past, and humbly implore Him to keep us brothers yet, and to restore our beloved country to its former high estate.

while we faithfully seek to know and understand THE RIGHT.

THE NATURE OF THE UNION.

In the outset I would announce the character in which I appear before you to-day. I am not THE UNION-offspring of kingly oppression; here as a Northern or a Southern man, an nursed in a cradle of blood and fire, yet, HerEastern or a Western man; nor as a "Demo-cules-like, strong enough in its infancy to strancrat," which I have been; nor as a "Republi-gle the serpent that would have crushed it; recan. " which I am not, nor ever was; but sim- spected by every foreign nation, while yet the ply as an AMERICAN CITIZEN: more than con- dew of its youth is upon it; admired and ventent with the glory of that title, and ambitious erated by the oppressed of other lands; beloved only that it may not, now or ever, be sullied by every patriotic American; and alas! conby any act or word of mine. With profound temned and hated by none in the whole world reverence I have, from my youth, followed the but its own children: what is it? We were teachings of the great lights of our country, most of us born in the Union; we have been from WASHINGTON to the present day, and from reared under its benign influence; we have them learned to love the Union of the Ameri- daily and hourly experienced its protection and can people above all other human institutions. its benefits; we enjoy, through it, the name It is, with me, the preeminent embodiment of and heritage of American citizens; and yet we all national wisdom, beneficence, and greatness. are constrained in this day, when ungoverned At the age of sixteen I was solemnly sworn to malignity assails it on every side, and ruthless support the Constitution which sprung from hands are raised for its destruction, to ask the that Union, and on other occasions since, that strange and apparently superfluous questionoath has been repeated, until, by its influence, What is the UNION? My friends, strange as it combined with that of every year's added ex- may appear, upon this question turns much of perience, fidelity to that Constitution has be- the bitter controversy of this dark epoch in come an intimate portion of my very existence; our country's history. It lies in the foreground never to be destroyed, I hope, until that exist- of every discussion of existing complications; ence shall itself cease. Here and elsewhere, to and those complications have, to a great extent, you and to all, I declare that so far as any past grown out of the efforts of ambitious and unor existing causes of dismemberment are con- scrupulous men, to close the popular mind cerned, I am, in life or in death, for the UNION. against what the Union is, and to lead the peoA third generation has almost passed away, ple to regard it as what it is not, and thereby since on this day eighty-five years ago, the weaken their affection for it; a work better American people proclaimed themselves to be, fitted for fiends than for men, but which fiends as they had already in fact long been, ONE PEO- could not have done better than it has been PLE, and solemnly before the world united their done by men, who owe to the existence of the destinies for all future time as A NATION-a new, Union all the position and influence which they an independent, a republican, and as time has have sacrilegiously used for its destruction. As shown, a great nation. Three millions of peo-to ple were born as a Nationality on that day, baptizing themselves in streams of their own best blood, shed for liberty and national existence; to-day, the same Nation, grown to more than ten times its original numbers, a thousandfold increased in physical power, and standing so lately without a superior in moral greatness In the States where secession has been acomamong the nations of the earth, stains itself-plished, so far as ordinances of secession could O! shameful and horrid sight!-with the blood accomplish it, a period of more than thirty of its own people, shed in a strife provoked by years has been unintermittingly occupied by passion and madness-a strife such as men have their leading men, in convincing their people not seen before, and as the civilized world be- that the Union sprung from the Constitution of holds with perplexity, amazement, and dread. the United States; that the Constitution is a mere league between separate and sovereign States, from which any State has a constitutional right to withdraw at any moment, for any cause she may deem sufficient; that allegiance is due from every man, primarily and by superior obligation, to the particular State of which he may happen to be a citizen, and only secondarily and by inferior obligation, to the United States; and that the Government of the United States is a mere agent of the States, for particular purposes, with the privilege in any State to terminate the agency, as to itself, whenever it pleases.

Under such circumstances, you will not expect that any other topics than those which so sadly engross every mind, should be now presented to you. Our Country and its perils is the all-absorbing theme; involving an examination of the nature of our institutions, and a discussion on the startling rebellion which has burst upon us within the past six months, threatening their overthrow; and to that examination and discussion, in a frank and fearless spirit, but without exasperation or passion, I shall now address myself; earnestly invoking the supremacy of reason and of conscience,

them, we may leave them to time and to God; but with the errors they have disseminated we may never, without guilt, cease to contend; for, wherever they are implanted, the warm, all-embracing love of country, which should fill every American heart, withers and dies.

