# No Peace Before Victory

This speech was given on September 24th, 1863, in Philadelphia.
Fellow-Citizens of the United States,—The election that is now pending in Pennsylvania and that which is now pending in the State of Maryland will go very far, though perhaps in very unequal degrees, to determine the presidential contest of next year. In my judgment, the election of a Democratic President, or, if he prefer the term, a Conservative President, will be the end of the war, and, with the end of the war, in my judgment, the end of the Union of these States. It will be the end, likewise, of that great result, though not the original object of the war—the change of the social relations in the rebellious States, which have occasioned our present disturbances.
If it be of any moment to any one here that the conduct of the national affairs shall remain in the hands of those who represent the principles which now preside over their conduct—if there be any one here who thinks that the war ought to be continued until every rebellious weapon sinks in submission to the national authority—if there be any one who thinks it is worth while, after having had experience of the mischiefs that grow from a vicious social organization, that we shall not be twice jeoparded by the same cause when we have the opportunity to root it out, let that person bear in mind that on the vote of Pennsylvania this fall depends, in a great measure, that result.
The gentleman who is competing with your present distinguished and patriotic executive for the position of governor of this Commonwealth does not leave you in the doubts with which Mr. Seymour, and other gentlemen less candid or more prudent, veil their opinion. Here, we understand our opponents formally declare that the Democratic party alone can restore the Union; that it can not be restored by arms; that it can only be restored by peace and conciliation; and that they are the only persons who can so restore it. They were in power when the rebellion broke out. Why did they not arrest it? They had all the factions that called themselves Democratic united—could have prevented the election of the gentleman who they now say has brought on the war. Why did they not subordinate their internal party differences to the patriotic purpose of averting an otherwise inevitable war? They say that they alone can restore the Union, and by peace. Then why did they break it up? They are very fond of asking who is responsible for the war, and I take great pleasure in responding, the Democratic party that ruled the country for thirty years. And I say that, with the kindliest regard, with the utmost respect, with the greatest deference for the honest members of that party, who, whatever may have been their judgments before the rebellion broke out, saw by the flames of civil war the dangerous path they trod, and joined their lifelong political opponents in the right path. They who now arrogate to themselves the reputation and the name of the Democratic party are the mere refuse that remained behind when the patriotic elements withdrew for the defense of the nation. If, when numbering many of the great men, many of the good men, many of the patriotic men, many of the eminent statesmen of the country, wise in council and firm in action, they could not prevent the war, who will believe that this wretched remnant can stop the war? Why did the South rebel? Because they had lost the majority of the North. There were a majority still at the North calling themselves Democrats, but they were Democrats that would not do what the Southern men desired. They committed themselves so far in favor of the Southern policy at the North that they lost the confidence of their fellow-citizens of the North, and with their confidence lost their votes; and when they lost their votes, the Southern men could no longer depend upon them to protect their peculiar interest—they smote those that had been their humble servants for two generations past. They taught Southern Democrats that they could ask no humiliation which would not be yielded; and that all who were not Democrats were Abolitionists—stood compurgators for every lie, and enabled them to imprint their hate and fear on the minds of the Southern people; and now that they are spurned by their masters—now the wretched remnant of these discarded allies, these worn-out tools of a despotic power that has been driven to rebellion—these men venture to assume to lift the mighty mace of the old Democratic party, and say, "We can restore the broken and shattered Union that all combined could not preserve." Why, men of the United States, what is the rebellion? The Democratic party in arms in the South and in sympathy in the North. What Democrat does not sympathize with his "Southern brethren?" What Seymour does not speak of them as his "friends?" They restore the Union by pacific means! That means that they will stop the war. We need no one to tell us that. They opposed it in its beginning; they have maligned it to the present day; they have embarrassed its progress; they have vilified those that conduct it; they have struggled against every measure essential to its conduct. Place them in power, would they not effectuate their own purpose, and let it drop? Of course, peace is their policy!
Opposed to the war! Of course they are. James Buchanan, and those that stood around him, and those that followed him, said, "It is unconstitutional." Are they honorable men, and can they disavow the words of their chief; or, considering the value the Democrats have always placed upon consistency when consistent with their interest, are they likely to evade the obligation that they have assumed, to treat it as unconstitutional, and therefore to stop it?
Who is their candidate for governor in Ohio? Is Vallandigham for restoring the Union by suppressing the rebellion? Who was their candidate in Connecticut? The namesake of the New York Seymour, and, better than the namesake, an honest avower of the opinions which the other dishonestly concealed. He said that peace and not war, the arrest of bloodshed and not the suppression of rebellion, were the highest purposes that any statesman could proclaim for himself. Where have they elected a Legislature that has not let the cloven foot appear? What say my friends from New Jersey, that I see around me—is Governor Parker for the war or against it? Is the Legislature of New Jersey for or against peace resolutions? Is the Legislature of Illinois for or against the war? Is the Legislature of Indiana for or against the war? Where have the resolutions in favor of an immediate armistice come from? Where have the resolutions proposing the meeting of a disloyal Convention in the city of Louisville come from? What great leading man, calling himself a Democrat and not now supporting the administration, avows himself in favor of prosecuting the war to the bitter end, till the banners of rebellion trail in the dust? Let him be named—who is he?
John Van Buren thought it would be worth while to go to Richmond, and then to proclaim an armistice. And what is to be done with the armies beyond it?
They all have profound, perfect confidence in an amnesty. An amnesty to men in arms, your equals on the battle-field, as often victorious as you are, inferior in numbers and resources, but nerved to desperation in a gigantic conflict! What is an armistice but something for them to laugh at?
Peace! Scarcely had Mr. Seward put forth another circular of ill-starred prophecies, than, as if to show you how far "our Southern brethren" are from dreaming of peace, they rush two to one upon Rosecrans and make him struggle to hold his ground even. Judge Woodward, I suppose, would appear upon the battle-field at Chattanooga with a laurel wreath on his head and an olive-branch in his hand bidding back the foe from that terrific strife. Do they suppose, gentlemen, that the American people are born fools? Do they suppose that their word, instigated by the desire to attain power, will make the people believe what every man in all the rebel region, in every place of authority, loudly denies. Vallandigham told us that every where in his progress through the nether regions he heard nothing but cries of peace and union. Why did he not name the man in authority that hinted at any terms that they were willing to accept or even to consider? Did he not know from the temper of the people of this country, their earnest desire for peace, their weariness of the war, the exhaustion of their resources, the harrowing of their affections by the desolation of the family circle, that any man who would go to the South and bring back terms of peace of any kind, even touching on and bordering upon humiliation, would receive the acclaim of two thirds of the American people. Would he be now skulking over the border in Canada, or would he not rather be treading triumphantly over the heads of thousands of admiring fellow-citizens, as they hail him the harbinger of the peace that he proclaimed? His silence is the falsification of his wretched invention.
