Confederate Military History. Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry

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СКАЧАТЬ institutions as they came from the fathers, sincerely believing that their course and doctrines were necessary to preserve for them and posterity the blessings of good government. The States have no motive to encroach on the Federal government and no power to do so, if so inclined, while the Federal government has always the inclination and always the means to go beyond what has been granted to it. No higher encomium could be rendered to the South than the fact, sustained by her whole history, that she never violated the Constitution, that she committed no aggression upon the rights or property of the North, and that she simply asked equality in the Union and the enforcement and maintenance of her clearest rights and guarantees. The latitudinous construction, contended for by one party and one section, has been the open door through which the people have complained. A strict construction gives to the general government all the powers it can beneficially exert, all that is necessary for it to have, and all that the States ever purposed to grant.

      Passion, revenge, cupidity, ignorance and fanaticism have created an incurable misunderstanding of secession, its source and object. In its simplest form and logically it meant a peaceable and orderly withdrawal from the compact of union, a dissolution of the civil partnership, a claim of the paramount allegiance of citizens, a declension to continue under the obligations due to or from the Federal government or the other States. The authority of the Constitution remains intact and unimpaired over the States remaining in the Union and ceases only as to the seceding State. The remaining or continuing States had no right of coercion nor of placing the ‘wayward sister’ in the attitude of an enemy. The history of the Union does not show any eagerness on the part of any State to interpose its sovereign power for protection. During the first quarter of our existence as a confederate union, New England showed much impatience at remaining under the bonds, made angry and repeated threats of dissolution, but did not execute her menaces. The truth is that the Union is so strong, has so many advantages, so many patriotic associations, that the motives and reasons for continuance in it, for patient forbearance, for submission even to injustice and wrong, are well-nigh overwhelming.

      The Southern States through many years showed the strength of their attachment to the Union by immeasurable sacrifices, illustrated their patriotism by acts of heroic devotion, and got their reluctant consent to a separation only after a series of unendurable wrongs, and the most indisputable demonstration of the purpose of a united North to deprive them of solemn guarantees of equality in the Union. From the ‘Missouri compromise’—prohibiting Southern extension north of the line of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes—substituting a new confederation for the old, drawing a geographical line, south of which was to be equality, north of which the Southern States were proscribed, dishonored, stigmatized, establishing the policy of an interference by Congress with an interest not common among all the States and thus creating two great combinations of States, between which mutual provocations were manufactured, down to the war between the States, the Congress and the government repeatedly and offensively declared that the Southern States were not the equals of the Northern States in the benefits of the Union, that property recognized and guaranteed in the Constitution must be restricted within narrow lines, and that ‘territory of the United States,’ obtained at the cost of common blood and common treasure, was not to be equally enjoyed, but was to be for the exclusive possession of the Northern States with their civilization and property.

      The Northern States, not in the regular and prescribed form, but in most irregular, illegal and contemptuous manner, by ecclesiastical action and influence, by legislative and judicial annulment, by public meetings, by pulpit and press, by mobs and conspiracies and secret associations, made null and void a clear mandate of the Constitution, protective of Southern property and adopted as an indispensable means for securing the entrance of the Southern States into the Union. To use the language of President Harrison: ‘Government of the mob was given preference over government of the law enforced by the court decrees and by executive orders.’ The highest Northern judicial and historical authorities concede that the Union would never have been formed without these compacts of guarantee and protection. This constitutional provision was sustained by the Supreme court and by every Congress and President up to 1861. Ten Northern States, with impunity, with the approval of such men as Governor Chase, afterward secretary of the treasury under Mr. Lincoln and chief justice of the Supreme court, nullified the Constitution, declared that its stipulation in reference to the reclamation of fugitives from labor was ‘a dead letter,’ and to that extent they dissolved the Union, or made an ex parte change of the terms upon which it was formed. These States did not formally secede, but of themselves, without assent of those Mr. Jefferson described as ‘co-parties with themselves to the compact,’ changed the conditions of union and altered the articles of agreement. Releasing themselves by their own motion, in most arbitrary, extra-judicial, extraconstitutional manner, of a covenant or injunction of the Constitution, because in their opinion it was unwise, they still, while thus in flagrante delicto, demanded obedience to the Constitution and laws on the part of the other cosignitories to the league of government. In the elections of 1860, on sectional issues and securing sectional ascendency, this rebellion against legitimate authority, this nullification, this assumption of a right to self-release from an imperative constitutional requirement, this setting up of private judgment, of individual or corporate whim, against statutory and organic law, an unbroken line of judicial precedents and the undisputed history of the formation of the Constitution, was sanctioned by the popular vote of the North and the election of President Lincoln, who had boldly declared that the States could not remain in union as they had originally agreed and stipulated. In that election, in direct antagonism to the opinions and covenants of the men who achieved our independence and framed and adopted the Constitution which made the Union, it was deliberately decided that the States could not exist together as slaveholding and non-slaveholding, and that ‘the irrepressible conflict’ between them must go on until ‘the relic of barbarism’ should be effaced from constitutions and laws.

      That election divided the Union into fixed hostile geographical parties, strongly distinguished by institutions, traditions, opinions and productions and pursuits, the stronger struggling and by the popular verdict licensed to enlarge its powers, and the weaker to save its equality and rights. It placed in the hands of the stronger section, dominated by a fanatical spirit, the power to crush the weaker section and institutions,, to destroy at will the existing constitutional relation between the races, and to leave no alternative but reduction to provincial condition or resistance. With the ascendency previously acquired by territorial monopoly and government favoritism, it was now made certain that political power was centralized permanently in the North to the control and subjection of the South whenever the feelings or interests of the sections came into conflict. What the result would be it required no seer to prophesy.⁴

       Secession the separate and legal act of the States.

      It is not uncommon to confound the secession of a state, as a separate, independent, sovereign act, with the subsequent establishment of a confederacy or a common government, by the co-operative action of several States after they had seceded. A State, by virtue of its individual, sovereign right, demonstrated in this introductory chapter, repealed or withdrew its act of acceptance of the Constitution, as the basis or bond of union, and resumed the powers which had been delegated and enumerated in that instrument. This act of resumption of delegated powers, assertion of undelegated sovereignty, was not by the legislature. There is in our American system what is not found elsewhere, a power above that of the Federal or of the State government, the power of the people of a State, who ordained and established constitutions for and over themselves. No secret conspiracy was needed, no mask to conceal the features of the State, no secret place in which to concoct or consummate the designs. Everything was done in broad daylight, and inspection was invited to the accomplishment of what had been repeatedly avowed as the logical consequence of sectional supremacy. The people of the State—the only ‘people’ then known under our political system—had a regularly and lawfully constituted government, already in their hands and subject to their direction. They had a complete corps of administrative officers, an executive, a legislative, a judiciary, filling every department of a free, representative government, all holding office under State authority alone and wearing no badge of official subordination СКАЧАТЬ