Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

---

[610] government. It had been created by the free consent of the people of the state, and they had defended it with their lives and their fortunes. It had been denied by the government of the United States that any one of the Confederate States was a foreign state or outside the Union by its secession. There was, therefore, neither in law nor in fact, any foundation for the assertion that the so-called rebellion had deprived the people of each Confederate state of all civil government.

Having thus stripped each Confederate state of all civil government, it was asserted that the Constitution declares that the United States shall guarantee to each state a republican form of government. But to guarantee is not to create, to organize, or to bring into existence. This can be done for a state government only by the free and unconstrained action of its whole people. The creation of such a government is beyond the powers of the government of the United States, as has already been shown. After a republican government has been instituted by the people, the Constitution requires the United States to guarantee its existence, and thereby forbids them or their government to overthrow it and set up a creature of its own. The duty to guarantee commands the preservation of that which already exists. Such were the governments of the Confederate states before the war and after the war. Thus the power granted in the Constitution to preserve and guarantee state governments was perverted to overthrow and destroy republican governments, and to erect in their places military governors, legislatures, and judicial tribunals.

The third proposition is that the President is commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy and the chief civil executive. His troops already occupied each of these states, and held the people in subjection. His proclamation was therefore merely a military order from the hand of the conqueror. Everything which he can do under such a character partakes of the nature, simply and solely, of martial law. Therefore he proceeds under the fourth proposition, wherein it ‘becomes necessary and proper to carry out the obligations of the United States to the people’ of each Confederate state, ‘in securing them in the enjoyment of a republican form of government.’ The American people were now about to witness, on an extensive scale, the tyrannical experiment of instituting republican governments by the processes of martial law. They had declared it to be a self-evident truth that it was ‘the right of the people to alter or to abolish it [their government], and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to ’