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tion throughout its eventful history, has been | smiled upon their efforts for deliverance and inless arraigned for injustice than any Govern- dependence. But if they had connived at the ment on earth. And time and patience and accession of the selfish, perverse, and bigoted a sense of popular justice, the ebbs and flows George to the Crown, that they might be able and currents of opinion would have proved a to complain of the reigning monarch, and, corrective of all serious causes of disturbance. above all, if they had controlled the Ministry, But efforts to divide the Union and destroy the and held a majority in Parliament, and had then Government, besides being intrinsically atro- vacated their seats, and yielded up the power cious, instead of correcting the alleged griev- to their opponents, and had cried out oppresances, are calculated to aggravate them more sion to cover schemes of political ambition, they than a hundred-fold, and, if successful, to close a would have both deserved, and received, inday of humanities, hope and promise, in this ref- stead of sympathy, or confidence, or counteuge of liberty, in blood and darkness. No one nance, the scorn and contempt of Christendom. denies to an oppressed people the right of revo- The Declaration of American Independence, lution as the last dreadful resort of man seck- the modern Magna Charta of human rights, ing emancipation, when all other efforts have evolved the idea, so cheering to the cause of proved unavailing-never to be entered upon freedom and yet so startling to monarchy, except as a terrible necessity. But Secession is that Governments derived their just powers a bold and bald and wicked imposture, with its from the consent of the governed, and that authors; a chimera, an illusion, and cheat with although Governments long established should those who are betrayed into its support, and it not be changed for light and transient causes, exhibits the worst features of the basest despot-yet when they become subversive of the ends ism in enforcing obedience to its reign of terror. It is but a synonym for disunion by violence, under the pretence of rights reserved to States; and must have sprung, like the voluptuous goddess, from froth, so little of right, or reason, or justice, or remedy, or good sense, is there in it, or around it, or about it; though, like the contents of the mystic girdle, it promised to its votaries a surfeit of hidden pleasures. The attempt to liken this wicked and corrupt rebellion to the American Revolution, requires an assurance of brass sufficient to reconstruct the Colossus of Rhodes. While the colonies were petitioning for a redress of grievances, war was precipitated upon them by the British Crown, to compel their submission and silence. While Congress was canvassing the alleged grievances of a portion of the States of the Confederacy, and while its legislation upon the subject of the Territories was proceeding in harmony with their professed wishes, members representing such aggrieved States withdrew and precipitated disunion in hot haste, before the result of proposed conciliatory efforts could be ascertained, as though they feared, if they awaited the development of events in progress, they might be more seriously aggrieved by a redress of grievances! The Colonies had neither support, nor sympathy, nor representation in any department of the British Government, but they persevered in their efforts to obtain justice and recognition so long as a single ray of hope gave promise, and until they were silenced by the presence of British troops, and were coinpelled to submit to slavery and degradation, or appeal to the last refuge of an oppressed people-the arbitrament of the battle-field. They claimed no false or fabricated reading of the British Constitution, which enabled them to sever their connection with the Crown and avoid the responsibility of revolution, but they manfully took their stand upon the ultima ratio of nations. They received a world's sympathy, because their revolt was an imperious necessity, and Heaven-it is coeval with being. No people, civilized

for which they were established, and "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinced the design. to reduce them under absolute despotism, it was their right, their duty to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security." But it nowhere declares that a knot of conspiring politicians, foiled in their schemes of ambition and plunder, and chafing under disappointment like a tiger cheated in his foray, may without the popular support or sympathy, but in defiance of both, assert that the election of a political opponent whose success they might have prevented, is a sufficient cause of rebellion; or that a party or an interest, which has the majority in both branches of the Representative Government, and is protected by the opinions of the judiciary of the nation, can withdraw, so as to give its opponents the power, and then set on foot a rebellion, and seek to destroy an edifice which stands as the last best hopes of man, because they fear they may be visited with political oppression! Those who practise such shallow devices before the world, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, should remember that they but copy the stupid instincts of the bird which buries its head in the sand, and then indulges the conceit that its ungainly body is concealed also. Whatever causes of disturbance and disaffection existed between the North and South, the public judgment has rendered its verdict upon abundant evidence, and with extraordinary unanimity, deciding that such formed a remote and feeble element in inducing disunion, but that it was a foregone conclusion with those who urged it forward, darkly designed and deliberately determined, for the purpose of securing personal eclat and selfaggrandizement, rather than of securing rights and privileges to an oppressed section of people.

