Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 14.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

Dear Sir,—Among the less-informed persons at the North there exists an opinion that the negro slave at the South was a mere chattel, having neither rights nor immunities protected by law or public opinion. Southern men knew such was not the case, and others desiring to know could readily learn the fact. On that error the lauded story of Uncle Tom's Cabin was founded, but it is strange that a utilitarian and shrewd people did not ask why a slave, especially valuable, was the object of privation and abuse? Had it been a horse they would have been better able to judge, and would most probably have rejected the story for its improbability. Many attempts have been made to evade and misrepresent the exhaustive opinion of Chief-Justice Taney in the “Dred Scott” case, but it remains unanswered.

From the statement in regard to Fort Sumter, a child might suppose that a foreign army had attacked the United States—certainly could not learn that the State of South Carolina was merely seeking possession of a fort on her own soil, and claiming that her grant of the site had become void.

The tyrant's plea of necessity to excuse despotic usurpation is offered for the unconstitutional act of emancipation, and the poor resort to prejudice is invoked in the use of the epithet “rebellion” —a word inapplicable to States generally, and most especially so to the sovereign members of a voluntary union. But, alas for their ancient prestige, they have even lost the plural reference they had in the Constitution, and seem so small to this utilizing tuition as to be described by the neutral pronoun “it!” Such language would be appropriate to an imperial Government, which in absorbing territories required the subjected inhabitants to swear allegiance to it.

Ignorance and artifice have combined so to misrepresent the matter of official oaths in the United States that it may be well to give the question more than a passing notice. When the “sovereign, independent States of America,” formed a constitutional compact of union it was provided in the sixth article thereof that the officers “ of the United States and of the several States shall be bound [409] by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution,” and by the law of June I, 1789, the form of the required oath was prescribed as follows: “I, A B, .do solemnly swear or affirm (as the case may be) that I will support the Constitution of the United States.”

That was the oath. The obligation was to support the Constitution. It created no new obligation, for the citizen already owed allegiance to his respective State, and through her to the Union of which she was a member. The conclusion is unavoidable that those who did not support, but did not violate the Constitution, were they who broke their official oaths. The General Government had only the powers delegated to it by the States. The power to coerce a State was not given, but emphatically refused. Therefore, to invade a State, to overthrow its government by force of arms, was a palpable violation of the Constitution, which officers had sworn to support, and thus to levy war against States which the Federal officers claimed to be, notwithstanding their ordinances of secession, still in the Union, was the treason defined in the third section of the third article of the Constitution, the only treason recognized by the fundamental law of the United States.

‘When our forefathers assumed for the several States they represented a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth, the central idea around which their political institutions were grouped was that sovereignty belonged to the people, inherent and inalienable; therefore; that governments were their agents, instituted to secure their rights, and deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, whence they draw the corollary that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it,’ etc. What was meant by the word “people” in this connection is manifest from the circumstances. It could only authoritatively refer to the distinct communities who, each for itself, joined in the declaration and in the concurrent act of separation from the government of Great Britain.

By all that is revered in the memory of our Revolutionary sires, and sacred in the principles they established, let not the children of the United States be taught that our Federal Government is sovereign; that our sires, after having, by a long and bloody war, won community-independence, used the power, not for the end sought, but to transfer their allegiance, and by oath or otherwise bind their posterity to be the subjects of another government, from which they could only free themselves by force of arms.

Respectfully,