Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 26.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

This convention adopted a platform containing these, among other, remarkable declarations:

‘That after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretence of a military necessity of a war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution has been disregarded in every part. Justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for the cessation of hostilities, with the ultimate convention of all the States, that these may be restored on the basis of a federal union of all the States, that the direct interference of the military authorities in the recent elections was a shameful violation of the Constitution, and the repetition of such acts will be held as revolutionary, and resisted; that the aim and object of the Democratic party is to preserve the federal union and the rights of the Sales unimpaired, and that they consider the administrative usurpation of extraordinary and dangerous powers, not granted by the Constitution, as calculated to prevent a restoration of the Union; that the shameful disregard of the administration in its duty to our fellow-citizens—prisoners of war—deserves the severest reprobation,’ &c., &c.

It will thus be seen that this platform charged the party in power with the very offences which the people of the South complained of and which caused the Southern States to secede. It charged that the ‘Constitution had been disregarded in every part’; it declared that “justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare” demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities; it charged the administration with the ‘usurpation of extraordinary and dangerous powers, not granted by the Constitution’; it charged it with direct interference in the elections, and with a shameful disregard of its duty to prisoners of war. The platform claimed that the object of the party adopting it was to preserve the Federal Union and the rights of the States unimpaired.

In a word, the grievances here set forth were those of which the South was then complaining, and the principles sought to be maintained those for which the South was contending. And in addition to these, the people of the South were then exercising the God-given right and duty of defending their homes and firesides against an invasion as ruthless as any that ever marked the track of so-called civilized warfare.

Mr. John Sherman tells us in his ‘Recollections of Forty Years ’