ADDRESSES
OP
HON. DANIEL W.'YOOMEES,
OF INDIANA;
COMPRISING HIS ARGUMENT DELIVERED AT CHARLESTOWN, VA.,
NOV. 8,1856, UPON THE
TRIAL OF JOHN E. COOK,
FOR
TREASON AND MURDER;
ALSO,
AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED BEFORE THE
LITERARY SOCIETIES
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA,
JULY 4, 1860.
RICHMOND, YA.:
PUBLISHED BY WEST & JOHNSTON.
1861.
ARGUMENT.
With the Permission of the Court—
Gentlemen of the Jury: The place I occupy in standing
before you at this time is one clothed with a responsibility as
weighty and as delicate as was ever assigned to an advocate
in behalf'of an unfortunate fellow-man. No language that
I can employ could give any additional force to the circum-
stances by which I am surrounded, and which press so heavi-
ly on the public mind as well as 011 my own. I come, too,
as a stranger to each one of you. Your faces I know only
by the common image we bear to our Maker; but,. in your
exalted character of citizens of the ancient and proud Com-
monwealth of Virginia, and of the American Union, I bear
to you a passport of friendship and a letter of introduction.
I come from the sunset-side of your Western mountains—
from beyond the rivers that now skirt the borders of your
great State; but I come not as an alien to a foreign land,
but rather as one who returns to the home of his ancestors,
and to the household from which he sprang. I come here
not as an enemy, but as a friend; with interests common
with yourselves, hoping for your hopes, and praying that the
prosperity and glory of Virginia may be perpetual. Nor do
I forget that the very soil on which I live in my Western
home was once owned by this venerable Commonwealth as
much as the soil on which I now stand. Her laws there
once prevailed, and all her institutions were there establish-
ed as they are here. Not only my own State of Indiana, but
also four other great States in the Northwest, stand as en-
during and lofty monuments of Virginia's magnanimity and
princely liberality. Her donation to the general Government
made them sovereign States ; and since God gave the fruitful
land of Canaan to Moses and Israel, such a gift of present
and future empire has never been made to any people.
Coming from the bosom of one of these States, can I forget
the fealty and duty which I owe to. the supremacy of your
4
laws, the sacredness of your citizenship, or the sovereignty
of your State ? Rather may the child forget its parent and
smite with unnatural hand the author of its being !
The' mission on which I have visited your State is to me,
and to those who are with me, one full of the bitterness and
poison of calamity and grief. The high, the sacred, the holy
duty of private friendship for a family fondly beloved by all
who have ever witnessed their, illustrations of the purest
social virtues, commands, and alone commands my presence
here. And, while they are overwhelmed by the terrible blow
which has fallen upon them through the action of the mis-
guided young man at the bar, yet I speak their, sentiments
as well' as my own when I say that one gratification, pure
and unalloyed, has been afforded us since our melancholy ar-
rival in your midst. It has been to witness the progress of
this Court from day to day, surrounded by all that is calcu-
lated to bias the minds of men, but pursuing with calmness,
with dignity, and impartiality, the true course of the law
and the even pathway of justice. I would not be true to the
dictates of my own heart and judgment, did I not bear vol-
untary and emphatic witness to the wisdom and patient kind-
ness of his Honor on the bench; the manly and generous
spirit which has characterized the counsel for the prosecu-
tion; the true, devoted, and highly professional manner of
the local counsel here for the defence ; the scrupulous truth-
fulness of the witnesses who have testified, and the decorum
and justness of the juries who have acted their parts from
the first hour of this Court to the present time—I speak in
the hearing of the country. An important and memorable
page in history is being written. Let it not be omitted that
Virginia has thrown around a band of deluded men, who in-
vaded her soil with treason and murder, all the safeguards
of her Constitution and laws, and placed them in her Courts
upon an equality with her own citizens. I know of what I
speak, and my love of truth and sense of right forbid me to
be silent on this point.
Gentlemen, I am not here on behalf of this pale-faced, fair-
haired wanderer from his home and the paths of duty, to
talk to" you about legal technicalities of law born of laborious
analysis by the light of the midnight lamp. I place him be-
fore you on 110 such ground. He is in the hands of friends
who abhor the conduct of which he has been guilty. But
doe^ that fact debar him of human sympathy ? Does the
simple act smite the erring brother with a leprosy which for-
bids the touch of the hand of affection ? Is his voice of re-
5
pentaiice and appeal for forgiveness stifled in his month ? If
so, the meek Saviour of the world would have recoiled with
horror from Mary Magdalene, and spurned the repentant
sorrow of Peter who betrayed him. For my client I avow
every sympathy. Fallen and undone ; broken and ruined
as he is by the fall, yet, from the depths of the fearful chasm
in which he lies, I hear the common call which the wretched
make for sympathy more clearly than if it issued from the
loftiest pyramid of wealth and power. If He who made the
earth and hung the sun and moon and stars on high to give
it light, and created man a joint heir of eternal wealth, and
put within him an immortal spark of celestial flame which
surrounds His*throne, could remember mercy in executing
justice when His whole plan of Divine government was as-
sailed and deranged ; when His law was set at defiance and
violated ; when the purity of Eden had been defiled by the
presence and counsels of the serpent—why, so can I, and
can you, when the wrong and the crime stand confessed, and
every atonement is made to the majesty of the law which the
prisoner has in his power to make.
Let us come near to each other and have a proper under-
standing. I am laboring with you for an object. I think I
know something of the human heart and of the leading at-
tributes by which it is governed throughout the world. By
virtue of those attributes, I feel that we may annihilate the
distance that separates our homes, sweep away all blinding
excitement, and sit down together and reason upon this most
tragic and melancholy affair as becomes citizens of the same
government, proud of the same lineage, actuated by the same
interests, and forever linked to the same destiny. You are
not merely empanneled in your capacity as jurors to pass
Upon the life of this erratic youth before you, but the nation
cannot be divorced from a deep and permanent interest in
your deliberations. The crime for Which the law claims his
life as forfeit is one connected with a question of the weighti-
est national import—a question which, without any fault of
yours, has rudely strained and shaken the bonds which em-
brace and hold together the States of this Union. This trial
is incident to that question, and must be met in the face of
the whole nation, and in the view of the entire American
people, as a matter of universal interest and concern. The
very nature of the offence now under discussion lifts us all
to a point of observation on which statesmen and patriots
have long bent their anxious looks. And the pressing, ever
present and determined question of the hour which now sits
6
with you iti the jury-box, and will retire with you to your
•deliberations on your Verdict, is, How shall you most fully
-meet the requirements of the American people at large ; best
•conduce to the peace and repose of the Union; allay the
•rushing, winds that are abroad on the face of the great deep;
say peace be still to the angry elements of passion and tre&>
sonable agitation, and at the same time do all your duty as
honest and conscientious men administering the laws of your
State? If it shall be in my power, in some measure, to
point out the course by which these great objects may be at-*
tained, I shall mark this, otherwise sad day on which I ad-
dress you, as the brightest to me in the calendar of time.
And, further, if these objects are to be attained on your part
by invoking into your midst, and following the winning
counsels of the meek-eyed and gentle angel of mercy—if you
can faithfully discharge your oaths as jurors, and, at the same
time, best meet the obligations which rest upon you as
American citizens by tempering the bitter cup which justice
commends to the lips of the prisoner with the ingredient of
clemency, I know you, by the universal law of the human,
heart, will rejoice in such an opportunity, and join in the
public and private happiness which will flow from your ver-
diet. By the help of Hod, and appealing to Him for the pu-
rity of the motives which animate my breast, I now proceed
to demonstrate such a course as both just and wise in the
case of John E. Oook.
First of all things, gentlemen of the jury, is your duty to
Virginia. Whatever she requires at your hands, that you
are to give. Your first love belongs to her; she is the ma-
tron who has nursed you, and the Queen Mother to whom
you owe allegiance. As an advocate and defender at home
of the doctrines of the State-rights men of the school of
1798, I do not come here to ask you to abate one jot or tittle
of your affection and jealousy for the honor and interest of
Virginia. Indeed, were sucli an invocation necessary, which
I know it is not, I would invoke you by the great names of
your history, by the memory of your ancient renown, by the
thrilling associations of the classic soil on which we stand,
and by the present commanding attitude which your Com-,
monwealth holds before the world, to be true and loyal to
what she has been, what she is, and what she hopes to be.
But how stands Virginia in reference to the assault which
was made upon her citizens and her soil at Harper's Ferry
on the 17th day of October, 1859, and what vindication does
she need at your hands for the outrage ? Are the circum-
7
stances such as to require of her the re-enactment of the
Mosaic law, repealed by the benign teachings of the Naza-
rene on the shores of Galilee ? Is she required to say in a
Stern and inexorable spirit:
" And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life.
Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.
Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe ?'
Not so. She asks nothing of the kind at your hands.
Punishment has already been swift and sure. The measure
of her vengeance for the great wrong committed against her
is full, and her vindication is ample before the world. She
met her invaders on the spot, and those who lifted their
hands against her are, most of them, in the graves to which
Virginians consigned tliem; a few bound in her prisons, and
a few others wanderers and fugitives on the face of the earth.
The Executive and citizens of your State guided the bolt
which fell upon this mad offspring of a loathsome fanaticism,
and the invasion perished at a single blow. And, in the
spirit of the answer of Cuslii to King David, I would say to
you: " The enemies of the State of Virginia, and all that
rise against her to do her hurt, be as these men are." But
as the great King of Israel rose up and went to his chamber,
and wept over the untimely fall of Absalom, the rebellious
son of his own loins, who had lifted his parricidal hand
against the life of an indulgent father, may not the world
commend a similar emotion in the breast of a jury of Vir-
ginians over the sorrowful fate of the youthful prisoner at
the bar! You will probably say that the lives of your citi-
zens have been sacrificed. I answer that it is lamentably
true ; but it is also true that life has been taken already to
atone for life; that the blood of murderers, older and wiser
than the prisoner, has been poured out in response to the
cry of the blood of your citizens from the ground. You will
say that the soil of your State has been polluted by the foot
of the traitor. I answer that that footstep rested but as for
a moment on your border, and was swept away by a whirl-
wind of patriotic indignation. You will say that your law
has been violated ; your dignity and honor as a free people
insulted. I answer, that, alas! it,is too true ; but I answer,
also, that it is equally true that your laws have been fully,
thoroughly, and justly vindicated. Here in this < court, again
and again, the sword of justice, wielded by an even hand, has
fallen upon the miserable remnant of the confederated band
who impiously mocked the integrity of the American Union
by assailing the institutions of Yirginia. The leader stands
8
at the foot of the gallows, and On its height will OlpiatO
many crimes against the peace and laws of this country—>
not least amongst which is the crime of enlisting young men
such as the prisoner, in a cruise of piracy against you and I,
and all law-abiding citizens of this happy Union. Let the
leader of the mutiny on ship-board perish, but if it appears
that young men have followed false guidance, and been bound
in tlie despotism of an iron will, oi'der them back to duty,
and give them one more chance to show whether they are
worthy of life or death. Virginia can thus afford to act. It
is one of the chief blessings of power that it can extend
mercy to the weak; and the crown jewel of courage is mag-
nanimity to the fallen.
But there is another point on which Virginia, though
mourning* for the death of her citizens, has triumphantly met
the aspersions and calumnies of the enemies of her domestic
institutions by reason of the late outbreak at Harper's Ferry.
The institution of domestic slavery to-day stands before the
world more fully justified than ever before in the history of
this or, indeed, perhaps, of any other country. The libera-
tor, urged on by a false and spurious philanthropy, deceitful
and sinister in its origin, and selfish and corrupt in its prac-
tice, came into your midst to set the bondsman free, and
though violence tore him from his master, though liberty was
sounded in his ear, though a leader was proclaimed to lead
him to the promised land, though an impiously self-styled
Moses of deliverance came in the might of the sword and
placed arms of bold attack and strong defence in his hands,
yet what a spectacle do we behold ! The bondsman refused
to be free ; drops the implements of war from his hands; is
deaf to the call of freedom; turns against his liberators,
and, by instinct, obeys the injunction of Paul by returning
to his master ! Shall thife pass for nothing ? Shall no note
be made of this piece of the logic of our Government ?
Shall the voice of the African himself die unheard oli the
question of his own freedonli ? No. It shall be perpetuated.
It shall be put in the rec6r<l. The slave himself, under cir-
cumstances the most tempting and favorable to his love of
freedom, if he has any; surrounded by men and scenes
beckoning him on to vengeance, to liberty and dominion ;
with the power of life and death over his master in his hands,
and the world open before him; with the manacle and chain,
which was never forged or wielded except in the heated fur-
nace of a riotous and prurient imagination, stricken from his
body, turns eagerly and fondly to the condition assigned him
9
by the layr not merely of Virginia, not merely of Legislatures
and law-makers, but by the law of his being, by the law*
which governs his relation to the white man wherever the
contact exists, by the law which made the hewers of wood
and drawers of water under a government formed by God
himself, and which, since the world began down to the pres^
ent time, has made the inferior subordinate to the superior
whenever and wherever two unequal races haVe been brought
together. Let this fact go forth to the country. Let it be
fully understood by those men and women who languish and
sigh over the condition ot your institutions that their sym-
pathy is repudiated, and that they themselves are despise
ed by both races in the South. This, too, Virginia has
proven.
Is there anything left to be done by your verdict in per-
emptorily taking the . life of the prisoner, and offering it a
sacrifice to heal the wrongs of your State ? I humbly com •
ceive that Virginia in no respect needs such a sacrifice. This
much I think I have shown.
