Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 17.djvu/155

 Life^ Services and Character of Jefferson Davis, 147

that any such **act or admission would have no bindinjj obligation on its people/*

While the Mexican war was being fought and the soldier states- man of Mississippi was carrying the Stars and Stripes in glory over the heights of Monterey, and bleeding under them in the battle shock of Buena Vista, Abraham Lincoln was denouncing the war as unconstitutional, and Northern multitudes were yet applauding the eloquence of the Ohio orator who had said in Congress that the Mexicans should welcome our soldiers **with bloody hands to hospitable graves.*'

CANDID VIEW FROM THE NORTH.

Consider these grave words, which are but freshly written in the life of Webster by Henry Cabot Lodge, who is at this time a Republican representative in Congress from the city of Boston, Massachusetts :

When the Constitution was adopted by the votes of States at Philadelphia, and accepted by votes of States in popular conventions, it was safe to say there was not a man in the country, from Washing- ton and Hamilton, on the one side, to George Clinton and George Mason, on the other, who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment entered upon by the States, and front which each and every State had the right to peaceably withdraw — a right which was very likely to be exercised,

CONTEMPORARY NORTHERN OPINIONS OF SECESSION.

Recall the contemporary opinions of Northern publicists and lead- ing journals. The New York Herald considered coercion out of the question. On the 9th of November, i860, the New York Tribune^ Horace Greeley being the editor, said :

" If the cotton States shall decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one, but it exists neverthe- less, and we do not see how one party can have the right to do what another party has a right to prevent. We must ever resist the asserted right of any State to remain in the Union and nullify or defy the laws thereof ; to withdraw from the Union is quite another matter.'*

This was precisely the creed of Jefferson Davis.

Again, on the 17th day of December, after the secession of South CaroUna, that journal said :