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CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

HILE it does not enter within the scope of this work to discuss the political subjects which, after long years of debate, culminated in the late war between the States, yet we are confronted at the very threshold of our undertaking with the moral question: Whether there was either violation of oath, or ingratitude to the United States, in resigning commissions in that service, and accepting commissions under their States, by those officers who had been educated in the military and naval schools at West Point and Annapolis?

That question involves in its solution the theories upon which the Constitution of the United States was framed. For, if it was ordained and established by one people, then the relation of citizenship to the United States was wholly outside of all relation to the States, and the allegiance of those officers was due directly and entirely to the United States. If, on the contrary, the Constitution was ordained and established by the States, in their sovereign and independent character, then allegiance was due primarily to the States, and became due to the United States only through the action of the States. If, therefore, the States, by their sovereign act, transferred the allegiance of their citizens to the United States, that allegiance could only be by the act of the State, and remain due only so long as the State continued a party to the Constitution of the United States.

Whether the theory of a national, or of a compact, government be the true theory of the Constitution, now and hereafter, it is not necessary to discuss. The compact theory of the United States Constitution, announced in 1800 to all the States, and denied by none, continued to be held by the people of the Southern States down to the year 1861. From that theory was derived the axiom of political faith, that the State, and not the citizen, was the contracting party to the Constitution, and that the power, right and duty of continuing with or withdrawing from the Union remained with the State. Hence

all Southern men held that the sovereign act of the State was obligatory on her citizens, and of such efficacy that disobedience by her citizen to the ordinance of secession would have been treason to the State. In the political relations of States there are questions, which the State only can determine; of these that of allegiance is the first and of most importance. At the formation of the Constitution of 1789, the States transmitted the allegiance of their citizens to the United States. The act of the State, by which the citizen was bound to obey the authority of the United States, did not divest the citizen of his duty to obey the State, but made allegiance to the United States to be the citizen's duty because the State was one of the United States. That act of the State did not create a double allegiance-one to the State, and another to the United States-but transferred, while the State was a party to the United States Constitution, the single allegiance of her citizen to the United States through and by virtue of the act of the State.

Under any theory of double allegiance it would have been impossible for the citizen to have escaped committing the crime of treason. For, if the State should be driven by oppression to withdraw from the Constitution of the United States, her citizen, under this double allegiance, would have been bound to the United States. Hence, if the citizens should obey their own State, they would be pursued and hunted down as traitors to the Federal government; and, if forsaking the State to which their allegiance was originally exclusively due, they should adhere to the Federal government, they would be traitors to their own State and enemies to their firesides. Such a scheme of government would be a monstrous engine of cruelty and oppression, which no man can believe the fathers of the Constitution erected to crush and grind their posterity between the upper and the nether millstones of the two governments, and then pronounce it to be a scheme "to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity."

With the officers of the army and navy there was no party politics- but they held a faith or conviction upon the relation of their States to the Federal Union, disconnected from all party association, which did not permit them to discuss whether their States were acting wisely or prudentlybut only that their States had acted, and that they were bound by the sovereign act of their States. It was their sense of duty their view of citizenship, their conviction of allegiance to the State-that impelled them to resign their commissions in the service of the United States and cast their fortunes with their States.

By ordinance of the Virginia Convention, it was "ordained that all officers, civil and military, and the people generally of this State, be and they are hereby released from any and all

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