This text is part of:
[365] of the North, instead of permitting the South to enjoy that domestic peace and tranquility which the Union was intended to secure to every section of the country, were persistently striving to stir up insurrection in the Southern States, and glorifying those who attempted to carry outrage and massacre into Southern homes; when the tendency to centralization was threatening to destroy State independence and build on its ruins a despotism akin to that which enslaved France, when it was said that ‘the government was sent down to the subject provinces by mail from Paris, and the mail was followed by the army, if the provinces did not acquiesce’; when the reins of government had passed into the hands of a purely sectional party, avowedly hostile to Southern interests, and declaring the Constitution to be ‘a covenant with hell and a league with the devil,’ which ought to be supplanted by a so-called ‘higher law;’ in a word, when it became evident that Northern power was to sit on the throne in Washington and make the Yankees conscience, rather than the Constitution, the fundamental law of the land, the Southern people felt that the preservation of community independence and liberty, won at Yorktown and bequeathed to them by their fathers as an inalienable birthright, demanded the resumption of the powers intrusted by them to the Federal Government.
Richmond, VA. 1894.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.