[526] it was accepted and approved by the other states, and New York became a member of the Union. The resolution of Rhode Island asserts the same reservation in regard to the reassumption of powers. It is unnecessary to examine here whether this reserved power exists in the states respectively or in the people; when the Confederate States seceded, it was done by the people, acting through, or in conjunction with, the state, and by that power which is expressly reserved to them in the Constitution of the United States. When Lincoln, therefore, issued his proclamation calling for seventy-five thousand men to subjugate certain ‘combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings,’ he not only thereby denied the validity of the Constitution, but sought to resist, by military force, the exercise of a power clearly reserved in the Constitution, and reaffirmed in its tenth amendment, to the states respectively or to the people for their exercise. But, in order to justify his flagrant disregard of the Constitution, he contrived the fiction of ‘combinations,’ and upon this basis commenced the bloody war of subjugation with all its consequences. Thus, any recognition of the Confederate States, or of either of them, in his negotiations would have exposed the groundlessness of his fiction. But the Constitution required him to recognize each of them, for they had simply exercised a power which it expressly reserved for their exercise. Thus it is seen who violated the Constitution, and upon whom rests the responsibility of the war. It has been stated above that the conditions offered to our soldiers whenever they proposed to capitulate, were only those of subjugation. When General Buckner, on February 16, 1862, asked of General Grant to appoint commissioners to agree upon terms of capitulation, he replied:
No terms, except unconditional and immediate surrender, can be accepted.When General Lee asked the same question, on April 9, 1865, General Grant replied:
The terms upon which peace can be had are well understood. By the South laying down their arms, they will hasten that most desirable event, save thoussands of human lives and hundreds of millions of property not yet destroyed.When General Sherman made an agreement with General Johnston for formal disbandment of the army of the latter, it was at once disapproved by the government of the United States, and Sherman therefore wrote to Johnston:
I demand the surrender of your army on the same terms as were given to General Lee at Appomattox, on April 9th, purely and simply.It remains to be stated that the government which spurned all these
