"There is not, as with us, a government only and its subjects to be regarded; but a number of governments, of states, having each a separate and substantive, and even independent existence, originally thirteen now six and twenty, and each having a Legislature of its own with laws differing from those of the other states. It is plainly impossible to consider the constitution which professes to govern this whole Union, this federacy of states, as anything other than a treaty."[[405]]

John Quincy Adams, speaking before the New York Historical Society in 1839, on the fiftieth anniversary of Washington's inauguration as President of the United States, said:

"To the people alone there is reserved as well the dissolving as the constituent power and that power can be exercised by them only under the tie of conscience binding them to the retributive justice of Heaven.

"With these qualifications we may admit the right as vested in the people of every state of the Union with reference to the General Government which was exercised by the people of the United Colonies with reference to the supreme head of the British Empire of which they formed a part and under these limitations have the people of each state of the Union a right to secede from the Confederated Union itself."[[406]]

CONSENT NOT FORCE

Mr. Lincoln, speaking on the 12th of January, 1848, in Congress, said:

"Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own any or so much of the territory as they inhabit."[[407]]

Probably Mr. Gladstone expressed in the briefest possible compass the general consensus of the Virginia people, when on the 24th of April, 1862, in his Manchester speech, referring to the attitude of the Federal Government and the Northern people, he said: "We have no faith in the propagation of free institutions at the point of the sword."[[408]]

VIEWS OF PROMINENT AMERICANS

Scarcely less pronounced were the sentiments of many prominent Americans expressed just before the outbreak of the Civil War with reference to the moral or political right of the Federal Government or the Northern people to coerce the Southern States.