And now let us turn to the prisoner. If Virginia, through
you, can afford to be clement, your inquiry will then be, is
the object on whom you are asked to bestow your clemency
worthy to receive it ? I know the field on which I now enter
is filled with preconceived ideas, but in the spirit of truth I
shall explore it, and by the truth of what I say I am willing
that my unfortunate client may be judged by you, and more-
over, by that God in whose presence no hidden things exist,
and before whom, at no distant day, you and I shall stand
with him and see him and know him as he is, and not as we
see him and know him now, encompassed by the dread and
awful calamities of the present hour.
Who is John E. Cook? He has the right himself to be
heard before you; but I will answer for him. Sprung from
an ancestry of loyal attachment to the American Govern-
ment, he inherits no blood of tainted impurity. His grand-
father an officer of the Revolution by which your liberty as
well as mine was achieved, and his grey-haired, father, who
lives to weep over him, a soldier of the war of 1812, he
brings no dishonored lineage into your presence. If the
blood which flows in his veins has been offered against your
peace, the same blood in the veins of those from whose loins
he sprang has been offered in fierce shock of battle and for-
eign invasion in behalf of the people of Virginia and the
Union. Born of a parent stock occupying the middle walks
of life, and possessed of all those tender and domestic vir-
10
tiles which escape the contamination of those vices that dwell
On the frozen peaks, or in the dark and deep caverns of so-
ciety, he would'not have been here had precept and example
been remembered in the prodigal wanderings of his short
and chequered life. Poor, deluded boy ! wayward, misled
child! An evil star presided over thy natal hour and smote
it with gloom. The hour in which thy mother bore thee and
blessed tliee as her blue-eyed babe upon her knee is to her
now one of bitterness as she stands near the bank of the chill
river of death and looks back on a name hitherto as unspot-
ted and" as pure as the unstained snow. May God stand by
and sustain her, and preserve the mothers of Virginia from
the waves of sorrow that now roll over her!
Not only the ancestry of John E. Cook, but ail with whom
his life is now bound up, stand before the country as your
friends, and the friends of the Constitution as handed down
i;o us by the valor and wisdom of Washington. I will not
shrink from the full and absolute recognition of my position.
You and I, gentlemen of the jury, can have no secrets in
this case from one another. We will withdraw the curtains,
and look each other fully in the face. A citizen of the State
in which I live, who, by virtue of his brilliant and command-
ing intellect, and because of his sound and national princi-
pies, has been placed at an early period of his life in the
highest position in the power of a State to give, is here be-
side me, and wears near his heart a sistdr's likeness to this
boy. And there is not in the wide world, on the broad green
face of the earth, a' man, whose heart is not wholly abandon-
ed to selfish depravity, who will not say that his presence
here is commended by honor, love, duty, and fidelity to all
that ennobles our poor fallen race. Let poor, miserable, de-
spised, loathed, spurned, and abhorred miscreants cavil and
revile at this proud act of painful duty. The true and eter-
nal impulses of the human heart, the world over, constitute
our appellate court.
But the Governor of the State of Indiana needs neither
vindication nor defence as a statesman of catholic opinions,
nor as a man fully appreciating the duties of domestic life.
Rather do I allude to his presence here and his position as
to the agitating questions of the day, to show that something
else besides ancestral inheritance or the teachings of family
connections, has given the fatal bias to the prisoner's mind,
which led him away from the worship of his own household
gods,_ and into the communion of idolaters, aliens and
enemies to the pure faith of an American citizen. And it
11
seems to me, in view of the services which those who love
this boy have rendered to their country, and in view of their
■devotion to the true construction of the Constitution and the
injunctions of our fathers, I might rehearse and quote to
you with propriety a passage from the history of the latter
years of the wisest king Israel ever hud:
" For it came to pass when Solomon was old that his wives turned away his
heart after other gods ; and his heart was not perfect with the Lord his God as
was the heart of David, his father* For Solomon went after Ashteroth, the god-
■dess of the Ionians, and after the abomination of tho Ammonites.
" And Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord, and went not fully after the
Lord as Aid David his father.
" And the Lord Was angry with Solomon because his heart was turned from
the Lord God of Israel which had appeared unto him twice j
" And had commanded him concerning this thing that he should not go after
■other gods ; but he kept not that which the Lord commanded.
" Wherefore the Lord said unto Solomon, forasmuch as this is done unto thee,
and thou hast not kept my covenant and my statutes which I have commanded
thee, I will surely rend the kingdom from thee, and will give it to thy servant.
" Notwithstanding, in thy days I will not do it for David thy fathers sake."
The King, who was forgiven, and spared not merely his
life, but his kingdom also, and his glory during his lifetime,
because of the loyalty of his father, who had gone before
him, was old and very wise, and full of experience. The
prisoner before you has done no more than to disobey your
covenants and statutes, and pleads that it has been done in
the early morning of life, his first offence, and under the
baneful influence of a school of philosophy which he once
thought sincere and right, but which he now here, once and
forever, to you, and before the world, renounces as false,,
pernicious, and pestilential. Shall man he more intolerant
than God ? Shall you be less merciful than He, in whose =
presence your only plea will be mercy! mercy! mercy!.
Will you say you dare not recommend mercy to John E. .
Cook, when divine examples and the appeals of your own.
consciences are on your side ? I Will never believe it until,
the appalling fact is announced by you.
But let us advance. I have spoken of Cook, his parentage*
and connections. Again comes the question, who is he t
And now I proceed to answer it with reference to the trans—
actions at Harper's Ferry, and with reference to the facts of
the case. Let us spread broad and wide before us the-
moving panorama of evil which reaches its denouement at
Harper's Ferry. There are hearts and feelings woven in the
destiny of the prisoner which shall be relieved and solaced
as far as truth, dragged up from the depths of this misfor-
tune, can relieve and solace them. In an evil hour—and
may it be forever accursed !—John E. Cook met John Brown
12
Oil the prostituted plains of Kansas. On that held of fanatL
cism, three years ago, this fair and gentle youth was thrown
into contact with the pirate and robber of civil warfare. To
others whose sympathies he has enlisted, I will leave the task
of transmitting John Brown as a martyr and hero to poster-
ity. In my eyes he stands the chief of criminals, the thief
of property stolen—horses and slaves—from the citizens of
Missouri, a falsifier here in this court, as I shall yet show,
and a murderer not only of your citizens, but of the young
men who have already lost their lives in his bloody foray on
your border. This is not pleasant to say, but it is the truth,
and as such ought to be and shall be said. You have seen
John Brown, the leader. Now look on John Cook, the fol-
lower. He is in evidence before you. Never did I plead for
a face that I was more willing to show. If evil is there, I
have not seen it. If murder is there, I am to learn to mark
the lines of the murderer anew. If the assassin is in that
young face, then commend me to the look of an assassin.
No, gentlemen, it is a face for a mother to love, and a sister
to idolize, and in which the natural goodness of his heart
pleads trumpet-tongued against the deep damnation that es-
tranged him from home and its principles. Let us look at
the meeting of these two men. Place them side by side.
Put the young face by the old face; the young head by the
old head. We have seen somewhat of the history of the
young man. Look now for a moment at the history of the
old man. He did not go to Kansas as a peaceable settler
with his interests linked to the legitimate growth and pros-
perity of that ill-fated Territory. He went there, in the lan-
guage of one who has spoken for him since his confinement
here, as the Moses of the slaves' deliverance. He went there
to fulfill a dream, which had tortured his brain for thirty
years, that he was to be the leader of a sacred Exodus from
bondage. He went there for war, and not for p§ace. He
went there to call around him the wayward and unstable
elements of a society in which the bonds of order, law, and
religion were loosened, and the angry demon of discord was
unchained. Storm was his element by his own showing.
He courted the fierce tempest. He sowed the wind that he
might reap the whirlwind. He invoked the lightning and
gloried in its devastation. Sixty summers and winters had
passed over his head, and planted the seeds of spring and
gathered the harvests of autumn in the fields of his experi-
ence. He was the hero, too, of battles there. If laurels
could be gained in such a fratricidal war as raged in Kansas
13
he had them on his brow. Ossawatomie was given to him,
and added to his name by the insanity of the crazy crew of
the North, as Napoleon conferred the names of battle-fields
on his favorite marshals. The action of Black Jack, too,
gave him consideration, circumstance, and condition with
philanthropists of bastard quality, carpet-knight heroes in
Boston, and servile followers of fanaticism throughout the
country. His courage is now lauded to the skies by men
who have none of it themselves. This virtue, I admit, he
has—linked, however, with/ a thousand crimes. An iron
will, with which to accomplish evil under the skillful guise
of good, I also admit to be in his. possession—rendering his
influence over the young all the more despotic and danger-
ous. Imagine, if you please, the bark on which this young
man at the bar and all his hopes were freighted, laid along-
side of the old weather-beaten and murderous man-of-war
whose character I have placed before you. The one was
stern and bent upon a fatal voyage. Grim-visaged war, civil
commotion, pillage and death, disunion and universal deso-
lation thronged through the mind of John Brown. To him
law was nothing, the Union was nothing, the peace and wel-
fare of the country were nothing, the lives of the citizens of
Yirginia were nothing. Though a red sea of blood rolled
before him, yet he lifted up his hand and cried, " Forward."
Shall he now shrink from his prominence and attempt to
shrivel back to the grade of his recruits and subalterns ?
Shall he deny his bad pre-eminence and say that he did not
incite the revolt which has involved his followers to ruin ?
Shall he stand before this Court and before the country and
deny that he was the master-spirit, and gathered together
the young men who followed him to the death in this mad
expedition ! No! his ow;n hand signs himself " Commander-
in-Chief," and shows the proper distinction which should be
made between himself and the men who, in an evil moment,
obeyed his orders. Now turn to the contrast again and be-
hold the prisoner. Young, and new to the rough ways of
life, his unsandaled foot tender and unused to the journey
before him, a waif on the ocean, at the mercy of the current
which might assail him, and unfortunately endowed with
that fearful gift which causes one to walk as in a dream
through all the vicissitudes of a life-time; severed and wan-
dering from the sustaining and protecting ties of kindred,
he gave, without knowing his destination or purpose, a pledge
of military obedience to John Brown, " Commander-in-
Chief."
14
Gentlemen of the Jury, there is one Character which, in
the economy of God's Providence, has been placed upon the-
earth, but perhaps has never been fully drawn, and is most
difficult to draw. It is the character of him wlnfglides down
the stream of life in a trance, dreams as he floats along, and
sees visions on either shore. Realities exist in this world, no
doubt. Practical views are certainly the best. But that
impalpable, airy, and unsubstantial creations of the busy im-
aginations come now and then, and lure the children of men
to chase the " Will-o'-the-Wisp" over the dangerous morass
of life, is as true as that we have our allotted pilgrimage of
three score years and ten. Who has not beheld the young
man of strict moral culture, impressed with high principles
of right, and gifted with good intellect, start out upon the
dusty and well-beaten highway, which millions have trod be-
fore him, only to turn aside at the first inviting grove of
pleasure, the first call of some fanciful wood nymph, or to
follow over the falls of ruin and death some meandering
stream whose beautiful surface caught his eye ? To such a
one right and wrong are utter abstractions, and have no re-
lati,on whatever to things that exist. Give to such a mind a
promise, however false, and from it will spring a castle in the
air, with proportions as true and just as the most faultless
architecture ever framed by mathematical skill.
Some lay the foundation of their actions on the rock and
are never overthrown. Some build upon the shifting sand,
and fall when the storm comes. But in each instance the
building may be the same in its symmetry. So with the
deductions of the mind. All depends, not upon the reason-
ing, but upon the basis on which thought rests, and which
supports the edifice of our conclusions. The enthusiast and
visionary takes his stand-point and fixes the premises of his
conduct from caprice and the circumstances which have ob-
tained the ascendancy over his mind. That such has been
the character and such the conduct of the prisoner, without
one spark of malignity of heart, or a single impulse of de-
pravity, all Ijie evidence in this case clearly establishes.
Some general ideas, gilded over by the alluring title of free-
dom, were held out to him by Brown, and formed the basis
of what seemed to him duty and honor. If ever man charged
with crime was lifted up by the evidence of his case above
the ignoble traits of the ordinary felon, the prisoner is thus
distinguished. ■ Instead of the eager and willing bandit,
anxious to join a hoary leader bent on mischief—instead of
the outlaw in mifld and character, gloomily and fiercely pon-
15
dering revenge against his fellow men for fancied or real
injuries—we see from the evidence a kind though wayward
heart, a cheerful, obliging, though visionary mind. With
children every where he has been a favorite; and since little
children crept upon the knee of the Saviour eighteen hun-
dred years ago, they have been the most infallible judges of
a gentle and affectionate heart. Amiability and sweetness of
temper he has carried with him through the world, and he
brings that trait now here before you to show that strong in-
ducements and powerful incentives must have been brought
to bear in order to engage him in an enterprise so desperate
as that for which his life is now so sadly imperiled. What
motive controlled him to this action ? A crime without a
motive cannot exist. Was it the motive of bloodshed ? His
character forbids the thought. Was it the motive of disloy-
alty to a government cemented by the blood of his ancestors,
and defended by all who are near him by the ties of kindred ?
