their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which obligations, and the laws of the General Government, have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa have enacted laws which either nullify the acts of Congress, or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from the service of labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own laws and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York, even, the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constitutional compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the nonslaveholding States; and the consequence follows, that South Carolina is released from her obligation.

"The ends for which this Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be

'to form a more perfect union, to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.'

"These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a federal government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights; by giving them the right to represent, and burdening them with direct taxes for, three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.

"We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted the open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace of and eloin the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain have been incited by emissaries, books, and pictures to servile insurrection.

"For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that article establishing the Executive department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be intrusted with the administration of the common government, because he has declared that that 'government can not endure permanently half slave, half free,' and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

"This sectional combination for the subversion of the Constitution has been aided, in some of the States, by elevating to citizenship persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy hostile to the South, and destructive of its peace and safety.

"On the 4th of March next this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunal shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

"The guarantees of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal

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rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government or selfprotection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.

"Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy is rendered vain by the fact that the public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanctions of a more erroneous religious belief.

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We, therefore, the people of South Carolina, by our delegates in convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world as a separate and independent state, with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do."

The South Carolina members, at the same time that their State declared its independence, formally withdrew from Congress with a studious expression in their letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives of a desire to do so with a feeling of "mutual regard and respect for each other, and the hope that in our future relations we may better enjoy that peace and harmony essential to the happiness of a free and enlightened people."

Apparent attempts had been made by some of the political leaders of the South to arrest this precipitate action of South Carolina. Some of these were undoubtedly prompted by a sincere attachment to the Union and a desire to preserve it. Some only affected the sentiment of patriotism, while others, equally resolved upon secession with the men of South Carolina, were desirous of a concert of action, in order to secure strength of effort and certainty of effect by combination. The Governor of Maryland, though beset by a strong secession sentiment in his State, resolutely opposed any indication of opposition to the legitimate authority of the Federal Government. In answer to a memorial of some of the more influential inhabitants of Maryland, urging him to convene the Legislature, he declared:

"Identified as I am by birth and every other tie with the South, a slaveholder, Nov. and feeling as warmly for my native 27. State as any man can do, I am yet compelled by my sense of fair dealing, and my respect for the Constitution of our country, to declare that I see nothing in the bare election of Mr. Lincoln which would justify the South in taking any steps tending toward a separation of these States. Mr. Lincoln being elected, I am willing to await further results. If he will administer the government in a proper and patriotic manner, we are all bound to submit to his administration, much as we may have opposed his election."

of Baltimore, the following resolution was passed:

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Resolved, That we deplore the action taken by our sister State of South Carolina, and earnestly protest against an ordinance of secession on her part as being unconstitutional, disorganizing, and precipitate, and unfriendly, if not arrogant, toward the counsels and situations of the other slaveholding States; and we believe that such act of secession ⚫ will weaken and must divide their ultimate position; and while we declare for co-operation, we will firmly resist being dragged into secession. Maryland will not stand as a sentinel at the bidding of South Carolina, and we remind her, by the memories of the Revolution, that such purpose can not be justified; and, in conclusion, in a fraternal spirit, we entreat South Carolina to suspend all further action until such measures of peaceful adjustment have first been tried and have failed."

Virginia, though many of her leaders, deeply infected with the heresies of Calhoun, were known to regard secession. from the United States as an act if not immediately desirable, at any rate legal and justifiable, seemed to stand firm for the Union. Her political writers, in an emphatic protest against the assumed right of South Carolina to individual action, thus rebuked her presumption:

"Throwing aside the question of constitutional right to secede at all, there is something due to comity, to neighborhood associations, to propriety. No man has a 'right,' by setting fire to his own house, to endanger the house of his

neighbor. Virginia, in this Union, or out of it as a sovereign, and as potential as South Carolina, has her own interests to look after, her own rights to be secured, her own feelings to be respected and she will demand this from South Carolina just as much as she would from any other State in the present United States. It would seem as if in the course now pursued, fearing the conservative action of Virginia, and not desiring, in truth, 'a united South,' certain cotton States were for going off by themselves, for the mere sake of 'forming a cotton confederacy,' totally irrespective of other Southern States which do not recognize cotton as their king, and totally regardless of any interests or any views but their own. It used to be a 'united South!' It was formerly disunion and secession for aggression by the General Government. It is now a disunited South-secession on account of the untoward result of a Presidential election! This is not the way to uphold the rights of the States and the rights of the South. It is weakening our own position, and destroying our own strength."

