How striking, too, is the contrast between the character and method of the proceedings which originated and now sustain the Rebellion, and those which initiated and carried through the Revolution!  The Rebellion exhibits to us a complete inversion of the course of measures which inaugurated the Revolution.  “Secession” was the invention of ambitious leaders, who overrode the forms of law, and have not dared to submit their votes and their doings to primary meetings of the people whom they have driven with a despotic tyranny.  In the Revolution the people themselves were the prime movers.  Each little country town and municipality of the original Colonies, that has a hundred years of history to be written, will point us boastfully to entries in its records showing how it instructed its representatives first to remonstrate against tyranny, and then to resist it by successive measures, each of which, with its limitations and its increasing boldness, was dictated by the same people.  The people of Virginia, remembering the ancient precedent which won them their renown, intended to follow it in an early stage of our present strife.  They allowed a Convention to assemble, under the express and rigid condition, that, if it should see fit to advise any measure which would affect the relations of their State to the Union, a reference should be made of it, prior to any action, to the will of the people.  The Convention covertly and treacherously abused its trust.  In secret session it authorized measures on the strength of which the Governor of the State proceeded to put it into hostile relations with the Union.  When the foregone conclusion was at last farcically submitted to the people, a perjured Senator of the National Congress notified such of them as would not ratify the will of the Convention, that they must leave the State.

Once more, in our Revolution, holders of office and of lucrative trusts in the interest of England were to a man loyal to the Home Government, and our independence was effected without any base appliances.  In the work of secession and rebellion, the very officials and sworn guardians of our Government have been the foremost plotters.  They have used their opportunities and their trusts for the most perfidious purposes.  Nothing but perjury in the very highest places could have initiated secession and rebellion, and to this very moment they derive all their vigor in the council-chamber and on the field from forsworn men, most of whom have been trained from their childhood, nurtured, instructed, and fed, and all of whom have been fostered in their manhood, and gifted with their whole power for harming her, by the kindly mother whose life they are assailing.  If the Man with the Withered Hand had used the first thrill of life and vigor coming into it by the word of the Great Physician to aim a blow at his benefactor, his ingratitude would have needed to stand recorded only until this year of our Lord, to have been matched by deeds of men who have thrown this dear land of ours into universal mourning.  Yet our English brethren would try to persuade us that these men are but repeating the course and the deeds of the American Revolution!