My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject.  Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.  If there be an object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it.  Such of you as are now dissatisfied still have the old Constitution unimpaired, and on the sensitive point, the laws of your own framing under it; while the new Administration will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either.  If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied hold the right side in this dispute there is still no single good reason for precipitate action.  Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty.  In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, are the momentous issues of civil war.  The government will not assail you.  You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.  You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend” it.

I am loth to close.  We are not enemies, but friends.  We must not be enemies.  Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection.  The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

JEFFERSON DAVIS,

OF MISSISSIPPI.’ (BORN 1808, DIED 1889.)

Inaugural address, Montgomery, Ala., February 18, 1861.

GENTLEMEN OF THE CONGRESS OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA, FRIENDS, AND FELLOW-CITIZENS: 

Our present condition, achieved in a manner unprecedented in the history of nations, illustrates the American idea that governments rest upon the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter and abolish governments whenever they become destructive to the ends for which they were established.  The declared compact of the Union from which we have withdrawn was to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity; and when in the judgment of the sovereign States now composing this Confederacy it has been perverted from the purposes for which it was ordained, and ceased to answer the ends for which it was established, a peaceful appeal to the ballot-box declared that, so far as they were concerned, the government created by that compact should cease to exist.  In this they merely asserted the right which the Declaration of Independence of 1776 defined to be inalienable.  Of the time and occasion of this exercise they as sovereigns were the final judges, each for himself.  The impartial, enlightened verdict of mankind will vindicate the rectitude of our conduct; and He who knows the hearts of men will judge of the sincerity with which we labored to preserve the government of our fathers in its spirit.