The Daily state journal. [volume] (Alexandria, Va.) 1868-1874, 1873-10-02
PUBLIC SPEAKING IN ACCOMAC
COUNTY.
PUNaoTEAaUE, VA, Sepber

Drumondtown, the county seat of Aeco-
mac county. A large concourse of the
cisizens had collected together to hear adj
dresses, which had been announced in the
press from Colonel Hughes, the Republic
can candidate for governor, and Hon.
L. III. Chandler, the Republican canvasser
at large of Virginia. AT II O'Clock these
gentlemen arrived, accompanied by Hon,
j. B. Sener, representative in congress
from the first district Of Virginia, and j..
H. Clements, esq.,, of Portsmouth.
The speaking began with an address of
an hour and a quarter from Colonel
Hughes, which was listened to throughout
with the deepest attention. Colonel Hughes
was most handsomely presented to the peo-
pie Of Accomac by Hon. e. X. Snead.
Colonel Hughes said that he stood for the
first time in his life on
THE EASTERN SHORE OF VIRGINIA.
Though born and reared on the South
side, and though living far away across the
Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies, in the
southwest, near the lines of Kentucky,
Tennessee and North Carolina, he had al
ways felt the deepest interest in the East
ern Shore. He was gratified to be in the
county which had given so many great
names to Virginia; the county of the
Wises, the Joynes, and the Bayleys. An
other name very dear to him had origi-
mated here and had emigrated early in
our colonial history to the Indian settle
ments under the Blue Ridge, and thence
across the Alleghanies- name of the
Floyds. This county would always be
conspicuous in the annals of Virginia by
its association with henry A. Wise, whose
long and eminent public services, whose
varied information, whose versatile genius,
and whose superb powers of oratory had
made his name conspicuous in the annals
of the state, where it would remain to be
remembered and honored as long as Vir-
ginia should have history.
Colonel Hughes said that the Monday
before he had spoken in GraYson county,
four hundred miles west, and half a mile
up in the air, between the clouds and the
sky. He had spoken two days afterwards
in the fine county, for tobacco and cereals,
of fAmelia on Thursday in the bold
Piedmont county of Madison on Friday
in Richmond, seated on her seven hills,
the Joy and pride Of our state. And now
he was speaking ON the savannahs of the
Eastern shore, to population more
purely of the old English stock, of less
admixture and clearer blood than any
English population now on the globe.
He had been more and more impressed
each week of his arduous, but on his part
agreeable canvass-agreeable from the
respect which was everywhere shown him
by the people-with the value of
THE RESOURCES OF OUR GREAT STATE,
and it's capacity for the development of
even greater wealth and prosperity than
were enjoyed by the most fortunate states
of the Union. Her mountains were every
where filled with minerals; her climate
was unrivaled; her soil presented all the
conditions favorable to aprosperous agricul-
tural development. And this morning, in
making his way to this shore, over the
waters of the Chesapeake, ne had been
occupied IN his mind with the inquiry
whether these noble commercial roadsteads
of the east were more valuable to our
commonwealth than the material wealth
which lay slumbering in her mountains.
He asked why it was that, with all her
treasures and advantages of mountain,
field, water and climate, Virginia had sunk
from her original rank Of the first state in
the Union down to the thirteenth +; why it
was that the waters of the Chesapeake were
not plowed by as many white-wnged mes
sengers of trade as those of the Delaware,
of East river and the Hudson; why it was
that this
SPLENDIDLY SITUATED PENINSULA,
which broke off the boisterous Atlantic
from the grandest inland sea of the
world, was not dotted everywhere with
prosperous villages, lined from end to end
with wharves, and occupied as its site by a
greater city than that which covered the
peninsula of Manhattan? 1t was sad to
think that there was not yet railroad
penetrating this peninsula, although situat-
ed ct the centre of the American Atlantic
seaboard.
Colonel Hughes said that this startling
contrast between the condition OF Vir'
ginia and of those states contiguous to her
on the north was owing, among other
things. to one leading cause: Virginia had
begun her career in this Union as 9
national state, and after few years had
become sectional state. She had founded
the Union. Her great statesmen had been
the principal agents in organizing and
establishing it. Such was their sense o
the value of the Union that they hat
induced her to give away 153, 100000
acres of land northwest of the Ohio rivel
to secure it. They knew that, centrally as
she was situated on the eastern seaboard o
the Union, the commerce of the grea
west would centre upon her waters, anG
that, as Union state, she would partici
pate in the prosperity of every section o
the Union which she founded.
The change of politics to which he ha
alluded had been
THE ILIAD OF HER WOES.
After Jackson's administration the polite
of Virginia had become more and NOR
sectional, more and more hostile to tn
Union. Her people had learned no longe
to cherish the Union according to the pre-
cepts Of Washington's farewell address
but TO hate it, and array the
politics and their interests against it. Tt
cause of this alienation was the institutlo
of slavery. She had invented her sections
or state-rights system of politics for tt
protection of slavery, and in the pursuit
that politics had become more and MOI
estranged from the Union, until finally 81
had taken up arms for secession and sci
aration. But that institution which 81
had thus boldly and manfully staked {
the issue of battle, had fallen by the arb
trament of arms and now, most fortunat
ly, there was no longer anyscause for b
remaining at war in her feelings and
enmity in her politics with the Unto
which her own Washington Madiso