Excerpt from The Union, Past and Future: How It Works, and How to Save It
The time has come, when it behooves every Southern man to consider the best means of preserving the Union which he loves, and the rights and honor which are yet dearer. Sixty years have passed since the Northern and Southern States entered into a treaty for "the common defence and general welfare." We joined that league as equals: its strictly defined powers were to be exercised for the equal good of all the parties, and its benefits and burdens wore to be equally shared. But our allies at the North have grown strong under the fostering protection of this great treaty, and are no longer content with the equal conditions upon which it was formed. They have perverted it from its original character, not only wielding the granted powers for sectional and oppressive purposes, but assuming every doubtful power for their exclusive advantage. In this spirit, they have advanced far in a series of measures, which, if unresisted, must end in the overthrow of our slaye institutions. But it cannot lie doubted that a free people, still untamed by the yoke of oppression and the stamp of inferiority, will resist such assaults. The South has at stake, not merely the fourteen hundred millions of dollars, the value of her slave property, but all of honor and of happiness that civilization and society can give. Jo count the means of resistance, the relative strength of the opponents, the value of what we must hazard, and the surest ways of preserving the Union in its original equality, is the object of this Essay.
The history of the causes of the present crisis is the history of ever-growing demands on the part of the. North, and of as constant concessions from the South. A hasty glance at the past will aid us to divine the future.
Virginia owned an immense territory to the northwest of the Ohio river, acquired by the same titles with the soil of the Old Dominion itself - the royal grants, her treasure, and her blood. More than one of her ancient colonial charters covered this whole domain, and in 1778, at her own expense, she fitted out an expedition for its conquest. Her gallant son, George Rogers Clarke, at the head of a small but during band, penetrated hundreds of miles through a savage and hostile country, expelled the English, subdued the Indians, and conquered for his mother State an empire larger than the Austrian. For the sake of the Union, Virginia gave up this line country, larger than all the Southern States of the Old Thirteen, and by "an act of grosser fatuity," as Randolph said, "than ever poor old Lear or the Knight of La Mancha was guilty of," she suffered her own citizens to be excluded from its benefit; for it was then a slaveholding territory, and the ordinance of 1787, abolishing slavery there, was passed chiefly by Northern votes, and that, as Mr. Madison said, "without the shadow of constitutional authority." It was a country well suited for slavery, for even so late as 180 we find a convention of the inhabitants of Indiana petitioning for its temporary introduction, and a committee of the House of Representative reporting through their chairman, Mr. Garnett of Virginia, in favor of their prayer. But while Virginia was guilty of this suicidal generosity, she annexed one condition for her own advantage, that not more than five States should be formed out of this territory, so as to preserve a due balance of political power in the Union. Yet even this condition the North has violated, and 22,336 square miles of its area, more than the avenge size of all the free States east of the Ohio, have gone to constitute the future State of Minnesota.
This was the first step, and the next was at the formation of the present Constitution, when a contest arose as to the ratio of representation. Should the South have as many representatives in proportion to her population as the North It was just and right that she should. The Federal Go. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Union, Past and Future (Muscoe R. H. Garnett)