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 OUR NATIONAL UNION: 
 
 THANKSGIVING DISCOURSE, 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE 
 
 Jf irst Crinitarian CongwgatiBiial (Cl]«rj:| 
 
 NOVEMBER 29, 18GO, 
 
 BY TRUMAN M. POST, D.D 
 
 ST. LOUIS: 
 
 R. P. 8TUDLEY AND 00., PRINTBKS, BINnERS AND LITnOORAPHEES, MAIN AND OLIVB STS. 
 
 L 
 

Saint Louis, Dec. 1st, 1860. 
 REV. DR. POST: 
 
 Dear Sir. — We heard with great satisfaction and pleasure your excellent 
 discourse on Thanksgiving Day. Fully sympathizing with the views expressed by you 
 in that discourse, and believing that they would be eminently useful in fostering in the 
 minds of our fellow citizens, sentiments of patriotism and affection for the Union, we 
 would most respectfully request of you a copy for publication. 
 
 FRANCIS WHITTAKER, 
 WYLLYS KING, 
 J. S. McCUNE, 
 RUSSELL SCARRITT, 
 SAM'L PLANT. 
 
 Saint Louis, Dec. 10, 1860. 
 Messrs. FRANCIS WHITTAIvER, 
 WYLLYS KING, 
 J. S. McCUNE, 
 RUSSELL SCARRITT, 
 SAM'L PLANT. 
 Dear Sirs. — Your expressed wish or opinion would ever have weight with me. 
 If the discourse, of which you ask a copy, shall contribute to strengthen in any mind 
 the sentiment of love and devotion to our National Union, under which this people have 
 lived so happily, and so long, I shall thank God for it. I am conscious at least it is 
 honest in its argument, and conciliatory in its design. As I had it not in manuscript 
 at the time of its delivery, I may not have been able exactly to restore it ; but it is, I 
 think, substantially the same. 
 
 Very truly yours, 
 
 T. M. POST. 
 
DISCOURSE. 
 
 II CHRONifLKS, XXX : 12. Also the hand of God was to give them one heart. 
 
 I have selected this text as expressive of the fact tliat National unity 
 of counsel and will, is the gift of God ; and fitly to be ranked with themes 
 claiming grateful commemoration. It stands in this passage, also histori- 
 cally connected with a most memorable and genuine Thanksgiving. Judah 
 and Israel, for more than two hundred years, had been disunited, much to 
 the opprobrium and disaster, moral and political, of both. Hezekiah had 
 at that time sent couriers about to the entire Hebrew nation, inviting them 
 once more to unite at least in the great National Festival of the Passover. 
 They were variously received in different quarters. But to some of the 
 people " God gave one heart to do the King's commandment." The 
 consequence was that they kept a most remarkable Thanksgiving; and 
 for even twice the usual number of seven days. For, says the Chronicle, 
 
 " The children of Israel that were present at Jerusalem kept the feast of unleavened 
 bread seven days with great gladness : and the Lcvites and the Priests praised the Lord 
 day by day, singing with loud instruments unto the Lord. 
 
 " And Hezekiah spake comfortably unto all the Levites that taught the good 
 knowledge of the Lord : and they did eat throughout the feast seven days, offering 
 peace offerings, and making confession to the Lord God of their fathers. 
 
 " And the whole assembly took counsel to keep other seven days ; and they kept 
 other seven days with gladness. 
 
 " For Hezekiah, king of Judah, did give to the congregation a thousand bullocks and 
 seven thousand sheep ; and the princes gave to the congregation a thousand bullocks 
 and ten thousand sheep ; and a great number of Priests sanctified themselves. 
 
 "And all the congregation of Judah, with the Priests and the Levites, and all the 
 congregation that came out of Israel, and the strangers that came out of the land of 
 Israel, and that dwelt in Judah rejoiced. 
 
 " So there was great joy in Jerusalem : for since the time of Solomon, the Son of 
 David king of Israel, there was not the like in Jerusalem. 
 
 " Then the Priests and the Levite» arose and blessed the people : and their voice 
 was heard, and their prayer came up to his holy dwelling place, even unto Heaven."* 
 
 *II Chron., 30: 21-27. 
 
6 
 
 That occasion, too, stands out from a ground of troublous and evil 
 times; even as this present. Indeed, the origin of our Thanksgiving 
 Festival dates back to the days of famine and sickness and savage terrors, 
 amid our fathers. It was well thus. Praise to God is ever due and comely. 
 Such time" constitute, moreover, the most effective setting of blessings, 
 less appreciated otherwise ; as the diamond gleams brightest enchased by 
 jet, or the star shines serenest and purest on a ground of stormy sky. 
 
 It is well, too, for spiritual excellency and happiness, in the darkest 
 times to devote seasons expressly to the duty of grateful joy — to look at 
 the bright aspects of gloomiest things, and to study gladness. A resolution 
 to do this will often resolve the murkincss and sadness of a day of cloud 
 and tempest. 
 
 To day I feel that we are called to set our joy on a groundwork of 
 sorrows and troubles. We meet amid financial perplexities, and solicitude 
 and sorrow for our country — a sorrow that sits at each fireside as a domestic 
 grief. Still let us consecrate the day to devout gladness. And we have 
 am])le cause. As we call for them, incentives to thanksgiving crowd on 
 us like the stars or the sea, from nature, providence and our entire being, 
 lint I have thought it most salutary, and demanded by the times, and by 
 your own feelings, to select as our theme, for this occasion, Our National 
 Union, thus far conserved, through the goodness of God, for almost a 
 century. The more so, as the infiuences of political institutions, from 
 their very commonness, are wont to become to us as the sunlight and 
 atmosphere ; aj)preciated only by their loss or perversion, as arc these, 
 when infected by ))estilence, or shaded by disastrous eclipse. Blessings 
 grow dear as they die or are in peril. 
 
