From the Richmond Daily Dispatch July 21, 1864:
An inevitable fate.
One of the favorite bugbears kept by the United States press before the people, to stimulate their energies in support of the invasion, is the dread of future internal convulsions and civil wars if this revolution is successful. It is an appeal to the fears of the masses, as well as to all the interests involved in law and order, and has no doubt exerted great influence in keeping the whole North resolute and persevering at its work.
But there never was a more shallow fallacy. War is the inevitable lot of humanity — civil as well as foreign war. Both have been the fate of every country of the world, and of democracies more than by other forms of government. Probably Prussia enjoys more internal stability than any other nation; because Prussia possesses the remarkable combination of a despotism controlled by public opinion, which public opinion is sustained by a citizen soldiery, who, in organization and military efficiency, are fully equal to her regular army, and vastly superior to it in numbers. If the North can adopt such a government, it may enjoy its immunities from civil convulsions; but, to do this, it must wade, for this generation, through a sea of blood which we hardly expect such a self-indulgent generation to encounter for the benefit of posterity. A wild democracy cannot be converted into a despotism, and the State Rights peculiarity of the United States Constitution exchanged for a formal consolidation, without scenes of strife and carnage, compared with which the horrors of this contest are mere child’s play.
The Constitution of the old United States, which theoretically was the essence of human wisdom, has proved practically the climax of human absurdity. Never before was there a Constitution which left the citizens in doubt to whom supreme allegiance was due.–This Constitution calls upon its people to serve two masters, the General Government and the States, and to serve two masters is as impossible for a nation as an individual. In addition to this seed of civil convulsions, sown in the very heart of the organic law, the democratic institutions of every State contain in themselves the prolific germs of everlasting faction and blood. The experience of universal history is uniform to that effect. No Democracy was ever permanent, and the United States, as it has fully proved during this war, are no wiser and no better than those who have before tried the same experiment. …
Their only hope, indeed, is to accept the separation of the old Union as an accomplished fact, to withdraw their invading armies, to moderate their inordinate ambition and vanity, and to consent event to a peaceful division of the Northwest and New England, rather than seek to compel the adhesion of such incongruous elements. Such a gigantic territory as that they seek to control, and such a dissimilar population, cannot be held together by anything but a gigantic despotism, and even that will not ensure permanent order and quiet. Three Republics are not too many for the area and numbers of the old United States. The balance of power could be preserved, and internal affairs more harmoniously directed by three than by two. That result will have to come some day, and it offers the only mitigation of the evils that are in store for the United States.
Alas, the Confederate Constitution also divvied up power between the central government and the states.