Somebody whispered over the Rappahannock the other day that peace was near. They found out the only officer that had been upon the banks that day, and language can not exceed the epithets of scorn and hatred with which he received the mere suggestion of peace—except upon terms that every Democrat is willing to receive to-morrow. The line of the Ohio, and the Mississippi, and the Potomac, the payment of the expenses of the war and damages for our outrages—who is ready for that here?—the surrender of Western Virginia and her heroic loyalists?—the yielding of Kentucky, that they have insolently called a member of their Confederacy, though no officer would dare set foot within her loyal limits ?—the return of the disenthralled and rescued martyrs of Eastern Tennessee?—now that daylight is dawning on North Alabama and North Georgia, the plunging them into hopeless and endless night—the return of Missouri to the domination that undertook to drive her from the aegis of the Union! These are the terms, and the only terms any man has ever heard uttered above a whisper within the Southern country? If Judge Woodward and his like mean that in the face of these terms they are ready to stop the war, then eternal will be the disgrace of Pennsylvania if, knowing that, she elect him for her chief magistrate. If he do not mean to accept these, the only terms that have ever been uttered, then the people of Pennsylvania deserve to be placed in their own hospitals if they accept a man to regulate and govern their Commonwealth who says he is for peace and an armistice when these are the only terms that are possible. An armistice for what purpose? To argue with maniacs? to debate on the field of battle? or to realize the darling idea of the Democratic disunionists to palsy the arm of the United States, to arrest the impetus of its onward advance, to give the people in rebellion time to breathe, the men stricken to the knee time to gain their feet, the men whose resources are exhausted an opportunity to replace them, to break up the blockade, to open their ports to foreign commerce, to give them the recognition that could never be withdrawn, not merely of belligerents, but of parties holding a position competent to deal on equal terms with the United States. How long after an armistice would the recognition of the Southern Confederacy be delayed by England or France? How would they remain idle during the conferences, how long delay to make their arrangements, not merely to mediate between powers, but to intervene in arms? The mere proposal of the armistice reveals the traitorous purpose that remains behind it.
My friends, the reception that you have given our soldiers of the Army of the Potomac shows that you at least are for no armistice—that you at least appreciate, without the necessity of argument from me, that an armistice is equivalent to the end of the war, and that the end of the war leaves the South independent. We can all now see where our opponents stand. They are opposed to every measure for conducting the war. Ah! they are opposed to the Conscription Act; yet they do not volunteer. How can we get soldiers? They are opposed to the $300 clause in it; yet they have generally paid the $300. They are opposed to negro soldiers; yet negro soldiers are the poor man's substitute, who can not pay the $300. They are opposed to confiscation; yet confiscation alone can break the power of the leaders of Southern politics. They are opposed to emancipation; yet emancipation alone can break the oligarchy that has brought on the war. They are opposed to discretionary arrests, which they call arbitrary arrests. They opposed them first because the President could not suspend the writ of habeas corpus—which was all true. They oppose them now, though Congress has suspended the writ of habeas corpus, which nobody denies their right to do. They opposed them, not because they were illegal, nor because they were arbitrary, but because, though legal, the discretion of the President might think rebel sympathizers suspicious characters.
They are, then, opposed to all the means of conducting the war; they are, then, in plain English, opposed to the farther conduct of the war. That means that they are in favor, whenever and wherever they can get in power, of throwing themselves against the government in the conduct of the war. They attempted in Illinois to take the military power from the hands of a loyal governor. They have attempted every where to elect disloyal governors pledged to embarrass the United States in the enforcement of the laws. Seymour, knowing that the riot would embarrass the government of the United States, stood paralyzed and powerless before his "friends." They discussed the propriety of recalling from the army the contingents of the various States. The candidate for Governor of Maine, lately so overwhelmingly beaten by that patriotic State, was asked whether, in the event of his election, he would recall from the armies the troops of Maine. Instead of repelling with indignation a question which was a humiliation to any man except a traitor, he said, "When Governor Seymour recalls the troops of New York, and the Governor of New Jersey recalls the troops of New Jersey, then I am ready to recall the troops of Maine." That marked him for a traitor; but he is mistaken in supposing that any regiment or any company of the troops of Maine would obey his illegal and treasonable order. Doubtless he thought they would obey, and that order would have been issued the day after his election. The people took care that he should not have the opportunity. Let them get the control by any accident, by any thoughtlessness, by any cowardice or timidity, by any weariness of the war or impatience of taxation, in the House of Representatives, and instantly every war measure will be clogged in that House; appropriations will be resisted; conditions will be annexed; the repeal of the laws that they have been assailing will be compelled by refusing supplies to the government; the government will stand paralyzed in the presence of its armed enemies.
If these are their purposes, then how are we to treat them and how are we to conduct the government? In my judgment, fellow-citizens of the United States, we all have a common interest in this great struggle, and what is the interest of Pennsylvania is the interest of Maryland. The line that so long has been of ill omen, I take it, was abolished by the day of Gettysburg.
The current of events is daily sweeping away the only mark of disunion between Pennsylvania and Maryland—their internal recognition of slavery, or their refusal to recognize slavery. We stand together, and ought to stand together as one man in maintaining the integrity of the government, which more entirely crushes us than any other portion of the Confederacy if it fall in ruin about our ears. How, then, shall it be maintained? I say, first, by filling up the depleted ranks of the Army of the Potomac. Whether the government see it or not, from the beginning of the war to this day there has been but one decisive point upon which one decisive battle could end the war, and that has been Virginia. It has never been a question of marching to Richmond; it has been a question of dispersing and destroying the army of General Lee, and that has never been difficult to find. What the government has needed is a singleness of purpose, bending its unbroken energies to the annihilation of that army, and with it would crumble the Southern republic. Victories on other points are victories of detail; victory on that point is decisive, final, and overwhelming. Peace will follow the destruction of that army; the war will endure until that army is destroyed. An armistice will not annihilate it; a mediation will not paralyze it; no election of a Democrat will do any thing except accomplish its purposes, without bloodshed, for it. The war drags its length now along because a Presidential election is only a year off, and the rebels of the South count on having their friends in office. If they have to make terms, they know the terms will be better with a Democrat than with men who are devoted to the integrity, and the power, and the perpetuity of the republic, and therefore they mean, so long as there is a man left in the Southern country, and as much as in them lies, that there shall no semblance of peace appear until a Democrat mount the presidential chair.
