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 revolution.
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 before, 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, ‘deriving 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
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67]
days from
Lexington to
Yorktown.
If thirteen colonies, with a population of less than three million of free men had the right to determine for themselves their form of government, and secede from the mother country, how much more should this new nation, possessing a territory twice as great, with a population of over six million of free men, exercise the same prerogative?
