atives by the grand committee of that body, and sustained in the house in which they originated, as they would doubtless have been in the Senate, had Southern senators been at their posts, and ready and willing to do their duty, would have given as much security to the slaveholding rights of the South as could in reason have been demanded.

8. The joint resolve reported by the grand committee of the House for the amendment of the Federal Constitution, which passed both houses, and which, on its ratification by a sufficient number of states, would have become part of the supreme law of the land, and have precluded forever all interference with slaveholding interests in any state not consenting thereto, was indignantly rejected by excited Southern senators, who preferred incurring all the perils of disunion to accepting any of the new securities now tendered to them.

So Southern secession senators and representatives, abandoning their seats in the two houses of Congress, and thus leaving their Republican adversaries in control of those bodies, and of all the resources and power of this gigantic republic, hurried on toward Montgomery, Alabama, where, in the course of a few weeks of deliberation, with closed doors, they agreed upon and promulgated to the world the most ill-digested, incongruous, and utterly impracticable Constitution of government that the "rash dexterity" of visionary theorists has ever been able to eliminate, under the nominal guidance and control of which a new confederacy was to have its confused and anomalous action; an unnatural and bloody civil war was to be commenced and prosecuted; state-rights

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and popular freedom were to be speedily overthrown; such gross mismanagement, both of civil and military affairs, was to be practiced by a vain, prejudiced, and incompetent executive chief as the world had never before witnessed; under the authority of which government free-born American citizens were to be cruelly hunted down, plunged into filthy prison-houses, and even deprived in some instances of life itself, for daring to entertain and express Union sentiments, and to maintain a quiet and peaceable, but a stubborn and inflexible loyalty to the government of their fathers; under which gov. ernment all rights of person and property were to be set at naught and trampled under foot, and even the boasted right of peaceable state secession to be formally and deliberately denied; and the long-venerated slaveholding rights, for the defense and maintenance of which this unwise and wasting war had been projected, were, in the fourth year of that very war, to be, upon the ground of military necessity, declared by a dogmatical executive rescript, subject to be violated, and even abrogated, at the pleasure of the great central agency in Richmond, which no longer held itself responsible to either God or man for its official acts.

CHAPTER XVI.

Speculative Views as to the self-defensive Powers of all Governments, and of the Government of the United States in particular.-View of the Circumstances existing, so far as the State of Tennessee is concerned, in the Outset of the War, and Vindication of the Conduct of that State. View of the Condition of Things existing in Washington in particular, and of the non-action Policy of Mr. Buchanan.-Notice of this Gentleman's late Defense of himself.-View of Mr. Lincoln's moderate and patriotic Conduct after his Election, and Notice of Speeches made by him at Indianapolis, Pittsburg, and Philadelphia.— Mr. Lincoln's Inaugural Speech, and commendatory Remarks thereupon.-Admirably patriotic Speech of Mr. Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, demonstrating the gross Impolicy of Secession.-Some Allusions to the early Movements of the War, and a short Discussion of the Monroe Doctrine.-Enforcement of that Doctrine the true Means of restoring the national Unity and Concord.

It would seem almost impossible to state a proposition more axiomatic in its character than the following one: Every government, being framed with a view to perpetuity, must needs possess the power of defending its own existence and all its essential rights, as well against dangers from without as from perils which disclose themselves in the bosom of the body politic. And this selfevident proposition would seem to include, by necessary implication, another, viz.: That self-preservation, being the general law of Nature, and applicable alike to all conventional associations as to all living creatures in their original character, whenever it shall happen, amid the complex and critical emergencies which it is in the pow

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er of a long-continuing war to engender, to have become plainly necessary to resort to the use of expedients the need of which the most long-sighted and clear-visioned lawgiver could scarcely be supposed to have specially anticipated, all such expedients must be regarded as rightfully subject to be employed. The quality which chiefly distinguished the Constitution framed by our fathers in 1788 from the Articles of Confederation which it superseded, is, that whereas the power of the latter could only operate on states, as integral members of the confederative association, that of the former was intended, on the contrary, to act on individual citizens of those states. These states, after the essential change in their character and attributes which had been then wrought, were no longer entitled to recognize themselves as the sovereign members of a league, but as existing, though still retaining their corporate capacity, in a condition in which they were bound to do fealty and exercise true homage, in many interesting respects, to that which, by solemn conventional arrangement, had been entitled to claim respect and obedience as a government of supereminent authority.

The power to constrain individual citizens, whether few or many, who, enjoying the protection of the government, are bound to exercise toward this grand representative of the whole nation such a loyal and effective obedience as the organic law itself contemplates, is by no means inconsistent with the continued existence of the reserved rights of the states and people thereof, the due preservation and maintenance of which is, indeed, one of the most sacred duties of the government established by all, for the safety and liberty of all. Those who persist in

recognizing the old confederative compact as continuing to survive, and who hold on, in spite of all the lights of history and all the force of argument, to the monstrous doctrine of secession, may well feel justified in denying to the government at present in operation authority to enforce the duty of obedience within the confines of the individual states, in opposition to acts of the local governments adopted for the express purpose of nullifying the ties of allegiance existing at the time of the framing of such acts between those very citizens and the government whose various forms of legislative action have been alone declared, by the solemn organic instrument to which all owe the most profound respect, to constitute "the supreme law of the land." Since Mr. Webster's celebrated replies to Mr. Hayne and Mr. Calhoun, more than thirty years ago, and the emanation of General Jackson's world-famous proclamation, few, if any, except the open supporters of the absurd and untenable theory of absolute state sovereignty, have undertaken to dispute the right of the Federal government to compel all within the scope of its authority to bow in unresisting submission to its lawful behests.

It does not, by any means, follow necessarily, from this view of the subject, that it was the duty of Mr. Buchanan, and of the Congress to whom his last annual message was addressed, to wage war upon the seceding states so soon as any one or more of them had proclaimed their connection with the Federal government at an end. Happily for the comfort and happiness of the inhabitants of earth, the illimitable power of the Deity is not always inclined to reveal itself, for the punishment of the err