"But how long could small States, with different forms of Government,
live together, confederated for common defense and general welfare, if
the people of one Section were to come to the conclusion that their
institutions were better than those of the other, and thereupon
straightway set about subverting the institutions of the other?"


In the reply of the Rebel "Commissioners of the Southern Confederacy"
to Mr. Seward, April 9, 1861, they speak of our Government as being
"persistently wedded to those fatal theories of construction of the
Federal Constitution always rejected by the statesmen of the South, and
adhered to by those of the Administration school, until they have
produced their natural and often-predicted result of the destruction of
the Union, under which we might have continued to live happily and
gloriously together, had the spirit of the ancestry who framed the
common Constitution animated the hearts of all their sons."

In the "Address of the people of South Carolina, assembled in
Convention, to the people of the Slaveholding States of the United
States," by which the attempt was made to justify the passage of the
South Carolina Secession Ordinance of 1860, it is declared that:

"Discontent and contention have moved in the bosom of the Confederacy,
for the last thirty-five years. During this time South Carolina has
twice called her people together in solemn Convention, to take into
consideration, the aggressions and unconstitutional wrongs, perpetrated
by the people of the North on the people of the South. These wrongs
were submitted to by the people of the South, under the hope and
expectation that they would be final. But such hope and expectation