Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/52

46 We will not argue over again the question of constitutional law. What I have always said on that subject is, that if there was a constitutional right of secession, of which I can see no trace whatever in the language of the Constitution, this was not an exercise of that right; this was a conspiracy as dark and treacherous, as deeply tainted with abused confidence and betrayal of trust, as any conspiracy in history. The man who poisons his friend in the cup of hospitality is not more perfidious than were the public servants who used the power confided to them over the public arsenals clandestinely to disarm the country, and expose it defenceless to the meditated blow. But it may be urged, there is a natural right of rebellion, independent of written constitutions, which no republican or Liberal can gainsay. That there is a right of rebellion against hopeless tyranny, for the purpose of recovering freedom, I admit; I do not admit that there was a right of rebellion against a free government, under which no grievance was hopeless, for the purpose of making a great mass of its people slaves for ever. The negro-labourers of the South had no part in secession; it was made to rob them of their last hope of emancipation, and they were entitled to the protection of the State: so were the white people of Western Virginia and Eastern Tennessee, who, when they resisted secession, were coerced by the slave-owners as rebels. Moreover, it is, I am convinced, a mistake to think that secession was a mere separation. It would have proved, and the chief authors of the plot intended that it should prove, indefinite aggression. Not only would the Slave Empire have spread westwards and southwards over territories destined to be the seat of great free communities, and of the future of which the American commonwealth was the