The South Was Right

by James Ronald Kennedy

  Article VI.

  SECTION 1.

  1. The Government established by this Constitution is the successor of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America, and all the laws passed by the latter shall continue in force until the same shall be repealed or modified; and all the officers appointed by the same shall remain in office until their successors are appointed and qualified, or the offices abolished.

  2. All debts contracted and engagements entered into before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the Confederate States under this Constitution as under the Provisional Government.

  3. This Constitution, and the laws of the Confederate States made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made under the authority of the Confederate States, shall be the supreme law of the land, and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

  4. The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the Confederate States and of the several States, shall be bound, by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office of public trust under the Confederate States.

  5. The enumeration, in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people of the several States.

  6. The powers not delegated to the Confederate States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people thereof.

  Article VII.

  SECTION 1.

  1. The ratification of the Conventions of five States shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the same. When five States shall have ratified this Constitution in the Manner before specified, the Congress, under the provisional Constitution, shall prescribe the time for holding the election of President and Vice-president, and for the meeting of the electoral college, and for counting the votes and inaugurating the President. They shall also prescribe the time for holding the first election of members of Congress under this Constitution, and the time for assembling the same. Until the assembling of such Congress, the Congress under the provisional Constitution shall continue to exercise the legislative power granted them; not extending beyond the time limited by the Constitution of the Provisional Government.

  Adopted unanimously, March 11, 1861

  At Montgomery, Alabama

  ADDENDUM VII

  Plunder of Eleven States

  The Yankee myth-makers would have us to believe that the complaints about Reconstruction come from Southern racists, and that, therefore, such complaints should be dismissed out of hand. By using this stratagem they can avoid the necessity of manning their indefensible position. We have included a portion of a speech delivered by a Northern Congressman who was brave enough to challenge the radicals of his day.

  Those who think that Reconstruction was a time of re-building and progressive political movements will find no comfort in these brave words.

  Plunder of Eleven States

  by

  Rep. Dan Vorhees, Indiana

  U.S. House of Representatives

  March 23, 1872

  From turret to foundation you tore down the government of eleven States. You left not one stone upon another. You not only destroyed their local laws, but you trampled upon their ruins. You called conventions to frame new Constitutions for these old States. You not only said who should be elected to rule over these States, but you said who should elect them. You fixed the quality and the color of the voters. You purged the ballot box of intelligence and virtue, and in their stead you placed the most ignorant and unqualified race in the world to rule over these people.

  Let the great State of Georgia speak first. You permitted her to stand up and start in her new career, but seeing some flaw in your handiwork, you again destroyed and again reconstructed her State government. You clung to her throat; you battered her features out of shape and recognition, determined that your party should have undisputed possession and enjoyment of her offices, her honors, and her substance. Then bound hand and foot you handed her over to the rapacity of robbers. Her prolific and unbounded resources inflamed their desires.

  In 1861 Georgia was free from debt. Taxes were light as air. The burdens of government were easy upon her citizens. Her credit stood high, and when the war closed she was still free from indebtedness. After six years of Republican rule you present her, to the horror of the world, loaded with a debt of $50,000,000, and the crime against Georgia is the crime this same party has committed against the other Southern States. Your work of destruction was more fatal that a scourge of pestilence, war or famine.

  Rufus B. Bullock, Governor of Georgia, dictated the legislation of Congress, and the great commonwealth of Georgia was cursed by his presence. With such a Governor, and such a legislature in perfect harmony, morally and politically, their career will go down to posterity without a rival for infamous administrations of the world. That Governor served three years and then absconded with all of the gains. The Legislature of two years spent $100,000 more than had been spent during any eight previous years. They even put the children’s money, laid aside for education of white and black, into their own pockets.

  There is no form of ruin to which she has not fallen a prey, no curse with which she has not been baptized, no cup of humiliation and suffering her people have not drained to the dregs. There she stands the result of your handiwork, bankrupt in money, ruined in credit, her bonds hawked about the streets at ten cents on the dollar, her prosperity blighted at home and abroad, without peace, happiness, or hope. There she stands with her skeleton frame admonishing all the world of the loathsome consequences of a government fashioned in hate and fanaticism, and founded upon the ignorant and vicious classes of manhood. Her sins may have been many and deep, and the color of scarlet, yet they will become as white as snow in comparison with those you have committed against her in the hour of her helplessness and distress.

