Chapter XIX: Conclusion: Of Farewell Address at New Orleans (2)

What is the contest in Virginia now? Between the men who want to make their slaves mechanics, for the increased wages it will secure, and the men who oppose, for fear of the influence it will have on the general security of slave property and white throats. Just that dispute will go on, wherever the Union is dissolved. Slavery comes to an end by the laws of trade. Hang up your Sharpe's rifle, my valorous friend! The slave does not ask the help of your musket. He only says, like old Diogenes to Alexander, "Stand out of my light!" Just take your awkward proportions, you Yankee Democrat and Republican, out of the light and heat of God's laws of political economy, and they will melt the slaves' chains away! W. Phillips.

CCLXXXIII.

THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT.

No matter where you meet a dozen earnest men pledged to a new idea,--wherever you have met them, you have met the beginning of a revolution. Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back. The child feels; he grows into a man, and thinks; another, perhaps, speaks, and the world acts out the thought. And this is the history of modern society. Men undervalue the Anti-slavery movement, because they imagine you can always put your finger on some illustrious moment in history, and say, here commenced the great change which has come over the nation. Not so. The beginning of great changes is like the rise of the Mississippi. A child must stoop and gather away the pebbles to find it. But soon it swells broader and broader, bears on its ample bosom the navies of a mighty republic, fills the Gulf, and divides a continent.

I remember a story of Napoleon which illustrates my meaning. We are apt to trace his control of France to some noted victory, to the time when he camped in the Tuileries, or when he dissolved the Assembly by the stamp of his foot. He reigned in fact when his hand was first felt on the helm of the vessel of state, and that was far back of the time when he had conquered in Italy, or his name had been echoed over two continents. It was on the day when five hundred irresolute men were met in that Assembly which called itself, and pretended to be, the government of France. They heard that the mob of Paris was coming the next morning, thirty thousand strong, to turn them, as was usual in those days, out of doors. And where did this seemingly great power go for its support and refuge? They sent Tallien to seek out a boy-lieutenant,--the shadow of an officer,--so thin and pallid that, when he was placed on the stand before them, the President of the Assembly, fearful, if the fate of France rested on the shrunken form, the ashy cheek before him, that all hope was gone, asked, "Young man, can you protect the Assembly?" And the stern lips of the Corsican boy parted only to reply, "I always do what I undertake!" Then and there Napoleon ascended his throne; and the next day, from the steps of St. Roche, thundered forth the cannon which taught the mob of Paris, for the first time, that it had a master. That was the commencement of the Empire. So the Anti-slavery movement commenced unheeded in that "obscure hole" which Mayor Otis could not find, occupied by a printer and a black boy. W. Phillips.

CCLXXXIV.

"TOUCH NOT SLAVERY"

What! you the descendants of those men of iron who preferred a life-or-death struggle with misery on the bleak and wintry coast of New England to submission to priestcraft and kingcraft; you, the offspring of those hardy pioneers who set their faces against all the dangers and difficulties that surround the early settler's life; you, who subdued the forces of wild nature, cleared away the primeval forest, covered the end less prairie with human habitations; you, this race of bold reformers who blended together the most incongruous elements of birth and creed, who built up a government which you called a model republic, and undertook to show mankind how to be free; you, the mighty nation of the West, that presumes to defy the world in arms, and to subject a hemisphere to its sovereign dictation; you, who boast of recoiling from no enterprise ever so great, and no problem ever so fearful--the spectral monster of Slavery stares you in the face, and now your blood runs cold, and all your courage fails you? For half a century it has disturbed the peace of this Republic; it has arrogated to itself your national domain; it has attempted to establish its absolute rule, and to absorb even your future development; it has disgraced you in the eyes of mankind, and now it endeavors to ruin you if it cannot rule you; it raises its murderous hand against the institutions most dear to you; it attempts to draw the power of foreign nations upon your heads; it swallows up the treasures you have earned by long years of labor; it drinks the blood of your sons and the tears of your wives and now, every day it is whispered in your ears, "Whatever Slavery may have done to you, whatever you may suffer, touch it not! No matter how many thousand millions of your wealths it may cost, no matter how much blood you may have to shed in order to disarm its murderous hand, touch it not! No matter how many years of peace and prosperity you may have to sacrifice in order to prolong its existence, touch it not! And if it should cost you your honor, touch it not!"

Listen to this story: On the Lower Potomac, as the papers tell us, a negro comes within our lines, and tells the valiant defenders of the Union that his master conspires with the rebels, and has a quantity of arms concealed in a swamp; our soldiers go and find the arms; the master reclaims the slave; the slave is given up; the master ties him to his horse, drags him along eleven miles to his house, lashes him to a tree, and, with the assistance of his overseer, whips him three hours--three mortal hours; then the negro dies. That black man served the Union; Slavery attempts to destroy the Union; the Union surrenders the black man to Slavery, and he is whipped to death--touch it not! Let an imperishable blush of shame cover every cheek in this boasted land of freedom--but be careful not to touch Slavery! Ah, what a dark divinity is this, that we must sacrifice to it our peace, our prosperity, our blood, our future, our honor! What an insatiable vampire is this that drinks out the very marrow of our manliness! Pardon me; this sounds like a dark dream, like the offspring of a hypochondriac imagination; and yet--have I been unjust in what I have said? Carl Schurz.

