Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/415

 Lett er from President Davis on States' Rights. 409

by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution,' and by the law of June I, 1789, the form of the required oath was prescribed as follows : 'I, A B, do solemnly swear or affirm (as the case may be) that I will support the Constitution of the United States.'

" That was the oath. The obligation was to support the Constitu- tion. It created no new obligation, for the citizen already owed allegiance to his respective State, and through her to the Union of which she was a member. The conclusion is unavoidable that those who did not support, but did not violate the Constitution, were they who broke their official oaths. The General Government had only the powers delegated to it by the States. The power to coerce a State was not given, but emphatically refused. Therefore, to invade a State, to overthrow its government by force of arms, was a palpa- ble violation of the Constitution, which officers had sworn to support, and thus to levy war against States which the Federal officers claimed to be, notwithstanding their ordinances of secession, still in the Union, was the treason defined in the third section of the third arti- cle of the Constitution, the only treason recognized by the funda- mental law of the United States.

' ' When our forefathers assumed for the several States they repre- sented a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth, the central idea around which their political institutions were grouped was that sovereignty belonged to the people, inherent and inalienable; therefore, that governments were their agents, instituted to secure their rights, and 'deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, whence they draw the corollary that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it," etc. What was meant by the word 'people' in this connection is manifest from the circumstances. It could only authoritatively refer to the distinct communities who, each for itself, joined in the declaration and in the concurrent act of sepa- ration from the government of Great Britain.

" By all that is revered in the memory of our Revolutionary sires, and sacred in the principles they established, let not the children of the United States be taught that our Federal Government is sove- reign; that our sires, after having, by a long and bloody war, won community-independence, used the power, not for the end sought, but to transfer their allegiance, and by oath or otherwise bind their posterity to be the subjects of another government, from which they could only free themselves by force of arms.

"Respectfully, Jefferson Davis."