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
slavery everywhere, and they might well fear that these repeated
declarations had been heard and might be accepted by their slaves.
The omission by individual senators to present the grievances which
justified secession is perhaps less notable then the same omission
by the conventions which ordained secession in the several States.
South Carolina presented, as a special outrage, the enactment of
personal-liberty bills in the free States, and yet, from the
foundation of the Federal Government, she had probably never lost
a slave in consequence of these enactments. In Georgia the attempt
at justification reached the ludicrous when solemn charge was made
that a bounty had been paid from the Federal Treasury to New-England
fishermen. The tariff was complained of, the navigation laws were
sneered at. But these were all public policies which had been in
operation with Southern consent and largely with Southern support,
throughout the existence of the Republic. When South Carolina
attempted, somewhat after the illustrious model of the Declaration
of Independence, to present justifying reasons for her course, the
very authors of the document must have seen that it amounted only
to a parody.
Finding no satisfactory exhibit of grievances, either in the speeches
of senators or in the declarations of conventions, one naturally
infers that the Confederate Government, when formally organized at
Montgomery in February, must have given a full and lucid statement
to the world of the reasons for this extraordinary movement. When
our fathers were impelled to break their loyalty to the English
king, and to establish an independent government, they declared in
the very fore-front of the document which contained their reasons,
that "when it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the
political bonds which have connected them with another, and to
assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station
to which the laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a
decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that _they should
declare the causes which impel them to the separation_." They
followed this assertion with an exhibit of causes which, in the
judgment of the world, has been and ever will be, a complete
justification of their revolutionary movement.
THOMAS JEFFERSON AND JEFFERSON DAVIS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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