the militia to execute the laws of the Confederate States, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions. Congress has power to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the Confederate States. Then comes the qualification. The States reserve the right to keep troops in time of war, when actually invaded. If she is not invaded, under provision made by Congress, they may be called forth if the emergency requires it. If she is invaded, she may keep such part of them as she thinks proper under her reserved right, and they cannot be taken without her consent. The whole case is in a nut shell. Congress may provide for calling forth the militia and for governing such part of them as are employed in the service of the Confederate States. The President is for the time commander-in-chief of all who are so employed. And all may be so employed except such as the State determines to keep by virtue of her reserved right in time of war, when actually invaded. These Congress has no right to call forth, and no right to provide for governing, and of these the President is not the constitutional commander-in-chief, but the Governor of the State is, so long as the State keeps them, and she has an unquestionable right to keep them as long as the invasion of her territory lasts.

This I understand to be the constitutional right of the State of Georgia. By this, as her Executive, I stand, and regard with perfect indifference all assaults upon either my loyalty or motives by those who deny this right, or seek to wrest it from her to increase their own power or gratify their own ambition. A word as to the use I shall make of this militia and of all the troops at the command of the State. No sentence in my former letter is an "inconsiderate utterance." No word in it justifies the construction that I will array my State in "armed antagonism against the Confederacy." On the contrary, I will use the troops to support and maintain all the just rights and constitutional powers of the Confederacy to the fullest extent. No State is truer to the Confederacy than Georgia, and none will make greater sactifices to maintain its rights, its just powers, and its independence. The sacrifices of her people at home and the blood of her sons upon the battle-field have abundantly established this truth. But, while I will employ all the force at my command to maintain all the constitutional rights of the Confederacy and of my State, I shall not hesitate to use the same force to protect the same rights against external assaults and internal usurpations. Those who imagine themselves to be the Confederacy, and consider only loyalty to themselves as loyalty to it, and who reconginze in neither the people nor the States any rights which conflict with their purposes or future designs, doubtless see in this the "foreshadowing of a guilty purpose." It is, to say the least of it, a fixed purpose. It is not only my right, but my duty, to uphold the constitutional rights and liberties of the people of Georgia by force, if necessary, against usurpations and abuses of power by the central Government. The militia is, under the Constitution, one of the proper instrumentalities for that purpose. There is scarcely a single provision in the Constitution for the protection of life, liberty, or property in Georgia that has not been and is not now constantly violated by the Confederate Government through its officers and agents.

It has been but a short time since one of the stores of the State of Georgia, containing property in the peaceable possession of the State, was forcibly entered by a Confederate officer, and the property taken therefrom by force. I had no militia present at the time to repel this