may explode, and the explosion of which may "deal damnation round the land," and involve the fathers and mothers, and husbands and wives, and sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters, and innocent children of Virginia in miseries and woes unnumbered, the end whereof none of the present generation may live to see.-Joseph Segar, 1861.

SECESSION NO TRUE VIRGINIAN DOCTRINE.

SIR, there is nothing in the past political action of Virginia, nor anything in the past or present relations between her and the Federal Government, to justify the extreme and revolutionary movement the secessionists propose for her.

In 1798 she fixed her great general rule-that the Federal Government should not be resisted until it had committed some "deliberate palpable and dangerous" infraction of the Constitution. What infraction of this sort has been committed by the Federal Government? What is it-where is it-when was it committed? Has the present administration perpetrated any such aggression? And if the seceding States had remained in the Union, could Congress, with twenty-one majority in one House, and eight in the other, have committed any outrage upon the rights of Virginia, or of the South? Virginia then, on her own established principles of political action, ought not now to present the spectacle she does of extreme excitement, and ought not and cannot, consistently rush upon the violent and unconstitutional measures involved in these Senate resolutions, much less secede from the Union. She ought-it becomes her dignity and her ancient renown-to look calmly, even placidly, around her, and from the stand-point of that dignity and renown surveying the whole ground, consider and advise, and remonstrate and forbear, and forbear yet again, until every pacific and constitutional expedient for composition and safety shall have been exhausted. And furthermore, these radical measures of seizing the United States arms and seceding from the Union, are totally unwarranted by the more recent po litical action of Virginia. In 1850, when the subject of the Wilmot Proviso was up for consideration in her legislature, she took a new position. She declared that if any one of four things should be done by the Federal Government, she would "resist at all hazards and to the last extremity:" first, the application of the Wilmot Proviso to the common territories; secondly, the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia;

thirdly, interference with slavery in the States; and fourthly, interference with the slave trade between the States. Has any one of these things been done? Has the Wilmot Proviso been applied to the Territories? No. On the contrary at the late session of Congress, though it had, by the secession of the Gulf States, a clear majority, that body, Republican as it is, passed three territorial bills, from all of which the Wilmot Proviso was excluded. There was no slavery prohibition whatsoever; and more than this, a provision was incorporated in each of them that all rights of property and questions of personal freedom should be determined by the principles and proceedings of the common law, with the right of appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States-provisions that open the territories to every citizen of the Union who may choose to carry his slaves thither. Has any been enacted abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia? No. Even Mr. Lincoln assures us that he will approve no such law, except with the consent of the slaveholders of the District, and then not without compensation to the owners. Has any law been passed interfering with slavery in the States? Not at all. Such a doctrine is not even in the Chicago platform, and-what, in my judgment, ought forever to quiet Southern apprehension in regard to slavery in the States and even elsewhere-at the late session of Čongress-in which by the secession of the Gulf States, as already stated, the Republicans have the majority-a resolution was adopted by the necessary constitutional majority, recommending an amendment to the Constitution, whereby, hereafter, interference with slavery in the States by the Federal Government is to be totally and forever forbidden. Has the proposition to interfere with the slave trade between the States been ever heard of in Congress, or has it been even talked about except by the most extreme abolitionists? Not one then of the four things has been done for which Virginia said she would withdraw from the Union. Why, then, all this hot excitement and this hot haste to get out of the Union? Can Virginia on her own principles, proceed hastily to extreme measures of resistance, or to the adoption of the seizure and appropriation proposed by the resolutions before us?

Verily, if her sons in this hall, who are constituted the special guardians of her honor, regard consistency as one of her jewels, they will make that jewel glow all the brighter by voting down these shameful resolutions, and repudiating secession until, on our own solemnly avowed principles, the hour for resistance and revolution shall have come. Joseph Segar, 1861.

CAUSELESS COMPLAINTS OF THE SOUTH,

I DESIRE to be informed what wrong has been done to me, or any citizen of the South, or the South at large, by that Federal Government which some regard as accursed, and which they so hurry to destroy. I, for one, am not aware of any. If there be any law on the Federal statute-book impairing the rights of one southern man, or impeaching the equality of the southern States with the northern, let it be pointed out. The production of it is defied. No man has ever shown it, and no man ever can, because it is not on the statute-book. If it be there, it is easy to show it. If I am wrong, let my colleagues here set me right; and lest perhaps I may be in error, I ask them one and all-I appeal to you, Mr. Speaker, to the gentleman from Madison, Gen. Kemper, to my ardent disunion friend from Stafford, Mr. Seddon, to all the confessed secessionists in this body, and to all such outside of this body, to put their finger on one Federal law in the least degree infringing the constitutional rights of the South. If it exist, let me see it, that I may recant the error.

