Farewell Speech of Senator Alfred Iverson, of Georgia,  January 28, 1861

Mr. Iverson:  I send to the Secretary a communication addressed to the Senate, which I ask to have read, and then I propose to submit a few remarks.

The Secretary read the following communication:

Washington City, January 28, 1861.

To the Senate of the United States:

The undersigned has received official information that, on the 19th instant, a convention of the people of Georgia, recently assembled, and now in session, passed the following ordinance:

An ordinance to dissolve the union between the State of Georgia and other States united with her under a compact of government, entitled the “Constitution of the United States of America.”

We, the people of the State of Georgia, in convention assembled, do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained, that the ordinance adopted by the people of the State of Georgia in convention on the 2d day of January, in the year of our Lord 1788, when the Constitution of the United States of America was assented to, ratified, and adopted; and also all acts and parts of acts of the General Assembly of this State, ratifying and adopting amendments of the said Constitution, are hereby repealed, rescinded, and abrogated.

We do further declare and ordain, that the Union now subsisting between the State of Georgia and other States, under the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved; and that the State of Georgia is in the full possession and exercise of all those rights of sovereignty which belong and appertain to a free and independent State.

The undersigned, recognizing the validity of said ordinance, and the fact that the State which he, in part, represents in the Senate of the United States, has withdrawn from the Federal Union, and is now a separate, sovereign, and independent State, does not feel at liberty any longer to take part in the proceedings of the Senate, and shall this day withdraw from the body.

Very respectfully,               

ALFRED IVERSON.

Mr. IVERSON.  The paper just read by the Clerk informs the Senate of what has already been announced to the public in unofficial form, that the State of Georgia, by the solemn act of her sovereign convention, has withdrawn from the Federal Union.  She is no longer one of the United States of America, but has resumed all the powers heretofore granted by her to the Federal Government, and asserted her independence as a separate and sovereign State.  In performing this important and solemn act, she has been influenced by a deliberate and firm conviction that her safety, her interest, and her honor, demanded it.  The opinion of her people has been gradually tending to this point for the last ten years, and recent events have strengthened and confirmed it.  An overwhelming majority of her people have, under the sanction of regularity and law, elected delegates to a convention, and expressed in that election a determination to withdraw from the Federal Union; and the convention, by a like decisive majority, and in conformity with the popular will, has passed an ordinance of secession.  Georgia is one of six States which, within less than sixty days, have dissolved their connection with the Federal Union, and declared their separate independence.  An election for delegates to a convention now in session of another State, is known to have resulted in favor of the same fixed determination, and steps are now in progress by all these States to form a Confederacy of their own.  In a few weeks at furthest, a provincial government will be formed by them, with ample powers for their own defense—with power to enter into negotiations with other nations, to make war, conclude peace, form treaties, and generally to do all other things which independent nations may of right do.  Provision will be made for the admission of other States into the new Union; and it is confidently believed that, within a few months, all the slaveholding States of the late Confederacy of the United States will be united together in a bond of union far more homogeneous, and therefore more stable, than the one now being dissolved.

I content myself, Mr. President, with a statement of these facts and these conclusions without making an argument to justify or defend them.  I have only to say, that this action of my own State, and of her immediate Southern neighbors and sisters, meets the approval of my well-considered and deliberate judgment; and as one of her native sons and loyal subjects, I shall cheerfully and joyously cast my lot with her and them, and, sink or swim, live or die, I shall be of and with her and them to the last.  Sir, with the secession of the Southern States, either in whole or in part, and the formation of a Southern Confederacy, two grave and momentous alternatives will devolve upon the Federal Government and the remaining States which shall compose the Federal Union.  You may acquiesce in the revolution, and acknowledge the independence of the new Confederacy, or you may make war upon the seceding States and attempt to force them back into a Union with you.  If you acknowledge our independence, and treat us as one of the nations of the earth, you can have friendly intercourse with us; you can have an equitable division of the public property and of the existing public debt of the United States.  If you make war upon us, we will seize and hold all the public property within our borders or within our reach, and we will never pay one dollar of the public debt.  War, by the laws of nations, extinguishes all public and private obligations between the contending States, and the individual citizens who compose them.  The first Federal gun fired upon the seceding States; the first drop of blood of any of their people shed by Federal troops, will cancel every public and private obligation of the South which may be due either to the Federal Government or to the Northern people. 

