The Great North-Western Conspiracy in All Its Startling Details | Page 6

Government. As for the doctrine of State
Rights as expounded by Calhoun, it is carried beyond the Virginia and
Kentucky resolutions of '98, to that point which renders it destructive of
the end for which it is claimed to be enunciated.
It has been sought to carry the doctrine to that extremity beyond the
exercise of its own reserved powers, which must inevitably bring it in
collision with the legitimate operation of the powers delegated to the
General Government.
With this extreme, hence fallacious, doctrine of State Rights thus firmly
imbedded in the hearts and heads of a zealous people, rendering them,
upon conscientious principles, the ready tools of ambitious leaders,

filled with lust for power and place, it should not be a matter of so
much surprise, that, after years of uninterrupted and persistent
education and training of the generations in their order, that the year of
1860 found the continent trembling beneath the crack of musketry, the
tread of horse, and the roar of cannon.
As among the more important means used by designing men in aid of
the scheme of rebellion, and the ultimate establishment of a separate
government in the South, the nucleus of which was to be the cotton
states, secret organizations, assuming different names and traditions in
different localities in the South were established, having for their
special mission in the meantime the privacy of the plot, and the
education of the people to that indispensable standard of treason which
would eventually lead them to avow their principles at the point of the
sword.
These organizations, in point of antiquity, are traced to a time not long
anterior to the nullification of South Carolina in 1832, which was so
promptly suppressed by General Jackson, then President of the United
States. Some of them, however, claim even greater antiquity, and point
with affected pride to the historical period of the American colonial
revolution against the taxation and tyranny of England, as the date of
their origin. Whatever may be the facts as to the precise date of the
existence, respectively, of these disreputable cables, laid to undermine
the greatness and glory of the National Union, cemented as it is by the
blood of the sires and sages of the Revolution, is unimportant to the
purpose of the author, while the great living fact that they have been the
most deadly weapon in the hands of the enemy is corroborated by the
eventful history of the union of these States.
Prior to the breaking out of the rebellion in 1861, these various
organizations, being the van-guards in the general conspiracy against
the integrity and perpetuity of the Federal Government, had not been
introduced, to any great extent, in the non-slaveholding states, and in
consequence thereof had little or no tangibility north of the compromise
of 1820, familiarly known as Mason and Dixon's line. South of this line,
however, they had long been standing institutions in every city, town,

hamlet, villa and populated district throughout all of the late so-called
Confederate States of America; vying the Palmetto in rankness of
growth, and rivaling the rattlesnake in deadness of poison, until at
length, gorged with their own baneful offspring, and pale with the
sickness of their own stomachs, the child of secession was born unto
them as a curse and reproach to the Southern people and the
generations to follow them forever.
On the 17th of April, 1861, the report of the gun fired upon Fort Sumter
was heard by every member of these secret conclaves in the South, and
was the signal for the opening of the outer gates of every temple of
treason in the land.
From that inauspicious moment forward to the present, no mask has hid
from the scorn of the Christian world treason's hideous visage, but that
blear-eyed monster, armed with every weapon of iniquity which
devilish invention could devise, has alternately, with rage and despair,
rushed to and fro across the continent, spilling the blood of innocence.
When, upon the occurrence of the Presidential election in 1860, it was
found that the kernel planted by Calhoun had been fostered to maturity
by secret organization, the blood and treasure of seven states was at
once staked upon the fearful result, and the disruption of the Republic
and the erection of a slave-driving despotism upon the ruins solemnly
declared. In the outset, it was thought by leading political minds at the
North, that but little sincerity could be attached to the assertion of
independence by the Southern people. But as time elapsed and the
contest grew more formidable and bloody, Northern men began by
degrees to comprehend the magnitude of a chronic conspiracy which
had cost the life-long labors of its ablest advocates to prepare. And
though the hosts enlisted in the execution of this conspiracy