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DRAUGHT 
 
 OF 
 
 !3t Declaration of Inbcycvfoma, 
 
 PROPOSI D TO THE 
 
 CONVENTION OF THE 
 
 BTATE ©7 ARK-ANtAft, 
 
 AND 
 
 Withdrawn from its consideration. 
 
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 LITTLE ROCK: 
 
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 18G1 
 
THE 
 
 WILLIAM R. PERKINS 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 DUKE UNIVERSITY 
 
 Rare Books 
 
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 [NOTE.] 
 
 [The instrument here printed was prepared at the solicita- 
 tion of many early advocates of Southern rights, and presented 
 in the Convention of the People of the State of Arkansas in 
 May, 1861, for its consideration. 
 
 On amendments being at once proposed, and it being mani- 
 fest that modifications would be demanded by some who denied 
 to the states the right of Secession, this paper was withdrawn, 
 and the author refused to permit it to be afterwards offered or 
 used. 
 
 It is now published by request, that it may remain during all 
 time, to show upon what grounds those who were in favor of 
 secession, as the exercise of a clear right, desired to place 
 their action, and in what attitude to present their State to 
 the world; not as a criminal, guilty of high treason, but as a 
 Sovereignty, preferring a tremendous indictment against those 
 States that had violated the constitution and dishonored them- 
 selves.] 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2011 with funding from , 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/draughtofdeclara01arka 
 
PROPOSED DRAUGHT 
 
 OF 
 
 A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 THE UNANIMOUS DECLARATION of the People of the 
 
 State of Arkansas, in Convention assembled, on the day 
 
 of May, in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hun„ 
 drkd an!) sixty-one. 
 
 When inexorable Necessity compels one People to sever the ties 
 of Union and a Common Government that have for many years 
 connected them with others; to assume among the Powers of 
 the world that equal and independent station to which they are 
 entitled, and to form new bonds of Alliance or Confederation, 
 in order to preserve their liberty, their rights and their honor, 
 justice entitles them to be heard to state the causes which impel 
 them to such separation. 
 
 When the People of the thirteen United States of America 
 declared their independence, they proclaimed these undeniable 
 truths; that all governments instituted among men derive from 
 the consent of the governed all the powers with which they 
 are justly invested, and that whenever any government becomes 
 destructive of the ends for which it was instituted, it is the 
 right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new 
 government, building it upon the solid foundation of such priir 
 
ciples, aud organizing its powers in such form as may, to them, 
 seem most likely to secure their safety and happiness. 
 
 WE, the People of the State of Arkansas, reiterate the^e 
 principles, to deny which is treason against Liberty itself; and 
 do rely upon them for our complete justification. 
 
 Our fathers declared, that prudence dictated, that govern- 
 ments long established should not be changed for light and 
 transient causes: and the occurrences of the past ten years 
 have shown the truth of their assertion, that men are more 
 disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right them- 
 selves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. 
 
 But when the great purposes for which a common government 
 and a Union of States were created, are wholly and persistently 
 disregarded; and essential conditions of that union are habitu- 
 ally violated and permanently annulled by a majority of those 
 states; when the system of government itself is denaturalized' 
 and its powers perverted to the worst uses, so that the union 
 becomes an engine of oppression, by which the majority of the 
 states is enabled to imperil the property and endangerthe safety 
 of the minority with impunity, then it is not only the right but 
 the duty of a state thus wronged, insulted and endangered, to 
 throw off the yoke of such government, and singly, or with 
 others in like manner aggrieved, to provide new guards for 
 future security. 
 
 Such is the necessity which now constrains us to rescind a 
 violated compact, and to establish other relations and a new 
 government. The longer continuance of the Union heretofore 
 existing has become impossible, unless the people of Arkansas 
 were dead to all considerations, not alone of self-respect and 
 honor, but even of peace and safety. Repeated aggressions 
 and reiterated injuries on the part of the Northern States, per- 
 sistent violations of the constitution, denials of common right' 
 which, if tolerated, would sink the States of the South to the 
 condition of Provinces; and a long train of other wrongs* 
 patiently endured by them for many years, have proven the 
 deliberate intention of those whom we once called brethren, to 
 make us their subjects and tributaries; until the Union has 
 fallen asunder by its own weight. 
 
