RETIREMENT OF SENATORS. . 55 revolt which were brought into their lives and fortunes of all her people." midst, could only have been maintained His associate, Stephen R. Mallory, folby the most friendly and earnest desire lowed in a gentle strain, "more in sorto preserve the blessings of peace for the row than in anger," invoking a peaceful whole country. States which had fully separation. determined upon revolt, up to the time of the actual resolve of their Conventions pronouncing the act of secession, were represented in Congress. As word came of the final defection, the members of the revolted States, deliberately and without impediment, took leave of their brethren, in various humors, according to individual tempers, from the pathetic to the defiant. The first of these withdrawals was of the South Carolina delegation of the House of Representatives, on the 21st of December, which was communicated in a brief letter to the Speaker. So far as the occasion admitted, it was courteously worded. A similar announcement was made by the Mississippi members, on the 12th of Jandary. Two days after, her Senator, Albert G. Brown, intimated his resignation. The formal leave-taking of his associate, Jefferson Davis, was delayed by illness till the 21st, when he made the act the occasion of a remarkable declaration of his sentiments. The two representatives of Alabama, Clement C. Clay and Benjamin Fitzpatrick next took their leave. Clay spoke for his colleague and himself in an harangue steeped with bitterness, the burden of which was the invasion by the North of the rights of slavery. He mentioned no other ground of difference. "It is now nearly forty-two years,” said he, "since Alabama was admitted into the Union. She entered it, as she goes out of it, while the Confederacy was in convulsions, caused by the hostility of the North to the domestic slavery of the South. Not a decade or scarce a lustrum has elapsed since her birth, that has not been strongly marked by proofs of the growth and power of that antislavery spirit of the northern people, which seeks the overthrow of that domestic institution of the South, which is not only the chief source of her prosperity, but the very basis of her social order and State polity." The indignant speaker then presented this fearful bill of indictment, all the items of which, it will be observed, have but one source It was a notable day in the Senate as the representatives of three States, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi, pro-and issue. "It (the anti-slavery spirit) nounced their farewells. David L. Yulee of Florida, led the way in a few temperately expressed remarks, in which he assigned sectional aggrandizement as the cause of the defection of his State. "She sees fast rising above all others," said he, "the great issue of the right of the people of the States to sovereignty and self-government within their respective territorial boundaries; and in such an issue she is prepared to devote the denied us Christian communion, because it could not endure what it styles the moral leprosy of slaveholding; it refused us permission to sojourn, or even to pass through the North, with our property, it claimed freedom for the slave if brought by his master into a northern State; it violated the Constitution and treaties and laws of Congress, because designed to protect that property; it refused us any share of lands acquired mainly by our diplomacy and blood and treasure; it the separation of his State, by her own refused our property any shelter or se- act, from the Union; he expressed his curity beneath the flag of a common approval of the measure, and reminded government; it robbed us of our prop- the members that he had in that house, erty and refused to restore it; it refused in their presence, for many years, advoto deliver criminals against our laws, cated the doctrine of secession, "as an who fled to the North with our property essential attribute of State sovereignty." or our blood upon their hands; it threat- It might be inferred, that assuming the ened us, by solemn legislative acts, with right, he would give some adequate reason ignominious punishment if we pursued for its exercise.. It could hardly be supour property into a northern State; it posed that one who had held such high murdered southern men when seeking offices under the government, could be the recovery of their property on nor- ignorant of the import and responsibility thern soil; it invaded the borders of of the measure he had in hand. An exsouthern States, poisoned their wells, planation was certainly due from him for burnt their dwellings, and murdered his course. He gave it in these words :— their people; it denounced us by delib- "It has been a conviction of pressing erate resolves of popular meetings, of necessity, it has been a belief that we party conventions, and of religious and are to be deprived in the Union of the even legislative assemblies, as habitual rights which our fathers bequeathed to violators of the laws of God and the us, which has brought Mississippi into rights of humanity; it exerted all the her