CCLXXXV.

OHIO.

Ohio rises before the world as the majestic witness to the beneficent reality of the democratic principle. A commonwealth younger in years than he who addresses you, not long ago having no visible existence but in the emigrant wagons, now numbers almost as large a population as that of all England when it gave birth to Raleigh, and Bacon, and Shakespeare, and began its continuous attempts at colonizing America. Each one of her inhabitants gladdens in the fruit of his own toil. She possesses wealth that must be computed by thousands of millions; and her frugal, industrious and benevolent people, at once daring and prudent, unfettered in the use of their faculties, restless in enterprise, do not squander the accumulations of their industry in vain show, but ever go on to render the earth more productive, more beautiful, and more convenient to man; mastering for mechanical purposes the unwitting forces of nature; keeping exemplary good faith with their public creditors; building in half a century more. churches than all England has raised since this continent was discovered; endowing and sustaining universities and other seminaries of learning. Conscious of the dynamic power of mind in action as the best of fortresses, Ohio keeps no standing army but that of her school-teachers, of whom she pays more than twenty thousand; she provides a library for every school-district; she counts among her citizens more than three hundred thousand men who can bear arms, and she has more than twice that number of children registered as students in her public schools. Here the purity of domestic morals is maintained by the virtue and dignity of woman. In the heart of the temperate zone of this continent, in the land of corn, of wheat, and the vine, the eldest daughter of the Ordinance of 1787, already the young mother of other commonwealths that bid fair to vie with her in beauty, rises in her loveliness and glory, crowned with cities, and challenges the admiration of the world. Hither should come the political skeptic, who, in his despair, is ready to strand the ship of state; for here he may learn how to guide it safely on the waters. Should some modern Telemachus, heir to an island empire, touch these shores, here he may observe the vitality and strength of the principle of popular power; take from the book of experience the lesson that in public affairs great and happy results follow in proportion to faith in the efficacy of that principle, and learn to rebuke ill-advised counsellors who pronounce the most momentous and most certain of political truths a delusion and a failure. G. Bancroft.

CCLXXXVI.

THE CONTROVERSY BETWEEN THE NORTH AND SOUTH.

It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the Southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. The question is, What will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. What will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly--done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and enforced suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

I am quite aware they do not state their case precisely in this way. Most of them would probably say to us: "Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about slavery." But we do let them alone--have never disturbed them--so that, after all, it is what we say, which dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying.

Nor can we justifiably withhold this, an any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we can not justly object to its nationality--its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension--its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?

Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces either of destruction to the government or of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT. A. Lincoln.

CCLXXXVII.

THE PRETEXT OF REBELLION.

If war must come--if the bayonet must be used to maintain the Constitution--I can say, before God, my conscience is clear. I have struggled long for a peaceful solution of the difficulty. I have not only tendered those States what was theirs of right, but I have gone to the very extreme off magnanimity, The return we receive is war, armies marched upon our Capital obstructions and danger to our navigation, letters of marque to invite pirates to prey upon our commerce, a concerted movement to blot out the United States of America from the map of the globe. The question is, Are we to be stricken down by those who, when they can no longer govern, threaten to destroy? What cause, what excuse do disunionists give us for breaking up the best government on which the sun of heaven ever shed its rays? They are dissatisfied with the result of a Presidential election. Did they never get beaten before? Are we to resort to the sword when we get defeated at the ballot-box? I understand that the voice of the people expressed in the mode appointed by the Constitution must command the obedience of every citizen. They assume, on the election of a particular candidate, that their rights are not safe in the Union. What evidence do they present of this? I defy any man to show any act on which it is based. What act has been omitted or been done? I appeal to these assembled thousands, that so far as the constitutional rights of the Southern States--I will say the constitutional rights of slaveholders--are concerned, nothing has been done, and nothing omitted, of which they can complain.

