Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume Two).djvu/17

Rh on the slavery question, which no interest required to be touched by any department of this Government. On that subject there are widely marked diversities of opinion and interest in the different portions of the Confederacy, with few mediating influences to soften the collision. In the struggle for party power, the two great regions of the country have been brought face to face upon the most dangerous of all subjects of agitation. The authority of the Government was relaxed just when its power was about to be assailed; and the people, emancipated from every control and their passions inflamed by the fierce struggle for the Presidency, were the easy prey of revolutionary audacity.

“Within two months after a formal, peaceful, regular election of the chief magistrate of the United States, in which the whole body of the people of every State competed with zeal for the prize, without any new event intervening, without any new grievances alleged, without any new menaces having been made, we have seen, in the short course of one month, a small portion of the population of six States transcend the bounds at a single leap at once of the State and the national constitutions; usurp the extraordinary prerogative of repealing the supreme law of the land; exclude the great mass of their fellow-citizens from the protection of the Constitution; declare themselves emancipated from the obligations which the Constitution pronounces to be supreme over them and over their laws; arrogate to themselves all the prerogatives of independent power; rescind the acts of cession of the public property; occupy the public offices; seize the fortresses of the United States confided to the faith of the people among whom they were placed; embezzle the public arms concentrated there for the defence of the United States; array thousands of men in arms against the United States; and actually wage war on the Union by besieging two of their fortresses and firing on a vessel bearing, under the