It seems to me a strange doctrine that
the most serious and responsible of all human acts imposes no
obligation on those who do it of showing that they have a real
grievance; that those who rebel for the power of oppressing others,
exercise as sacred a right as those who do the same thing to resist
oppression practised upon themselves. Neither rebellion nor any other
act which affects the interests of others, is sufficiently legitimated
by the mere will to do it. Secession may be laudable, and so may any
other kind of insurrection; but it may also be an enormous crime. It
is the one or the other, according to the object and the provocation.
And if there ever was an object which, by its bare announcement,
stamped rebels against a particular community as enemies of mankind,
it is the one professed by the South. Their right to separate is the
right which Cartouche or Turpin would have had to secede from their
respective countries, because the laws of those countries would not
suffer them to rob and murder on the highway.
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