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INAUGURATION OF PRESIDENT DAVIS

On February 17 President Davis arrived at Montgomery, on a special train from Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, having delivered twenty-five speeches to enthusiastic crowds. In these he made such declarations as the following:

"It may be that we will be confronted by war, that the attempt will be made to blockade our ports, to starve us out; but they know little of the Southern heart, of Southern endurance. No amount of privation could force us to remain in a Union on unequal terms. England and France would not allow our great staple [cotton] to be dammed up within our present limits; the starving thousands in their midst would not allow it. We have nothing to apprehend from blockade. But, if they attempt invasion by land, we must take the war out of our territory. If war must come, it must be upon Northern, and not upon Southern, soil. In the meantime, if they are prepared to grant us peace, to recognize our equality, all is well.

"Your border States will gladly come into the Southern Confederacy within sixty days, as we will be their only friends. England will recognize us, and a glorious future is before us. The grass will grow in the Northern cities, where the pavements have been worn off by the tread of commerce. We will carry war where it is easy to advance-where food for the sword and torch await our armies in the densely populated cities; and, though they [the enemy] may come and spoil our crops, we can raise them as before; while they cannot rear the cities which took years of industry and millions of money to build."

On February 18 the President was inaugurated with imposing ceremonies. His Inaugural Address, says Horace Greeley, in his "American Conflict," was a temperate and carefully studied document. Assuming the right of secession as inherent in "the sovereign States now composing this Confederacy," to be exercised whenever, in their judgment, the compact by which they acceded to the Union "has been perverted from the purposes for which it was ordained, and ceased to answer the ends for which it was established," and that its exercise "merely asserted the right which the Declaration of Independence of 1776 defined to be

inalienable," he avers of their recent action that "it is by the abuse of language that their act has been denominated revolution." "They formed a new alliance," he continues, [ignoring their solemn compact in the Federal Constitution by which they had covenanted with each other that "No State shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation."] The Federal Government is termed by him "the agent through whom they

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Acknowledged by a Mighty Prince and Faithful Ally

[The Prince to his Cabinet: "I am afraid in rascality they will beat us''] From the collection of the New York Historical Society

communicated with foreign nations," which they have now "changed"-that is all. As they had cotton to sell, which the North, with nearly all other civilized countries, wished to buy, their policy was necessarily one of peace; and he argued that the old Union would inevitably and gladly, for cotton's sake, if for no other, cultivate peace with them.

There was an undertone in this Inaugural, however,

which plainly evinced that the author expected nothing of the sort. "If we may not hope to avoid war," says Mr. Davis, "we may at least expect that posterity will acquit us of having needlessly engaged in it. We have entered upon a career of independence, and it must be inflexibly pursued through many years of controversy with our late associates of the Northern States." Hence, he very properly called upon his Congress, in addition to the services of the militia, to provide for a navy, and "a well-instructed, disciplined army, more numerous than would usually be required as a peace establishment."

Mr. Davis carefully refrained from any other allusion to slavery, or the causes of estrangement between the North and the South, than the following:

"With a Constitution differing only from that of our fathers in so far as it is explanatory of their well-known intent, freed from sectional conflicts, which have interfered with the pursuit of the general welfare, it is not unreasonable to expect that the States from which we have parted may seek to unite their fortunes to ours, under the government which we have instituted. For this, your Constitution makes adequate provision; but beyond this, if I mistake not, the judgment and will of the people are that union with the States from which they have separated is neither practicable nor desirable. To increase the power, develop the resources, and promote the happiness of the Confederacy, it is requisite there should be so much homogeneity that the welfare of every portion should be the aim of the whole. Where this does not exist, antagonisms are engendered, which must and should result in separation."

SLAVERY THE CORNERSTONE OF THE CONFEDERACY

ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS

Mr. Stephens, the Vice-President of the "Confederacy," proved far less reticent and more candid. On his return from the convention or congress whereby the "Confederacy" had been cemented, and he chosen its Vice-President, he was required to address a vast assemblage at Savannah, and did so on March 21, in

elaborate exposition and defence of the new Confederate Constitution. After claiming that it preserved all that was dear and desirable of the Federal Constitution, while it embodied very essential improvements on that document, in its prohibition of protective duties and internal improvements by Confederate authority; in its proffer to cabinet ministers of seats in either House of Congress, with the right of debate; and in forbidding the reëlection of a President while in office, Mr. Stephens proceeded:

"But, not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other-though last, not least: the new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution— African slavery as it exists among us-the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the 'rock upon which the old Union would split.' He was right. What was conjecture with him is now a realized fact. But whether he comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time. The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guaranty to the institution while it should last; and hence no argument can be justly used against the constitutional guaranties thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation; and the idea of a government built upon it-when the storm came and the wind blew, it fell.

"Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon, the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that

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