 Our National Union would be worthy of thanksgiving for what it has 
 wrouixht, were it to die to-day ; we woidd still gather around it, as around 
 the body of a dead friend, and commemorate its benefits, and thank God 
 it has lived so long; may we not, the rather, this day gather around its 
 lit'i', with prayers and vows for its coniiiui.ince. And as the feuds of 
 briitliiers are oft healed or forgot beside the mortal sickness of a mother, 
 may we not hope that our political asperities and antagonisms may now be 
 hiishi'd jisvhilc, as W(! watch beside the deadly peril of our Natiomil T^nioii, 
 the mothi-r of us all. May not our filial piety be (piiekened, our feeling of 
 fratc-rnity be reaniniatccl, and oiir hearts be softened, purified and enlarged 
 — as all nmtital recrimination dismissed the while — we recount her benefits 
 to us all, in a memorable! and happy past? 
 
 Let UH then to-day, banishing complaint and accusation, reutU'r to our 
 God thanksgiving for the fraternal tic that has still bound us together as 
 virtually one Nation, f<>r fonr-score years; while the whole earth mean- 
 wliilc — East of us in the <>M wiuM, and South of us in tin' new — has been 
 rocking with rev(dntion and (.•haiige. 
 
And tirst we thank Him for the Union of the Revolution ; a Union 
 amid Colonies accustomed to act, for a century, as separate peoples ; 
 divided more widely, even than our present extremes of territory, by time 
 and difficulty of intercommunication, as also by habitudes of thought and 
 feeling-, and of social and political life ; and presenting greater difficulties to 
 combination of counsels and interests than now. ^Ye thank God that 
 spite of all these, He gave them "one heart" to achieve political emanci- 
 pation and a place am.ong the Nations ; and in achieving this, to pour out 
 as one, their best blood and treasure — all for each and each for all, means 
 or extremes alike — standing shoulder to shoulder, true brothers, in that 
 terrible hour. 
 
 We thank God again for the Union of the Confederation ; whereby 
 they entered as one people into the scale of Nations, and presented a 
 league for the most part impregnable to foreign intrigue and influence ; 
 and were enabled to live together as brethren, though with governmental 
 tie very loose and precarious. Especially we thank Him, that when its 
 fatal defects became manifest in the paralysis and impoverishment of the 
 Federal Government, amid the conflicting claims, legislations, judicatures 
 and commercial regulations of States, He enabled them to go through the 
 fearful experiment of the dissolution of one government and the creation 
 of another, without bloodshed or tumult, in the quiet of a profound peace ; 
 presenting a spectacle without a parallel in history, and of which any 
 people were presumptuous to invite a repetition. And we thank Him 
 that He gave them finally one heart to form the Union of the Consti- 
 tution : expressly projected and ordained by them, " To form a more 
 perfect Union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for 
 the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings 
 of liberty to themselves and their posterity." * 
 
 It was God, we believe, that gave them one heart to overcome the 
 almost insuperable difficulties of conflicting opinion and seemingly con- 
 flicting interest in the way, and to frame an instrument on the whole, the 
 most perfect of its order ever devised by man. All human things are 
 imperfect. But its seeming diverse defects as looked at from difl:erent 
 sides, are, most of them, the only practicable resultants of interests, com- 
 plex and divisive, framed into one system ; and representative of necessary 
 compromises. They were essential to the creation of the instrument, 
 which, if not the best ideal, appears to have been the best possible for the 
 time. And who shall say it were better there had been none ? that it 
 has not, with all its alleged faults, been still an incalculable blessing.^ 
 The wonder is not that our fathers did not create a better, but that they 
 created one at all. Should we be likely to form one more perfect ? If in 
 
 *See Preamble to the Constitution. 
 
such hope we destroy this, we shall, I fear, emulate the crime of the 
 daughters of Pelias; and see from its mangled fragments, however we 
 stir the cauldron, no superior form, no living shape reborn. 
 
 We thank God this day that, for nearly the life of three generations, this 
 instrnmcnt has to such an extent accomplished its express designs, of 
 "union," "justice," " domestic tranquillity," "defense," "liberty," "gen- 
 eral welfare ;" that it has secured a more perfect union, and thereby 
 presented us in foreign relations, not as a league of States, but one Nation ; 
 wielding in diplomacy and arms the strength of a first class Nation, and 
 now speaking with the voice of more than thirty millions of people; and 
 tliat thereby we have been safe and respected everywhere, our llag the 
 protecting wing of a powerful empire over our citizens on all lands and 
 every sea ; that we have stood erect, and not crouched and crawled amid 
 tlie Nations; have presented an impregnable front to undue or divisive 
 foreign infiuence, whether by intrigue, intimidation or corruption ; that 
 we have been saved from the melancholy history and example of all other 
 confederacies in the presence of great despotic and centralized Powers — 
 Powers which passed from intrigue and bribery to Patrons, Protectors, 
 Tyrants and Kavagers. I thank God for the union that has saved us from 
 that wretched clientship of States, presented in case of the above Confed- 
 eracies; prosecuting emulous suits in foreign courts; dupes and victims of 
 foreign cupidity, treacliery and anibition; and purchasing advantages 
 over a rival, by dishonorable alliance or subserviency, by mutual betrayals, 
 and finally by sacrifice of tiieir own free existence. Would that our 
 countrymen might pause to read at this day the history of the Hellenic 
 States after the glorious war of Independence with Persia ; the fearfully 
 graphic sketch which Thucydides has given of the woes and crimes and 
 shaiin-s (if the I'l'lopnnesiaii war; and the story of the unutterably sad 
 and opprobrious ages after his picture — the ages of the death and dissolu- 
 tion (jf a people, corrupted, coii(|uered, enslaved, crushed undei' successive 
 overlaying despotisms of Europe and Asia. 
 