The Virginian leaders, even the most headstrong advocates of States' Rights, seemed desirous of making an effort to hold fast by the Union. At a politDec. ical banquet in Richmond, "The 5. Union," "Virginia in the Union," and other patriotic toasts, were drunk and responded to with enthusiasm. While there might be doubt of the continued loyalty of Eastern, there was no question of the persistency of that of

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Western, Virginia, whose proximity to the free States of Illinois and Ohio, and identity of origin, habits, and interests, made them as one people. The loyalty of the East was conditional upon such concessions to the slave power as the most sanguine believers in compromise could hardly anticipate. The loyalty of the West, comparatively free of the entanglement of slave interests, was sincere and unconstrained.

Virginia strove to check the precipitancy of South Carolina by appointing a commissioner to urge an arrest of proceedings until there might be a conference among the slave States.

Tennessee, though her governor was suspected even at that early period of a strong sympathy, if not active concurrence, with the leaders of the rebellion, was apparently indisposed to secession. Her United States senator, and formerly governor, Andrew Johnson, and Emerson Etheredge, a member of the House of Representatives, were among the first to deny emphatically the assumed right of secession, and to call it treason. They both have continued as they began, the firm assertors of the Federal authority and the resolute opponents of its enemies. Johnson, in the Senate of Dec. the United States, while even 19. Northern men were doubting the right of the Government to suppress a rebellion against its authority, thus emphatically argued not only for its existence, but for its exercise :

they may resolve and declare themselves absolved from all allegiance to this Union, yet it does not save them from the compact. If South Carolina drives out the Federal courts from the State, then the Federal Government has a right to re-establish the courts. If she excludes the mails, the Federal Government has a right and the authority to carry the mails. If she resists the collection of revenue in the port of Charleston, or any other ports, then the Government has a right to enter and enforce the law. If she undertakes to take possession of the property of the Government, the Government has a right to take all means to retain that property. And if they make any effort to dispossess the Government, or to resist the execution of the judicial system, then South Carolina puts herself in the wrong, and it is the duty of the Government to see the judiciary faithfully executed. In 1805, South Carolina made a deed of cession of the land on which these forts stand-a full cession-with certain conditions. The Government complied with the conditions, and has had possession of these forts till this day. And now has South Carolina any right to attempt to drive the Government from that property? If she secedes, and makes any attempt of this kind, does she not come within the meaning of the Constitution, where it speaks of levying war? And in levying war, she does what the Constitution declares to be treason. We may as well talk of things as they are, for if anything can be treason, within the scope of the

the Government, treason? Is not attempting to take the property of the Government and expel the Government soldiers therefrom, treason? Is not attempting to resist the collection of the revenue, attempting to exclude the mails, and driving the Federal court from her borders, treason? What is it? I ask, in the name of the Constitution, what is it? It is treason, and nothing but treason."

With a sympathy among many of the political leaders of Tennessee with secession, and an undisguised effort to promote it, there yet seemed to exist among the people throughout the State, but especially in the eastern districts, a firm attachment to the Union. A secession meeting at Memphis was disturbed Nov. by manifestations of opposition on 30. the part of a large gathering of unionists. The Honorable John Bell, of Nashville, who had been a candidate for the Presidency, in a letter in answer to an invitation to an assemblage of secessionists, declared that he was for the Union, that he did not think that the election of Lincoln was a just cause for its dissolution, and that the South, equally with the North, was responsible for the angry sectionalism of feeling which prevailed.

In Kentucky the Union sentiment was, as it continues to be, predominant. There was, however, great uneasiness of feeling and a disposition on the part of many of the political leaders of the State to act concurrently with the cotton States, or to demand excessive concessions from the North as the condition of