you commenced a war promising to be more ferocious and exterminating throughout the Republic than was the atrocious decree of Herod in a single village. Sumter was not erected for the exclusive defence of the harbor of Charleston, but for the purpose of preventing a foreign enemy from making a lodgment there, and from that point levying successful maritime war upon New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, and other towns and cities. And the unfriendly relations, which sprung up between the southern states and the government of the Union, made its retention and occupation ́more necessary than before. You will not consent that the general government, the government of the whole people, should march forces over the "sacred soil of a state" of the confederacy, to maintain its own dignity and authority, to check rebellion and save the capital from conflagration and its archives from destructiou; but you should stand admonished that there is no soil sufficiently sacred under the broad ægis of the Constitution to shelter armed rebellion or secret treason, and that the government of the United States has not only full right and lawful authority to march its forces over every inch of territory between the St. Lawrence and the Pacific, to stop the progress of enemies, foreign or domestic, to put down rebellion, to arrest those who despoil its property, or resist the execution of the laws, but it is its first and most solemn duty to do so. Should the general government enter a state for the purpose of interference with its domestic policy, it would be usurpation and an unwarrantable invasion; a neglect to employ its power to enforce its constitutional prerogative would be a culpable disregard of official obligation. You profess to defend your home-hearths, your firesides, your porches, your altars, your wives and your children, your household gods, and those resolves sound well indeed, even in the abstract; but practically the defence will be in time when they are assailed, or at least threatened. And you may rest with the assurance, that, when either of these sacred and cherished interests shall be desecrated or placed in danger or in jeopardy from any vandal spirit on the globe, you shall not defend them alone; for an army from the free states mightier than that which rose up to crush your rebellion, aye a great multitude, which no man can number," will defend them for you. But the issue must not be changed nor frittered away. Sumter was not your home-hearth, Pickens your fireside, Harper's Ferry your porch, the navy yards your altars, the custom-houses and post-offices and revenue cutters your wives and children, nor the mints your household gods! The government has no right to desecrate your homes, nor have you the right to seize upon and appropriate to yourselves under any name, however specious, what is not your own, but the property of the whole people of the United States; not of those in array against it as enemies, defying its laws, but those who acknowledge and defer to its authority. You desire peace. Then lay down your arms, and you will have it. It was peace when you took them up; it will be peace when you lay them down It will be peace when you abandon war and return to your accustomed pursuits. Honorable, enduring, pacific relations will be found in complete obedience to the provisions of the Constitu tion, and not in their violations or destruction. The government is custained by the people, not for the purpose of coercing states in their domestic policy; not for the purpose of crushing members of the confederacy because they fail to conform to the federal standard; not for the purpose of despoiling their people, and least of all not for the purpose of disturbing or in any degree intefering with the system of southern servitude; but for the sole and only purpose of putting down an unholy, armed rebellion, which has defied the authority of the government and seeks its destruction; and in this their determination is taken with a resolution compared with which the edicts of the Medes and Persians were yielding and temporary. When the government of our fathers shall be again recognized, when the Constitution and the laws, to which every citizen owes allegiance, shall be observed and obeyed, then will the armies of the Constitution and the Union disband by a common impulse, in obedience to an unanimous popular will, And should the present or any succeeding administration attempt to employ the authority of the government and people to coerce states, or mould their internal affairs in derogation of the Constitution, the same array of armed forces would again take the field, but it would be to arrest federal assumption and usurpation, and protect the domestic rights of the states. War is emphatically, and more especially a war between brethren, a disgrace to civilization; and any war is a drain upon the life-blood, and originates in wrong. Evil spirits give power to evil men for its inauguration, that amidst conflicts of blood they may cast all down to the dark regions where the waves of oblivion will close over them. Its evils cannot be written, even in human blood. It sweeps our race from earth, as if heaven had repented the making of man. It lays its skinny hand upon society, and leaves it deformed by wretchedness and black with gore. It marches on its mission of destruction through a red sea of blood, and tinges the fruits of earth with a sanguine hue, as the mulberry reddened in sympathy with the romantic fate of the devoted lovers. It "spoils the dance of youthful blood," and writes sorrow and grief prematurely upon the glad brow of childhood; it chills the heart and hope of youth; it drinks the life-current of early manhood, and brings down the gray hair of the aged with sorrow to the grave; it weaves the widow's weeds with the bridal wreath, and the land, like Rama, is filled with wailing and lamentation. It lights up the darkness with the flames of happy homes. It consumes, like the locusts of Egypt, every living thing in its pathway? It wrecks fortunes, brings bankruptcy and repudiation, and blasts the fields of the husbandman: it depopulates towns, and leaves the cities a modern Herculaneum. It desolates the fireside and covers the family dwell, ing with gloom, and an awful vacancy rests, where, like a haunted mansion, "No human figure stirred to go or come, No face looked forth from shut or open casement; No chimney smoked; there was no sign of home No dog was on the threshold, great or small, Not one domestic feature." It loads the people with debt, to pass down from one generation to another like the curse of original sin. Upon its merciless errand of violence it fills the land with crime and tumult and rapine and it "gluts the grave with untimely victims and peoples the world of perdition." In the struggle of its death throes, it heaves the moral elements with convulsions, and leaves few traces of utility behind it to mitigate its curse; and he who inaugurates it, like the ferocious Hun, should be denominated the scourge of God; and when his day of reckoning shall come, he will call upon the rocks and mountains to hide him from popular indignation. But with all its