/ 
 
 V 
 
;opy 1 
 
 OUR RELATIONS WITH THE REBELLIOUS STATES. 
 
 SPEECH 
 
 HON. JAMES M. SCOVEL, 
 
 DeliTercd in the New Jersey Senate, Fel>rnar3E_27tli, 18C6. 
 
 jVIr. President: 
 
 lie must be a bouyant philosopher as well as the most 
 charming of optimists who will deny, since the 22d day 
 of February, that there is vitality in the spirit of slavery. 
 
 It belongs to brave and creative intellects to forget 
 the past, and I did not, Mr. President, take my place 
 upon the floor of the Senate to-day to indulge in any 
 historical detail of the sad but glorious recollections of 
 the past four years through which the American Repub- 
 lic has struggled, and suffered and triumphed. 
 
 But, sir, events which have so recently shaken politi- 
 cal opinion to its centre teach me to 
 
 " Be wary and mistrustful : 
 The sinews of the soul are these." 
 
 And without effort I recall the session of that defiant 
 Convention which nominated a candidate for President 
 because he had never won a battle, and then, with un- 
 blushing and unbridled audacity asked the world to be- 
 lieve that a just war was a failure, and that a cessation 
 

 of "hostilities" was demanded by justice, and liberty, 
 and liuraanity ! 
 
 But the God of our Fathers, and not the wisdom of 
 man, rescued the Republic. 
 
 Sherman, within a mouth after the Chicago surrender, 
 with the glittering bayonets of his hundred thousand, 
 stamped Mr. Vallandigham's utterances as a political 
 falsehood. 
 
 The Empire of Liberty moved forward. As we fondly 
 imagined, the reign of peace had come. That kindest 
 and most loving of men — he who was most deeply 
 versed in the unwritten laws of humanity, the trusted 
 and most well beloved leader of the nation's cause, 
 walked hand in hand with his little child unguarded 
 through the streets of Richmond. 
 
 Not one year ago, upon that wild and awful night in 
 April, Booth's bullet stilled the pulse of that mighty 
 heart. The grass has not yet grown green over the 
 grave where we laid him. 
 
 Where was the great criminal ? *^ 
 
 Mr. President," he lives to-day, not the leading spirit 
 of a lying civilization, comfortable in a casemate of 
 Fortress Monroe and rejoicingly celebrating the 22d day 
 of February, in the year of Grace 1866 — not Alexander 
 IL Stephens, who saw "a ray of light" through the 
 Chicago platform and now sees another qs he compla- 
 cently refers to President Johnson as his ''great stand- 
 ard-bearer," and generously hopes that the present policy 
 of restoration may " receive the cordial support of every 
 well-wisher of his country." 
 
 Elected to the Senate of the United States by an un- 
 regenerate rebel constituency who scorned a constitution 
 under whose shelter they basely endeavor again to creep, 
 Mr. Stevens, of Georgia, even promises that the black 
 man may "start c<pud before the law in the possession 
 oi' LMijuynicnt t)f all rights of personal liberty and property. . 
 
Small thanks for strong deservings! The Constitu- 
 tional Amendment gives to the dark-skinned citizens of 
 the Republic a right to be free, therefore in this yon 
 yield him nothing, sir. 
 
 The free black in all the States has heretofore enjoyed 
 the right to hold property, and in Maryland he (the 
 colored man) voted with the whites for the Constitution 
 of the United States. 
 
 Then if we are just to the Vice President of a dead' 
 Confederacy, you yield to the black man who carried a 
 bayonet or who merged his rights in the will of his mas- 
 ter when slavery existed in 7iame nothing but the bare 
 right to live and to hold property— if he can get it ! 
 
 Nol Mr. Stephens, you still persist in your denial of 
 the rights of man ; and in these days there are more 
 simple infidels to man than infidels to God. 
 
 ^o State Government has ever been recognized w^hich 
 ostracised a majority or any great mass of the people.. 
 The right of the State to ostracise a great mass of free- 
 negroes has never Jbeen recognized. 
 
 It this precedent be set now it is for the first time to 
 be set. 
 
