- From J.D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of Jefferson
Davis and the Confederacy, Including Diplomatic Correspondence, 1861-1865
Montgomery, April 29, 1861.
-
- Gentlemen of the Congress: It is my pleasing duty to
announce to you that the Constitution framed for the establishment of a
permanent Government for the Confederate States has been ratified by conventions
in each of those States to which it was referred. To inaugurate the Government
in its full proportions and upon its own substantial basis of the popular
will, it only remains that elections should be held for the designation
of the officers to administer it. There is every reason to believe that
at no distant day other States, identified in political principle and community
of interests with those which you represent, will join this Confederacy,
giving to its typical constellation increased splendor, to its Government
of free, equal, and sovereign States a wider sphere of usefulness, and
to the friends of constitutional liberty a greater security for its harmonious
and perpetual existence. It was not, however, for the purpose of making
this announcement that I have deemed it my duty to convoke you at an earlier
day than that fixed by yourselves at your meeting. The declaration of war
made against this Confederacy by Abraham Lincoln, the President of the
United States, in his proclamation issued on the 15th day of the present
month, rendered it necessary, in my judgment, that you should convene at
the earliest practicable moment to devise the measures necessary for the
defense of the country. The occasion is indeed an extraordinary one. It
justifies me in a brief review of the relations heretofore existing between
us and in a succinct statements of the events which have resulted in this
warfare, to the end that mankind may pass intelligent and impartial judgment
on its motives and objects. During the war waged against Great Britain
by her colonies on this continent a common danger impelled them to a close
alliance and to the formation of a Confederation, by the terms of which
the colonies, styling themselves States, entered "severally into a
firm league of friendship with each other for their common defense, the
security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding
themselves to assist each other against all force offered to or attacks
made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade,
or any other pretense whatever." In order to guard against any misconstruction
of their compact, the several States made explicit declaration in a distinct
article-- that "each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence,
and every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by this Confederation
expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled."
-
- Under this contract of alliance, the war of the Revolution
was successfully waged, and resulted in the treaty of peace with Great
Britain in 1783, by the terms of which the several States were each by
name recognized to be independent. The Articles of Confederation contained
a clause whereby all alterations were prohibited unless confirmed by the
Legislatures of every State after being agreed to by the Congress; and
in obedience to this provision, under the resolution of Congress of the
21st of February, 1787, the several States appointed delegates who attended
a convention "for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles
of Confederation and reporting to Congress and the several Legislatures
such alterations and provisions therein as shall when agreed to in Congress
and confirmed by the States, render the Federal Constitution adequate to
the exigencies of Government and the preservation of the Union." It
was by the delegates chosen by the several States under the resolution
just quoted that the Constitution of the United States was framed in 1787
and submitted to the several States for ratification, as shown by the seventh
article, which is in these words: "The ratification of the conventions
of nine States shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution
between the States so ratifying the same." I have italicized certain
words in the quotations just made for the purpose of attracting attention
to the singular and marked caution with which the States endeavored in
every possible form to exclude the idea that the separate and independent
sovereignty of each State was merged into one common government and nation,
and the earnest desire they evinced to impress on the Constitution its
true character-- that of a compact between independent States. The Constitution
of 1787, having, however, omitted the clause already recited from the Articles
of Confederation, which provided in explicit terms that each State retained
its sovereignty and independence, some alarm was felt in the States, when
invited to ratify the Constitution, lest this omission should be construed
into an abandonment of their cherished principle, and they refused to be
satisfied until amendments were added to the Constitution placing beyond
any pretense of doubt the reservation by the States of all their sovereign
rights and powers not expressly delegated to the United States by the Constitution.
