The Independence of the Confederate States
Washington
States and Union, March 22, 1861
We insisted in our issue of yesterday, and we shall continue
the same thread to-day, that “a Republican government has no power whatever
to protect itself, where the people, for whose benefit it was formed, choose
to alter, amend, or even annihilate it.” In so far as the people are
concerned, it is an absolute monarchy, they being sole dictator. Their will
is law, their wish the potent voice of majesty. The Constitution is a rope
of sand, the government a system of courtesy. Vermont, New York, and Virginia,
upon entering the Union, were wise enough to distinctly enunciate this principle
in setting forth the independent sovereignty of a State, when they reserved
the right to “resume the powers delegated to the federal government”
whenever they were found to be used in an oppressive manner—a right
which is as pure and as sacred as any political heretage
[sic] under heaven, and whose forfeiture can never be obtained from the smallest
portion of even the Border Slave States.
In the exercise of this right—call it the right of
revolution, if you please—the people of the Cotton States have considered
themselves capable to judge and act. As independent States they have concluded
to resume the powers delegated to the federal government. Having resumed them,
they have further found it to their interest to unite in a new government
of their own creation, which suits them better than the old Union from which
they separated, because a portion of the Northern people had virtually declared
war upon them by the election of a President pledged to deadly hostility to
a vital institution of theirs. However hasty, impolitic and ill-advised such
a precipitate action may have been, it being an accomplished fact, all argument
upon its merits ceases to be of moment in the grave issue which presents itself,
Shall the government of the United States recognise
the independence of the Confederate States?
Up to a very recent period, the single independence of
one of these States was denied by nobody. The doctrine of State-rights was
as dear to the people of Massachusetts as to the people of South Carolina.
So long as Alabama put her portion in the public pot, New York was ready to
concede her perfect freedom of thought and deed; but as soon as these States,
which have been so wonderfully free, take a notion to employ a little of their
much-talked-of liberty, and try independence upon their own hook, State-rights
becomes a terrible crime, and secession the vilest treason. Whilst coercion,
because on the same principle that secession is admitted to be revolution,
an enforcement of the laws must be admitted to be coercion, becomes a duty
of the Federal government, no matter at what cost, according to the bloody
code prescribed by the radical Republicans.
The laws cannot be enforced. No State can be coerced. The
little hamlet of Delaware, should it take it into its head to go out of the
Union, could not be whipped back, if its people did not want to come back,
by all the other States put together. You might subjugate her, destroy her
people and power, but you could never restore her to that love and duty, without
whose blessed influence no community is worth a button to any government.
State sovereignty, like a woman’s chastity, when once invaded, can never
be restored to that purity which once made it a priceless jewel to the federal
government. Pollute one of those fair stripes with
a breath of oppression, and you may as well tear its attendant star from the
field of blue forever. Once assail the people of one of those independent
sovereignties, thereby uniting all, and never on earth shall you be able to
persuade them back to the roof-tree of home, the protecting threshold of the
Union. But, just as the father did with his prodigal son, give them their
portion, and with it a blessing, and let them go, whither it pleases them,
in peace and good will, ready, should their fate still further assimilate
with the Biblical illustration, to receive them back, whenever adversity overtakes
them, and they come home for shelter and rest, bone of our bone and flesh
of our flesh.