More than this, there is not only no such statute to be found from 1789 to this moment, but the Federal Government has been to the South the most parental of governments. Why, then, should we of the South desire to part with such a government? Some wrongs we are undoubtedly suffering at the hands of some of the northern States, but these grievances lie not at the door of that parental Federal Government, whose blessings drop upon us as gently as the dews of heaven, nor are they now for the first time existing. They existed and we endured them under the previous administrations, but now they have become wrongs so enormous and intolerable, that on account of them we must in an instant shiver this blessed Union into fragments.

But here arises the practical inquiry-that which so much concerns the masses of the people-shall we redress these grievances, or make them lighter, or remedy any wrong by disunion? Most assuredly not. Whatever ills we are suffering will be a thousand times aggravated by a separation of the States. The slavery agitation will be intensified; we shall lose scores of slaves where we now lose one; because by the abolition of the Fugitive Slave Law, and by reason of the readier facilities of escape, there will be no effectual impediment to such escape; the underground railroad will be sped, and its operations vastly extended; emigrant aid societies will be augmented in number, and means, and effi

ciency; and for one active abolitionist we shall have a thousand. The alienation which will be left behind disunion, the bitter and deep-seated sectional hate, and incessant border feuds and wars that must and will flow from the source of disruption, will as surely bring about these lamentable results as God's sun will send down his rays upon the earth when his broad disc glories above the horison.

Joseph Segar, 1861.

CONSEQUENCES OF SECESSION.

MR. SPEAKER, I shall not argue this doctrine of secession. The simple history of the Constitution; its simple and yet plainer reading; the overwhelming authority of our fathers against it, the crushing weight of opinion against it in our own State-her Jefferson declaring that even the old Confederation, a government far weaker than the present Federal Union, possessed the power of coercion-her Madison, the very father of the Constitution, solemnly asserting that its framers never for one moment contemplated so disorganizing and ruinous a principle-her great and good Marshall, decreeing more than once, from the bench of the Supreme Judiciary, that the Federal Constitution did not constitute a mere compact or treaty, but a government of the whole people of the United States, with supreme powers within the sphere of its authority -Judge Spencer Roane, the Ajax Telamon, in his day, of her State-rights republicanism, endorsing the sentiment: "It is treason to secede !"—her Thomas Ritchie, the "Napoleon of the Press," and Jupiter Tonans of the modern democracy, heralding, through the columns of the Richmond Enquirer, the impregnable maxims that "no association of men, no State or set of States has a right to withdraw from the Union of its own accord," and that "the first act of resistance to the law is treason to the United States;" the decisions of some of the most enlightened of the State judiciaries in repudiation of the dangerous dogma; the concurrent disavowal of it by the Marshalls, and Kents, and Storys, and McLeans, and Waynes, and Catrons, and Reverdy Johnsons, and Guthries, and all the really great jurists of the land; the brand of absurdity and wickedness which has been stamped upon it by Andrew Jackson, and Webster, and Clay, and Crittenden, and Everett, and Douglas, and Cass, and Holt, and Andrew Johnson, and Wickliffe, and Dickinson, and the great body of our truly eminent statesmen: these considerations and

authorities present the doctrine of secession to me with one side only.

But I do wish to inquire of my colleagues, if they have seriously reflected on the consequences of secession, should it come?

Do you expect, (as I heard some of you declare,) that the power and influence of Virginia are such that you will have peaceable secession, through an immediate recognition of the separate independence of the South? Alas! you hug a delusion.

Peaceable secession-secession without war! You can no more have it than you can crush in the rack every limb and bone of the human frame without agonizing the mutilated trunk. "Peaceable secession!" said Mr. Webster, “peaceable secession! Sir," continued the great expounder, “your eyes and mine are not destined to see that miracle. The dismemberment of this vast country without convulsion! The breaking up of the fountains of the great deep without ruf fling the surface!" No! secede when you will, you will have war in all its horrors; there is no escape. The Presi dent of the United States is sworn to see that the laws be faithfully executed, and he must and will-as Gen. Washington did, and as Gen. Jackson would have done in 1833-use the army, and the navy, and the militia, to execute the laws, and defend the Government. If he does not, he will be a perjured man. Besides, you cannot bring the people of the South to a perfect union for secession. There are those,"and their name is legion' "--whom no intimidation can drive into the disunion ranks. They love the old Union which their fathers transmitted to them,,and under which their country has become great, and under which they and their children have been free and happy. Circumstances may repress their sentiments for a while, but in their hearts they love the Union; and the first hour they shall be free to speak and to act, they will gather under the Stars and Stripes, and send up their joyous shouts for the old flag. They will not fight with you against the flag; so that there must be a double war-a Federal war, and a war among ourselves. And it may be that whole States may refuse to join in the secession movement, (which is most probable,) and then we shall witness the revolting spectacle of one Southern State warring against, and in deadly conflict with, another; and then, alas! will be over our unhappy country a reign of ter ror none the less terrific than that which deluged with blood and strewed with carnage revolutionary France. Joseph Segar, 1861.