Not a syllable of proof warrants such a conclusion. Was
his motive robbery and unholy gain ? Other fields are more
inviting to the land pirate; but the thought of plunder never
crossed a mind like his. One answer, an'd one alone, is to be
given to all these questions. John Brown was the despotic
leader, and John E. Cook was an ill-fated follower of an en-
terprise whose horror he now realizes and deplores. I defy
the man, here or elsewhere, who has ever known John B.
Cook, who ever looked once fully into his face, and learned
any thing of his history, to lay his hand on his heart and say
that he believes him guilty of the origin or the results of the
outbreak at Harper's Perry.
Here, then, are the two characters whom you are thinking
to punish alike. Can it be that a jury of Christian men will
find no discrimination should be made between them ? Are
the tempter and the tempted the same in your eyes ? Is the
beguiled youth to die the same as the old offender who has
ponde'red his crime for thirty years ? Are there no grades in
your estimation of guilt ? Is each one, without respect to
age or circumstance, to be beaten with the same number of
stripes ? Such is not the law, human or divine. We are all
to be rewarded according to our works, whether in punish-
ment for evil, or blessings for good that we have done. You
are here to do justice, and if justice requires the same fate
to befal Cook that befals Brown, I know nothing of her rules,
and do not care to learn. . They are as widely asunder in all
that constitutes guilt as the poles of the earth, and should
fee dealt with accordingly. It is in your power to do so, and
16
by the principles by which you yourselves are willing to be
judged hereafter, I implore you to do it!
Come with me, however, gentlemen, and let us approach
the spot where the tragedy of the 17th of October occurred.,
and analyze the conduct of the prisoner there. It is not true
that he came as a citizen of your State and gained a home
in your midst to betray you. He was ordered to take his
position at Harper's Ferry, in advance of his party, for the
sole purpose of ascertaining whether Col. Forbes of New
York had divulged the plan. This order came from John
Brown, the " Commander-in-Chief," and was doubtless a
matter of as much interest to others, of prominent station as
to himself. Cook simply obeyed—no more. There is not a
particle of evidence that he tampered with your slaves during
his temporary residence. On the contrary, it is admitted on
all hands that he did not. His position there is well defined.
Nor was he from under the cold, stern eye of his leader.
From the top of the mountain his chief looked down upon
him, and held him as within a charmed circle. Would Cook
have lived a day had he tried to break the meshes which en-
vironed him ? Happy the hour in which he had made the
attempt, even had he perished ; but, in fixing the measure of
his guilt, the circumstances by which he was surrounded
must all be weighed. At every step we see him as the in-
strument in the hands of other men, and not as originating
or advising any thing. His conduct towards that elegant
and excellent gentleman, Col. Washington, is a matter of
sore regret to his friends and also to himself. It is the one
act most difficult of all others to reconcile with the.well-
known character of the man. But even there his offence is
palliated by the dictatorship which governed him. At
first glance, we see a high-toned gentleman's hospitality
abused. This has been used to aggravate his acknowledged
offences. But the truth is, that when Cook first visited
Colonel Washington's house and received from him various
acts of kindness, the thought that soon he was to be ordered
back over that threshold in a hostile manner had never en-
tered his brain. The act was not Cook's, but Brown's.
The mere soldier is never punished for the outrages of his
commander. And when you allow that the prisoner's great
error was his enlistment under the leadership of Brown in
the first place, then you must admit that everything else has
followed in logical sequence. Obedience and fidelity upon a
leader in a false and pernicious cause are entitled to offset,
in some measure at least, the evil that has flown from them..
17
But the prisoner took certain weapons hallowed by great and
sacred associations from the possession of Col. Washington.
Ah! in this he is once more consistent with the visionary
and dreamy cast of his mind. The act was not plunder, for
he pledged their safe return to their owner, and has faithfully
kept that pledge to the full extent of his power. But his
wayward fancy was caught with the idea that a spell of en-
chantment hung around them, and that, like the relics of a
saint, they would bless and prosper any cause in which they
were invoked. The sword of Frederick the Great and the
pistols of Lafayette linked to the name and family of Wash-
ington! With what a charm such associations would strike
the poetic temperament of a young enthusiast, embarked in
an enterprise presenting to his perverted imagination the in-
centives of danger and glory; and if a new order of things
was to be inaugurated, and storm and revolution were to
shake the country and the world, like the heart of the Bruce
or the eagles of Napoleon, these warlike incentives of heroes
were to fascinate and allure followers, and hallow the battles
in which they were lifted. The mind of the prisoner is fully
capable of dreaming such dreams and nursing such visions..
But it is said that Cook left the scene at Harper's Ferry at
an early hour to avoid the danger of the occasion, and thus
broke faith with his comrades in wrong. Even this is wholly
untrue. Again we find the faithful, obedient subaltern car-
rying out the orders of his chief, and when he had crossed
the river and fulfilled the commands of Brown, he did what
Brown's own son would not do—by returning and exposing,
himself to the fire of the soldiers and citizens for the relief
of Brown and his party. We see much, alas ! too much, to
condemn in his conduct, but nothing to despise; we look irt
vain for an act that belongs to base or malignant nature..
Let the hand of chastisement fall gently on the errors of such;
as him, and reserve your heavy blows for such as commit
crime from motives of depravity. Up to this point I have
followed the prisoner, and traced his immediate connexion
with this sad affair. You have everything before you. You
have heard his own account of his strange and infatuated
wanderings up and down the earth with John Brown and his
coadjutors; how like a fiction it all seems, and yet how la-
mentably true; how unreal to minds like ours; how like
the fever-dream of a mind warped and disordered to the.
borders of insanity does the part which the prisoner has
played seem to every practical judgment! Is there nothing
in it at all that affords you the dearest privilege which man
2
18
has on earth—the privilege of being merciful ? Why, the
very thief on the cross, for a single moment's repentance
over his crimes, received absolute forgiveness and was re-
warded with paradise. But, gentlemen, in estimating the
magnitude of this young man's guilt, there is one fact which
is proven in his behalf by the current history of the day
which you cannot fail to consider. Shall John E. Cook per-
ish, and the real criminals who for twenty years have taught
the principles on which he acted hear no voice from this
spot ? Shall no mark be placed on them-? Shall this occa-
sion pass away, and the prime felons who attacked your soil
and murdered your citizens at Harper's Ferry escape ? The
indictment before us says that the prisoner was seduced by
the false and malignant counsels of other traitorous persons.
Never was a sentence written more just and true. " False
and malignant counsels" have been dropping for years, as
■deadly and blighting as the poison of the Bohun Upas' tree,
from the tongues of evil and traitorous persons in that sec-
• tion of the Union to which the prisoner belongs. They have
seduced not only his mind, but many others, honest and mis-
guided like him, to regard the crime at Harper's Ferry, as
no crime, your right as unmitigated wrongs, and the Consti-
tution of the country as a league with hell and a covenant
with death. On the skirts of the leaders of abolition fanati-
cism in the North is every drop of blood shed in the conflict
at Harper's Ferry ; on their souls rests the crime of murder
for~every life there lost; and all the waters of the ocean
could not wash the stains of slaughter from their treacherous
and guilty hands. A noted Boston abolitionist, (Wendell
Phillips,) a few days ago, at Brooklyn, New York, in the
presence of thousands, speaking of this tragic occurence,
says: " It is the natural result of anti-slavery teaching.
For one, I accept it. I expected it." I, too, accept it in the
same light, and so will the country. Those who taught, and
not those who believed and acted, are the men of crime in
the sight of God. And to guard other young men, so far as
in my power, from the fatal snare which has been tightened
around the hopes and destiny of John E. Cook, and to show
who are fully responsible for his conduct, I intend to link
with this trial the names of wiser and older men than he ;
and if he is to be punished and consigned to a wretched
doom, they shall stand beside him in the public stocks; they
shall be pilloried forever in public shame as the evil and
traitorous persons who seduced him to his ruin by their false
and malignant counsels.
19
The chief of these men, the leader of a great party, a
Senator of long standing, has announced to the country that
there is a higher law than the Constitution, which guaranties
to each man the full exercise of his own inclination. The
prisoner before you has simply acted on the law of Wm. H.
Seward, and not the law of his fathers. He has followed the
Mahomet of an incendiary faith. Come forth, ye sages of
abolitionism, who now cower and skulk under hasty denials
of your complicity with the bloody result of your wicked
and unholy doctrines, and take your places on the witness
stand. Tell the world why this thing has happened. Tell
this jury why they are trying John E. Cook for his life.
You advised his conduct and taught him that he was doing
right. You taught him a higher law and then pointed out
to him the field of action. Let facts be submitted. Mr.
Seward, in speaking of slavery, says : " It can and must be
abolished, and you and I must do it." What worse did the
prisoner attempt ? Again he said, upon the same subject,
" Circumstances determine possibilitiesand doubtless the
circumstances with which John Brown had connected his
plans made them possible in his estimation ; for it is in evi-
dence before the country, unimpeached and uncontradicted,
that the great Senator Of New York had the whole matter
submitted to him, and only whispered back, in response, that
he had better not been told. He has boldly announced an
irrepressible conflict between the free and slave States of this
Union. These seditious phrases, " higher law" and " ir-
repressible conflict," warrant and invite the construction
which the prisoner and his young deluded companions placed
upon them. Yet they are either in chains, with the frightful
gibbet in full view, or sleep in dishonored graves, while the
apostle and master-spirit of insurrection is loaded with
honors and fares sumptuously every day. Such is poor,
short-handed justice in this world.
An old man, and for long years a member of the National
Congress from Ohio, next shall testify here before you that
he taught the prisoner the terrible error which now involves
his life. Servile insurrections have forever been on the
tongue and lips of Joshua R. Giddings. He says "that
when the contest shall come, when the thunder shall roll and
the lightning flash, and when the slaves shall rise in the
South in imitation of the horrid scenes of the West Indies,
when the Southern man shall turn pale and tremble, when
your dwellings shall smoke with the torch of the incendiary,
and dismay sit on each countenance, he will hail it as the
20
approaching dawn of that political and moral millennium
which he is well assured will come upon the world." The
atrocity of these sentiments chills the blood of honest pa-
triots, and no part of the prisoner's equals their bloody im-
port. Shall the old leader escape and the young follower
die ? Shall the teacher whose doctrines told the prisoner
that what he did was right, go unscathed of the lightning
which he has unchained ? If so, Justice has fled from her
temples on earth, and awaits us only on high to measure out
what is right between man and man. The men who have
misled this boy to his ruin shall here receive my maledic-
tions. They shrink back from him now in the hour of his
calamity. They lift up their hands and say, Amen ! to the
bloody spectacle which their infernal orgies have summoned
up. You hear them all over the land ejaculating through
false, pale, coward lips, " Thou canst not say I did it," when
their hands are reeking with all the blood that has been shed
and which yet awaits the extreme penalty of the law. False,
fleeting, perjured traitors; false to those who have acted
upon your principles; false to friends as well as country, and
perjured before the Constitution of the Republic—ministers
who profess to be of God who told this boy here to carry a
Sharp's rifle to Kansas instead of his mother's Bible—shall
this jury, this court, and this country forget their guilt and
their infamy because a victim to their precepts is yielding up
his life before you ? May God forget me if I here, in the
presence of this pale face, forget to denounce with the1 with-
ering, blighting, blasting power of majestic truth, the tall
and stately criminals of the Northern States of this Union.
The visionary mind of the prisoner heard from a member
of Congress from Massachusetts that a new constitution, a
new Bible and a new God were to be inaugurated and to
possess the country. They were to be new, because they
were to be anti-slavery, for the old constitution, and the old
Bible, and the God of our fathers, the ancient Lord God of
Israel, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, were not on
the side of abolitionism. Is there no mitigation for his doom
in the fact that he took his life in his hand, and aimed at
that which a coward taught him, but dared not himself at-
tempt ? Base, pusillanimous demagogues have led the pris-
oner to the bar; but while he suffers—if suffer he must—*
they, too, shall have their recreant limbs broken on the
wheel. I will not leave the soil of Virginia, I will not let
this awful occasion pass into history, without giving a voice
and an utterance to its true purport and meaning, without
21
heaping upon its authors the load of execration which they
are to bear henceforth and forever. Day after day and year
after year has the baleful simoon of revolution, arnachy, dis-
cord, hostility to the South and her institutions, swept over
that section of the country in wjiich the lot of the prisoner
has been cast. That he has been poisoned by its breath,
should not cut him off from human sympathy ; rather should
it render every heart clement toward him. He never sought
place or station, but sought merely to develop those doctrines
which evil and traitorous persons had caused him to believe
were true. Ministers, editors, and politicians—Beecher,
Parker, Seward, Giddings, Sumner, Hale, and a host of lesser
lights of each class—who in this court-room, who in this
vast country, who in - the wide world who shall read this
trial, believes them not guilty, as charged in the indictment
in all the courts, to a deeper and far more fearful extent
than John E. Cook? Midnight gloom is not more sombre
in contrast with the blazing light of the meridian sun than
is the guilt of such men in comparison with that which over-
whelms the prisoner. They put in motion the maelstrom^
which has engulphed him. They started the torrent which
has borne him over the precipice. They called forth from
the caverns the tempest which wrecked him on a sunken
reef. Before God, and in the light of Eternal truth, the dis-
aster at Harper's Ferry is their act, and fiot his. May the
ghost of each victim to their doctrines' of disunion and
abomination sit heavy on their guilty souls! May the fate
of the prisoner, whatever it may be, disturb their slumbers
and paralyze their arms when they are again raised against
the peaci of the country and the lives of its citizens!
