ADDRESS
OF
HON. JOHN S. PRESTON,
COMMISSIONER FROM SOUTH CAROLINA,
To the Convention of Virginia, February 19, 1861.
COLUMBIA, S. C.:
STEAM POWER-PRESS OF R. W. GIBBES.
1861.
ADDRESS.
Mr. President and Gentlemen of Virginia:
I have the honor to present to you my credentials as Commissioner from the Government of South
Carolina to the Convention of the people of Virginia. On these credentials being duly received by you, I
am instructed by my Government to lay before you the causes which induced the State of South Carolina
to withdraw from the United States, and resume the powers heretofore delegated by her to the
Government of the United States of America.
In performing this duty, I desire to announce to you that it is no part of my purpose, nor is it the wish
of my Government, that I should make an argument before you in proof of the right of secession. My
Government has assumed that right in her sovereign capacity, and my ministry here is to recite the
causes which that Government has deemed sufficient to enforce upon her the necessity of exercising that
right.
.....
For nearly thirty years, the people of the non-slaveholding States have assailed the institution of
African slavery, in every form in which our political connection with them permitted them to approach it.
During all that period, large masses of their people, with a persistent fury, maddened by the intoxication of
the wildest fanaticism, have associated, with the avowed purpose of effecting the abolition of slavery by
the most fearful means which can be suggested to a subject race: arson and murder are the charities of
their programme.
1. The representatives of these people in the Federal Legislature, acting on the same ultimate idea,
have endeavored to shape the legislation of the Government so as to deprive the slave States of political
equality, by excluding them from all interest in the territorial accretions of the Government. They have
succeeded to the full extent, and have decreed that there shall be no more slave States admitted to the
Union.
2. A majority of the non-slaveholding States have not only refused to carry out the provisions of the
Constitution and laws to protect slave property, but have made stringent laws to prevent the execution of
those provisions.
3. Eight of those States have made it a criminal offence to execute the plainest provisions of the
Constitution which give protection to a property furnishing $250,000,000, annually, to the commerce of
the country, and on which rests the entire order of civilization of twelve millions of people. In not one of
the seventeen non-slaveholding States can a citizen of a slave State claim protection for his main
property, and the person of the citizen in numerous cases has been violated, and in many of these cases
the violence has resulted in murder.
4. The citizens of not less than five non-slaveholding States have invaded a slaveholding State, and
proclaimed the annihilation of its people by servile insurrection; two of these States have refused to
surrender the felons engaged in this invasion; and one of these States--that State which claims the most
advanced civilization and refinement, which claims to represent before the world American sentiment and
American principles--by the most solemn decree, through its highest constituted authority, has approved
of that invasion; and large bodies of people throughout the whole of the non-slaveholding States have
made votive offerings to the memory of John Brown and his associates.
5. The most populous, and by far the most potent, of the Confederates has proclaimed, for years,
through its representatives in the Federal Senate, that it is a conflict of life and death between slavery and
anti-slavery. This is the solemn decree, through its constituted forms, of a State containing near three
millions of people, who conduct four-fifths of the commerce of the Republic. Additional millions of people,
making majorities in all the States, and many of the States by legislative action, have declared that the
institution of slavery, as it exists in the Southern States, is an offence to God, and, therefore, they are
bound by the most sacred duty of man to exterminate that institution. They have declared and acted upon
the declaration, that the existence of slavery in the Southern States is an offence and a danger to the
social institutions of the Northern States, and, therefore, they are bound by the instinct of moral right and
of self-preservation to exterminate slavery.
Finally, impelled by these sacred duties to God and their consciences, and by the scarcely less
binding impulses of self-protection, after years of earnest labor and devotion to the purpose, they have
succeeded, by large majorities in all the non-slaveholding States, in placing the entire executive power of
the Federal Government in the hands of those who are pledged, by their obligations to God, by their
obligations to the social institutions of man, by their obligation of self-preservation, to place the institution
of slavery in a course of certain and final extinction.
That is, twenty millions of people, holding one of the strongest Governments on earth, are impelled,
by a perfect recognition of the most sacred and powerful obligations which fall upon man, to exterminate
the vital interests of eight millions of people, bound to them by contiguity of territory and the closest
political relations. In other words, the decree inaugurated on the 6th of November was the annihilation of
the people of the Southern States. Now, gentlemen, the people of South Carolina, being a portion of
those who come within the ban of this decree, had only to ask themselves: Is existence worth a struggle?
Their answer is given in the Ordinance I have had the honor to submit to you.
I see before me wise and learned men, who have observed and sounded the ways of human life in
all its records, and many who have been chief actors in some of its gravest scenes. I ask, then, if in all
their lore of human society, they find a case parallel to this? South Carolina has 300,000 whites and
400,000 slaves; the whites depend on their slaves for their order of civilization and their existence.
Twenty millions of people, with a powerfully organized Government, and impelled by the most sacred
duties, decree that this slavery must be exterminated. I ask you, Virginians, is right, is justice, is
existence, worth a struggle?