Before the bar of the whole civilized world we arraign the 
 Northern States, their statesmen, their men of letters, their 
 divines and their people: 
 
 They have changed the very nature of the Constitution, by 
 embracing the doctrine that it is not a compact between the 
 States, and that these are no parties to it, but that it is an im- 
 perative creation and enactment of a Supreme Government, by 
 the People of all the States: thus annulling all State Sover- 
 eignty and independence, and converting a Constitutional Re- 
 public and Union of States into the government of a mere 
 popular majority; and striking down all our guards of freedom 
 and security at once. 
 
 They have proclaimed that there is a law superior to the Con- 
 stitution; of which each individual conscience is the judge in 
 the last resort; which absolves them from all obligation to obey 
 that Constitution, whenever, in their private opinion, the two 
 conflict; and which yet permits them to swear to support it, 
 with a mental reservation, whenever they cannot otherwise 
 hold an office that enables them to violate it with effect and 
 impunity. 
 
 While the people of each of the United States, in ordaining 
 and establishing the Constitution, declared that they did so, in 
 order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure 
 domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote 
 the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to them- 
 selves and their posterity, the Northern States and People have 
 made that Constitution, by their habitual perversions and vio- 
 lations of its provisions, an instrument to alienate one section 
 of the country from another, and so to destroy the Union; to 
 annihilate domestic tranquility and substitute in its stead insur- 
 rections, disturbances, hatreds, and a general sense of insecur- 
 ity; to provide for the defense and promote the welfare of the 
 North, at the expense of the South; and to inflict the curse of 
 freedom on an inferior race, to the ruin of ourselves and our 
 posterity, for whom the Constitution was made. 
 
 In fulfilment of their determination to lower the white man 
 to the level of the African, and in open and deliberate defiance 
 of the solemn decision of the Supreme Court, they have 
 
adhered to the doctrine that negroes may become citizens of the 
 United States; by permitting them to vote by thousands for their 
 President and Vice-President, lately elected. 
 
 They have in other respects refused to submit to the decis- 
 ions of the Supreme Court, solemnly pronounced, whenever 
 those decisions have conflicted with their notions of the Consti- 
 tution and the higher law; and have thus leveled another bar- 
 rier, reared by the Fathers, against encroachment and usurpa- 
 tion by popular majorities. 
 
 They have appointed as representatives abroad, and to offices 
 of high trust and honor at home, a multitude of men, whose 
 chief recommendation it is, that they are singularly and justly 
 odious to the Southern States, and whose public acts are 
 remarkable for little else than bitter and persistent hostility to 
 us and our institutions. 
 
 They have canonized in their churches, and dared to com- 
 pare with the Redeemer of mankind, a miscreant who had in- 
 vaded a State of the South with an armed band, endeavored 
 to excite a servile insurrection, and committed murder and 
 treason; and who had been justly tried, condemned and execu- 
 ted as a felon. 
 
 After profitably carrying on the slave-trade for many years, 
 and while their people and their vessels are still engaged in it; 
 after preventing its abolition at an earlier period than the year 
 eighteen hundred and eight; after relieving themselves of their 
 slaves, not by emancipation, but by selling Ihem, they have, on 
 account of the existence of slavery in the Southern States, 
 pharisaically and insultingly assumed to stand upon a higher 
 level of virtue, morality and social refinement than ourselves; 
 have allowed a crusade to be organized against us, have encour- 
 aged their writers and divines to malign and defame us, and 
 have strenuously labored to array against us the prejudices and 
 to arouse against us the hatred of the whole civilized world. 
 
 By means of Tariffs devised for purposes of protection to 
 their manufactures; of the monopoly of the coast-wise carrying 
 trade; of the exclusion from that trade of vessels foreign-built 
 by means of which New England has been the ship-builder 
 and common carrier for the whole Union; and of fishing boun- 
 
ties and other devices sedulously resorted to from the very be- 
 ginning of the government, they have systematically levied 
 tribute of the People of the South, to the amount of hundreds 
 of millions annually; until, insolent with the prosperity thus 
 attained, they refuse longer to pay the consideration of non- 
 interference with our property and rights, to secure which the 
 Southern States have so long submitted to an unjust and oner- 
 ous system of taxation, b} T which they vainly hoped to purchase 
 peace. 
 
