Doc. 23.-SPEECH OF JEFFERSON DAVIS ON spoken of in the Declaration of Independence was LEAVING THE SENATE.

only narrow his mind and give up to party what was meant for mankind, but he must recede as submissively as a blind horse in a bark mill to every perverted opinion which sits, whip in hand, on the revolving shaft, at the end of which he is harnessed. To be a diamond of the first water, he must stand in the Senate House of his country, and in the face of a forbearing people, glory in being a traitor and a rebel. He must solemnly proclaim the death of the nation to which he had sworn allegiance, and with the grave stolidity of an undertaker, invite its citizens to their own funeral. He must dwarf and provincialize his patriotism to the State on whose local passion he thrives, to the country where he practises court, or to the city where he flaunts in all the meretricious dignity of a Doge of Venice. He can take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, but he can enter with honor into a conspiracy to overthrow it. He can, under the sanctity of the same oath, advise the seizure of forts and arsenals, dockyards and ships, and money belonging to the Union, whose officer he is, and find a most loyal and convenient retreat in State authority and State allegiance. He was ready to laugh in their faces if they only told him that, before the time when he was "muling and puking in his nurse's arms," there lived a very obscure person named GEORGE WASHINGTON, who, before he died, became eminent by perpetrating the immortal joke of advising the people of the United States, that it was of infinite moment, that they should properly estimate the immense value of their national Union

and he would not therefore utter, even in a whisper, one word which might tend to bring down the impending avalanche upon the quiet homes of the people. He would at the same time speak as a Southern man, identified with all the interests of the South. He would speak as a Western Virginian, and as the custodian of those who were not old enough to know the perils to which they were exposed, by those who were now riding on the crest of the popular wave, but who were, nevertheless, destined to sink into the very trough of the sea to a depth so unfathomable that not a bubble would ever rise, to mark the spot where they went so ignominiously down. Well might those who had inaugurated the revolution which was now stalking over the land, cry out with uplifted hands for peace, and deprecate the effusion of blood. It was the inventor of the guillotine who was its first victim, and the day was not far off when they would find among their own people, those who would have to rely upon the magnanimity of that population, whom they had most cruelly outraged and deceived. He had not the heart to enter into a detail of the arguments, or to express the indignant emotions, which rose to his lips for utterance. But before God, and in his inmost conscience he believed that Slavery would be crucified, should this unhappy controversy end in a dismemberment of the Union. If not crucified, it would carry the death-rattle in its throat. It remained to be seen whether treason could be carried out with the same facility with which it has been plotted. There was a holy courage among the minority of every State that might that they should cherish a cordial, habitual and imbe for the time overwhelmed. Lazarus was not movable attachment to it-that they should watch dead, but slept; and ere long the stone would be its preservation with jealous anxiety, discountenance rolled away from the mouth of the tomb, and they whatever might suggest a suspicion that it could would witness all the glories of a resurrection. It in any event be abandoned, and indignantly frown would not be forgotten, that among the clans of down the first dawning attempt to alienate any Scotland, beacon fires used to be lit by concerted portion of the country from the rest, or to enfeeble signals from crag to crag, in living volumes of the sacred ties which linked together its various flame, yet expiring even in its own fierceness, and parts. WASHINGTON Saw into the future, and dissinking into ashes as the fagots which fed them covered that disastrous period in our history against were consumed. To such a picture as that might be which he warned his countrymen when he told likened a rebellion such as political leaders some- them to "beware of geographical parties." These times excite for a brief hour; but the fires of re- extreme parties, North and South, had at last met. bellion burnt out with the fagots, and all was cold Their differences had been created and carried on and dark again. There was a striking contrast by systematic perversions of each other's aims and between such a movement, between such a rebel- objects. In the North it had been represented that lion as he alluded to, and the uprising of the masses the South desired and intended to monopolize with of the people in vindication of violated rights. As slave territory all the public lands, and to drive there. great a difference as there was between Snug, the from free labor, to convert every free State into joiner, and Bottom, the weaver, who "could roar common ground for the recapture of colored persons you as fierce as a lion, or coo you as gently asas slaves who were free, and to put the Federal Govsucking-dove." One was the stage-trick of a polit-ernment in all its departments under the control of a ical harlequin, the other was a living reality-the slave oligarchy. These and all other stratagems that one was a livid and fitful flame, the other was a could be resorted to aroused antagonistic feelings, prairie on fire, finding in every step of its progress which were welded with turbulent passions. As they food for its all-ravening maw. In the present emer-planted so they reaped. Now that victory had been gency, before this political conspiracy, it might be won by the Republican party, and the Government that he would stand alone with his colleague, (Mr. must be administered upon national policy; the fisWilson.) Let it be so. He sought no office. His sures in the ground occupied by them became appolitical race was very nearly voluntarily run. His parent, and hence there would necessarily be a large tory would record the proceeding of this turbulent defection in its ranks among the more ultra of its period, and time-the gentle but infallible arbiter adherents, who were, as a general thing, ideal, specuof all things earthly-would decide the truth. Upon lative, and not practical men. Out of actual power, that he would take his stand. They lived in an a party was apt to be radical. Vest it with power, age of political paradoxes. Broad, expansive love and it became conservative. This was the ordeal of country had become a diseased sentimentality. through which the Republican, like all other parties, Patriotism had become a starveling birdling, cling-was now passing, and he hoped for the peace of the ing with unfledged wings around the nest of twigs where it was born. A statesman must now not

