Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1: From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860Blaine, James Gillespie
History
Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1: From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860
Blaine, James Gillespie
United States -- History; United States -- History -- 1865-1898
It seems never to have occurred to Mr. Benjamin, or to Mr. Yulee,
or to the Texas senators, or to the Arkansas senators, that the
money paid from a common treasury of the nation gave any claim to
National sovereignty. Their philosophy seems to have been that
the General Government had been paid in full by the privilege of
nurturing new States, of improving their rivers and harbors, of
building their fortifications, of protecting them in peace, of
defending them in war. The privilege of leading the new communities
through the condition of Territorial existence up to the full
majesty of States, was, according to secession argument, sufficient
compensation, and removed all shadow of the title or the sovereignty
of the National Government, the moment the inhabitants thus benefitted
announced their desire to form new connections. Louisiana had cost
fifteen millions of dollars at a time when that was a vast sum of
money. It had cost five millions of money and the surrender of a
province, to purchase Florida, and nearly a hundred millions more
to extinguish the Indian title, and make the State habitable for
white men. Texas cost the National Treasury ninety millions of
dollars in the war which was precipitated by her annexation, and
ten millions more paid to her in 1850, in adjustment of her boundary
trouble. All these States apparently regarded the tie that bound
them to the National Government as in no degree mutual, as imposing
no duty upon them. By some mysterious process still unexplained,
the more they gained from connection with the National authority,
the less was their obligation thereto, the more perfect their right
to disregard and destroy the beneficent government which had created
them and fostered them.
SOUTHERN GRIEVANCES NOT STATED.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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