 Let us thank (»o<l for the contrast to theirs, which our history lias thus 
 far presenter! ihrcMigh the \inion of lliesc States. And also for that union as 
 a means whereby a central government — sovereign in its sphere of interests 
 properly national, and arini-d with the fidl complement of powers, diplo- 
 matic, legislative, judicial and executive for its self-maint«nance and 
 enforcement, and with a nati()nal exchequer, army and navy — is made to 
 so harnioiiiz*! with stale sovereignties, in like manner iridepondent and 
 ^iuprcme in their sphere, that they can no more clash in tlieir proper 
 functions, than planets with their satellite moons may c<illide with the 
 solar svstem in which they are inorbcd. 
 
 We owe thanks that thus wc have been enabled for four-score years, to 
 
9 
 
 blend together in our nation the advantages, seemingly incompatible, of 
 large and small states, the minutely and thoroughly distributed life and 
 culture and democratic activities of one, with the massive strength and 
 order, and the larger comparisons and cosmopolitan civilization of the 
 other ; a combination, the ideal of which would unite the brilliant, intense 
 and thorough vitality of the Hellenic Polities with the stability, regularity 
 and power of Imperial Rome, We have thus been enabled to unite muni- 
 cipal freedom with strong central government, local variety with national 
 uniformity, and individual liberty with imperial order and security. 
 
 We would render thanks, too, this day for a union, whereby we secure a 
 uniformity of administration and judicature in interests of national order 
 and reach ; and avoid the irritations and perplexities of conflicting local 
 ordinances and jurisprudence; and especially, whereby we have the 
 arbitrament of Law and not of the sword above states ; that contests 
 between States are not driven for settlement to the fields of battle ; a 
 blessing we can estimate only in contrast of a state of things where such 
 controversies fret through dijtlomatic intrigue, and forceful reprisals to 
 war, or form the opening for foreign intrigue, corruption and ambition ; 
 as in the case of the States of Ancient Greece or the principalities of 
 Medieval Italy and Germany. May we never learn to prize this blessing 
 by its loss. 
 
 We have, moreover, reasons for gratitude this day, that we have so long 
 enjoyed a union whereby these great interests are secured, not only with- 
 out enfeeblement, but with the strenghening, of political liberties ; a system 
 not like a Grecian dome, weakened by expansion, but like the Gothic 
 minster, where the rising of arch upon arch, with all their tracery and 
 interlacing, makes each part the stronger with the strength and massiveness 
 of the entire structure. So are individual and local liberties strengthened 
 and guaranteed by the interlacings of State and National prerogatives, that 
 each part guards the whole and the whole each part. Our State liberties 
 are safer for our National sovereignty, and are likely to be crushed beneath 
 its ruins if it fall. 
 
 We owe thanks for our National Union, also, in that under it is possible 
 a great commercial and economical system, embracing the breadth of a 
 continent and zone ; whereby industry, trade, productions, enterprise and 
 internal improvements, have been left free to consult for the mutual cor- 
 respondencies of climate, soil, position and the geographic configaration 
 of a continent, unembarrassed by local tariffs, custom houses, passports 
 and sumptuary laws; and unburthened by the expenses, civil and military, 
 of numerous petty nationalities, .each with its governmental ofiicials, its 
 armies and navies and foreign missions ; a union which convoys the trade 
 of remotest seas to- our shores secure under our national colors, and under 
 
10 
 
 which we have conquered the desert, the wilderness and the mountains, 
 and unite tlie commerce of two oceans to a continental transit through one 
 people, of one speech, and under one arch of empire ; a union which has 
 blent, with a most free and powerful civilization, a domestic tranquillity 
 under which has been achieved a degree of physical and social prosperity 
 without parallel in the history of mankind. The Arts have flourished, 
 enterprise has been quickened, our territories have been improved, 
 empires conquered from the wilderness, wealth has been accumulated, and 
 commerce quickened and expanded into the most distant regions, and in 
 the midst of profound peace. 
 
 Meanwhile not only have material interests prospered ; great social 
 problems have been resolved, education has been fostered, intelligence 
 has been diffused, prejudices have been corrected, ideas enlarged and 
 modified, and a civilization larger, broader, more national, more composite 
 and cosmopolitan, been elaborated. Society has achieved a permanent 
 advance, and the kingdom of God has been expanding itself and accumu- 
 lating power for future conquest. History presents no other such picture 
 of liberty, order and liappiness. Shall we, in the wantonness and caprice 
 of gambling-venture, put all this to peril ? Amid all this our National 
 Union stands as a vast Magistracy of the Peace. Shall we now tear it 
 down ? 
 
