Dallas: "You will say (to
Lord John Russell) that, by our own laws and the laws of nature and the
laws of nations, this Government has a clear right to suppress
insurrection. An exclusion of commerce from national ports which have
been seized by insurgents, in the equitable form of blockade, is a
proper means to that end."[174] This is the same doctrine of
"combinations" fabricated by the authorities at Washington to serve as
the basis of a bloody revolution. Under the laws of nations, separate
governments when at war blockade each other's ports. This is decided to
be justifiable. But the Government of the United States could not
consent to justify its blockade of our ports on this ground, as it would
be an admission that the Confederate States were a separate and distinct
sovereignty, and that the war was prosecuted only for subjugation. It,
therefore, assumed that the withdrawal of the Southern States from the
Union was an insurrection.
Was it an insurrection? When certain sovereign and independent States
form a union with limited powers for some general purposes, and any one
or more of them, in the progress of time, suffer unjust and oppressive
grievances for which there is no redress but in a withdrawal from the
association, is such withdrawal an insurrection? If so, then of what
advantage is a compact of union to States? Within the Union are
oppressions and grievances; and the attempt to go out brings war and
subjugation.
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