Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

[548]

South Carolina, as a separate, independent sovereignty, assumes the right to take into her possession everything within her limits essential to maintain her honor or her safety, irrespective of the question of property, subject only to the moral duty requiring that compensation should be made to the owner. This right she can not permit to be drawn into discussion. As to compensation for any property, whether of an individual or a Government, which she may deem it necessary for her honor or safety to take into her possession, her past history gives ample guarantee that it will be made, upon a fair accounting, to the last dollar. The proposition now is, that her law officer should, under authority of the Governor and his Council, distinctly pledge the faith of South Carolina to make such compensation in regard to Fort Sumter, and its appurtenances and contents, to the full extent of the money value of the property of the United States delivered over to the authorities of South Carolina by your command.

I will not suppose that a pledge like this can be considered insufficient security. Is not the money value of the property of the United States in this fort, situated where it can not be made available to the United States for any one purpose for which it was originally constructed, worth more to the United States than the property itself? Why, then, as property, insist on holding it by an armed garrison? Yet such has been the ground upon which you have invariably placed your occupancy of this fort by troops; beginning, prospectively, with your annual message of the 4th December; again in your special message of the 9th [8th] January, and still more emphatically in your message of the 28th January. The same position is set forth in your reply to the Senators, through the Secretary of War ad interim. It is there virtually conceded that Fort Sumter “is held merely as property of the United States, which you deem it your duty to protect and preserve.”

Again, it is submitted that the continuance of an armed possession actually jeopards the property you desire to protect. It is impossible but that such a possession, if continued long enough, must lead to collision. No people, not completely abject and pusillanimous, could submit, indefinitely, to the armed occupation of a fortress in the midst of the harbor of its principal city, and commanding the ingress and egress of every ship that enters the port, the daily ferryboats that ply upon the waters moving but at the sufferance of aliens. An attack upon this fort would scarcely improve it as property, whatever the result; and, if captured, it would no longer be the subject of account.

To protect Fort Sumter merely as property, it is submitted that an armed occupancy is not only unnecessary, but that it is manifestly the worst possible means which can be resorted to for such an object.

Your reply to the Senators, through Mr. Holt, declares it to be your sole object “to act strictly on the defensive, and to authorize no movement against South Carolina unless justified by a hostile movement on their part,” yet, in reply to the proposition of the Senators that no reenforcements should be sent to Fort Sumter, provided South Carolina agrees that during the same period no attack should be made, you say: “It is impossible for me (your Secretary) to give you (the Senators) any such assurance,” that it “would be a manifest violation of his (your) duty to place himself (yourself) under engagements that he (you) would not perform the duty either for an indefinite or a limited period.”

In your message of the 28th inst., in expressing yourself in regard to a similar