 For the purpose of compelling us through fear, to submit to 
 the demands of their insatiable avarice, and to permit the 
 heavy burthens laid upon us to be doubled, they have with a 
 deliberate wickedness unparalleled in its infamy, appealed to 
 the prejadices even of the foreigners among them against sla- 
 very, represented it as hostile to free labor, excited hatred 
 against the owners of slaves, whom they have denounced as 
 few in number and despisers of the poor, and converted even 
 Religion and Philanthropy into devilish engines of malice; and 
 while thus engaged they have shamelessly avowed their motive, 
 by offering to quiet the passions thus aroused, if we would but 
 submit quietly and permanently to a Tariff arranged to enrich 
 them at our expense; thus purchasing an inglorious peace by 
 paying dishonorable tribute. 
 
 They have organized a party in all their States upon the 
 single basis of oppositu n to slavery, and for the purpose, 
 sometimes concealed and sometimes declared, of ultimately 
 abolishing it every where. 
 
 They have by this means, at length, placed the powers of 
 Government in the hands of those who have for years sedu- 
 lously impregnated the minds of their people with the convic- 
 tion that there is of necessity an irrepressible conflict between 
 the two systems of labor, slave and free, and that one or the 
 other must ultimately prevail in all the States. 
 
 They have proclaimed the doctrine, that all men, of whatever 
 color, are unconditionally entitled to freedom; that it is a crime, 
 and the sum of all villainies, to hold any human being in 
 bondage, and that every slave has a right, by the law of God 
 and Nature, to slay his master in order to escape. They have 
 
10 
 
 circulated incendiary publications among our domestics, sent 
 emissaries to incite them to insurrection, and even commis- 
 sioned ministers of the Gospel to assist in bringing upon us and 
 upon our wives and daughters the multiplied horrors of civil 
 war. 
 
 They have, in most of their states, by a legislation that in- 
 volves perjury as well as violation of a solemn contract and 
 forfeiture of honor, wilfully annulled that provision of the Con- 
 stitution which bound them to deliver up persons held to labor 
 or service, on claim of the party to whom such labor or service 
 is due: making it, in manys tates, a felony, infamous, and pun- 
 ishable with penalties that involve infamy, for such party to 
 reclaim his slave, if he can establish his right by such testimony 
 only as by the act of Congress in that behalf is sufficient; so 
 that this essential condition of the Union, without which it 
 would never have been formed, has virtually been stricken out 
 of the Constitution. 
 
 They have denied to our citizens the right of even passing 
 through their States, carrying with them their domestic ser- 
 vants. 
 
 They have permitted riotous assemblages of negroes to 
 defeat by violence and terror the process of the United States, 
 and to murder our citizens who have entered their borders, 
 peaceably and in accordance with law, to reclaim their slaves; 
 and their juries have promptly acquitted the murderers. 
 
 Their governors have refused to cause to be surrendered, 
 upon the legal demand of the States aggrieved, persons guilty 
 of crime, who have taken refuge among them, when those per- 
 sons were aLo slaves. 
 
 Their courts have begun to set at defiance the Supreme 
 Court of the United States, descending to the base service of 
 shielding those who have broken the laws resisted the process, 
 and done violence to the officers, of the United States. 
 
 Thry have claimed and exercised for thirty years, the right, 
 by Congressional legislation, virtually to exclude the people of 
 the Southern States from the common territory, purchased with 
 the moneys or blood of the South and the North alike. 
 
 They have permitted the occupants of the public lands in a 
 
11 
 
 new territory to enact laws destroying the rights of property of 
 our citizens therein, and making it a felony for the owner of a 
 slave to claim to be entitled to his labor and service, and have 
 refused in Congress to annul those laws; by which, if they were 
 valid, every fugitive from service, entitled to be reclaimed, if 
 he escapes to a State, becomes free at the moment when he 
 plants his foot on the soil of a Territory. 
 
 They have allowed the Southern States to be defamed in 
 the Senate, as the Barbary States of the Union, and the whole 
 people of these States to be charged there, by one immense 
 indictment, as by means of the existence of slavery necessarily 
 inferior in respect to individual decency, private honor and 
 private virtue; and this hideous arraignment, not dissented from 
 by any Northern Senator, has been formally adopted as its own. 
 by the State whose Senator uttered it, in order by this unusual 
 formality to make the insult more gross and deadly. 
 