 Even Despotism has received the gratitude of history as a vast police 
 of nations, and nnder that we are sure to seek domestic tranquilliLj^, if 
 sacrilegiously we subvert that National Republic which now keeps the 
 peace of ouf vast empire of States. 
 
 The Historian of the Decline and Fall, pronounces the era of the Anto- 
 nines one of the happiest in the history of the world. True, under the 
 dome of a universal despotism the earth was dying all the while. The 
 loss of liberty was the loss of life. Humanity was growing more emascu- 
 late ; the pulse of civilization beating feebler, and the shadows of the 
 coming night falling faster from the Indus to the Atlantic. 
 
 But there was j.hysical well-being, personal safety and unembarassed 
 commerce under an enforced universal order. The Imperial Robber per- 
 mitt.-d no other than herself. To Syria and Egypt and Macedon, to the 
 Iberian and Gaul and the Moor, she said " keep {.eace with each other." 
 From her seat in the Cajiitol she looked forth, the supreme court, the 
 sovereign arbiter and lawgiver, the enforcer of order, to the world ; the 
 centre of a universal magistracy and police, before which the clangor of 
 national discords and arms was hushed, and under whose arch of empire 
 commerce convoyed her argosies and her caravans and mercantile ventures, 
 in unobstructed ways, through peaceful ami prosperous peoples, from the 
 Erythrean Gulf to the Isle of BriUiin. 
 
I 
 
 \ 
 
 11 
 
 So far was Gibbon right that the era of the Antonines shows amid the 
 contrasts of anarchy, discord and violence between which it occurs, as an 
 Age of Gold. Peace and order are the necessities of nations. Better, 
 infinitely, a Russian despotism than the bloody anarchy of the Druses and 
 Maronites. We should find the most stringent of military despotisms, a 
 refuge from that wretched tumult of petty, jangling, crouching, corrupt, 
 Macchiavellian nationalities, which opens on us through the portals of dis- 
 union. From a history like that of Mexico or Central America — whom we 
 should be likely to follow with even bloodier trace — we should find relief 
 even under the despotism of the Czars or Napoleons. That would be the 
 certain and the most hopeful solution of the wretched imbroglio. But shall 
 we for this, in wantonness and wilfulness, cast away a system which, fur 
 three-fourths of a century, has been demonstrated capable of wedding 
 together order and life, liberty and law, in a civilization, imperial in its 
 territorial range, and cosmopolitan in its elements and ideas ? 
 
 True, objections may be raised from various quarters, diverse and antag- 
 onist as the quarters they come from, against the Constitution of our 
 Union. Were all invited, as in the case of the ancient picture hung up for 
 criticism, to mark their opinions of defect, they would probably leave it 
 but one blot. And so, if their marking of excellencies was called for. 
 And the defects of one class would probably be excellencies to another. 
 I may have my serious objections to the instrument ; you have yours ; and a 
 third party has his ; and so on infinitely. But our objections are discrepant 
 and contradictory. For the most })art they confute each other. But 
 with them all, who does not believe that, with all imputed faults, our Con- 
 stitution has yet been, on the whole, one of the greatest blessings ever 
 granted by God to any nation ? And when, and how are we likely to get 
 a better? This is susceptive of peaceful amendment, if necessary, accord- 
 ing to its own provisions. With much reluctance and hesitation indeed, 
 should I enter on the work of amending, lest I should take from its excel- 
 lence or its reverence. Still, if defects or inequities in it seem no longer 
 endurable, can we not confer and arrange in reference to them, frater- 
 nally and constitutionally ? But if we destroy to rebuild, from its ruins no 
 ree stable organism will be likely to re-arise. The hands that tear it down, 
 I verily believe, dig beneath themselves an abyss. Demoniac forms and 
 faces the rather will emerge from the seething deeps, that shall wander 
 forth to mock and madden through a funeral century ! 
 
 The Constitution, too, we should remember, is blameless for many of the 
 abuses accomplished under it, and claiming its sanction. It has had 
 strains put upon it, that it should never have been called to bear. The 
 misconstructions of hate or of worship ; the distortions of passion, fraud, 
 tyranny and fanaticism ; the glosses of parties, creeds and interests ; alleged 
 
12 
 
 conHiet with natural right or Divine law, or arrogation of pi*erogative 
 superior to such right and law ; reverence for its name invoked in defence 
 of wrong, until men have been tempted to question the duty of reverence; 
 threats of dissolution employed as the leverage for advancing the interests 
 of faction, till men l)ave begun to inquire wliat the organic instrument of 
 our Union was worth — now, for abuses of this kind the Constitution is not 
 answerable ; though by them it has suffered ; and even more from worship 
 tlian liate : for the arrogation of perfection, contradicted by a single fault, 
 loses too oft our entire confidence. The god dethroned sinks below the 
 mortal, and idolatry confuted, turns to contempt. 
 
