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, nor to disturb your internal relations, but to preserve the Union which shelters and protects all, and vindicate the Constitution, which is your only defence from aggression. They war not upon your peculiar system of domestic servitude, 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 administration. 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, navy-yards, 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 batteries which the Government of the United States, in its extreme desire for peace, permitted you to erect for that purpose, under the guns of the same fortification, a proceeding unheard of before, and never to be repeated hereafter-bombarded it, too, because the flag of the Union which your fathers and yourselves had fought under with us the battles of the Constitution-a flag which a few days previously you had hailed with pride-because the stars and stripes, the joy of every American heart, full of glowing histories and lofty recollections-floating over it ac cording to the custom of every nation and people under hea ven, were hateful in your sight! The Athenians were tired of hearing their great leader called the Just, and consigned him to banishment. You were annoyed at the sight of the noblest national emblem which floats under the sun, when unfurled where, by your consent, and for a consideration, too, the Government of the United States held exclusive juris diction, and where it properly belonged; and for this 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. . Hon. D. S. Dickinson, 1861. 66 THE WAY OF PEACE. You propose to defend your hearths, your fire-sides, your porches, your altars, your wives, and your children, your household gods, and these 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 upon 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, ay, a great multitude, which no man can number," will defend them for you. But the issue must not be changed nor frittered away. Sumpter was not your hearth, Pickens your fire-side, 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 Constitution, and not in its violation or destruction. The Government is sustained 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 a Federal standard, not for the purpose of despoiling their people, nor of interfering 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 a unanimous popular will. And should the present or any succeeding administration attempt to employ the authorities 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 States. Hon. D. S. Dickinson, 1861. AN APPEAL FOR THE UNION. 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 bloodbought history? Give up the Union! "this fair and fertile plain to batten on that moor." 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! 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 a Josh, instead of the living and true God! But sustain the emblem your fathers loved and cherished. Give up the Union? Its name shall be heard with veneration amid 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 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 destiny of our dear land recognize the conception of the poet of her primitive days: "Perfumes as of Eden flowed sweetly along, The queen of the world and the child of the skies." Hon. D. S. Dickinson. THE MEANS OF RESISTANCE. MR. LINCOLN has increased his call from seventy-five thousand to four hundred thousand men. He has increased his demand for money from the five millions first asked for, and asks his Congress, now in session, for four hundred millions of dollars. Whether he will raise his men or his money, I know not. All I have to say about it is, that if he raises his four hundred thousand men, we must raise enough to meet him, and if he raises his four hundred millions of money, we must raise enough to meet it. We have, upon a resonable estimate, at least seven hundred thousand fighting men. Whether all these will be required to drive back his armed myrmidons, I know not; but, if they are, every man must go to the battle field. He may think, and doubtless does, that four hundred thousand men will intimidate, subjugate, and overrun us. He should recollect, however, as we should, and reverently, too, that the "race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,' but it is God that gives the victory. Four hundred thousand may be a formidable army against us, but it is not as formidable as the six hundred thousand led by Darius against the Grecian States; and we there have the example of much fewer numbers than we are, fighting a battle for right, for justice, for independence, and for liberty. We have an example worthy of our imitation. Six hundred thousand Persians invaded Greece. These small States could bring against them but eleven thousand all told. The eleven thousand met the hosts of Persia, not the six hundred thousand, but all that could be brought against them on the common plain. The eleven thousand with valorous hearts, fight ing for home, fighting for country, fighting for every thing dear to freemen, put to flight the hosts of Persia, leaving sixty thousand slain upon the field. Men of the South, therefore, let this war assume its gigantic proportions, its most threatening prospects, (nerving our hearts with the spirit of our revolutionary fathers, when they were but three millions, and coped with Great Britain, the most powerful nation in the world)-animated by these sentiments, fighting for every thing dear to us, fear not the result, recollecting that "thrice armed is he who hath his quarrel just;" and as our fathers, in the bloody conflict of the Revolutionary War, appealed to the God of battles for success in their cause, so may we, since we have the consciousness, in any event, that this war is not of our seeking.-Hon. A. H. Stephens, 1861. THE PRINCIPLES OF SECESSION IDENTICAL WITH THOSE OF SEVENTY-SIX. THIS war is not of our seeking. We simply wish to govern ourselves as we please. We simply stand where our revolutionary fathers stood in '76. We stand upon the great fundamental principle announced on the 4th of July, 1776, and incorporated in the Declaration of Independence-that great principle that announces that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed. In the announcement of this principle, the delegation from Massachusetts, and from Rhode Island, and from Connecticut, and from all the Northern States, united with the delegates from the Old Dominion, and from the Palmetto State, and from Georgia, the youngest and last of the colonies, then not numbering more than fifty thousand of population-they united in this declaration of the delegates from all the States or colonies, and for the maintenance of it they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor-Massachusetts side by side with Georgia, John Hancock at their head, and strange to say, to-day, the people of Massachusetts and the Northern States are reversing the position of our fathers, |