We care not in what shape or form, or under what pretexts, you attempt coercion.  We shall consider and treat all and every effort to assert your authority over us as acts of war, and shall meet and resist them.  You may send your armies to invade us by land; your ships to blockade our ports, and destroy our trade and commerce with other nations.  You may abolish our ports of entry by act of Congress, and attempt to collect your Federal revenues by ships of war.  You may do all or any of these or similar acts.  They will be acts of war, and will be so understood and treated; and in whatever shape you attack us, we will fight you.  You boast of your superior numbers and your greater strength.  Remember that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.  You have your hundreds of thousands of fighting men.  So have we; and, fighting upon our own soil, to preserve our rights, vindicate our honor, and defend our homes and firesides, our wives and children, from the invader, we shall not be easily conquered.  You may possibly overrun us, desolate our fields, burn our dwellings, lay our cities in ruins, murder our people, and reduce us to beggary; but you cannot subdue or subjugate us to your Government or your will.  Your conquest, if you gain one, will cost you a hundred thousand lives, and more than a hundred million dollars.  Nay, more, it will take a standing army of a hundred thousand men, and millions of money annually, to keep us in subjection.  You may whip us, but we will not stay whipped.  We will rise again and again to vindicate our right to liberty, and to throw off your oppressive and accursed yoke, and never cease the mortal strife until our whole white race is extinguished and our fair land given over to desolation.  You will have ships-of-war, and we may have none.  You may blockade our ports and lock up our commerce.  We can live, if need be, without commerce.  But when you shut out our cotton from the looms of Europe, we shall see whether other nations will not have something to say and something to do on that subject.  Cotton is king, and it will find means to raise your blockade and disperse your ships.

Mr. President, I know that hopes are entertained, and great efforts are being made to retain the border slaveholding States in the present Federal Union.  Let coercive measures be commenced against the Southern Confederacy, or any of the seceding States, no matter in what form they may be adopted, and all such hopes and efforts will vanish into thin air.  The first act of Federal legislation looking to coercion—the first Federal gun fired—the first Federal ship which takes her station off a Southern port to enforce the collection of the Federal revenues—will bring all the other Southern States, including even Maryland—laggard as she seems to be in the vindication of Southern Independence—into an immediate alliance and union with their more Southern sisters; and thus united, they will resist and defy all your efforts to subdue them.  There are those, Mr. President, who, surrendering all hope of preventing a disruption of the Union, and recognizing the existing fact of its dissolution, yet hope to see it reconstructed.  Sir, war between the two sections will forever close the door to such a project.  I will not say, sir, that the Southern States, if let alone, ever after they have formed a separate Confederacy, will not listen respectfully to propositions of reconstruction.  Let the North make them, and we will consider them.  The Southern people have heretofore cherished a warm and sincere attachment and reverence for the Union, and nothing but a stern conviction of the necessity and propriety of leaving it, and forming a safer and more perfect Union, would have driven them to the alternative of separation from it.  When they see (if it shall not be too long deferred) a returning sense of justice and fraternal feelings in the Northern mind and heart, and can find sufficient and reliable guarantees for the protection and permanent enjoyment of their equality and rights in the Union, they may, perhaps, reconsider their present action, and rejoin their former confederates. 

For myself, sir, I am free to declare that, unless my opinions shall be greatly changed, I shall never agree to the reconstruction of the Federal Union.  The Rubicon is passed; and it shall never, with my consent, be recrossed.  But in this sentiment I may be overruled by the people of my State, and of the other Southern States.  I may safely say, however, that nothing will satisfy them or bring them back, short of a full and explicit recognition and guarantee of the safety of their institution of domestic slavery and the protection of the constitutional rights for which in the Union they have been so long contending, and a denial of which, by their Northern confederates, has forced them into their present attitude of separate independence.

And now, Mr. President, it remains for me only to express my grateful acknowledgments and thanks for the uniform courtesy and kindness with which I have been treated by all those Senators with whom I have had official or social relations during my service in this body; and wishing them each and all long life, prosperity, and happiness, I bid them farewell.