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eracy of States, the peer and equal of New York." She was going to settle for herself the time, the mode and manner of redress, and this would include the action of this very committee. In America, the State was the principal; the Representative, the agent. "I tell the North that Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina are certain to secede from this Union within a short period; Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas are certain to follow within six months." Hawkins, like Iverson, saw an obstacle in Governor Houston, but unlike Iverson, he did not suggest assassination to remove him. He only hampered Texas. But, said Hawkins, "Texas may be compelled to commence her action with revolution at home."

This precipitated a scathing and rather personal review of the committee, but it also brought out some sectional opinions. "There is not upon your committee," said Clement L. Vallandigham, of Ohio, "one solitary Representative east of the Rocky Mountains, of that mighty host, numbering one million six hundred thousand men, which for so many years has stood as a vast breakwater against the winds and waves of sectionalism, and upon whose constituent elements, at least, this country must still so much depend in the great events which are thronging thick upon us, for all hope of preservation now or restoration hereafter. I speak now as a Western man, and I thank the gentleman from Florida heartily for the kindly sentiments towards that great West, to which he has given utterance. Most cordially I reciprocate them, one and all. We of the Northwest have a deeper interest in the preservation of this Government in its present form than any other section of the Union. Hemmed in, isolated, cut off from the seaboard upon every side, a thousand miles and more from

the mouth of the Mississippi, the free navigation of which, under the law of nations, we demand, and will have at every cost; with nothing else but our other great inland seas, the lakes, and their outlet too, through a foreign country; what is to be our destiny? We have fifteen hundred miles of southern frontier, and but a little narrow strip of eighty miles or less from Virginia to Lake Erie, bounding us upon the east. Ohio is the isthmus that connects the South with the British possessions, and the East with the West. The Rocky Mountains separate us from the Pacific. Where is to be our outlet? What are we to do when you shall have broken up and destroyed this Government? We are seven States now, with fourteen Senators and fifty-one Representatives, and a population of nine millions. We have an empire equal in area to the third of all Europe, and we do not mean to be a dependency or province either of the East or of the South; nor yet an inferior or secondrate power upon this continent, and if we cannot secure a maritime boundary upon other terms we will cleave our way to the seacoast with the sword. A nation of warriors we may be, a tribe of shepherds, never." And Vallandigham complained that this imperial domain was not represented on the committee. But the pith of his thought was the fate and probable action of the West. Had the Mississippi River emptied into Delaware Bay doubtless Vallandigham, for the reasons he now gave, would have said to the secessionists, "May not a people do what it will with its own?" And the shepherds of the West might not have turned into a nation of warriors in the South.

1

"When the question of secession comes up in a practical form," said John A. McClernand, of Illinois, "I 1 Globe, December 10, 1860, p. 38.

THE APPROACHING STRUGGLE DEPICTED.

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will be prepared to take my position upon it, in the view of the House and of the nation, and having taken it, will endeavor to maintain it to the utmost of my limited influence, and by all the legitimate means in my power;" words singularly prophetic of his own career when the question came. "Until then I will forbear to enter into it, preferring rather to obey the dictate of the scriptural proverb which dictates that 'sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' I will only say now that no more fearful question could engage the attention of this body. It discloses to my vision a boundless sea of horrors. Peaceable secession, in my judgment, is a fatal, a deadly delusion. The Government, in itself may be weak, comparatively weak, but is strong in the moral sentiment and patriotic feeling of the country. In this respect, it is or at least ought to be, the strongest government in the world. Bound together as one people, by a common language, a common religion, common rivers, mountains and lakes, civil war alone, in my opinion, can sunder us into broken fragments, a tremendous civil war, such a war as would choke our rivers with carnage, and discolor our inland seas with human blood; such a war as never before fattened the earth with human slaughter. It would not be a war in which Greek met Greek, but Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Saxon; father, son; and brother, brother. If I am asked, why so? I retort the question, How can it be otherwise? How are the questions of public debt, public archives, public funds, and other public property, and above all, the question of boundary to be settled? Will it be replied, that while we are mutually unwilling now to yield anything, we will be mutually willing, after a while, to concede everything? To concede everything by and for the sake of national duality? Who believes this? What, too, 1 Globe, December 10, 1860, p. 39.

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THE WEST AND THE NATION.

would be the fate of the youthful but giant Northwest, in the event of a separation of the slaveholding from the non-slaveholding States? Cut off from the main Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico on one hand, or from the eastern Atlantic ports, on the other, she would gradually sink into a pastoral state, and to a standard of national inferiority. This, the hardy and adventurous millions of the Northwest would be unwilling to consent to. This they would not do. Rather would they, to the last man, perish upon the battlefield. No power on earth could restrain them from freely and unconditionally communicating with the Gulf and the great mart of New York." Speaking then of the Southern States he continued: "If they are wronged, let them seek redress in the Union; first by all lawful methods, and next, if necessary, by other means, but still as members of the Confederacy. Abandoning us, however, to our fate, what must be our revulsion of feeling towards the South? I will not undertake to say, only so far as to predict that it would consolidate the two sections, severally, against each other in fierce and unrelenting strife." But McClernand put the responsibility of civil war upon the Republican party, because of "their persistent and dogmatical adherence to their anti-slavery proviso, and to their opposition to the principles or details of the fugitive slave law." The Speaker had ignored the Douglas Democrats, was his complaint, had "proscribed them,” as he said, "by excluding a million and a half of Northern Democrats from any representation on the committee."

"I look upon secession," said Daniel E. Sickles, of New York, "as the last dread alternative of a free State when it has to choose between liberty and injustice. In our federal system the recognized right of secession is a con

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servative safeguard. It is the highest constitutional and moral guarantee against injustice, and, therefore, if it had been always and universally acknowledged as a rightful remedy, it would have contributed more than all else to perpetuate the Union, by compelling the observance of all their obligations on the part of all the States. The opposite dogma, which is so extensively believed at the North, that no matter what wrongs a State may have to endure, it may and ought to be compelled by force to remain in the Union, even as a conquered dependency, is a most dangerous error in our system of government, and has contributed largely to the existing anarchy." He put the responsibility with the Republican party. It was an illusion that the responsibility rested with the South. If the Speaker had committed a fault it was in not putting more ultra-Republicans among the Thirty-three. Let the President-elect speak a few words of conciliation. If he "would cause it to be made known to all the applicants for office under his administration, that he will not entertain the application of any man who is in favor of the so-called personal liberty bills, or opposed to the faithful execution of the fugitive slave-law, if he will do that, plainly and in good faith, through his representative men, you will not hear the word 'slavery' for the next four years from the Republican party North, East or West." But this verbal remedy for the wrongs of the South was not the end of events. Secession might not prove merely a Southern question.

"The city of New York," he continued, "will cling to this Union while there is a hope left for its preservation, and she will hold all men to a just accountability for whatever woe shall betide the Confederacy; but when there is no longer a Union, proud as she is, and has been always, of her position as its metropolis, ready to bury everything