"Order is Heaven's first law,"

would occasion little inconvenience.

or savage, ever existed without a Government | may prove a barren and a blasted field, when for their guidance and regulation. Beasts of the those for whom it was designed prepare to reap field and forest, birds of the air, fishes of the sea, their inheritance. and insects which inhabit all, form their colonies It is a familiar principle of law that a reand associations, and arrange themselves in obe- pealing statute, itself repealed, revives and puts dience to some recognized rule; and even inani- in force the former law. So long, then, as Conmate objects obey with unerring certainty the gress permits its several acts for the admission hand that guides them. Nor do the lights of his- of the revolted States to the Union to stand, tory, the lessons of experience, or the flickering according to Secession law and logic, these shadows of tradition tell of a Government States can go out and in at pleasure, and if which voluntarily and by design planted the they may withdraw by an ordinance of their seeds of its own decay in its bosom, or provid- own, by the same rule Congress may expel ed for its own destruction and overthrow, by them by repealing its act of admission. To go committing its life and destiny to other hands. out of the Union as they insist, they have only The Constitution forming the Union and erect- to pass an act or ordinance of Secession without ing its Government, was the emanation of the the knowledge, privity, or consent of the Govpeople of the United States. It was adopted, ernment of the Union. To return, they would as declared in its preamble, "to form a more have only to repeal it. They can then go out perfect Union, to establish justice, insure do- when it suits principle, and return when it famestic tranquillity, provide for the common de- vors interest; or they can alternate like mifence, to promote the general welfare, and to gratory birds with the seasons, hatching Dissecure the blessings of liberty to the people union in the Confederacy and rearing it withwho ordained it to their posterity." But if the out, and as thus far its managers have, in most instrument, which formed the more perfect instances, generously relieved the people of Union with becoming solemnity contemplated participation in the matter, the destruction of its dismemberment and overthrow, by the with-old governments and the erection of new ones drawal of all or any of the States therefrom at the pleasure of their capricious politicians, it Minerva, according to mythology, and that remained a most imperfect and pitiable Union is an authority not easily refuted, leaped fully still. If the justice it established was but tem- armed from the brain of Jupiter; but stranger porary, if the domestic tranquillity it insured still, the founders of the Government of the was for the time being, if the common defence Southern Confederacy leaped fully armed with it provided for was until some of the States high-sounding titles of official station from their should withdraw from the Union and make war own, and brought their government with them; upon it, and if the blessings of liberty it secur- an emanation neither suggested nor approved ed to posterity were upon condition that those by the popular voice, but the creation of those who secured them should not wish to subvert who, like the renowned Peter Brush, "wanted the liberty thus secured by armed force, then something to have rather than something to our boasted Constitution, which has been hail- do," and almost universally repudiated wher ed throughout the earth as one of the wisest ever opportunity has been afforded. A Govemanations of man, and enjoys a world-wide ernment purporting to be of the people without fame for its humane provisions and lofty con- permitting them to have a voice in constructceptions of statesmanship, should be scouted as ing it; without a "local habitation," of dea fraud, a delusion, and an imposture, possess-partments in the abstract, and offices with more ing much more sound than substance, and car- titles than duties; a President without an rying by design in its own bosom the seeds of election, a Treasury without money, or sources its dissolution. But no sentence, or word, or of revenue, a Navy without ships, a Post-Office syllable can be found in the Federal Con- without mails, a Minister of foreign relations, stitution sustaining an idea at once so puerile whose relations abroad decline to acknowledge and monstrous. It provides for the admis- the connection, a department of the Interior sion to the Union of new States, but not the representing a nature-abhorred vacuum, an Atwithdrawal therefrom of those already mem-torney-General without law, and a Patentbers. To gain such admission the State must Office which, in the absence of other business, apply to Congress, with a constitution Repub- should issue letters securing the exclusive right lican in form; and upon an act of Congress au- of this new-fledged confederacy to those who thorizing such admission, duly approved and invented it, for its extraordinary novelty rather signed by the President of the United States, than its acknowledged utility; that it may be such State becomes a member of the confed-preserved to after-times in the world's curiosityeracy. If one State, being thus admitted, can withdraw at pleasure, by passing an act or ordinance of Secession, and cancel a solemn cove nant by one party alone, which it required two to make, and in which both remain interested, any or all may do the same, and the rich harvest of liberty and its attending blessings, which our forefathers professed to secure to posterity,

shop, with Law's scheme of banking, the moonhoax of Locke, the messages of the President and Queen over the submarine telegraph, and Redheiffer's perpetual motion.