The way to peace, therefore, fellow-citizens, is over the battlefield, and there is no other path. If a lion lie in that path that you are afraid to meet, or one too powerful for you to meet, then give up the war. If you are unwilling to make that admission, then prosecute it with every energy that you can summon, of money and of men; with no hesitation; no stinting; no critical spirit; no inclination to find fault; mourning errors, not casting them in the teeth of those in authority; countenancing them with your earnest support, with the firm conviction that because there are traitors in the North, every loyal man must double himself in strength, energy, and devotion. And when they menace you with insurrection here, tell them the sooner it begins the sooner it will be ended. Let them understand that it is wholly immaterial to you whether they begin the civil war now, or two years hence, when, having under false pretenses crept into power, betrayed the nation, negotiated a hollow semblance of peace with the Southern Confederacy, and brought discord to every Northern door, the beginning of desolation, the introduction of civil war, the impossibility of keeping the residue of the States together, will be manifest to all men—the sooner the better. That party has always been magnificent in bullying—do not be frightened by their violence.
But how else, gentlemen, shall you end the war? More than a million of men of the white race have volunteered their services in defense of American liberty against an oligarchy of slaveholders, and until recently their farms have been cultivated in quiet, their laborers have been untouched; they have suffered by the blockade, they have suffered by invasion when our armies touched them; the great mass of their agricultural labor has gone on as regularly as in the halcyon days when cotton was king. I propose to invade the quiet realm of this discrowned king. There are four millions of men in those regions on our side. Who opposes the arming of them except the Democratic Conservatives? They are slaves. The President has proclaimed them free. That paper confers no title; it can only be made a title by arms. The negro's arm is ready to execute it. Why shall he not be allowed to do it? "It is humiliating to white soldiers to serve in the same ranks with the negroes!" What say the Army of the Potomac to fifteen or twenty thousand to help them in the next great fight? What said General Banks at Port Hudson? What said General Gilmore at Fort Wagner? Just what George Washington of the Revolution said. Just what Andrew Jackson at New Orleans said. Just what Perry on Lake Eric saw. Just what Barney, with his negro men mingled in with his white men at Bladensburg, saw, when other men ran away. Men are men in spite of the skin, and deeper than the skin. The first martyr of the Boston massacre in 1770 was a negro slave leading the white men. One of the heroes of the battle of Bunker Hill, living forever in the historic canvas of Trumbull, and living more immortally on the page of Bancroft, was a negro. No battle-field of the Revolution that was not stained by their blood. The men of that day shrank at first, and came to it afterward. They formed no separate regiment; they mingled in with the rank and the platoon of their "white fellow-countrymen," as Andrew Jackson called them. From the days of the Revolution to the days of the War of 1812, prejudice was silent before reason—national necessity and national interest. It was only when the cotton aristocracy arose that common sense was driven from the minds of men. What do they fear half so much as a negro army marching through the cotton-field?
Gentlemen, without a negro army an attempt at emancipation is idle. The President has proclaimed emancipation. A proclamation is a breath, or printer's ink. It dies of itself unless there be something living behind it. In point of law, no court will hold it a valid title to freedom; that is my judgment as a lawyer. I may be wrong, but it is my judgment . If the negroes of the South are to render us any material aid in the suppression of the rebellion, they must have a title to freedom that they will understand to be effectual, and they know that the proclamation is not effectual without something following it—a law of Congress and arms. They must farther be relieved from the idea, which has been most unfortunately countenanced in certain high quarters,that after they have fought the battles of liberty, and have aided us to win back our territory and consolidate our empire—that after an indefinite period of service upon public works in the malaria of the South, and on the canals of the Northwest, they are to be banished from the land in which they were born and which they have aided to save. Banish, gentlemen, from your minds that humiliating and unworthy idea. Make up your minds that if they are to be soldiers, they are to be freemen, with the rights of free laborers, protected by the laws, recognized by the United States in their position, guaranteed the remedies of the courts of the United States, and armed and drilled to make their rights effectual. And how shall that be done? On the theory of our "conservative" fellow-citizens? They say that, true, the South is in rebellion, but the State governments remain; their governments are in existence; they have the right, the moment they lay down their arms, to be recognized by the United States as the only persons entitled to speak in behalf of the Southern States; that the men now in authority are the governors, the legislators, the judges, the magistrates, the sheriffs of the rebel States; and that what the President should do is merely to offer an amnesty to screen individual offenders, and open his arms to receive those who have just now had the sword pointed at our bosoms, not merely as citizens obedient to the law, but as the representatives and constitutional governors of the loyal people of the rebel States. That is the Democratic theory of the restoration of State government in the rebellious States. Where does that lead you? Suppose it to be accomplished; that is what they mean by "the Union as it was," with the old coalition of the Southern secessionist and the Northern Democrat to govern the country and divide the spoils. "The Union as it was" is their watch-cry. Do they mean that they will restore Western Virginia to Eastern Virginia, bound hand and foot? Do they mean that they will recognize the fugitive Harris as Governor of Tennessee, and his scattered legislators as her Legislature? Do they mean that they will recognize the men who assume to represent Kentucky in the Southern Confederacy as the proper representatives of the people of Kentucky? Do they mean that they will bring back the fugitive Governor of Missouri? That would be "the Union as it was." That would be to recognize as the parties entitled to govern the rebel States the rebels who now govern them. They are the people who, the Democrats say, are now entitled, and only entitled, to be listened to. I pray you pause and consider gravely this great subject of the restoration of State governments under the Constitution.
Are the American people ready for such a restoration as that? Is all that the Union has accomplished by a hundred thousand of its dead sons, and hundreds of thousands of desolate men and women at home mourning them, to recognize an insolent pretense, which never for a moment has been a fact? If that be not so, then "the Union as it was," in the sense of the men who call for it, is an impossibility. They delude the people with vain words when they speak of "the Union as it was." Call the dead to life; clothe his bones with his dissolved flesh; restore the soul to the soulless eyes of the thousands that have fallen martyrs upon the battle-field, and then you can restore the Union as it was. The attempt is to begin a new civil war. When you order back West Virginia, she will turn to you the points of her bayonets that are now on your side—and justly. When you recognize the butchers of East Tennessee for its republican government, the very ghosts of the murdered dead will lead the living men to battle against you. When you talk of recognizing Kentucky and Missouri as States of the rebellion, you will be overwhelmed by ridicule that no man can stand up against . And that is "the Union as it was," in the words of the Democratic orators. Why will they perpetually come before the people with a lie in their mouth and delusion in their right hand?