 While they are rapidly creating new States in the north-west, 
 at a rate of progress dangerous to the South, and continually 
 accelerated by improper inducements held out to emigrants at. 
 our expense, they determine to forbid our extension to the 
 south-west; intending thus to confine slavery within narrower 
 and yet narrower limits, as it disappears from the Border States; 
 and so attempting to repeal a law of God, by which growth is 
 a necessity for young and vigorous nations, in order to impose 
 upon our children the hideous danger of an overflowing and 
 unprofitable servile population, forbidden an outlet, and becom- 
 ing a danger and a curse. 
 
 We arraign these insolent and audacious States at the bar 
 of the civilized world: 
 
 For declaring it to be treason and rebellion on the part of 
 seven States to withdraw peaceably from the Union for these 
 repeated, deliberate and long continued infractions of the Con- 
 stitution on the part of their Northern Confederates. 
 
 Fur persisting in holding forts and arsenals in those States, 
 after they had, with a unanimity, a wisdom and an order un- 
 exampled, formed a new Confederacy, and when they were 
 proposing to their late associates relations of peace and friend- 
 ship, and interchange of good offices. 
 
12 
 
 For endeavoring to re-in force those forts, after repeated 
 promises and pledges to the contrary; thus provoking and com- 
 pelling hostilities, by treachery and falsehood. 
 
 For attempting to blockade the ports of the Southern States 
 and so to cut off their trade with all parts of the world. 
 
 For attempting to collect duties in the South, in accordance 
 with a law intentionally framed and enacted for the benefit of 
 individuals, and to enable a few to grow rich by plundering the 
 many. 
 
 For calling out large bodies of the militia, contrary to the 
 Constitution and the laws, in order to make war upon the 
 Southern States. 
 
 For threatening to excite domestic insurrection among us; 
 and for endeavoring to array one portion of our people against 
 the other. 
 
 They have abdicated government in these States, by declar- 
 ing them in rebellion, and waging war against them: 
 
 They are at this time marching large armies to the frontiers 
 of the Southern States, in the hope of reducing them to sub- 
 jection by arms, and are threatening to occupy with a great 
 force of troops the Indian country upon our border. 
 
 Never eager to defend the honor of their country against a 
 foreign foe, they hive hastened, with indecent swiftness, to 
 tender men and money to the National Government, and to 
 offer to aid in subjugating the Southern States; thus proving 
 their hatred of us, and that continued union with them is 
 equally impossible and undesirable. 
 
 We have not acted hastily or in anger. We have waited 
 patiently, hoping that the patriotic efforts at reconciliation 
 made by the Border States, might possibly be crowned with 
 success; and that a returning sense of justice would relight in 
 the Northern heart the flame of a generous and noble patriot- 
 ism. 
 
 While our sister Southern States of the same blood and 
 lineage, the same manners and institutions, as ourselves, ap- 
 pealed to us to unite our fortunes with theirs, and warned us 
 that we had nothing to expect from the generosity or justice of 
 the North, we still paused. Devoted to the Union established 
 
13 
 
 by the Fathers, we still hoped that a final separation might be 
 prevented, and harmony restored. 
 
 That hope has disappeared. We are forced to elect whether 
 we will draw the sword with or against our sister Southern 
 States; and Honor and Decency alike forbid us longer to hesi- 
 tate. Suffering under the same wrongs, and having identical 
 interests, we elect to share their fortunes, and must acquiesce 
 in the necessity which compels us to separate from the North- 
 ern States, and to hold them enemies in war, in peace friends. 
 
 WE, THEREFORE, THE DELEGATES AND REPRESENTATIVES OF THE 
 
 State of ARKANSAS, in General Convention assembled, ap- 
 pealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the rectitude 
 of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the 
 good People of this State, solemnly publish and declare, that 
 the State of Arkansas is, and by right ought to be, a free, sove- 
 reign and independent State; that her people are absolved 
 from all allegiance to the United States of America, and that 
 all political connection between them and the States known 
 by that name, and continuing in that Union, is and ought to be 
 totally dissolved: and that as a free and independent State 
 they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract 
 alliances, establish commerce, unite in a new Confederation, 
 and do all other acts and things which independent States of 
 right may do. 
 
 And for the support of this declaration, with a humble but 
 firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we 
 mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our 
 sacred honor. 
 
Hollinger Corp, 
 P H 8.5