the mouth of the Mississippi, the free navigation of which, under the law of nations, we demand, and will have at every cost; with nothing else but our other great inland seas, the lakes, and their outlet too, through a foreign country; what is to be our destiny? We have fifteen hundred miles of southern frontier, and but a little narrow strip of eighty miles or less from Virginia to Lake Erie, bounding us upon the east. Ohio is the isthmus that connects the South with the British possessions, and the East with the West. The Rocky Mountains separate us from the Pacific. Where is to be our outlet? What are we to do when you shall have broken up and destroyed this Government? We are seven States now, with fourteen Senators and fifty-one Representatives, and a population of nine millions. We have an empire equal in area to the third of all Europe, and we do not mean to be a dependency or province either of the East or of the South; nor yet an inferior or secondrate power upon this continent, and if we cannot secure a maritime boundary upon other terms we will cleave our way to the seacoast with the sword. A nation of warriors we may be, a tribe of shepherds, never." 1 And Vallandigham complained that this imperial domain was not represented on the committee. But the pith of his thought was the fate and probable action of the West. Had the Mississippi River emptied into Delaware Bay doubtless Vallandigham, for the reasons he now gave, would have said to the secessionists, "May not a people do what it will with its own?" And the shepherds of the West might not have turned into a nation of warriors in the South.

"When the question of secession comes up in a practical form," said John A. McClernand, of Illinois, "I 1 Globe, December 10, 1860, p. 38.

THE APPROACHING STRUGGLE DEPICTED.

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will be prepared to take my position upon it, in the view of the House and of the nation, and having taken it, will endeavor to maintain it to the utmost of my limited influence, and by all the. legitimate means in my power;" words singularly prophetic of his own career when the question came. "Until then I will forbear to enter into it, preferring rather to obey the dictate of the scriptural proverb which dictates that 'sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' I will only say now that no more fearful question could engage the attention of this body. It discloses to my vision a boundless sea of horrors. Peaceable secession, in my judgment, is a fatal, a fatal, a deadly delusion.1 The Government, in itself may be weak, comparatively weak, but is strong in the moral sentiment and patriotic feeling of the country. In this respect, it is or at least ought to be, the strongest government in the world. Bound together as one people, by a common language, a common religion, common rivers, mountains and lakes, civil war alone, in my opinion, can sunder us into broken fragments, a tremendous civil war, such a war as would choke our rivers with carnage, and discolor our inland seas with human blood; such a war as never before fattened the earth with human slaughter. It would not be a war in which Greek met Greek, but Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Saxon; father, son; and brother, brother. If I am asked, why so? I retort the question, How can it be otherwise? How are the questions of public debt, public archives, public funds, and other public property, and above all, the question of boundary to be settled? Will it be replied, that while we are mutually unwilling now to yield anything, we will be mutually willing, after a while, to concede everything? To concede everything by and for the sake of national duality? Who believes this? What, too, 1 Globe, December 10, 1860, p. 39.

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THE WEST AND THE NATION.

would be the fate of the youthful but giant Northwest, in the event of a separation of the slaveholding from the non-slaveholding States? Cut off from the main Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico on one hand, or from the eastern Atlantic ports, on the other, she would gradually sink into a pastoral state, and to a standard of national inferiority. This, the hardy and adventurous millions of the Northwest would be unwilling to consent to. This they would not do. Rather would they, to the last man, perish upon the battlefield. No power on earth could restrain them from freely and unconditionally communicating with the Gulf and the great mart of New York." Speaking then of the Southern States he continued: "If they are wronged, let them seek redress in the Union; first by all lawful methods, and next, if necessary, by other means, but still as members of the Confederacy. Abandoning us, however, to our fate, what must be our revulsion of feeling towards the South? I will not undertake to say, only so far as to predict that it would consolidate the two sections, severally, against each other in fierce and unrelenting strife." But McClernand put the responsibility of civil war upon the Republican party, because of "their persistent and dogmatical adherence to their anti-slavery proviso, and to their opposition to the principles or details of the fugitive slave law." The Speaker had ignored the Douglas Democrats, was his complaint, had "proscribed them," as he said, "by excluding a million and a half of Northern Democrats from any representation on the committee."

"I look upon secession," said Daniel E. Sickles, of New York, "as the last dread alternative of a free State when it has to choose between liberty and injustice. In our federal system the recognized right of secession is a con

VERBAL REMEDIES.

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servative safeguard. It is the highest constitutional and moral guarantee against injustice, and, therefore, if it had been always and universally acknowledged as a rightful remedy, it would have contributed more than all else to perpetuate the Union, by compelling the observance of all their obligations on the part of all the States. The opposite dogma, which is so extensively believed at the North, that no matter what wrongs a State may have to endure, it may and ought to be compelled by force to remain in the Union, even as a conquered dependency, is a most dangerous error in our system of government, and has contributed largely to the existing anarchy." He put the responsibility with the Republican party. It was an illusion that the responsibility rested with the South. If the Speaker had committed a fault it was in not putting more ultra-Republicans among the Thirty-three. Let the President-elect speak a few words of conciliation. If he "would cause it to be made known to all the applicants for office under his administration, that he will not entertain the application of any man who is in favor of the so-called personal liberty bills, or opposed to the faithful execution of the fugitive slave-law, if he will do that, plainly and in good faith, through his representative men, you will not hear the word 'slavery' for the next four years from the Republican party North, East or West." But this verbal remedy for the wrongs of the South was not the end of Secession might not prove merely a Southern

events.

question.

"The city of New York," he continued, "will cling to this Union while there is a hope left for its preservation, and she will hold all men to a just accountability for whatever woe shall betide the Confederacy; but when there is no longer a Union, proud as she is, and has been always, of her position as its metropolis, ready to bury everything

648

THE CITY OF NEW YORK.

Be

like sectional prejudice, ready always to contribute in all things to maintain its honor and preserve its integrity at home and abroad; yet when this Union is no more, she will never consent to remain an appendage and a slave of a Puritan province. She will assert her own independence. The North will then see and feel that secession, although it may begin at the South, will not end at the South. There is no sympathy now between the city and the State of New York, not the least, nor has there been for years. The city of New York is now a subjugated dependency of a fanatical and puritanical State government, that never thinks of the city except to send its tax-gatherers among us, or to impose upon us hateful officials, aliens to our interests and sympathies, to eat up the substance of the people by their legalized extortions. tween such communities there can be no sympathy, no feeling of fraternity, no loyalty in the city to the State; and nothing has prevented the city of New York from asserting the right to govern herself except that provision of the Federal Constitution which prohibits a State from being divided without its own consent. If we had not been thus restrained by the Constitution-and every word of it is sacred to us-we would long ago, in accordance with the desire of three-fourths of our people, have sought in independence the only escape from the oppression which has been put upon us. But the reverence of the people for constitutional obligations yet remained and they submitted year after year. When that restraint shall no longer exist, when the obligations of those constitutional provisions which forbid the division of a State without its own consent shall be suspended, then I tell you that imperial city shall throw off the odious government to which she now yields a reluctant allegiance; she will repel the hateful cabal at Albany, which has so long used its power