History is an inconvenient truth which cannot be revised and overwritten by the North, then, or by the ignorant of today.
IF THE ACT OF SECESSION WAS AN ACT OF DISGRACE, (WHICH IT WAS NOT) THEN IT IS A DISGRACE EQUALLY SHARED WITH THE NORTH, THE GREATER CONDEMNATION BELONGING TO THE NORTH AS THEIR EARLIER THREATS OF SECESSION WERE COUPLED WITH INDIGNANT VIOLATIONS OF THE CONSTITUTION.
“I need not array further evidence as to where and when the seeds of disunion were first sown. The truth is, they antedate the Constitution, and the nursery and hotbed in which they were cared for and cultivated in the first fifty years of the republic was in the North, principally New England. The truth I believe is that, from the very beginning, a large majority of the South believed in the constitutional right of a State to secede and some believed in the doctrine of nullification as a remedy to flagrant violations of the Constitution; but they loved the Union, and, largely controlling its destinies for sixty out of seventy years, they held it steadily within its constitutional limits. They never nursed any doctrine looking to its destruction. In its early perils, when its enemies within and without threatened its existence, when at best it was an experiment, the South was found entangled in no hostile machinations. As in her revolutionary struggles the South sent to the army no Benedict Arnold, so in the weakness of her infancy she furnished no Shay’s rebellions nor Hartford conventions.
Alexander Stephens has said, and it is worth remembering, that:
“No Southern State ever did. intentionally or otherwise, fail to perform her obligation as to her confederates under the Constitution, according to the letter and spirit of its stipulated covenants, and they never asked of Congress any action or invoked its powers upon any subject which did not lie clearly within the provisions of the Articles of Union.”
I affirm, therefore, if odium is to attach to the South for the act of secession, it must also attach to the great North and East, where it was. for political, economical, and industrial reasons, sedulously agitated and inculcated up to the Mexican war, and the right distinctly recognized by its leading statesmen up to 1860. History ought to not allow them to slip this odium, if odium it be, from their shoulders to the shoulders of the South.”
Excerpt from a speech by Judge Henry Rogers to the United Confederate Veterans at New Orleans , La., held May 19-22, 1903