ple in times of peace, protecting them from punishment for any crime committed upon the citizens; suppressing our commerce; taxing us, without our consent; denying the right of trial by jury; transporting citizens beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences; taking away our charters; abolishing our laws; changing the forms of our government; suspending our legislatures and assuming the powers to legislate for us. He is accused of abdicating government here, by declaring us out of his protection, and levying war against us; plundering our seas, ravaging our coasts, burning our towns, and destroying the lives of the people; importing armies to complete the work of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun, with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy, only paralleled among the most barbarous nations; compelling our citizens to bear arms against their brethren; exciting insurrections among the citizens, and employing against them the savages, whose rule of warfare is the indiscriminate destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

Here, in the briefest possible space, is the indictment of the Colonies against the King of Great Britain. Here is the summing up of the wrongs, abuses and oppressions, which the colonists had long endured of the government under which they lived, and for the redress and removal of which they finally resolved upon resistance. Their accusation is not made up of abstractions; the wrongs they had endured were no imaginary evils. They were of such magnitude that the whole civilized world unanimously approved the attempt to redress them, even though it involved all the evils, sufferings and horrors of a civil war. Their indictment was not a piece of empty rhetoric adroitly designed to inflame the passions of men. It was the most solemn appeal of men as thoroughly sincere and as terribly in earnest as it is possible for men to be, when they know that all temporal interests-fortune, life and honor, are involved in the course they pursue. Their "Declaration" is not a "string of glittering generalities," ingeniously devised to mislead the judgment of men at home or abroad. Every one of its allegations was but a condensed history of facts, then fresh and glowing in the minds of the whole people, and patent to the world. It was no mere bauble of ambition; it was no dictate of vanity or pride, that induced the Revolution

ary patriots to risk all in resistance to the parent government; it was to secure for themselves and their posterity those rights which they declared to be the birthright of all men. It was for the vindication of no doubtful or questionable right that they appealed to arms. It was for the redress of no hypothetical wrongs that they resolved to resist the tyranny of the British Crown; it was to secure those rights everywhere regarded as essential to their highest interests; it was for the redress of those wrongs to which no intelligent and cultivated people could peaceably submit, or would long endure. It was not to anticipate measures of oppression, which they feared or imagined the government at some future time, might adopt; it was to resist measures by which they had long been oppressed, and against which they had earnestly and constantly protested. No right, civil, social, or religious could be safe from invasion, if they tamely submitted to the oppressive measures already adopted by the Crown. Indeed, submission would only have proved them unworthy the rights they claimed.

But it was not enough that they had convinced the civilized world that they had ample cause to resist the government to which they had hitherto owned allegiance. They must show that all other methods of redress had been unsuccessfully attempted. Hence they declare, "In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our petitions have been answered only by repeated injury." They had appealed from the throne to the people of the British realm; warning them of their attempts to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over the people of the Colonies; reminding them of the circumstances of the early emigration to this country; appealing to their native justice and magnanimity; conjuring them by the ties of a common kindred, to disavow the oppressive measures of the government. But the people, no less than the throne, were deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity. Nothing was left them but an appeal to God for the purity of their motive, and to the terrible ordeal of war to vindicate their rights and redress their wrongs. Though the struggle was long and severe, the result proved that they did not misjudge their ability to succeed. The multiplied wrongs they had endured-the repeated invasions of their dearest rights, justified before the world their appeal to arms.

Their long endurance and humble petitions for redress, threw upon the government that refused to listen to the supplications of its oppressed subjects, the responsibility for the extreme measures to which it had driven them, and for all the evils that should attend the terrible strife which it refused to avert.1

This country is now involved in a civil war, which, so far as human foresight can reach, threatens to be one of no ordinary magnitude and no trifling consequences. Never before since Xerxes invaded Greece has there been such hosts

1 Perhaps we cannot better illustrate the contrast between the spirit of 1776 and that of the South in 1861, than by placing side by side the two following extracts,-the first erased from Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence, to placate fastidious Slaveholders -the second is from the Preamble of the Louisiana Ordinance of Secession:

armed for deadly conflict upon any field of earth. Never before since the morning of creation has any conflict involved such momentous consequences as the one that has been precipitated upon our own beloved country. It seems almost impossible to imagine that men could be so deluded or so mad as to bring this terrific evil upon a land like this-the freest and most prosperous people upon whom the sun ever shone, under the noblest and most liberal government that ever held the sceptre of dominion upon the earth ;—surely, it is impossible, one is ready to say, for intelligent men to rise in rebellion against such a government. How could men rationally pursue such a course, except to vindicate some right acknowledged by all enlightened nations to lie at the foundation of all civil and social well-being; or to redress some enormous wrong to which no intelligent people could ever be expected to submit? We can very readily understand how a foreigner finds it very difficult to conceive that the people who have risen in arms against the legitimate authority of the country, have not done so for the defence of some important right, for the security of which all peaceful methods have been tried in vain, or for the redress of some stupendous wrong under which they have long suffered and remonstrated in vain. The object of the present paper is to examine the reasons which the leaders of the rebellion have assigned for the course they pursue; to enquire whether those reasons, if admitted, justify their present position in relation to the government; and whether their allegations are

true.

It is to be taken for granted, of course, that those who have been most active in promoting the present deplorable collision between the general Government and the seceded States, in the reasons they have assigned for their course, have endeavored to place their action in as fovorable a light as possible. If they have assigned any other than the true reasons for their course, it is because they judged that the fictitious reasons are better adapted than the true to enlist in their behalf the judgment, sympathy and assistance of the civilized world. It is not supposable that they should give false reasons for the rebellion into which they have plunged, if the truth would serve their purpose better. better. We are bound to admit that they have defended their cause by the ablest and most plausible plea within their reach. If

therefore the reasons they have assigned fail to justify them in their attempt to overthrow the Government, then their justification is out of the question. If then we fairly examine the reasons which have been given to the world by the leaders of the rebellion in defence of their cause, whether those reasons are real or pretended, we shall do them all the justice they can ask.

They are not entirely unanimous in the reasons they give for their attempt to overthrow the Government. Some have given but a single cause; others three or four; others again have assigned no cause at all, but confined themselves to the most general declamation, and vague assertions about the tyranny and oppression of the Government, the wrongs they have been compelled to endure, and the encroachments upon their rights which have been habitually and systematically practiced by the Government, till forbearance has ceased to be a virtue. The reasons they have given we can easily examine; the vague, impassioned and inflammatory declamation would be hardly worth our notice, were it not that it has played so conspicuous a part in plunging the nation into its present distraction and civil war.

These

One of the causes of complaint by the leaders of the rebellion-not a very important one, to be sure; not of sufficient note to be always upon their lists; but, if not "the last feather that broke the camel's back," it is one of the feathers that made up the burden which at last became intolerable, is the Fishing Bounties. That is a certain premium, according to their tunnage, paid to certain vessels engaged in deep sea fisheries. No discrimination is made in behalf of vessels from any section of the country. bounties are as open to the competition of Florida and Texas, as to Maine and Massachusetts. In the natural order of things, they would be awarded to those who had the energy and enterprise to secure them, by engaging in the arduous, perilous and uncertain business, for which the bounties were intended. And the fact that they have been secured almost exclusively by a certain section of the country, should be no cause of complaint to any other section. They were not offered with a design to benefit one section more than another, but to promote the interests of the whole country, by encouraging young men to engage in the fishing business. That vocation was regarded as a kind of school in which to