Again: we are required by the constitution to protect you against the escape of your slaves through our Territories, to return them, and to return them in violation of common law, and against the principles of international relations acknowledged by the whole civilized world. Would France do that? Would Mexico do that? Would England do that? Would the Czar of Russia do that? No, sir. It is to us, and to us alone, that you are to look for whatever of safety, of succor, of sympathy you can find in the whole world, and -I had well nigh said-in the whole universe. Hon. E. D. Baker, 1861. A FREE PRESS. MR. PRESIDENT: do men propose to us seriously that we shall stop the right of free discussion; that we shall limit the free press; that we shall restrain the expression of free opinion everywhere, on all subjects, and at all times? Why, sir, in this land, if there be a man base enough, unreflecting enough, to blaspheme the Maker that made him, or the Saviour that died for him, we have no power to stop him. If there be the most bitter, unjust and vehement denunciation upon all the principles of morality and goodness, on which human society is based, and on which it may most securely stand, we have, for great and over-ruling reasons connected with liberty itself, no power to restrain it. Private character, public service, individual relations-neither these, nor age, nor sex, can be, in the nature of our government, exempt from that liability to attack. And, sir, shall gentlemen complain that slavery is not made an exception to that general rule? I hope they will see at once, that the attempt to require us to do for them what we cannot do for ourselves is unjust and cruel in the highest degree. Sir, the liberty of the press is the highest safeguard to all free government. Ours could not exist without it. It is like a great, exulting and abounding river. It is fed by the dews of heaven, which distil their sweetest drops to form it. It gushes from the rill, as it breaks from the deep caverns of the earth. It is augmented by a thousand affluents, that dash from the mountain top, to separate again into a thousand bounteous and irrigating streams around. On its broad bosom it bears a thousand barks. There genius spreads its purpling sail. There poetry dips its silver oar. There art, invention, discovery, science, morality, religion, may safely and securely float. It wanders through every land. It is a genial, cordial source of thought and inspiration, wherever it touches, whatever it surrounds. Upon its borders, there grows every flower of grace, and every fruit of truth. Sir, I am not here to deny that that river sometimes oversteps its bounds. I am not here to deny that that stream sometimes becomes a dangerous torrent, and destroys towns and cities upon its bank. But I am here to say that, without it, civilization, humanity, government, all that makes society itself, would disappear, and the world would return to its ancient barbarism. Sir, if that were possible, though but for a moment, civilization would roll the wheels of its car backward for two thousand years, and the fine conception of the poet would be realized: "As one by one, in dread Medea's train, Star after star fades off the ethereal plain, Sir, we will not risk these consequences, even for slavery; we will not risk these consequences even for union; we will not risk these consequences to avoid that civil war with which you threaten us;-that war which you announce as deadly, and which you declare to be inevitable. Hon. E. D. Baker, 1861. THE GARRISON OF SUMTER. Is there any point of pride which prevents us from withdrawing that garrison? I have heard it said by a gallant gentleman, to whom I make no special reference, that the great objection was an unwillingness to lower the flag. To lower the flag! Under what circumstances? Does any man's courage impel him to stand boldly forth, to take the life of his brethren? Does any man insist on going to the open field with deadly weapons, to fight his brother on a question of courage? There is no point of pride. These are your brethren; and they have shed as much glory upon that flag as any equal number of men in the Union. They are the men, and that is the locality, where the first Union flag was unfurled, and where was fought a gallant battle before our independence was declared-not the flag with thirteen stripes and thirty-three stars, but a flag with the cross of St. George, and the long stripes running through it. It was when the gallant Moultrie took the British Fort Johnson that the Union flag flew in the air for the first time; and that was in October, 1775. When he threw up a temporary battery with palmetto logs and sand, upon the site called Fort Moultrie, that fort was assailed by the British fleet, and bombarded until the old logs, clinging with stern tenacity to the enemy that assailed them, were filled with balls. But the flag still floated there, and though many bled, the garrison conquered. Those old logs are gone; the corroding current is even taking away the site where Fort Moultrie stood; the gallant men who held it now mingle with the earth; but their memories live in the hearts of a gallant people, and their sons yet live, and are ready to bleed and to die for the cause in which their fathers triumphed. Glorious are the memories clinging around that old fort, which now for the first time has been abandoned-abandoned, not even in the presence of a foe, but under the imaginings that a foe might come; and guns have been spiked and carriages burned where the band of Moultrie bled, and, with an insufficient armament, repelled the common foe of all the colonies. Her ancient history compares proudly with the present. Can there, then, be a point of pride upon so sacred a soil as this, where the blood of the fathers cries to Heaven against civil