There has never been a time, from the day that Washington was inaugurated first President of these United States, when the rights of the Southern States stood firmer under the laws of the land than they do now; there never was a time when they had not as good a cause for disunion as they have to-day. What good cause have they now that has not existed under every administration? If they say the Territorial question--now, for the first time, there is no act of Congress prohibiting slavery anywhere. If it be the non-enforcement of the laws, the only complaints that I have heard have been of the too vigorous and faithful fulfillment of the Fugitive Slave Law. Then what reason have they? The slavery question is a mere excuse. The election of Lincoln is a mere pretext. The present secession movement is the result of an enormous conspiracy formed more than a year since--foraged by leaders in the Southern Confederacy more than twelve months ago. They use the slavery question as a means to aid the accomplishment of their ends. They desired the election of a Northern candidate, by a sectional vote, in order to show that the two sections cannot live together. When the history of the two years from the Lecompton charter down to the Presidential election shall be written, it will be shown that the scheme was deliberately made to break up this Union. They desired a Northern Republican to be elected by a purely Northern vote, and now assign this fact as a reason why the sections may not longer live together. If the disunion candidate in the late Presidential contest had carried the united South, their scheme was, the Northern candidate successful, to seize the Capital last spring, and, by a united South and divided North, hold it. That scheme was defeated in the defeat of the disunion candidate in several of the Southern states. The conspiracy is now known. Armies have been raised, war is levied to accomplish it. There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against them. There can be no neutrals in this war; only patriots or traitors. S. A. Douglass.

CCLXXXVIII.

NO NEUTRALS; ONLY PATRIOTS OR TRAITORS.

But this is no time for a detail of causes. The conspiracy is now known. Armies have been raised, war is levied to accomplish it. There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against them. There can be no neutrals in this war; only patriots or tractors. We cannot close our eyes to the sad and solemn fact that war does exist. The government must be maintained, its enemies overthrown; and the more stupendous our preparations the less the bloodshed, and the shorter the struggle will be. But we must remember certain restraints on our action even in time of war. We are a Christian people, and the war must be prosecuted in a manner recognized by Christian nations. We must not invade constitutional rights. The innocent must not suffer, nor women or children be the victims. Savages must not be let loose. But while I sanction no war on the rights of others, I will implore my countrymen not to lay down their arms until our own rights are recognized. The Constitution and its guarantees are our birth right, and I am ready to enforce that inalienable right to the last extent. We cannot recognize secession. Recognize it once, and you have not only dissolved government, but you have destroyed social order, and upturned the foundations of society You have inaugurated anarchy in its worst form, and will shortly experience all the horrors of the French Revolution.

Then we have a solemn duty,--to maintain the government. The greater our unanimity, the speedier the day of peace. We have prejudices to overcome from a fierce party contest waged a few short months since. Yet these must be allayed. Let us lay aside all criminations and recriminations as to the origin of these difficulties. When we shall have again a country, with the United States flag floating over it, and respected on every inch of American soil, it will then be time enough to ask who and what brought all this upon us. I have said more than I intended to say. It is a sad task to discuss questions so fearful as civil war; but sad as it is, bloody and disastrous as I expect the war will be, I express it as my conviction, before God, that it is the duty of every American citizen to rally round the flag of his country. S. A. Douglass.

CCLXXXIX.

ON THE ORDINANCE OF SECESSION IN THE GEORGIA CONVENTION.

This step, once taken, can never be recalled; and all the baleful and withering consequences that follow will rest on the convention for all coming time. When we and our posterity shall see our lovely South desolated by the demon of war, which this act of yours will inevitably invite and call forth; when your green fields of waving harvests shall be trodden down by the murderous soldiery and the very car of war sweeping over our land; our temples of justice laid in ashes; all the horrors and desolation of war upon us, who but this convention will be held responsible for it? and who but him who shall have given his vote for this unwise and ill-timed measure shall be held to strict account for this suicidal act by the present generation, and probably cursed and execrated by posterity for all coming time, for the wide and desolating ruin that will inevitably follow this act you now propose to perpetrate?

Pause, I entreat you, and consider for a moment what reasons you can give that will ever satisfy yourselves in calmer moments,--what reasons you can give to your fellow-sufferers in the calamity that it will bring upon us? What reason can you give the nations of the earth to justify it? They will be the calm and deliberate judges in the case, and to what cause, or one overt act can you point, on which to rest the plea of justification? What right has the North assailed? What interest of the South has been invaded? What justice has been denied? and what claim founded in justice and right has been withheld? can either of you to-day name one governmental act of wrong deliberately and purposely done by the government at Washington of which the South has a right to complain? I challenge the answer! While, on the other hand, let me show the facts (and believe me, gentlemen, I am not here the advocate of the North, but am here the firm friend and lover of the South and her institutions, and for this reason I speak thus plainly and faithfully for yours, mine, and every other man's interest, the words of truth and soberness,) let me show the facts, I say, of which I wish you to judge, and I will only state facts which are clear and undeniable, and which now stand as records authentic in the history of our country.

When we of the South demanded the slave-trade, or the importation of Africans for the cultivation of our lands, did they not yield the right for twenty years? When we asked a three-fifths representation in Congress for our slaves, was it not granted? When we asked and demanded the return of any fugitive from justice, or the recovery of those persons owing labor or allegiance, was it not incorporated in the constitution? and again ratified and strengthened in the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850? Do you reply that in many instances they have violated this compact, and have not been faithful to their engagements? As individuals and local communities they may have done so; but not by the sanction of government; for that has always been true to Southern interests.