 But while our Constitution claims not to be worshipped as God's absolute 
 work, it does ask to bo revered and loved as the best of its kind, thus far 
 achieved or practicable among the nations. Could the spirit of its framers 
 still breathe on us from their mould, it would still utter to this Union a 
 monition like tliat of the Latin Lyrist to Ancient Rome, " AVhile you bear 
 yourself subordinate to the gods, you hold empire." Human constitutions 
 are manifestly vital only as subordinate to the eternal constitution of God. 
 Transcending that limit they of necessity undermine and subvert them- 
 selves. They destroy the moral basis on which alone they must ultimatelv 
 rest. The cry of union, therefore, raised to cover wrongs ; to consecrate 
 injustice or impiety ; to shield with inviolableness absurdities and abuses ; 
 to stifie free questionings of the reason or of the moral and religious senti- 
 ment, or to claim our honor and trust for men, in whom, if love of union 
 still abides, it grows like the mistletoe, on the decayed trunk of all other 
 virtues — such treatment of the Constitution is most illegitimate and most 
 unfair to any human ordinance of government ; it must in the end destroy 
 it. Nothing can prove more clearly the excellence of our own, than that 
 tor so many years it has endured the strain put on it by sucli treatment, 
 and yet its liold on the nation's heart has not been broken, but it is still 
 strong ill the love and reverence of the millions of this people. But, in 
 truth, the utmost of alleged grievances, lying in the course of its past or 
 probable abuses, are as nothing conqiared with the infernal gulf it now 
 covers and closes. Indeed, we shall best estimate the im])ortance of these 
 objections, in the light of the lii^toric landscape that opens upc^n us, if the 
 Constitution to which liiey attach, is destroyed. Our debt of gratitude to 
 Heaven for the past, can be best estimated by reversing the picture we 
 have taken. 
 
 Suppose, then, our country is lc<l along the way in which present 
 disunion movements are marshalling us ; our National Banner no longer 
 floats in the heaven ; the architects of ruin have liad their way; the North 
 American liepublic, with its glorious memories and hopes, disappears 
 from history ; a gulf opens before us like that seen of the Ilcbrew Pro- 
 
13 
 
 })het, on which the four winds strove, and from which issued strange 
 tierce, ravening political forms. Chaos is there, and forms as baleful as 
 waited around the portals of eternal night. Into that abyss I care not to 
 look. Suppose we liave lloundered through it : dissolution in all its 
 stages —secession upon secession — disunion on disunion — revolution after 
 revolution, have been accomplished. Political disintegration has reached 
 its utmost term — what term, who shall tell, when once the process of 
 dissolution has begun, and public faith been dissolved. New combinations 
 wrestling with new destructions, emergent — who may forecast or describe 
 them i How many confederacies, leagues, oligarchies, empires, Eastern 
 Western, Northern, Southern and Middle; of the Atlantic, the Pacific, the 
 Mississippi, the Lakes, the Gulf or the great Basin? But it emerges — order 
 in some fashion — from the dark and crimson gulf. Now what shall be 
 the relation of these States to Foreign Powers ? What their place in 
 the scale of nations ? 
 
 It is the imagination of Astronomers that once, between the orbits 
 Jupiter and Mars, there shone a planet glorious as Jupiter, object of 
 admiration and delight to any eye that beheld, and among the lords of 
 the system amid which it rolled. A seemingly blank abyss, revealing to 
 the telescopic vision alone, asteroids of feeble, dim and servile disc and 
 divergent ever-parted orbs — this is the field once filled with its brightness 
 but where the fragments of its ruin, nntracefl and untraceable, wander 
 now darkling forevermore. 
 
 Such appears our change in the horoscope of dissolution. Our proud 
 bj'ight sphere among the nations, knows us no more. Our country speaks 
 no more, in foreign diplomacy, with the voice of thirty millions of people. 
 It enters in foreign relations no longer with the wealth, the art and pro- 
 ductions, the commerce, the arms of so many millions, in its scale. Its 
 colors, that spread as the wing of a mighty empire over each ship and 
 each citizen on the uttermost land and main, have fallen as a blighted 
 constellation from the sky. I see now a medley of petty States, creeping 
 and crouching among the nations. Their proud port is gone. On the 
 land and sea their flag is vailed, or floats by sufferance. Rival States 
 appear instead ; alien, hostile, in shifting combinations of league and 
 counter-league, intrigue and adverse intrigue ; the minor clustering 
 around the larger, or banding against them — as in the case of Austria and 
 Prussia, in the modern Germanic, or of Sparta and Athens, in the ancient 
 Grecian system of States — the stronger, whether in strife or conspiracy, 
 equally afflicting the weaker, and each and all fomenting within others 
 faction and insurrection. A medley of States in such relations to each 
 other, I see exposed to insult and injury, at the caprice of great powers at 
 home and abroad ; wearying the ear of foreign courts with suits of obse- 
 quious rivals, suppliant and accusatory, waiting for patronage or protection 
 
14 
 
 around the purlieus of palaces ; like client nations attendant on the Roman 
 Senate, or the Hellenic cities intriguing at the courts of Persia, Macedon, 
 Syria or Egypt. We should become like Mediicval and Modern Italy or 
 Germany, the football and prize of foreign policies, and the quarry of 
 foreign ambition. Our Union, which, as a wall of adamant, has presented 
 itself impervious as well to foreign intrigue and gold as to foreign arms, 
 being gone, we should soon find ourselves penetrated, through and through., 
 with corrupt or divisive influences from abroad, baleful as Macedonian 
 faction or Persian bribery. AVe should enact over again the wretched 
 histories of Modern Italy in the presence of the powerful monarchies of 
 France and Spain, and of the Othos, Fredericks and Hapsburgs — their 
 arena of intrigue and battle, trampled of foreign policies and war. Now 
 this is no fancy picture ; it is a prophecy of all past history. Incredulity 
 here is infatuation. Are we better or wiser than past times, that like 
 causes shall no longer produce like effects ? Our present history, certainly, 
 of tumult for disunion, springing from the bosom of unparalleled prosperity 
 and profound peace, is encouraging no such conceit of superior reason, 
 sobriety or goodness. 
 
