Jefferson Davis

“ It is our duty in this last hour to seize the pillars of our Government and uphold them, though we be crushed in the fall. Then what is our policy? Are we to drift into war? Are we to stand idly by, and allow war to be precipitated upon the country? Allow an officer of the army to make war? Allow an unconfirmed head of a department to make war? Allow a general of the army to make war? Allow a President to make war? No, sir. Our fathers gave to Congress the power to declare war, and even to Congress they gave no power to make war upon a State of the Union. ”

“ If it be treason for a citizen to defend the State under whose protection he lives, even against the Federal Government, the Constitution has placed him in the cruel dilemma of being, in the event of conflict between his State and the United States, necessarily compelled to commit treason against one or the other. This surely cannot be the condition to which our fathers reduced us when they entered into the compact of union. Allegiance is everywhere due to the sovereign only. That sovereign, under the American system, is the People—the People of the State to which the individual belongs ”

“ When they see a President making war without the assent of Congress; when they behold judges threatened because they maintain the writ of habeas corpus so sacred to freemen; when they see justice and law trampled under the armed heel of military authority, and upright men and innocent women dragged to distant dungeons upon the mere edict of a despot; when they find all this tolerated and applauded by a people who had been in the full enjoyment of freedom but a few months ago — they believe that there must be some radical incompatibility between such a people and themselves. ”

“ Let our progress be across the land and over the sea, let our flag as stated in your resolutions, continue to wave its welcome to the oppressed, who flee from the despotism of other lands, until the constellation which marks the number of our States which have already increased from thirteen to thirty two, shall go on multiplying into a bright galaxy covering the field on which we now display the revered stripes, which record the original size of our political family, and shall shed its benign light over all mankind, to point them to the paths of self-government and constitutional liberty. ”

“ The Constitution is the law supreme to every American. It is the plighted faith of our fathers; it is the hope of our posterity. I say, then, I come not to argue questions outside of or above the Constitution, but to plead the cause of right, of law and order, under the Constitution and to plead it to those who have sworn to abide by that obligation.
One of the fruitful sources, as I hold it, of the errors which prevail in our country, is the theory that this is a Government of one people; that the Government of the United States was formed by a mass. ”

“ The successful soldier when he returns from the field is met by a welcome proportionate to the leaves which he has added to the wreath of his country’s glory. Each has his reward; to one, the admiring listener at the hearthstone; to another, the triumphal reception; to all, the respect which patriotism renders to patriotic service. To the soldier who, in the early part of the Mexican war, set the seal of invincibility upon American arms, and subsequently by a signal victory dispersed and disorganized the regular army of Mexico, his countrymen voted the highest reward known to our government. ”

“ A new union might subsequently be formed, but the original one could never by coercion be restored. Any effort on the part of the others to force the seceding State to consent to come back is an attempt at subjugation. It is a wrong which no lapse of time or combination of circumstances can ever make right. A forced union is a political absurdity. No less absurd is President Lincoln's effort to dissever the sovereignty of the people from that of the State; as if there could be a State without a people, or a sovereign people without a State. ”

“ Is a man a pauper merely because he comes here without property, without money in his purse? Go, look along your lines of internal improvements, where every mile has mingled with it the bones of some foreigner who labored to create it. Go to your battle fields, where your flag has been borne triumphantly, and where fresh laurels have been added to the brow of your country, and there you will find the sod dyed as deep by the blood of the foreign born as by that of the native citizen. ”