The Bedford gazette. [volume] (Bedford, Pa.) 1805-current, 1862-08-29
VOL. 6. NO. 4

the brave and gallant Lafayette. Aye, free
men of the West, fortresses, bearing these hon
ored names, and meant for the defense of the
country against foreign foes, and out of whose
casemates bristle cannon planted to hun death
and destruction at armed invaders, echo now
with the groans and are watered by the tears
not of men only from States seeded and in re-
bellion, or captured in war, but from the loyal
States of the North and the West, and from that
party which has contributed nearly three-fourths
of the soldiers in the field to-day. Are these
things to be borne? Never, no, never) If you
have the spirit of freemen in you, bear them
notl tGreat applause, and cries of that's it,
that's the talk.) What is life worth What
are property and personal liberty and political
liberty worth? Of whatvalue are all these things,
if we, born of an ancestry of freemen, boast
ing in the very first hours of our boyhood of
more extended liberty than was ever vouch-
safed to any other people, are to fail now in this
the hour of sore trial, to demand and to defend
them at every hazard? Freedom of the Press !
Is the man who sits in the White House at
Washington, and who owes all his power to the
press and the ballot, is he now TO play the ty-
rant over us? (No! never, never.) Shall the
man who sits at one end of a telegraphic wire
in the War Department or the Department Of
State, mere clerk it may be, servant of ser
wants, sit down and by one single click of the
instrument, order some minion of his thou
sand miles off, to arrest Samuel Medary, Judge
Ranney, or Judge Thurman and hurry them to
a bastile? (No; it can't be done; we will new
er allow it.) The Constitution says, ''no man
shall be held to answer for crime except on due
process of law" Our fathers, six hundred
years ago, assembled upon the plains of Runney
Mede in old England, and rescued from tyrant
hands, not by arms but by firm resolve, the God
given right to be free. Our fathers, in the time
of James |, and of Charles /, endured trial and
persecution, and loss of life and of liberty, ra-
ther than submit to oppression and wrong
John Hampton, glorious John Hampden, the
first gentleman of England, arrested upon an il
legal executive warrant, went calmly and hero
ically to the cells of prison rather than pay 20
shilngs of an Illegally assessed tax, laid in de-
fance of the constitution and laws of England,
and the rights and privileges of Englishmen.
And all history is full of like examples. VIII
liam Tell brooked the tyrant's frown in his day
and generation, in defense of these same rights,
in the noble republic of the Swiss; and that
though surrounded on every side by despots
whose legions numbered more than the whole
population of Switzerland, have by that same
indomitable spirit of liberty maintained their
rights, their liberties and their independence to
this hour And are Americans now to offer
themselves up a servile sacrifice upon that altar
of arbitrary power? Sir, l have misread the
signs of the times and the temper of the people,
if there is not already spirit in the land which
is about to speak in thunder tones to those who
stretch forth still the strong arm of despotic
power. ''Thus far shalt thou come, and no far
ther. We made you: you are our servants"
That, sir, was the language which was taught
to apply to men in Office, when / was youth,
or in first manhood and a private citizen, and
afterwards when holding Office as the gift of the
people, to hear applied to me, and bore the til
tie proudly. And asked then, as / ask now,
no other or better reward than, 'Well done,
good and faithful servant" Cries of, ''You
shall have it; you deserve it"] But to-day,
fiiay who are our servants, creatures made out
of nothing by the power of the people, whose
little brief authority was breathed into their
nostrils by the people, would now, forsooth, be-
come the masters of the people; while the or
gans and instruments of the people-the press
and public assemblages-are to be suppressed,
and the Constitution, with its right of petition,
and of due process Of law and trial by jury,
and the laws and all else which makes life worth
possessing-are to be sacrificed now upon the
tyrants plea that it is necessary to save the Gov
ernment, the Union. Sir, we did save the u
Mon for years--yes, we did. We were the
''Union savers" not eighteen months ago. Then
there was not an epithct in the whole vocabu-
larry of political bilingsgatc SO opprobrous in
the eyes of Republican when applied to the
Democratic party as "Union-shriekers,' or the
"Union-savers."
/ remember in my own city, on the day
of the Presidential election, in 1901 re-
member it well, for / had that day travelled
several hundred miles to vote for Stephen
A. Douglas for the Presidency-that in
ward where the judges of the election were
all Democrats, your patriotic Wide-Awakes,
strutting in unctious uniform, came up hour
after hour thrusting their Lincoln tickets
twixt thumb and finger at the judges, with
the taunt and sneer, ''.Save the UaaiOn; S0Ue
tie Union" And yet now forsooth, we are
TRAITORS" and ''secessionists!" And old,
gray headed and gray bearded men who Gv-
ed and voted in the times of Jefferson, and
Madison, and Monroe, and Jackson--men
who have fought and bled upon the battle
field, and who tondly indulged the delusion
for forty years that they were patriots, wake
up suddenly to-day to find themselves ''trai-
tors !"--sneered at, reviled and insulted by
striplings "whose fathers they would have
disdained to set with the dogs of their
hocks.'' OF all these things an inquisition,
searching and terrible, will yet be made, as
sure, as sudden, too, it may be, as the day
of iudgment. We of the loyal States--we