The advocates of the right of Secession in claiming that a State, after its solemn admission and while enjoying the protection and participating in the fruits of the Union, may at its

pleasure, and by its own act, secede, to be con- I army, and endeavoring to wrest the Governsistent, should hold that a nation may at pleas- ment from the rightful monarch, would doubture withdraw from its treaty obligations with- | less have claimed, according to modern accepout previous provision or consent of the other side; that one who has conveyed an estate and received the consideration, may resume it when it suits his necessity or convenience, that the husband or wife may repudiate the marriage obligation without detriment, or a disregard of marital faith, and in short, that a covenant made by two parties, and in which both are interested, may be cancelled by one.

tation, that he was acting from high convictions of duty, from a powerful necessity, and fighting purely in self-defence. And when the great battle was set in array in the wood of Ephraim, where 20,000 were slaughtered, and the wood devoured that day more than the sword devoured, there was evidently nothing that he so much desired, when he saw exposure and overthrow inevitable, as to be let alone. But that short struggle subdued the aspirations, and closed forever the ignoble career of this ambitious leader in Israel-a warning to those who would become judges before their time, or be made kings upon the sound of a trumpet, blown by their own directions. Let all such remember the wood of Ephraim, the wide-spreading branches of the oak, the painful suspense which came over the author of the reex-bellion, the darts of Joab, and the dark pit into which this prince of the royal household was cast for his folly, his madness, and treachery.

The right thus to secede must rest upon a political free love, where States unequally united inay, on discovering their true affinities, dissolve the first condition and become sealed in confederate wedlock to their chosen companions during pleasure, and the authors of the discovery should go down to posterity as the Brigham Youngs of modern confederacies. Most events of modern times find their parallel in early history, and this attempt to temporize a government upon the elements of political disquietude, so that, like sets of dollar jewelry, every person can have one of his own, does not form an exceptional case. When David swayed the sceptre of Judea, the comely Absalom, a bright star of the morning, whose moral was obscured by his intellectual light, finding such amusements as the slaying of his brother and burning the barley fields of Joab, too tame for his ambition, conceived the patriotic idea of driving his father from the throne, of usurping the regal authority and relieving the people unasked from the oppressions under which he had discovered they were groaning. Like modern demagogues he commenced with disaffection, advised all who came with complaints that, from royal inattention, no one was deputed to hear them, and in greeting those who passed the King's gate with a kiss, that he might steal away their hearts, he lamented that he was not a judge in the land, so that any one who had a cause or suit, might come to him, and he would do him justice. Under pretence of going to Hebron, the royal residence in the early reign of David, to pay his Vows, for he was conscientious in the matter of vows as Herod, he raised a rebellious army, and sent spies through the land to proclaim him king and reigning in Hebron, when the trumpet should sound upon the air. The conspiracy, says sacred history, was strong, and the rebellion was so artfully contrived, so stealthily inaugurated, that it gave high promise of success. The king, although in obedience to the stern dictates of duty, he sent forth his armies by hundreds and by thousands to assert and maintain his prerogative, exhibited the heart of a good prince and an affectionate father, in beseeching them for his sake, to deal gently with the young man, even Absalom; and when the conflict was over, the first inquiry with anxious solicitude was, "Is the young man safe?" And yet this ambitious rebel, in raising a numerous and powerful

And when those charged with the administration of our Government send forth its armies by hundreds and by thousands to maintain and vindicate the Constitution and Union of our fathers, may they imitate the example of the wise king of Judea, and beseech the captains of the hosts to deal gently with the young Absaloms of Secession, and by all means inquire for their safety, when their armies have been completely routed, and the rebellion put down forever.

Secession, either peaceable or violent, if crowned with complete success, can furnish no remedy for sectional grievances, real or imaginary. It would be as destructive of Southern as of Northern interests, for both are alike concerned in the maintenance and prosperity of the Union. It would increase every evil, aggravate every cause of disturbance, and render every acute complaint hopelessly chronic. Look at miserable, misguided, misgoverned Mexico, and receive a lesson of instruction. She has been seceding, and dividing, and pronouncing, and fighting for her rights, and in the self-defence of aggressive leaders, from the day of her nominal independence, and she has reaped an abundant harvest of degradation and shame. No President of the Republic has ever served the full term for which he was elected, and generally, had his successor had more fitness than himself, it would have occasioned no detriment. When the population of the United States was three millions that of Mexico was five; and when that of the United States is thirty, the population of Mexico is only eight; and while the United States has gained the highest rank among the nations of the earth, by common consent, Mexico has descended to the lowest. Her people have been the dupes, and slaves, and footballs of aspiring leaders, mad with a reckless and mean ambition, inflated with self-importance and conceit, and

destitute of patriotism or statesmanship. But | upon domestic institutions, yet the time for as a clown with a pickaxe can demolish the choicest productions of art, so can the demagogue overthrow the loftiest institutions of wisdom.

