res which
inaugurated the Revolution. "Secession" was the invention of ambitious
leaders, who overrode the forms of law, and have not dared to submit
their votes and their doings to primary meetings of the people whom
they have driven with a despotic tyranny. In the Revolution the
people themselves were the prime movers. Each little country town and
municipality of the original Colonies, that has a hundred years of
history to be written, will point us boastfully to entries in its
records showing how it _instructed_ its representatives first to
remonstrate against tyranny, and then to resist it by successive
measures, each of which, with its limitations and its increasing
boldness, was dictated by the same people. The people of Virginia,
remembering the ancient precedent which won them their renown,
_intended_ to follow it in an early stage of our present strife. They
allowed a Convention to assemble, under the express and rigid condition,
that, if it should see fit to advise any measure which would affect the
relations of their State to the Union, a reference should be made of it,
prior to any action, to the will of the people. The Convention covertly
and treacherously abused its trust. In secret session it authorized
measures on the strength of which the Governor of the State proceeded
to put it into hostile relations with the Union. When the foregone
conclusion was at last farcically submitted to the people, a perjured
Senator of the National Congress notified such of them as would not
ratify the will of the Convention, that they must leave the State.

Once more, in our Revolution, holders of office and of lucrative trusts
in the interest of England were to a man loyal to the Home Government,
and our independence was effected without any base appliances. In the
work of secession and rebellion, the very officials and sworn guardians
of our Government have been the foremost plotters. They have used their
opportunities and their trusts for the most perfidious purposes. Nothing
but perjury in the very highest places could have initiated secession
and rebellion, and to this very moment they derive all their vigor in
the council-chamber and on the field from forsworn men, most of whom
have been trained from their childhood, nurtured, instructed, and fed,
and all of whom have been fostered in their manhood, and gifted with
their whole power for harming her, by the kindly mother whose life they
are assailing. If the Man with