 Meantime, with the perishing of our Union, our great continental system 
 of commerce and of internal iinprovruients, whether of private or govern- 
 mental enterprise, disappear. Amid the distrusts and rivalries, the restric- 
 tions, taritl's, passports and conflicting policies, of alien States, and amid the 
 tumults of factions, forays and wars, this of course would perish. Our com- 
 mercial systems could no longer adjust themselves to the correspondencies 
 and configuration of a vast and imperial field, to a continental arrangement 
 of rivers and mountains. The strength of thirty millions of people could 
 no longer bi; levied to grapple with the desert and mountain. Our Pacific 
 railroad would fade out, like Alexander's projected pathway of occidental 
 traffic, for ages. Our dream of the trajection of Asiatic trade, through 
 peaceful and prosperous millions, of one speech under one empire, from 
 ocean to ocean, without passports or customs, must vanish with the phan- 
 tom of an imperial past. And not only so, but the land is meanwhile 
 devoured by its multiplied exactions. Instead of the civil, military and 
 diplomatic budget of one nation, it now has to bear that of nearly two 
 score of difft-rent sovereignties, each compelled to keep a large military 
 force to guard its frontier and collect its customs. 
 
 Industry, art and enterprise, pressed down undi r these burdens, can no 
 loiig'M-, as now, enter into competition with the markets of the world. 
 Impoverishment sets in, like consmiiptioii on our peoples, while passport 
 and custom-house systems vex the frontier, and the tax-gatherer, together 
 with a despotic police and espionage, harasses the interior. Under just 
 such influences as these, and springing too from just such a condition as 
 
15 
 
 disunion now otters us, the richest prosperities hnvc faded away ; whole 
 climes have withered, and the curse of ages descended on the fairest earth 
 and sky. 
 
 Moreover, with the perishing of our unity of legislation, administration 
 and judicature in matters of national order, countless irritations would 
 arise, and countless discrepancies and antipathies would be loosed, that 
 would fret more and more toward hatred and war. Those prerogatives of 
 the central government, which now are the means and guarantee of 
 domestic tranquillity, when broken up and distributed among some thirty- 
 three sovereignties — soon to be multiplied to we know not how many — 
 would be constantly clashing at State bordei's. This political structure 
 broken up, all the edges of the fracture will be sharp and dentated. 
 Oppositions of policies and interests, and of laws and judicatures, contests 
 of claims extending across State lines, and now of national reach and 
 relation, will then constantly deepen the contrasts and repugnancies of 
 civilization. Alien sentiments will more and more grow up, and more 
 and more they will be exasperated to dislike and hate of neighbors as 
 foreigners. How long would this continue before the frontier would 
 throng with armed men ? Yea, each State, then a nation, must per- 
 manently be so thronged, watching and guarding against its neighbor, 
 with fortress and standing armies. The frontiers must permanently bristle 
 with forts and bayonets, and be vexed with passports, customs, spies, and 
 gendarmes. And how long before war would tiash along such frontiers ? 
 A spark would ignite it. Occasions would never be wanting. Antipathies 
 and resentments, and discrepancies of interest or of civilization, if they will 
 not allow our living together as one country, will not, we may be assured, 
 leave us peacefully side by side with each other as foreign ones. Especially 
 is this hopeless, when we reflect that the original difficulty is not political, 
 but intellectual and moral, arising, not from unity of government nor 
 removable by political severance, but having its ground in diversities of 
 civilization, culture, social order, political economy, and moral convictions; 
 convictions amenable only to reason and religion, and not to be arrested 
 by State lines or prohibitory laws or armed men, but only by a border of 
 desolations over which no social relations should stretch, no press, railroad 
 or telefrraph should extend the contagion of thought, and no living breath 
 might pass. Indeed, that strife, upon which, as a ground-swell, all other 
 strifes of the present crisis arise, and which it is hoped to quell by dis- 
 union, would burn all the more fiercely for the proposed remedy ; a 
 remedy which, even regarded from the stand point of those who use it, 
 seems like stopping the plague, bj[ breaking down the walls of a pest house. 
 The evils complained of would be cured by dissolution no more than would 
 cholera. They would ^soon, indeed, acquire four-fold exasperation, and 
 
IG 
 
 without present restraint. How long could this continue without inflam- 
 ing into war ? especially as then we would have no longer any Supreme 
 Court as common arbiter. 
 
 In this respect, the anticipated position of these States, after dissolution, 
 contrasts fearfully with the present. The Federal Judiciary aboHshed, the 
 sword alone is umpire. Might alone makes right. Our judicial process is 
 war. Our court rooms widen to the field of battle. In each such quarrel, 
 too, each i);uty, aiming to strengthen itself by alliance, would draw as 
 many neighbors as it could lay hold of, into the conflagration. And on 
 every side animosities, grudges, antipathies and counter claims would never 
 be wanting, along which would kindle the contagion of war. 
 
 And even if these causes are insufficient, and evil and ambitious insti- 
 gators among ourselves shall be quiet, all around will be foreign powers, 
 who nuiy think they Hud their interest in our weakness and quarrels, and 
 whose intrigue and gold would not be wanting to stir up war ; till, as 
 Philip was called in at last as President of the Hellenic Amphictyony, so 
 we should inaugurate some Foreign Power as our Supreme Court, our 
 Protector, our Master. 
 
