“Our country is at this moment in a most deplorable condition. The Constitution of the United States has been openly contravened and set at defiance, while that of our own State has shared no better fate, and by the sworn representatives of the people has been utterly disregarded. In this calamitous state of affairs, when the liberties of the people are so imperilled and their most valued rights endangered, it behooves them, in their primary meetings and in all their other accustomed modes, to assemble, consult calmly as to their safety, and with firmness to give expressions to their opinions and convictions of right. “We, therefore, the delegates here assembled, representing and reflecting, as we verily believe, the opinions and wishes of a large majority of the people of East Tennessee, do resolve and declare: “That the evils which now afflict our beloved country, in our opinion, are the legitimate offspring of the ruinous and heretical doctrine of secession; and that the people of East Tennessee have ever been, and we believe still are, opposed to it by a very large majority. That while the country is now upon the very threshold of a most ruinous and desolating Civil War, it may with truth be said, and we protest before God, that the people, so far as we can see, have done nothing to produce it. That the people of Tennessee, when the question was submitted to them in February last, decided by an overwhelming majority that the relations of the State towards the Federal Government should not be changed; thereby expressing their preference for the Union and the Constitution under which they had lived prosperously and happily, and ignoring in the most emphatic manner the idea that they had been oppressed by the General Government in any of its acts, legislative, executive, or judicial. “That in view of a so decided expression of the will of the people, in whom all power is inherent and on whose authority all free governments are founded, and in the honest conviction that nothing has transpired since that time which should change that deliberate judgment of the people, we have contemplated with peculiar emotions the pertinacity with which those in authority have labored to over-ride the judgment of the people and to bring about the very result which the people themselves had so overwhelmingly condemned.