Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/494

States government it would be found that the great cause of disruption was the interference by States with a compact into which they had solemnly entered. "No man found cause for dissolution in anything that the Federal government did, for all declared that they wanted to preserve the Union until Lincoln was elected; nor in the decisions of the supreme court; nor could any objection be laid against the Federal Congress, for there the conservatives had a majority. What was the difficulty, Mr. President? The Northern States, sir, passed their personal liberty bills and nullified the acts of Congress. The State governments would not render up fugitives, declaring they were not criminals in withholding the escaped negroes, alleging they were not property; and the State judges took it upon themselves in their State courts to set aside the acts of Congress passed to carry out the fugitive slave law. These were the enormities that drove the South to her condition of determined secession. And when Mr. Lincoln was elected, it was thought he was seeking not to continue the Federal government, but to pervert the government and to accomplish through Federal agency what the Northern States had already sought to do by State action. That perfected the argument." Mr. Wigfall, expressing with some indignation his surprise at Mr. Hill s statement that the Federal government never trespassed upon the rights of the Southern States, brought out Mr. Hill’s explanation that the trespasses of the Federal government were not the evils alleged by the people in seceding. It was the trespasses committed by the States in the North in their faithlessness to the common compact. "I held the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, but the Federal government as such did not commit the trespasses which drove the Southern people into secession." Mr. Wigfall, interrupting with questions and remarks, denied very decidedly the observation of Senator Hill that there had been no cause of complaint against Congress on the ground