-
- Strange, indeed, must it appear to the impartial observer,
but it is none the less true that all these carefully worded clauses proved
unavailing to prevent the rise and growth in the Northern States of a political
school which has persistently claimed that the government thus formed was
not a compact between States, but was in effect a national government,
set up above and over the States. An organization created by the States
to secure the blessings of liberty and independence against foreign aggression,
has been gradually perverted into a machine for their control in their
domestic affairs. The creature has been exalted above its creators; the
principals have been made subordinate to the agent appointed by themselves.
The people of the Southern States, whose almost exclusive occupation was
agriculture, early perceived a tendency in the Northern States to render
the common government subservient to their own purposes by imposing burdens
on commerce as a protection to their manufacturing and shipping interests.
Long and angry controversies grew out of these attempts, often successful,
to benefit one section of the country at the expense of the other. And
the danger of disruption arising from this cause was enhanced by the fact
that the Northern population was increasing, by immigration and other causes,
in a greater ratio than the population of the South. By degrees, as the
Northern States gained preponderance in the National Congress, self-interest
taught their people to yield ready assent to any plausible advocacy of
their right as a majority to govern the minority without control. They
learned to listen with impatience to the suggestion of any constitutional
impediment to the exercise of their will, and so utterly have the principles
of the Constitution been corrupted in the Northern mind that, in the inaugural
address delivered by President Lincoln in March last, he asserts as an
axiom, which he plainly deems to be undeniable, that the theory of the
Constitution requires that in all cases the majority shall govern; and
in another memorable instance the same Chief Magistrate did not hesitate
to liken the relations between a State and the United States to those which
exist between a county and the State in which it is situated and by which
it was created. This is the lamentable and fundamental error on which rests
the policy that has culminated in his declaration of war against these
Confederate States. In addition to the long-continued and deep-seated resentment
felt by the Southern States at the persistent abuse of the powers they
had delegated to the Congress, for the purpose of enriching the manufacturing
and shipping classes of the North at the expense of the South, there has
existed for nearly half a century another subject of discord, involving
interests of such transcendent magnitude as at all times to create the
apprehension in the minds of many devoted lovers of the Union that its
permanence was impossible. When the several States delegated certain powers
to the United States Congress, a large portion of the laboring population
consisted of African slaves imported into the colonies by the mother country.
In twelve out of the thirteen States negro slavery existed, and the right
of property in slaves was protected by law. This property was recognized
in the Constitution, and provision was made against its loss by the escape
of the slave. The increase in the number of slaves by further importation
from Africa was also secured by a clause forbidding Congress to prohibit
the slave trade anterior to a certain date, and in no clause can there
be found any delegation of power to the Congress authorizing it in any
manner to legislate to the prejudice, detriment, or discouragement of the
owners of that species of property, or excluding it from the protection
of the Government.
-
- The climate and soil of the Northern States soon proved
unpropitious to the continuance of slave labor, whilst the converse was
the case at the South. Under the unrestricted free intercourse between
the two sections, the Northern States consulted their own interests by
selling their slaves to the South and prohibiting slavery within their
limits. The South were willing purchasers of a property suitable to their
wants, and paid the price of acquisition without harboring a suspicion
that their quiet possession was to be disturbed by those who were inhibited
not only by want of constitutional authority, but by good faith as vendors,
from disquieting a title emanating from themselves. As soon, however, as
the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits
had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling
voice in Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures
against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated
and gradually extended. A continuous series of measures was devised and
prosecuted for the purpose of rendering insecure the tenure of property
in slaves. Fanatical organizations, supplied with money by voluntary subscriptions,
were assiduously engaged in exciting amongst the slaves a spirit of discontent
and revolt; means were furnished for their escape from their owners, and
agents secretly employed to entice them to abscond; the constitutional
provisions for their rendition to their owners was first evaded, then openly
denounced as a violation of conscientious obligation and religious duty;
men were taught that it was a merit to elude, disobey, and violently oppose
the execution of the laws enacted to secure the performance of the promise
contained in the constitutional compact; owners of slaves were mobbed and
even murdered in open day solely for applying to a magistrate for the arrest
of a fugitive slave; the dogmas of these voluntary organizations soon obtained