war? Can there be a point of pride against laying upon that sacred soil to-day the flag for which our fathers died? My pride, senators, is different. My pride is that that flag shall not be set between contending brothers; and that, when it shall no longer be the common flag of the country, it shall be folded up and hid away like a vesture no longer used; that it shall be kept as a sacred memento of the past, to which each of us can make a pilgrimage, and remember the glorious days in which we were born. Hon. Jefferson Davis, 1861. THE CAUSES OF SEPARATION. I CARE not to read from your platform; I care not to read from the speeches of your President elect. You know them as I do; and the man who is regarded by the country as the directing intellect of the party to which he belongs-the Senator from New York-has, with less harshness of expression than others, but with more of method, indicated this same purpose of deadly hostility in every form in which it could be portrayed. Did we unite with you in order that the powers of the general government should be used for destroying our domestic institutions? Do you believe that now, in our increased and increasing commercial and physical power, we will consent to remain united to a Government exercised for such a purpose as this? What boots it to tell me that no direct act of aggression will be made? I prefer direct to indirect hostile measures which will produce the same result, as I prefer an open to a secret foe. Is there a Senator upon the other side who will agree to-day that we shall have equal enjoyment of the Territories of the United States? Is there one who will deny that we have equally paid in their purchase, and equally bled in their acquisition by war? Then, is this the observance of your compact? Whose is the fault, if the Union be dissolved? If we are not equals, this is not the Union to which we were pledged; this is not the Constitution you have sworn to maintain, nor this the Government we are bound to support. I have heard with some surprise, for it seemed to me idle, the repetition of the assertion heretofore made, that the cause of the separation was the election of Mr. Lincoln. The man was nothing, save as he was the representative of opinions, of a policy, of purposes, of power, to inflict upon us those wrongs to which freemen never tamely submit. Senators, the time is near at hand when the places which have known us as colleagues laboring together can know us in that relation no more forever. I have striven unsuccessfully to avert the catastrophe which now impends over the country; and for the few days which I remain, I am willing to labor in order that the catastrophe shall be as little as possible destructive to public peace and prosperity. If you desire at this last moment to avert civil war, so be it; it is better so. If you will but allow us to separate from you peaceably, since we cannot live peaceably together—to leave with the rights we had before we were united, since we cannot enjoy them in the Union-then there are many relations which may still subsist between us, drawn from the associations of our struggles from the Revolutionary era to the present day, which may be beneficial to you, as well as to us. If you will not have it thus; if in the pride of power, if in contempt of reason and reliance upon force, you say we shall not go, but shall remain as subjects to you, then, gen tlemen of the North, a war is to be inaugurated, the like of which men have not seen. Sufficiently numerous on both sides, in close contact, with only imaginary lines of division and with many means of approach, both parties, sustained by productive sections, the people of which will give freely, both of money and store, will prolong and multiply conflicts indefinitely; and masses of men, sacrificed to the demon of civil war, will furnish hecatombs, such as the recent campaign in Italy did not offer. At the end of all this, what will you have effected? Destruction upon both sides, subjugation upon neither; a treaty of peace leaving both torn and bleeding; the wail of the widow and the cry of the orphan substituted for those peaceful notes of domestic happiness that now prevail throughout the land;-and then you will agree that each is to pursue his separate course as best he may. This is to be the end of war. If so, Is there wisdom, is there patriotism in the land? easy must be the solution of this question. If not, then Mississippi's gallant sons will stand like a wall of fire around their State; and I go hence, not in hostility to you, but in love and allegiance to her, to take my place among them, be it for good or for evil.-Hon. Jefferson Davis, 1861. THE ATTITUDE OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN. WHY, I ask, the present dread of disunion? Is it the election, in a perfectly constitutional mode, of a citizen as President, who is thought to hold principles fatal to Southern rights? Suppose he does; will he not be impotent for harm? His powers for any such purpose are subordinate to those of Congress, and the action of both, if illegal, can be revised and annulled by a patriotic judiciary which has ever shown itself capable and willing to uphold, with even hand, the rights of all the States. But is the President elect so hostile to southern rights? I do not deem it necessary or advisable, in the present excited state of the South, to hunt up what he may have said, in an electioneering canvass. One thing I know, the South did not always view him as especially dangerous, for certainly they did not pursue the course the best, if not the only one, even promising to defeat his election. A speech in the Senate that became at once a Southern and a Northern campaign document, used to defeat in the one section Judge Douglas, and in the other to promote the cause of Mr. Lincoln, was made |