  I challenge the darkest annals of the human race for a parallel to the robberies which have been perpetrated on these eleven American States. Had you sown seeds of kindness and good will they would long ere this have blossomed into prosperity and peace. Had you sown seeds of honor, you would have reaped a golden harvest of contentment and obedience. Had you extended your charities and your justice to a distressed people you would have awakened a grateful affection in return. But as you planted in hate and nurtured in corruption so have been the fruits which you have gathered.

  ADDENDUM VIII

  Joint Resolutions, No. 1 State of New Jersey

  The following resolution from a Yankee state is instructive as to the degree of disregard that the Radicals had for the Original Constitution. The work of destruction carried on by the Northern Congress was so bad that even some of their own kinsmen were revolted by it.

  Even though New Jersey rescinded its ratification, the Radicals nonetheless continued to count New Jersey as having ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. This resolution also supports the Southern claim that the actions of the federal Congress regarding the Southern states and the Constitution were (and still are) unconstitutional, illegal, revolutionary, and voidl

  Senate

  Joint Resolutions, No. 1.

  State of New Jersey

  Joint Resolutions withdrawing the consent of this State to the proposed Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, entitled article fourteen and rescinding the Joint Resolution, approved September eleventh, Anno Domini eighteen hundred and sixty-six, whereby it was resolved that said proposed Amendment was ratified by the Legislature of this State.

  The Legislature of the State of New Jersey having seriously and deliberately considered the present situation of the United States, do declare and make known:

  Th
at the basis of all government is the consent of the governed; and all constitutions are contracts between the parties bound thereby; that until any proposition to alter the fundamental law, to which all the States have consented, has been ratified by such number of the States as, by the Federal Constitution, makes it binding upon all, any one that has assented is at liberty to withdraw that assent, and it becomes its duty to do so, when, upon mature consideration, such withdrawal seems to be necessary to the safety and happiness of all; prudence dictates that a consent once given should not be recalled for light and transient causes; but the right is a natural right, the exercise of which is accompanied with no injustice to any of the parties; it has therefore, been universally recognized as inhering in every party, and has ever been left unimpaired by any positive regulation.

  The said proposed amendment not having yet received the assent of the three-fourths of the States, which is necessary to make it valid, the natural and constitutional right of this State to withdraw its assent is undeniable.

  With these impressions, and with a solemn appeal to the Searcher of all Hearts for the rectitude of our intentions, and under the conviction that the origin and objects of said proposed amendments were unseemly and unjust, and that the necessary result of its adoption must be the disturbance of the harmony, if not the destruction, of our system of self-government, and that it is our duty to ourselves and our sister States to expose the same, do further declare:

  That it being necessary, by the Constitution, that every amendment to the same should be proposed by two-thirds of both Houses of Congress, the authors of the said proposition, for the purpose of securing the assent of the requisite majority, determined to, and did, exclude from the said two Houses eighty representatives from eleven States of the Union, upon the pretence that there were no such States in the Union; but, finding that two-thirds of the remainder of said Houses could not be brought to assent to the said proposition, they deliberately formed and carried out the design of mutilating the integrity of the United States Senate, and without any pretext or justification, other than the possession of the power, without the right, and in palpable violation of the Constitution, ejected a member of their own body, representing this State, and thus practically denied to New Jersey its equal suffrage in the Senate, and thereby nominally secured the vote of two-thirds of the said Houses.

  The objective of dismembering the highest representative assembly in the nation, and humiliating a State of the Union, faithful at all times to all its obligations, and the object of said amendment were one—to place new and unheard of powers in the hands of a faction, that it might absorb to itself all executive, judicial and legislative power, necessary to secure to itself immunity for the unconstitutional acts it had already committed, and those it has since inflicted on a too patient people.

  The subsequent usurpations of these once national assemblies in passing pretended laws for the establishment, in ten States, of martial law, which is nothing but the will of the military commander, and therefore inconsistent with the very nature of all law, for the purpose of reducing to slavery men of their own race in those States, or compelling them, contrary to their own convictions, to exercise the elective franchise in obedience to the dictation of a faction in those assemblies; the attempt to commit to one man arbitrary and uncontrollable power, which they have found necessary to exercise to force the people of those States into compliance with their will; the authority given to the Secretary of War to use the name of the President to countermand the President’s orders and to certify military orders to be the direction of the President, when they are notoriously known to be contrary to the President’s direction, thus keeping up the form of the Constitution to which the people are accustomed, but practically deposing the President from his office of Commander-in-Chief, and suppressing one of the great departments of the government that of the executive; the attempt to withdraw from the supreme judicial tribunal of the nation the jurisdiction to examine and decide upon the conformity of their pretended laws to the Constitution, which was the chief function of that august tribunal as organized by the fathers of the republic; all are but ample explanations of the power they hoped to acquire by the adoption of the said amendment.