Thus has poor, despised, dwarfed, and downtrodden Mexico been crushed forever, under the iron heel of her own insane despoilers; a memorable but melancholy illustration of a people without a fixed and stable government: the sport of the profligate and designing, the victims of fraud and violence.

disunion, so long invoked, had come, and one State, so far as in her power, sundered the bonds that made her a member of the Union before the result of the Presidential election had been declared by Congress. They turned their backs upon friends and sympathizers, denounced laggards in the cause, declared their repudiation of the Constitution, and applied the torch to the temple of free government and the Union, with as little solemnity as they would have repealed an act of legislation. The property of the United States, by sea and by land, was seized, and the Government was defied and menaced by armed forces and avowed preparation for war; other States followed, in form if not in substance, by the action of politicians if not people—some half willing, others more than half forced-those who should have stood with sleepless zeal upon the ramparts of the Constitution ingloriously surrendered their posts, and the reign of anarchy was thus inausys-gurated in our own happy land.

barrassment which surrounded the question. But still the spirit of the times, the voice of the people in every section, South as well as North, demanded peace-that abstractions should be laid aside, that every substantial cause of grievance should be redressed, and that the interests of a great and prosperous

Southern States along the free border had felt most seriously all the injury and irritation produced by inharmonious and conflicting relations between them and their brethren of the North, and yet the people of these States shrunk from the remedy of Secession as from the bottomless pit. They saw in it nothing but swift and hopeless destruction, and believed that the desire for disunion had originated more in ultra-ambitious schemes than in a determination to protect their peculiar tem of domestic servitude from encroachment. All this increased, and seriously too, the emBut States with which the heresy originated and had been cherished, had long revelled in dreamy theories and vague notions of benefits which would flow to them from a dissevered Union, and madly hastened to destroy the fabric of their fathers before it could be rescued. The most sordid passions of man, seeking indulgence of their appetites in the prom-nation should not be disturbed, nor the moral ised land of Secession, lent their absorbing stimulants to urge forward the catastrophe. Avarice clanked her chains for the necessitous and mercenary, and fortunes sprung up unbidden on either hand to greet them, seeking masters and service. Ports, and harbors, and marts, and entrepots rushed in upon a heated imagination, as they heard in the distance the knell of the Union tolling; they beckoned, and the contributions of a world's commerce were poured into their lap by direct trade, and universal expansion came over all the votaries of disunion, as if by magic. "The three-hooped pot had ten hoops," and what was "Greek Creek once was Tiber now." Mammon erected his court, and they heard the clinking of gold in the world's exchequer, as it accumulated at the counters of their exchange. Ambition kindled her torch, which, like the bush of Horeb, burned and was not consumed, and rank, and place, and station, and stars and garters, and the gew-gaw trappings of nobility, were showered in promiscuous profusion; wreaths of laurel adorned the brows of the brave, and the devotees of pleasure danced at the music of secession sackbut and psaltery and harp, "and all went merry as a marriage bell." Though sectional feeling had, after many years of profitless conflict, culminated, and the wise and Union-loving were engaged in restoring friendly relations, under circumstances more favorable to success than thirty years of struggles had furnished, and though Congress was organizing the Territories without restriction

sense of the world shocked by a conflict of arins among brethren. There was yet hope that the cup of intestine war might in mercy be permitted to pass. The report of the first hostile gun which was discharged, however, proclaimed to the world that all chances of peaceful adjustment were over; that "heaven in anger for a dreadful moment had suffered hell to take the reins "-that Pandora's box was opened again, and the deadliest plagues known to earth let loose to curse it; but like that repository of evil, hope yet smiled at the bottom. Argument and opinion were thrust aside for violence and blood with deliberate preparation. Is it strange that the natural elements sympathized with the occasion, as the intelligence was flashed through the land? A sheet of cimmerian darkness, near midnight, hung like a death-pall over the earth-the winds moaned heavily, like the wail of spirits lost-doors creaked and windows clattered, driving currents and counter-currents of sleet and rain descended like roaring cataracts; but the hoarse and startling shriek of the New York newsboy rose above all with the appalling cry, "the bombardment of Fort Sumter," and

"Gave signs of woe
That all was lost."

