It was Southern politics that proposed the great union of the sovereign States in 1787. To that union the three States of Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia have added out of their own bosoms ten more great States. These Southern States were the mothers of States, and most naturally did they talk of States and State's rights. Southern politics, prevailing in the national councils against the bitter protests of New England, carried through the war of 1812; added Florida to the Union, and, by the purchase of Louisiana, all the Trans-Mississippi valley from the Gulf to Canada. It was Southern politics against the furious opposition of New England that annexed Texas, and, by the war with Mexico, brought in the vast territory far away to the Pacific. The South sent 45,000 volunteers to the Mexican war; the whole North, with three times the population, sent 23,000. Thus the South was the mother of territories, and was it not natural that she should talk of territories and of her rights in the territories? In political platforms, in legislative enactments, and notably in the election of Mr. Lincoln in 1860, the more populous North declared that the Southern States should be shut out from all share in the territories bought with common treasure and blood. Our women, a child, a negro, could see the iniquity of the claim. The action of the North in regard to national territory was an edict, too, that the negroes, through no fault of their own, should be shut up in one little corner of the country. Then when the South sought the only alternative left her, that of peaceable secession, her right to go was justified by the terms of the Constitution; by the distinct understanding among the sovereign States when they entered the Union, more directly insisted and put on record by the three States of Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island than any other State; by the secession convention of New England in the war of 1812; by the Northern secession convention in Ohio in 1859 and the reiterated declarations of Henry Ward Beecher, and by Wendell Phillips, and Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison and the other great leaders of Northern thought in 1860. As to coercing the States back into the Union, President Buchanan well said at the time there was "not a shadow of authority" for it, and Governor Seymour, of New York, truthfully said "coercion is revolution."