  To conceal from the people the immense alterations of the fundamental law they intended to accomplish by the said amendment, they gilded the same with prepositions of justice, drawn from the State Constitutions; but like all the essays of unlawful power to commend its designs to poplar favor it is marked by the most absurd and incoherent provisions.

  It proposes to make it a part of the Constitution of the United States, that naturalized citizens of the United States shall be citizens of the United States; as if they were not so with out such absurd declaration.

  It lodges with the legislative branch of the government the power of pardon, which properly belongs, by our system, to the executive.

  It denounces, and inflicts punishment for past offenses, by constitutional provision, and thus would make the whole people of this great nation, in their most solemn and sovereign act, guilty of violating a cardinal principle of American liberty: that no punishment can be inflicted for any offence, unless it is provided by law before the commission of the offence.

  It usurps the power of punishment, which, in any coherent system of government, belongs to the judiciary, and commits it to the people in their sovereign capacity.

  It degrades the nation, by proclaiming to the world that no confidence can be placed in its honesty or morality.

  It appeals to the fears of the public creditors by publishing a libel on the American people, and fixing it forever in the national Constitution, as a stigma upon the present generation, that there must be constitutional guards against a repudiation of the public debt; as if it were possible that a people who were so corrupt as to disregard such an obligation would be bound by any contract, constitutional or otherwise.

  It imposes new prohibitions upon the power of the State to pass laws, and interdicts the execution of such parts of the common law as the national judiciary may esteem inconsistent with the vague provisions of the said amendment, made vague for the purpose of facilitating encroachments upon the lives, liberties and property of the people.

  It enlarges the judicial power of the United States so as to bring every law passed by the State, and every principle of the common law relating to life, liberty, or property, within the jurisdiction of the Federal tribunals, and charges those tribunals with duties, to the due performance of which they, from their nature and organization, and their distances from the people, are unequal.

  It makes a new apportionment of representation in the national councils, for no other reason than thereby to secure to a faction a sufficient number of the votes of a servile and ignorant race to out weigh the intelligent voices of their own.

  It sets up a standard of suffrage dependent entirely upon citizenship, majority, inhabitancy and manhood, and any interference whatever by the State, imposing any other reasonable qualifications as to time of inhabitancy, causes a reduction of the State’s representation.

  But the demand of the supporters of this amendment in this State, that Congress should compel the people of New Jersey to adopt what is called “impartial suffrage,” makes it apparent that this section was intended to transfer to Congress the whole control of the right of suffrage in the State, and to deprive the State of a free representation by destroying the power of regulating suffrage within its own limits, a power which they have never been willing to surrender to the general government, and which was reserved to the States as the fundamental principle on which the Constitution itself was constructed—principles of self-government.

  This section, as well as all others of the amendment, is couched in ambiguous, vague and obscure language, the uniform resort of those who seek to encroach upon public liberty; strictly construed, it dispenses entirely with a House of Representatives, unless the States shall abrogate every qualification, and especially that of time of inha
bitance, with out which the right of suffrage is worthless.

  This Legislature, feeling conscious of the support of the largest majority of the people that has ever given expression to the public will, declare that the said proposed amendment being designed to confer, or to compel the States to confer the sovereign right of the elective franchise upon a race which has never given the slightest evidence, at any time, or in any quarter of the globe, of its capacity for self-government, and erect an impracticable standard of suffrage, which will render the right valueless to any portion of the people, was intended to overthrow the system of self-government under which the people of United States have for eighty years enjoyed their liberties, and is unfit, from its origin, its object and its matter, to be incorporated with the fundamental law of a free people; therefore,

  1. BE IT RESOLVED, by the Senate and General Assembly of the State of New Jersey, That the joint resolution approved September eleventh, Anno Domini eighteen hundred and sixty-six, relative to amending the Constitution of the United States, which is in the following words, to wit: