States, respectively, or to the people; and whereas it is the tendency of stronger governments to enlarge their powers and jurisdiction at the expense of weaker governments, and of majorities to usurp and abuse power and oppress minorities, to arrest and hold in check which tendency, compacts and constitutions are made; and whereas the only effectual constitutional security for the rights of minorities-whether as people or as states-is the power expressly reserved in constitutions, of protecting those rights by their own action; and whereas this mode of protection, by checks and guarantees, is recognized in the Federal Constitution, as well in the case of the equality of the States in representation and in suffrage in the Senate, as in the provision for overruling the veto of the President and for amending the Constitution, not to enumerate other examples; and whereas, unhappily, because of the vast extent and diversified interests and institutions of the several States of the Union, sectional divisions can no longer be suppressed; and whereas it concerns the peace and stability of the Federal Union and Government, that a division of the States into mere slaveholding and non-slaveholding sections, causing, hitherto and from the nature and necessity of the case-inflammatory and. disastrous controversies, upon the subject of slavery, ending, already, in present disruption of the Union-should be forever hereafter ignored; and whereas this important end is best to be obtained by the recognition of other sections without regard to slavery, neither of which sections shall alone be strong enough to oppress or control the others, and each be vested with the power to protect itself from aggressions: Therefore,

Resolved, by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, (two-thirds of both Houses concurring,) That the following articles be, and are hereby, proposed as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid, to all intents and purposes, as part of said Constitution, when ratified by conventions in threefourths of the several States:

ARTICLE XIII.

SEC. 1. The United States are divided into four sections, as follows:

The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and all new States annexed and admitted into the Union, or formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any of said States, or by the junction of two or more of the same, or of parts thereof, or out of territory acquired north of said States, shall constitute one section, to be known as the NORTH.

The States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Kansas, and all new States annexed or admitted into the Union, or erected within the jurisdiction of any of said States, or by the junction of two or more of the same, or of parts thereof, or out of territory now held or hereafter acquired north of latitude 36° 30', and east of the crest of the Rocky Mountains, shall constitute another section, to be known as the WEST. The States of Oregon, and California, and all new States annexed and admitted into the Union, or formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any of said States, or by the junction of two or more of the same, or of parts thereof, or out of territory now held or hereafter acquired west of the crest of the Rocky Mountains and of the Rio Grande, shall constitute another section, to be known as the PACIFIC.

The States of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri, and all new States annexed and admitted into the Union, or formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any of said States, or by the junction of two or more of the same, or of parts thereof, or out of territory acquired east of the Rio Grande, and south of latitude 36° 30', shall constitute another section, to be known as the SOUTH.

SEC. 2. On demand of one-third of the Senators of any one of the sections on any bill, order, resolution, or vote, to which the concurrence of the House Representatives may be necessary, except on a question of adjournment, a

vote shall be had by sections, and a majority of the Senators from each section voting, shall be necessary to the passage of such bill, order, or resolution, and to the validity of every such vote.

SEC. 3. Two of the electors for President and Vice-President shall be appointed by each State in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, for the State at large. The other electors to which each State may be entitled, shall be chosen in the respective congressional districts into which the State may, at the regular decennial period, have been divided, by the electors of each district, having the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State Legislature. A majority of all the electors in each of the four sections in this article established, shall be necessary to the choice of President and Vice-President; and the concurrence of a majority of the States of each section shall be necessary to the choice of President by the House of Representatives, and of the Senators from each section to the choice of Vice-President by the Senate, whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them respectively.

SEC. 4. The President and Vice-President shall hold their office each during the term of six years; and neither shall be eligible to more than one term, except by the votes of two-thirds of all the electors of each section, or of the States of each section, whenever the right of choice of President shall devolve upon the House of Representatives, or of Senators from each section whenever the right of choice of Vice-President shall devolve upon the Senate.

SEC. 5. The Congress shall, by law, provide for the case of failure by the House of Representatives to choose a President, and of the Senate to choose a Vice-President, whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them respectively, declaring what officer shall then act as President; and such officer shall act accordingly until a President shall be elected. The Congress shall also provide by law for a special election for President and Vice-President in such case to be held and completed within six months from the expiration of the term of office of the last preceding President, and to be conducted in all respects as provided for in the Constitution for regular elections of the same officer, except that if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President, should the right of choice devolve upon them, within twenty days from the opening of the certificates and counting of the electoral votes, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President. The term of office of the President chosen under such special election shall continue six years from the fourth day of March preceding such election.

ARTICLE XIV.

No State shall secede without the consent of the Legislatures of the States of the section to which the State proposing to secede belongs. The President shall have power to adjust with seceding States all questions arising by reason of their secession; but the terms of adjustment shall be submitted to the Congress for their approval before the same shall be valid.

ARTICLE XV.

Neither the Congress nor a Territorial Legislature shall have power to interfere with the right of the citizens of any of the States within either of the sections to migrate upon equal terms with the citizens of the States within either of the other sections to the Territories of the United States: nor shall either the Congress or a Territorial Legislature have power to destroy or impair any rights of either person or property in the Territories.

New States annexed for admission into the Union, or formed or erected within the jurisdiction of other States, or by the junction of two or more States, or parts of States; and States formed, with the consent of the Congress, out of any territory of the United States, shall be entitled to admission upon an equal footing with the original States, under any constitution establishing a government republican in form which the people thereof may ordain, when

ever such States, if formed out of any territory of the United States, shall contain, within an area of not less than sixty thousand square miles, a population equal to the then existing ratio of representation for one member of the House of Representatives.