 When negroes become free they beccme a part of the. 
 nation, and to ostracise them is to sanction a princiiJlefaial 
 to American government. i 
 
 There have been for the bondman two hundred and 
 fifty years of unrequited toil ; for forty years the African 
 has been the subject of conflict in politics in the pulpit 
 and in the halls of Congress. 
 
 Wise men and Statesmen insisted that servitude was 
 his proper status; Congress declared by solemn resolu- 
 tions that he should no longer be talked about. Eut ho 
 was talked about. lie grew into colossal proportions. 
 The black man fronted the stars. God raised up (or 
 permitting the use of the Devil's instruments for his own 
 excellent purposes) such abolitionists as John C. Breck- 
 inridge and JeiiersoD Davis. 
 
By their avarice and their ambition, seeking to limit 
 the ends of Government to the protection of property, 
 and to blend the lofty commerce of spirit with spirit 
 into the base bargaining of political selfishness, they at 
 last succeeded, against their will, in breaking the bonds 
 of the slave, while they strive to burst asunder the bonds 
 of the Union, and to-day, thank God, the negro stands 
 before the world a fixed figure on the canvas of history. 
 'No longer three-fifths of a man, but a whole man under 
 an amended Constitution. He has rights which a white 
 man is bound to respect — these rights will be secured to 
 him by the fidelity of such men as Ulysses Grant and 
 Horace Greeley, and if the political Moses at the White 
 House is not yet out of the Bulrushes^ there are 20,000,000 
 freemen in the North who have twice dared at the ballot 
 box in 1860, and four years later, to declare that some 
 Moses must be found to lead the lono^-waitinsj African 
 through any Red Sea over to the promised land where 
 he shall find, after 90 years of bondage, the stone of 
 ignorance and prejudice has rolled away from the sepul- 
 chre and that he walks a freeman whom the truth makes 
 free, in the light of a morning wliich breaks upon the 
 new resurrection of human freedom. 
 
 But I have asked where is the great criminal who 
 menaces the life of the Nation ? 
 
 He lives yet as he has lived during the Rebellion, cor- 
 rupting the heart and animating the minds of the men 
 of whom Mr. Shellebarger says : 
 
 "They planned one universal bonfire of the North from Lake 
 Ontario to the Missouri. They murdered by systems of starvation 
 and exposure sixty thousand of your sons, as brave and heroic as ever 
 martyrs were. They destroyed in the five yearsof horrid war another 
 army so large that it would reach ahuosl around the globe in march- 
 ing colums ; and then to give to the infernal drama a fitting close, 
 and to concentrate into one crime all that is criminal in crime, and 
 all that is detestable id barbarism, they killed the President of the 
 United States." 
 
But the great criminal died not with the Rebellion. 
 
 We think we exercised the evil spirit in iN'ew Jersey 
 last Xovember; hut that he is utterly dead, I beg leave 
 to doubt. 
 
 1. But he lives among the nutmeg men of Connecticut, 
 who refuse the negro the right to vote, and yet impose 
 upon him the double duties of fighting for the Union 
 and paying taxes incurred in breaking down a slave- 
 holders' rebellion. 
 
 2. He lives in the swamps of South Carolina, where 
 black codes are enacted, creating Slavery in fact on one 
 hand while they pretended to abolish it in mane on the 
 other. 
 
 3. The great criminal lives wherever in high places 
 men shout "this is a white man's government;" and it 
 lives and moves and has a being wherever caste flourishes 
 and tortures its victims with the remorselessness of the 
 Spanish Inquisition. 
 
 Society is, simply, human nature existing in combina- 
 tions, sometimes natural, but generally artificial. It 
 connot be denied that for half a century the American 
 Nation have not been homogeneous. The N'orth might 
 be properly called the labor States, and the South the 
 capital States. 
 
 With us labor took care of itself, with them habits of 
 idleness were periectly consistent with ideas of dio-iiity. 
 Labor Avas pienial. They firmly believed in the curse, 
 but not in the nobility of labor. 
 
