Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 7.djvu/45

28 race of whom at least half a million are able and willing to shoulder muskets, can never be subdued while fighting around and over their own hearthstones. If they could be, they would no longer be equal members of the Union, but conquered dependencies. We propose to wrest this potent engine from the disunionists by saying frankly to the slave States: "If you choose to leave the Union, leave it, but let us have no quarrel about it. If you think it a curse to you and an unfair advantage to us, repudiate it, and see if you are not mistaken. If you are better by yourselves, go and God speed you. For our part, we have done very well with you, and are quite willing to keep along with you, but if the association is irksome to you, we have too much self-respect to insist on its continuance. We have lived by our industry thus far and hope to do so still, even though you leave us." We repeat that only the sheen of Northern bayonets can bind the South wholly to the evils of secession, but that may do it. Let us be patient, neither speaking daggers nor using them, standing to our principles but not to our arms, and all will yet be well.

New York Tribune, December 8, 1860. — We again avow our deliberate conviction that whenever six or eight contiguous States shall have formally seceded from the Union, and avowed the pretty unanimous and earnest resolve of their people to stay out, it will not be found practicable to coerce them into subjection; and we doubt that any Congress can be found to direct and provide for such coercion. One or two States may be coerced, but not the entire section, or quarter of a Union. If you do not believe this, wait and see.

New York Tribune, December 17, 1860. —  But if ever seven or eight States sent agents to Washington to say, ‘We want to get out of the Union,’ we shall feel constrained by our devotion to human liberty to say, ‘Let them go.' And we do not see how we could take the other side without coming in direct conflict with those rights of man which we hold paramount to all political arrangements, however convenient and advantageous.

New York Tribune, December 24, 1860. — Most certainly we believe that governments are made for the peoples, not peoples for the governments; that the latter derive their just power from the consent of the governed; and whenever a portion of this Union, large enough to