The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume 2

by Jefferson Davis

Again he says, and, if sincerely, shows himself to be utterly ignorant of the real condition of our affairs:

"Before the Queen's proclamation of neutrality, the disturbance in the United States was merely a local insurrection. It wanted the name of war to enable it to be a civil war and to live, endowed as such, with maritime and other belligerent rights. Without the authorized name, it might die, and was expected not to live and be a flagrant civil war, but to perish a mere insurrection."

The first extract in itself contains a fiction. If the Queen's proclamation possessed such force as to raise the Confederate States to an equality with the United States as a belligerent, perhaps another proclamation of the Queen might have possessed such force, if it had been issued, as to have lifted the Confederate States from the state of equality to one of independence. This is a novel virtue to be ascribed to a Queen's proclamation. This idea must have been borrowed from our neighbors of Mexico, where a pronunciamiento dissolves one and establishes a rival administration. How much more rational it would have been, to say that the resources and the military power of the Confederate States placed them, at the outset, on the footing of a belligerent, and the Queen's proclamation only declared a fact which the announcement of a blockade of the Southern ports by the Government of the United States had made manifest!— blockade being a means only applicable as against a foreign foe.

Nevertheless, the Government of the United States, although refusing to concede belligerent rights to the Confederate States, was very ready to take advantage of such concession by other nations, whenever an opportunity offered. The voluminous correspondence of the Secretary of State of the United States Government, relative to the Confederate cruisers and their so-called "depredations," was filled with charges of violations of international law, which could be committed only by a belligerent, and which, it was alleged, had been allowed to be done in the ports of Great Britain. On this foundation was based the subsequent claim for damages, advanced by the Government of the United States against that of Great Britain; and, for the pretended lack of "due diligence" in watching the actions of this Confederate belligerent in her ports, she was mulcted in a heavy sum by the Geneva Conference, and paid it to the Government of the United States.

It is a remarkable fact that the Government of the United States, in no one instance, from the opening to the close of the war, formally spoke of the Confederate Government or States as belligerents. Although on many occasions it acted with the latter as a belligerent, yet no official designations were ever given to them or their citizens but those of "insurgents," or "insurrectionists." Perhaps there may be something in the signification of the words which, combined with existing circumstances, would express a state of affairs that the authorities of the Government of the United States were in no degree willing to admit, and vainly sought to prevent from becoming manifest to the world.

The party or individuality against which the Government of the United States was conducting hostilities consisted of the people within the limits of the Confederate States. Was it against them as individuals in an unorganized condition, or as organized political communities? In the former condition they might be a mob; in the latter condition they formed a State. By the actions of unorganized masses may arise insurrections, and by the actions of organized people or states, arise wars.

The Government of the United States adopted a fiction when it declared that the execution of the laws in certain States was impeded by "insurrection." The persons whom it designated as insurrectionists were the organized people of the States. The ballot-boxes used at the elections were State boxes. The judges who presided at the elections were State functionaries. The returns of the elections were made to the State officers. The oaths of office of those elected were administered by State authority. They assembled in the legislative chambers of the States. The results of their deliberations were directory to the State, judicial, and executive officers, and by them put in operation. Is it not evident that, only by a fiction of speech, such proceedings can be called an insurrection?

Why, then, did an intelligent and powerful Government, like that of the United States, so outrage the understanding of mankind as to adopt a fiction on which to base the authority and justification of its hostile action? The United States Government is the result of a compact between the States—a written Constitution. It owes its existence simply to a delegation of certain powers by the respective States, which it is authorized to exercise for their common welfare. One of these powers is to "suppress insurrections"; but there is no power delegated to subjugate States, the authors of its existence, or to make war on any of the States. If, then, without any delegated power or lawful authority for its proceedings, the Government of the United States commenced a war upon some of the States of the Union, how could it expect to be justified before the world? It became the aggressor—the Attila of the American Continent. Its action inflicted a wound on the principles of constitutional liberty, a crashing blow to the hopes that men had begun to repose in this latest effort for self-government, which its friends should never forgive nor ever forget. To palliate the enormity of such an offense, its authors resorted to a vehement denial that their hostile action was a war upon the States, and persistently asserted the fiction that their immense armies and fleets were merely a police authority to put down insurrection. They hoped to conceal from the observation of the American people that the contest, on the part of the central Government, was for empire, for its absolute supremacy over the State governments; that the Constitution was roiled up and laid away among the old archives; and that the conditions of their liberty, in the future, were to be decided by the sword or by "national" control of the ballot-box.

With like disregard for truth, our cruisers were denounced as "pirates" by the Government of the United States. A pirate, or armed piratical vessel, is by the law of nations the enemy of mankind, and can be destroyed by the ships of any nation. The distinction between a lawful cruiser and a pirate is that the former has behind it a government which is recognized by civilized nations as entitled to the rights of war, and from which the commander of the cruiser receives his commission or authority, but the pirate recognizes no government, and is not recognized by any one. As the Attorney-General of Great Britain said in the Alexandra case:

"Although a recognition of the Confederates as an independent power was out of the question, yet it was right they should be admitted by other nations within the circle of lawful belligerents—that is to say, that their forces should not be treated as pirates, nor their flag as a piratical flag. Therefore, as far as the two belligerents were concerned, on the part of this and other governments, they were so far put on a level that each was to be considered as entitled to the right of belligerents—the Southern States as much as the other."