 My dead, but immortal friend, Henry Winter Davis, 
 himself once a slave-owner, nnd one of the grandest and 
 purest soldiers who ever fought for the 'liberation of 
 humanity, said of the South : 
 
 " It was resolved by them to become a power and cease to be 
 merely an interest. 
 
 It could be tolerated as an interest, it could not be tolerated as a 
 power, which by political coalition became the dominant power of 
 the Nation (the addition of the great regions of Florida and Louisiana 
 to the domain of the United States, fired the blood of its supporters 
 
with the determination of ruling). It first asserted itself as a power in 
 the great Missouri compromise so long worshiped by all men as the 
 emblem of our peace. Texas was its conquest. The compromise of 
 1850 was the recognition of its equality with freedom in disposing of 
 the fortunes and fate of the Nation. 
 
 Tlie repeal of the Missouri compromise was its assertion, not 
 merely that it was a power, but that it had power to rule. The war in 
 Kansas was its struggle, to assert against a reluctant people, its right 
 to rule. The Dred Scott decision was the sanction of its most insolent 
 claims by the supreme judicial authority of the Nation before which 
 bowed every dissenting voice in the South. 
 
 It had made for itself a permanent home in the South, a home 
 full of ideas and arguments for its maintenance and advancement ; it 
 seized upon, and taught the doctrine of State rights as one of its 
 bulwarks." 
 
 (And John C. Calhoun was the wicked and persistent 
 evangelist of this pernicious idea, which, when backed 
 by the terrible unity of Southern politicians, and the 
 conscienceless tyranny of executive courts, had well 
 nigh taken the life of American Liberty). 
 
 The Dred Scott decision cultivated submission to the 
 local authorities, so that in case of collision the men of 
 the South ynight j^rcfer their iStale to the nation. Slavery 
 was first wrong, then excusable, then defensible, then 
 defended by Scripture, historical and political arguments; 
 then advocated and vaunted as the highest development 
 of the social organization. 
 
 Every principle of human reason was confounded in 
 the deliberate attempt to make right of a wrong. 
 
 It created a new theology, a new history, a new 
 ethnology for itself. "They dreaded the intrusive eye 
 of freedom, tolerated it only blindfold, and thus firmly 
 imbued with convictions scientifically and logically 
 wrought, with a social system, strong in arguments for 
 its sui)port, at peace with their consciences, given over 
 to believe a lie, a territory equal in area to the greatest 
 empire in tlu^ world — filled with an energetic, brilliant, 
 brave and devoted people, educated in the idea that the 
 
State is supreme and could secede at will, and that even 
 if the State had not that right, it could sanction, and by 
 its authority, which they were bound to obey, excuse all 
 who, under its bidding, took arms against the nation ; 
 armed against moral reprobation by pride — strong against 
 the law of the land in arms, in the sympathy of many at 
 the North, in a generation educated and devoted to those 
 ideas for whicli they were ready to die, they drew the 
 sword ! throwing away the scabbard, to assert that slavery 
 is the true corner-stone of freedom. That corner-stone 
 on which they sought to raise a new empire, now lies 
 crumbled and shattered atthefeet of advancing freedom." 
 
 The empire is dead, but, alas ! slavery lives. Its cat- 
 like step walks the courts, and its Judas Benjamins still 
 live on this side of the Atlantic. 
 
 Its Janus-face and its iron hand, encased in a velvet 
 glove, are softly found peeping over the cushion of 
 Northern pulpits, and I have heard gentle prayers, 
 whispered in words worthy of Sydney, the sweet Secre- 
 tary of Eloquence, in thanks to God for having "con- 
 verted the. Southern heart t*o loyalty." Slavery dead! 
 My God ! No, Sir ! No ! Clasping the Bible with hand- 
 cuffs, and festooning the Cross of Christ with chains, it 
 murders one President at Ford's theatre on the anni- 
 versary of the fall of Fort Sumpter, and on the anni- 
 versary of the day that gave birth to the Father of his 
 Country, at another theatre in Washington, slavery clasps 
 its collar around the neck of another President, while 
 Sunset Cox of Ohio, with graceful mien, gets ready a 
 rehearsal of his new play, entitled 
 
 "C^SAR AND MOSES, 
 
 OR, 
 
 CROSSING THE RUBICON! 
 