"The Constitution as it is, and the Union as it was!" I am for the Constitution as it is, and that has altered the Union from what it was, and it will stay altered until eternity. If the "conservative" gentlemen attain to power, it will stay altered in fragments of shame to us and our posterity. If those who are now in power, and their successors, continue to retain the management of the government on its present principles, it will continue as it is, excepting so far as it is bettered, according to the Constitution as it is. And when I speak of the Constitution as it is, I mean as it came from the hands of George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, not the wretched, crippled humpback that has been presented before our eyes, the result of a cross between the Northern and the Southern Democrat, an ill-begotten and shapeless monster that they have contrived for their purposes. Born without arms to use or legs to move with, and with a head that could only contrive mischief, and for every thing else was impotent; but that Constitution, in the full vigor of its humanity, as it came from the hands of George Washington, adequate for every contingency of national life, speaking so plainly that those who run may read, and only the perversely blind can misinterpret. Ay, the Constitution as it is, which says that Congress may call forth the militia and use the armies of the United States to suppress insurrection, and therefore the war is constitutional according to the letter of the Constitution as it is. That Constitution says that Congress shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government, and it is under the Constitution as it is that the armies now march to remove oppression and restore republican liberty. And it is the Constitution as it is which declares that Congress shall have a right to pass all laws necessary and proper to carry into execution all the powers vested in it or any other department of the government; and, therefore, whatever Congress may think in its judgment is necessary to restore and guarantee republican forms of government in the rebel States, that law, according to the Constitution as it is, Congress may pass. I am for exerting the power. I do not believe, my friends, that there is any arbitrary power vested any where in the government of the United States. I think the Constitution a provision made for the great necessities of national life by men who had just come out of a war of seven years, and anarchy of twelve years—wise men who knew the necessities of public life, and were not careful to bind the arms of the nation when its being is at stake; and they provided that in the event of invasion or rebellion, or public danger, the writ of habeas corpus might be suspended. That meant, not that the President should be vested with an arbitrary and reckless power to arrest any man at his will and pleasure, irresponsible to the people and answerable only to himself, but that the exigencies of national life, in the conduct of war, rendered it impossible to rest on the mere judicial process for enforcing the laws. It is impossible to let the public safety depend upon the possibility of proving by legal evidence a participation with public enemies; and, therefore, as the lesser of two evils, as anarchy stood upon the one side, and discretionary power, under the guardianship of the people, temporarily vested in their chosen officer by them, was the only danger to be encountered upon the other—as they trust the President to determine who are in rebellion, and with the command of the armies for its suppression upon the field of battle, and to sacrifice the lives of thousands because they are dressed in gray uniform, and not as we are, in blue, so they give him the discretionary power if in his judgment any one, Democrat or Republican, is dangerous to the public peace from any reason, he may not punish him, not try him by court-martial, not incarcerate him in the penitentiary, but he may arrest him to prevent mischief, and hold him till the danger is past. That is the Constitution as it is, and not as the Democrats construe it; and I am in favor of applying its powers to the letter and in the spirit, and to the bitter end of the war.
I warned the government a year before they got an act of Congress to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, that undertaking to do it without that authority would raise a storm that they could not meet . Gentlemen, no man deplores more than I do the accuracy of my reading of the tenderness of the American people for the forms of law. It has cost us, and we are this day suffering from it, the State of New York, the State of Pennsylvania last year, the State of Ohio, the State of Indiana, and the State of Illinois. Now the power is upon the just basis of law. Rational men will yield obedience to it. None but traitorous conservatives will continue to howl against it. Every loyal man knows the President will not use it for oppression.
I turn to consider that other great power and duty—the guarantee of republican governments to the States. That touches a question which ought to have been decided by the last Congress, which our friends are singularly timid about meeting. In my judgment, the sooner it is met the better, and the sooner the grounds upon which we act are ascertained, the better for all parties. I regret that, in dealing with the question of reorganizing the State governments, eminent gentlemen have used words which they, I think, will regret hereafter. They speak of the Southern men in arms as being alien enemies. The President has never so called them. Congress has never so called them. No law upon the statute-book so treats them. No official document has ever hinted at that character. To call them alien enemies admits that their secession was effectual to give them the right of independence in the eye of the world. It admits they are not traitors, but enemies. I say they are traitors and not enemies; citizens under the law, against which they are illegally waging war, not foreigners waging a war upon equal terms with men who are foreigners to them. They war with the rope around their necks. Their victory can be decorated by no laurel in history. Where she speaks of their deeds of valor, it will always be with a melancholy tear over the cause in which it was exhibited. It will always be accompanied with the bar sinister, to mark that the cause was illegitimate, the purpose iniquitous, the object unjust. You sanctify them when you call them alien enemies. Keep them to their real character—traitorous enemies of their country. And when the right of conquest is referred to, as it has been by a very distinguished and a very able gentleman, to find out the methods of dealing with the reorganization of the State governments, I desire to say that any man or any party that claims over the Southern States, after the insurrection has been repressed—that is the legal language, gentlemen, of the statutes of the United States—any party that after the insurrection shall have been repressed shall attempt to consider them a conquered people, that party will destroy itself, or, if it be successful, it will destroy republican liberty. It is a doctrine unknown to the Constitution of the United States; it is beyond the purview of American principles of government; it recognizes what no responsible statesman has heretofore recognized or ought ever to recognize, the possession of absolute, arbitrary, despotic power in the government over a portion of the States as the result of its military operations to suppress an insurrection. It places the government above the law to enforce the law! The law speaks differently; the Constitution speaks differently. Under them both we have to act. We owe it to the wisdom of our forefathers to recognize that they have left our hands as free to deal with rebellion as wisdom will sanction, and every power in our hands which tends to accomplish the object . We must deal with it in their mode. The States are, by rebellion, extinguished and become Territories! says a very distinguished and eloquent statesman. Then how can it be that the Constitution requires Congress to guarantee to every State a republican form of government, if the destruction of a republican form of government in the State converts it into the condition of a Territory, and subjects it to the arbitrary power of Congress? They did not so deem it. They regarded the States as continuing, perpetual elements of our Union, and their citizens always beneath the Constitution. But they draw the broad and marked discrimination between the individual rights of the citizen, the existence of the State as a body politic, and its capacity by reason of its want of organization to exert its political powers. If a man in South Carolina comes to Philadelphia, no lawyer can plead "alien enemy" to his suit . If I go to South Carolina, I have all the rights of a citizen of South Carolina. The officers of the United States, their postmasters, their collectors, their marshals, are still provided for by law, and some exist; the statutes are still upon the statute-books; it is still illegal to import any thing within those limits without paying the duties; the courts exist wherever the President names judges. They are in every particular still under the laws of the United States, described on their statute-books, nowhere except as States of this Union. When men