Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 1.

[274] reassembled on the 25th of March. There were able men among them, who contended that the people and not that Convention should decide whether or not the new Constitution should be the supreme law of their land. These democratic ideas were scouted as heterodox, and the Convention proceeded to act as the embodied sovereignty of the State, by adopting the new plan of government by a vote of seventy-eight against seven.

March 26, 1861.

Such was the method by which a few arrogant politicians in seven of the States of the Union, usurping the rights and powers of the people, formed a league against the rightful and beneficent Government of that people, and in their name plunged their peaceful and highly prosperous country into a civil war unparalleled in the history of mankind in its extent, energy, and waste of life and treasure. The confiding, misled, and betrayed people had given them leave to meet in conventions, only to consider alleged grievances, and to deliberate upon the subject of their relations to the Union. From that time, the politicians acted as if there were no people to consult or to serve — as if they, and they alone, constituted the State. Their constituents were never allowed to express their opinions by vote concerning: the Ordinances of Secession, excepting in Texas, and the proceedings there were fraudulent and outrageous. And when seven of the revolutionary conventions, transcending the powers delegated to them by the people, appointed from among themselves commissioners to meet in General Convention at Montgomery, and that Convention assumed the right to found a new empire, the people were not only not consulted, and not allowed to express their views, by ballot, on a subject of such infinite gravity to themselves and their posterity, but, under the reign of a terrible military despotism, unequaled in rigor, lawlessness, and barbarity, they were not allowed to utter a dissenting word ever so privately, without danger of being relentlessly persecuted. Davis, the head of that despotism, had said (and his words applied equally to the people of the South, the North, and the world) :--“Whoever opposes us, shall smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel.”

While Jefferson Davis was on his way from his home in Mississippi to the city of Montgomery, near the Southern extremity of the Republic, there to be inaugurated leader of a band of conspirators and the chief minister of a despotism, Abraham Lincoln was journeying from his home in Springfield, Illinois, hundreds of miles farther north, on his way toward .the National Capital, there to be installed in office as Chief Magistrate of a nation. The contrast in the characters and political relations of the two men was most remarkable. One was a usurper, prepared to uphold Wrong by violence and the exercise of the gravest crimes; the other was a modest servant of the people, appointed by them to execute their will, and anxious to uphold Right by the majesty and power of law and the exercise of virtue and justice.

Mr. Lincoln was an. eminent representative American, and in his own career illustrated in a most conspicuous and distinguished manner the