Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/292

276 the United States government. They as States had seceded from the United States in their sovereign capacity, and were capable of legally reconsidering their former action and again uniting with the other States of the Union. The people in the seceded States, as they understood it, had fought to perpetuate the Constitution of their fathers. They believed in State sovereignty in its broadest sense. This question had been an unsettled one always. They believed in the reserved rights of the States. They believed in the decisions of the Supreme court as finally settling all constitutional questions. They had looked to the Constitution to protect their property in slaves. They did not know what to expect next when fourteen of the States of the Union practically nullified the acts of Congress and the decisions of the highest court of the land in the matter of the fugitive slave laws. They had fought to maintain the constitution of 1789 as framed by a common ancestry. They felt and believed that they were actuated by as pure and lofty a spirit of liberty as had ever actuated and governed any people, and their devotion and sacrifices in the war were the evidence of this belief. The North entertained different views as to these questions. They wanted their views to prevail in the construction of the Constitution, and they wanted the Union to remain as it was. They had a majority of votes. The war came and the two irritating causes of difference, slavery and secession, were finally and forever settled against the South. They were eliminated as causes of dissension and difference, and that, too, by the highest appeal known to man that of arms.

The South could do nothing but accept the result of the war. This they were anxious to do, and desirous to claim the protection of the Constitution of their fathers, framed by common ancestry, North and South. They were ready to accept the results with the same honesty and sincerity with which they had been ready to