 IN A BASKKT OF BULRUSHES !" 
 
 During the performance, Vallandigham hangs out his 
 flag and fires a hundred guns! The people do not say 
 
8 
 
 *'amei.." But let us turn to a more agreeable picture ; 
 for if we count time by heartthrobs, these have been 
 long and weary days in which we have watched the flank 
 movement of a pro-slavery army with banners, readily 
 recoffnizins: a new foe with an old face. 
 
 We turn from the " nervous man to the me7i of nerve." 
 But when we behold the able and courtly Fesseuden, 
 and the true-hearted Sumner, whose fidelitj- to principle 
 is, to-day, the marvel of two worlds, we sigh as we are 
 forced to the conclusion that John C. Breckinridge, a 
 refugee and a traitor, is supposed to have more power 
 in this Government than Maine or Massachusetts. 
 
 But, Mr. President, I propose to return to the consid- 
 eration of the resolutions before the Senate. There never 
 was any jar or discord between generous sentiments and 
 €Ound policy. Nature never says one thing and wisdom 
 another. 
 
 And when I advocate an enactment by Congress which 
 will give to every soldier twenty-one years of age, who 
 has served his country since April 14, 1861, the right to 
 vote, I believe such a law \^'t)uld be sanctioned both by 
 good sense and by sound policy. 
 
 I may be met by tlie objection that the Constitution is 
 silent upon the question of suffrage, and that this ques- 
 tion ought to be left to the States themselves. But the 
 Constitution puts the badge of inequality upon no one. 
 And shall we ? 
 
 That policy which would call the black to our aid in 
 putting down the Kebellion, and then turn him over to 
 the charity of the man whom he fought against, and 
 who once owned him, must be founded in inequality, 
 injustice and in infinite meanness. 
 
 "If you did not wish to have the negro hereafter to 
 enjoy the rights of a man, why did you bring him on 
 the battle-iield." 
 
 When he could relieve us from an impending draft, 
 
9 
 
 we did not stop to discuss his rig-htto political privileges 
 then. "If he is their and your equal (and Thomas 
 Jefferson said the measure of the black man's talent is 
 no measure of his rights) on the battle-iield, in the service 
 of the country, he is and should be at the ballot-box, 
 and if he is not your equal on the battle-field, then you 
 have cheated the United States, to the injury of the 
 national cause, to save yourselves from service." 
 
 But above all, this question is not purely a question of 
 justice and humanity. We are bound by Article IV., 
 Section 4 of the Constitution, to give to the South a 
 Kepublican form of government. Congress has imposed 
 not conferred this paramount duty. 
 
 There cannot in the nature of things be a loyal ma- 
 jority in the eleven States in rebellion, where, if you 
 exclude the nameless martyr of East Tennessee, there 
 was found no sino;le man to make head aojainst a revolu- 
 tion which very soon, in the South, was led by "the men 
 who originally opposed it. I tell you, Sir, there is 
 nothing to hope and everything to fear from these States, 
 of which Carl Schurz, the President's appointed agent, 
 says : 
 
 "The loyalty of the masses and most of the leadei't of the South- 
 ern people, consists in submission to necessity. There is, except in 
 individual instances, an entire absence of that national spirit which 
 forms the basis of true loyalty and patriotism. 
 
 "The emancipation of the slaves is submitted to only in so far as 
 chattel slavery in the old form could not be kept up. But although 
 the freedman is no longer considered the property of the individual 
 master, he is considered the stave of society, and all independent States 
 legislation will share the tendency to make him such. 
 
 "The ordinances abolishing slavery, passed by the Convention 
 under the pressure of circumstances, will not be looked upon as 
 barring the establishment of a new form of servitude." 
 
