Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

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[219] that has been quoted from Hamilton, or Madison, or Marshall, or John Quincy Adams, more emphatically repudiates the claim of right to restrain or coerce a state in the exercise of its free choice. Nothing that has been said since the war which followed could furnish a more striking condemnation of its origin, prosecution, purposes, and results. A comparison of the sentiments above quoted, with the subsequent career of the party, of which that journal was and long had been the recognized organ, would exhibit a striking incongruity and inconsistency.

The Tribune was far from being singular among its Northern contemporaries in the entertainment of such views, as Greeley, its chief editor, has shown by many citations in his book, The American Conflict. The Albany Argus, about the same time, said in language which Greeley characterizes as “clear and temperate”: “We sympathize with and justify the South as far as this: their rights have been invaded to the extreme limit possible within the forms of the Constitution; and, beyond this limit, their feelings have been insulted and their interests and honor assailed by almost every possible form of denunciation and invective; and, if we deemed it certain that the real animus of the Republican party could be carried into the administration of the Federal Government, and become the permanent policy of the nation, we should think that all the instincts of self-preservation and of manhood rightfully impelled them to a resort to revolution and a separation from the Union, and we would applaud them and wish them godspeed in the adoption of such a remedy.”

Again, the same paper said, a day or two afterward: “If South Carolina or any other State, through a convention of her people, shall formally separate herself from the Union, probably both the present and the next Executive will simply let her alone and quietly allow all the functions of the Federal Government within her limits to be suspended. Any other course would be madness; as it would at once enlist all the Southern States in the controversy and plunge the whole country into a civil war. . . . As a matter of policy and wisdom, therefore, independent of the question of right, we should deem resort to force most disastrous.”

The New York Herald—a journal which claimed to be independent of all party influences—about the same period said: “Each State is organized as a complete government, holding the purse and wielding the sword, possessing the right to break the tie of the confederation as a nation might break a treaty, and to repel coercion as a nation might repel invasion. . . . Coercion, if it were possible, is out of the question.”

On January 31, 1861—after six states had already seceded—a great