There has been a disposition at the North, encouraged by the few Union men at the South, to regard secession as the work of a few ambitious and unprincipled leaders, who, by their threats, their violence, and their overbearing manner, forced the mass of the people of their respective States into secession against their convictions and their will.No doubt there were leaders at the South, as there are in every great movement at the North; no doubt there were individuals in the seceding States that held secession wrong in principle, and were conscientiously attached to the Union; no doubt, also, there were men who adhered to the Union, not because they disapproved secession, but because they disliked the men at the head of the movement, or because they were keen-sighted enough to see that it could not succeed, that the Union must be the winning side, and that by adhering to it they would become the great and leading men of their respective States, which they certainly could not be under secession.
Others sympathized fully with what was called the Southern cause, held firmly the right of secession, and hated cordially the Yankees, but doubted either the practicability or the expediency of secession, and opposed it till resolved on, but, after it was resolved on, yielded to none in their earnest support of it.
These last comprised the immense majority of those who voted against secession.Never could those called the Southern leaders have carried the secession ordinances, never could they have carried on the war with the vigor and determination, and with such formidable armies as they collected and armed for four years, making at times the destiny of the Union well nigh doubtful, if they had not had the Southern heart with them, if they had not been most heartily supported by the overwhelming mass of the people.They led a popular, not a factious movement.
No State, it is said again, has seceded, or could secede.The State is territorial, not personal, and as no State can carry its territory and population out of the Union, no State can secede.
Out of the jurisdiction of the Union, or alienate them from the sovereign or national domain, very true; but out of the Union as a State, with rights, powers, or franchises in the Union, not true.Secession is political, not territorial.
But the State holds from the territory or domain.The people are sovereign because attached to a sovereign territory, not the domain because held by a sovereign people, as was established by the analysis of the early Roman constitution.The territory of the States corresponds to the sacred territory of Rome, to which was attached the Roman sovereignty.That territory, once surveyed and consecrated, remained sacred and the ruling territory, and could not be divested of its sacred and governing character.The portions of the territory of the United States once erected into States and consecrated as ruling territory can never be deprived, except by foreign conquest or successful revolution, of its sacred character and inviolable rights.
The State is territorial, not personal, and is constituted by public, not by private wealth, and is always respublica or commonwealth, in distinction from despotism or monarchy in its oriental sense, which is founded on private wealth, or which assumes that the authority to govern, or sovereignty, is the private estate of the sovereign.All power is a domain, but there is no domain without a dominus or lord.In oriental monarchies the dominus is the monarch; in republics it is the public or people fixed to the soil or territory, that is, the people in their territorial, and not in their personal or genealogical relation.The people of The United States are sovereign only within the territory or domain of the United States, and their sovereignty is a state, because fixed, attached, or limited to that specific territory.It is fixed to the soil, not nomadic.In barbaric nations power is nomadic and personal, or genealogical, confined to no locality, but attaches to the chief, and follows wherever he goes.The Gothic chiefs hold their power by a personal title, and have the same authority in their tribes on the Po or the Rhone as on the banks of the Elbe or the Danube.Power migrates with the chief and his people, and may be exercised wherever he and they find themselves, as a Swedish queen held when she ordered the execution of one of her subjects at Paris, without asking permission of the territorial lord.In these nations, power is a personal right, or a private estate, not a state which exists only as attached to the domain, and, as attached to the domain, exists independently of the chief or the government.The distinction is between public domain and private domain.
The American system is republican, and, contrary to what some democratic politicians assert, the American democracy is territorial, not personal; not territorial because the majority of the people are agriculturists or landholders, but because all political rights, powers, or franchises are territorial.The sovereign people of the United States are sovereign only within the territory of the United States.The great body of the freemen have the elective franchise, but no one has it save in his State, his county, his town, his ward, his precinct.Out of the election district in which he is domiciled, a citizen of the United States has no more right to vote than has the citizen or subject of a foreign state.This explains what is meant by the attachment of power to the territory, and the dependence of the state on the domain.The state, in republican states, exists only as inseparably united with the public domain; under feudalism, power was joined to territory or domain, but the domain was held as a private, not as a public domain.All sovereignty rests on domain or proprietorship, and is dominion.
