There was a time before South Carolina had
placed herself in open hostility to the Union, when we, and we
believe a large majority of the North, would have consented to part
with her, if she had consulted the other States, and requested
permission to try a peaceful experiment as a separate nation. Her
turbulence, and avowed maintenance of doctrines at war with the
existence of the nation, made her, at the best, a useless member of
the confederacy, and very many would have been glad to give her a
chance to test the wisdom of her theories in a solitary existence. So
with those States that sympathized with her, and were preparing to
follow in her lead. But the case now
is widely and fearfully changed. These States do not ask, or care to
consult their associates, and learn whether it may not be possible to
arrange our difficulties so as to move on in harmony as heretofore.
They have put it out of our power to
consent to anything. They have met
us, not with a request for peaceful consultation, but with war. If we
concede their demands now it is the surrender of a nation
conquered by rebel members. If we
make no effort to resist the wrong we submit at once to disunion and
national degradation. There is no course left, either for honor or
patriotism, but to reclaim by the strong hand, if it must be so, all
that the seceding States have taken, enforce the laws, and learn the
traitors the wisdom of the maxim that it takes two to make a bargain.
All questions of expediency were thrust out of reach by the act which
took Fort Moultrie as a hostile fortress, and hauled down the
national flag as a sign of the conquest. They have all been decided
without our help. We have had no opportunity to say a word. The
seceding States have raised the issue, argued it to their own
satisfaction, and decided it by war. We have been left no alternative
but to resist or submit. We deplore this state of things. We had
earnestly hoped that the Gulf States would give all shades of
sentiment a fair opportunity of expression in the election of their
Conventions, discuss their grievances calmly, request a consultation
with the nation, and if they firmly and deliberately refused to abide
in the Union as it is, we were willing to let them drop out, still
holding our government unchanged over ourselves. In this way it was
possible to get rid of the rebellious States, by simply diminishing,
instead of dissolving the Union, which the London Times says is
impossible. It is now, but it was not, and need not have been, if the
seceding States had been willing to meet the Union fairly and come to
an understanding. Such a course would have been in accordance with
the enlightenment of the age, the dictates of Christianity, and the
best interests of both sections. But the hope of such an adjustment
is all past, at least till the seceding States restore the government
property, submits to the laws, and return to their former position of
peaceful members of the Union. There can be no
conciliation with them till they do. The government
must be preserved. It is ours as well as theirs, and when they
attempt to overturn it by force, we must preserve it by force. A
government kicked aside at the will of any State, is nothing. The
right of secession would make the government a mere accident,
subsisting because thirty or forty members happened to agree in
regard to it. We insist that our government is neither an accident or
a trifle. It is the best yet devised by the wit of man, and is worth
a dozen wars to keep. And we mean to keep it. To allow a State to
rebel against it, and give way to the rebellion, is to consent to its
destruction. We cannot claim that it exists even for those still
remaining in it, when it is set at naught and defied by any other
member. It must be whole or it cannot be at all. The people may let a
member out of it, but no member can break it down to get out without
breaking it to pieces. We are therefore for the most determined
measures of resistance to the rebellion in the Gulf States. We insist
that the Union shall be preserved till those who made it shall
consent to change it. No refractory State or combination of traitors
must be permitted to peril it in the pursuit of insane vengeance or
impracticable theories. And if their madness leads them to open war
let them suffer the doom of traitors.