 Indeed, abolish this single feature of our Constitution — a Supreme 
 Federal Tribunal — and you open the closures of the pit. Violence, tumult, 
 rapine, massacre, war — an infernal troupe — will enter this land through a 
 breach in this National Union, wandering and wasting, till they devour 
 it. And over it, and around it, as a quarry, meanwhile will wait foreign 
 intrigues, corruption and ambition, like vultures around a field of carnage. 
 
 Such results from National Disunion are plainly prophesied by history, 
 and indeed foreshadowed in the present condition of sentiments and aftairs. 
 Earth breeds the same race of men now as of old. If we tread their paths, 
 we shall dash on their Kiiin. The past warns us, no strifes are like those 
 of brothers ; no wars like civil wars. Community of blood and civilization 
 seems only to work the fiercer and more cruel hate. Few wars have been 
 so atrocious as those between Judah and Israel, after the peaceful realm of 
 Solomon was snndered. 'J'lie I'eloponesian war — a war among States 
 related to each other in many respects as we are — breaking out after an 
 era of prosperity and glory, raged witli atrocity and cruelty beyond the 
 common measure of barbaric war ; and the strife they opened blazed on 
 unexliiiguishable from age to age, till it burned up the land. It became 
 desolations; and the wilderness and wild beast returned attain. The wolf 
 and the banditti hunted together over the lands, before rich with cities of 
 opulence and art, a di-iise and ])rosper()iis popidatioii, and with vineyards 
 and olive groves. A blight seemed to have fallen on earth and air and on 
 man. Art with nature seemed to have perished from the clime of beauty; 
 and genius with love and honor, from the human soul. Even at the close 
 
17 
 
 of the Peloponesian war — which raged on for a generation, extending its 
 contagion to three continents and over all the seas, until it burned through 
 the whole Greek world — at the close of this war, historians tell us, humanity 
 seemed exhausted ; all truth and brotherhood, all enthusiasm, generosity 
 and benevolence, had perished : no freshness of life was left to men or 
 society ; no youthful look toward the future ; no faith in men or God or 
 virtue ; the demoralization was dreadful. But the wound of civil strife 
 was not staunched, when the victim seemed exhausted. It was incurable. 
 The plague of discord had struck through the entire Hellenic race and 
 burned on like a poison in the veins, through two-and-a-half centuries. 
 All power of permanent confederacy, or even of peace among the Greek 
 States, seemed gone. There was no public spirit, no mutual trust : The 
 pulse of Hellenic life, with occasional convulsions rending the victim and 
 ultimating in death spasm, ebbed on feebler and colder. In those sad 
 ages, men lived on without greatness or honor, without generous aspiration 
 and almost without interest and without hope. Civil Disunion, like a 
 Nemesis from fraternal blood that could not be Jaid, wandered over the 
 land from age to age, till it devoured it and the inhabitants thereof; that 
 curse, which, if we now wickedly let it loose on these lands and if history 
 follows with us her way-marks in other ages, will rage, unappeasable like 
 a doom of God, till it has consumed them. 
 
 The Thirty Years ^Xav amid the confederated States of Germany in the 
 seventeenth century, that burned through one entire generation till four- 
 fifths of the entire population were devoured by it and the forest and the 
 beast of prey returned upon the land again — this may instruct us what to 
 dread when discord bears her torch through a system of States like ours. 
 Entire realms were ruined and the civilization of the land beat back for a 
 century. It has not even recovered fully to this day. 
 
 Italy may also warn us of the effects of Disunion amid small States con- 
 stituting naturally one country : Italy brilliant with wealth and culture, 
 but for centuries incapable of peace ; cursed with eternal feuds, and meshed 
 in endless intrigues and conspiracies, and varying a history of internal 
 faction and assassination, with the calling in of foreign arms; the quarry of 
 surrounding despotisms, convulsed within and torn from without, till after 
 the ravages of Charles the Vlllth, as one of her own sons describes her, she 
 resembled the dessicated skin of a victim lacerated and drained by a beast 
 
 of prey. 
 
 For more than a thousand years, the curse of implacable incurable dis- 
 union, amid the petty States of her peninsula has paralysed and poisoned 
 
 her. 
 
 Now, she has the sympathies- and prayers of the good throughout the 
 world, as she is heroically struggling to heal her long plague of political 
 2 
 
18 
 
 division, and to extricate herself from that imbroglio of petty nationalities, 
 that have made her, for opprobrious centuries, powerless abroad, and cor- 
 rupt, wretched and enslaved at home; defeating all those gifts of nature 
 and genius that made her once lord of the earth. Slowly, toilsomely, 
 bloodily, through ages of sin and shame and sorrow, she now emerges 
 from that Tartarus. Shall we now plunge our land into it ? Shall we, 
 fur alleged present grievances, real or imaginary, cast away that Union 
 vainly sought for by otl'cr nations tlirough centuries, with sighs, and tears, 
 and blood? Once cast away, we may for ages invoice it, but it will not 
 return. 
 
 But what Schiller or Thucyides shall recite the last days of this North 
 American Republic ? What Macchiavelli or Tacitus, narrate its process 
 of dissolution ? When taxation, and corruption and tyranny and war shall 
 unite to slay it ? What hope shall there be for the independence of small 
 States in these times of violence ? Must they not be crushed in the coUis- 
 sion of larger ones like a small craft between men of war? Yea, what 
 hope shall there be for the political liberties of any, large or small ? The 
 standing force requisite to be kept up by States so situated in relation to 
 eacli other, and in some of them to keep down large servile populations, 
 surrounded by foreign States of alien institutions, and to enforce the 
 police and ci-nsorship necessary for this purpose, upon thought and speech, 
 could hardly consist with the liberties of the small sovereignties that must 
 sustain them. 
 
