Excerpt from The Three Secession Movements in the United States
The letter, a facsimile copy of which is annexed hereto, was published on the eve of the Presidential Election of 1880, by Mr. Samuel J. Tilden, at this time candidate for the Presidency of the United States, and scattered broadcast by him, in the vain hope of defeating the election of Mr. Lincoln.
The year 1860 was the great crisis in our history. With the election of Mr. Lincoln began the desperate military struggle for the maintenance of our national unity. It had for some time been evident that the North was about to pronounce against the creation of new Slave States. The exercise of such a right or power was met on the part of the South by threats of secession; the election of Mr. Lincoln, whose triumph foreshadowed that of the cause of freedom, to be the signal for their movement. It is unnecessary again to go over the ground so often gone over. The South seceded in a body. War followed with infinite waste of blood and treasure, and with all the pangs and heart-rendings that the death, in camp or in field, of half a million of men could cause.
Who were the authors of this war, with all its waste of treasure and of life; which bereft almost every family in the land of some one of its members, and which turned the whole nation into a house of mourning? Those at the North who instructed the Southern States that secession was a right secured to them by the Constitution, and that they were the sole judges of the occasion, as well as the mode in which it was to be accomplished. Among the most conspicuous and criminal of them stands Mr. Tilden, who now asks the people to honor him with the highest office in their gift.
The question always asked, from the adoption of the Constitution in 1788 to the present time, has been, "What is the nature of the government of the United States 1 Is it a confederation from which each State, as an integral party, may withdraw at pleasure; or is it a government of paramount powers from which no State can withdraw but by the consent of the whole?" Although the question had in itself nothing to do with geographical distinctions or boundaries, the South very soon came to give one answer, the North another, and each differing wholly and totally in kind. That of the South was formulated on the famous Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798-99, directed against the Alien and Sedition laws, and of which Mr. Jefferson, though not a member of the Legislature of either State, was the author; and in the Report made by Mr. Madison upon the same to the Legislature of the former State. These Resolutions, among other things, declared:
The Resolutions Of 1798-99.
"That the several States composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government, but that by a compact under the style and title of the Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes; delegated to that government certain definite powers; reserving, each State to itself, the residuary measure of right to their own self-government; and that, whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party; that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each part has an equal right to judge for itself; as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress... and that a nullification by those sovereignties of all unauthorized nets done under the color of that instrument is the rightful remedy."
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