Nashville Republican Banner, January 26, 1861

Those who are plotting the disruption of this Government and the establishment of a Southern Confederacy, claim to be the only true friends of the South and its institutions. Those who are for maintaining the Government are denounced as Republicans, abolitionists, &c. Any man with half a man's reasoning power can see that the friends of the existing Government are the only true friends of slavery. The prosperity of the South—its wealth and refinement—has resulted from the existence of the institution of slavery—and that institution has depended mainly for its existence upon the protection afforded it by the Constitution, which has bound the free States of the Confederacy as well as the slave to its maintenance. No other government in the world has been able to sustain slavery so successfully as this—none, indeed, to sustain it at all. The constitutional support of seventeen free States, united with fifteen slave States, and forming one of the first powers of the earth, has extended over this institution a protection which has kept the anti-slavery sentiment of the whole world at bay, as far as any practical interference jeopardizing our safety is concerned. But how will it be after the present government is dissolved, and the Northern States are absolved from their Constitutional obligations, and instead of being parties to the maintenance of slavery, as they are under the Constitution, become its open and avowed enemies, not in the abstract, but practically, and as a republic? It is clear to be seen that the South will be greatly and fatally weakened, and the doom of slavery irrevocably fixed.

In this opinion we are endorsed by one of the most sagacious leaders of the present movement in South Carolina. In 1851 the Hon. W. W. BOYCE stood out successfully against secession, though in 1860 he was forced to yield, seeing that in ten years those engaged in "educating the Southern mind," and "firing the Southern heart," had made such rapid progress as to render resistance self-immolation, and very few politicians at this day are in the habit of carrying their convictions of right to such an extent. But the arguments of Mr. BOYCE against secession in 1851, are unanswered either by himself or his cosecessionists in 1860, and they will not be answered. Then, after speaking of "the hostile spirit of the age to the institution of slavery," he said:

Secession, separate nationality with all its burdens, is no remedy. It is no redress for the past; it is no security for the future. It is only a magnificent sacrifice to the present, without in any wise gaining in the future. . . . For the various reasons I have stated, I object in as strong terms as I can, to the secession of South Carolina. Such is the intensity of my conviction on this subject, that if secession should take place—of which I have no idea, for I cannot believe in the existence of such a stupendous madness—I shall consider the institution of slavery as doomed, and that the Great God, in our blindness, has made us the instruments of its destruction.