Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/567

Rh speaker on that side, nevertheless it went into the popular mind that the opposition had denounced the soldiery of the Union. The platform declared for an unimpaired Union and indicted the administration on all the grounds of usurpation which had become familiar by frequent use. The arraignment was startlingly terrible, and being true, justified secession before every popular tribunal in the world. These fearful counts in the accusation of this convention of eminent men against the administration were as follows: Usurpation of extraordinary and dangerous powers not granted by the Constitution; the subversion of the civil by military law in the faithful States; arbitrary military arrest, imprisonment, trial and sentence of American citizens in States where the civil law exists in full force; suppression of freedom of speech and of the press; denial of the right of asylum ; open and avowed disregard of State rights; employment of unusual test oaths; interference with and denial of the right of the people to bear arms in their defense ; direct interference of the military in elections and disregard of the Constitution in every part. This burning impeachment exceeded all the causes set forth by the Colonies in the Declaration of Independence to justify their rebellion against King George. They were deliberately published by a vast convention composed of men who were among the ablest and most conservative in the Union, and they were applauded in every State of the Union. The evidence to sustain every charge was at the command of these distinguished Northern men, all of whom were devotees of the Union and many of them actual soldiers in the army. The reading of the lurid lines so long after the restoration of the Union produces a shudder because it is thus made to appear that on the holiest of pleas the most tyrannical acts can be perpetrated in a republic as well as in a monarchy. The Confederate leaders said in 1860: &quot; We fear that these things will be done.&quot; The most