I know by the gleam of each eye into which I look in this
jury-box, that if these men could change places with young
Cook, you would gladly say to him, " Go, erring and repent-
ant youth, our vengeance shall fall on those who paid their
money, urged on the attack, and guided the blow." Let me
appeal to you, gentlemen of the jury, in the name of Eternal
truth and everlasting right, is nothing to be forgiven to youth,
to inexperience, to a gentle, kind heart, to a wayward and
peculiar though not vicious character, strangely apt to be
led by present influences ? I have shown you what those in-
fluences, generally and specially, have been over the mind of
the prisoner. I have shown you the malign influence of his
direct leader. I have shown you, also, the " false and ma-
lignant counsels" in behalf of this sad enterprise, emanating
from those in place, power, and position. It might have
22'
been your prodigal son borne away and seduced by suqli
counsels, as well as my young client. Do with him as you
would have your own child dealt by under like circumstan-
ces. He has been stolen from the principles of his ancestors
and betrayed from the teachings of his kindred. If he was
your own handsome child, repentant and confessing his
wrong to his country, what would you wish a jury of strangers
to do ? That do yourselves. By that rule guide your ver-
diet; and the poor boon of mercy will not be cut off from
him.
He thought the country was about to be convulsed ; that
the slave was pining for an opportunity to rise against his
master; that two-thirds of the laboring population of the
country, North and South, would flock to the standard of re-
volt; that a single day would bring ten, fifty—yea, a hun-
dred thousand men—to arms in behalf of the insurrection of
the slaves. This is in evidence. Who are responsible for
such terribly false views ? and what kind of a visionary and
dreaming mind which has so fatally entertained them ? That
the prisoner's mind is pliant to the impressions, whether for
good or for evil, by which it is surrounded, let his first inter-
view in prison with Gov. Willard, in the presence of your
Senator, Col. Mason, bear witness. His error was placed
before him. His wrong to his family and his country was
drawn by a patriotic, and, at the same time, an affectionate
hand. His natural being at once asserted its sway. The in-
fluence of good, and not of evil, once more controlled him
as in the days of his childhood ; and now here, before you,
he has the merit at least of a loyal citizen making all the
atonement in his power for the wrong which he has commit-
ted. That he has told strictly the truth in his statement, is
proven by every word of evidence in this cause.
Gentlemen, you have this case. I surrender it into your
hands the issues of life and death. As long as you live, a
more important case than this you will never be called to
try. Consider it, therefore, well in all its bearings. I have
tried to show you those facts which go to palliate the conduct
of the prisoner. Shall I go home and say that in justice you
remembered not mercy to him ? Leave the door of clemency
open; do not shut it by a wholesale conviction. Kemember
that life is an awful and a sacred thing; remember that
death is terrible—terrible at any time, and in any form.
" Come to the Bridal Chamber, Death—
Come when the mother feels,
For the first time, her first-born's breath;
Come when the blessed seals
28
That close the pestilence are broke,
And crowded cities wail its stroke;
Come in Consumption's ghastly form,
The Earthquake's shock, the Ocean's storm;
Come when the heart beats high and warm
With banquet song, and dance and wine,
And thou art terrible. The groan,
The knell, the pall, the bier,
And all we know, or dream, or fear
Of agony are thine."
But when to the frightful mien of the grim monster, when
to the chill visage of the spirit of the glass and scythe, is
added the hated, dreaded spectre of the gibbet, we turn shud-
dering from the accumulated horror. God spare this boy,
and those who love him, from such a scene of woe.
I part from you now, and most likely forever. When we
next meet—when I next look upon your faces and you on
mine—it will be in that land and before that Tribunal where
the only plea that will save you or I from a worse fate than
awaits the prisoner, will be mercy. Charity is the para-
mount virtue; all else is as sounding brass and a tinkling
cymbal. Charity suffereth long, and is kind. Forbid it not
to come into your deliberations ; and, when your last hour
comes, the memory that you allowed it to plead for you err-
ing brother, John E. Cook, will brighten your passage over
the dark river, and rise by your side as an interceding angel
in that day jvhen your trial, as well as his, shall be deter-
mined by a just but merciful God.
I thank the Court, and you, gentlemen, for your patient
kindness, and I am done.
AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED
BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OE VIRGINIA,
JULY 4, 1860.
CORRESPONDENCE.
University of Virginia, )
Charlottesville, July 5th, 1860. J
Hon. D. W. Vooriiees :
Dear Sir—Believing that a wider circulation of your oration delivered before
the Literary Societies of the University on yesterday, will serve to increase the
great pleasure experienced by your audience and give a still further circulation to
sentiments, which, while they challenged an enthusiastic approval from your
hearers, have a peculiar value and appropriateness in the present aspect of our
country, we request a copy for immediate publication.
Hoping that you may see fit to comply with our request, at your earliest con-
venience, we are with sentiments of the highest regard,
Your obedient servants,
E. HOLMES BOYD,
J. McD. CARRINGTON,
WOOD BOULDIN,
E. C. ANDERSON, Jr.,
R. M. VENABLE, .
WILLIAM ALLEN,
ALEX. B. COCHRAN,
LEIGH ROBINSON,
DOUGLAS F. FORREST,
WILLIAM NORWOOD,
Terre Haute, Ind., July 13th, 1860.
Gentlemen—I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt ot your favor of the
5th inst.
Yielding to your wishes as therein expressed, I will furnish without delay a
copy of my address for publication.
I tender you my grateful thanks for the manner in which you see proper to al-
lude to its supposed merits. I trust at least that its sentiments will not be found
at variance with an enlightened and patriotic view ot the true relation which the
American citizen sustains towards the Federal and State governments. I trust
also that it will in some measure commend itself to those who have studied im-
partially the history and character of the exalted race to which we belong, and
the relation which different races have borne towards each other in every civilized
age of the world.
Permit me to embrace this opportunity to express to you and through you to
the Societies whom you represent, my deep and lasting sense of the kind and
very flattering reception with which I was honored while at the University.
Very truly, your obedient servant,
D. W. VOORHEES.
E. Holmes Boyd, William Allen, and others.
Committee
of the
Jefferson Society.
Committee
of the
Washington Society.
THE AMERICAN CITIZEN.
Ladies and Gentlemen:—
"We stand to-day in an august and venerable presence.
The associations by which we are surrounded are connected
with a great and unparalleled age. The scenes on which
our eyes rest call up befofe the mind with vivid power, the
early and the exalted days of the Republic. The soil on
which we tread teems with classic memories. The sky that
bends above us is the same that once drew the gaze of the
philosophers of American liberty and American science.
The barren mountains that sleep off yonder in the dim blue
distance are fruitful and luxuriant in the bright and beauti-
ful historical pictures which the youths of America, whether
they be dwellers on the Aroostook or the Mississippi, have
treasured away in their lessons taught by the wintry fireside.
The rivers ,that encircle the eastern slope of a mighty conti-
nent, and that roll away from these plains to the ocean, mur-
mur a song of everlasting praise to the deeds of immortal
renown which were once enacted on their shores. All around
us breathes the fame of grand and wonderful achievements.
The very air is redolent of the rich odors of a short, though
felicitous, blessed antiquity.
We turn our faces around towards the past. We look
along down the fleeting years of little more than an ordinary
lifetime, and we see the young and struggling institutions of
our country arise from chaos and civil conflict. The birth-
place of distinguished merit, of genius—of him who serves
his country and his race in an eminent capacity, has ever
been the theme of faithful commemoration. But what shall
be said of the spot where the principles of a great free gov-
ernment were born—where the throes of constitutional liber-
ty were first felt in a definite form—where the volcanic ideas
were first Engendered, which tore as by a mighty eruption,
an ancient monarchy in twain, and made the dissevered frag-
ment overshadow the colossal proportions of the parent
28
trunk. We ponder over our answer in awe-struck silence,
for we are in and about that place. The ground whereon
we tread is holy, and the burning bush from which was
spoken the independence of the American people, is blazing
in full view of us from where we stand. These walls are
full of a strange, touching eloquence. Freedom of action,
freedom of thought, and a generous love of science and let-
ters, constituted the trinity at whose shrine the illustrious
patron of this Institution paid his devotions. The spirit of
a regenerated, progressive era in the history of mankind is
here. It becomes us, therefore, to gather in upon our minds
the elements of the moral, political and philosophic world
which surround us. And as for me, I bow with reverence
before the genius of the place and the hour, and acknowledge
with profound sensibility the honor that attaches to the posi-
tioh in which I stand.
But not only the wonderful and gigantic proportions of
the past arise at this hour, like the shadowy, though splendid
creation of some fabled enchanter: The present—the liv-
ing, breathing present, with its arteries of action interlacing
the globe; with its pulses of life beating high and bounding
with an irresistible energy ; its great heart throbbing beneath
the weight of the destiny of the human race ; it too, is here
and demands the recognition of practical minds. We may
not ignore it. It is the lineal descendant and legitimate off-
spring of those days wherein the arts of war and peace first
assumed to act for American interests, guided by American
valor and wisdom.
The importance of the present epoch in the history of the
world, is however simply the importance which attaches to
the condition and probable destiny of that universal hero of
all earthly dramas,—man himself. I propose to-day to dis-
cuss him in one of his present and most important relations
to the age in which we live, to God and to the human race,
—as The American Citizen. And though I come here from
a young'and distant State, a province, as it were, of Rome
in her ancient days; peopled but yesterday by the progressive
spirit of the race and the age to which we belong, yet the
bond of our citizenship is a joint inheritance and links us to-
gether in a firm and fraternal alliance. I come to you with
the grand' hailing sign, not of distress, not of peril and dis-
aster, not of shuddering, affrighted and appalled extremity,
but of liberty, of peace, of glory and of hope; I too, am an
American Citizen.
It is not merely, however, for the purpose of calling to
29
mind the lustre which attaches throughout the earth to tliO
idea of American citizenship, that I have chosen that theme
on this occasion. It is true, that everywhere beneath the
sun, on the high seas and in the midst" of the desert, wherj
ever the insatiate thirst for knowledge, or gain, has lured the
children of civilization} the magic power of the American
name is never invoked in vain. It is true, that wherever the
human heart, galled by tyranny, feels the faintest aspiration
for freedom, there the image of our laws and" our civil polity
appears as a heavenly visitant. It is true that the Roman,
when sinking beneath the scourge, made his appeal for relief
and protection to a government unequal to that which, hav-
ing her seat of empire here in the west, reaches forth her
hands to the uttermost parts of the earth to protect the hum-
blest citizen that ever reposed on her bosom. All this is
true, and the patriotic heart fondly dwells on these rich and
fascinating evidences of national renown. And like the care-
worn and heavily burthened traveller who turns aside from
the wearisome highway, and revels for a season amidst se-
ductive groves, refreshing fountains and shaded lawns, so
might we dispose of weighty and serious thoughts, and give
ourselves to exultation and honest pride over the political,
physical, moral and mental greatness of the iand we inhabit.
But the times we live in, the scenes by which we are sur-
rounded, are mixed with gioom as well as glory. The pre-
cise moment of time to-day which we occupy, is too fearfully
fraught, too ominously fiHed with grave, grand and terrible
interests to the American people, and indeed to the friends
of liberty throughout the world, to admit of anything but a
severe and candid scrutiny into the solemn duties as well as,
the privileges, the imposing responsibilities as well as the
pleasures of the American citizen. The hour draws nigh in
which the pure and lofty love of country, for which bur
fathers were famed, will be in anxious demand. The Ameri-
can citizen in his full and proper developement and moving
in the grand sphere which the Constitution marks out for
him, is equal to the high mission whereunto he is called; the
perpetuation of liberty, regulated by law. Let us look brief-
ly at the nature of the trust reposed in his hands.
Government is a social necessity. While each successive
generation of mankind has acknowledged and acted on this
fact, yet every people and every age have had their distinc-
tive principles as the basis of the institutions by which they
were governed. The history of human government is one
over which the student and the philosophic statesman ponder
80
long and wonder much. Since the world began, all the
powers of man, good as Well as evil, have been concentrated
on the stupendous problem of governing himself and his
fellow-men. He Was born in a paradise, and another of ce-
lestial splendor and eternal duration awaits him, if he shall
happily pass the mystic river that flows between the two
worlds, that were given to him from the beginning. He is
the bright, supreme intelligence of this beautiful sphere,-—-he
is linked to endless ages by the immortality of mind, and is
allied to Deity by the divine origin and destiny of the soul.
He is the master-piece of the handiwork of Him who con-
ceived the flaming sun when all was dark, and bade it shine
a full realization of his conceptions,—-Who measured the just
proportions and laid the architrave of hemispheres and con-
tinents before matter had emerged from chaos,—who bade
the imperial ocean seek its bed, who reared the mountain
and sunk the valley, and put all nature under the suprema-
cy, not of chance, blind as fate, but of Order, the vicegerent
of Jehovali on earth. Such is man, such the source whence
he came, and such is the destiny that awaits him. No
wonder that his Government has engaged not only the deep
and protracted solicitude of himself, but even also of the
Author of his being, who promulgated that great code of
laws in the midst of the lightnings on Sinai, which have
withstood all revolutions, an<j. have neither been repealed,
nor amended, nor loosened from the pedestal of majestic au-
thority on which they rest.