REBELLION RECORD, 1860-61.

"the delegates appointed by the good people of | stitutions fit to nurture freemen. They were, these Colonies," was the first general or national government which existed in America: and its very assembling was a declaration of Union, as its act, nearly two years afterwards, was a Declaration of Independence.

On the day, therefore, of the assembling of that Congress, the grand idea of American Union attained its full development, and expanded into action. That was the birthday of United America-the natal hour of our hallowed UNION. We celebrate the Fourth of July for our Independence; but we take no note of the fifth of September for the Union, without which Independence would never have been achieved, or, perhaps, meditated.

Having thus traced back the stream of Union to its source, let us observe for a moment the character of the people who then commingled their fate, and the circumstances with which they were surrounded. They were, in language, lineage, and institutions, essentially one people, | as they then organized and consolidated themselves into one nation. Nearly the whole body of them were immigrants from Great Britain, or their descendants. They all acknowledged allegiance to the British crown, from which they had received their possessions and their chartered privileges; and all looked to the common law of England for the regulation and maintenance of their individual rights of persons and property. Trade between the Colonies was unrestrained. An inhabitant of one Colony might inherit from an ancestor or kinsman dying in another. They were not only bound together by community of origin, but by ten thousand ties of kindred and affinity, interlaced through every city, village, and settlement, from the Piscataqua in the frigid North, to the St. Mary's in the flowery South. They were, with partial exceptions, of the same religious faith, and read in their common language the same Bible. The history of England was the history of their fathers and their ancestral institutions, and whatever of glory was there written was their common inheritance as Englishmen. They passed from Colony to Colony, and from point to point, as freemen, and were equally at home in every place, and equally protected everywhere by similar laws, framed and administered by themselves. There were among them no transmitted feuds or hereditary animosities, no strifes of rival leaders or wars of factions, no struggles for lawless supremacy of one Colony over another, no greed of conquest from each other: from all these curses, flowing from the unholy passions of men and of races, they enjoyed in their secluded home a happy exemption, through their essential unity. Subjected, as they were, to annoyances and perils from the savage foes around them, who long threatened their destruction, they united their forces in the common defence, and worked on bravely and sternly, in the common cause of securing for themselves and their posterity an abiding and peaceful home, under laws and in

in short, by every circumstance surrounding their homes, by their relations to each other, and by their own expressed assent, ONE PEOPLE; separated, it is true, into thirteen several mu diverse interests, but still not the less in mind, nicipal organizations, having in many respects in heart, and in destiny, ONE.

of that people; and I ask you if it is not trueNow, my friends, you and I are descendants if you do not in your hearts know it to be true Revolution through which they were called to that when, in the incipient stages of the struggle, they magnanimously put aside all local differences and jealousies, and with one their lives, their all, against fearful odds, for impulse combined their efforts, their fortunes, the redress of their common grievances at the hands of the mother country, and for the independence which they resolved to achieve, they evoked an already existing feeling of unity, and did, in the very essence of the term, form a full, unreserved, and practical Union of THE PEOPLE, intended by themselves to be perpetual? Did they not, as perfectly as any people ever did, constitute and declare themselves a single and undivided NATION? Is there in all history an instance of such a union among a people who did not feel themselves to be, in every impor tant particular, the same people? Why, even before the Union was a fact in history, the feeling in the North in reference to it was expressed by JAMES OTIS, one of the leading patriots of Massachusetts, in the Convention of 1765, in the hope that a Union would be formed, which should "knit and work together into the very blood and bones of the original system every region as fast as settled;" and from distant South Carolina, great-hearted CHRISTOPHER GADSDEN answered back-" There ought to be no New England man, no New Yorker, known on the continent, but ALL OF US AMERICANS." And in the very hour of the Union's birth-throes PATRICK HENRY flashed upon the Congress of 1774, these lightning words: "ALL AMERICA 18 THROWN INTO ONE MASS. landmarks-your boundaries of Colonies? They Where are your Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and are all thrown down. The distinctions between New Englanders are no more. VIRGINIAN, BUT AN AMERICAN." I AM NOT A after the Union was a recorded and mighty And when, fact in history, the united people through their Congress, organized the first form of government for the new-born nation, they solemnly tion, "THE UNION SHALL BE PERPETUAL." If wrote down in the Articles of their Confederaany further evidence is desired of the character of the Union, and of the intention that it should endure forever, recur again to that first line of our noble Constitution, declaring itself to have been established "in order to form a more perfect Union "-more perfect in its principles and in its machinery, and more perfect in its adaptedness for perpetuity.

