Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/340

 334 Southern Historical Society Papers.

act of admission would have no binding force whatever on the people of Massachusetts."

Here we have the unequivocal assertion of the right to secede.

In 1814, on the call of Massachusetts, several of the New England States met in convention in Hartford and promulgated the following:

"It is as much the duty of State authorities to watch over the rights reserved, as of the United States to exercise the powers which are delegated.

" In cases of deliberate, dangerous and palpable infraction of the constitutions affecting the sovereignty of the people, it is not only the right but the duty of such State to interpose its authority for their protection in the manner best calculated to secure that end. When emergencies occur, which are either beyond the reach of the judicial tribunals, or too pressing to admit of the delay incident to their forms, States which have no common umpire must be their own judges and execute their own decisions."

We, of the South, were watching over not only our reserved rights, but also those guaranteed to us as well. We had the delibe- rate, dangerous and palpable infraction of the Constitution. Emer- gencies had reached beyond the cure of judicial tribunals, for the " originally small party" positively refused to recognize and obey the courts, and the time had come when we might, as the Hartford convention said we had the right to do, become our own judges and execute our own decisions.

The principles set forth by that convention were signed by a num- ber of the leading men of that day, and amongst them Nathan Dane, founder of the professorship of law in the Cambridge University, and who was author of the ordinance for the government of the North- western Territory in 1787. He, like Rawle, understood what was meant by the powers of the Constitution. He lived in their day and with them, and we may regard his utterances as an authoritative con- struction of the instrument.

On the gth of November, 1860, Horace Greeley wrote : "The tele- graph informs us that most of the cotton States are meditating a withdrawal from the Union because of Lincoln's election. Very well, they have a right to meditate, and meditation is a profitable em- ployment of leisure. We have a chronic, invincible disbelief in disunion as a remedy for either Northern or Southern grievances. We cannot see any necessary connection between the alleged disease and the ultra heroic remedy. Still we say, if any one meditates disunion