Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 14.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

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[70] as thus authoritatively construed. By the bloody Caesarian operation of the war, the right of secession has indisputably been eviscerated from the fundamental law.

Blistered be the slanderous tongue, and cankered the coward heart, which would pervert what I am about to say into an attempt to revive dead issues or reopen settled controversies.

The constitutional dispute between the States as to the right of secession is, to day, as purely a historical question as the questions between the colonies and Great Britain about the rightfulness of the Stamp Act and of taxation without representation. As such I feel myself charged with the solemn duty of discussing it, to the end that I may aid in distributing and perpetuating for the benefit of this and coming generations, a knowledge of the grave and substantial grounds upon which their forefathers believed, when they ‘stood ia the imminent, deadly breach,’ in defence of the States, of which they were citizens, that they were acting in their right, in obedience to lawful authority, and in violation of no rightful allegiance due by them to any earthly power.

Standing by the grave of this dead and buried right of secession, we inscribe upon its tomb the solemn ‘requiescat in pace,’ we admit that the sepulchre wherein it is ‘inurned’ may never ‘ope his ponderous and marble jaws to cast it up again;’ but fanaticism itself cannot deny us the privilege of asserting that it once ‘lived and moved and had its being,’ sprung from the womb of the Constitution, begotten of the loins of the Fathers, in its day a leader of hosts as true and valiant as ever struck for the ‘altars of their country and the temples of their gods.’

Follow me, therefore, oh fellow-citizens of a reunited country, whether from the North or from the South, while, with reverent heart, in the spirit of impartial history, and in necessary vindication of the cause for which he fought in whose memory this monument is erected, I seek to trace the origin, the foundation and the history of the right of secession, bearing ever in mind that I speak not from the standpoint of to-day, but of that eventful moment in the already distant past when Lee was called upon to determine, by the lights then surrounding him, whether his allegiance was due to his native State or to the Federal Government, from which she had withdrawn.

Down to the days of Hobbes, of Malmesbury, kingship founded its claim to authority on Divine right. Hobbes originated the doctrine that political authority was derived from the consent of the governed, and based that consent upon the fiction of an ‘original ’