Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 7.djvu/484



CIVIL ACTION OF THE STATE IN SECEDING FROM THE FEDERAL UNION—REVIEW OF THE REASONS FOR SECESSION—LEGISLATURE PROVIDES FOR CONVENTION—PROCEEDINGS OF THE SAME.

HISTORY of the military operations of the troops raised in the State of Mississippi during the war of the Confederacy should embrace their operations within the State and wherever they participated in battles fought in other States. Before proceeding to discharge this duty (assigned to the writer), it is proper to make a brief statement of the reasons which impelled the State of Mississippi to dissolve her connection with the Federal government, as expressed in her legislature, and more solemnly in her sovereign convention.

Our forefathers, in their solemn Declaration of Independence which severed the ties that bound them to the mother country, declared: "That these colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent States." They waged the seven years' war of the Revolution to maintain this declaration. They succeeded. When they came to form a civil government to protect the liberties thus dearly achieved, they refused to give the general or federal government, created under the Articles of Confederation, the power of taxation. The war of the Revolution had been waged by them to free the colonies from "unjust, onerous and oppressive taxation without representation." It was doubtless this recollection, fresh in their minds, which prompted them to deny the power of taxation to the newly constructed confederacy.

A very few years sufficed to show that a general or federal government, dependent on the voluntary quota of