"To us now this position seems worse than illogical. It is impossible. So events proved it then. Yet, after all, it is based on the fundamental principle of the consent of the governed; and in the days immediately preceding the Civil War something very like it was accepted as an article of correct political faith by men afterwards as strenuous in support of a Union re-established by force as Charles Sumner, Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Horace Greeley. The difference was that confronted by the overwhelming tide of events, Virginia adhered to it; they, in presence of that tide, tacitly abandoned it."[[416]]
| [399] | History of the United States, Rhodes, Vol. III, p. 214. |
| [400] | Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Vol. I, p. 617. |
| [401] | Memoirs of Robert E. Lee, Long, p. 88. |
| [402] | Proceedings of Peace Convention, Crittenden, p. 136. |
| [403] | See Richmond Enquirer, March 2d, 1908. |
| [404] | Democracy in America, de Tocqueville, Vol. II, p. 257. |
| [405] | Political Philosophy, Brougham, 1849, part 3, p. 336. |
| [406] | Buchanan's Administration, Buchanan, p. 98. |