Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 July 1885 — JEFF DAVIS ON SCHOOL HISTORIES. [ARTICLE]

JEFF DAVIS ON SCHOOL HISTORIES.

Tlie Old Arch-Traitor Objects to the Northern Historic*. The Jackson (Miss. ) Clarion prints tho following letter from Jefferson Davis in response to one in which'allusion had Been made to a favorable expression of opinion by tho West Station (Miss. ) Educational Journal concerning a Northern “School History of the United States:” Miss., June 20, 1885. "Col. J. L. Power, Clarion Office: “Dear Sir —lnclosed with this I send to you a letter on a subject of such importance as will no doubt commend it to your attention. As there can be no higher duty than to guard against false impressions in the instruction,©! children, so there can be no care more essential than the proper selection of tho school books. In them to pervert history and propagate untrue doctrines is to poison the sources’of our political streams. ■>, . ■ j.» “Among the l4ss informed persons at the North there exists an opinion that the negro Slave at the South was a mere chattel, having neither rights nor immunities protected by law or public opinion. Southern men knew such was not the case, and others desiring to know could readily learn the fact. On that error the,lauded story of‘Uncle Tom's Cabin ’was founded; but it is strange that a utilitarian and practical people did not ask why a slave especially valuable was the object of privation and abuse. Had it been a horse they would Lave been better able to judge, and they, would most probably have rejected the story for its improbability. Many attempts have been made to evade and misrepresent tho exhaustive opinion of Chief Justice Taney in the ‘Dred Scot’ case, but it remains unanswered. “From the statement in regard to Fort Sumter, a child might suppose that a foreign army had attacked the United States—(certainly could not learn that the State of South Carolina was merely seeking possession of a fort on her own soil, ana claiming that her grant of the site had become void. “The tyrant’s plea of necessity to excuse despotic usurpation is offered for the unconstitutional act of emancipation, and the poor resort to prejudice is invoked in the use of the epithet ‘rebellion’—a word inapplicable to States generally, and most especially so to sovereign members of a voluntary Union. But, alas for their ancient prestige, they Have even lost the plural reference they had in the Constitution, and seem so small to this utilizing tuition, as to be described by the neutral pronoun ‘it!’ Such language would be appropriate to an Imperial Government which in absorbing territories required the subjected inhabitants to swear allegiance, to ife. - “Ignorance and artifice have combined so to misrepresent the matter of official oaths in the United States that it may be well to give the question more than a passing notice. When the ‘Sovereign, independent States of America’ formed a constitutional compact of union it was provided in the sixth article thereof that the officers ‘of the United States and of the several States shall be bound bv oath or affirmation to support this Constitution,’ and by the law of June 1, 1789, the form of the required oath was prescribed as follows: ‘I, A B, do solemnly swear or affirm (as the case may be) that I will support the Constitution of the United States.’ “ That was the oath. The obligation was to support the Constitution. It created no new obligation, for the citizen already owed allegiance to his respective State, and through her to the Union of which she was a member. The conclusion is unavoidable that those who did not support, but did not vio-, Tate the Constitution, were they who broke their official oaths. The General Government had only the powers delegated to it by the States. The power to coerce a State was not given, but emphatically refused. Therefore, to invade a State, to overthrow its government by force of arms, was a palpable violation of the Constitution, which officers had sworn to support, and thus to levy war against States which “the Federal officers claimed to bd, notwithstanding their ordinances of secession, still in the Union, was the treason defined in the third section of the third article of the Constitution; the only treason recognized by the fundamental law of the United States. “When our forefathers assumed for the several States they represented a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth, the central idea around which their political institutions were grouped was that soverignty belonged to the people, inherent and unalienable: therefore, that governments were their agents, intrusted to .secure their rights ancFderiving their just powers from the consent of the governed, whence they drew the corollary ‘that whenever any government becomes destructive of these ends it is tiie right of the people to abolish it,’ etc t What is meant by the word ‘people’ in this connection is manifest from the circumstances. It could only authoritatatively refer to the distinct communities who, each for itself, joined in the declaration and in the concurrent act of separation from the government of Great Britain. “By all that is revered in the memory of our revolutionary sires and sacred in the principles they established, let not the children of the United States be taught that our Federal Government is sovereign; that our sires, after a long and bloody war, won commnnity independence, used the power not for the end; sought, but to transfer their allegiance, and by oath or otherwise bind their posterity to be the subjects of another government, from which they could only free themselves by force of arms. Respectfully, JeffebsCn Davis.” » The proportion of illegitimacy in Chili is prodigious—exceeding 23 per cent. In the United States it is less than 7 per cent. In Austria, the European country which approaches most nearly to Chili in this particular, it is less than 13 per cent. The giraffe has never been known to-, utter a sound. In this respect it resembles a young lady in a street-car when a gentleman gives her his seat The happy past is the happy present.