Page:Journal of Georgia Secession Convention.djvu/113

Rh express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government, have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union, for many years past, in the condition of virtual civil war. Our people, still attached to the Union, from habit and National traditions, and averse to change, hoped that time, reason and argument, would bring, if not redress, at least exemption from farther insults, injuries and dangers. Recent events have fully dissipated all such hopes, and demonstrated the necessity of separation. Our Northern confederates, after a full and calm hearing of all the facts, after a fair warning of our purpose not to submit to the rule of the authors of all these wrongs and injuries, have, by a large majority, committed the Government of the United States into their hands. The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness, that they shall not rule over them. A brief history of the rise, progress and policy of anti-slavery, and of the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed, will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia. The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party, while it attracts to itself by its creed, the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government; anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. By anti-slavery it is made a power in the State. The question of slavery was the great difficulty in the way of the formation of the Constitution. While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race were fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slaveholding States of the original thirteen; the