they would not for a moment believe the stale complaint of sectional hate. I will tell you when you most cordially hate each other. It is when the ins are compelled to give place to the outs. When that army of political retainers, by the reverses of political fortune, has to take up its baggage, and abandon the tempting harvests of the capital; then it is you hate each other. Sir, if you desire to witness a grand living panorama of the sorrowful faces which were seen when the Jews were led into captivity, you have but to take a position upon one of these adjacent towers on the 4th of March, and behold these martyrs, now so devoted to country, when they are exiled from the places they now know and love so well.

Sir, I trust that in a grave public emergency like this, love of our whole country, and every part of it may banish all meaner emotions. In an hour like this I would scorn to cherish an unkind political feeling toward a human being. I feel that if I could, by immolating myself, add a day to the life of my country, I would freely make the offering; and I trust that all others will yet be found to yield much to preserve that Union with which are mingled the best hopes of mankind. Again I ask you, will you love each other better in that fearful hour of final separation? You will not. You cannot. But hate, undying hate, will foment and protract feuds and contests more bitter and unrelenting than those of the rival houses of York and Lancaster. Furthermore, let this Government be broken up, and the border slave States dragooned, first into revolution, and then into a southern confederacy, and ten years will not have elapsed before the slumbering fires of the present strife will be blazing there, and, perhaps, another revolution will mark our history. If this be not so, then all history is a falsehood, and its philosophy a lie. Hon. Emerson Etheridge, 1861.

THE SECESSION OF FLORIDA.

MR. SPEAKER, when the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed, when the Constitution was ratified, our western boundary was the Mississippi River. From that day to this, at the instance of southern statesmen, the area of this country has been vastly enlarged. Whatever territory the men of the South have asked Congress to acquire, the same has been acquired; whatever policy her representatives have advocated, whether financial or commercial, has generally prevailed; and in all these protracted struggles growing out of the slavery

question, the just and reasonable demands and guarantees required by us have been given.

The purchase of the Louisiana territory-a slaveholding country-was made at the instance of the people of the South. Three slave and two free States have already been formed within its limits. Its area was great. It now has vast resources, and in a few brief years it will have the wealth and population of a mighty empire. Fifty years hence, it will be more powerful in all that constitutes a state than was France when Napoleon, flushed with victory, first looked upon the "sun of Austerlitz." It was acquired, I repeat, by the negotiations of a southern president-northern representatives generously voting with those of the South, to advise the treaty and to contribute the purchase money. Subse quently, in 1819, we purchased Florida, in which slavery then and now exists. I mention Florida with somewhat of sorrow, I will not say with shame. But a few years ago the statesmen of this country were clamorous that Florida should be purchased by the Federal Government. For what purpose? Because, said they, that peninsula belongs to a foreign power. It is part and parcel of this continent; it is geographically a part of the United States; it commands the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico, and its hostile eye frowns upon our commerce-it must be ours. And, Sir, it was purchased-purchased at a cost of five million dollars. We have expended nearly fifty million in subduing and removing the savages. Millions more have been expended in erecting beacons and fortifications along her reefs, to protect the commerce of the whole country. Yet, after all these large expenditures, Florida, with but little over half the number of the voting population of the district I represent, secedes--goes out of the Union -carrying with her, not only our public lands, but the forts, arsenals, and fortifications which were placed there by this Fovernment for the benefit of the whole Union. And worse still she breaks the unity of our Government, and destroys the prestige which has attended her glorious career. I can better pardon South Carolina, for she was one of the glorious "old thirteen;" but little Florida-which to-day has barely population sufficient to protect herself from the alligators within her borders-is wholly without apology. Florida, like Louisiana, was purchased by the aid of northern representatives, and paid for by the money of all of our people; yet, without a single grievance, she is to destroy the Union of these States, to which she owes her very existence..

Hon. Emerson Etheridge, 1861.

TENNESSEE NOT TO BE DRIVEN INTO SECESSION.

MR. SPEAKER, as it is said that the cause of secession is gaining strength in Tennessee, I wish to say a few wordsmore, I confess, for the ear of the people of that State, than for this House. I wish to say to the people of Tennessee, that they, in the exercise of their rights as freemen, should survey the ground well, over which disunion asks them to tread. They should look at the origin of this movement, and to the instrumentality which has been used to bring it out. They should remember that in the cotton States-ay, sir, among Democrats who have rejoiced in all time past to magnify and glorify the power of the people-the men who have led this movement have not deigned to consult the people at all in regard to what they have done. They have not condescended to let them vote for secession, or no secession. I have no doubt that if the great heart of the southern people could be exhibited here to-day, the result would show that there are hundreds and thousands of men even in South Carolina, who, if they could be permitted to speak, would say they were against civil war, and against disunion. I doubt not that such is the fact in every southern State. But the tyranny of a despotic majority is there-a tyranny more to be dreaded than musketry or batteries. Freemen are so situated that they dare not speak their true thoughts. I would invoke the people of Tennessee also to remember the prophetic language, as it turns out to be, of Mr. Yancey: "We shall fire the southern heart, instruct the southern mind, give courage to each other; and, at the proper moment, by one organized, concerted action, we can precipitate the cotton States into a revolution." Not three years have elapsed since Mr. Yancey thus wrote. How wondrously has the southern heart been fired! How rapidly have seceding States given courage to each other! With no time for popular deliberation, the concerted movement long meditated has precipitated, hurried them headlong into revolution; and now they groan under taxation and prostrate credit, and hear "the thunder of the captains and the shouting."

