PERPETRATED BY FRAUD AND VIOLENCE. 5. The rebellion was carried through the forms of secession, in many of the States, by fraud and violence, against the wishes, and in some against the direct vote, of a majority of the people. The facts which illustrate this are voluminous, and generally well known. We are compelled to glance at them briefly, and can refer to a few palpable cases only. The popular vote of Louisiana upon the ordinance of secession was never officially made public. It was charged by the New Orleans papers at the time as being largely against secession, and the officers of the Convention were challenged to proclaim the result. To this day that duty has never been performed by them, while there is the most unquestionable evidence that the State was forced into honor and justice, is to accord to the South any necessary protection against the piratical policy of abolitionism, and a distinct recognition of her rights in the Territories of the United States." What, then, does Dr. Baird wish to have done, and by whom? He would probably have had Congress, when assembled in December, 1860 immediately get down on its knees and beg the South's pardon that the people had elected Mr. Lincoln, even when that Congress had a Democratic majority in both Houses. Hear him: "No one capable of forming an intelligent judgment on the subject, can look over the progress of events at the South, and the results thus far, and doubt that had Congress, at the opening of the present session, PROMPTLY shown a spirit of magnanimous patriotism, such as was so eminently becoming from the stronger to the weaker, and which the circumstances so clearly demanded, the tide of secession would have been stayed on the borders of South Carolina; and that State would soon have returned to her place in our midst." We have shown what measures for "peace" Congress did actually propose when that Democratic majority had been reduced to a minority by the withdrawal of the Southern members. Dr. Baird, nevertheless, mourns over "Congressional inactivity," and denounces "the treacherous passivity of the present session." It is but just to suppose, however, that he would not have belabored Congress in exactly that style, had the proceedings of the whole session been before him at the time he wrote; especially when, at the opening, his friends were in the majority. But after making allowance for this, the character of his pamphlet is such, throughout, that, although by no means as we suppose so intended, it was well calculated and unquestionably did give "aid and comfort" to the rebellion, both among those who were then and long before had been mustering and arming soldiers for the overthrow of the Government, and their hearty sympathizers all through the North. PERPETRATED BY FRAUD AND VIOLENCE. 17 secession against the direct vote of a majority of the people. Governor Hamilton, of Texas, in an address to the people of that State in January last, not going into any proof of the fact, but incidentally referring to what those whom he was addressing well knew to be true, says: "When you were forced, by a minority, into rebellion, you were in the enjoyment of every blessing ever conferred by civil government upon men." Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, were carried into secession by violence and terror, as many of their own newspapers and public men at the time declared. Proof of this which we have in possession would fill many pages. In some States, the whole work was done by a Convention, or by the State Legislature, without the voice of the people taken upon the ordinance of secession; in others, the submission of the question to a popular vote was but a burlesque on the elective franchise. We mention facts which are too recent and too familiar to be doubted, and only refer to them to exhibit another of the striking characteristics of the rebellion. A single testimony, chiefly concerning the manner in which Virginia was carried "out of the Union," will serve as an example of other cases. It is furnished by a distinguished Southern statesman who was familiar with the scenes he describes: In these circumstances was the peaceful process of secession set on foot, and the deceived masses of the Southern States stimulated into that unnatural frenzy which wildly hurried them into a treason from which retreat soon became impossible. When this drama of secession came to the stage of its formal enactment in the passage of secession ordinances, it was characterized by frauds only more stupendous than those I have described, because they implicated a greater number of actors and spread over a wider surface. Whilst some of the States, perhaps a majority of them, were in earnest in their resolve to secede the most important States were not; and if the people in these had been left to the free expression of their wish they would have refused. The Convention of Virginia had been elected by a vote which was largely against secession, and the Legislature which authorized that Convention had taken care to provide that no ordinance of secession should have any effect unless ratified by a subsequent expression of the popular will in the regular election. When the Convention assembled at Richmond, there was a majority of its members opposed to the ordinance. The scenes that were enacted in the sequence of the proceedings, by which that majority was reduced to a minority, are only partially known to the country. Whilst the sessions were open to the public observation the majority held its ground, but amidst what perils and appliances, every inhabitant of Richmond at that time knows. The best men of the State, and there were many, who had dared to speak in the Convention in favor of the Union, were exposed to the grossest insults from the mob that filled the lobbies, and by whom they were pursued with hootings and threats to their own dwellings. Still, no vote could be got sufficient to carry the ordinance. The Convention then resolved to exclude the public and manage their work in secret session. From that day affairs took a new turn. The community of Richmond was filled with strife. The friends of the Union, both in the Convention and out of it,- -a large number of persons,- -were plunged into the deepest anxiety and alarm. They felt that the cause was lost and that the sentiment of the majority of the State would be overruled. Quarrels arose. Ardent and reckless men were distempered with passion. It was no longer safe to discuss the subject of the day in the streets. The hotels were filled with strangers, loud, peremptory, and fierce. A friend of the Union could not mingle in these crowds without certainty of insult, nor even sometimes without danger of personal violence. The recusant members of the Convention were plied with every expedient to enforce their submission. The weak were derided, the timid bullied, the wavering cajoled with false promises and false representations of the state of opinion in the country. Those who could not be reached by these arguments, but who were found pliable to more genial impulses, were assailed by flattery, by the influences of friendship, by the blandishments of the dinner-table, and finally carried away by the wild enthusiasm of midnight revelry. If the Convention had sat in Staunton or Fredericksburg, -anywhere but in Richmond.no ordinance of secession could have been passed. As it was, it was a work of long and sinister industry to bring it about. It became neces PERPETRATED BY FRAUD AND VIOLENCE. 