present decision." Simply the notion moral and physical agencies that human or fear that "we are to be deprived." For ingenuity can devise, or diabolical malice three score and ten years and more the can employ, to heap odium and infamy government of the United States had upon us, and to make us a by-word of performed its functions with paternal hissing and of scorn throughout the civ-kindness, without one single imputed act ilized world." Yet this climax, virulent of trespass upon the privileges or preand intolerable as it would seem, might, said Mr. Clay, have been endured some time longer, but for the republican platforms of 1856 and 1860, and the election of a President who promised "to disregard the judgments of your courts, the obligations of your Constitution, and the requirements of his official oath, by ap-is proving any bill prohibiting slavery in the Territories of the United States." rogatives of any one of the States, and now, on the mere supposition that she may at some unknown time, in some unknown way, do otherwise, an act of withdrawal constituting a child of the household, from whom love, honor and obedience might be challenged, an alien, avowed and justified. This senator, whose words are made. more memorable by his subsequent posiAfter a few words from Mr. Fitzpat- tion, proceeded: "I find in myself, perrick, Jefferson Davis closed the melan-haps, a type of the general feeling of my choly procession of departing senators. constituents towards yours. I am sure I With calmness, with courtesy, with an feel no hostility to you, senators from the approach even to the language of tender- North. I am sure there is not one of ness, he informed his brother senators of you, whatever sharp discussion there may LUGUBRIOUS FAREWELLS. have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you well; and such, I am sure, is the feeling of the people whom I represent towards those whom you represent. I therefore feel that I but express their desire when I say I hope, and they hope, for peaceful relations with you, though we must part. They may be mutually beneficial to us in the future, as they have been in the past, if you so will it. The reverse may bring disaster on every portion of the country; and if you will have it thus, we will invoke the God of our fathers, who delivered them from the power of the lion, to protect us from the ravages of the bear; and thus, putting our trust in God, and in our own firm hearts and strong arms, we will vindicate the right as best we may." And with such words as these on his lips, with his hand on the doors of the closed temple of Janus, in the very act of letting loose upon a continent the unutterable woes and sufferings of civil war, this plotter and accomplisher of sedition walked forth in peace from the sacred precincts of the capitol, and made his way in safety, unchallenged, to perfect his impious work in the banded rebellion of the South. A week later, Alfred Iverson, of Georgia, treated the Senate to another of these lugubrious farewells. His mood, as we have seen, at the opening of the session, was the truculent and defiant. He had now the satisfaction, of looking upon the accomplishment of two months of treasonable conspiracy, of reasserting, with fuller confidence, the imminent approach of the great slaveholding Confederacy of the South. Again he calculated the chances of war. 'You may," he said, with an anticipation of coming 57 evils, the necessity of which few were then disposed to contemplate, even in imagination, "you may possibly overrun us, desolate our fields, burn our dwellings, lay our cities in ruins, murder our people, and reduce us to beggary; but you cannot subdue or subjugate us to your government or your will. Your conquest, if you gain one, will cost you a hundred thousand lives and more than a hundred million dollars. Nay, more, it will take a standing army of a hundred thousand men and millions of money, annually, to keep us in subjection. You may whip us, but we will not stay whipped. We will rise again and again to vindicate our right to liberty, and to throw off your oppressive and accursed yoke, and never cease the mortal strife until our whole white race is extinguished and our fair land given over to desolation. You may have ships of war and we may have none. You may blockade our ports and lock up our commerce. We can live, if need be, without commerce. But when you shut out our cotton from the looms of Europe, we shall see whether other nations will not have something to say and something to do on that subject. 'Cotton is king,' and it will find means to raise your blockade and disperse your ships." On the 4th of February, two other memorable men, the representatives of Louisiana, John Slidell and Judah P. Benjamin, pronounced their valedictories on the floor of the Senate. Slidell spoke in a plausible vein, of the course of the new Confederacy in the adjustment of its relations with the government, the division of the public property, the free navigation of the Mississippi, and other matters of negotiation. All this was on the presumption of a peaceable separa |