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.