Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/83

 Ceremonies at Unveiling of Statue of General Lee. 77

his writings that "the Constitution was a compact, not between indi- viduals, but between poHtical societies, the people, not of America, but of the United States, each (State) enjoying sovereign power and, of course, equal rights."

Time and the occasion admonish me that I must arrest here the discussion of this interesting historical question. I have, of course, barely indicated the faint outlines of the grand argument sustaining the right of secession. Those who desire to go deeper may consult those great storehouses of facts and principles, the works of Cal- houn, Bledsoe, Stephens, Sage, and our immortal leader, Jefferson Davis.

It is not for me dogmatically to proclaim that we were right and that the supporters of the Union were wrong. I shall have accom- plished a duty, and shall, as I believe, have rendered a service to the whole Union, if what I have said shall contribute to confirm the Southern people in the veneration and respect justly due to the cause for which their fathers fought, and, at the same time, to mode- rate the vehemence with which many of the Northern people have denounced that cause as mere wicked and unreasoning treason. The war may have established that the Constitution no longer binds the States by a mere love tie, but by a Gordian knot, which only the sword can sever ; yet all patriots will admit that the safest guarantee of its permanence must lie in the mutual respect and forbearance from insult of all sections of the people toward each other.

Far be it from me to impugn the motives of those who advocated and enforced the indissolubility of the Union.

In union the States had achieved their independence. In union, at a later time, during the infancy of the Republic, they had defied again the power of the mightiest nation of the earth, and had vindi- cated their capacity to protect and defend the rights which they had so dearly won. In union they had subdued the savage, leveled primeval forests, subjected vast wildernesses to the sway of peaceful populations and happy husbandry, borne the ensign of the Republic to the capital of a foreign foe, extended their frontiers till they em- braced a continent and swelled their population to a strength which might defy the world in arms. In union the sails of their commerce whitened every sea, wealth poured in affluent streams into their laps, education flourished, science and art took root and grew apace, and those ancient foes, religion and toleration, liberty and law, public order and individual freedom, locked hands and worked together to magnify and glorify the grandest, happiest and freest people that ever flourished " in the tides of time."