But even the strong hand and paternal reasoning of God
himself could not prevent from arising in the breasts of his
own people, a desire for change in the institutions which
governed them, and which they knew to be of divine ordain-
ment. All subsequent -time, all subsequent human experi-
ence, has been a reiteration of the principle of restless dis-
content which caused Israel to murmur against the constitu-
tion and laws of the fathers, and demand a king. Not that
I mean here to state, that the tendency of the race, when
acting under enlightened impulses, is towards (despotism or
the government of a single sceptered hand, but that revolu-
tion has been the order of the world. Change has always
been the desire of man's heart. He has never ceased
to recognize the imperious necessity of government, but its
forms have been as changing and diversified as the capricious
movements of a dream. He who tells you that stability has
ever been attained in the principles or the practice of any
government hitherto established by the children of men, or
31
indeed that permanence has ever marked any of the works
of human hands, has read the history of his race in vain. It
is not so ; and I allude to the fact to show that struggling
systems of political institutions have forever been jarring
against each other, have alternately triumphed and alternate-
ly fallen, have forever been engaged in conflict, whether at
the Red Sea or at Marathon, whether at Thermopylae or at
Yorktown. This fact which comes down to us with all the
sanction of universal history, commends itself with over-
whelming force to the American citizen who fondly imagines
that to his government has been issued the sublime edict,
esto perpetua ! May it be so. May the broken column and
desecrated temple never mark the downfall of American free-
dom. But the murky gloom of the political heavens, the
angry ocean of human passion which now imperils the land-
marks of the Constitution; the voice of hoarse sedition
which, like the boding cry of birds of ill omen, now fills the
land; the harsh sounds of unnatural, fratricidal strife be-
tween the tribes of one covenant,—all admonish us that the
hour for idle wishes and vain entreaties addressed to some
imaginary genius of concord, has passed away, and that ac-
tion, bold, honest and patriotic action on the part of the citi-
zen, can alone guarantee a long lease of life to the present
form of the American government.
This universal instability in the political Institutions of
men has stamped history with its striking diversity. Mental
ingenuity and mental power have examined, grasped, adopt-
ed, and discarded every theory, built on every basis, and in
turn, destroyed their own creations. In the vast and com-
plicated annals of the past we behold all the multiplied forms
in which human government has been attempted. But in all
its thousand shapes there have been but two contending
principles in behalf of Which men have enlisted their ''minds
in council and their arms in action. The unlawful assump-
tion of power by those who hold authority, has been waging
an unbrokeil contest with the rightful sovereignty of political
institutions from the earliest dawn of history to the present
time. Liberty and despotism have been the two great oppos-
ing forces which have convulsed the world, torn down old
systems and planted new ones, and marked the world's high-
way of progress with fields of battle. Their struggles for
the supremacy have never ceased. It is in the heart of man
to grasp at power. Dominion is sweet, and the earth and
the sea with all that in them dwell have not sufficed in their
subserviency to fill the measure of man's ambition to gov-
as
§rii. Alexander the Macedonian, following the gilded meteor
of conquest through all the domain of the Bast, and at last
pausing upon the Indus to weep, because the limits of the
earth were smaller than the boundaries of his imperial de-
sires, was simply the illustration and type of that love of
power which is inherent in the human heart. A crown with
its jewels, a sceptre, and the robes of royality, have never
failed to lure the daring mind, tmchastened by the love of
legal liberty, to tempt the dangerous heights of sole supreme
acy. But on the other hand, resistance to the power of one
over many, to the spirit of royal domination, and to the ab-
sorbing prerogatives of kingly rule, has been obstinate, fierce
and perpetual. The loVe of power is. shared by all alike,
and the laboring millions of a government cherish it as dear-
ly as he who wears away his days, and consumes- his nights
in feverish longings after the fleeting emblems of temporal
greatness. Freedom from the impositions and restraints of
one supreme will has been the wholesome object sought in
almost every popular revolution in which mankind ever en-
gaged. We may exhaust ourselves in the exploration of past
ages ; we may travel back beyond the area of Christ, and as-
cend still higher up the stream of time beyond the flood, and
there by the dim, mysterious twilight of oriental history,
scan the traces of ancient conflicts ; we may take our stand
at a period two thousand years ago, and with the clear light
of a high Civilization streaming around us, contemplate the
contending parties of Greece—Athens, witll her democracy
and her aristocracy, in a perpetual struggle with varied re-
suits, and Sparta torn by rival parties ; we may turn and
survey Borne in the days of her greatness, when she was
the full perfection of a political power, with her Gracchi and
Tribunes of the people arrayed in high and fierce contest
with the advocates of royalty and centralized power ; we may
sadly watch the expiring agonies of Roman liberty, and be-
hold Brutus slay Caesar at the base of Pompey's statue in a
mad attempt to reinstate the fallen fortunes of the republic ;
we may then leave the banks of the yellow Tiber, as did the
genius of liberty Veiled and mourning, and cross over the
dark ages, the gulf in which centuries lie buried ; we may
take our stand at Bunneymede, and witness Magna Charta
wrenched from the unwilling hand of the tyranical and per-
fidious John; We may stand on the soil of Prance and shrink
aghast and horror-struck from the gory memories which
arise on every hand as awful witnesses of the bloody baptism
which that nation underwent in the Beign of Terror; we
38
may call to mind the Dutch Republic, heroic and glorious
little Holland, maintaining, in the midst of strife within, and
of European despotism without her borders, a free govern-
ment more than two hundred years ago; we may appeal to
all nations, to the living and the dead, wherever the sun has
looked down on a people enlivened by a sense of their rights,
and wa find the same opposing principles, the same elements
at war, the same parties in contest, liberty forever lifting its
bright and radiant crest against the haughty pretensions of
defiant despotism.
But the success of freedom as a practical and substantial
fact, as an acknowledged and palpable measure for the pro-
motion of human happiness has only been achieved by one
distinct race of the human family. Free Government, oc-
cupying the wholesome medium ground between anarchy and
the licentious violence of the unrestrained populace on the one
hand, and rigid tyranny on the other, has been aimed at and
sought after, but never fully attained until the Anglo Saxon
race laid its hand on the destinies of the world, and became
the champion of liberalized civilization. Plato, it is true,
dreamed of his perfect Government. Utopia arose as a vision
of primeval purity, peace and order. He saw men moving
among their fellows in obedience solely to the higher attri-
butes of our nature, and utterly insensible to the passions
which thirst for pleasure and power. He witnessed the ele-
vating and sacred precepts of his almost divine philosophy
reduced to daily practice, by the citizens of this fanciful Re-
public. Law and liberty moved in exquisite harmony, and
no jarring sounds were heard to issue from the various
spheres of well regulated action. But all this was simply
the beautiful creation of a Philosopher's genius. He, alone,
beheld it, and that with the far reaching glance of inspira-
tion. The world never saw anything of the kind. The-
great tide of action and busy life, has rushed on in its fierce
headlong course, guided by 110 system of such beneficence as
was displayed to the view of the Grecian Sage. But, after-
the world had experimented and failed—after Philosophers
had dreamed their dreams, and awakened to find them van-
ished, a new and mighty race gradually emerged from the
rude condition of nature, and gradually became the patron
of science, the friend of letters, the nurse of Christianity,
and the defender of constitutional freedom. To that race,
the American citizen belongs, and his time may be usefully
employed, and his attention profitably engaged for a brief space,
in contemplating its history and its powerful characteristics.
3
34
I hold nothing in common 'With that false and pernicious
system of political ethics, which proclaims as its favorite
dogma, the unqualified equality of the whole human family.
The social fabric, wherever it has been reared, has always
had its virulent and determined enemies, seeking, under the
specious guise of good, to implant evil in its Constitution,
and to undermine and drag down the pillars of its virtue and
wisdom. Our age and our nation can claim no exemption
from this class of destroyers. Seizing upon some isolated
expression of the founders of our Government, and pervert-
ing it totally from its original application, losing sight of, or
studiously misrepresenting the circumstances under which it
was originally uttered, we see men in our midst, forgetful of
the proud lineage of the American citizen, -and seeking to
debase and tarnish the armorial bearings of the great race to
which he belongs, advance the doctrine and urge the theory
of absolute human equality. It is time that the great minds
that dressed naked liberty in the habiliments of the American
Constitution and confided her to the care and sleepless vigi-
lance of the Anglo Saxon race on this continent, should be
vindicated from the odium which would justly attach to their
memories if .they had denied the superiority of the race for
whom they made this Government.
Abstract equality is visible in none of the works of God.
Inanimate creation presents an endless variety. One star
differetli from another star in glory. The Heavens that de-
clare the glory of God and the Firmament that showeth His
handiwork, display to the eye of the Astronomer, planets,
spheres, orbs and worlds, scattered in marvellous and prolif-
ic profusion through their azure fields and awful depths,
but an individuality marks , each from the other—fiery Mars
and lovely Venus, ringed Saturn and majestic Jupiter, Arc-
turus, Orion and the Pleiades with their " sweet influences,"
have each and all their separate, distinguishing characteris-
tics. The broad face of the great globe, on which we stand,
presents also one vast panoramic view Qt change, diversity,
inequality. Our minds grow dizzy in the attempt to grasp
an idea of that Omnipotence, capable of producing a measure-
less universe, and yet with detailed accuracy, creating no
two things of exact equality. The traveller who has been
the pilgrim of every land, and whose adventurous foot has
touched every shore, who has traversed every plain, scaled
every mountain, crossed every river, navigated every sea and
ocean, has been lured from spot to spot, and from clime to
85
elime, because new scenes break upon his vision at every
step, because each object he beholds has its novelty, though
he may have gazed upon thousands of its species before.
Animal life is full of the same wonderful lesson; but the
Inost striking feature of the grand system of inequality de-
signed and accomplished by the great author of all is fur-
nislied by that highest perfection of animal existence'—-man
himself. The inequalities of the human race are the more
striking and numerous because of man's Various endow-
ments. We pause with solemn wonder at the versatility of
the creative power when we try to call to mind the countless
throng of human beings who have heretofore peopled the
earth, together with its millions who now people it, and re-
fleet that in mere physical conformation no two were ever
alike—were ever equal. But the great inequality which
marks one branch of the human race from another, which
distinguishes one people from another, consists in those im-
mortal parts, the intellect and the moral attributes which
elevate their possessors to the social grade of angels or drag
them down to the companionship of the damned. Let us
raise ourselves to the full conception of this question. Let
us measure to some extent at least, the inequalities which
exist between the different races of the earth. Let us es-
pecially determine the due supremacy which belongs to our
own race, and thus vindicate the wisdom of our ancestors
.and the policy of the American Republic. In the light of
history We see the Anglo-Saxon race for twenty centuries
steadily asserting and maintaining its right, in the face of all
opposing forces, to assume the guardianship of the best and
dearest interests of humanity. What though its origin is in
the wild mountains of Scandinavia and amidst the dark
Druid Oaks of Britain; yet within the breasts of that yellow
haired, fair faced and blue eyed race were the germs of a
greatness and a power which mocked at the strength of the
gates of Rome, and humbled the pride of civilized Europe
before the American continent was discovered. It arose
from the fresh, untamed regions of Northern Europe with
all the newness of life,—-with the bounding energy of a
youthful giant. The oriental races had played their several
parts and had each contributed something to the slow and
halting progress which the world was painfully making in
those infant ages of history. The Chaldeans had watched
the stars and studied the dim rudiments of astronomy from
the hills and plains of the Eastern Hemisphere ; the Pharaohs
and Ptolmeys had developed a high order of mechanism and
feared tlie Pyramids, built the temple of Meituion and carved
the Sphynx ; the Hebrew race had given warriors, statesmen,
poets and sages to the world and had been the medium
through which the awful presence of Deity was manifested
on earth; the Persian hosts had swarmed over towards
Southern Europe to subject it to the vassalage of Xerxes and
his successors; Attila and Alaric had scourged the nations,
and sunk forever leaving nothing save the crimson sign of
strife and battle to mark their presence on earth; the land
of Pericles had reached its acme of fame, and all the great
Eepublics of ancient days wherein liberty, science and ele-
gant literature were supposed to dwell had grown to their
full stature and were hastening to their downfall, when the
tall and magnificent forms of our remote progenitors first be-
came visible to the eye of the annalist and the historian.
The effete and worn out races of the East were no longer the
controlling agencies of human affairs. Their labors and their
discoveries were scattered along the shores of time like frag-
ments from the bosom of the stormy ocean, and these were
left for the new race to ponder over, and appropriate in the
enterprise of regenerating the world. A second commenc.e-
ment towards the ultimate destiny of man had to be made
when the world slowly awakened from the lethargy of the
middle ages, and the race to which you and I belong stood
ready to assume the task. The former principal races of the
earth existed then as they exist now, simply as the shrunken
mementoes of their once all absorbing grandeur; and the
superiority which must exist somewhere amongst the tribes
of men declared itself with the blood of Edward the Confes-
sor, and Alfred the Law-giver. Since then, what do we be-
hold ? Shall the mock Philanthropist and spurious reformer
tell, and convince the enlightened world that this race of
which I speak shall be recognized only as equal to those who
have stood still, or whose foot prints point backwards toward
ignorance and original barbarism ? In the establishment of
governments shall the predominant race of the earth abjure
and annihilate the eternal distinctions and inequalities which
were decreed from the beginning of time between superior
and inferior races ?