country, and the triumph of practical, rather than ideal policy and measures. Herein consisted the

almost insuperable difficulty of coming to any feasible adjustment upon the existing discontents. The bulk of politicians, North and South, were bound by a past record and past professions. They were, in fact, thinking all the while "what Mrs. Grundy would say." The people themselves understood the cause of the difficulty, and if they but once interfered, the country would be saved. What was the difficulty now? He appealed whether it was not that in the hands of ultras, North and South, the slaveholder had been used as a shuttledore, who, for purposes utterly dissimilar, had been banded from South Carolina to Massachusetts, and from Massachusetts back again to South Carolina, until now the last point of endurance had been reached? Every violent word uttered North had been sent South, and the South had responded in the spirit. The abolitionist himself had been granted an audience in every Southern city, at every Southern political meeting, and the most violent insulting, agrarian speeches repeated even in the hearing of the slaves themselves. Was it not bumiliating to confess, that the very people who would burn in effigy, if not at the stake, a postmaster who would dare to distribute a copy of abolition speeches, honer as among their chief defenders the candidates who could quote the most obnoxious passages from all who had made Southern politics a vast hot-bed for the propagation of abolition sentiments? The two great sections of the nation stood at that moment towards each other like two encamped armies, waiting the orders to engage. The patriot planned, deplored, and appealed, but found little succor in the only quarter whence succor could come. The abolitionist revelled in the madness of the hour. He saw the cracks in the iceberg at last. To him the desert and the battle-field were alike welcome. He had knelt down in the desert with the camels, for a speck in the far distance showed that the simoom was coming. He looked into the future as into a dark cloud in the morning, when nothing but the early lark was on the wing. But soon history, like the light of the eastern horizon, would curtain back that cloud, and paint in blood's ruddiest tints field and forest, hamlet and city, the very mountains to their pine-crowned tops, and the great ocean itself, as an ensanguined flood, where brother contending with brother should find a nameless sepulchre. No anaconda, with his filthy folds around the banyan tree, threw out the venomous tongue and yearned with fiercer passion for the crushed bone and the pulpy flesh than he, the abolitionist, now expectant of his prey, yearned for this long-proposed repast Well might he cry that the day of jubilee had come. Well might he marshal his hosts to the last great war of sections and of races. Defeated, stigmatized, insulted, scoffed at, ostracized and gibbeted by his countrymen, he now gloated over the most fearful of all retributions. His deadliest foes in the South had now struck hands in a solemn league of kindred designs, and with exult-that they do not get, out of the Union, this equality ant tramp, stolidly marched, adorned, like a Roman ox, with the garlands of sacrifice, to their eternal doom. At this moment, when a sudden frenzy had struck blind the Southern people, this picture could not even be realized in all its horrors. When he looked at his country, and its present distracted and desolate condition, and its possible fate, he felt almost ready to close the quick accents of speech, and allow the heart to sink down voiceless in its despair. He would refer them to the words of LLOYD GARRISON, and demand what answer would be given to them. Mr. CLEMENS then referred to an article in the Liberator,