Leaving out of the view, for the present, the countless millions of dollars you must expend in a war with the North, there will be thousands and tens of thousands of your sons and brothers slain in battle, and opened up as sacrifices upon the altar of ambition,--and for what, we ask again? It is for the overthrow of the American government, established by our common ancestry cemented and built up by their sweat and blood, and founded on the broad principles of Right, Justice, and Humanity? And, as such, I must declare here, as I have often done before, and which has been repeated by the greatest and wisest of statesman and patriots in this and other lands, that it is the best and freest government,--the most equal in its rights,--the most just in its decisions--the most lenient in its measures: and the most inspiring in its principles to elevate the race of men, that the sun in heaven ever shone upon.

Now, for you to attempt to overthrow such a government as this, under which we have lived for more than three quarters of a century, in which we have gained our wealth, our standing as a nation, our domestic safety while the elements of peril are round us with peace and tranquility accompanied with unbounded prosperity and rights unassailed--is the height of madness, folly and wickedness, to which I can neither lend my sanction nor my vote. A. H. Stephens.

CCXC.

"THE HIRELING LABORERS" OF THE NORTH.

The Senator from South Carolina [Mr. Hammond] exclaims: "The man who lives by daily labor, your whole hireling class of manual laborers, are essentially slaves; and they feel galled by their degradation." What a sentiment is this to hear uttered in the councils of this democratic republic! This language of scorn and contempt is addressed to senators who were not nursed by a slave; whose lot it was to toil with their own hands,--to eat bread, earned, not by the sweat of another's brow, but by their own.

Sir, should the Senator and his agitators and lecturers come to Massachusetts, on a mission to teach our "hireling class of manual laborers," our "slaves," the "tremendous secret of the ballot-box," and to help "combine and lead them," these stigmatized "hirelings" would reply to the Senator and his associates: "we are freemen; we are the peers of the gifted and the wealthy; we know 'the tremendous secret of the ballot-box;' and we mould and fashion these institutions that bless and adorn our free Commonwealth! These public schools are ours, for the education of our children; these libraries, with their accumulated treasures, are ours; these multitudinous and varied pursuits of life, where intelligence and skill find their reward, are ours. Labor is here honored and respected, and great examples incite us to action.

"All around us, in the professions, in the marts of commerce, on the exchange where merchant princes and capitalists do congregate, in these manufactories and workshops where the products of every clime are fashioned into a thousand forms of utility and beauty, on these smiling farms fertilized by the sweat of free labor, in every position of private and of public life,--are our associates, who were but yesterday what you call 'hireling laborers,' and therefore, 'essentially slaves!' In every department of human effort are noble men who sprang from our ranks,-men whose good deeds will be felt, and will live in the grateful memories of men, when the stones reared by the hands of affection to their honored names shall crumble into dust. Our eyes glisten and our hearts throb over the bright, glowing, and radiant pages of our history that record the deeds of patriotism of the sons of New England who sprang from our ranks, and wore the badges of toil. While the names of Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Nathaniel Greene, and Paul Revere, live on the brightest pages of our history, the mechanics of Massachusetts and New England will never want illustrious examples to incite us to noble aspirations and noble deeds.

"Go home, sir, and say to your privileged class, which you vauntingly say leads progress, civilization, and refinement, that in the opinion of the 'hireling laborers' of Massachusetts, if you have no sympathy for your African bondsmen, you should, at least, sympathize with the millions of your own race, whose labor your have dishonored and degraded by slavery! You should teach your millions of poor and ignorant white men, so long oppressed by your policy, the 'tremendous secret that the ballot-box is stronger than an army with banners!' You should 'combine' and lead them to the adoption of a policy which shall secure their own emancipation from a degrading thraldom!" H. Wilson.

CCXCI.

THE DEATH OF SLAVERY THE LIFE OF THE NATION.

We of America have been accustomed to contemplate, with something of gratified and patriotic pride, the wondrous progress of our country, and the strength and stability of our Government. Gazing with beaming eye and throbbing heart upon the grandeur and beauty of this splendid edifice of constitutional government in America, we came to believe that it was as imperishable as the memory of its illustrious builders. We dreamed for our native land a glorious destiny--a magnificent career among the nations during the coming ages. But our firm, confident faith is now shaken--our bright hopes are now dimmed--our lofty pride is now humbled--our gorgeous visions of the future glories of the Republic are now obscured by the storm of battle. Our country, the land of so much of affection, of pride and of hope, now presents to the startled and astonished gaze of mankind an appalling, humiliating, and saddening spectacle. Treasonable menaces of other days have now ripened into treasonable deeds. Civil war holds its carnival, and reaps its bloody harvest. The nation is grappling with a gigantic conspiracy--struggling for existence--for the preservation of its menaced life--against a rebellion that finds no parallel in the annals of the world.

