The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume 2

by Jefferson Davis

"In repudiating it, I gave dissatisfaction, if not offense, to many whose support the country can not afford to lose. And this is not the end of it. The pressure in this direction is still upon me, and is increasing."

This pressure consisted in the demand of his extreme partisans that the whole authority of the Government should be exerted for the immediate and universal emancipation of the slaves.

By a reference to the statement of the causes of our withdrawal from the Union of the United States, it will be seen that one of them consisted in the conviction that the newly elected officers of the Government would wield its powers for the destruction of the institutions of the Southern States. The facts already related in these pages furnish ample proofs of the justice and accuracy of this conviction.

The time was now close at hand when the mask was to be thrown off, and, at a single dash of the pen, four hundred millions of our property was to be annihilated, the whole social fabric of the Southern States disrupted, all branches of industry to be disarranged, good order to be destroyed, and a flood of evils many times greater than the loss of property to be inflicted upon the people of the South, thus consummating the series of aggressions which had been inflicted for more than thirty years. All constitutional protections were to be withdrawn, and the powers of a common government, created for common and equal protection to the interests of all, were to be arrayed for the destruction of our institutions. The President of the United States says: "This is not the end. The pressure in this direction is still upon me, and is increasing." How easy it would have been for the Northern people, by a simple, honest obedience to the provisions of the Constitution, to have avoided the commission of all these crimes and horrors! For the law which demands obedience to itself guarantees in return life and safety. It is not necessary to ask again where the President of the United States or the Congress found authority for their usurpations. But it should be remembered that, if the necessity which they pleaded was an argument to justify their violations of all the provisions of the Constitution, the existence of such a necessity on their part was a sufficient argument to justify our withdrawal from union with them. If necessity on their part justified a violation of the Constitution, necessity on our part justified secession from them. If the preservation of the existence of the Union by coercion of the States was an argument to justify these violent usurpations by the United States Government, it was still more forcibly an argument to justify our separation and resistance to invasion; for we were struggling for our natural rights, but the Government of the United States has no natural rights.

How can a people who glory in a Declaration of Independence which broke the slumbers of a world declare that men united in defense of liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness are "traitors"? Is it henceforth to be a dictum of humanity that man may no more take up arms in defense of rights, liberty, and property? Shall it never again in the course of human events become lawful "for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them"? Is the highwayman, henceforth, to be the lord of the highway, and the poor, plundered traveler to have no property which he may defend at the risk of the life of the highwayman?

On July 12, 1862, the President of the United States, persistent in his determination to destroy the institution of slavery, invited the Senators and Representatives of the border slaveholding States to the Executive Mansion, and addressed them on emancipation in their respective States. He said:

"I intend no reproach or complaint when I assure you that, in my opinion, if you all had voted for the resolution in the gradual emancipation message of last March, the war would now be substantially ended. And the plan therein proposed is yet one of the most potent and swift means of ending it. Let the States which are in rebellion see definitely and certainly that in no event will the States you represent ever join their proposed confederacy, and they can not much longer maintain the contest. But you can not divest them of their hope to ultimately have you with them so long as you show a determination to perpetuate the institution within your own States. Beat them at elections as you have overwhelmingly done, and, nothing daunted, they still claim you as their own. You and I know what the lever of their power is. Break that lever before their faces, and they can shake you no more for ever."

He further said that the incidents of the war might extinguish the institution in their States, and added:

"How much better for you as seller and the nation as buyer to sell out and buy out that without which the war could never have been, than to sink both the thing to be sold and the price of it in cutting one another's throats!"

The reply of the majority, consisting of twenty of the twenty-nine Senators and Representatives, subsequently made to the President, is worthy of notice. They said that they were not of the belief that funds would be provided for the object, or that their constituents would reap the fruits of the promise held out, and added: