Horace Greeley, in the issue of the New York Tribune of November 9th, 1860, discussing the contemplated secession of the Cotton States, wrote:
"If the Cotton States shall decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one but it exists nevertheless; and we do not see how one party can have a right to do what another party has a right to prevent."[[409]]
Again he wrote:
"If it (the Declaration of Independence) justified the secession from the British Empire of three millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southerners from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on this point why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why(?)"[[410]]
On the 23d of February, 1861, he wrote:
"We have repeatedly said and we once more insist that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of American Independence that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed is sound and just; and that if the Slave States, the Cotton States, or the Gulf States only, choose to form an independent nation they have a clear moral right to do so."[[411]]
President Buchanan, in his message to Congress on the 3d of December, 1860, said:
"The fact is that our Union rests upon public opinion and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people it must one day perish. Congress possesses many means of preserving it by conciliation; but the sword was not placed in their hands to preserve it by force."
Edward Everett, writing on the 2d of February, 1861, to the Union Meeting called to assemble at Faneuil Hall, said:
"To expect to hold fifteen states in the Union by force is preposterous. The idea of a civil war, accompanied, as it would be, by a servile insurrection, is too monstrous to be entertained for a moment. If our sister states must leave us, in the name of Heaven, let them go in peace."[[412]]