[148]
If the Declaration of Independence justified the secession from the British empire of three millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southerners from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on the point, why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why?And yet again, on the 23d of February, after Mr. Davis had been inaugurated as President at Montgomery, it said:
We have repeatedly said, and we once more insist, that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of American Independence, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, is sound and just, and that if the slave States, the cotton States, or the Gulf States only choose to form an independent nation they have a clear moral right to do so.
