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.
Yonder, across the wide waste of waters, four millions of helpless
slaves--the victims of the cruelty and lust of Southern men-stealers--raise
their fettered hands and imploringly inquire what part you will take in the
conflict which involves their fate and that of their posterity; whether you
will give aid and comfort to their oppressors, or whether you will send
them words of sympathy and hope, and give encouragement and support to the
friends of freedom in the North, who are nobly sacrificing property and
life for their redemption. What answer will you return to this appeal? What
think you is the duty of England in this life-or-death contest between the
North and the South? Of England, whose heart was with the cause of the
heroic black population of Hayti, when, under the leadership of the
immortal Toussaint l'Ouverture, they were resisting unto blood, in the
cause of liberty, the mercenary hordes of Napoleon? Of England who, with
disinterested ardor, fought the battle of the Greeks against the Turks? Of
England, who has so often raised her voice on behalf of bleeding, crusaded,
denationalized Poland? Who has welcomed in her cities, and cherished in her
homes, the illustrious patriot Louis Kossuth? Whose best wishes and earnest
prayers have ever attended the efforts in the cause of freedom of Mazzini
and Garibaldi?
In what do the struggles in which England has heretofore sympathized,
differ from that which is now convulsing America? Is it not a contest
between a vile slaveholding oligarchy on the one hand, and the upholders of
free democratic institutions and the friends of emancipation on the other?
The only difference, if difference there be, is this, that the
conspirators against human rights in the South are fighting for objects
immeasurably more base and more deeply stained with guilt than any which
were ever sought by the crowned kings and despots of the Old World. The
confederate banditti of the South are fighting for what their
Vice-president avows is a new idea--a government based upon the perpetual
enslavement of the laboring class. In a conflict between liberty and
slavery between a free democratic government and the foulest despotism
which the enemies of mankind ever conspired together to establish, where
should England stand? On the side of two hundred and fifty thousand
traitors and tyrants, or on the side of four millions of slaves? England
with her past history and glorious traditions, England that extinguished
the accursed slave trade, and abolished colonial slavery, whose cathedrals
and council chamfers and market places are adorned with the statues of
Howard and Wilberforce, and Clarkson, and Buxton, and Sturge?
It may be granted that, when the Government of the North first armed for
the defence of the national life, it did not at once decree the universal
abolition of slavery; and I have given, as I think, good and sufficient
reasons why it did not and could not. The action of the President at the
beginning was restricted to constitutional objects. Those objects were--the
enforcement of the laws; the suppression of a local insurrection; the
reintegration of the disputed territory; the protection of the Capitol and
its archives from the spoliating hands of traitors. But the seat of
government saved; the President seated firmly in the chair; the Congress
duly assembled; and the machinery of the Constitution set to work; and then
commenced, and were carried out, a series of measures such as were never
before accomplished in the same space of time by any government in the
world. First we saw the National District purged from the pollution and
shame of slavery; then, the prohibition of slavery forever in the vast
Territories of the Northwest; then, the enforcement of the laws against the
slave trade, and the execution of Gordon the slave trader; then, an offer
of compensation to such slave States as would adopt measures of
emancipation; then, the recognition of the independence of the black
republics of Hayti and Liberia; and finally, a proclamation of freedom to
all the slaves within the rebel States.
It was said of Napoleon that he would go down to posterity with the code
which bears his name, in his hand. It may be said of Abraham Lincoln, that
he will descend to future time, holding in his hand the Great Charter of
the Negro's rights his Emancipation Proclamation of January, 1863. With
such a President, at the head of such a people, engaged in such a cause,
need I answer the questions I have so often put to you, on which side
should England be found in the great American struggle?
G. Thompson.
CCXCIX.
PATRIOTISM.
Right and wrong, justice and crime, exist independently of our country. A
public wrong is not a private right for any citizen. The citizen is a man
bound to know and do the right, and the nation is but an aggregation of
citizens. If a man should shout, in the delirium of his dinner, "My
country, by whatever means extended and bounded: my country, right or
wrong;" he merely repeats the words of the thief who steals in the streets
or of the trader who swears falsely at the Custom-House, both of them
chuckling "My fortune, however acquired." Thus, gentlemen, we see that a
man's country is not a certain area of land--of mountains, rivers, and
woods--but it is principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.
In poetic minds and in popular enthusiasm this feeling becomes closely
associated with the soil and symbols of the country. But the secret
sanctification of the soil and the symbol is the idea which they
represent, and this idea the patriot worships through the name and the
symbol, as a lover kisses with rapture the glove of his mistress and wears
a lock of her hair upon his heart.
So, with passionate heroism, of which tradition is never weary of tenderly
telling, Arnold Von Winkelreid gathers into his bosom the sheaf of foreign
spears, that his death may give life to his country. So Nathan Hale,
disdaining no service that his country demands, perishes untimely, with no
other friend than God and the satisfied sense of duty. So George
Washington, at once comprehending the scope of the destiny to which his
country was devoted, with one hand put aside the crown, and with the other
sets his slaves free. So, through all history from the beginning, a noble
army of martyrs has fought fiercely and fallen bravely for that unseen
mistress, their country. So, through all history to the end, as long as men
believe in God, that army must still march and fight and fall--recruited
only from the flower of mankind--cheered only by their own hope of
humanity, strong only in their confidence in their cause.
G. W. Curtis.
CCC.
POLITICAL MORALITY.
Have we no interest that the controlling force in this country shall be a
moral force?--that it shall conspire with the great idea of Liberty, and
not degrade and destroy it? The theory of our institutions is our pride.
But it is a pitiful truth that our public life has become synonymous with
knavery. If a politician is introduced, you feel of your pockets. It is
shameful that it is universally conceded that the best men, the men of
intelligence and probity, generally avoid politics, and that the word
itself has come to mean something not to be touched without defilement.
Consequently, what good men will not touch, bad men will. It is understood
that bribery carries the election; and the Presidency is the result of an
adroit process of financial engineering. I have myself been shown a handful
of bank-notes publicly displayed in the ante-room of a Legislature, and
sagaciously told: "That is the logic for legislators." Men think they
cannot afford to go to Congress, and send other men to do their duties to
the State--forgetting that we can have nothing without paying for it, and
that if we hope to enjoy the best government in the world we must give time
and labor, each one of us, and not suppose that the country will govern
itself nor bad men govern it well.