Why is it that the land resounds with the measured tread of a million of armed men? Why is it that our bright waters all stained and our green fields reddened with fraternal blood? Why is it that the young men of America, in the pride and bloom of early manhood, are summoned from homes, from the mothers who bore them, from the wives and sisters who love them, to the fields of bloody strife--there to do soldiers' duties, bear soldiers' burdens, and fill soldiers' graves? Why is it that thousands of the men and the women of Christian America are sorrowing, with aching hearts and tearful eyes, for the absent, the loved, and the lost? Why is it that the heart of loyal America throbs, heavily oppressed with anxiety and gloom, for the future of the country?

These crimes against the peace of the country and the life of the nation are all, all to eternize the hateful dominion of man over the souls and bodies of his fellow-men--to make slavery perpetual and its power forever dominant in Christian and Republican America. These sacrifices of property of health, of life--these appalling sorrows and agonies now upon us, are all the inflictions of slavery, in its gigantic effort to found a slaveholding empire in America. Yes, slavery is the "architect of ruin" who organized this mighty conspiracy against the unity and existence of the Republic. Slavery is the traitor that plunged the Nation into the fire, and blood, and darkness of civil war. Slavery is the criminal whose hands are dripping with the blood of our murdered sons. Before the tribunal of mankind, of the present and of coming ages--before the bar of the ever-living God--the loyal heart of America holds slavery responsible for every dollar sacrificed, for every drop of blood shed, for every pang of toil, of agony, and of death for every tear wrung from suffering or affection, in this godless rebellion now upon us. For these treasonable deeds, these crimes against freedom, humanity, and the life of the Nation, slavery should be doomed by the loyal people of America to a swift, utter, and ignominious annihilation.

Slavery, bold, proud, domineering with hate in its heart, scorn in its eye, defiance in its mien, has pronounced against the existence of republican institutions in America, against the supremacy of the Government, the unity and life of the Nation. Slavery, hating the cherished institutions that tend to secure the rights and enlarge the privileges of mankind, despising the toiling masses, as "mudsills" and "white slaves," defying the Government, its Constitution and its laws, has openly pronounced itself the mortal and unappeasable enemy of the Republic. Slavery stands now the only clearly pronounced foe our country has on the globe. Therefore, every word spoken, every line written, every act performed, that keeps the breath of life, for a moment, in slavery, is against the existence and perpetuity of democratic institutions against the dignity of the toiling millions of America--against the liberty, the peace, the honor, the renown, and the life of the Nation. In the lights of to-day that flash upon us from camp and battle-field, the loyal eye, heart, and brain of America sees and feels and realizes that THE DEATH OF SLAVERY IS THE LIFE OF THE NATION! The loyal voice of patriotism throughout all the land pronounces, in clear accents, that AMERICAN SLAVERY MUST DIE THAT THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC MAY LIVE! H. Wilson.

CCXCII.

THE FANATICISM OF MASSACHUSETTS.

This, sir, is not the first time in her history that Massachusetts has drawn upon herself reproach and rebuke for unbending adherence to the rights of human nature. In the days of her colonial existence, her unshrinking devotion to the rights of mankind often drew upon her the censure of the pliant supporters of the British Crown; but the world now quotes and commends her inspiring example. Now her abhorrence of human slavery brings upon her the condemnation of its advocates and apologists, but the hour will yet come, in the march of time, when her unwavering fidelity to an unpopular cause in spite of obloquy and reproach, will be a source of inspiration to men struggling to recover lost rights. Massachusetts clings with the tenacity of profound conviction to the teachings of her own illustrious sons. She was taught by Benjamin Franklin that "slavery is an atrocious debasement of human nature;" by John Adams that "consenting to slavery is a sacrilegious breach of trust;" by John Quincy Adams that "slavery taints the very sources of moral principle"--"establishes false estimates of virtue and vice;" by Daniel Webster that "it is a continual and permanent violation of human rights"--"opposed to the whole spirit of the Gospels and to the teachings of Jesus Christ;" by William Ellery Channing that "to extend and perpetuate the evil, we cut ourselves off from the communion of nations; we sink below the civilization of our age; we invite the scorn, indignation and abhorrence of the world." Massachusetts cannot forget or repudiate these words of her immortal sons.

