The curse of slavery is gone. It was a joint heritage of woe, to be wiped out and expiated in blood and flame. The mirage of the Confederacy has vanished. It was essentially bucolic, a vision of Arcadie, the dream of a most attractive economic fallacy. The Constitution is no longer a rope of sand. The exact relation of the States to the Federal Government, left open to double construction by the authors of our organic being, because they could not agree among themselves, and union was the paramount object, has been clearly and definitely fixed by the three last amendments to the original chart, which constitute the real treaty of peace between the North and the South, and seal our bonds as a nation forever. The Republic represents at last the letter and the spirit of the sublime Declaration. The fetters that bound her to the earth are burst asunder. The rags that degraded her beauty are cast aside. Like the enchanted princess in the legend, clad in spotless raiment and wearing a crown of living light, she steps in the perfection of her maturity upon the scene of this, the latest and proudest of her victories, to bid welcome to the world. Need I pursue the theme? This vast assemblage speaks with a resonance and meaning which words can never reach. It speaks from the fields that are blessed by the never-failing waters of the Kennebec and from the farms that sprinkle the valley of the Connecticut with mimic principalities more potent and lasting than the real; it speaks in the whirr of the mills of Pennsylvania and in the ring of the wood-cutter’s axe from the forests of the lake peninsulas; it speaks from the great plantations of the South and West, teeming with staples that insure us wealth and power and stability, yea, from the mines and forests and quarries of Michigan and Wisconsin, of Alabama and Georgia, of Tennessee and Kentucky far away to the regions of silver and gold, that have linked the Colorado and the Rio Grande in close embrace, and annihilated time and space between the Atlantic and the Pacific; it speaks in one word, from the hearthstone in Iowa and Illinois, from the home in Mississippi and Arkansas, from the hearts of seventy millions of fearless, freeborn men and women, and that one word is “Union!” There is no geography in American manhood. There are no sections to American fraternity. It needs but six weeks to change a Vermonter into a Texan, and there has never been a time, when, upon the battle-field, or the frontier, Puritan and Cavalier were not convertible terms, having in the beginning a common origin, and so diffused and diluted on American soil as no longer to possess a local habitation or a nativity, except in the National unit.