Lincoln on Secession
President Abraham Lincoln, Message
to Congress (July 4, 1861)
"The
[Secessionists] invented an ingenious sophism, which, if conceded, was followed
by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the complete destruction
of the Union'. The sophism itself is, that any state
of the Union may, consistently with the national Constitution, and therefore
lawfully, and peacefully, withdraw from the Union, without the consent of the
"This sophism
derives much-perhaps the whole-of its currency, from the assumption, that there
is some omnipotent, and sacred supremacy, pertaining
to a State-to each State of our Federal Union. Our States have neither more,
nor less power, than that reserved to them, in the Union, by the Constitution -
no one of them ever having been a State out of the
"Having
never been States, either in substance, or in name, outside of the Union,
whence this magical omnipotence of 'State rights,' asserting a claim of power
to lawfully destroy the Union itself?"