attending evils, this Union cannot be yielded to its demands nor to avoid its terrors; even though, like the republic of France, we may exchange for a time "liberty, equality, fraternity," for infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Nor are tame and timid measures the guarantees of peace. It is as much the nature of faction to be base as of patriotism to be noble; a divided Union, instead of securing peace, would present constant occasion for conflict and be a fruitful source of war. Let the rabble cry of divide and crucify go on from the throat of faction; and the cold and calculating political Pilates wash their hands and proclaim their innocence, while their souls are stained with guilt and crime for urging it forward; but let the faithful, conscious of their integrity and strong in truth, endure to the end. Ruthless as is the sway and devastating as is the course of war, it is not the greatest of evils nor the last lesson in humiliation. "Sweet are the uses of adversity." In its currents of violence and blood it may purify an atmosphere too long surcharged with discontent and corruption and apostasy and treachery and littleness; and prove how poor a remedy it is for social grievances. It may correct the dry rot of demoralization in public station, and raise us as a people above the dead level of a mean and sordid ambition. It may scatter the tribe of bloated hangers-on, who seek to serve their country that they may plunder and betray it; and above all it may arouse the popular mind to a just sense of its responsibility, until it shall select its servants with care and hold them to a faithful discharge of their duties; until deficient morals shall be held questionable, falsehood a social fault, viola tions of truth a disqualification, and bribery a disgrace; until integrity shall be a recommendation, and treason and larceny crimes. Can a Union dissevered be reconstructed by the arrangement of all parties concerned in its formation? No! When it is once destroyed, it is destroyed forever. Let those who believe it can be, first raise the dead, place the dimpling laugh of childhood upon the lip of age, gather up the petals of May flowers and bind them upon their native stems in primeval freshness amidst the frosts of December, bring back the withered leaves of autumn and breathe into them their early luxuriance, and then gather again the scattered elements of a dissevered Union when the generous springtime of our republic has passed away. and selfishness and ambition have come upon us with their premature frosts and "winter of discontent.' Shall we then surrender to turbulence and faction and rebellion, and give up the Union with all its elements of good, all its holy memories, all its hallowed associations, all its blood-bought history? "No! let the eagle change its plume, The leaf its hue, the flower its bloom," But do not give up the Union! Preserve it to "flourish in immortal youth," until it dissolves in the "wreck of matter and crash of worlds." Let the patriot and statesman stand by it to the last, whether assailed by foreign or domestic foes; and if he perishes in the conflict, let him fall like Rienzi, the last of the Tribunes, upon the same stand where he preached liberty and equality to his countrymen. Preserve it in the name of the Fathers of the Revolution, preserve it for its great elements of good, preserve it in the sacred name of liberty, preserve it for the faithful and devoted lovers of the Constitution in the rebellious states-those who are persecuted for its support, and are dying in its defence. Rebellion can lay down its arms to government -government cannot surrender to rebellion. Give up the Union, “this fair and fertile plain, to batten on that moor!" Divide the Atlantic, so that its tides shall beat in sections, that some spurious Neptune may rule an ocean of his own! Draw a line upon the sun's disc, that it may cast its beams upon earth in division! Let the moon, like Bottom in the play, show but half its face! Separate the constellation of the Pleiades and sunder the bands of Orion! but retain the Union. Give up the Union, with its glorious flag, its Stars and Stripes, full of proud and pleasing and honorable recollections, for the spurious invention, with no antecedents but the history of a violated Constitution and of lawless ambition? No! let us stand by the emblem of our fathers: "Flag of the free heart's hope and home, By angels' hands to valor given, Thy stars have lit the welkin dome And all thy hues were born in heaven." Ask the Christian to exchange the cross, with the cherished memories of a Saviour's love, for the crescent of the impostor, or to address his prayers to the Juggernaut or Josh instead of to the living and true God! but sustain the emblem your fathers loved and cherished. Give up the Union? Never! The Union shall endure, and its praises shall be heard, when its friends and its foes, those who support and those who assail, those who bare their bosoms in its defence, and those who aim their daggers at its heart, shall all sleep in the dust together. Its name shall be heard with veneration amidst the roar of Pacific's waves, away upon the rivers of the north and east, where liberty is divided from monarchy, and be wafted in gentle breezes upon the Rio Grande. It shall rustle in the harvest, and wave in the standing corn, on the extended prairies of the West, and be heard in the bleating folds and lowing herds upon a thousand hills. It shall be with those who delve in mines, and shall hum in the manufactories of New England, and in the cotton-gins of the South. It shall be proclaimed by the Stars and Stripes in every sea of earth, as the American Union, one and indivisible, Upon the great thoroughfares, wherever steam drives and engines throb and shriek, its greatness and perpetuity shall be hailed with gladness. It shall be lisped in the earliest words, and ring in the merry voices of childhood, and swell to Heaven upon the song of maidens. It shall live in the stern resolve of manhood, and rise to the mercy-seat upon woman's gentle availing prayer. Holy men shall invoke its perpetuity at the altars of religion, and it shall be whispered in the last accents of expiring age. Thus shall survive and be perpetuated the American Union, and when it shall be proclaimed that time shall be no more, and the curtain shall fall, and the good shall be gathered to a more perfect union still, may the des tiny of our dear land realize the poetic conception: "Perfumes as of Eden flowed sweetly along, And a voice as of angels, enchantingly sung, Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise, The queen of the world and the child of the skies." THE REBELLION: ITS ORIGIN AND MAINSPRING. CHARLES SUMNER. New York, November 27, 1861. On the sixth of November last, the people of the United States act ing in pursuance of the Constitution and laws, chose Abraham Lincoln President. Of course this choice was in every particular perfectly constitutional and legal. As such, it was entitled to the respect and acquiescence of every good citizen. It is vain to say that the candidate represented opinions obnoxious to a considerable section of the coun |
