewpoint that the Constitution was a compact the right of secession is unquestionably established.

Was the Constitution a compact between the States? To ascertain this we must look back to the manner in which it was formed and upon what foundation it rests. The Constitution was the creation of the several States acting sep

arately and independently and not jointly, was drawn up by the States, each acting for itself, every item therein was voted upon by each one of the States separately, each State having one vote, and then the entire instrument was adopted by the States acting as separate, independent and equal bodies. There was no joint approval of the Constitution, but each State acted for itself alone, "free and independent, uncontrolled and uncontrollable by any power upon earth," thereby showing that it was a union of States effected by the several acts of each State in forming a Federal government, and not a national government. Provision was made by the Convention for the submission of the Constitution to be ratified by each of the several States acting for itself independently of the action of any other

State.

Gouverneur Morris made a motion to have the Constitution ratified by a general Convention chosen and authorized by the people to consider, amend and establish the same, which motion if carried would have had the effect to establish a national government, but his motion faild to receive a second in the convention.

Mr. Madison moved that "a concurrence of a majority of both the States and the people should be required to ratify the Constitution," which motion also tended to the formation of a national government and was summarily voted down. The minutes of that convention and the declarations of the members thereof will show that every suggestion of a national government was promtly and unequivocally repudiated and that the convention rigidly adhered to the determination of establishing a Federal and not a National Government by referring the adoption of the Constitution to "the accession of the several States each acting separately and independently for itself and bound only by its own voluntary act."

James Madison, though personally