States are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government, but that by a compact, under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes-delegated to the Government certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself the residuary mass of right to their self-government; and that whenever the General Government assumes undelegated power, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and as an integral party, its coStates forming, as to itself, the other party; that the Government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.

"2. Resolved, That as Jefferson made the rugged issue of doctrine with Adams, so must we make it with the Federal Administration, if we would resist effectually the infinitely greater dangers which surround us. We do, consequently, declare THE WAR WHOLLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL, and on that ground we hold it should be stopped. If a majority of the copartnership States can retain a member by force, they may expel one by force, which has not yet been pretended by anybody. The Federal agency at Washington, backed up by a majority of the States in Congress, without right, in the vain attempt to subjugate the minority of the States, is destroying their liberty, and crushing the federal system to atoms by thus attacking the Constitution. The Administration, and that majority, are the real enemies of the Union, which cannot and ought not to exist after its conditions are destroyed. The Chicago platform, and General McClellan and his war-record letter, which he has laid over it, must all be repudiated by Democrats for the same reason. If we admit that the war is constitutional, we must not murmur at the monstrous abuses which attend it, for they all naturally grow out of the original atrocity.

"The evils of paper money, of a protective tariff, of the public debt; the military draft; the military governors; the arbitrary

arrests; the provost-marshals; the fifteen bastiles; the drumhead courts-martial; the bayonet elections; the padlocked lips; the fettered press; the wholesale confiscation; the constructive treason; our immense armies and navies, are mere incidents of the war itself; and so are President Lincoln's futile proclamations of slave emancipation, and his general amnesties. Half truths and narrow issues have been the bane of Democracy for many years, and they have so contracted the minds and hearts of Democrats, that all sense of justice, and all knowledge of constitutional law which sat there so long enthroned, have departed, and left us an easy prey to the violence of President Lincoln's Administration, and to corrupt managers of our own party in State and national conventions."

We shall not undertake here to follow the course, or enumerate the details of the Presidential campaign of 1864. We may anticipate our narrative generally to say, that that campaign resulted in the signal triumph of fanaticism and violence in the North, and in the election of Abraham Lincoln by the vote of every Northern State except Delaware, Kentucky, and New Jersey.

THE RIVAL ADMINISTRATIONS AT RICHMOND AND WASHINGTON.A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF NORTHERN DESPOTISM.

While on political subjects in the war, it will not be amiss here to put in comparison the internal administrations of the rival governments at Washington and Richmond. We have, on other occasions, developed some points of this comparison. It is fruitful of many considerations; it is after all the most interesting inquiry in the war; and it comes up naturally and conveniently for another review at the date of the Northern election which approved Mr. Lincoln's policy, and bestowed upon him a second term of office.

There were many persons to be found in the North, who, admitting the rapid decline, since the commencement of the war, of their government to despotism, attempted a consolation by the assertion that a similar lapse of liberty had taken place in the Confederate States. This opinion obtained to a remarkable extent, even among those who were not unfriendly to the South, and certainly were not disposed to do her in

justice. It is to be largely ascribed to the very prevalent ignorance in the North, even among men otherwise well informed and intelligent, of the internal policy of the Confederate States, and of the true spirit of their peculiar legislation with reference to the war. It was not only the Black Republican party that circulated the idea of an iron-handed tyranny in the Confederate States; but that idea was admitted to a large extent in the minds of those who were disposed to think well of the Southern experiment, but were not proof against the impressions derived from such peremptory laws as required men to take up arms in mass, to devote certain property to the government, and to hold themselves, generally, in subjection to the necessities of the war. These measures wore the appearance of the machinery of despotism to them, simply because they did not understand their true nature; while they added to their ignorance the mistake of viewing them from a stand-point which put the North and the South in the same circumstances.