A card, from which the following is extracted, was published by Mr. VALLANDIGHAM, in the Cincinnati Enquirer, on the 10th of November, 1860, a few days after the presidential election:

And, now, let me add that I did say-not in Washington, not at a dinner-table, not in the presence of "fire-eaters," but in the city of New York, in a public assembly of Northern men, and in a public speech at the Cooper Institute, on the 2d of November, 1860-that, "if any one or more of the States of this Union should, at any time, secede for reasons of the sufficiency and justice of which, before God and the great tribunal of history, they alone may judge-much as I should deplore it, I never would, as a Representative in the Congress of the United States, vote one dollar of money whereby one drop of American blood should be shed in a civil war.' That sentiment, thus uttered in the presence of thousands of the merchants and solid men of the free and patriotic city of New York, was received with vehement and long-continued applause, the entire vast assemblage rising as one man, and cheering for some minutes. And I now deliberately repeat and reaffirm it, resolved, though I stand alone, though all others yield and fall away, to make it good to the last moment of my public life. No menace, no public clamor, no taunts, nor sneers, nor foul detraction, from any quarter, shall drive me from my firm purpose. Ours is a government of opinion, not of force-a Union of free will, not of arms; and coercion is civil war-a war of sections, a war of States, waged by a race compounded and made up of all other races, full of intellect, of courage, of will unconquerable, and, when set on fire by passion, the most belligerent and most ferocious on the globe-a civil war, full of horrors, which no imagination can conceive and no pen portray. If Abraham Lincoln is wise, looking truth and danger full in the face, he will take counsel of the old men," the moderates of his party, and advise peace, negotiation, concession; but if, like the foolish son of the wise king, he reject these wholesome counsels, and hearken only to the madmen who threaten chastisement with scorpions, let him see to it, lest it be recorded at last that none remained to serve him "save the house of Judah only." At least, if he will forget the secession of the Ten Tribes, will he not remember and learn a lesson of wisdom from the secession of the Thirteen Colonies ?

In answer to a gross telegraphic misrepresentation of this proposition, Mr. VALLANDIGHAM explained and defended it, in a card to the Cincinnati Enquirer, dated February 14, 1861, as follows:

My proposition looks solely to the restoration and maintenance of the Union forever, by suggesting a mode of voting in the United States Senate and the electoral colleges, by which the causes which have led to our present troubles may, in the future, be guarded against without secession and disunion; and, also, the agitation of the slavery question, as an element in our national politics, be forever hereafter arrested. My object-the sole motive by which I have been guided from the beginning of this most fatal revolution-is to MAINTAIN THE UNION, and not destroy it. When all possible hope is gone, and the Union irretrievably broken, then, but not till then, I will be for a Western confederacy.

One needs some familiarity with the persevering perversity of the Abolition press, not to feel a little surprised at finding the false statement, contradicted above, continually repeated and reaffirmed, as if made out of some grains of truth, at the first, and never denied. And yet a leading Abolition paper, in Cincinnati, so late as December 16, 1862, says:

Mr. Vallandigham, by his propositions for a division of the Republic into four distinct nationalities--propositions as infamous in their design as ruinous in their consequences-did as much to rouse the people to a sense of their real danger, as the first shots of the insurrectionists at Charleston.

Referring to this statement, in a communication to the Cincinnati Enquirer, under date of Washington, D. C., December 18, 1862, Mr. VALLANDIGHAM says:

Now, it is somewhat remarkable, certainly, that after the introduction, in February, 1861, of the propositions falsely thus described by that newspaper, it not only complimented the speech in which Mr. Vallandigham defended them, but actually so far failed to become aroused to a sense of danger, as to repeatedly and earnestly advocate the policy of letting the South go-a something that Mr. Vallandigham has never done, to this day. But let that pass.

The deliberate and circumstantial repetition, at this time, and in its fullest form, of the misrepresentation of the nature of the propositions which I did introduce, is but another proof of the desperate fortunes of the Abolition party, and particularly of the press which has supported it. To the personal assaults of that press, and especially of the paper quoted from, I reply not. Pope and Pagan may now very calmly be allowed to sit at the mouth of the Abolition cave, and gnash their toothless gums at Democratic pilgrims as they pass by. "The effectual check and waning proportions" of this Administration, and its despotic and bloody policy, enable us to practice the more cheerfully now, a philosophy which hitherto may have been somewhat compulsory. But false statements of recorded or historic

facts do not come within the rule.

Now, Mr. Vallandigham never proposed to divide "the Republic into four distinct nationalities." So far as any such proposition has been suggested at all, it was by General Scott, who even went so far as to name the probable capitals of three of those "nationalities." My proposition, on the contrary, was to maintain the existing Union, nationality" forever, by dividing or arranging the States into sections within the Union, under the Constitution, for the purpose of voting in the Senate and electoral colleges.

or

NUMBER FOUR.

EXECUTIVE USURPATION.

SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, JULY 10, 1861.

"After some time be past."

Ir the sober and unerring review of history should demonstrate that the present Administration has, from the first, lent itself to the development and execution of a cunningly devised plot, whose object was to destroy the old Union, constituted by the suffrages of the States, and establish in its place a government under which civil rights would be held and enjoyed only at the pleasure of an absolute, centralized, and irresponsible despotism-should history, when it resumes the startling events of these times, and traces those events to their now hidden causes, convict the President, and those with whom and through whom he has been acting, of this great crime against God and their country, it will then be seen with what clear penetration that eminent statesman, to whose counsels we have been listening, described the most secret movings, the first and most cautious unfoldings of that infamous plot. Then, "after some time be past," the stern verdict of history will justify and vindicate the solemn warnings he gave, and it will be recorded that all who heeded those warnings, and rallied to the protection and defense of the Temple of Liberty, obeyed the dictates of prudence and wisdom. It has been said, a nation may lose its liberties in a day, and not discover the loss in a hundred years. Should this be the sad doom of our country, which once gloried in calling itself the