LIBRS

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by

CHARLES D. DRAKE,

in the Clerk's Office, of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of Missouri.

PREFACE.

Ir is with no reluctance that I have acceded to the suggestions of friends in the publication of this book; nor is any apology deemed necessary for its appearance. It contains the fruits of the most earnest labor of my life, and speaks the supreme convictions of my judgment and conscience, and the intense emotions of my heart, concerning the terrible struggle through which our country is now passing. If I know myself in any tolerable degree, that labor has been prompted solely by a sense of patriotic duty, regardless of consequences to myself. It has, indeed, been a labor of love for my country, for Truth, Liberty, and Humanity. I know no valid reason why the utterances flowing from it, which, in a greater or less degree, secured attention in almost every part of the loyal States, at the time they appeared in the public journals of the day, should not, in a more permanent form, continue to have such measure of influence as their arguments and appeals are capable of exerting. My only regret is, that I could not have thrown into them a hundred fold greater power.

This publication is made under circumstances which forbid my receiving any pecuniary benefit from it. All the profits of its sale, therefore, are to go, as the title-page indicates, to a patriotic and benevolent association of ladies in my own city, to be expended for the relief of such of the brave soldiers of the Republic as may, through wounds or sickness, need the ministrations of

some of the noblest women that have, by their high-hearted and self-sacrificing labors during the war, glorified their sex, and blessed their country in the day of its affliction and mourning.

The reader will probably observe the progressive development of opinion and feeling in regard to the institution of Slavery, from the Fourth of July, 1861, when I referred to it only remotely, to the twenty-second of February, 1864, when I urged its complete and final extirpation from the whole land; and may also note the advance from the position of April, 1862, in favor of its gradual removal from Missouri, to that of September, 1863, declaring for "Emancipation, immediate, unconditional, final," in that State. These progressions were but the results of an education by current events, whose power I could no more resist, than a tree can resist leafing, when the spring sap flows into its thirsty pores. They indicate such change only as that of the child into the man; and I pity him who, from passion, prejudice, selfishness, ambition, party associations, devotion to Slavery, or aught else, voluntarily remains a child as to our country's mortal contest for its life, when, by casting off their shackles, he might straightway rise to the stature of manhood in patriotism.

It is in no fanatical spirit that the word "anti-Slavery" is embodied in the title of this book. The conviction is so overpowering within me, that there is no good future to this nation, but through the total destruction of Slavery, that I do not shrink from inviting others, by the title of the book, to scrutinize the grounds upon which that conviction rests. And in styling them "Union and anti-Slavery Speeches, " instead of one or the other alone, I purpose to suggest the absolute inseparability, henceforth, of Union and anti-Slaveryism; just as Daniel Webster, by a similar form of expression, pronounced "Union and Liberty" to be one and inseparable. If that conviction is wrong, the words dictated by it will speedily be forgotten; but if it is rightas millions in this land now believe, who did not so believe three

years ago then its flame will leap from heart to heart through the nation, until the whole mighty mass of its loyal people, with one fiery and resistless onset, will sweep Slavery the accursed, with all its hideous wrongs and remorseless crimes, from America, to be known there no more for ever.

It will be observed that three of the speeches-those at pages 308, 337, and 377—have special reference to the phase which the rebellion, either in its direct workings, or in its collateral influences in connection with Slavery, has assumed in Missouri. Did they refer merely to local politics, I would not have included them here; but it is not so. The contest in that ill-fated State, which has attracted the attention of the country, has been, and still is, between Loyalty and Disloyalty: the particular questions of State policy, concerning which it has occurred, having been but the occasion for starting into action the innate and irrepressible antagonism between those discordant elements. It is only another form of the conflict which in the South is waged by arms. Any history of the rebellion will be incomplete which does not analyze and portray it. Hence, though these speeches treat ostensibly of Missouri affairs, they relate, in fact, to the rebellion, in one of its insidious and dangerous forms, under the very folds of the Old Flag; and while, because of their seeming local character, they may not as readily as the others attract the notice of readers in other States, yet they will be found to elucidate matters which it were well for all reading and thinking men to understand, and their insertion here will make the volume more acceptable to those with whom I have labored for Missouri's regeneration.

St. Louis, May, 1864.