Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 9.djvu/22

12 decision, was not adverse to belief in such a remedy. They proposed no war upon the government at Washington, nor upon any individual States, and no one had, until after their initial action, claimed that the right of coercion existed as a means of keeping them in the Union. The whole trend of sentiment in the North as well as the South, while many deprecated the wisdom or necessity of the movement, was that it was a question for them to decide as an exercise of a reserved right. In the North this expression, both as to the broad principle laid down by Mr. Jefferson as heretofore recited, and as to their right to decide for themselves, was clear and without ambiguity.

In 1859, at a convention in Cleveland, Ohio, in which Joshua R. Giddings, Senator B. F. Wade, Governor S. P. Chase and ex-Governor Dennison participated, resolutions were adopted using the language and reaffirming the strongest declaration of the Kentucky resolutions of 1798. In 1861 Wendell Phillips said in a speech at New Bedford, Mass., "Here are a series of States girdling the Gulf who think their peculiar institutions require that they should have a separate government They have a right to decide that question without appealing to you or to me."

Three days after Mr. Lincoln's election Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune said: "If the cotton States shall become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may still be a revolutionary one, but it exists nevertheless. We must ever resist the right of any State to remain in the Union and nullify or defy the laws thereof. To withdraw from the Union is quite another matter, and whenever a considerable section of the Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep it in. We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to another by bayonets. "Quotations of a sim-