Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 7.djvu/490

Rh its present limits, denying the power of expansion. It tramples the original equality of the South under foot. It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain. It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst. It has enlisted its press, its pulpits and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.

"It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists. It seeks not to elevate or support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.

"It has invaded a State and invested with honors a wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings and the weapons of destruction to our lives. It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security. It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system. It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause. It has recently obtained control of the government by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood. Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers to secure this as well as other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the crown of England.

"Our decision is made. We follow in their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation and, for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights, with the full consciousness of the justice of our course and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it."

On motion of Mr. Clayton, of Marshall, the report was received and agreed to. The address was then adopted.