Shades of these departed patriots! arise, and say to the sons of Carolina, it was the Union that made you free. Without it, you would yet be subjects, colonial vassals, and slaves; without it, the chains are now forging that will bind you to the thrones of despots. And could we stand with folded arms, and behold the Union dissolved? Could we see the seventeen thousand freemen of Carolina, who cling with the grasp of death to the banner of the Union, deprived of their privileges as American citizens, proscribed, disfranchised, expelled from all offices, civil and military, driven by glittering bayonets from the bench and the jury box, tried and convicted by judges and jurors sworn to condemn, attainted as traitors, torn from the last embraces of wives and children, consigned to the scaffold or the block, or immured within the walls of a dungeon, where the light of heaven or liberty should never visit them, with no consolation but their patriotism, and no companions but their chains? And, gracious Heaven, for what? Oh! Liberty, when was thy sacred temple profaned by deeds like this? Thy martyrs suffered only for clinging to the banner of the American Union. And could we see them torn from around that sacred banner, and move not to their rescue? No; the glow that beams on every countenance, the patriot's answer that speaks from every throbbing breast, proclaims that, as in '76 our fathers marched to free their sires from tyrants' power, so would their children go, to save from death or bondage Carolina's friends of union--with them, beneath the standard of our common country, to die or conquer.