control of the Legislatures of many of the Northern States, and laws were
passed providing for the punishment, by ruinous fines and long-continued
imprisonment in jails and penitentiaries, of citizens of the Southern States
who should dare to ask aid of the officers of the law for the recovery
of their property. Emboldened by success, the theater of agitation and
aggression against the clearly expressed constitutional rights of the Southern
States was transferred to the Congress; Senators and Representatives were
sent to the common councils of the nation, whose chief title to this distinction
consisted in the display of a spirit of ultra fanaticism, and whose business
was not "to promote the general welfare or insure domestic tranquillity,"
but to awaken the bitterest hatred against the citizens of sister States
by violent denunciation of their institutions; the transaction of public
affairs was impeded by repeated efforts to usurp powers not delegated by
the Constitution, for the purpose of impairing the security of property
in slaves, and reducing those States which held slaves to a condition of
inferiority. Finally a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining
the administration of the Government, with the avowed object of using its
power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation
in the benefits of the public domain acquired by all the States in common,
whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States
in which slavery should be prohibited; of thus rendering the property in
slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating
in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. This party,
thus organized, succeeded in the month of November last in the election
of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States.
-
- In the meantime, under the mild and genial climate of
the Southern States and the increasing care and attention for the well-being
and comfort of the laboring class, dictated alike by interest and humanity,
the African slaves had augmented in number from about 600,000, at the date
of the adoption of the constitutional compact, to upward of 4,000,000.
In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages
into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied
not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction. Under
the supervision of a superior race their labor had been so directed as
not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition,
but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of wilderness into
cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people; towns and cities had
sprung into existence, and had rapidly increased in wealth and population
under the social system of the South; the white population of the Southern
slaveholding States had augmented form about 1,250,000 at the date of the
adoption of the Constitution to more than 8,500,000 in 1860; and the productions
of the South in cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco, for the full development
and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable,
had swollen to an amount which formed nearly three-fourths of the exports
of the whole United States and had become absolutely necessary to the wants
of civilized man. With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled,
the people of the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North
to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which
they were openly menaced. With this view the Legislatures of the several
States invited the people to select delegates to conventions to be held
for the purpose of determining for themselves what measures were best adapted
to meet so alarming a crisis in their history. Here it may be proper to
observe that from a period as early as 1798 there had existed in all of
the States of the Union a party almost uninterruptedly in the majority
based upon the creed that each State was, in the last resort, the sole
judge as well of its wrongs as of the mode and measure of redress. Indeed,
it is obvious that under the law of nations this principle is an axiom
as applied to the relations of independent sovereign States, such as those
which had united themselves under the constitutional compact. The Democratic
party of the United States repeated, in its successful canvass in 1856,
the declaration made in numerous previous political contests, that it would
"faithfully abide by and uphold the principles laid down in the Kentucky
and Virginia resolutions of 1798, and in the report of Mr. Madison to the
Virginia Legislature in 1799; and that it adopts those principles as constituting
one of the main foundations of its political creed." The principles
thus emphatically announced embrace that to which I have already averted--
the right of each State to judge of and redress the wrongs of which it
complains. These principles were maintained by overwhelming majorities
of the people in all the States of the Union at different elections, especially
in the elections of Mr. Jefferson in 1805, Mr. Madison in 1809, and Mr.
Pierce in 1852. In the exercise of a right so ancient, so well-established,
and so necessary for self-preservation, the people of the Confederate States,
in their conventions, determined that the wrongs which they had suffered
and the evils with which they were menaced required that they should revoke
the delegation of powers to the Federal Government which they had ratified
in their several conventions. They consequently passed ordinances resuming
all their rights as sovereign and independent States and dissolved their
connection with the other States of the Union.
-
- [The remainder of the message deals with the formation
of the Confederacy after secession, the firing on Ft. Sumter, and preparations
for war.]
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