The distinguishing opinion of Massachusetts concerning slavery in America is often flippantly branded in these Halls, as wild, passionate, unreasoning fanaticism. Senators of the South! tell me, I pray you tell me, if it be fanaticism for Massachusetts to see in this age, what your peerless Washington saw in his age "the direful effects of slavery?" Is it fanaticism for Massachusetts to believe as your Henry believed, that "slavery is as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible, and destructive to liberty?" Is it fanaticism for her to believe as your Madison believed, that "slavery is a dreadful calamity?" Is it fanaticism for her to believe with your Monroe, that "slavery has preyed upon the vitals of the union and has been prejudicial to all the States in which it has existed?" Is it fanaticism for her to believe with your Martin that "slavery lessens the sense of the equal rights of mankind, and habituates us to tyranny and oppression?" Is it fanaticism for her to believe with your Pinckney that "it will one day destroy the reverence for liberty, which is the vital principle of a Republic?" Is it fanaticism for her to believe with your Henry Clay, that "slavery is a wrong, a grievous wrong, and no contingency can make it right?" Surely, Senators who are wont to accuse Massachusetts of being drunk with fanaticism, should not forget that the noblest men the South has given to the service of the Republic, in peace and in war, were her teachers. H. Wilson.

CCXCIII.

DEFENCE OF MASSACHUSETTS.

Massachusetts, in her heart of hearts, loves liberty--loathes slavery. I glory in her sentiments; for the heart of our common humanity is throbbing in sympathy with her opinions. But she is not unmindful of her constitutional duties, of her obligations to the Union and to her sister States. Up to the verge of constitutional power she will go in maintenance of her cherished convictions; but she has not shrunk, and she does not mean to shrink, from the performance of her obligations as a member of this Confederation of constellated States. She has never sought, she does not seek, to encroach, by her own acts or by the action of the Federal Government, upon the constitutional rights of her sister States. Jealous of her own rights, she will respect the rights of others. Claiming the power to control her own domestic policy, she freely accords that power to her sister States. Concealing the rights of others, she demands her own. Loyal to the Union, she demands loyalty in others. Here, and now, I demand of her accusers that they file their bill of specifications, and produce the proofs of their allegations, or forever hold their peace.

In other days, when Adams, Webster, Davis, Everett, Cushing, Choate, Winthrop, Mann, Rantoul, and their associates graced these chambers, Massachusetts was then, as she is now, the object of animadversion and assault. I have sometimes thought, Mr. President, that these continual assaults upon the Commonwealth of Massachusetts were prompted--not by her faults, but by her virtues rather--not by the sense of justice, but by the spirit of envy and jealousy and uncharitableness. Unawed, however, by censure or menace, she continues in her course, upward and onward, to the accomplishment of her high destinies. She is but a speck, a mere patch on the surface of America, hardly more than one four-hundredth part of the territory of the Republic, with a rugged soil and still more rugged clime. But on that little spot of the globe is a Common wealth where common consent is recognized as the only just basis of fundamental law, and personal freedom is secured in its completest individuality. In that Commonwealth are one and a quarter million of freemen, with skilled hand and cultivated brain,--with mechanic arts and manufactures on every streamlet, and commerce on the waves of all the seas--with institutions of moral and mental culture open to all, and art, science, and literature illustrated by glorious names--with benevolent institutions for the sons and daughters of misfortune and poverty, and charities for humanity the wide world over, The heart, the soul, the reason of Massachusetts send up unceasing aspirations for the unity, indivisibility, and perpetuity of the North American Republic; but if it shall be rent, torn, dissevered, she will not lose her faith in God and humanity, she will not go down with the falling fortunes of her country without making a struggle to preserve and perpetuate free institutions. So long as the ocean shall roll at her feet, so long as God shall send her health-giving breezes and sunshine and rain, she will endeavor to illustrate, in the future as in the past, the daily beauty of freedom secured and protected by law. H. Wilson.

CCXCIV.

EMANCIPATION.

Shall these once slaves but now freemen be remanded back to bondage? No: "personal property once forfeited is always forfeited." No: slaves once legally free are always free. No, no; thrice no, by the ashes of our fathers, by the altar of our God! The "chosen curses," and the "hidden thunder in the stores of heaven" will forbid the rendition--a crime to them, a malediction to their masters, a shame to us, and a disgrace to the age. If these children of wrong and oppression are the lawful spoil of our victorious arms, give up to the enemy your proudest national memorials--the sword of Washington, the staff of Franklin, that time-worn but immortal parchment which just authoritatively published your Independence to the world--give up to him the blood-stained flags and trophies which, upon the bristling crest of battle, our heroic defenders have wrenched from his desperate grasp; give up to him this Capitol itself and throw at his feet the President's head, before you give up the most abject of these bondsmen disenthralled; for in surrendering them you will squander one of those priceless moments, big with the future, worth more than a whole generation of either bond or free, the rare and pregnant occasion placed in your hand by the fortune of war of wiping forever African slavery from the American continent.

