Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/73

Rh The Southern States believed that the transfer of the government to pronounced hostility to their institutions involved a repudiation of the covenanted faith of their sister States, and released them from the burden of their own covenants when they were denied the benefit of the corresponding covenant of the other contracting states. Seeing the hopelessness of security from President, or Congress, or courts, or public opinion, all inflexibly averse to their constitutional rights, as understood by the patriot fathers, they felt constrained to withdraw from a government which had ceased to be what those fathers made it. Not to have done this would have been to leave the stronger section in entire and hostile control of the government and to consolidate the powers of our compound system in the central head. The last hope of preserving the Constitution of the Union being extinguished, nothing remained except to submit to a continuation of the violation of the compact of union, the perversion of the grants of power from their original and proper purposes, or to assert the sovereign right of reassuming the grants which the States had made.

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 A State, by virtue of its individual, sovereign right, demonstrated in this introductory chapter, repealed or withdrew its act of acceptance of the Constitution, as the basis or bond of union, and resumed the powers which had been delegated and enumerated in that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