are to be tried for treason, they can only be tried in the courts of the United States, according to the laws of the United States, by juries summoned according to the laws of the United States, under the Constitution of the United States. But these clauses do not fetter the hands of the Government, as stupid Conservatives say when they quote the Constitution to prohibit the marching of an army to remove opposition to the execution of the laws. When the opposition is dispersed, then the reign of the courts is restored and the day of punishment may come. But with reference to their political franchises, the wisdom of our forefathers has placed them a step farther off. Our "Conservative" friends are altogether too eager to have their votes for the next Presidential contest when they propose to regard the existing authorities in the rebel States as entitled to be recognized as the authorities of the States within the Union. That, doubtless, would be very convenient if they could get the votes of half a dozen of the Southern States, and make up their deficiency of votes in the North in that way, and thereby elect their "Conservative" President. Fortunately, the law is not so unwise. There can be no electors of President from any State, unless there be a government organized in it recognized by the government of the United States, whose officers have sworn obedience to the Constitution of the United States. Till that, there can be no authority any where exerted. Do those men now in authority in the Southern States constitute the State governments under the Constitution that they repudiate, that they say is annulled, that they have taken up arms to destroy? On the contrary, the very first act in secession was not to carry their territory from beneath the laws of the United States, but to tear down their own State governments and institute others. Those that they tore down were republican governments in the sense of the Constitution. Those that they have established are a mob in the form of the government, and the rebellion organized to execute its purpose, entitled to recognition by nobody. To participate in their government is, by the laws of the United States, the crime of high treason. Their governor, by merely accepting his position, renders himself liable to trial, conviction, and hanging. Every officer of theirs is aiding to promote the war. They are a band of traitors, usurping rights over citizens of the United States. The armies of the United States move to strike that power from their hands, and restore it to loyal men; and in doing that, the only arbiter of what government shall be recognized, the only arbiter of who shall be treated as a governor, or a legislator, or a judge of a rebel State, is the United States in Congress assembled. Till they shall recognize another government, there is no government. In the absence of a State government, there must be either anarchy, or a legislative and executive power somewhere. Those that have abdicated can no longer be the government of the State. The right and the duty to guarantee a republican government is vested in Congress. Congress is therefore charged to take every measure that is necessary to restore republican government. Pending the interregnum, Congress is the only legislative power for the State, the President is the only executive power for the State. They can, under a provision which I have already quoted, pass any law in their judgment necessary to consolidate the republican government which they are about to establish, and they have the sole and absolute discretion of determining who shall and who shall not be recognized as the government of the State. Nay, gentlemen, so far is this from being mere theory or a fanciful disquisition, it is now the policy on which the administration has acted. John Letcher was playing governor at Richmond when the President of the United States recognized Pierpont as the Governor of Western Virginia, and the Senate of the United States and the House of Representatives admitted their representatives to the floors of Congress. When men speak of any other mode of adjustment, they fly in the face of the actual conduct of the government. It is not my theory; it is the policy of the administration. They have already solved the problem; they have already pointed out their course of action; they have already declared their interpretation of the Constitution to be that which I have put upon it, that they are acting as the guarantors of republican government in States where Republican government has ceased to exist, and that they alone are at liberty to re-establish it, that they alone are entitled to determine who are the legitimate possessors of power, and that they have done in the case of Western Virginia. Had John Letcher been the Governor of Virginia, and merely an erring mortal, going a little too far in the tracks of treason, as our "Conservative" opponents would lead you to suppose, then there could be no recognition of any other State government any where within the borders of Virginia. The President and Congress did not so treat him. They treated him as the head of the Richmond mob; they treated him as the leader of the Virginia rebels; they treated him as a traitor who had pulled down his own State government, and then undertook to usurp illegal authority over his fellow-citizens. It is in that light, and that alone, that he stands before the government of the United States.
Now, gentlemen, let us see how this will work out, and whether this is not the safer law and the only one possible path for us who mean to accomplish something practical, permanent, and blessed by the suppression of the rebellion to pursue. The President has proclaimed the abolition of slavery. If it rests on that proclamation, let us trace it out a little. Suppose the war to be ended, and our "Conservative" friends to be in power, and Mr. John Letcher to be recognized as the Governor of Virginia, and Mr. Bonham as the Governor of South Carolina, and so on through the rebellious States; the existing Legislatures remain; the existing distribution of political power remains; the existing Southern courts remain; the existing organization of the Southern militia remains; the existing debts, the war debts that they have incurred to fight us, remain. They will be at liberty to assume, as most of them I believe have already done, the Confederate debt of the rebel States. That, therefore, becomes a permanent burden upon the people of the United States in common with our State debts and with our national debt . Those men thus reinstated in power by our act are the only persons that can have a word to say on the subject of whether the proclamation is or is not valid as law. What do you suppose the judges of South Carolina would say on that point if a negro were to claim his freedom under it? It makes it at once a dead letter. It is altogether frivolous; I say farther, gentlemen, it is something very much like a cowardly evasion when men who wish to avoid that inevitable consequence of that form of reconstructing the governments in the rebel States say, "If the proclamation is valid, it will be held valid by the courts; and if it is void, it can not be made valid." Neither proposition is of the courts of the rebel States in the hands of the true. If it were as valid as any law upon the statute-book of the United States, if it remain a mere proclamation and be left to the tender mercies of rebel judges, it will be annulled and disregarded, for they are the only judges of what is the law of their own State, and therefore when you shall have turned the negro free, if he should attempt to assert his freedom, their process will hang him; their process will shoot him; their process will hunt him down by the bloodhound; their process will drag him backward into slavery. If he attempt to rebel and show himself too strong, they will call on the government of the United States to send the Army of the Potomac to reduce him to slavery under the laws of the States; and a "Conservative President would only be too happy to have the opportunity of manifesting in that manner that he was opposed to 'negro equality.'"
Neither is the other hypothesis true that if it be invalid it can not be helped. As it now stands, in my judgment the Supreme Court of the United States will not recognize it as law; the United States courts can not enforce it . But it can be helped by an act of Congress under its power to legislate for the States pending the execution of the guarantee; it can be helped by an act of Congress in the execution of its guarantee of republican government if it considers that the continuance of these men in slavery, and the power of the masters over them, is incompatible with a permanent consolidation of republican institutions in the States. That is a political, and not a judicial question. That will be decided by the Congress of the United States and the President of the United States, and the courts of the United States will follow the judgment of Congress and the President. Make it an act of Congress, and then you have made it a law. Place on the statute-book judicial process, and then you have given the freedmen the courts of the United States to protect them against the local tyranny. Make it a law of the United States, and then the armies of the United States stand, not to return them to their masters, but to repel their masters from them under the law.
