Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 17.djvu/158

 150 Southern Historical Society Papers.

ample ; wonder, indeed, that all men have not seen that the events which controlled him controlled also his antagonist.

THE COUNTRY UNIFIED BY NATURAL LAWS.

The United States have been unified by natural laws, kindred to those which unified the South in secession, but greater because wider spread. Its physical constitution, in 1861, answered to the Northern mind the written Constitution and 4he traditions of our origin to which the South appealed. The Mississippi river, the natural outlet of a new-born empire to the sea, was a greater interpreter to it than the opinions of statesmen who lived when the great new common- wealths were yet in the wilderness, and before the great republic spanned the father of waters.

The river, seeking its bed as it rolls oceanward, pauses not to con- sider whose are the boundaries of the estates through which it flows. If a mountain barrier stands in the way, it forms a lake until the accumulated waters break through the impeding wall or dash over it in impetuous torrents. So nations in their great movements seem to be swept out of the grooves defined by the laws of man, and are oftentimes propelled to destinies greater than those conjured in their dreams.

THE CONSTITUTION OF NATURE AND THE JURY OF THE SWORD.

The rivalry, not the harmony, of sections won the empire of the Union ; its physical constitution proved more powerful than its writ- ten one ; in the absence of a judge all appealed to the jury of the sword. We belong to a high-handed race and understand the law of the sword, for the men of independence in 1776 and 1861 were of the same blood as those who in each case cried, ** Disperse, ye rebels.** And were I of the North I would prefer to avow that it made conquest by the high hand, than coin the great strife that mar- shalled over three millions of soldiers into police-court technicalities and belittles a revolution continent wide into the quelling of an in- surrection and the vicarious punishment of its leader. The greatest conqueror proclaims his naked deed.

THE SOUTH IN THE UNION AT HOME.

As we are not of the North, but of the South, and are now, like all Americans, both of and for the Union, bound up in its destinies, con-