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If this truly eloquent and statesmanlike epistle does not express the views of the Republican managers at the time, it does at least indicate with sufficient clearness their relations towards the Peace conference and the determined purpose of the radicals to have “a fight,” and it furthermore foreshadows the actual direction given to future events.
Held out to the last.
But I cannot protract this discussion further.
Suffice it to say, that
Virginia,
North Carolina,
Tennessee and
Arkansas did not secede, until
Mr. Lincoln had actually declared war against the seven Cotton and Gulf States, then forming the Southern Confederacy, and called on these four States to furnish their
quota of the seventy-five thousand troops called for by him to coerce these States.
This act, on
Mr. Lincoln's part, was without any real authority of law, and nothing short of the most flagrant usurpation, Congress alone having the power to declare war under the
Constitution.
He refused to convene Congress to consider the grave issues then confronting the country.
But when it did assemble, on the 4th of July, 1861, he tried to have his illegal usurpation validated; but Congress, although then having a Republican majority, refused to consider the resolution introduced for that purpose.
The four States above named, led by
Virginia, only left the
Union then, after exhausting every honorable effort to remain in it, and only when they had to determine to fight
with or
against their sisters of the
South.
This was the dire alternative presented to them, and how could they hesitate longer what to do?
In the busy, bustling, practical times in which we live, it will doubtless be asked by many, and, with some show of plausibility, why we gather up, and present to the world, all this array of testimony concerning a cause, which is almost universally known as the ‘lost cause,’ and a conflict, which ended more than thirty-five years ago?
Does it not, they ask, only tend to rekindle the embers of sectional strife, and can thus only do harm?
You, our comrades, know that such is not our purpose or desire.
Our reasons have been very briefly stated.
It is the truth that constrains.
The apologists for the
North, using all the vehicles of falsehood, are insistent in spreading the poison; with it the antidote must go. If others attribute to us wrong motives in this matter, we are sorry, but we have no apologies to make to any such.
We admit that the
Confederate war is ended; that slavery and secession are forever dead,
