ifference whether the
present movement at the South be called "secession" or "rebellion." The
movers, however, well understand the difference. At the beginning they
knew they could never raise their treason to any respectable magnitude by
any name which implies violation of law. They knew their people possessed
as much of moral sense, as much of devotion to law and order, and as much
pride in and reverence for the history and government of their common
country as any other civilized and patriotic people. They knew they
could make no advancement directly in the teeth of these strong and noble
sentiments. Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious debauching of the
public mind. They invented an ingenious sophism which, if conceded, was
followed by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the
complete destruction of the Union. The sophism itself is that any State of
the Union may consistently with the national Constitution, and therefore
lawfully and peacefully, withdraw from the Union without the consent of
the Union or of any other State. The little disguise that the supposed
right is to be exercised only for just cause, themselves to be the sole
judges of its justice, is too thin to merit any notice.

With rebellion thus sugar-coated they have been drugging the public mind
of their section for more than thirty years, and until at length they
have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the
government the day after some assemblage of men have enacted the farcical
pretense of taking their State out of the Union, who could have been
brought to no such thing the day before.

This sophism derives much, perhaps the whole, of its currency from the
assumption that there is some omnipotent and sacred supremacy pertaining
to a State--to each State of our Federal Union. Our States have neither
more nor less power than that reserved to them in the Union by the
Constitution--no one of them ever having been a State out of the Union.
The original ones passed into the Union even before they cast off their
British colonial dependence; and the new ones each came into the Union
directly from a condition of dependence, excepting Texas. And even Texas
in its temporary independence was never designated a State. The new ones
only took the designation of States on coming into the Union, while that
name was first adopted for the old ones in and by the Declaration of
Independence. Therein the "United Colonie