The entire supremacy of the Anglo Saxon race in all use-
ful achievements will not be questioned by the enlightened
student. It has justly won this proud distinction. Its tro-
phies exist in every department of human thought and ac-
tion. The wisdom of the Chaldeans is obscure and forgot-
ten, while the philosophic wand of Newton rolled back the
3T
curtains of the Universe, and exposed the ^reat arcana of its
mysteries to the gaze of men as long as men shall exist, and
matter retain its present form. Homer invaded the heathen's
Elysium, and borrowed thence his heroes for a song of the
warlike deeds of Ilium, but his counterpart of the sixteenth
century, blind, sublime Milton, rose to the familiar presence
of angels, soared with an even and unshaken wing through
the celestial world, and then turned from the daylight glories
above, and explored the dismal vaults, and walked unharm-
ed over the burning marl of Hell. Euripides, Sophocles,
Virgil, Horace and Juvenal dwelt upon all the chords of the
human heart, that were then known to respond to the invo-
cations of genius, but from the loins of the Anglo-Saxon
race, there sprang a wayward bard on the banks of the
AvOn, who has supplanted them all, and transcended their
combined glories, who stands as the acknowledged high
priest and interpreter of the mysteries, the sorrows and joys
of human nature in its loftiest and in its lowliest moods, and
will so stand forever more. Socrates, Zeno, Aristotle and
their disciples both in Greece and in Home philosophized
and laid down laboriously wrought rules of moral conduct
and mental progress, but the world was startled and awaken-
ed with a sense of new being, and a revolution swept over
the universal mind of civilization when Francis Bacon launch-
ed his Novum Organum upon the tide of time. Cicero was
eloquent, and immortalized the Forum and the Senate of
Rome by his defense of the liberal principles of his country ;
Demosthenes filled the world with the majestic music of the
Grecian tongue ; but greater themes have hallowed the lips
and inspired the genius of Burke, of Chatham, of Curran,
and of Henry than ever awakened the thinking powers of
classic ages. Lycurgus and Solon inscribed their laws as
they imagined for endless durability; and Justinian prepared
his Pandects for universal application; but the Common
Law of England has proved the basis of a superstructure be-
neath whose shadow all other systems have dwarfed, and
abandoned their hold on human affairs. Sylla and Marius,
and Caesar, and Pompey, and other conquerors of the olden
time without number, wrote their names with their swords
high up on the canvass of fame, but ever since our ancestors
stormed the walls of the Imperial City, and climbed her
Capitol Hill in triumph, the blood of the Tudors and the
Plantaganets has been the steadiest, the coolest, the boldest
and the bravest that ever joined in the shock of battle. The
ancestry of the American citizen has achieved, greatness apd
38
glory in every field of mental, moral and physical action,
and it remains only for him to be true to the supremacy
which has already been won, and which all history con-
cedes.
But this Western Hemisphere, this great American con-
tinent is the chief theatre for the display of the vast power
and resources of the Anglo Saxon race. And as if there
should be a fitness and a propriety in the chain and connec-
tion of human events, the discovery of the New World was
made by the descendants of those Northern tribes, who first
desolated Southern Europe, and then permanently peopled
its most beautiful portions. The ancient Castilian of Spain
has the blood of the marauding Vikings in his veins; and
Columbus discovered the land where his far away kindred
should perfect the glory of the race.
The early settlement of the American colonies, presents a
sublime spectacle. A superior people, full of the wisdom
and experience of an advanced stage of civilization, taking
possession of the country in the name of human progress,
could not fail to stamp the era as one distinguished in im-
portant results. Certain great laws of nature—laws born of
the will and knowledge of God himself, controlled the con-
duct of the American citizen, in his first settlement upon
this continent. An aboriginal race was here. A people of
remote origin, and long prescriptive title to the soil, were in
possession of all the land that lies between the two oceans.
But the same fundamental principle which governed the set-
tlement of Canaan by the children of Israel, and which op-
erated under the direct sanction of God, to exclude and ex-
terminate, and to reduce to subserviency, the various aborig-
inal tribes of that chosen spot, produced precisely the same
results, when American colonists landed at Jamestown, and
at Plymouth. But one race was ever designed to participate
in the labors, the duties, and the privileges of one govern-
ment. I speak of races distinct from each other, by their
origin, their mentality, their moral tendencies, and with dis-
tinet reference to their physical characteristics.
The Indian vanished into the shades of the forest as the
white man enlarged the boundaries of civilization. The law
of total extermination was against him and his ; and the de-
cree that he should give place to the pale-faced conqueror
was written in sole and special reference to the inevitable re-
lation which distinct and unequal races bear -towards each
other when Israel was commanded to cast out the " seven
nations greater and mightier" than Israel herselfgreater
39
and mightier in numbers, wealth and extent of possessions,
but not linked to a superior and immortal destiny. The
experiment of commingling the blood of separate races, or of
combining their energies in the control of a single govern-
ment, met the disapprobation of the Almighty, and has dis-
gracefully failed wherever it has been attempted. Exter-
mination was more desirable to the haughty Red man than
subserviency; but that the philosophy and teaching of all
ages, as well as the wisdom of God himself, sanction and
justify the existence of a dependent and vassal condition on
the part of an inferior towards a superior race, when the
two are brought in contact, no well informed and impartial
mind will deny. This, too, is a natural and inevitable result
of the irreconcilable inequalities of the human race. It is
founded on a principle coeval with the birth of man. We
cannot turn a leaf of history on which are written the
achievements of the best and brightest eras of civilization
without finding the bondman as one of its developments. I
know that the experiment of equalizing distinct races has
been and may be made again. But compare for a moment
the condition in all respects, and the progress of the North
American Republic with the sunken and degraded popula-
tion, and fallen fortunes of the Southern portion of this hem-
isphere. The reflective mind needs but a glance. We would
sicken to dwell long on the blighting effects of a total disre-
gard of a natural, supreme law of humanity. Let those who
will cpvil at the positions which I have assumed, find the de-
lights, the prosperity and the national glory of their system
amidst the jarring, discordant scenes of the mongrel races of
Mexico, Central and South America. To my mind it is suf-
ficientfy clear that the founders of our colonies and after-
wards of our Federal Government, wisely framed and fash-
ioned 'our institutions for themselves and their posterity, and
proclaimed no equality, entered into no partnership, and di-
vided no civil rights with any other race. The American
citizen who superintended the early labors that were bestow-
ed on the question of our liberties and the construction of
our Constitution, never asserted that all men were created
equal in the sense which modern conspirators against the
peace of the nation attach to those memorable words. The
withdrawal by a portion of the subjects of Great Britain from
their allegiance to their Prince on account of heavy griev-
ances committed against them, and not against their British
fellow subjects, was the object at which our fathers aimed
when that phrase was given by them to the world. They
40
asserted their own equality to the other citizens of the British
realm, and they appealed to arms against the unjust discrimin-
ations which were made against them by a corrupt Parliament
and an imbecile King. They did more. They asserted for
themselves the right to become their own rulers, and denied
the superiority any longer of that branch of their own blood
which they had left behind them 011 the Isles of Great
Britain. They asserted their right to become their own no-
blemen, their own aristocracy and their own King. This
was one of the species of equality which they proclaimed.
But looking out upon the grand future which was awaiting
the work of their hands, they asserted still afiother kind of
equality which will forever be a question of the first magni-
tude with their posterity—the equality of American citizen-
ship. With an eye on the Temple whose beautiful propor-
tions were gradually rising, and remembering all the time
for whom it was being constructed, they proclaimed the law-
ful inmate of that Temple free from the despotic forms of
government which then darkened the whole face of the globe,
and equal to all others whose rights were thus recognized.
A reasonable and sensible construction of the Declaration of
our Independence as a nation, can only be arrived at in the
light of the circumstances which surrounded its production
and adoption. It had reference to the causes which called it
into existence, and the purposes it was designed to accom-
plish. If it was intended as a sweeping assertion of univer-
sal human equality, it stands in the - face of six thousand
years of testimony to the contrary; and if it was intended
as a broad charter under which all men withih the jurisdic-
tion of its operations could claim their freedom and become
free, then it stamps its author and its advocates as falsifiers
of tlieir own words, and is itself the greatest failure in the
history of human efforts. But if, on the contrary it receives
its just purport, its palpable meaning as a declaration of
civil rights, on behalf of those whose rights were invaded,
and who were solemnly reclaiming them from the grasp of
power, then it stands in harmony with the facts which pre-
ceded as well as those which Succeeded its adoption, and
should be venerated by rising generations as the grand enun-
ciation of the principles of freedom which made us a free
people.
We have thus seen the necessity of government and the
various shapes and phases'it has assumed under the willful
and restless spirit of man. We Have seen the eternal con-
flict, throughout all changes and revolutions, between the
41
principle of liberty and the iron force of despotism. We have
seen the inequalities of the human race, and witnessed free-
dom choosing for her guardian and defender the superior
branch of that race. We have seen the theatre of human
greatness and national excellence transferred by slow march-
es, moving as the great cycles of time move, from the gor-
geous and luxurious plains of the ancient seats of Empire ;
from the banks of the Euphrates and the Indus, from the
banks of the Nile, from the shores of the dark Euxine, from
the waters of the Mediterranean, from the regions of the
swift and arrowy Rhone and the dark rolling Danube ; yea,
in a powerful measure from the very banks of the Thames
itself, to the banks qf the Potomac and the Mississippi.
And we have seen at last, a government here assume shape
and form, founded upon the philosophic relation which
exists between the different races that inhabit this conti-
nent; and dedicated to the freedom and equality of its citi-
zens.
We might here, perhaps, appropriately pause and reflect
upon the position which that government has so quickly at-
tained before the world. Strange, strange, and without a
parallel; alone, solitary, and without a peer in all history,
has been the career of American progress. It is a mystery
which the tongue is too feeble, and our language too barren,
adequately and fully, to interpret. It seems as fabulous as
the palace of Aladdin, and yet it bears a moral too vast and
overwhelming for human comprehension. The statesman
with his proudest periods, and the poet with his sublimest
passages, have dwelt upon the sudden and brilliant promo-
tion of the American Government to the foremost rank, and,
indeed, far in advance , of the foremost rank of nations.
But, in the presence of the great fact itself, in the presence
of the living glory, all description fails, and eulogy falls weak
and baffled to the ground. The voice of our brief- history,
drowns and stifles all other voices that may be raised in its
behalf, as the voice of the ocean would overwhelm the song
that was uttered in its praise on the beach. Liberty has not
merely conferred unequaled civil rights on the American
citizen, but like Brairius of old, it has touched with a htm-^
dred hands, all the springs of human progress. The physi-
cal improvement of the country has especially obeyed its gi-
gantic impulse. The ancient works of scientific labor, the
Egyptian Pyramids, the Roman Aqueducts, the Appian Way,
and the Temple of Ephesus, sink into utter insignificance,
when compared with the industrial glories of this young Re-
42
public. But however delightful it may be to the American
to dwell upon the various developments of his country, yet
there are other questions of vital and pressing interest which
more properly commend themselves to his consideration, at
the present juncture of our affairs. Let us not boast so
much upon what has already been done, but let us rather
address ourselves to some of the more important duties of
the American citizen, on the full performance of which de-
pends the future welfare, yea, the very existence of the Re-
public.
Other ages, other people, and other countries have as we
have seen, achieved excellence of a high degree in the vari-
ous fields of human action, but the peculiar form and char-
acter of the American Government' stand alone, without a
model in the past, the discovery and accomplishment of our
own race, our own age, and our own country. To embrace
many governments in one, to deal with independent and dis-
tint sovereignties, and procure their acceptance of a Consti-
tution framed for their Government, in an associated capaci-
ty, was the delicate task which fell to the hands' of our
fathers. Similar attempts, it is true, have been made in the
history of the world, but the American Union is the first confed-
eration of States, in the' annals of mankind where the attri-
butes of sovereignty were allowed to remain in its individual
members. Centralization of power has been the bane of
every confederation of which history gives any account, and
the brightest displays of learned statesmanship, which this or
any other age ever beheld were made by the founders of this
government, in originating and adopting the means whereby
that rock of shipwreck and disaster might be forever avoid-
ed. Their success is now admitted, if the present and future
citizen shall faithfully adhere to the doctrines then enforced
and agreed upon by the Architects of the American Union.
And the strong tendency which was displayed in the early
history of our Government, towards an unjust absorption of
the powers of the States by the Federal Government, and
which again discovers itself in the most odious forms, after
an apparent slumber of years, demands of the citizen, fully
to comprehend what those doctrines were. If this Union,
through fanaticism and licentious sectional hate, shall per-
ish, shall therefore American liberty itself fail ? I am aware
that such is the usual consequence attributed to the destruc-
tion of this Confederacy. It may be true. No eye can fore-
see the correct results of such an appalling disaster, but
when the original compact of States shall have failed of its
48
purpose, if fail it must, to " establish justice, insure domestic
tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the
general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to our-
selves and our posterity," why may not the rights of free-
men find sanctuaries in the several States ? They were the
first Governments of this country, and delegated but never
surrendered beyond the power of reclamation, certain of
their own powers, duly and carefully specified to the Federal
Government in trust, and to be exercised strictly in obedi-
ence to that sacred deed of trust—the Constitution. Who
shall say when the trustee becomes unfaithful, and all the
methods recognized in the different departments of the Gov-
ernment, have been exhausted in vain, to compel the per-
formance of the conditions on which the trust was created,
that each State of this Union may not reinvest itself with
all its original rights, privileges and powers ? This double
chance for the American citizen to perpetuate his freedom, is
the chief glory and crowning virtue of our complex, and at
the same time, simple and beautiful system of' Government.
