66 Southern Historical Society Papers.
These various resolutions and enactments of State authorities, and declarations of statesmen both of the Revolutionary and later periods, were accepted as avowals of constitutional rights, implying no lack of loyalty or patriotism.
If the States had the right under the Constitution to secede, then the Federal government had no constitutional right to coerce them. The inability of the Federal government to coerce States had been frequently illustrated by the refusal of governors to honor requisi- tions made upon them by governors of other States for the rendition of fugitive slaves, though the statute under which the requisitions were made was passed by Congress, and the government stood pledge'd to enforce its execution.
Thus stood the historical and legal features of the great contro- versy. To say that the people of Virginia, or of any other State, acting under the forms of law, could not withdraw from the Union without a violation of the Constitution, was to contest what was an accepted theory of the government, held by leaders of thought in every section, from the day of its foundation.
We are not discussing either the wisdom of exercising the right of secession or the wisdom of the fathers in the formation of such a goverment, but we are considering the actual terms of the Constitu- tion and the truths of history. And in the light of these conditions, that man is indeed reckless of inexorable facts who avows that men who died in the maintenance of rights so time-honored and so widely accepted were guilty of treason.
THE RIGHT OF REVOLUTION.
The statesmen of the seceding States founded their action, as we have seen, upon their rights under the Constitution. They never admitted that it was necessary to have recourse to the right of revo- lution. Mixed, however, in the popular mind with the right of secession was the conviction that the right of revolution was one that could not be denied. They had never learned to admit that George Washington was a traitor, only saved from the scaffold by the adventitious fortunes of war. Less than one hundred years be- fore, their fathers had decided for themselves the great question of their political destiny, with no higher warrant than the brave avowal of the declaration that governments are instituted among men, "de- riving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
The people felt that they had walked the path blazed out by the fathers, and asserted rights which had been vindicated in the heroic
