To this we reply:  The plea is as profligate as the act was tyrannical.  It is the jesuitical doctrine, that the end sanctifies the means.  It is a confession of sin, but the denial of any guilt in its perpetration.  It is at war with the government of God, and subversive of the foundations of morality.  It is to make lies our refuge, and under falsehood to hide ourselves, so that we may escape the overflowing scourge.  “Therefore, thus saith the Lord God, Judgment will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet; and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place.”  Moreover, “because ye trust in oppression and perverseness, and stay thereon; therefore this iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant.  And he shall break it as the breaking of the potter’s vessel that is broken in pieces; he shall not spare.”

This plea is sufficiently broad to cover all the oppression and villainy that the sun has witnessed in his circuit, since God said, “Let there be light.”  It assumes that to be practicable, which is impossible, namely, that there can be freedom with slavery, union with injustice, and safety with bloodguiltiness.  A union of virtue with pollution is the triumph of licentiousness.  A partnership between right and wrong, is wholly wrong.  A compromise of the principles of Justice, is the deification of crime.

Better that the American Union had never been formed, than that it should have been obtained at such a frightful cost!  If they were guilty who fashioned it, but who could not foresee all its frightful consequences, how much more guilty are they, who, in full view of all that has resulted from it, clamor for its perpetuity!  If it was sinful at the commencement, to adopt it on the ground of escaping a greater evil, is it not equally sinful to swear to support it for the same reason, or until, in process of time, it be purged from its corruption?

The fact is, the compromise alluded to, instead of effecting a union, rendered it impracticable; unless by the term union we are to understand the absolute reign of the slaveholding power over the whole country, to the prostration of Northern rights.  In the just use of words, the American Union is and always has been a sham—­an imposture.  It is an instrument of oppression unsurpassed in the criminal history of the world.  How then can it be innocently sustained?  It is not certain, it is not even probable, that if it had not been adopted, the mother country would have reconquered the colonies.  The spirit that would have chosen danger in preference to crime,—­to perish with justice rather than live with dishonor,—­to dare and suffer whatever might betide, rather than sacrifice the rights of one human being,—­could never have been subjugated by any mortal power.  Surely it is paying a poor tribute to the valor and devotion of our revolutionary fathers in the cause of liberty, to say that, if they had sternly refused to sacrifice their principles, they would have fallen an easy prey to the despotic power of England.