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Updated: May 6, 2025
At the same time, as there was a danger that the Bulgars, thoroughly disappointed in their aspirations, might secede from us, it became absolutely impossible to hand over the Dobrudsha to the Roumanians.
In my annual message I expressed the conviction, which I have long deliberately held, and which recent reflection has only tended to deepen and confirm, that no State has a right by its own act to secede from the Union or throw off its federal obligations at pleasure.
Calhoun that the compact should be broken the moment the absolute control of Government passed out of the hands of the slaveholding clique. He was willing to wait till we had stolen Texas and paid a hundred millions for Cuba; but if the game seemed to be up, then secede at once. In a hasty moment, he started his revolution, when there was a stronger man than he to confront him.
The idea of respectable men going out to hunt each other, like game, became ridiculous to me, and I wondered why the statesmen of the North and South did not get together and agree on some sort of a compromise, and have the fighting stop. I would have agreed to anything, only, of course, whatever arrangement was made, it must be understood that the South had no right to secede.
As has been said, there was in the South generally no disposition to give up Southern claims, no doubt as to the right of secession, and no fundamental and overriding loyalty to the Union, but there was a considerable reluctance to give up the Union and much doubt as to whether secession was really wise; there was in the North among those who then made themselves heard no doubt whatever as to the loyalty due to the Union, but there was, apart from previous differences about slavery, every possible variety and fluctuation of opinion as to the right way of dealing with States which should secede or rebel.
Is it to be wondered at that the Southern people were absolutely clear in their conception of the right to secede if such doctrines were taught in the North by the highest authority within the party which had elected Abraham Lincoln? If his own party leaders were boldly proclaiming such treason to the Union how could he hope to stem the tide that had set in for its ruin?
This contract between sovereign States has been broken to such an extent, by long and repeated aggressions upon the South by the North, that the slave States who have seceded from the Union, or who may secede, are not only right in thus doing, but are justified in taking up arms, to prevent the collection of revenue by the Federal Government.
The agitation over slavery was growing more and more bitter, and when Lincoln was elected some of the Southern States threatened to go out of the Union. They claimed that it was their right to decide for themselves whether they should secede. On the other hand, the North declared that no State could secede without the consent of the other States.
It may be pointed out as a matter of special interest to the student of American history that, if the right of "self-determination" were sound in principle and uniformly applicable in establishing political allegiance and territorial sovereignty, the endeavor of the Southern States to secede from the American Union in 1861 would have been wholly justifiable; and, conversely, the Northern States, in forcibly preventing secession and compelling the inhabitants of the States composing the Confederacy to remain under the authority of the Federal Government, would have perpetrated a great and indefensible wrong against the people of the South by depriving them of a right to which they were by nature entitled.
"When the ship is in a storm," he used to say, "the passengers must lend a hand, and even women tug at the ropes." When the Southern States began to secede, some frightened compromisers in the North hoped to soothe them by silencing the abolitionists; roughs were employed to fill the anti-slavery halls and drown every voice. Sometimes there was personal violence.
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