If the force of numbers, inflamed by the wicked and hereti-
cal spirit of aggression upon established, constitutional rights,
should ever strike down any one or more of these States, by
the usurped authority of the General Government, then it
remains for such States themselves to lift up and reinstate
fallen liberty.. < Deny this right to the State and you destroy
its boasted sovereignty, and open up the road to a tyranny,
guided by prejudice and passion, more galling to its victims
and more destructive of their happiness, than the hand of a
sanguinary despot ever inflicted. This is no new principle
that I am asserting; it is not for its novelty, that I advance
it here, but it involves rights of such magnitude to the citi-
zen; rights strenuously questioned by a large class of evil
spirits, who now surround the political cauldron, and invoke
a charm of direful import to the Republic, that it should be
more boldly and firmly advanced now than ever before. The
struggles of freedom, the advancement of the liberal arts,
the development and supremacy of the Anglo Saxon race,
the settlement of the American colonies, their resistance to
the demands of George III, the wisdom of the early patriots
who discovered a new and mighty science of human govern-
ment, all, all are in vain, if legal rights may be destroyed,
and sacred privileges invaded,-r-the bond of our Union, per-
verted, in these latter days, into an instrument of torture
and degradation; if these things may happen, and all in the
name of liberty and equality, and there be 110 lawful mode
44
to arrest evils so monstrous. But the American citizen is
not left helpless and without resources in the face of such
sad contingencies, which, alas ! may be hovering nearer the
present crisis of public affairs than the hopeful lover of his
country is willing to realize. He looks to the doctrine of
the rights of the States and invokes the name and memory
of Jefferson, who declared the independence of the people,
and taught them how to maintain it from the insidious as-
saults of sedition and treason, as well as from open enemies.
State Equality is a necessary accompaniment of State Sov-
ereignty. That each State of this Union affords its citizens
an absolute equality in every respect, under the American
Constitution with the citizens of every other State is a fact
founded upon the spirit of justice which controlled the foun-
dation of this confederacy. This kind of equality is an es-
pecial object of assault in these days of degenerate patriot-
ism. The greedy avarice and insatiate demands of the de-
scendants of a bigoted and speculating class now seek to ab-
sorb the right to think, the right to act, and the right to pos-
sess and enjoy, for, and in the place of, and to the exclusion
of all who exist outside of their malignant circle. This fact
constitutes the paramount evil of the hour. These arrogant
assumptions must be rebuked, crushed and destroyed or this
Union is no longer a Union, and will perish as a wonderful
evidence of what genius and patriotism can create, and
what the restless and corrupt fanaticism of man can
destroy. This Union was founded upon the principle
that each member was its own domestic ruler and, that its
neighbor should neither seek to unsettle its domestic institu-
tions or strive to cast a blight and a mildew over its reputa-
tion by becoming a common slanderer before the world. On
the land, in the broad Territories, on the high seas and wher-
ever American citizens may rightfully go, there goes also an
absolute equality in the enjoyment of life, liberty and prop-
erty. The citizen of South Carolina may meet the citizen
of New York, the citizen of Indiana may meet the citizen of
Virginia, the citizen of Florida may meet the citizen of
Maine, but who dares assert that they do not meet as equals
in the eye of that Constitution which was made as much for
the one as for the other. Shall that school of false philoso-
phy and spurious statesmanship which upholds universal
human equality deny the equality of the citizenship of the
Republic ?
Recent legislation, and attempted legislation, as well as the
wide-spread promulgation of the most dangerous dogmas,
45
give great significance to this question. It embraces the
Whole theory from which American citizenship derives its
Value. It goes farther; it involves, as a living, vital issue
now upon us, the continuation of our present form of gov-
ernment. The proud heart, wherever it beats, recoils with
horror, or rather swells with indignant emotion, at the thought
that the star of the State whose pride and honor is its own,
shall ever grow dim and blaze with an inferior and unequal
lustre to the stars which signalize the other States on the
flag of the Union. If such a degradation could have been
foreseen, what State would have hazarded its honorable ex-
istence and tempted its melancholy fate by joining the com-
pact aiid signing the covenants of the Constitution? Not
one. If some sage, with the gift of second sight, could have
risen on the floor of the Convention, whose labors developed
the American Constitution, and there announced, as a vision,
which less than a century would make real, that a party pre-
tending patriotism would organize itself upon the doctrine
of the inequality of the States, would proclaim the chief end of
political labor to be the discrimination through the power
of the Federal Government against the vested, legal rights of
a section; if such an announcement had been made, and its
truth foreseen, the American Union would never have had a
place in history. The Convention would have adjourned
without day, and its delegates returned to their States, there
to establish liberty exposed to no such future calamity and
curse. Yet that curse is already upon us, and one of the
duties of the American citizen is to study its nature fully,
and if possible avoid its manifest purpose.
I shall not here invade the arena of political discussion.
I shall not advance the views of the partisan; but the general
principles which affect a nation's welfare, and the vicious
results of diseased opinions which assail the fundamental
laws and virtues of a free people are not unworthy of men-
tion on the most solemn and exalted occasions. No interest'
that appertains merely to earth is of such sublime conse-
quence to the American as the maintenance of his birth-right
in the equal enjoyment of legal liberty. I shall endeavor to
point out the chief danger to that birth-right and the arch
enemy to that sacred enjoyment. The rapid growth of the
country, the increasing avenues to wealth and promotion, the
Vast number of internal and external questions of policy,
the political revolutions which sweep over the nation, pre -
senting endless and overwhelming temptations to call forth
the worst1 passions of men, have all combined to beget that
46
M6st dangerous and revolting pest to hiunaii society aild foe
to public peace and virtue—the seditious citizen. With-
in that phrase is embraced the nature of the evil with which
the friends of the American Union are now assailed. No
open violence yet grasps at unlawful power, no Csesar has
crossed the Rubicon, but the air grows dark with the ele-
ments of sedition, and a vast conspiracy is gathering force to
usurp the seats of power at the Capitol, over the torn and
dishonored' fragments of the Constitution. The seditious
citizen glories in the billows of popular fanaticism which roar
around him, and rejoices in sight of the fatal lee shore on
which the Union is drifting. No cry of horror escapes his
lips. He rather jeers at the warning voice of others, He
seeks with insane fury to grasp with his own hand the helm
of the vessel to hurl her more swiftly and surely on destrue-
tion. Bp professes to mock at calamity and laugh at fear.
It would be the first and most natural supposition of a patri-
ot's heart, that such a citizen would sink down, a powerless
and despised victim to public scorn.
" But in seditions bad men rise to honor,"
and what was Written of the days of Cleon and Alcibiades is
made true in American history. Instead of ostracism, not
the ostracism of the shell, for its banishments fell on a wor-
thier class, but the ostracism of strong contempt and abhor-
rence, we see the seditious citizen receive the senatorial robe,
and from that high and once sacred eminence, we hear him
Vex the ear of the nation. He is not satisfied with his gov-
ernment. He clamors for change. He does not boldly pro-
claim the necessity of revolution or amendment to the Con-
stitution. That Would be too manly for his character. He
prefers to plunder his fellow citizens of their rights, by false
constructions and cowardly evasions. He is not content
that peace and fraternal affection should remain an undis-
turbed inheritance to the descendants of those who laid the
foundations of the Union, in love with one another. But in
the paths of danger or probable combat, he never Ventures.
He is content to incite the deluded disciples of his creed to
follow its logical and inevitable results to the extent of blood
and civil war, but that is not the part of the drama of sedi-
tion in Which he personally appears. In order to establish
Unkind relations between different sections, and foster jeal-
ousy and vindictive rivalry between kindred blood, he prosti-
tutes his time in the base and ignoble pursuit of materials on
which to found systematic and elaborate calumny. The
47
/
slander of States of historic renowii and tinimpeached devo*
tion to the laws, he rolls as a sweet morsel beneath his tongue.
He is eminently gifted with that quality which would drag
angels down, not that he has the power or even the desire to
soar into their places, but he grows pale in the envy of supe-
rior excellence, and delights in the abasement of virtue.
Not satisfied with calumniating States, and denying their
equality, he reviles statesmen of spotless integrity and ap-
proved wisdom, and seeks to impair their usefulness by cast-
ing a blight over their fame. Nor do the dead escape his
fangs. He preys with accursed avidity on those great and
good names, whose possession is the nation's truest wealth
and brightest glory. He drags them from their dread abode,
and consumes the night and wastes the day in torturing their
virtues into frailties for an indecent exhibition. Miltiades died
within a year after the battle of Marathon, of a gangrened
wound, and in a prison where his ungrateful countrymen had
placed him, but the seditious citizen of the United States, in
the august assemblage of Senators, declares Washington a
pirate in the practices of his domestic life, Madison a barba-
rian, Jackson, Clay and Calhoun robbers and foes to Chris-
tian civilization. Ingratitude and injustice to the living is an
evil sufficiently deplorable, but the willful slander of the dead
is the lowest depth of baseness to which the mind of a dastard
can descend. If the seditious citizen visits foreign lands, he
goes not as the generous patriot, whose home-sick heart
bounds with proud emotion when he sees the ample folds of
the flag of his country floating in undiminished splendor.
He goes rather as the carping defamer of American institu-
tions, and wins his way to the ante-chambers of Despotism,
by pronouncing American freedom a failure. He ransacks
ancient libraries and burrows amongst the curiosities of
literature, to find strange materials with which to embellish
and adorn a malicious libel against the land that gave him
birth. He digs up the forgotten opinions of men no wiser
than himself, and flaunts them in the face of the world, as
the conclusive evidences of truth. And to what end is all
this ? For what purpose are all these labors ? There
is but one answer. To create sectional enmity, to beget ani-
mosity, to degrade the citizens of one section of this gov-
ernment in the eyes of the citizens of another section, and
%thus destroy that sense of American equality which alone
can preserve the Union of the States, are the mournful and
calamitous objects on which the seditious citizen fastens all
the powers of his will, and toward which he summons all his
48
energies and intellectual resources. His chief delight and
the most gratifying consequence of his labors, is to embroil
in sanguinary strife the brethren of one race, one language
and one worship. History has given over to an infamous
immortality the names of a few citizens of Jerusalem who
played the same part in the hour when dangers of mortal
extrepiity assailed the city of David. When Titus environed
the city with the deep squadrons and long drawn out legions
of Rome, when the -walls were broken day by day, when fam-
ine, gaunt and frightful, sent its devouring pangs amidst the
beleaguered hosts within, when the dead lay piled upon the
dead, and the holy rites of sepul'ture were abandoned, when
fire burst from the gaping earth, when unearthly sounds were
heard, and unearthly visitations experienced, when the Jew
and the Roman stood still and paused by mutual consent, in
their work of slaughter, to gaze in awful amazement at fiery
squadrons charging each other in the clear vaults of Heaven
above them, when the doom of the Jewish nation, and the
fulfillment of prophecy were betokened with marvelous cer-
tainty, yet, in the midst of all this, the seditious citizen trav-
ersed the streets, usurped the places of authority, and
inflamed a bitter warfare, revolting scenes of carnage, be-
tween tribes of the same covenant, exposed to the same des-
tiny. The historian of remote periods, when carefully col-
lecting the materials for the history of the present age of the
American Republic, will preserve its seditious citizen as a
species of the same God-defying madness—the same shock-
ing specimen of a cruel and insane fanaticism. Though
dangers environ the Union and encompass the Constitution
011 all sides, though the laws are broken down and scorned
beneath the foot of the traitor, though brother has lifted his
hand against brother, though society itself is menaced with
violent disruption, though " the custom of fell deeds" seems
prevalent, though " domestic fury and fierce civil strife"
threaten to pervade all the confines .of this hitherto happy
country; yet with a felon's voice we hear him invoking more
and more the bitterness and sectionalism which have already
produced this startling condition of public affairs. In the
name of Liberty, France was smitten with a curse, and Ar-
nold called upon her name to justify him in his infamy, but
the seditious citizen of the American Government of the
present day, with the same sweet sound on his polluted
tongue, seeks to inaugurate scenes of deeper horror than
those through which Madame Roland passed to the scaffold;
and to perpetrate a treason in comparison with which the
49
treason of Arnold would become commonplace and insignifb
cant. We are told that the ancient god Ixion, in seeking the
embraces of Juno, embraced a cloud, and from this unnatu-
ral Embrace the Centaurs sprang in their malice and their
deformity. We see something similar in this practical age,
without seeking it in the pages of Grecian mythology. The
seditious American citizen who holds public station, embraces
a corrupt and stormy fanaticism, and a brood of frightful
and depraved theories and revolting actions instantly spring
up, and,
" "With wide Cerberian mouths full loud,"
harrass and shock the patriotism of the country.
And against the evil tendencies of the present hour what
have we to oppose ? What is our remedy for principles more
pernicious than the plague ? Where is the patriot's house of
refuge ? f Reason, argument and peaceful remonstrance are
thrown away upon the authors of sedition. We can appeal
to the patriotism of the country, to the popular sense of jus-
tice, to the law-abiding spirit of the citizen who loves the
institutions of his fathers. We can hold up to our country-
men the sacred Constitution, hallowed by the sublime rem-
iniscences of the past, and gathering increased glory and
consequence in view of the approaching future. We can
point them to the rents which the thrusts of seditious citizens
have made in that holy instrument, and appeal to the lovers'
of their country, wherever they may be, to revenge the dese-
cration. We can oppose wise counsels to the ravings of fa-
naticism, and brotherly love to sectional strife. We can
appeal to the American citizen to allow the house which his
fathers built to stand forever—that though divided it may be
in its domestic economy, yet it is not divided unto its fall.
