n and
community of its rights; and the animating spirit is the mutual respect
and good-will of all members of the Union. The Northern people have
violated the provisions of the Constitution; they have infringed the
essential rights of the Southern communities, and threatened to invade
them still further; and they have displaced the spirit of mutual
good-will by alienation, suspicion, and hostility. The formal bond of
the Union being thus impaired, and its vital spirit lost, we propose
explicitly and finally to dissolve this partnership of States, and
reorganize our Southern communities in a new Confederacy.

"We charge you of the North with explicit violation of the Constitution
in the matters of the territories, the Supreme Court and the fugitive
slaves.

"You deny our right to carry a part of our property,--our unquestioned
property under the Constitution,--into the territories which belong
equally to the whole nation, and which have been acquired by our
treasure and our blood not less than by yours. You prevent slave-holders
from participating in the colonization of this domain, and thus
determine in advance that its future States shall exclude our
institutions. You thus unfairly build up a political preponderance,
which you use for the discouragement and injury of our industrial
system.

"Against this wrong we have appealed to the Supreme Court, and secured
its express affirmation of the right to carry slave property, equally
with any other property, into the territories. This solemn decree of the
highest judicial authority you set at naught and defy. You say you will
reorganize the court and reverse the decision. You do not even wait for
that; you assume in party convention to reverse the mandate of the
Supreme Court. You not only contradict its declaration that slavery in
the territories is protected by the Constitution; you go farther, and
affirm that Congress has no authority to protect it there.

"The Constitution affirms that fugitives from labor must be returned to
their masters. A Federal statute provides for such return. That statute
is not only decried by your orators and resisted by your mobs; it is
contravened and practically nullified by statutes in all the free
States.

"These specific wrongs against us are inspired by a disposition which in
itself dissolves the bond of friendship between you and us,--a spirit of
open and avowed hostility to our social and industrial system. The Union
as our fat