19 sary to fire the people with new and startling sensations-to craze the public mind with excitement. To this end, messages were sent to Charleston to urge the bombardment of Sumter. *** The whole South became ablaze. Men lost all self-control, and were ready to obey any order. The vote of the Convention had been canvassed from time to time during this process of ripening the mind for the act of secession, and it was now found that it might be successfully put. It was taken three days after the surrender of Fort Sumter, and the public were told that it was carried by a large majority. Subsequent disclosures show that upwards of fifty of its members stood firm and preserved their equanimity in this great tempest of passion. The scene at the taking of the vote is described by one of the members as resembling the riot of a hospital of lunatics. The ratification of this act was yet to be gone through, as prescribed by the law, in a vote of the people to be taken in May. That proceeding was substantially ignored in all that followed. An appointment of members to the rebel Congress was immediately made, to represent the State in the Provisional Government then established at Montgomery. The President of the new Confederacy was forthwith invited to send an army into the State; and accordingly, when the month of May arrived, troops were stationed in all those counties where it was supposed any considerable amount of loyalty to the Union existed amongst the people. The day of election appointed for the ratification found this force stationed at the polls, and the refractory people mastered and quelled into silence. Union men were threatened in their lives if they should dare to vote against the ordinance; and an influential leader in the movement, but recently a Senator of the United States, wrote and published a letter, hinting to those who might be rash enough to vote against secession, that they must expect to be driven out of the State.* Of course, the ratification * Reference is here made to James M. Mason, now the Rebel Commissioner to London. His letter is dated "Winchester, Va., May 16, 1861," and was published in the Winchester Virginian. In this letter he says: "The ordinance of secession withdrew the State of Virginia from the Union, with all the consequences resulting from the separation. It annulled the Constitution and the laws of the United States within the limits of this State, and absolved the citizens of Virginia from all obligations and obedience to them." This is a little remarkable, when the Convention provided that the ordinance should be submitted to a vote of the people of the State. But we see from another paragraph of the same letter, what sort of an election this was to be: "If it be asked, what are those to do who in their consciences cannot vote to separate Virginia from the United States, the answer is simple and plain; honor and duty alike require that they should not vote on the question; if they retain such opinions, they must leave the State." All very "simple" and very "plain" and the plan was very faithfully executed. found no opposition in any doubtful county. * * * My object is to show that the whole secession movement was planned and conducted in the spirit of headlong revolution and premeditated war. In Tennessee the proceeding was even less orderly than in Virginia. In Missouri it was no better. The attempt was made to carry Kentucky and Maryland by the same arts and the same frauds, but utterly failed. Maryland has repudiated secession and its abettors with a persistent and invincible loyalty. Kentucky, under severe trial and in the actual contest of civil war, has bravely and honorably preserved her faith and repelled every assault. We have given this long extract, not because any proof is wanting of the fraud and violence by which the rebellion was inaugurated, but to show in these graphic details what loyal men all through the South suffered at the outset for opposing the insane movement. This authority is unquestionable. The extract is taken from the National Intelligencer, of Washington, D. C., of Feb. 23, 1864. The editor indorses the writer as "evincing ability, sagacity, and fine analysis, in laying bare the secret springs of the great insurrection," and says he is a "Southern gentleman who for many years occupied with distinction a seat in the National Legislature, and who subsequently held a responsible post in the administration of an important Executive Department of the Government."* * At a Union meeting in Huntsville, Alabama, on the 5th of March, 1864, the Hon. Jeremiah Clemens, formerly a United States Senator from that State, addressed the meeting, and said “he would tell the Alabarnians how their State was got out of the Union." He proceeded to say: "In 1861, shortly after the Confederate Government was put in operation, I was in the city of Montgomery. One day I stepped into the office of the Secretary of War, General Walker, and found there, engaged in a very excited discussion, Mr. Jefferson Davis, Mr. Memminger, Mr. Benjamin, Mr. Gilchrist, a member of our Legislature from Lowndes county, and a number of other prominent gentlemen. They were discussing the propriety of immediately opening fire on Fort Sumter, to which General Walker, the Secretary of War, appeared to be opposed. Mr. Gilchrist said to him: 'Sir, unless you sprinkle blood in the face of the people of Alabama they will be back in the old Union in less than ten days!" The next day General Beauregard opened the batteries on Sumter, and Alabama was saved to the Confederacy." Another distinguished statesman says upon the same gen |