Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 13.djvu/347

 346 Southern Historical Society Papers.

tinencies? Or do they, indeed, expect to escape the grand impeach- ment ? Let them lay no such flattering unction to their souls. With the progress of light the retributive justice of history becomes more certain and severe. When they seized upon Jefferson Davis and threw him into irons, and into a felon's cell, but not to meet a felon's punishment, they insulted a whole people, whom they assumed to punish thus vicariously. The iron which then entered into their souls, generally and particularly, will nerve them to stand by the contest until they have shown where the charge of fraud and false- hood rests. If vows, sacred vows, were broken, they will invoke this book to show by whom it was done. The brutal and vulgar denunciations of Chandler and Conger, or the scarcely more respect- able, but smoother and subtler, chicaneries of Elaine, will not serve to distract public attention, or call off public pursuit, from those who were once willing to make a false promise to secure a benefit, and not ashamed afterwards to break it for a profit. The efforts which cer- tain Northern speakers have made to sow and keep alive the spirit of hate in the hearts of the people of the different sections, seems to us to scarcely keep it alive, but what effect it may have hereafter we undertake not to decide. We only say, that such efforts will make it impossible for those who held the guaranteed interest which was trampled on and crushed out, by the very guarantors, in defiance of those pledges to forget the fraud and the breaches of faith under which they suffered. It will then be for those who have thus sinned to decide what they owe to those who have kept those terrible mem- ories alive

But, let us return to our book. See what it has proved in regard to the elements of which our government is formed, and of the forces by which our Union was drawn together, and by which it may be cast asunder, in the event of disagreement between the parts.

In an extract from a letter of the editor of one of the leading journals of the time, it is well and truthfully said of the book: "It is my belief that it is the ablest work ever written in support of the right of self-government, as well as the best of all treatises on our American federal system." Charles O'Connor, the great New York lawyer, in a letter to the author, said: "If, upon the numerous points that any lawyer can see in the case, I had so admirably pre- pared an overwhelmingly conclusive brief as the protest, my task (in defending Davis) would be slight indeed." What sort of brief Mr. O'Connor would have prepared, we know not, but, to an impartial mind, nothing more conclusive than the demonstration in this book