Let the Conservative howl; this is the Constitution as it is; this is the execution of the guarantee that George Washington placed in the Constitution; this is the condition to which the States by rebellion have brought themselves within the legitimate, express legislative power of Congress, to deal with them and their property, and the organization of their society, on such principles as Congress shall judge to be not incompatible with the permanence of republican government. It is frivolous to say that we can arm a million of men to prostrate half a million in the dust, taking away precious life, to restore republican government, but we can not restore freedom to slaves in the same cause. Life is protected against illegal aggression in the Constitution as well as property, even of the most unquestionable character. Life is not less sacred than slavery. Can we destroy life to repel from power those who have usurped a power to create unrepublican forms of government in the rebel States? and are we to be told, if Congress shall be of the opinion that the continuance of these men in slavery is an insuperable barrier to the restoration of republican government, if they shall be of opinion that the resources of the government are not enough to put down the rebellion without their aid, if they are convinced that they can not get their aid without promising and securing to them freedom, and that they can never be free unless their wives and their children, their old and their young, are free with them—are we to be told that the power of Congress is limited with reference to that species of property—that it must stand a perpetual obstacle to free government? Why, fellow-citizens, it is to construe the Constitution in the interest of the rebellious faction that by coalition with Northern Democrats has governed the country to its ruin for thirty years, to adopt it. They have always been the strict constructionists. George Washington was the rational constructionist. They have been always in favor of tying the government of the United States hand and foot, because they saw that it had strong feet to trample down rebellion, and long arms to reach it. Their rebellion has, I think, removed the cobwebs from before the people's eyes. They now begin to see the policy that lay at the bottom of the strict construction of the Democratic school. They begin to understand that they were barriers thrown up to protect the institution of slavery. They begin to understand that they were the deliberately prepared bulwarks for a premeditated rebellion. They now begin to see that James Buchanan was only repeating the lesson he had heard from Jefferson Davis when he said there was no power to invade a State, no power to make war against a State, no power to coerce a State; the States must be left to their good pleasure, to do ill if they so pleased. That was not the Constitution that George Washington framed, nor the one that the early men of the republic acted upon, nor is it the one that we now, in the presence of a great national necessity, will act upon. We will restore it to its power, and act upon that. Oh, but they say, if you refuse to recognize the existing State governments, they will refuse to lay down their arms. Nobody but a fool expects them to lay down their arms till they are knocked from their hands. They are out of Eastern Tennessee now. How did they get out? They are out of Western Virginia. How came they out? They are out of one third of the residue of Virginia. How came they out? If the re-enforcements pour on rapidly enough, they will soon be out of Georgia and Alabama as well as Mississippi. Where would a "Conservative" President go to find the Governor of Mississippi or Louisiana now? When we are done with the rebellion, there will be no governments, even in form, to recognize, if the President do his duty. The traitors will be hunted from their hiding-places. If the President executes his duty, the first men to be sought out and arrested are those who have held civil office in the rebellious States. He will seize on the governor first, and the constable last, in the order of their precedence, and, when he shall send them to jail, he will tell them not to stand upon the order of their going, but to go at once, and go quickly, and then the Conservatives will be in great trouble, for there will be no government, rebel or loyal. What are we to do then? The execution of the military powers of the President brings the States back to where I say they are by law—people forming a State without a political organization, called State government. That they can only receive under the auspices of Congress, and in accordance with the forms and by the laws that it, and it alone, shall see fit to prescribe. When proper provision shall have been made for these things, then there will be something else necessary, for to all liberties a guarantee is necessary. Our great forefathers had none of our foolish, sentimental belief in the impeccability of the people—not a bit of it. They thought that, as a general thing, and in the long run, the great mass and body of the people were wise, and liberal, and honest, and would conduct their affairs well; but they knew that bad men could get into power; that great masses of men could be inflamed by passion; that injustice might be perpetrated by mobs as well as by a tyrant; that a republican government could be overthrown and a despotic government erected; that a minority, with superior arms or superior intelligence, could trample down a majority disarmed and out of possession of the government. They foresaw, as the pages of the Federalist will prove to any man who has read it, when they framed the Constitution, exactly what we now see with our eyes in these days of blood and carnage, that a great interest acting together as a unit, covering a great region of country, antagonistic to the other interests of the country, might combine, and by foreign aid, and the possession of the local governments, create a great rebellion, overthrow the republican government, and establish something that was not republican; and therefore they created the power to suppress insurrection, and imposed the duty on Congress to guarantee republican governments. We, unlike those who have to deal with most great rebellions, without hurting any one great permanent legitimate interest of society, can strike from under the faction its only foundation. Heretofore civil strifes have arisen between the poor and the rich; those who have, and those who have not, property; between those who are in power and those who are out of power, to acquire what they have not. Those are revolutions difficult to be dealt with. It is difficult to get at the cause and to remove it. You can not destroy property. It is difficult to change the form of a political organization. Here the foundation is a social institution—the right by law, contrary to the law of nature, for one man to hold another in servitude. You cut up the roots of the rebellion by striking the shackles from the slave. How shall it be done? Congress passed two laws in 1862 authorizing the President to use as many persons of African descent as he might see fit, to aid him, organized in such manner as he might think best, to suppress the rebellion. The President now, late in the day—in my judgment much later than it ought to have been—has commenced in earnest the organization of the negro regiments from the slave element of the country. The "Conservatives," North and South, cry aloud against it. No man who does not mean to aid the rebellion will lay a straw across the track of that march. We are informed "slaves can not be soldiers!" There is mighty little of the slave left in the man who has a musket upon his shoulder. "Slaves can not be soldiers." They who have taken leave of absence are likely to keep it. "Slaves can not be soldiers." Then make them free by law of Congress, and let us stop the argument. "You can not take private property for public use without compensation." No; but every man in the United States owes military service to the United States paramount to all laws of the States; and if the negro owes the service, the master has no right to claim pay for it. The burden passes with the property. The master has been voting upon the negro's personality for eighty years. We will let the negro fight a little now upon his personality. But it is said, white soldiers will not fight in the same ranks with the negroes. Where have the soldiers said they did not want their aid? Where have they turned their backs upon an enemy because a negro stood facing the same enemy? What officers have thrown up their commissions because they are humbled by being in the same ranks? Are they rather not rational enough to say that the musket upon the shoulder of the negro elevates him to the dignity of man? The Federalist, in its wisdom, foresaw this day in something of its brightness when it said that commotions might make a race of unhappy beings emerge to the level of manhood. But we are told, "You will disorganize your armies." Was Rosecrans's army disorganized four days ago because negroes had been introduced into the army? "The Union men of the loyal slave States will be disgusted, and they will rebel." Where? Western Virginia has abolished slavery since this system has been initiated and proclaimed. Missouri has passed her act of emancipation, made gradual by her Copperheads, because her loyal men would otherwise have made it peremptory and immediate. In Maryland, that surrounds your capital, and more than once has felt the tramp of the invader—such is the unanimous sentiment of her people, that her governor has been compelled to hasten up his lagging opinions and proclaim himself in favor of emancipation—and a Convention next year to effect it; and the only question is whether the enlistment of the slaves will leave any to emancipate. Who has rebelled? Who that was loyal to the government has become disloyal? Somewhere, where the negro fever has been lurking under the skin, of course it has broken out; but the fever was there before; it only required a hot day to bring it out. No sound loyal man has a symptom of that in him.
