The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 | Page 2

stare and an embarrassed pause to ensue upon his avowal. At the same time that all his sympathies and hopes were for the North, the writer entertained opinions which forbade him to condemn the South, so far as the mere fact of secession and armed insurrection was concerned. To take a wide view of the question, he apprehends, that, in every fully constituted community, there are two coextensive and countervailing rights: the right of the existent de facto government to maintain itself by all legal and honorable means, and, if requisite, by the arbitrament of the sword; and the right of any section of the community to reorganize itself as it may see fit for its own interests, and to establish its independence by force of arms, should nothing else serve,--the "sacred right of insurrection." The insurgent party is not to be decried for the mere act of resistance, nor the loyal and governmental party for the mere act of self-conservation and repression of its opponents; each stands the hazard of the die, and commits its cause to a supreme trial of strength. If the American colonies of Great Britain were not to be blamed for the mere act of resisting the constituted authorities, if the English Parliamentarians, the French Revolution, the Polish Insurrection, the Italian Wars of Independence, were justifiable,--and the writer thoroughly believes that they all were so,--he fails to see that the Southern States of the American Union were necessarily in the wrong simply because they revolted from the Federal authority. And in each case he recognizes the coextensive right, so far as that alone is concerned, of the existing government to assert itself, and stem the tide of revolt. It is the old question of the Rights of Man and the Mights of Man, concerning which Carlyle has had so much to say. A trial between the Mights often throws considerable light upon the question of the Rights; and, until at any rate the true Might has been ascertained by this crucial test, one may without half-heartedness admit that both of the opposing Rights, the conservative and the disruptive, are genuine rights, mutually antagonistic and internecine, but neither disproved by the other.
But this is only the most rudimentary view of the matter. An abstract and indefeasible right of insurrection may exist, maintainable in any and every case; and yet a particular instance of insurrection maybe foolish, wicked, and altogether worthy of ruin and extinction. And the writer believes that he is perfectly consistent with himself in thinking both that the abstract right of insurrection existed in the case of the Southern States of the Union and the abstract right of repression in the Federal Government, and also that this particular insurrection deserved condemnation and failure, and this particular repression deserved credit and triumph,--a triumph which, when the "Mights of Men" had been sufficiently tested, it very arduously and very conclusively managed to achieve.
As to the question of a legal and constitutional right of secession, the writer has not the impudence to express--and scarcely to entertain--an opinion. That is a question for American lawyers and publicists to discuss and determine; the obfuscated British mind being entitled to affirm only this: that there seems to have been something to say on the Southern side of the question, as well as a good deal on the Northern. The writer apprehends that the abstract right of insurrection on the one hand, and of self-conservation on the other, quite overbears, in so vast and momentous a debate, the narrow, technical, legal question: that which it does not overbear is the rightness or wrongness of the immediate motive, conduct, and aim of any particular insurrection and repression, considered individually. The abstract rights remain the same in all cases; the application of those rights differs immeasurably, according to the merits of each several case.
What were the merits of this particular case? The constitutional majority of the whole nation had elected a President whose election was held by both parties to be tantamount to the policy of non-extension of slavery into the Territories of the Republic, and into all States to be thereafter constructed; and before the President elect had entered upon his functions, before a single subsisting legal right (which might or might not be a moral wrong) had been interfered with, while there was yet no ground for affirming that any such right would ever be interfered with, the Southern States declared that their minority was of more weight than the nation's majority, that they would break up the nation rather than abide by its award, and would themselves constitute a new nation, founded on the maintenance of slavery within their own borders, and its extension and propagation as opportunity might offer. This, and not the mere fact that they were secessionists,