expressly stipulated in a written instrument called the Constitution. In that union the States constituted the units or integers, and were bound to it only because the people of each of them acceded to it in their separate capacities through the acts of their representatives.

That confederacy was designed to united under one Government two great and diverse social systems under one or the other of which all the States might be classified. As these two social systems were unequally represented in the common Government it was sought to protect one against a warfare which might be waged by the other through the forms of law by carefully defined restrictions and limitations upon the power of the majority in the common Government. Without such restrictions and limitations it is known historically that the union could not have been formed originally. But the dominant majority which at last proved to be sectional in its character not only used the machinery of a Government which they wielded to plunder the minority through unequal legislation in the shape of protective tariffs and appropriations made for their own benefit, but proceeding from step to step they waged through the forms of law a war upon the social system of the slave-holding States and threatened when fully armed with political power to use the Government itself to disturb the domestic peace of those States.

Finding that the covenants and conditions upon which the Union was formed were not only persistently violated but that the common Government itself then entirely in the hands of a sectional majority was to be used for the purposes of warring upon the domestic institutions which it was bound by express stipulations to protect, eleven of the slave-holding States felt it to be due to themselves to withdraw from a union when the conditions upon which it was formed either had been or were certainly about to be violated. They were thus compelled to withdraw from a Government which not only abdicated its duty to protect the domestic institutions of fifteen States, but on the one hand threatened those institutions with war and on the other withheld from the people interested in them the means of self-defense. The eleven Confederate States were thus forced in self-defense to abandon a Union whose ends were thus perverted, not from any passion of novelty or from any change of purpose, but to attain under a new Confederacy of more homogenous materials and interests the very ends and objects for which the first was formed. It was amongst the first of these objects to obtain a Government whose authority should rest upon the assent of the governed and whose action should represent also their will.

It was for the sacred right of self-government that they had been forced to take up arms and not to escape the just obligations incurred under the compact upon which the first Union was formed. On the contrary one of the first acts of the Government of the Confederate States was to send commissioners to the President of the United States to adjust amicably and fairly all questions of property and responsibility which had been jointly acquired or incurred by all the States when embraced in the same Union. The Government of the United States refused to receive these commissioners, the authority of their Government was denied, their people were denounced as rebels and threatened with coercion at the point of the sword.

On the part of the Confederate States the war in its inception was one of self-defense, and it has been waged since by them with no other end than to maintain their right to self-government. It is in the name