Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/74

46 system what is not found elsewhere, a power above that of the Federal or of the State government, the power of the people of a State, who ordained and established constitutions for and over themselves. No secret conspiracy was needed, no mask to conceal the features of the State, no secret place in which to concoct or consummate the designs. Everything was done in broad daylight, and inspection was invited to the accomplishment of what had been repeatedly avowed as the logical consequence of sectional supremacy. The people of the State the only &quot;people&quot; then known under our political system had a regularly and lawfully constituted government, already in their hands and subject to their direction. They had a complete corps of administrative officers, an executive, a legislative, a judiciary, filling every department of a free, representative government, all holding office under State authority alone and wearing no badge of official subordination to any power. This government was complete in all its functions and powers, unchanged as to its internal affairs, altered only in its external or Federal relations, and law and order reigned in every portion of the State precisely as if no change had occurred, secession was as valid as the act of ratification by which the State entered the Union. The secession, or withdrawal of a State from a league, had no revolutionary or insurrectionary character, and nothing which could be tortured into rebellion or treason except by ignorance or malignity.

Several States having openly, with most public declaration of purposes, withdrawn from the compact, they established a union, a confederacy of states, for themselves. The constitution was formed, adopted, ratified, in precisely the same manner and by the same forms and agencies as the Constitution of the United States came into being. Not a clause nor article interfered with the right of any Northern State or citizen. No assault was made upon property or institutions of any other people.