 Alexander Stephens may say on the 22d of February, 
 as he did at the inauguration of th* Rebellion, " My 
 only hope is founded in the virtue, the intelligence and 
 the patriotism of the American people." But if he 
 
10 
 
 means to describe, as doubtless he does, the people with 
 whom he lives, what have we to expect of unregenerate 
 rebels, whose average civilization is that of the middle 
 ages, and who believed, or assumed to believe, that the 
 laws of war justified starving 60,000 Union prisoners till 
 they died at Anderson villa. 
 
 In the States now represented in Congress we rely 
 upon the educated intelligence of the people, and not 
 upon such blind servility as that which followed without 
 question the great Satrap of Slavery till he was captured 
 among the swamps of Carolina, a fugitive in woman's 
 apparel. 
 
 And what can be said of the patriotism of a people 
 who hunger and thirst for the ruin of this government 
 they have done so much to destroy, a government they 
 have despised and reviled for four years, and now seek- 
 ing its protection ; blot from our language the word 
 31avkind^ which enriches it — a word that never passed 
 the lips of Plato, Aristole or Socrates. Shame on such 
 patriotism which tells us, "come take away these 
 4,000,000 of God's creatures and expatriate them, or 
 they shall suffer extermination at our hand in the com- 
 ing " War of Races." This is the same spirit that said 
 to Tristram Bnrgess, " to day, to-day let New England 
 be blotted out," 
 
 Sir! this is first a question of right. Then it is a 
 question of power. It is first a question of morals (for 
 the forces always goes with the virtues), then it a ques- 
 tion of salvation. We are to choose whether we will 
 have a friendly and a Kcpublican Government in eleven 
 States lately in rebellion, or whether the old Oru2:arc'hv 
 shall come back into the Union, governing themselves- 
 loilhin a year of the time they pursued us with fire and 
 sword, and more than this, coming back with the privi- 
 lege when aided by discontented partisans in the North 
 with the privilege of governing us. I am not an alarm- 
 
11 
 
 ist. But I have lived among the younger leaders of the 
 Rebellion and in the Southern States. I know their 
 temper, and much as I hate their injustice, I have a still 
 livelier contempt for that hypocrisy here, which, under 
 the thin guise of a love for "the restored Union," 
 eagerly waits to strike hands with the men who headed 
 the Rebellion at the South, when they say with a terri- 
 ble show of truth : 
 
 " Once more 
 Erect the standard (here of ancient riglit, 
 Yours be the advantage all, mine the revenge." 
 
 I speak that I do know when I affirm that it has come 
 to this — that the question of suffrage is now not so 
 much, or so wholly a question of justice and humanity, 
 as it is for all of us a question of 5-20s and 7-30s. 
 Southern Senators and members of Congress will never 
 vote to pay the debt created in subjugating them unless 
 3^ou add their debt incurred to subjugate us. We need 
 the vote of the colored men, and in strengthening the 
 hands of the party of reconstruction it is the right inten- 
 tion not the philosophic judgment which casts the votes. 
 In the Rebel States w^e absolutely need numbers as 
 well as intelligence. But I am met by the objection 
 that the States are in the Union and must regulate these 
 questions for themselves. If w^e grant that, there is vi- 
 tality in the Rebel State governments ; and second, that 
 they have the right to regulate the question of suffrage, 
 then our argument is at an end ; but we make no such 
 admission. A " State " is defined to be a "body poli- 
 tic." A Government " the persons who administer the 
 laws." Well, then, the body politic cannot go out and 
 has not gone out of the Union, but since the Supreme 
 Court, the recognized arbiter of conflict between a State 
 and Federal authority, by the voice of all its Judges has 
 unanimously declared that from the 13th day of July, 
 1861, a civil territorial war has existed between the 
 
12 
 
 Uuitecl States and the Confederate States ; since such 
 war has existed, the State Governments — the persons 
 who administer the laws are outside of the pale of the 
 Constitution, because they become belligerents and ene- 
 mies of the United States. These State Governments, 
 then, have ceased to exist. Their suspended animation 
 will know no revival. They ceased to exist in law when 
 they renounced the Constitution. They ceased to exist 
 in fact because such governments were expelled by force 
 of arms. If the President of the United States counts 
 heads and calls that the people, he at once takes the 
 power from Congress, for it is the joint action of the 
 House of Representatives, Senate and Executive which 
 constitute Congress and places it in the Executive, where 
 it does not properly belong. 
 