It is quite true that the conscription and impressment laws of the Confederacy were apparently harsh measures. Yet there is something to be said of them beyond the justification of necessity; and this is, that they were really nothing more than the organized expressions of the popular devotion of the South in the war; intended only to give effect and uniformity to it. They were not instances of violent legislation imposed upon the people; they were merely the formulas of willing and patriotic contributions of men and means to a war, in which not only a nation fought for its very existence, but each individual for the practical stake of his own fortune. It was difficult to make Northern men understand this: that, while they had a mortal terror of the draft and other demands of the war, the people of the South were cheerfully willing to take up arms, and to devote their substance to the government. It is thus that the conscription and impressment laws, which, in the North, would have been the essence of despotism, were really in the South not edicts of violence, but mere conventionalisms of the war, through which the patriotism of the people acted with effect and regularity.

But, beyond these laws, even the appearance of despotism stopped in the Southern Confederacy. We have only to com

pare the established routine there with what was constantly observed in the North, to show how divergent, since the first gun was fired at Fort Sumter, had been the histories of the belligerents on all questions affecting political and civil liberty. There were no military governors in the Confederacy; there was no martial law there; there was, properly called, no political police there-the police establishment being limited to a mere detective force to apprehend, in the communities in which they were placed, spies and emissaries of the enemy. At no time in the war had soldiers ever been placed at a pollingplace in the Confederacy; at no time had newspapers ever been suppressed; and at no time had a single instance of arbitrary arrest, or of imprisonment without distinct charges and the opportunity to reply, occurred within the Confederate jurisdiction. These are facts which carry their own comment on the base reflection that in the war the South had declined, along with the North, in its civil administration, and had kept company with it on its road to despotism.

When we speak of the despotism at Washington, we do not design a figure or an exaggeration of rhetoric. We merely name a clearly defined species of human government, as we would any other fact in history. The Presidential election of 1864 gave occasion for a full review of the acts of the Washington authorities. We may sum up that review in some brief paragraphs, dividing it into two branches: First, Mr. Lincoln's unconstitutional course on the rights of the States on the slavery question; second, his course on the rights of his own people in all matters of civil liberty;-these two classes of outrage being a convenient division of his Administration, viewed both as to its intentions upon the South and its effects upon the North.

As to the slavery question, it is only necessary to state the record.

1. The convention which nominated Abraham Lincoln President of the United States in 1860, passed a resolution affirming "the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively.”

2. Mr. Lincoln, in his inaugural of March, 1861, inserted this resolution at length, and declared that to him it would be

"a law," and added, "I now reiterate these sentiments ;" and "in doing so, I only press upon the public attention the most conclusive evidence of which the case is susceptible, that the property, peace, and security of no section are not to be in anywise endangered by the now in-coming administration." In the same State paper he had before said, quoting approvingly from one of his own speeches, "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it now exists ;" and subjoined, "I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

3. In Secretary Seward's famous letter to the minister of the United States, resident at Paris, designed as a diplomatic circular to the European courts, and written "by direction of the President," occurs the following paragraph: "The condition of slavery in the several States will remain just the same, whether it (the rebellion') succeeds or fails. The rights of the States, and the condition of every human being in them, will remain subject to exactly the same laws and forms of administration, whether the revolution shall succeed, or whether it shall fail. Their constitutions, and laws, and customs, habits and institutions, in either case, will remain the same. It is hardly necessary to add, to this incontestable statement, the further fact that the new President, as well as the citizens through whose suffrages he has come into the administration, has always repudiated all designs whatever, and wherever imputed to him and them, of disturbing the system of slavery as it is existing under the Constitution and the laws. The case, however, would not be fully presented were I to omit to say that any such effort on his part would be unconstitutional, and all his acts in that direction would be prevented by the judicial authorities, even though they were assented to by Congress and the people."

4. In his message to Congress of the 6th of March, 1862, known as his emancipation message, after recommending to that body that they should pass a resolution that the United States ought to co-operate with the States by means of pecuniary aid in effecting the gradual abolishment of slavery, Mr. Lincoln expressly disavowed, for the Government, any authority over the subject, except with State assent. His language was, that his proposition "sets up no claim of a right, by Fed