Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 28.djvu/184

 178 Suittlit'rn 1 Upturn-ill ,S'or/<7y /"V///ir>.

" If it (the Declaration of Independence) justified the secession from the British Empire of three million of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on this point, why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why ?' '

Again, on February the 23rd, 1861, five days after the inaugura- tion of President Davis at Montgomery, he said:

' ' We have repeatedly said, and we once more insist, that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of American Inde- pendence that governments derive their just powers from the con- sent of the governed is sound and just, and that if the Slave States, the Cotton States or the Gulf States only, choose to form an inde- pendent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so."

And we know that this man was one of the foremost of our oppress- ors during the war, although his kindness to Mr. Davis and others after the war, we think, showed that he knew he had done wrong. And yet, he had the audacity (and may we not justly add mendac- ity, too ?) to say, after the war, that he never at any moment of his life had "imagined that a single State, or a dozen States, could rightfully dissolve the Union." Comment is surely unnecessary.

On November the gth, 1860, the New York Herald said:

" Each State is organized as a complete government, holding the purse and wielding the sword; possessing the right to break the tie of the confederation as a nation might break a treaty, and to repel coercion as a nation might repel invasion. Coercion, if it

were possible, is out of the question."

Both President Buchanan and his Attorney-General, the after- wards famous Edwin M. Stanton, decided at the same time that there was no power under the Constitution to coerce a seceding State.

SENTIMENT IN THE NORTH.

But this "Massachusetts heresy," as the writer before quoted from calls the right of secession, was not only entertained, as we have shown, at the North before the war, but has been expressed in the same section in no uncertain terms long since the war. In an article by Benjamin J. Williams, Esq., a distinguished writer of Massachu- setts, entitled "Died for Their State," and published in the Lowell Sun on June 5th, 1886, he says, among other things: