Our editors here refer to Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens -- of the "Cornerstone Speech" fame -- as "Aleck", first time I've seen that name.
Some people refer to Jefferson Davis as old Jeff Davis, but I doubt if anyone ever called him "Jeff" to his face... could be wrong about that.
Anyway, this is a great editorial, making arguments I've made on these threads many times, but also some I never thought to make, this one in particular:
- "He ["Aleck"] pleads that it all comes from the wicked obstinacy of the North in refusing to abide by the principles of the Declaration of Independence, that "all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."
With characteristic rebel willfulness the rebel Vice-President mutilates and perverts the doctrine of the Declaration.
What he quoted was only part of the sentence.
The very next clause qualifies it so as absolutely to make the passage dead against him -- its language being, "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends (i.e., life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,) it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it."
The very crime of the Confederacy is that they have undertaken to destroy a Government which was not destructive of these ends; in other words, that they rebelled without necessity.
The whole body of the Declaration is taken up with a recital of the "long train of abuses and usurpations" which could gain no redress, and which left no recourse but revolutionary resistance.
In the judgment of our fathers, it was not enough that they desired a new Government; they had to show that the old Government was an insufferable engine of oppression.
The Declaration upholds revolution only as an extreme resort.
Its whole tenor is a recognition that nothing short of virtual necessity can justify resistance to established authority.
The right of revolution is like the right of taking life.
There is such a right, but only in an extreme case.
Self-preservation alone confers it.
For ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS and his fellow-criminals to plead the example of our fathers as a justification of their acts, is as brazen as it would be for a wanton murderer to plead the example of a mad who had used the knife to save his life.
The murderer might as decently appeal to the code on justifiable homicide, as these rebels to the Declaration on justifiable revolution."
- "Though there were an Aleck Stephens at every crossroad in the Confederacy, they could not persuade the people to such extravagance of folly as he has urged them on to.
The rebel masses will be conquered into submission to the Constitution; and will live, if for nothing else, at least to teach their children to curse the day on which they ever gave themselves up to the revolutionary rule of DAVIS and STEPHENS."
