Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 07.djvu/240

232 of that compact, those States whose safety and well-being depended upon the performance of these covenants were justly absolved from all moral obligation to remain in such a Union. And when the government of that Union, instead of affording protection to their social system, itself threatened not merely to disturb the peace and the security of its people, but also to destroy their social system, the States thus menaced owed it to themselves and their posterity to withdraw immediately from a Union whose very bonds prevented them from defending themselves against such dangers. Such were the causes which led the Confederate States to form a new Union, to be composed of more homogeneous materials and interests. Experience had demonstrated to them that a union of two different and hostile social systems under a Government in which one of them wielded nearly all the power, was not only ill-assorted, but dangerous in the extreme to the weaker section whose scheme of society was thus unprotected.

Prompted by these teachings, eleven sovereign States, bound together by the tie of a common social system and by the sympathies of identical interests, have instituted a new Confederacy and a new Government, which they justly hope will be more harmonizing in its operation and more permanent in its existence. In forming this Government they seek to preserve their old institutions and to pursue through their new organic law the very ends and purposes for which, as they believe, the first was formed. It was because a revolution was sought to be made in the spirit and ends of the organic law of their first union by a dominant and sectional majority, operating through the machinery of a government which was in their hands and placed there for different purposes, that the Confederate States withdrew themselves from the jurisdiction of such a government and established another for themselves. Their example, therefore, furnishes no precedent for the overthrow of the lawful authority of a regular government by revolutionary violence, nor does it encourage a resort to factious tumult and civil war by irresponsible bodies of men. On the contrary, their union has been formed through the regular action of the sovereign States composing the Confederacy, and it has established a government competent to the discharge of all its civil functions and entirely responsible, both in war and peace, for all its actions. Nor has that Government shown itself unmindful of the obligation which its people incurred whilst their States were members of the former union. On the contrary, one of their first