Is Davis a traitor; or, Was secession a constitutional right previous to the war of 1861?
By Albert Taylor Bledsoe, free download or read at Archive.org
Bledsoe spent the entire CW in London pouring over the only other of the Constitution because Davis suspected that the North would try to show the South was wrong in a court of law. Chase feared Bledsoe in a court of law (Bledsoe was the chancellor and teacher at Ole’ Miss Law School) and knew that the North was wrong to invade the South and feared reparations to the South. A later case from Texas came up but the SCOTUS was packed with Northerners and didn’t have a chance. Bledsoe shows how in the Federalist papers even the preamble described asession into the Union but was changed for brevity. A recent study at Harvard (of all places unexpectedly) came to the conclusion that the Constitution was changed at the point of a bayonet and secession has not been proved to be unconstitutional. Many are not informed of the topic and parrot what is briefly written in many inadequate history books.
It is not the design of this book to open the subject of secession. The subjugation of the Southern States, and their acceptance of the terms dictated by the North, may, if the reader please, be considered as having shifted the Federal Government from the basis of compact to that of conquest; and thereby extinguished every claim to the right of secession for the future. Not one word in the following pages will at least be found to clash with that supposition or opinion.
The 14th Amendment defeats state claims of being sovereign and independent states. It reversed the relationship of the states and the federal government. It dictates to the states who are its citizens. Self-determination of state citizenship was extinguished.
The book was later republished by his daughter Sophia under the title, "The War Between the States; or Was Secession a Constittional Roight Previous to the War of 1861-65?" This reprint edition included an explanatory preface which may be of interest.
EXPLANATORY PREFACEAlbert Taylor Bledsoe had been graduated at West Point in 1830. He was there with both Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, though not a classmate of either. While professor of mathematics in the University of Mississippi his relations with Davis were maintained with great cordiality.
He was not in favor of sesession, but with the call for her quota of 75,000 men from Virginia, to enter the Federal Army, like Lee and other Virginians he felt that he could not ally himself with the enemies of his State, so he entered the Confederate Army, receiving the title of Colonel; but he was preeminently a student and a scholar, not a soldier. Later President Davis gave him a position in the Confederate Cabinet; his title was Chief of the Bureau of War, his duties those of Assistant Secretary of War. Later on in a consultation between Davis and Lee it was decided that the greatest service he could render to the seceded States was to write a constitutional history which should, if the facts were made clear, justify the South in the right to secede.
In order to do this it was necessary for him to have access to the debates in the formation of the constitution, of the United States as well as of the individual States, then constituting the Union.
The necessary documents were not to be found south of Mason and Dixon’s Line. He was therefore obliged to go to England to study there in the British Museum.
My mother, who was born in New Jersey, but for many years had lived in the South, was an ardent Southerner. She, out of a very limited inheritance, paid all of the expenses of the trip, of my father’s stay of several years in England, and of the family while he was gone, as well as of the publication of the book after his return in 1866.
He had intended to give it the title almost exactly like the' subtitle of the published volume; but on his return to America, Jefferson Davis was a prisoner in Fortress Monroe, and in peril of his life. He, therefore, gave the volume when it was issued the title, “IS DAVIS A TRAITOR?”
Charles O’Connor, Mr. Davis’s advocate in the trial for treason, told my father that without the facts brought to light in his book, he could not have saved Mr. Davis’s life.
My mother never received any compensation for what she had expended, and she always rejoiced that she had been able to aid in justifying her beloved South.
These few words of explanation seem necessary in issuing this volume again, as a book of reference for the schools of the South.
Sophia Bledsoe Herrick.
Another lawyer sent to Britain during the war was Benjamin Janin Sage who, under the name P.C. Centz, produced a book entitled "Republic of Republics; or American Federal Liberty.