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The South Was Right, Secession, Newsletter

The South Was Right, Secession

Jefferson Davis was arrested and treated like a criminal and held in jail for 2 years, yet the federal government was afraid to bring him to trial or any other Confederate leader or general.  So why not? Everyone knew that the states had the right to succeed, it was even written in the Texas Constitution and was a condition of acceptance by the Republic of Texas, when Texas became a state.  The concept of secession and states rights is more important today as the dictatorship in Washington is doing Hitler like tactics in seizing power.

Read the below article for more details:

At any rate, the Northern government prepared to try President Davis for treason while they had him in prison. Mr. Connor observed that: “The War Department presented its evidence for a treason trial against Davis to a famed jurist, Francis Lieber, for his analysis. Lieber pronounced ‘Davis will not be found guilty and we shall stand there completely beaten’.” According to Mr. Conner, U.S. Attorney General James Speed appointed a renowned attorney, John J. Clifford, as his chief prosecutor. Clifford, after studying the government’s evidence against Davis, withdrew from the case.  He said he had ‘grave doubts’ about it. Not to be outdone, Speed then appointed Richard Henry Dana, a prominent maritime lawyer, to the case. Mr. Dana also withdrew. He said basically, that as long as the North had won a military victory over the South, they should be satisfied with that. In other words--you won the war, boys, so don’t push your luck beyond that!

Conner also informed his readers that: “In 1866 President Johnson appointed a new U.S. attorney general, Henry Stanburg. But Stanburg wouldn’t touch the case either. Thus had spoken the North’s best and brightest jurists re the legitimacy of the War of Northern Aggression--even though the Jefferson Davis case offered blinding fame to the prosecutor who could prove that the South had seceded unconstitutionally.” None of these bright legal lights from Yankeedom would touch this case with a ten-foot pole. It’s not that they were all dumb, in fact, the reverse is true. These men had sense enough to know a dead horse when they saw it--and they were not about to climb aboard and attempt to ride it across the treacherous stream of illegal secession. They knew better. In fact, a Northerner from New York, Charles O’Connor, became the legal counsel for Davis--without charge! That, plus the celebrity jurists from the North that held their noses and walked away from the case, told the federal government that they, in reality, had no case against Davis or secession and that Davis was merely being held as a political prisoner.
Most folks, even in the North, already knew that.

At one point, the federal government intimated that it would be willing to offer Davis a pardon, should he grovel a little and ask for one. Davis refused--to his credit.  He demanded that the government either give him a pardon or give him a trial.  Mr. Street said: “He died, unpardoned, by a government that was leery of giving him a public hearing.” If Davis was as guilty as they claimed--why no trial???

Had the federal government had any possible chance to convict Davis and therefore declare secession unconstitutional, they would have done so in a heartbeat.  The fact that they hemmed and hawed around for two years and finally released him without benefit of a trial that he wanted, proves that the North had no real case against secession.
http://www.cakewalkblogs.com/antiestablishmenthistory