Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 22.djvu/377

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of the North, instead of permitting the South to enjoy that domestic peace and tranquility which the Union was intended to secure to every section of the country, were persistently striving to stir up in- surrection in the Southern States, and glorifying those who at- tempted to carry outrage and massacre into Southern homes; when the tendency to centralization was threatening to destroy State inde- pendence and build on its ruins a despotism akin to that which enslaved France, when it was said that "the government was sent down to the subject provinces by mail from Paris, and the mail was followed by the army, if the provinces did not acquiesce"; when the reins of government had passed into the hands of a purely sectional party, avowedly hostile to Southern interests, and declaring the Constitution to be "a covenant with hell and a league with the devil," which ought to be supplanted by a so-called "higher law;" in a word, when it became evident that Northern power was to sit on the throne in Washington and make the Yankees conscience, rather than the Constitution, the fundamental law of the land, the Southern people felt that the preservation of community independence and liberty, won at Yorktown and bequeathed to them by their fathers as an inalienable birthright, demanded the resumption of the powers intrusted by them to the Federal Government.

DID NOT DESIRE WAR.

Not as a passion swept mob rising in mad' rebellion against consti- tuted authority, but as an intelligent and orderly, people, acting in accordance with due forms of law, and within the limit of what they believed to be their constitutional right, the men of the South with- drew from the Union in which they had lived for three-fourths of a century, and the welfare and glory of which they had ever been fore- most in promoting.

They did not desire war; nor did they commence the war. It is true that they fired the first gun; but every one who is familiar with the history of those stormy days knows that the North committed the first overt act of war, which justified and necessitated the firing of that gun. They made every effort consistent with their safety, self-respect, and manhood to avert war. They parted from their Northern brethren in the spirit in which old Abram said to Lot: "Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee."

But the North would not have it so. Every proposal looking to peace was rejected by those in power at Washington. Says an