. . . the main internal history of the United States has been one untiring, unfaltering effort on the part of
the non-slaveholding States to gain the control of the Federal Government--first to restrict, then to
subsidize, and now to destroy, the vital interests of the slave States. Checked or baffled in one course,
with the relentless energy and pertinacity of their nature, they have adopted another; retarded for a time,
by the lingering but sturdy fragments of a dying patriotism among themselves, or the banded resistance of
their victims, they have still held on with the fierce grip of avarice, and the mad rage of fanaticism, until
God has cursed them with a triumph which has plunged this continent into civil war, and destroyed,
perhaps forever, the fairest forms which human philosophy ever grafted upon the institutions of man.
.....
Gentlemen of Virginia, the people of these Southern States are no noisy faction, clamoring for place
and power; no hungry rabble, answering in blood to every appeal to brutal passion; no shouting mob,
ready to take for their Government a glittering epigram, or a fustian theory. They are not canting fanatics,
festering in the licentiousness of abolition and amalgamation. Their liberty is not a painted strumpet,
straggling through the streets. Nor does their truth need to baptise itself in pools of blood. They are a
grave, calm, prosperous, religious people; the holders of the most majestic civilization; the inheritors, by
right, of the fairest estate of liberty; fighting for that liberty; fighting for their fathers' graves; standing
athwart their hearth-stones, and before their chamber doors.
.....
But there is another element of disintegration and repulsion, still more potent than the geographical
or the political severance. It comes of the deep-seated, but active, religious sentiment, which belongs to
both people, having arrayed itself on the sides of the sections. This diversity, at this moment, is
appearing, not in forms of denominational polemics, but in shapes as bloody and terrible as Religion has
ever assumed since Christ came to the earth. Its representative, the Church, has bared her arm for the
conflict--her sword is already flashing in the glare of the torch of fanaticism--and the history of the world
tells us that when that sword cleaves asunder, no human surgery can heal the wound. There is not one
Christian slaveholder here, no matter how near he may be to his meek and lowly Master, who does not
feel in his heart, that from the point of that sword is now dripping the last drop of sympathy which bound
him to his brethren of the North. With demoniac rage, they have set the Lamb of God between their seed
and our seed.
I have run rapidly over these diversities to show that they pervade the entire composition of the
social systems of the two sections, and that, therefore, we believe the political union unnatural and
monstrous; and its offspring must be abortive and fruitless, save of that fearful brood of woes which must
always come from such conjunctions.
.....
Believing the rights violated and the interests involved are identical with the rights and interests of
the people of Virginia, and remembering their ancient amity and their common glory, the people of South
Carolina have instructed me to ask, earnestly and respectfully, that the people of Virginia will join them in
the protection of their rights and interests.
Mr. President, I have performed my missions, and do now, in the name of my Government, tender to
this Convention the most cordial thanks for their honorable consideration of that mission; and, in my own
behalf, I offer to the Convention and the citizens of Virginia, my heartfelt gratitude for their noble courtesy
and most generous kindness to myself personally.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/prestonj/prestonj.html
Abraham Lincoln
First Inaugural Address
Monday, March 4, 1861
Fellow-Citizens of the United States:
IN compliance with a custom as old as the Government itself, I appear before you to address you
briefly and to take in your presence the oath prescribed by the Constitution of the United States
to be taken by the President "before he enters on the execution of this office."
...
Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a
Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be
endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most
ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is
found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from
one of those speeches when I declare that—
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States
where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many
similar declarations and had never recanted them; and more than this, they placed in the
platform for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic
resolution which I now read:
Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of
each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment
exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our
political fabric depend; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any
State or Territory, no matter what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.
I now reiterate these sentiments, and in doing so I only press upon the public attention the most
conclusive evidence of which the case is susceptible that the property, peace, and security of no
section are to be in any wise endangered by the now incoming Administration. I add, too, that
all the protection which, consistently with the Constitution and the laws, can be given will be
cheerfully given to all the States when lawfully demanded, for whatever cause—as cheerfully to
one section as to another.
...
I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is
perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national
governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic
law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National
Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some
action not provided for in the instrument itself.
Again: If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature
of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who
made it? One party to a contract may violate it—break it, so to speak—but does it not require all
to lawfully rescind it?
. . . no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union that resolves and
ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States
against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to
circumstances.
I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws the Union is unbroken, and to
the extent of my ability, I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me,
that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem to be only a
simple duty on my part, and I shall perform it so far as practicable unless my rightful masters,
the American people, shall withhold the requisite means or in some authoritative manner direct
the contrary. I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the
Union that it will constitutionally defend and maintain itself.
In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be
forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and
possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and
imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using
of force against or among the people anywhere.
...
That there are persons in one section or another who seek to destroy the Union at all events and
are glad of any pretext to do it I will neither affirm nor deny; but if there be such, I need address
no word to them. To those, however, who really love the Union may I not speak?
Before entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its
benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain precisely why we do it?
Will you hazard so desperate a step while there is any possibility that any portion of the ills you
fly from have no real existence? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the
real ones you fly from, will you risk the commission of so fearful a mistake?
...
Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by
constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of
popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it
does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a
minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority
principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.
...
One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other
believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.
...
Physically speaking, we can not separate. We can not remove our respective sections from each
other nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go
out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country can
not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile,
must continue between them.
...
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of
civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being
yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government,
while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion
may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory,
stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over
this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will
be, by the better angels of our nature.
http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html
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