William Henry Stiles, Address Delivered before the Georgia Democratic State Convention, Assembled at Milledgeville, July 4tb, 1856 (Atlanta: Printed at the ‘Examiner’ Office, 1856).

Through six years of devastating but heroic war, the principles of that declaration, they sustained by their arms and sealed with their blood, on many a hard-fought field, from the disastrous commencement on the heights of Abraham, to the glorious termination in the surrender at Yorktown. There is perhaps no portion of people's national history so little understood by some, and so thoughtlessly perverted by others, as the causes which led to the separation of these colonies from all political connexion with Great Britain. A brief recurrence to the history of the past will demonstrate the fallacy of such an impression. In the first place the American colonists were not slaves. A people possessed of right of legislation, of habeas corpus, and of trial by jury, can in no proper sense be considered as slaves, nor can a ruler by whatever high-sounding titles he may be addressed.