"But there will be servile insurrections, outrages upon women, massacres of masters, burning down of houses, destruction of great regions of country," every thing that the Apocalypse describes before the last day. That mass of freedmen has done no such iniquity any where. They have submitted with more than angelic patience to the torments of their masters, till the United States has given them an opportunity of freedom; and then, murdering no one, outraging no one, insulting no one, they have marched quietly through the streets of Baltimore to the negro camp, and undertaken the obligations of the military oath. The guarantee that you want is, enough of them—that is all. Organize one hundred thousand, or two hundred thousand, or three hundred thousand, and plant them as a beacon-light and a tower of strength in the middle of the Southern country, and that, with an act of Congress, makes freedoms not only law, but fact; and till that is done, the President's proclamation is not worth the paper on which it is written. Your declaration that you are going to set the slaves free is a mere delusion; their rushing to join the army is merely preparing their necks for the halter; the recognition of the existing rebel authorities is merely handing them over to the stake and the torture. Humanity, Christianity, the highest principles, the most ordinary honor, combine in crying shame on thus complicating the fate of that innocent people with yours, if you do not mean to make their fate also yours. Let them stay at home, doomed to the inexorable lash and eternal labor, rather than drag them out to incur the deadly hate and hostility of their masters, and then return them defenseless to their tender mercies. There may be execrable humiliations yet connected with the adjustment of this great revolution, but the pen of the historian will steep itself in gall of equal bitterness for no other act as for calling negroes into the field, and abandoning them afterward to slavery. That, fellow-citizens, is one of those steps which, once taken, can never be recalled. "The Union as it was" can never be after that step. But when the negroes shall be organized, armed, disciplined, decorated with the uniform of the United States, and taught the manoeuvres of the field, an act of Congress which proclaims them and their like free will be an act that will be respected. Then the United States will have acquired four millions of people in the rebel States whose liberty depends upon the perpetuity of the Union, and for the first time you will have a guarantee such as you never had before. You will have converted the element of your weakness into the element of your strength. You will have wrested the sword from your antagonist, and will wield it over his defenseless head. Your friends are camped eternally among them, and they are on their good behavior. If they attempt to reduce them to slavery, the law calls the men of the North to vindicate the right they have conferred, not to meet in arms the men they had previously armed against the Southern rebellion. That is the legal way that that problem will be accomplished. Then, if we hear the wretched cry, coming from the lowest of the populace, chiefly that which floods us from abroad, about negro equality and the intrusion of negro labor upon white labor, mention to them one or two things which may even meet their intellect. In the first place, if any body is afraid of negro equality, he is not far from it already; in the next place, if God has made him equal, and only accidental circumstances have made him unequal, you can not help it; and if He has made him unequal by the laws of nature, and independently of accidental circumstances, then no amount of demagoguism, no amount of abolition enthusiasm can make one hair black or white, or add an inch to his stature, intellectual or moral. When you talk about expelling him from the country, you talk simple craziness. Expel four millions of people! Where are the ships? Where is the land that will receive them? Where are the people that will pay the taxes to remove them? Who will cultivate the deserted regions that they leave? Who will indemnify King Cotton for the loss of his subjects? What will the cotton-planter do—represented to you as a gentleman who, like Apollyon in the Pilgrim's Progress, eats and spouts nothing but fire; but you will find a little common sense at the bottom of it all. Let him understand that the negro is free, and that he has to deal with him as a free laborer, or let cotton go uncultivated, and he will hasten to pay him wages, and the negro will be glad to receive them. But he will run up North, say this same class of people, and compete with us for our labor. Who ever heard of a free negro running away from where he was free? Who ever heard of a negro running at all, if he could help it? They don't run from Maryland to Pennsylvania—why from South Carolina to Louisiana? "But they are lazy and idle." Those who want to keep them as slaves say so; nobody else. We in Maryland have more experience on that subject than any body else. We have about 200,000 negroes; one half of them are free, the other half are slaves. We find that the slaves are lazier than the free negroes. We find that the free negroes have schools, educate their children, lay up money in the Savings Banks, and do not crowd the court of my friend Judge Bond as much as the class of white people from across the water. Every body talks against them who wants to keep them down below the level of the slave. It is the interest of the people who own the slave property with which they come in competition to do it; but when there was an attempt made a few years ago to expel them from Maryland, the leading landholders and negroholders protested against it, and stopped it because it would destroy the agricultural industry of the State. If we in Maryland did not want to lose one half of our agricultural population, how will they of South Carolina live if they lose it all? Gentlemen, necessity is a teacher that we in this country have yet to learn to respect. We have been in the habit of doing what seemed to us good in our own eyes; frequently it was very bad. We have to learn, and our Southern brethren have to learn more bitterly than we, that sometimes people have to do what they can do, and not what they prefer to do. When the Southern master is taught that the question is not whether be will have the negro free or slave, but whether he will have him free or no cotton, he will take the negro free. No rebel State will vote to emancipate their slaves. Do not be under any such delusion for an instant. They mean to hold them as long as they can. No rebel State will vote to come back to the Union—rest assured of it—as long as there is an army in the field; but state the question, Do you prefer, now belonging to the United States, to govern yourselves or be governed by Congress? and they will hasten to reorganize a proper State government. So with reference to the negro: if you ask them whether they would rather have the negro free or slave, they will say unanimously "slave;" but if you say "the negro shall be free; will you pay him wages as a workman, or will you not have cultivators for your fields," they will say, "We will pay him wages;" and that is no speculation either, gentlemen. At this moment large plantations in Louisiana are cultivated under bargains made between the master and the slave for a reasonable compensation. To such an extent has the depletion of the slave population of the western shore of Maryland gone, that some of the most violent secessionists have gone to their slaves and offered them higher, wages than heretofore they would have had to pay white men if they would stay at home and not enlist.