This movement has been carried on to completion in South Carolina, without consultation with the border States as to her secession and hostile acts. She first put herself in the attitude of rebellion against the government; the other cotton States have followed in their turn; and now, whether right or wrong, willing or unwilling, they desire to drag us into the whirlpool of disunion. As a Tennesseean, I desire

to raise my voice against being driven into secession. I protest against tyranny from any quarter whatever-against the tyranny that is attempted to be practiced upon us in the North, when they would force opinions upon us contrary to our will, and against this fiercer tyranny in the South, that proclaims fidelity to the Union treason, and would drag every Southern State into the vortex of civil war. And, sir, I can say, so far as the people of Tennessee are concerned, unless I greatly misapprehend their sentiments and feelings, they are not a people to be coerced, either by the North or by the South. The men whose fathers fought at King's Mountain; the men who themselves fought at Talladega, at Ennickfaw, at the Horse-Shoe and upon the plains of New Orleans, and who sent their sons to fight at Monterey; whose blood, sir, was poured out like water at Cerro Gordo and Chapultepec; such men, Mr. Speaker, never will submit to dictation from any quarter under the heavens, be it North, or be it South. No, sir; they will not do it. I say to the people of Tennessee that they should resist this attempt to coerce them to do what they are otherwise unwilling to do; resist it, if need be, with arms, and unto the death. It is an insult that freemen ought not submit to. If Tennessee chooses to go out of the Union, let it be done by the deliberate and voluntary act of her own sons, without constraint, and without coercion. Let her go not as a seceder; but in a manner worthy of the volunteer State. Let her, like our revolutionary sires, have the boldness to go as a rebel, because she thinks the government has oppressed her, and because she has determined to throw off the yoke and risk all consequences.-Hon. Thomas A. R. Nelson, 1861.

THE SOUTH WARNED AGAINST MILITARY DESPOTISM.

IF war is to come upon us, if civil discord is to reign where peace so sweetly smiled before, the men who will have to fight the battles will not be your partisan leaders, who desire to be colonels and captains, majors and generals, governors and ministers; but it will be the farmers, the mechanics, and the laboring men of the country. I ask them-and I would to God that my voice could echo and reëcho from one end of my State to the other-are they willing to submit to this in order to build up a pampered aristocracy in the South? Are they willing to do it in order to establish a military despotism in the South? For, Mr. Speaker, not the least of all the evils

which threaten us in the Southern States, is the danger of military domination.

We have seen a great political movement, which gentlemen ludicrously call "peaceable secession," suddenly assume all the pomp and circumstance of glorious war, by arming and proposing to arm the whole of the Southern States. How easy for ambition to turn this movement against the liberties of the people! Peaceable secession! and yet the whole of the Southern States in arms. This is the manner in which they are attempting to carry out a long premeditated plot; and now, throughout the Southern States, the despotism of military power is beginning to be felt. Cockades are in the ascendant, and plowshares may rust. A reign of terror is already beginning to trammel free speech in the South and I doubt not that in many places the iron heel of military power is felt, and men opposed to rashness and precipitancy dare not speak as freemen should speak and as they would wish to speak, against secession. Let the people of Tennessee awake. Let them beware of military conquerors-and let the whole land beware of them; for, sir, if we shall overthrow the peaceful institutions which we have so long enjoyed; if we shall dissolve the Union of the American States, some Cæsar or Napoleon will soon trample down the liberties of the people and destroy the last hope and the last vestige of freedom upon the earth. How will the tyrants and despots of the world, who have delighted to deride free government, "laugh at our calamity, and mock when our fear cometh !" Let our people in Tennessee, and everywhere else, gather around our temple of liberty;—and, determined to oppose taxation, military despotism, a war of the sections, and strife such as earth has never seen-may they, with their own mighty arms, sustain its falling columns.

Hon. Thomas A. R. Nelson, 1861.

WHY DESTROY THIS GOVERNMENT?

MR. SPEAKER, why shall we destroy this Government? Is it because it was an easy matter to establish it? Go back to the days of the Revolution, and behold your fathers proscribed as traitors, abandoning their homes to the desolations of their foes, now flying before them, and then, half armed and almost naked, turning back upon their pursuers, with the blood trickling at every step from their unshod feet upon the frozen ground; and when you remember these and a thousand