If this deliverance is ever vouchsafed, then shall we be purged forever of the sole source of our weakness and dissension in the past; then will pass away forever the sole cloud that threatens the glory of our future; then will the American Union be transfigured into a more erect and shining presence, and tread with firm footsteps a loftier plane, and cherish nobler theories, and carry its head nearer the stars; then will it be no profanation to wed its redeemed and unpolluted name to that of immortal Liberty; then Liberty and Union will go on, hand in hand, and, under a holier inspiration and with more benign and blessed auspices, will revive their grand mission of peacefully acquiring and peacefully incorporating contiguous territories, and peacefully assimilating their inhabitants; then from the Orient to the Occident, from the flowery shores of the great Southern Gulf to the frozen barriers of the great Northern Bay, will they unite in spreading a civilization, not intertwined with slavery, but purged of its contamination, a civilization which means universal emancipation, universal enfranchisement, universal brotherhood.

Despair not, then, soldiers, statesmen, citizens, women, we are fighting energetically for a nation's life. The cloud which now shuts down before your vision will yet disclose its silver lining. Peace shall be born from war, and out of chaos order shall yet emerge. We shall dwell together in harmony, and but one nation shall inhabit our sea-girt borders. We seem sailing along the land, hearing the ripple that breaks upon the shore, where our recreated and regenerated Republic, after it has passed through this fiery furnace of war, these gates of death, shall be permanently installed. We shall yet tread its meadows and pastures green, trade in its marts, live in its palaces worship in its temples, and legislate in its Capitol. H. C. Deming.

CCXCV.

PROTECTION FOR TENNESSEE.

The amendments to the Constitution which constitute the Bill of Rights, declare that "a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Our people are denied this right secured to them in their own constitution and the constitution of the United States; yet we hear no complaints here of violations of the Constitution in this respect. We ask the Government to interpose to secure us this constitutional right. We want the passes in our mountains opened, we want deliverance and protection for a down-trodden and oppressed people who are struggling for their independence without arms. If we had had ten thousand stand of arms and ammunition when the contest commenced, we should have asked no further assistance. We have not got them. We are a rural people; we have villages and small towns--no large cities. Our population is homogeneous, industrious, frugal, brave, independent; but now harmless and powerless, and oppressed by usurpers. You may be too late in coming to our relief or you may not come at all though I do not doubt you will come--and they may trample us under foot; they may convert our plains into graveyards, and the caves of our mountains into sepulchers; but they will never take us out of this Union, or make us a land of slaves--no, never! We intend to stand as firm as adamant, and as unyielding as our own majestic mountains that surround us. Yes, we will be as fixed and as immovable as are they upon their bases. We will stand as long as we can; and if we are overpowered and Liberty shall be driven from the land, we intend before she departs to take the flag of our country with a stalwart arm, a patriotic heart, and an honest tread, and place it upon the summit of the loftiest and most majestic mountain. We intend to plant it there, and leave it, to indicate to the inquirer who may come in after times, the spot where the Goddess of Liberty lingered and wept for the last time, before she took her flight from a people once prosperous, free, and happy.

We ask the Government to come to our aid. We love the Constitution as made by our fathers. We have confidence in the integrity and capacity of the people to govern themselves. We have lived entertaining these opinions; we intend to die entertaining them. We may meet with impediments, and may meet with disasters, and here and there a defeat; but ultimately freedom's cause must triumph, for--

"Freedom's battle once begun,
Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
Though baffled oft, is ever won."

Yes, we must triumph. My faith is strong, based on the eternal principles of right that a thing so monstrously wrong as this rebellion cannot triumph. I say, let the battle go on--it is freedom's cause--until the Stars and Stripes ( God bless them!) shall again be unfurled upon every cross-road, and from every house-top throughout the Confederacy North and South. Let the Union be reinstated; let tie law be enforced; let the Constitution be supreme. A. Johnson.

CCXCVI.

THE SUBMISSIONISTS.

With the curled lip of scorn we are told by the disunionists that, in thus supporting a Republican Administration in its endeavors to uphold the Constitution and the laws, we are "submissionists," and when they have pronounced this word, they suppose they have imputed to us the sum of all human abasement. Well, let it be confessed, we are "submissionists," and weak and spiritless as it may be deemed by some, we glory in the position we occupy. The law says, "Thou shalt not swear falsely;" we submit to this law, and while in the civil or military service of the country, with an oath to support the Constitution of the United States resting upon our consciences, we would not, for any earthly consideration, engage in the formation or execution of a conspiracy to subvert that very Constitution and with it the Government to which it has given birth. Write us down, therefore, "submissionists."

Nor are we at all disturbed by the flippant taunt that, in thus submitting to the authority of our Government, we are necessarily cowards. We know whence this taunt comes, and we estimate it at its true value. We hold that there is a higher courage in the performance of duty than in the commission of crime. The tiger of the jungle and the cannibal of the South Sea Islands have that courage in which the revolutionists of the day make their especial boast; the angels of God and the spirits of just men made perfect have had, and have that courage which submits to the law. Lucifer was a non-submissionist, and the first secessionist of whom history has given us any account, and the chains which he wears fitly express the fate due to all who openly defy the laws of their Creator and of their country. He rebelled because the Almighty would not yield to him the throne of heaven. The principle of the Southern rebellion is the same. Indeed, in this submission to the laws, is found the chief distinction between good men and devils. A good man obeys the laws of truth, of honesty, of morality, and all those laws which have been enacted by competent authority for the government and protection of the country in which he lives; a devil obeys only his own ferocious and profligate passions.

