Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 1.

[303] Governor Pickens had been so notified, they sent for the Secretary's reply, and received the Memorandum alluded to; and on the 9th they returned a response characteristic of the cause which they represented. It was disingenuous, boastful, and menacing. They spoke of their government — the band of usurpers at Montgomery — as one seeking the good of the people who (they falsely alleged) “had intrusted them with power, in the spirit of humanity, of the Christian civilization of the age,” et coetera and who, among its first acts, had sent to the Government of the United States, which they were attempting to revolutionize, the olive-branch of peace.

The Commissioners proceeded to give the Secretary a lecture, composed of a curious compound of truth, untruth, prophecy, and sophistry. “Persistently wedded,” they said,

to those fatal theories of construction of the Federal Constitution always rejected by the statesmen of the South, and adhered to by those of the Administration school, until they have produced their natural and often-predicted result of the destruction of the Union, under which we might have continued to live happily and gloriously together, had the spirit of the ancestry who framed the common Constitution animated the hearts of all their sons, you now, with a persistence untaught and uncured by the ruin which has been wrought, refuse to recognize the great fact presented to you of a complete and successful revolution; you close your eyes to the existence of the government founded upon it, and ignore the high duties of moderation and humanity which attach to you in dealing with this great fact. Had you met these issues with the frankness and manliness with which the undersigned were instructed to present them to you and treat them, the undersigned had not now the melancholy duty to return home and tell their government and their countrymen that their earnest and ceaseless efforts in behalf of peace had been futile, and that the Government of the United States meant to subjugate them by force of arms. Whatever may be the result, impartial history will record the innocence of the Government of the Confederate States, and place the responsibility of the blood and mourning that may ensue upon those who have denied the great fundamental doctrine of American liberty, that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed;” and who have set naval and land armaments in motion to subject the people of one portion of the land to the will of another portion. That it can never be done while a freeman survives in the Confederate States to wield a weapon, the undersigned appeal to past history to prove. ...

It is proper, however, to advise you, that it were well to dismiss the hopes you seem to entertain that, by any of the modes indicated, the people of the Confederate States will ever be brought to submit to the authority of the Government of the United States. You are dealing with delusions, too, when you seek to separate our people from our government, and to characterize the deliberate sovereign act of the people as a “perversion of a temporary and partisan excitement.” If you cherish these dreams you will be awakened from them, and find them as unreal and unsubstantial as others in which you have recently indulged. The undersigned would omit the performance of an obvious duty, were they to fail to make known to the Government of the United States, that the people of the Confederate States have declared their independence with a full knowledge of all the responsibilities