Gentlemen, the world moves palpably to the eye in this latter day, and the man who supposes he can stand still in the midst of the great moral movement of this world might as well plant his feet firmly in the mud and say, "The world may circle around the sun, but I will not go with it." You are parts of the current, and are borne on with it against your will. Day after day you accept what yesterday you would have scouted, and the day before would have thought craziness. Men's interests are sometimes blinded by their passions, but when their passions are chastised their interest resumes the supremacy. Crush the rebellion, and cotton will be again cultivated. Crush the rebellion, and the question of labor will revive. Crush the rebellion, and the interests of the planter will be a matter for his consideration. Crush the rebellion, and he will make the best terms he can with his emancipated and armed fellow-countrymen of the African race. And, on the other hand, if this wretched, cross-eyed, and double-faced conservatism shall get into power; if the men who delude the people, and lie to their own consciences where they are not dishonest, shall crown themselves again, as for thirty years they have hitherto crowned themselves for evil, with the powers of the government of the United States, and shall proceed to act on their view of the Constitution, and recognize the rebel leaders as the masters of their loyal fellow-citizens, whom now for two long years they have illegally oppressed, restore them to the seats of power, admit into the Congress of the United States their representatives, leave the conduct of the local elections under their dictation, and allow their armies to stand guard over the ballot-box, and their laws to regulate who shall elect and who shall be elected, and their Constitution to determine how the balance of power shall be distributed between the white regions of the State and the slave regions of the State—then, I say, although the Union may be restored in that way, it will be at the loss of all the fruits of the war; there will be no permanent peace; it will be a treacherous and shifting sand on which no permanent structure can be laid, over which no great march for improvement can pursue its unobstructed way. We merely restore to power those that have rebelled, to subjugate the North by the old coalition to abide their time till undying hate, still fostered and kept alive by the perpetuation of political power, shall awake amid some great national collision from abroad; to leave our ranks in the day of battle, to lift the banner of rebellion in the midst of national disaster, with combined armies tear in pieces the republic that they are now vainly struggling to overthrow. I say that now, when our armies have advanced to the very heart of the Confederacy, let us press it home and rest nowhere. Our armies now gird all the rebellion; the leaders of the rebellion begin to feel the inward tortures of conscious guilt, and they begin to feel the searching throes of the fire that we are heaping around them. Press forward only a little more, and they will be consumed in the conflagration that they themselves have created. We have now possession of the Mississippi; we have possession of all west of it substantially; we have all of Mississippi in our possession; we have nearly all Louisiana in our possession; we have all of Tennessee in our possession; we have one half of the State of Virginia in our possession; we have one full half of all the population that rebelled in our possession; we have crippled their resources, in great measure disorganized or paralyzed their armies; we have still fighting to do, but we have less of it to do than we had a year ago; and now, with one combined and energetic effort, if with our feet we can stamp down the "conservative" revolutionary reaction at home, and launch as a bolt of fire upon the enemy our unbroken ranks, a year more and possibly we shall begin to see the end of the war. But, gentlemen, rest assured that they who are ready to make peace first will not dictate the terms of it; rest assured that they who are determined to see no end of the war, excepting under the crown of victory, will wear that crown. It is tenacity, it is endurance, it is patience, it is the resolution never to stop fighting until your enemy yields, that constitute the great qualities .of nations born to rule. We now are on trial before the nations of the world. If the sword drop from our wearied hands, they will say, "Go, ye nation of shop-keepers and weavers; work, navigate, be ingenious, build houses, weave fabrics; make arms for the rest of the world, leave other men to bear and wield them; you are not the legitimate descendants of the men who wrested their independence from the power of Great Britain." Maintain your power intact, scout down and stamp down any man who speaks of any terms of peace at all. Tell him that this is no foreign war to be terminated by a treaty; it is a domestic rebellion to be stamped in the earth, and the only treaty is the Constitution of the United States as it is and as we construe it; the only privileges of the rebels are the laws of Congress as we have passed them and will execute them over them till they submit; their only right is to a legal trial and mercy afterward, if the President sees fit. They are not alien enemies, they are traitors whose lives are forfeited. When we deal with them, gentlemen, on these terms, they will understand that they have begun a work which they know now is not easy, they will then know is impossible; they will find that they set out to avert death in old age, and they encountered suicide at the threshold; they will begin to understand what might there slumbers in the heart of the American people, wielded by wisdom, backed by energy and resolution, and by that instinct which is never wanting to any people destined to greatness—the instinct of power that leads them never to yield as long as a man or a dollar remain, as long as there is an acre to be defended or an inch to be restored to their domination. Never allow the god Terminus to recede across the boundary of any State—let that be the watchword of the American republic. Then it will be as great, as glorious, as beneficent, as long-lived, yea, more long-lived than the immortal example of republican government, the Rome of the ancient world. On these terms we shall stand respected before the nations of the world.
Every despot in Europe curled his lips when the rebellion broke out at the feeble, wretched, vacillating, dilapidated government that undertook to restore its authority over this immense and magnificent region. When the men of the North and of the loyal slave States commenced to develop their power, they paused in their determination to recognize, they paused in their more than half-formed resolution to intervene and throw the weight of their arms on the other side. When our arms were at a low ebb a year and a half ago, Louis Napoleon thought it a convenient opportunity to march in and take possession of Mexico—to limit our expansion. He would not do it to-day; and, by the blessing of God, when this rebellion shall be suppressed, I take it there is a long account to settle with two great nations of the European world. I never said a word, my friends, to any body in this house on that subject before, but I knew what I thought, and I guessed what every American thought. The sailing of the Alabama and the Florida—the organization of companies to supply arms to shoot down our brethren—the organized attempt to break through the blockade with every material of war and every comfort of life for our enemies; under the guise of a neutrality violated at every step—the moral power and force given to the rebellion by the countenance of the governments of France and England, whose fear of the consequences alone prevented formal intrusion into our domestic quarrel—the thorn in our side of Nassau—the prying eye that watched our every movement at Halifax—the long thorn that France has planted in our side in Mexico—these things fester and rankle till the day of account. I used to be opposed to foreign conquest, opposed to the acquisition of that territory, opposed to foreign war. I have learned something in two years. I take it that the sailing of the Alabama has unsettled the Northeastern frontier. I take it that the intrusion of a monarchical power into Mexico has made us feel that Mexico is a republic, and our safety requires its expulsion. I take it that we feel uncomfortably bound in by the Bahama Islands, and that hereafter Nassau will not be the pirate's nest, to prey on us. When this giant shall have recovered the use of all his faculties, not now like a man cloven from head to foot, and wielding scarce any of his native power, but restored to his whole manhood, united in his absolute vigor, I look with glorying to the day when the black regiments shall stream to the capital of the Montezumas, while the Army of the Potomac, becoming the Army of the St. Lawrence, shall march to Quebec and Montreal. And if by the blessing of God, and the wisdom that shall preside over the Navy Department, our navy shall reach the magnificent proportions of our army, and the navy of England shall meet her equal on the seas, if it shall only be the will of God that the nation's great admiral, Dupont, shall live to lead it on the ocean, then I trust to live to hear of the explosion of the bombshells over the dome of St. Paul's, and of the arches of London bridge sent into the air.
This work was published before January 1, 1930, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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