We can do all this, and we can hope that our labors will
bring forth the fruits of peace. But if the evil hour must
come, if patriotism is to be humiliated and treason exalted,
if the schemes of the seditious citizen are to triumph, and
civil strife and commotion are to cumber this fair land, then
may some Brutus avenge the cause of liberty in the Capitol;
and may the authors of our ruin be the first to sup full of its
horrors!
But we will turn away from this gloomy theme and refresh
ourselves with more pleasing pictufes. If, in the wisdom
and mercy of Divine Providence, this government is permit-
ted to survive the baleful principles of the present crisis,
serene skies and a peaceful calm await us in the future. The
patriot will take hope and the conspirator will shrink away
4
50
baffled into an odious oblivion. Good omens will cheer us,
and the Anglo-Saxon race will rush forward again on the
bright track of American progress.
The expansion of the Republic is a natural law of its
healthy existence. That principle is now paramount to all
other questions of national policy which remain to be devel-
oped, except the question of the preservation of the Union
itself. In the past it has steadily met the requirements of
the age, but the future of this government, if it shall happily
have a future, is to be one wide theatre of expansion. Op-
position has always stood in the way of this doctrine, but we
have only to look at the map of the United States to vindi-
cate it in its former practical results. But for that construe-
tion of the Constitution which gave to it its expansive force,
this hour the very heart and central portion of our confed-
eracy, the spot where St. Louis sits, the commercial queen of
the mighty West; the Mississippi and its western and south-
ern tributaries; Florida and the borders of the Gulf of Mex-
ico; New Orleans with its floating palaces freighted with the
staple articles which link together the commerce of two
worlds ; San Francisco and California, the city and State of
magical, golden growth—would all be in the possession of
foreign powers, owned by foreign governments, and governed
by the bayonets of Europe. Who would now tear out the
chaplers of our history which record these territorial acqui-
sitions ? But if this Union shall escape its perils, if the Con-
stitution shall survive its enemies, our future will be to our
past as is the meridian sun to the gray struggling dawn of
the morning. There is a destiny in the pathway of this
Union such as the eye of man never beheld nor the heart of
man conceived. Allowing no more than that this young
government shall double its present lifetime, and what a
future rises before the mind! Who shall paint the Republic
of that period ? Who shall speak of its commerce and num-
ber its ships that go down to the sea ? Who shall portray its
cities—its Tyres, its Sidons, its Carthages, and its Romes ?
Who shall count their wealth and image forth in this age the
splendors that shall await on that ? Who shall attempt to
reckon the myriads that shall then inhabit our plains, our
valleys and our mountains ? Who shall foretell the improve-
ments of science and the triumphs of man over the world of
nature around him ? Who shall take the map now and. draw
the boundaries of this republic when age shall have given it
the full stature of vigorous manhood?
But we will wait for no distant future to accomplish much
51
of that destiny which I have suggested. It is now rising and
becoming visible to the eyes of the present generation. The
expansive principle of this government has hitherto mainly
followed the track of the sun into the imperial possession of
the West, but it is now wooed into the embrace of softer
climes and more fruitful fields. The South, the South, the
South shall henceforth be the watchword of American ex-
pansion. The law of political gravitation points in that
direction, and the South herself should not lose the golden
opportunity which the spirit of the age holds out to her.
The whole patriotism of the country responds to the course
of manifest destiny. I speak not of that manifest destiny
which moves without law, but of that which is to be achieved
by law. The spirit of American liberty and American pro-
gress is abroad upon the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and
Spanish tyranny is trembling in its presence. This spirit has
touched the shores of Cuba, and will never be driven from
her soil until the wisdom of American statesmanship has
achieved her acquisition. This question has arisen in the
pathway of progress, and we cannot ignore or go round it.
It must and will be met in a practical form. The day for
argument is past and gone. The whole civilized world be-
holds, though it may not acknowledge, the right and the
national necessity which exists on the part of the American
government to the ownership of the key to the Gulf. Action,
action, lawful but unyielding action, should now characterize
the policy of the American citizen in his relation to that glo-
rious though oppressed island.
But is this all ? Are there no other concerns of vast na-
tional import under the southwestern horizon ? Ah ! what
giant events are there awaiting the ripening process of a few
eventful years. In vain we may turn our faces from them,
or shut our eyes to the shadows which they cast before in
their coming. In vain, too, will be open opposition to their
approach. The greatest acts in the drama of American de-
velopment are yet to come, and the curtain will as surely
rise upon them, as years come and go with the changing
seasons. Look to Mexico! Lost, fallen, dissevered, bleeding
at every pore, the prey of domestic assassins, the sport of
bloody-handed factions, her neck beneath the heel of alter-
nate beggarly usurpers, her fields drenched with the blood of
her own veins ; chained to the rock of semi-barbarism with
the links of despotism festering in her flesh, like the links
of the lame Lemnian, and the Promethean vulture of civil
war forever consuming her vitals. Her experiment of gov-
52
ernment in every form has proved a failure. Instead of
peace, order and happiness to the citizen, misrule, like the
destroying angel, fills all her borders with desolation and
death. This condition of affairs cannot last. There is no
corner of the earth where the Anglo-Saxon blood has pene-
trated, dark enough for such scenes to have a long duration.
Much less will they continue thevir ghastly jround within the
immediate sphere of American influence and American ad-
vancement. Step by step we have approached, in the past
history of the country, the attitude which we now sustain
towards Mexico. It has not been sought, neither could it
have been avoided. The onward march of human affairs,
the tendency of the American mind in that direction, the phi-
losophy of political motion, the irresistible superiority of the
Anglo-Saxon blood, have all conspired to bring this Govern-
ment to look upon the destiny of Mexico as linked to her
own'. There are those within the hearing of my voice, many,
I doubt not, who will witness the joining of those destinies
in one, and will behold the land of the Aztecs carved into
American States. Examine your maps, commence at the
mouth of the Rio Grande, trace along down through the
waters of the Bay of Vera Cruz, around that high headland
of Yucatan, down through the Carribean Sea, across the
tropic of Cancer into the Gulf of Darien; cross the Isthmus
there, into the Gulf of Panama, follow up the Pacific coast
through twenty-two degrees of latitude, to the boundary line
of the Treaty of 1854, and all within those limits is fastened
to the interests and wrapped up in the destiny of American
institutions, by the great God whose hand shapes the conti-
nents of the earth, and scoops out its oceans, gulfs and har-
bors. The great law of self-defence and national security, a
law of nations paramount to all other laws, calls imperatively
for the practical recognition of this fact in the diplomacy and
legislation of the Government.. The waters of the Gulf of Mex-
ico, on its northern and eastern coast, now wash the borders
of five States of the Union, and its tide rises to the wharf of
the commercial metropolis of the South. Over on the oppo-
site side lie the distracted States of Mexico, and lower down
those of Central America. They would constitute an easy
acquisition to any European power with sufficient boldness
to defy the Monroe policy of this Government, and from that
line of coast the hostile armaments of all Europe could be
equipped in sight of American soil. If the American Union
shall be preserved, its wisest statesmen will be the first to
53
look steadily and boldly to these facts, and to shape the policy
of the nation towards its lawful and inevitable expansion.
Gentlemen of the Societies of Washington and Jef-
ferson.—You are surrounded to-day by no ordinary circum-
stances. An epoch in the history of liberty has been reach-
ed which will be forever memorable in the annals of coming
time. As you leave these venerable walls and start out to
meet life with its rugged issues, the great and imperious
question of the hour which will first salute you will be the
preservation of that constitutional liberty which the fathers
of the Republic provided for the enjoyment of their posteri-
ty; and second to that will be the consideration of that des-
tiny which awaits the Anglo Saxon race on this continent.
You are born to a mighty responsibility as well as to a rich
inheritance. You spring from a race unto whom is given
dominion, power and exaltation over the other races of the
earth. The blood of a conquering, governing race is in your
veins and brings with it the responsibility which attaches to
the leadership in the concerns of Earth's supremest moment.
You are of the lineage of Washington, who led the army of
Independence, whose great heart resisted the appalling ad-
versities of the Revolution, who stood upon the banks of the
Delaware and above the roar of the elements heard the call
of patriotic duty, who led his little column to the mouth of
the cannon at Trenton, who led the feeble colonies, like
Moses at the head of the Tribes in the wilderness, but who
more favored than the great captain of Israel, was permitted
from the plains of Yorktown to enter into the possession of
liberty ; who stands now and will stand forever as a sublime
and unapproachable example of virtue, and love of country.
He was born in the county of Westmoreland and in the State
of Virginia, but the whole Anglo Saxon race from all the
four quarters of the Globe points to his matchless life as an
evidence of its superiority, and humanity itself assumes new
dignity because the name of Washington has been written
in her records. You are of the same lineage too of the
great .philosopher of liberty, of Thomas Jefferson, who stud-
ied the principles of government as he did the eternal truths
of science, who loved freedom in an excess of devotion, who
drafted the fundamental doctrines of our national existence,
who foresaw more clearly than any other statesman of that
day the grandeur of the future upon which American insti-
tutions were advancing, who laid aside the robes of office
more honorable than the imperial purple and turned to the
genial pursuit of letters, laid these foundations yrhere we
54
stand, and entitled himself to the epitaph which marks..the
grave of the author of the Declaration of civil and religious
freedom and the patron of learning in the western world.
To your hands, in common with the young generation to
which you belong, will soon be committed tl^e interests which
were bequeathed to you by the patriots and sages of Ameri-
can antiquity. Each one of you will assume ere long the
high and responsible character of an American citizen, ac-
tive in the varied scenes which now chequer the public af-
fairs of the nation. You will never, however, forget your
birth right, the pure blood of your ancestors, nor the destiny
which awaits the American Union preserved An its justice
and in its equality. Nor will you ever forget the loyal in-
fluences of this great State on whose bosom you have reposed
while here drinking in inspiring draughts, from her crystal
fountain of learning. Virginia teaches 110 doubtful lesson
oh the subject of her devotion to the Constitution and the
Union. Happy are they who sit at her feet and learn wis-
dom from her precepts! She is rich in historical renown.
She rocked the cradle of the Union and defended the infant
Hercules from the grasp of the Serpent. Within her bosom
repose the ashes of those most illustrious in the cause of lib-
erty since the song of Miriam arose as a song of deliverance
on the banks of the Red Sea. The curious traveller threads
his way amongst the tombs of Westminister Abbey and on
eitlierjiand sleep Kings, conquerors, princes, poets, states-
men, historians and philosophers. In 'that solemn pile gen-
ius rests from its brilliant triumphs and its exquisite sorrows,
and eloquence and learning hallow the spot with the glory of
intellectual excellence. But the modest eminence of Mount
Vernon, and the quiet heights of Monticello contain more
precious dust than was ever treasured away in the " storied
urn" of human greatness or the royal sepulchre of Kings.
The soil of this ancient and revered commonwealth is rich
with the shrines of the mighty. Her children have been the
tall spirits of the earth, and every valley and every mountain
is full of thrilling memories. The drama of the Revolution
closed within her borders. The spirit of American liberty
here first took assurance of safety, and a permanent exist-
ence. But the historian who records the various and exalted
glories of Virginia will find in her loyalty and devotion to
the Union and the Constitution as it now is, something of
more priceless value, a jewel of more radiant lustre, than any
of the historical glokfes with which she is so richly decorated.
Whatever hereafter may be the policy reluctantly adopted by
55
Virginia, *no one can charge her with a willing and ready de-
sertion of the established order of things. A wonderful scene
is presented to us as we look back on the strange events
which have recently convulsed the nation. Sedition sent an
armed force against her border. Fanaticism sought to give
the flesh of her citizens a prey to the eagles, and her houses
to the torch of the incendiary. Murder was inaugurated as
a virtue on her soil, and her domestic institutions were as-
sailed with a sectional hate which rejoiced in the prospect of
a carnival of blood. The barriers of State sovereignty and
the safeguards of State equality were broken down at the be-
hests of the seditious citizen. The mother of States and of
Statesmen was the first to feel the unnatural and ungrateful
blow of a monstrous conspiracy against the Constitution.
In that hour of bitterness, in that day of her calamity, when
her wrongs were fresh, and her wounds were bleeding, the
messenger of a new Union, the bearer of despatches from a
sister State of the South, came to Virginia, and tempted her
in the moment of her severest temptation, in the very wil-
derness of her sufferings, to abandon the temple of her an-
cient worship. It was true that the old Union of the Fathers
had not afforded her protection against criminal outrage. It
was true that war had been proclaimed against her by the
consistent followers of a prevalent sectional fanaticism. It
was true that the equality of American citizenship was strick-
en down on the soil which gave it birth. But remembering
her early struggles and sacrifices, calling to mind the pre-
cious memories which bind her to the American Union,
yearning for the return of fraternal harmony and hoping all
things, Virginia turned her back on the Tempter to Disunion,
and announced her determination to appeal once more to the
holy spirit of justice and peace which has not finally taken
its flight from the country. This proud act of magnanimous
forbearance will never grow dim. It will be treasured up
and recalled to. the honor of this illustrious commonwealth
through every vicissitude of her fortunes. The full measure
of her duty has been performed, and the blood of disunion
can never be found on her skirts. May each State profit by
her example! May her wise precepts govern the public
mind as in the days of Madison and Henry! May Union
never be destroyed, but in any event and under all circum-
stances may the American citizen be true to his race, and
true to liberty as it is recognized in the American Constitu-
tion!
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