Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/68

40 mies, the true disunionists, have been those who, under the disguise of a deceptive name, have perverted the name and true functions of the government and have usurped, for selfish or partisan ends, or at the demand of crazy fanaticism, powers which States never surrendered. Those who contend most strenuously for the rights of the States and for a strict construction of the Constitution are the genuine lovers and friends of the Union. Their principles conserve law, good order, justice, established authority; and their unselfish purpose has been to preserve and transmit our free 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