 That point has been ably put thus. I ask that 
 gentlemen will go and read that great argument of 
 Daniel Webster in the Rhode Island case before the Su- 
 preme Court of the United States, where he met this 
 semi-revolutionary attempt to count heads and call that 
 the people, and maintained, and so the Su[)reme Court 
 judged, when it refused to take jurisdiction of the ques- 
 tion that the great political law of Ameiicais that every 
 i-hanirc of government shall be conducted under the 
 supervising authority of some existing legislative hod}', 
 throwing the protection of law around the polls, detin- 
 ing the rights of voters, protecting them in the exen-ise 
 of the elective franchise, guarding against fraud, re- 
 pelling violence and appointing arbiters to pronounce 
 the result, and declare the persons chosen by the people 
 and we say greatly to the honor of the American people, 
 it would take him to the going down of the sun to enu- 
 merate the instances in which almost every Constitution 
 in the United States has been changed, without one ever 
 having been changed by a revolutionary process, not 
 under the a^gis of law, not guided by pre-existing politi- 
 
13 
 
 cal authority. He maintained it to be the great fiinda- 
 menial j)rind pie of the American Government thai legislation 
 shall guide eferg political change, and that it assumes, that 
 somewhere within the United States there is always a 
 permanent organized legal authority which shall guide 
 the tottering footsteps of those who seek to restore gov- 
 ernments which are disorganized and broken down. 
 We have then, Mr. President, governments disorganized 
 and broken down. What will we do with tliem ? 
 
 Before I answer that question I shall summon one to 
 whom public law is scarcely less indebted but who wrote 
 a century later, that Vattel may reiterate with more pre- 
 cision, that 
 
 " A civil war breaks the bands of society and government, or at 
 least, suspends their force and eflTect ; it produces in the Nation two 
 independent parties who consider each other as enemies and acknow- 
 ledge no common judge. These two parties, therefore, must necessarily 
 be considered as constituting, at least, for a time, two distinct 
 societies." 
 
 Need I appeal to Requielme, wdio declares that " when 
 a part of a State takes up arms againt the government, 
 if it is sufficiently strong to res st its ad ion, and to 
 constitute two parties of equally balanced forces, tlie 
 existence of civil war is thenceforward determined. If 
 the conspirators against the government have not the 
 means of assuming this position their movement does 
 not pass beyond a Rebellion, as true civil war breaks 
 the bonds of society bj^ dividing it in fact into two inde- 
 pendent societies. It is for this consideration that we 
 treat of it in international law. Since each party form- 
 ing as it were a separate Nation, both should be regarded 
 as subject to the laws of w^ar. This subjection to the 
 law of Nations is the more necessary in civil wars, since 
 these, by nourishing more hatred and resentment than 
 foreign wars, require more the execution of the law" of 
 Nations in order to moderate their ravages." 
 
 In God's government as well as in every wise human 
 
14 
 
 government, the enforcements of obligations are coupled 
 with and inseparable from the enjoyment of rights. 
 With what semblance of reason can people administer- 
 ing governments in place of those extinguished by war 
 claim the rights and powers of a State under a Consti- 
 tution, which they have for years scorned, derided and 
 despised ? 
 
 After destroying that army which I have said in solid 
 column would nearly reach around the globe they would 
 modestly ask (the vanquished in conference with the 
 victor) leave to submit, for their own approval, the laws 
 under which they desire to liold their property and enjoy 
 every right undisturbed as if there had never been any 
 Eebellion. Dare we trust implicitly that these men will 
 with cheerful resio-nation come back under a flas; which 
 they hate ? but which we love, ten thousand times better 
 than ever, because every stain on it folds has been 
 washed white in the blood of the brave. 
 
 And when I contemplate the solem questions of the 
 hour, when I stared, astonished at the indecent haste with 
 which red-handed Rebellion pleading most piteously a 
 new-born love for the Constitution ; and when I see 
 men in high places " wincing under Southern thunder," 
 just as American politicians have winced, and wincing 
 yielded, for eighty-seven years, then I begin to tremble 
 for my country. 
 