The question, What is the Union? is answered.

STATE SOVEREIGNTY.

It is no league of States, no compact between | assert doctrines, and claim rights and attributes, different peoples, no treaty between rival pow- which are without a semblance of warrant, in ers, but a voluntary, complete, and permanent or out of the Constitution, and are at deadly coalescence of the several parts of one people, variance with the principles on which the for their common defence, and to secure to Union was formed, and on which its existence themselves and their posterity the blessings of depends, is as apparent to me as my own being; freedom and self-government. When I call to and I am not without hope of making it apparyour earnest remembrance, that this Union was ent to you. formed without any express or formal stipulation; that it rested in the outset solely upon the good faith of the people towards each other; that it was consummated before their Independence was declared, and in advance of any written form of General Government; that it was the free-will offering of the heart of the struggling Nation upon the altar of liberty; and that it was upheld and consolidated by sacrifices such as only a people truly united in heart would make for each other; you will, I am sure, join with me in ascribing to it a sacredness that should forever protect it against the parricidal blow. State pride-poor, narrow, vain, and short-sighted State pride!-rejects this broad and glorious view of the nature of the Union; but it is the only one consistent with history, the only one that can stand the test of truth, the only one which makes our double system of governments consistent throughout, the only one which satisfies the patriotic heart, the only one which can secure a happy future to this nation, or give stability to American liberty.

You will not, I am sure, complain of the time I have devoted to the exhibition of the true character of the Union, as the leading topic of this day's discussion. The views I have expressed are, in my judgment, entwined, as nothing else is, with the very heart-strings of our whole system of free institutions. It is therefore vital that the true nature of the Union should be impressed broadly and deeply upon the American mind. Error on many other points may exist, and be widely diffused, without serious injury; but error on this point is fatal. It is poisoning the minds of multitudes in Missouri, as it has already poisoned those of millions in the insurgent States. I believe it to be undeniably true, that not one of those States would have put on the livery of treason, had not a large portion of their people first been seduced from their fidelity to the Union, by the heresies that lurk under the glittering guise of STATE RIGHTS. As it is necessary in the prosecution of the argument, that I should assail those heresies, let me say here that I am as firm a defender of the constitutional rights of the States as any other man, and would as resolutely resist, by all constitutional means, any unauthorized infringement of them by the National Government. But I STAND BY THE CONSTITUTION; and in that position it is my duty equally to resist any attempt by any State to disturb the equilibrium of our system, by arrogating to itself powers and privileges not belonging to it. That the insurgent States VOL. II.-Doc.

15

Revolting though it be to State pride, I hold that no greater or more destroying error has ever been promulgated in regard to our noble system of government, than the claim of State Sovereignty, as advanced in the States which have ordained secession from the Union; and yet upon that claim is based the unprecedented rebellion that convulses this land this day. Viewed in any light, there is neither consistency, logic, nor truth in it. To believe in it, history must be forgotten, the simplest axioms of government ignored, the acts and testimony of the fathers of the country disregarded, and the plainest language distorted or contemned; all which, I need not add, has been done in those States, as I will endeavor to prove.

'Sovereignty is the highest power. For a State or nation to be sovereign, it must govern itself, without any dependence upon another power. It must have no superiors. If a State makes a part of another community or State, and is represented with foreign powers by that community or State of which it is a part, it is not sovereign." These are the simplest principles of constitutional and international law, affirmed by the greatest jurists, and recognized and acted upon by all civilized nations. Tested by them, no State in the American Union, except Texas, ever was sovereign, in any but a limited sense, and that, only within its own boundaries and over its own local affairs.

As to foreign nations, what act of sovereignty has any single State in the Union ever performed, from the Declaration of Independence, when the original thirteen announced themselves States, to the present time? Not one; nor could any of them ever have done such an act, without violating its obligations to the Nation of which it was a part. By the National Constitution, to which the people of every State irrevocably bound themselves, every attribute of external sovereignty is denied to the individual States, either in express terms, or by being vested in the United States. No State can make treaties with foreign powers, regulate commerce with other nations, declare war, or be represented by an ambassador, or other diplomatic agent, with any government on earth. For any purpose of sovereignty, one of the United States is no more recognized abroad, than the city of St. Louis is recognized in the State of Oregon, as a sovereign city.

Nor is it otherwise as between the States themselves. No State can, without the consent of Congress, enter into any agreement or com