| which appeared a few days after the secession of South Carolina, in which GARRISON said that "the last covenant with death was annulled, and the agreement with hell broken, by the action of South Carolina herself;" closing with an appeal to Massachusetts, ending with the words, "How stands Massachusetts at this hour in reference to the Union?-in an attitude of hostility." Mr. CLEMENS then quoted from a speech of WENDELL PHILLIPS, delivered in the Music Hall, at Boston, a few days ago, in which PHILLIPS declared, "We are Disunionists, not for any love of separate confederacies," &c., ending with a reference to South Carolina, "and Egypt will rejoice that she has departed." The people had, therefore, arrayed against them these knights of a new crusade. The Constitution of the United States was the sanctified Jerusalem against which their deluded cohorts battled. They contended that the only mode to overthrow slavery was to overthrow the constitution. These men claimed that their allegiance was only due to the States wherein they lived. They claimed to be States' rights men of the strictest sect, and they would wield the legislative power of the State for the extinction of slavery, as South Carolina professed to wield it for the perpetuation of slavery. In this crisis it was meet that Massachusetts, so largely partaking of the common glory in the past-Massachusetts, where the first blood for American liberty had been shed-should rise superior to the convulsions of the hour, and give an earnest at least that the spirit of conciliation, of inter-State comity, of fraternal affection, was not yet wholly lost. As the worn traveller in the midst of the snows of the Alps lingered with delighted gaze upon the friendly light which peered from the windows of the convent where from the desolation of the storm around him he might at last find repose, so did he hail the little gleam of hope in the future. Mr. CLEMENS gave statistics of population and slavery in the Border States and in the Gulf States, for the purpose of showing, as he said, that there was an irreversible law of population governing the question, and that the South wanted population and capital rather than territory. If secession were allowed to be carried out, he would show them a Southern Confederacy from which every man would turn back affrighted and pale, because it would be on the bloody hand that his rights of property would have to depend. Slavery cannot expand rapidly, either within the Union or without the Union, so long as slaves remained at their present high prices. The only mode by which slavery could ever expand, was to reduce the price, and have a new source of supply. That was, in fact, the real design of the coast States. Mr. CLEMENS, in proof of this, referred to all the Southern Conventions of late years, and cited the admissions of Messrs. MILES, BONHAM, MCRAE, and CRAWFORD, in the House, to show that the object was the re-opening of the slave-trade. Suppose, said he,

which they now claim? That is a little problem in the Rule of Three, which will be ciphered out if these events are much longer pending. The Border Slave States might as well be prepared first as last for the realization of the truth. But where was slavery to expand? If the South left the Union, she would never get as much of the present territory as he could grasp in his hand. A war of thirty years would never get it back, nor could there ever be extorted from the North a treaty giving the same guarantees to slavery that it now had. Where was slavery to expand? Not to Central America, for England exer

cised sovereignty over one-half her domain. Not to Mexico, for England had caused the abolition of slavery there also. Their retiring confederates ought not to forget the events of 1834, when GEORGE THOMPSON, the English abolitionist, was sent to enlighten the dead conscience of the American people. In this connection he cited a letter from THOMPSON to MURRELL, of Tennessee, in which was this sentence: "The dissolution of the Union is the object to be kept steadily in view." In the event of a Southern Confederacy, there will be, besides the African slave-trade, other elements of discord and agitation. Slavery was the great ruling interest of the extreme States, while the other States had other great interests which could not be lightly abandoned. It would be for the interest of the coast States to have free trade in manufactured goods; but how would that operate on the mechanical and manufacturing industry of Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware? There would be, therefore, in the proposed Union, an antagonism quite as great as there ever has been in this. But if manufactories were to be protected and encouraged in the Border Slave States, their white population would increase so fast that they would be but nominally Slave States, and would finally become Free States. He appealed to the North to guarantee by constitutional enactments the principle secured by the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case. Let us feel, he said, that we have a country to save instead of a geographical section to represent. Let us act as men, and not as partisans, and the old Constitution, now in the trough of the sea, with battered masts and sails, will weather the storm.

-Times, Jan. 23.