 It is no solace for our fears that Mr. Alexander 
 Stephens so recently said : " Should all the States be 
 brought back to their practical relations under the Con- 
 stitution, we shall have still left the essentials of free 
 government contained and embodied in the old Consti- 
 tution imloticlicd and imini pared." 
 
 I may l)c excused from trusting too liir these gift bear- 
 ing Greeks ! 
 
 I fail to descern that candor in the late Vice Pi-esident'e 
 carefully prepared oration, spread uj^on the journals of 
 
15 
 
 botli Houses of the Georgia Legislature, which so touch- 
 ingly turned the periods of his last and most eloquent 
 plea for the Union of our fathers in 1860. (Our Southern 
 friends understand the plaj^, " She Stoops to Conquer.") 
 
 I would recall to his mind his Milledgeville letter, in 
 which he says more than four years ago : " If every- 
 thing else has to go down let our untarnished honor, at 
 least survive the wreck." 
 
 If they get hack on their own terms, they themselves 
 have predicted that the next war will he inside of the 
 Union for Southern rights. Sir, Southern honor did not 
 survive the 14th day of April. It becomes us to meet 
 these questions without passion, but with that courage 
 which is often the loftiest prudence. The supreme hour 
 for the nation has struck. 
 
 If we are just and fear not, we can teach the men so 
 eager for the power they voluntarily abandoned, that 
 " Conquering may prove as lordly and complete a thing, 
 in lifting upward as in crushing low." 
 
 If the Conflict which is to decide whether the peace 
 we have won by the sword is worth having and has come 
 to stay; if that conflict must come, let it come. Let 
 it come now, for with God's help and man's fidelity we 
 will never, never be recreant to that trust sanctified to 
 us and to the world by the valor of the dead, and dear to 
 us all by the sacrifices made by the living. We cannot, 
 we will not, we dare not omit to do that which the safety 
 of the Union reqires. The statesman is never regard- 
 less of consequences. But the man who is true to him- 
 self and just to others accepts all consequences which 
 follow the discharge of public duty. As for myself I 
 belong neither to the party of Cfesar nor to that of Brutus. 
 America will never be cursed with a Dictator, and assassi- 
 nation does not thrive since the days of the Roman Senate. 
 We are engaged in a conflict of ideas nobler and more 
 far reaching than the clash of bayonets. 
 
 If Congress does not give us Manhood Suffrage, we 
 
16 
 
 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 013 744 771 P 
 
 will have an Amendment to the Constitation prohibiting 
 representation except upon the basis of those who are 
 entitled to vote. The deep throbbing of the popuhir 
 heart cannot be baulked in its purpose. If I do not live 
 to see it my children will live to see the day when no 
 man shall be denied a political right on account of his 
 complexion. A democracy and an aristocracy of senti- 
 ment and manners I can understand. But a Democracy 
 of Laws which compel the able bodied to bear arms and 
 pay taxes, but prohibits the able minded from having 
 either vote or voice in the policies which control them 
 is a monstrosity in legislation, a falsehood in politics, 
 and a sandy foundation for a Republic. 
 
 My soul expands to the altitude to which its Divine 
 Author intended it to expand when I contemplate my 
 country, often baffled and often defeated, but finally tri- 
 umphing over all her oppressors. And, sir, in the eye of 
 my mind I behold the shaft of granite from which rises 
 the pillars of Constitutional, Republican and Universal 
 Liberty in America. Its foundation is broader and its 
 pillars more beautiful than the Grecian Parthenon upon 
 whose snowy front the sunsets of two thousand years 
 have left their golden stains; and upon this granite rock, 
 moist with the blood of our best and bravest, will be 
 written by each succeeding generation in letters of light 
 that imperishable truth of history : There is no Power 
 without Justice. 
 
 MURPHY k BECIITEL, PllINTEllS, OPPOSITE THE CITY HALL. 
 
/^ 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 013 744 771 A 
 
 TS/ynm\U(^.m