rently regarded the tie that bound
them to the National Government as in no degree mutual, as imposing
no duty upon them. By some mysterious process still unexplained,
the more they gained from connection with the National authority,
the less was their obligation thereto, the more perfect their right
to disregard and destroy the beneficent government which had created
them and fostered them.

SOUTHERN GRIEVANCES NOT STATED.

In all the speeches delivered by the senators from the seceding
States, there was no presentation of the grievances which, in their
own minds, justified secession. This fact elicited less notice at
the time than it calls forth in retrospect. Those senators held
in their hands in the beginning, the fate of the secession movement.
If they had advised the Southern States that it was wiser and better
to abide in the Union, and at least to wait for some overt act of
wrong against the slave States, the whole movement would have
collapsed. But they evidently felt that this would be a shrinking
and cowardly policy after the numerous manifestoes they had issued.
South Carolina had taken the fatal step, and to fail in sustaining
her would be to co-operate in crushing her. While these motives
and aims are intelligible, it seems utterly incredible that not
one of the senators gave a specification of the wrongs which led
the South to her rash step. Mr. Toombs recounted the concessions
on which the South would agree to remain; but these were new
provisions and new conditions, never intended by the framers of
the Federal Constitution; and they were abhorrent to the civilization
of the nineteenth century.

Mr. Toombs, Mr. Jefferson Davis, and Mr. Benjamin were the three
ablest senators who spoke in favor of secession. Not one of them
deemed it necessary to justify his conduct by a recital of the
grounds on which so momentous a step could bear the test of historic
examination. They dealt wholly in generalities as to the past,
and apparently based their action on something that was to happen
in the future. Mr. John Slidell sought to give a strong reason
for the movement, in the statement that, if Lincoln should be
inaugurated with Southern assent, the 4th of March would witness,
in various quarters, outbreaks among the slaves which, although
they would be promptly suppressed, would carry ruin and devastation
to many a Southern home. It was from Mr. Slidell t