Excerpt from A Vindication of Secession and the South From the Strictures of Rev. R. J. Breckinridge, D. D., LL. D., In the Danville Quarterly Review

Nothing remains for the author to discuss, under his fifth head, but the duty of the Government at Washington in relation to secession. Having assumed that this is a con solidated nation, secession comes to be denounced as sedi tion, anarchy and rebellion, which must be crushed by the central authority. By the express terms, as iwell by the very nature of the Federal Constitution, a secession ordi nance in the South is as totally void as a personal liberty law in the North can possibly be. There was no more le gal necessity, nor any more logical consistency, in diatribes about lack of power to coerce a State, in one case than in the other. The doctrine that the people of a State are citizens of the United States only through its own Constitution and Government, is pronounced a political falsehood, and the power is declared complete to execute the laws of the United States upon every citizen of the United States, where ever found. He declares it sheer folly to weaken the posture of the General Government towards the secession movement; and is accordingly very severe upon those at the North who have united in protests against coercion, as all this but tends to avert the coming reaction which may save the country. His deliberate counsel, therefore, is, in this great emergency, that the General Government shall steadily but temperately enforce the laws, postal, revenue, and every other, in all the seceding States, in utter disre gard of all the ordinances these latter may have enacted, avoiding armed collision, except in repelling force by force. By this policy, to which he denies the term coercion, the voice that has not yet been heard, and the hand that has not yet been lifted - even the voice and the hand of this great nation - will be raised to restore the old Union to its former integrity.

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