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 44

On the 9th of November, 1860, Mr. Horace Greeley, the great apostle of the Republican party, and who was often referred to during Mr. Lincoln's administration as the "power behind the throne—greater than the throne itself"—said in his paper, the New York Tribune:

"If the Cotton States consider the value of the Union debatable, we maintain their perfect right to discuss it; nay, we hold with Jefferson, to the inalienable right of communities to alter or abolish forms of government that have become oppressive or injurious; and if the Cotton States decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may he a revolutionary one, but it exists nevertheless; and we do not see how one party can have a right to do what another party has a right to prevent."

On the 17th of December, 1860, just three days before the secession of South Carolina, he again said in the Tribune:

"If it (the Declaration of Independence ) justified the secession from the British Empire of three millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on this point, why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why?"

Again, on February the 23rd, 1861, five days after the inauguration of President Davis at Montgomery, he said:

"We have repeatedly said, and we once more insist, that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of American Independence—that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed—is sound and just, and if the Slave States, the Cotton States, or the Gulf States only, choose to form an independent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so."

And we know that this man was one of the foremost of our oppressors during the war, although his kindness to Mr. Davis and others after the war, we think, showed that he knew he had done wrong. And yet, he had the audacity (and may we not justly add