Eureka daily sentinel. [volume] (Eureka, Nev.) 1871-1887, 1884-02-20
THE REASON OF THEOBJECTION.
Phillips Remarkable speech Before
the Rebellion Outbreak.

sAO hAOLAOAJ "a ~
Phillips, Mr.. Eaton Of Connecticut Demo-
craft called out, 81 object" and the effect
was that the Speaker could not at that
time receive the resolution. Mr.. Eaton is
credited with saying privately, in explana-
zion OF his course, that the resolution was
badly worded, and described Mr.. Phillips
not only as a great orator, which he In
questionably was, but as a statesman,
which he as certainly was not; and that
when the South proposed to secede, the
great agitator also did his utmost to break
up the Union.
Mr.. Eaton's a~llusion is presumably to
an address which Mr.. Phillips delivered
on Sunday, Jan. 20, 1861, in the Boston
Music Hall, before the Twenty-eighth
Congregational Society. Those whose
memories go back to that time of intense
public excitement, when the future was so
ominous, will recall that the Governor of
the State, the Adjutant General, the
County Sheriff, and the Mayor Of the city
stationed themselves close by to meet q
threatened outbreak against the speaker;
that police officers were scattered through
the crowded hall, and a large reserve force
secretly held ready a few rods distant.
Wendell Phillips was then at the climax
Of his rhetorical power and fame, and, in
spired by the feeling that the hour he had
worked for during a quarter OF a century
had come, he delivered a speech which
proved at once an unsurpassed specimen
of his oratOry and a clear statement of his
all-ruling political idea. You may be in
terested in these typical passages of the
address, cut from the Atlas and Bee of the
| following morning:
The Lord reigneth; let the earth re-
joice. 1.-THE Covenant with death is an
~nulled-the agreement with He'll is
broken to pieces" The chain which
has held the slave system since
1887 is parted. Thirty years ago
Southern leaders, sixteen years ago North
ern a~bolitionists, announced their pur-
pose to seek the dissolution Of the Ameri-
can Union. Who dreamed that success
would come 30 soon? South Carolina,
bankrupt, alone, with hundred thousand
more slaves than whites, four blacks to
three whites within her border, filings her
gauntlet at the feet of rs, 000, 900 of peo-
| pie in defence Of an idea. / would New
England could count one State as fearless
among her six. Three States have fol-
lowed her example. Probably the rest Of
the slave States, or many of them, will find
themselves unable to resist the infection
and then the whole merciless conspiracy of
1887 is ended, and timid men will dare to
hate slavery without trembling for bread
of life.
Suppose a State has no right to secede,
Of what consequence is that? A Union is
made up OF willing States, not of con-
quered provinces. There are some rights,
quite perfect, yet wholly incapable of be-
ing enforced. South Carolina may be
punished for her fault in going out of the
Union, but that does not keep her in it..
Why not recognize soberly the nature and
necessity Of our position? Why not, like
statesmen, remember that homogeneous
nations, like France, tend to centraliza-
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. like ours, tend inevita.
bly, to dismemberment?
Real unions are not made-they grow.
| This was made, like an artificial waterfall
or q Connecticut nutmeg. 1t was not an
oak which to-day a tempest skaters. 1t
was a wall hastily built, in hard times, of
| round boulders; the cement has crumbled,
and the smooth stones, obeying the law
| Of gravity, tumbled here and there. Why
| should we seek to stop them, merely to
| show that we have q right and can? That
| we're only a waste of means and temper.
| Let us build, like the pyramids, a fabric
| which every natural law guarantees; or,
| better still, plant q Union whose life sur
| wives the ages, and quietly gives birth to
its successor.
Now, if the Union created for us a fresh
| Golconda every month, if it made every
| citizen wise as Solomon, blameless as St.
| John, and safe as an angel in the courts of
| Heaven, to cling to it would still be a
damnable crime, hateful to God, while its
cement was the blood of the negro-while
! it, and it alone, made the crime of slave
| holding possible in fifteen States.
Sacrifice anything to keep the slavehold-
| ing States in the Union | God forbid /!
We will rather build q bridge Of gold and
| pay their toll over it-accompany them
| out with glad noise of trumpets, and
speed the parting guest" Let them not
''stand on the order of their going. but 60
at oncel |" Take the forts, empty our
arsenals and sub-treasuries, and we will
lend them beside jewels of gold and jewels
of silver, and Egypt be glad when they are
departed.
A Union whose despotism is 80 cruel
| and searching that one-half our lawyers
and one-half our merchants stife con-
| conscience for bread-in the name of Mar
| tin Luther and John Milton, Of Algernon
| Sydney and Henry Vane, of John Jay and
| Samuel Adams, / declare such a Union a
failure.
Disunion is Abolition That is all the
| value Disunion has for me. l care moth
| ing for forms Of Government. No foreign
| State dare touch US, united or disunited.
1t matters not to me whether Massachu.
| setts is worth one thousand millions, as
now, or two thousand, as she might be, if
| she had no Carolina to feed, protect, and
carry the mails for. The music of dis
| union to me is that at its touch the slave
breaks into voice, shouting his jubilee.
In my soul l believe that a dissolu ton
| of the Union, sure to result speedily in the
| abolition of slavery, would be a lesser evil
than the slow, faltering, diseased, gradu-
ally dying out Of slavery, constantly
| poisoning US with the fostering remains
of this corrupUpolitical. social and literary
state.
Take your distorted Union, your night
mare monster, out of the light and range
of those laws OF trade and competition;
then. without any sacrifice on your part,