Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/75

Rh The model of the Constitution of the Union, which had been respected, obeyed and revered by the Southern States, was followed, with only such changes as time and experience had demonstrated to be necessary for the states to retain their equality in the Union and have their guaranteed rights respected. There seemed no other alternative for the security of the domestic institutions of self-governing States institutions over which neither the Federal government nor people outside the limits of such States had any control, and for which they had no moral or legal responsibility. Southern life was habitually denounced as utter &quot;barbarism, &quot;and an institution of the remotest origin, sanctioned in the Old Testament and by the law of nations, and upheld for centuries by all civilized governments, and existing at the time of the Declaration of Independence in all the States, was held up to odium as &quot;the sum of all villainies,&quot; and the Constitution, because of its explicit recognition and guarantee of this institution, was spurned as &quot;a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.&quot; It was a logical and inevitable inference that the predominant and fanatical sentiment of the North should purge. the country of such an &quot;unmitigated crime&quot; by its speedy suppression, and that invested with, or arrogating supreme power, it should throw its irresistible weight in the sacrifice of Southern interests to a remorseless and destructive propagandism.

No one would now hazard the assertion that, if the Southern States had acquiesced in the result of the elections of 1860, the equality and rights of the Southern States could have continued unimpaired by the unfriendly action of the government at Washington and of the Northern States. We need not be left to conjecture as to what would have occurred, for a few years later—not during the frenzy of the war, but in the flush of victory and the strength of peace—we had a notable illustration of the insecurity of reliance upon the clearest constitu-