Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.Stowe, Harriet Beecher
History
Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
United States -- Biography; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Biography
"As I look, sir, to the smiling valleys and fertile plains of Kansas,
and witness there the sorrowful scenes of civil war, in which, when
forbearance at last ceased to be a virtue, the Free State men of the
Territory felt it necessary, deserted as they were by their Government,
to defend their lives, their families, their property, and their
hearthstones, the language of one of the noblest statesmen of the
age, uttered six years ago at the other end of this Capitol, rises
before my mind. I allude to the great statesman of Kentucky, Henry
Clay. And while the party which, while he lived, lit the torch of
slander at every avenue of his private life, and libelled him before
the American people by every epithet that renders man infamous, as a
gambler, debauchee, traitor, and enemy of his country, are now engaged
in shedding fictitious tears over his grave, and appealing to his old
supporters to aid by their votes in shielding them from the indignation
of an uprisen people, I ask them to read this language of his, which
comes to us as from his tomb to-day. With the change of but a single
geographical word in the place of "Mexico," how prophetically does
it apply to the very scenes and issues of this year! And who can
doubt with what party he would stand in the coming campaign, if he
were restored to us from the damps of the grave, when they read the
following, which fell from his lips in 1850, and with which, thanking
the House for its attention, I conclude my remarks.
"But if, unhappily, we should be involved in war, in civil war, between
the two parties of this Confederacy, in which the effort upon the one
side should be to restrain the introduction of slavery into the new
Territories, and upon the other side to force its introduction there,
what a spectacle should we present to the astonishment of mankind,
in an effort not to propagate rights, but--I must say it, though
I trust it will be understood to be said with no design to excite
feeling--a war to propagate wrongs in the Territories thus acquired
from Mexico! It would be a war in which we should have no sympathies,
no good wishes--in which all mankind would be against us; for, from
the commencement of the Revolution down to the present time, we have
constantly reproached our British ancestors for the introduction of
slavery into this country."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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