The blood-fiend laughed loud; the evil genius of humanity clapped his hands in triumph; Monarchy "grinned horribly a ghastly smile," but Liberty, bathed in tears, was bowed in

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the

shame, for the madness of her degenerate children.

The first flash of artillery kindled anew a flame of patriotic devotion to country, which will burn with a pure and constant glow when the lamp of mortal existence shall pale and flicker in death. Its first reverberations upon the air, aroused a slumbering love of Constitution and of Union, and of the cherished emblem of all, the Stars and Stripes, which will not again seek repose until the roar of hostile guns shall be silenced. It startled to their feet, as if by a common impulse, twenty millions of freemen, to guard the citadel of their faith from destruction, as war was driving his ebon car upon his remorseless mission.

This civil intestine war is one of the inost fearful and ferocious that ever desolated earth; and its authors will be cursed, when the atrocities of Bajazet and Tamerlane, and the Khans of Tartary and India, and other despoilers of the earth shall be forgotten. It is a war between and among brethren. Those whose eyes should have beamed in friendship now gleam in war; those who close in the death-struggle upon the battle-field, were children of the same household and nurtured at the same gathering place of affection; baptized at the same font, and confirmed at the same chancel:

"They grew in beauty, side by side,
They filled one house with glee;

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Whose voices mingled as they prayed
Round the same parent knee."

But, while we express deep humiliation for the depravity of our kind, and are shocked and sickened at a spectacle so revolting, we should not abandon the dear old mansion to the flames, even though kindled by brethren, who should have watched over it with us, and guarded it from harm. And, while we should not raise our hand to shed a brother's blood, we may turn aside his insane blow, aimed at the heart of the venerated mother of all. And, if a great power of Europe is disposed to sympathize with rebellion, and believes this Government and this people can be driven by the menace of foreign and domestic forces combined, to avoid the curses of war, let her try the experiment. But when they come, to save time and travel, let them bring with them a duly executed quit claim to the Union for such portions of the North American Continent as they have not surrendered to it in former conflicts, for they will have occasion for just such an instrument, whenever their impertinent interference is manifested practically in our domestic affairs. Conspicuous in this strange passage of the new world's history is the secession of Texas. A State with extended territories, and the right to form four more States from them without restriction, south of the old Missouri line,-a State requiring the protection of the Federal Government to guard it from marauding savages and other hostile bands-a State which was never wronged by a Northern State, nor

| by the Government of the Union, in theory or in practice. This State was the last Southern State gathered under the flag of the Unionadmitted in 1845, more as a Southern than a Northern measure; admitted, too, under peculiar circumstances, after a most memorable struggle, and in the highest branch of the National Legislature, by a single vote.

"Sir John of Hynford, 'twas my blade,
That knighthood on thy shoulder laid;
For this good deed, permit me then,
A word to these misguided men."

Not to those who would seek to maintain but to those who labor to destroy the Union. You have widely mistaken both the temper and the purpose of the great body of people of the Free States in the present crisis. In this unnatural struggle, which your leaders have forced upon them, they seek only to uphold and maintain, and preserve from destruction a Government which is a common inheritance, and in the preservation of which you are equally interested. They seek not to despoil your States, not to disturb your internal relations, but to preserve the Union which shelters and protects all, and vindicate the Constitution, which is especially your only defence from aggressionis both your sword and shield. They war not upon your peculiar system of domestic servitude, nor will they, but they admonish you in a spirit of kindness that, during this brief struggle, its friends and advocates have been its worst enemies, and have furnished arguments against it which will weaken its foundations, when the denunciation of its most persistent Anti-Slavery foes are forgotten forever. You arraign the people of the free States for rallying around the Government of the Union, of which a few months since you were members, and sustained it yourselves, and which, at the time of your alleged secession, had experienced no change beyond one of political administrations. You rebuke those who stood with you through good and evil report, in defence of the Constitution and all its guarantees, in its dark days of trial, when menaced only by opinion, for sustaining it, now, when it is assailed by armed forces, and insist that, after having defended that sacred instrument so long and so faithfully, they are bound now to assist in its overthrow!-a system of law, logic, and morality peculiar to disunion ethics alone. You repudiate the Constitution with no sufficient cause of revolution, for all the alleged causes of grievance as stated were insufficient to justify it, and proclaimed a dissolution of the Union, defied and dishonored its flag, and menaced the Government by denouncing actual war. You seized by violence its fortresses, armories, ships, mints, custom-houses, navyyards, and other property, to which you had not even a pretence of right, and threatened to take possession of the National Capital. You bombarded Fort Sumter, a fortress of the United States, garrisoned as a peace establishment only, and in a state of starvation, from

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