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 48 Union. Immediately on the finding of these indictments, he (through his eminent Northern as well as Southern counsel) appeared at the bar of the court and demanded a speedy trial, in order that he might judicially vindicate his course and that of his people before the world. This right of trial was postponed by the Federal Government for nearly three years. During two of these years, he was confined in a casemate at Fortress Monroe and subjected to indignities and tortures, by which it was attempted to break the spirit of the distinguished captive; and at the same time to degrade the people whom he represented, and for whom he was a vicarious sufferer. It is hardly necessary to say, that this conduct is to-day universally regarded as not only unworthy of the representatives of the government which held Mr. Davis as its prisoner, but that it has made a page in its history of which it ought to be, and we believe is, ashamed.

When at last the Government consented to try the case, it declined to meet the question involved, in its own chosen tribunal; and having been advised by the best lawyers and statesmen at the North that the decision must be against the North and in favor of the South, in order to evade the issue, Chief Justice (Chase) himself suggested a technical bar to the prosecution, which was adopted and the cases dismissed. The South was entirely in the power of the North, and could do nothing but accept this, their own confession that they were wrong and that the South was right.

And so we say, our comrades, that just because the States of the South did, in the most regular and deliberate way, exercise their constitutional and legal right to withdraw from a compact which they had never violated, but which the Northern States had confessedly violated time and again, a right which, as we have seen, was not only recognized by the leading statesmen of the North, but which it had threatened on several occasions to put into execution—we say, just because the Southern States did take this perfectly legal step in a legal way, these same people of the North, with Abraham Lincoln as their head, proceeded, as we shall