Presidential Candidates:: Containing Sketches, Biographical, Personal and Political, of Prominent Candidates for the Presidency in 1860Bartlett, D. W. (David W.)
History
Presidential Candidates:: Containing Sketches, Biographical, Personal and Political, of Prominent Candidates for the Presidency in 1860
Bartlett, D. W. (David W.)
Statesmen -- United States; United States -- Biography
"Sir, you are now proposing to carry out this Dred Scott decision
by forcing upon the people of Kansas a constitution against which
they have remonstrated, and to which, there can be no shadow of
doubt, a very large portion of them are opposed. Will it succeed?
I do not know; it is not for me to say, but I will say this, if
you force that, if you persevere in that attempt, I think, I hope
the men of Kansas will fight. I hope they will resist to blood and
to death the attempt to force them to a submission against which
their fathers contended, and to which they never would have
submitted. Let me tell you, sir, I stand not here to use the
language of intimidation or of menace; but you kindle the fires of
civil war in that country by an attempt to force that constitution
on the necks of an unwilling people; and you will light a fire
that all Democracy cannot quench. Aye, sir, there will come up
many another Peter the Hermit, that will go through the length and
the breadth of this land, telling the story of your wrongs and
your outrages; and they will stir the public heart; they will
raise a feeling in this country such as has never yet been raised;
and the men of this country will go forth, as they did of olden
time, in another crusade; but it will not be a crusade to redeem
the dead sepulchre where the body of the Crucified had lain from
the profanation of the infidel, but to redeem this fair land,
which God has given to be the abode of freemen, from the
desecration of a despotism sought to be imposed upon them in the
name of 'perfect freedom' and 'popular sovereignty!'"
ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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