 Un<juestionabIy the exigencies, the very existence of such States in the 
 circumstances, will require a strong, consolidated, centralized government. 
 The elements may seethe for a while after the act of dissolution. It will 
 be difficult for States or men to recombine and to trust each other in any 
 new confedtTacy after such violation of the old ; and a chapter of Mexican 
 or Central American History may await us. But from the necessities of 
 the case, this cannot last. The ruin will at length crystallize, but it will 
 be in adamantine and ilungeou forms. Let us not deceive ourselves. The 
 loss of liberty — <h-spotism — probably military despotism — according to all 
 indications of history and philosophy, certainly lies not far in the distance 
 in the path of disunion, to those who shall lead in the movement. The 
 pH'-sioii and irritation required to tear down our system, give poor promise 
 of ability to build another in its pliic.-. If directed by supposed interest, 
 ftuch a course is a drfndfnl mistake; if by resentment, it is suicide. 
 
 It is sad attem|iting to trace the processes of dying States — States that 
 die on, after liberty itself is dead ; to watch the progress of internal corrup- 
 tion ami external violence — the vulture an<l the worm — that work the disso- 
 lution of the corpse of empires. It were sad attempting to forecast through 
 what progressive stages, what death spasms, what convulsions and baffled 
 
19 
 
 struggles foi" recovery, this country may go down to the sides of the pit ; 
 as the Grecian States vainly strove through ^Etolian, Spartan, Achaian con- 
 federations, to arrest the destiny that dragged them down. Nor is the 
 problem soluble to mortal prophecy. Heaven grant that it may never be 
 solved by our experience ! But argument from history seems clearly to 
 open before disunion, a valley of death-shade, along which waits the inevit- 
 able hour — reached through what processes who shall tell ! — when the Muse 
 of History, laying her hand on the heart of our Republic, that has once 
 beat so proud and strong, with glorious memories and hopes, and finding its 
 convulsive throb stilled, shall pronounce it " dead ;" and wretched ages be- 
 yond, like those that waited on dead empires past, shall enter to bury her. 
 Let us not deceive ourselves, nor think to hide things by euphemism. 
 Call disunion whatever else you may, call it not Peace. Whatever it may 
 be in theory, and should be in reason, whatever it might be in certain 
 contingencies, whatever it may be at first and in earlier stages, to us, in 
 our circumstances and relations, in the end its name is War! the war of 
 brothers — sectional, civil, social, domestic — and a war of ages. Nor call 
 it Order. It is Anarchy rather — dissolution, not of our National Union 
 alone, but of sections, states, counties, municipalities, classes, interests, 
 institutions, and whatever element of our civilization the solvent poison 
 can enter. Nor call it Liberty; for a government strong enough to bind 
 up the ruin it opens, must be no other than Despotism; not only political, 
 but over speech and thought; whose iron shall not only fetter the body, 
 but enter into the soul. Nor call it Life. For the pressure requisite to 
 stifle anarchy, and coerce the loosened and maddened elements to order, 
 must suffocate and crush life, political and social. Its name is Death. 
 And Dissolution — the plague we now invoke — will work on after political 
 death, still preying on the body of our civilization, like a worm in the 
 grave ; while a Skepticism, sneering at patriotism, honor, heroism, liberty 
 and God, shall come forth like a Ghoul from the tomb, to disport itself 
 with the ashes of our Great Dead, and empoison the air of the world for 
 centuries. 
 
 But I will not look that way. I turn from the terrible i:>icture to which 
 I have pointed to enhance our gratitude to our God for our National 
 Union, preserved to us, notwithstanding our unworthiness, so long, and to 
 stimulate our prayer and effort that it niay still stand between us and the 
 abyss into which we have looked. I thank God that the hideous picture 
 of it sketched, is yet but picture ; that yet we can stretch our hands across 
 State lines and clasp with brethren ; that yet we can look from the 
 Gulf to the Lakes, and from ocean to ocean, and say. Oar Country. May 
 God give us largeness of heart' this day to cherish, and love, and pray 
 for all. 
 
20 
 
 In behalf of the race of iiiaii, 1 thank God that a Union with wliieh is 
 garnered up so much of hope for human liberty, has lasted so long. I say, 
 so much, not all. For associated with my thanksgiving for National 
 Union this day, is my gratitude to God for the assurance that its ultimate 
 triumph is placed above the caprices and passions of this hour; indeed, far 
 above any smgle National experiment. Our failure may be the failure of 
 the present historic cycle ; may drive society wide of its present course 
 through other disastrous despotic ages. But the Goal is ultimately cer- 
 tain, forewritten in prophecy and in history. God's Kingdom, that ot 
 Truth, Love and Liberty, shall yet live, and shall surely triumph. High 
 above the policies or passions of the hour, above the change of empires 
 and systems, stands the eternal ordinance, " Lift up your eyes to the 
 heavens, and look upon the earth beneath : the heavens shall vanish away 
 like smoke, ami the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that 
 dwell therein shall die in like manner: but my salvation shall be forever, 
 and my righteousness shall not be abolished." * 
 
 * Isaiah 51 : 6. 
 
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