It may well be imagined that the American people have been taken by surprise, both by the suddenness and violence of the outcry for secession, and by the ready concessions of the President. From the day the message appeared it was evident that South Carolina no longer formed part of the Union. The State had, by every organ which it possessed-by its Senators, its Representatives, by the voice of the Press, of the great slaveowners, and of the multitude-declared its resolution to sccede. Only courage like that of General Jackson could have quelled the "Gamecock State," as we perceive some of its admirers call it. But there was a middle path between civil war and such an instant recognition as Mr. Buchanan thought advisable. As one charged with the duty of upholding the Federal power, he might have easily used the authority vested in him to delay the movement, and give the Union and South Carolina itself time for reflection. Mr. Cass would, probably, deprecate holding a State by force, but he still declined to remain in the cabinet of the statesman who would not reinforce Fort Moultrie, and assert, during the short remainder of his term of office, the supremacy of the constitution. But as things went the action of South Carolina was predetermined. On the 20th of December that State seceded from the Union by an unanimous vote, and by this time has probably gained possession of all the Federal property within its borders, and established a post-office and customhouse of its own. The instruments which the Carolinians drew up on this occasion are singular and almost amusing. The philosophy and phraseology of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 are imitated. Whole paragraphs are copied from that famous document. The thoughts and style of Jefferson were evidently influenced by the great writers Doc. 25.-THE DISUNION MOVEMENT. of his age, and we may trace Montesquieu and Rousseau in every line of his composition. It is rather Never for many years can the United States be to interesting to see his language, which denounced the world what they have been. Mr. Buchanan's mes- King George's violation of the social compact, used sage has been a greater blow to the American peo- by a conclave of frantic negro-drivers to stigmatize ple than all the rants of the Georgian Governor or the conduct of those who will not allow a Southern the "ordinances" of the Charleston Convention. gentleman to bring his "body servant" into their The President has dissipated the idea that the territory. South Carolina, however, has shown wisStates which elected him constitute one people. dom in thus taking high ground. People are genWe had thought that the Federation was of the na-erally taken at the value which they set on themture of a nationality; we find it is nothing more than a partnership. If any State may, on grounds satisfactory to a local convention, dissolve the union between itself and its fellows; if discontent with the election of a President, or the passing of an obnoxious law by another State, or, it may be, a restrictive tariff, gives a State the "right of revolution," and permits it to withdraw itself from the community, then the position of the American people with respect to foreign Powers is completely altered. It is strange that a race whose patriotic captiousness when in the society of Europeans is so remarkable, should be so ready to divide and to give up the ties of fellow-citizenship for a cause which strangers are unable to appreciate. Still stranger is it that a chief magistrate, who would have plunged the world in war rather than a suspicious craft should be boarded by English officers after it had displayed the Stars and Stripes, or would have done battle against despots for any naturalized refugee from Continental Europe, should, without scruple, and against the advice of his own Secretary of State, declare the Federal Union dissolved whenever a refractory State chooses to secede.

selves, and Carolina does right to play the part of outraged patience and indignant virtue. She has declared, in the language of the Fathers of the Republic, that the Federal Union no longer answers the ends of its foundation by insuring the happiness and prosperity of South Carolina, and that the conduct of several States having been a violation of the compact made by all, South Carolina resumes her rights as a sovereign community, and will make war or peace, conclude treaties, or establish commerce, independently of the Government at Washington.

This bold course has its natural effect on the exciteable slaveowners. The secession of South Carolina has been received everywhere with enthusiasm. It may, perhaps, be said that the other States have feigned an approbation which they do not feel, in order to bring the North to terms by the menace of a Southern Republic. But, whether from feeling or policy, the secession cry was just at its loudest at the close of the year. It was looked upon as certain that six or seven States would separate from the Union in the first days of 1861. Georgia leads the van. The ordinance of secession was looked upon as already passed. The North Carolina Leg

islature had read a second time the bill for arming the State. Alabama had voted, by a large majority, in favor of secession. In Virginia, the oldest, the most conservative, and the most cautious of the Slave States, we are told that the secession feeling was gaining ground. State conventions are to meet in Florida on the 3d of January, in Alabama on the 7th, in Texas on the 8th, in Georgia on the 9th, and Doc. 26.-CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN SENAin Louisiana on the 23d; and our correspondent believes that "there will be a majority in each of them in favor of immediate and separate secession." Hence in a few days more the United States of America, as the world has hitherto known them, will cease to exist.