Scarcely less pronounced were the sentiments of many prominent Americans
expressed just before the outbreak of the Civil War with reference to
the moral or political right of the Federal Government or the Northern
people to coerce the Southern States.
Horace Greeley, in the issue of the _New York Tribune_ of November 9th,
1860, discussing the contemplated secession of the Cotton States, wrote:
"If the Cotton States shall decide that they can do better out of the
Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to
secede may be a revolutionary one but it exists nevertheless; and we
do not see how one party can have a right to do what another party has
a right to prevent."[409]
Again he wrote:
"If it (the Declaration of Independence) justified the secession from
the British Empire of three millions of colonists in 1776, we do not
see why it would not justify the secession of five millions of
Southerners from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on this
point why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why(?)"[410]
On the 23d of February, 1861, he wrote:
"We have repeatedly said and we once more insist that the great
principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of American
Independence that governments derive their just powers from the
consent of the governed is sound and just; and that if the Slave
States, the Cotton States, or the Gulf States only, choose to form an
independent nation they have a clear moral right to do so."[411]
President Buchanan, in his message to Congress on the 3d of December,
1860, said:
"The fact is that our Union rests upon public opinion and can never be
cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it cannot
live in the affections of the people it must one day perish. Congress
possesses many means of preserving it by conciliation; but the sword
was not placed in their hands to preserve it by force."
Edward Everett, writing on the 2d of February, 1861, to the Union
Meeting called to assemble at Faneuil Hall, said:
"To expect to hold fifteen states in the Union by force is
preposterous. The idea of a civil war, accompanied, as it would be, by
a servile insurrection, is too monstrous to be entertained for a
moment. If our sister states must leave us, in the name of Heaven, let
them go in peace."[412]
Wendell Phillips, speaking at New Bedford, Mass., on the 9th of April,
1861, said:
"But I am sorry that a gun should be fired at Fort Sumter or that a
gun should be fired from it for this reason: The administration at
Washington does not know its time. Here are a series of states girding
the Gulf who think that their peculiar institutions require that they
should have a separate government. They have a right to decide that
question without appealing to you or me. A large body of people,
sufficient to make a nation, have come to the conclusion that they
will have a government of a certain form. Who denies them the right?
Standing with the principles of '76 behind us, who can deny them the
right?"[413]
Abraham Lincoln, speaking on the 15th of November, 1860, said:
"My own impression is, leaving myself room to modify the opinion, if,
upon further investigation, I should see fit to do so, that this
Government possesses both the authority and the power to maintain its
own integrity. That, however, is not the ugly point of this matter.
The ugly point is the necessity of keeping the Government together by
force as ours should be a Government of fraternity."[414]
On the 10th of April, 1861, only five days previous to the call for
seventy-five thousand soldiers, Mr. Seward, as Secretary of State, in an
official communication to the American Minister to Great Britain, wrote:
"For these reasons he (the President) would not be disposed to reject
a cardinal dogma of theirs (the Secessionists), namely, that the
Federal Government could not reduce the seceding states to obedience
by conquest, even though he were disposed to question that
proposition. But, in fact, the President willingly accepts it as true.
Only an imperial or despotic government could subjugate thoroughly
disaffected and insurrectionary members of the state. This Federal
Republican system of ours of all forms of government is the very one
which is most unfitted for such labor."[415]