The principle on which this rebellion proceeds, that laws have in themselves no sanctions, no binding force upon the conscience, and that every man, under the promptings of interest, or passion, or caprice, may at will, and honorably, too, strike at the government that shelters him, is one of utter demoralization, and should be trodden out as you would tread out a spark that has fallen on the roof of your dwelling. Its unchecked prevalence would resolve society into chaos, and leave you without the slightest guarantee for life, liberty, or property. It is time, that, in their majesty, the people of the United States should make known to the world that this Government, in its dignity and power, is something more than a moot court, and that the citizen who makes war upon it is a traitor, not only in theory but in fact, and should have meted out to him a traitor's doom. The country wants no bloody sacrifice, but it must and will have peace, cost what it may. J. Holt.

CCXCVII.

ADDRESS TO KENTUCKY VOLUNTEERS.

Soldiers, next to the worship of the Father of us all, the deepest and grandest of human emotions is the love of the land that gave us birth. It is an enlargement and exaltation of all the tenderest and strongest sympathies of kindred and of home. In all centuries and climes it has lived and has defied chains and dungeons and racks to crush it. It has strewed the earth with its monuments, and has shed undying lustre on a thousand fields on which it has battled. Through the night of ages, Thermopylæ glows like some mountain peak on which the morning sun has risen, because twenty-three hundred years ago, this hallowing passion touched its mural precipices and its crowning crags.

It is easy, however, to be patriotic in piping times of peace, and in the sunny hour of prosperity. It is national sorrow, it is war, with its attendant perils and horrors, that tests this passion, and winnows from the masses those who, with all their love of life, still love their country more. While your present position is a most vivid and impressive illustration of patriotism, it has a glory peculiar and altogether its own.

The mercenary armies which have swept victoriously over the world, and have gathered so many of the laurels that history has embalmed, were but machines drafted into the service of ambitious spirits whom they obeyed, and little understood or appreciated the problems their blood was poured out to solve. But while you have all the dauntless physical courage which they displayed, you add to it a thorough knowledge of the argument on which this mighty movement proceeds, and a moral heroism which, breaking away from the entanglements of kindred, and friends, and State policy enables you to follow your convictions of duty, even though they should lead you up to the cannon's mouth. It must, however, be added, that with elevation of position come corresponding responsibilities. Alike in the inaction of the camp, and amid the fatigues of the march, and the charge and shouts of battle, you will remember that you have in your keeping not only your own personal reputation, but the honor of your native State, and, what is infinitely more inspiring, the honor of that blood-bought and beneficent Republic whose children you are. Any irregularity on your part would sadden the land that loves you; any faltering in the presence of the foe would cover it with immeasurable humiliation.

Soldiers, when Napoleon was about to spur on his legions to combat on the sands of an African desert, pointing them to the Egyptian pyramids that loomed up against the far-off horizon, he exclaimed, "From yonder summits forty centuries look down upon you." The thought was sublime and electric; but you have even more than this. When you shall confront those infuriated hosts, whose battle-cry is, "Down with the government of the United States," let your answering shout be, "The Government as our fathers made it;" and when you strike, remember that not only do the good and the great of the past look down upon you from heights infinitely above those of Egyptian pyramids, but that uncounted generations yet to come are looking up to you, and claiming at your hands the unimpaired transmission to them of that priceless heritage which has been committed to our keeping. I say its unimpaired transmission--in all the amplitude of its outlines, in all the symmetry of its matchless proportions, in all the palpitating fulness of its blessings; not a miserably shrivelled and shattered thing, charred by the fires and torn by the tempests of revolution, and all over polluted and scarred by the bloody poniards of traitors. J. Holt.

CCXCVIII.

THE AMERICAN QUESTION IN ENGLAND.

Citizens of Carlyle, I have endeavored to present to your view a faithful picture of the religion and politics, the objects and the aims, of the rebel confederate States of America; of those States that at this moment, through their commissioned emissaries on this side the Atlantic, are seeking admission into the Commonwealth of Christian nations! One of these accredited representatives is, while I am speaking, upon our shores; and on the behalf of the object of these men some of our leading journals are daily writing laborious articles; for them our shipbuilders are constructing warlike vessels, not to meet an equal foe in fair fight, but to plunder and destroy defenseless merchantmen, engaged in the lawful and laudable trade of carrying the legitimate products of one country to the markets of another; for these men our capitalists are raising money, that, if possible, they may render successful a rebel slaveholders' revolt--a revolt which for wickedness and infamy has no parallel save in the impious rebellion of Lucifer and his compeers.