The pages of the _Congressional Globe_ of 1860-61 make the two most
intensely interesting volumes in our country's history. They embrace the
last words that the North and South had to say to each other before the
doors of the temple of Janus were thrown open to the Civil War. As the
moment of parting approached, the language became plainer, and its most
marked characteristic was not anger, not hatred between disputants, but
failure to understand each other. It was as though the men on either
side were looking at an object through glasses of different color, or
arguing in different languages, or worshiping different gods. Typical of
the disputants were Davis and Trumbull, men of equally strong
convictions and high breeding, and moved equally by love of country as
they understood that term. Davis made three speeches, two of which were
on the general subject of debate, and one his farewell to the Senate.
The first, singularly enough, was called out by a resolution offered by
a fellow Southerner and Democrat, Green, of Missouri (December 10,
1860), who proposed that there should be an armed police force provided
by Federal authority to guard, where necessary, the boundary line
between the slaveholding and the non-slaveholding states, to preserve
the peace, prevent invasions, and execute the Fugitive Slave Law. This
scheme Davis considered a quack remedy, and he declared that he could
not give it his support because it looked to the employment of force to
bring about a condition of security which ought to exist without force.
The present want of security, he contended, could not be cured by an
armed patrol, but only by a change of sentiment in the majority section
of the Union toward the minority section. Upon this test he argued in a
dispassionate way for a considerable space, ending in these words:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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