Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 1.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

[450] fully aware that neither Constitution nor laws gave them any right to coerce a State to remain in the Union. The whole people, even in the imperious North, knew and recognized this truth. The New York Tribune, even, admitted it, violent as it was, and deprecated a Union “pinned together with bayonets.” Even General Winfield Scott, the military “Man Friday,” of Federal power, advised that the Government should say: “Erring Sisters, go in peace.” So strong was the conviction, even in the Northern mind, that such journals as Harper's Weekly and Monthly, shrewdly mercenary in their whole aim, were notoriously courting the secession feeling. New York, the financial capital of America, was well known to be opposed to the faction and to coercion. The previous Congress had expired without daring to pass any coercive measures. The administration was not at all certain that the public opinion of the American people could be made to tolerate anything so illegal and mischievous as a war of coercion. [Subsequent events and declarations betrayed also how well the Lincoln faction knew at the time that it was utterly unlawful. For instance: when Lincoln launched into that war, he did not dare to say that he was warring against States, and for the purpose of coercing them into a Federal Union of force. In his proclamation calling for the first seventy-five thousand soldiers, he had deceitfully stated that they were to be used to support the laws, to repossess Federal property and places, and to suppress irregular combinations of individuals pretending to or usurping the powers of State Governments. The same was the tone of all the war speakers and war journals at first. They admitted that a State could not be coerced into the Union; but they held that no State really and legitimately desired to go out, or had gone out--“the great Union-loving majority in the South had been overruled by a factious secession minority, and the Union troops were only to liberate them from that violence, and enable them to declare their unabated love for the Union.” No well informed man was, at first, absurd enough to speak of a State as “committing treason” against the confederation, the creature of the States; the measure was always spoken of as “Secession,” the actors were “Secessionists,” and even their territory was “Secessia.” It remained for an ecclesiastical body, pretended representative of the Church of the Prince of Peace, in their ignorant and venomous spirit of persecution, to apply the term “treason” first to the movement in favor of liberty.] The action of the seven States, then, perplexed the Lincoln faction excessively. On the