Slavery -- United States; United States -- Politics and government -- 1861-1865; United States -- Race relations
Secondly, I charge them with openly attempting to deprive the people
of the slaveholding States of their equal enjoyment of, and equal
rights in, the common Territories of the United States, as expounded
by the supreme court, and of seeking to get the control of the federal
government, with the intent to enable themselves to accomplish this
result by the overthrow of the federal judiciary.
Thirdly, I charge that large numbers of persons belonging to this
organization are daily committing offences against the people and
property of the southern States which, by the law of nations, are good
and sufficient causes of war even among independent States; and
governors and legislatures of States, elected by them, have repeatedly
committed similar acts."
The facts are reviewed closely and summed up with extraordinary force; the
subject is treated as carefully under the law of nations as under the
constitution; the quotation from Mill's "Moral Sentiments," and that from
Thucydides, narrating the successful effort of Pericles in persuading the
Athenians to resort to war rather than concede the right of the Megareans
to receive their revolted slaves, are appositely used; the conviction that
there is no longer safety for the south in the union speaks out in every
line; and, with the exception of a few overheated passages, the entire
speech is from the loftiest height of the statesman who bids his people
arm for self-preservation. Just preceding the peroration there are
paragraphs describing nervously and graphically the great resources of the
south and her rapid development from feeble beginnings, one of which
especially emphasizes the past and present of Virginia, adding at the last
"One blast upon her bugle horn
Were worth a million men."
Next before this are words which invoke the northern democracy, but they
seem out of place and foreign. He abruptly ends his appeal to the national
classes who have his respect by saying, "The union of all these elements
may yet secure to our country peace and safety. But if this cannot be
done, peace and safety are incompatible with this union. Yet there is
safety and a glorious future for the south. She knows that liberty in its
last analysis is but the blood of the brave. She is able to pay the price
and win the blessing. Is she ready?"
The last three sentences are the southern correlative of Webster's soaring
when he magnified the union in his reply to Hayne. They were repeated over
and over by everybody with a wild acceptance utterly without parallel in
my knowledge, and after the election of Lincoln became the war cry of
Georgia.
The position taken in the very conclusion of this truly Periclean speech
is especially to be attended to here. It is that in the event of the
success of the republican party in the next presidential election the
people of his State must redeem their pledge made nine years before in the
Georgia Platform.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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