5 works sedulously, ingeniously, and sometimes heroically; but somehow or other, we do not like his idea, and try to stop it, and to substitute for it another idea, such as Sing Sing, or Auburn. Yet, even were it otherwise, is it then wholly forgotten that a revolution implies two parties, who must fight it out; and we, the one of the interested parties, must be acknowledged to have the right of saying No ? If it were not so, there would be no revolution. We fight in this, our trying struggle, emphatically for our own. We fight for the integrity of our country, of which Louisiana or Georgia belongs to me, as citizen of the United States, quite as much as to any Georgian or Louisiana man ; and I have a right as well as the duty to fight for it as much so as a Frenchman would have to fight for his France should Languedoc declare itself independent on some unlucky day. But say others, and it is sad to observe there are many Northerners of great notoriety among them, we have no right to fight the South, inasmuch as they, being sovereign States, had a sovereign right to secede. We deny it. We maintain that the word sovereignty applied to our States has merely slipped into our political language—merely slipped in, and much mischief has it done. The Constitution does not contain the word once from beginning to end. Let us, however, for argument’s sake accept this position. Either the South had a perfect right to secede, or it had no such right. If the latter, we are of course right in fighting for our Government, for Law, and Country ; and if the South had a right to secede, why then they constitute a sovereign nation, and we, being a sovereign nation too, have, according to all law of nations, the right of conquering another sovereign nation. Again, it is said that in fighting against the South we fight against the first of all American principles, namely, that which ascribes the foundation and essence of all true and good government to the consent of the governed. Mr. O’Sullivan, a New Yorker, I am grieved to say, calls this principle ‘'Americanism,” in a pamphlet, of which a large number has been sent from England to the United States, to convert those who stubbornly resist the South. It is a very sad production, yet not without its humor. Thus Mr. O’Sullivan urges upon every patriot in the North the duty of repudiating our own debt, and of assuming the debts of the South. But to leave the jocose part of the pamphlet, the pam
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=