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and are demanding to rule, to govern, to coerce, to subjugate us against our consent.

But for one I declare to you to-day, you may think of it as you please, the people of the South may decide it as they please, but for one, I would never surrender this principle, though every valley from here to the Potomac should run with Southern blood, and every hill top be bleached with Southern bones. Home, firesides, life, friends and luxuries are dear, but there is something dearer to a true man than life, than home, and all. It is honor and independence. Let the enemy, therefore, make his calculation as wide and broad as he pleases. I say every true Southern heart is impressed with the magnitude of the responsibility that now rests upon us; and let every man be nerved to meet that responsibility at any and every cost. Our fathers pledged life, honor and fortune for this principle, and I know we are not the degenerate sons, nor are we the degenerate daughters of the noble matrons of that day, that would sacrifice, lose or surrender these principles at a less cost.

Hon. A. H. Stephens, 1861.

THE TRUE CAUSE OF THE REBELLION.

COULD one, an entire stranger to our history, now look down upon the South, and see there a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand men marching in hostile array, threatening the capture of the capital, and the dismemberment of the territory of the Republic; and could he look again and see that this army is marshalled and directed by officers recently occupying distinguished places in the civil and military ser vice of the country; and further that the States from which this army has been drawn appear to be one vast, seething cauldron of ferocious passion, he would very naturally conclude that the Government of the United States had committed some great crime against its people, and that this uprising was in resistance to wrong and outrages which had been borne until endurance was no longer possible. And yet no conclusion could be further from the truth than this. The Government of the United States has been faithful to all its constitutional obligations. For eighty years it has maintained the national honor at home and abroad, and by its prowess, its wisdom, and its justice, has given to the title of an American citizen an elevation among the nations of the earth which the citizens of no republic have enjoyed since

Rome was mistress of the world. Under its administration the national domain has stretched away to the Pacific, and that constellation which announced our birth as a people, has expanded from thirteen to thirty-four stars, all, until recently, moving undisturbed and undimmed in their orbs of light and grandeur. The rights of no States have been invaded; no man's property has been despoiled, no man's liberty abridged, no man's life oppressively jeoparded by the action of this Government. Under its benign influences the rills of public and private prosperity have swelled into rivulets, and from rivulets into rivers ever brimming in their fulness, and everywhere, and at all periods of its history, its ministrations have fallen as gently on the people of the United States, as do the dews of a summer's night on the flowers and grass of the gardens and fields.

Whence, then, this revolutionary outbreak? Whence the secret spring of this gigantic conspiracy, which, like some huge boa, had completely coiled itself round the limbs and body of the Republic, before a single hand was lifted to resist it? Strange, and indeed startling, as the announcement must appear when it falls on the ears of the next generation, the national tragedy, in whose shadow we stand to-night, has come upon us because, in November last, John C. Breckinridge was not elected President of the United States, and Abraham Lincoln was. This is the whole story. And I would pray now to know, on what John C. Breckinridge fed that he has grown so great, that a republic founded by Washington and cemented by the best blood that has ever coursed in human veins, is to be overthrown, because forsooth, he cannot be its President? Had he been chosen, we

well know that we should not have heard of this rebellion, for the lever with which it is being moved would have been wanting to the hands of the conspirators. Even after his defeat, could it have been guaranteed, beyond all peradventure, that Jeff Davis or some other kindred spirit, would be the successor of Mr. Lincoln, I presume we hazard nothing in assuming that this atrocious movement against the Government would not have been set on foot. So much for the principle involved in it. This great crime, then, with which we are grappling, sprang from that "sin by which the angels fell"-an unmastered and profligate ambition--an ambition that "would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven"—that would rather rule supremely over a shattered fragment of the Republic than run the chances of sharing with others the honors of the whole.

Hon. Joseph Holt, 1861.

A MIRROR FOR TRAITORS.

LET no man imagine that, because this rebellion has been made by men renowned in our civil and military history, it is the less guilty or the less courageously to be resisted. It is precisely this class of men who have subverted the best governments that have ever existed. The purest spirits that have lived in the tide of times, the noblest institutions that have arisen to bless our race, have found among those in whom they had most confided, and whom they had most honored, men wicked enough, either secretly to betray them unto death, or openly to seek their overthrow by lawless violence. The Republic of England had its Monk; the Republic of France had its Bonaparte; the Republic of Rome had its Cæsar and its Cataline, and the Saviour of the world had his Judas Iscariot. It cannot be necessary that I should declare to you, for you know them well, who they are whose parricidal swords are now unsheathed against the Republic of the United States. Their names are inscribed upon a roll of infamy that can never perish. The most distinguished of them were educated by the charity of the Government on which they are now making war. For long years they were fed from its table, and clothed from its wardrobe, and had their brows garlanded by its honors. They are the ungrateful sons of a fond mother, who dandled them upon her knee, who lavished upon them the gushing love of her noble and devoted nature, and who nurtured them from the very bosom of her life; and now, in the frenzied excesses of a licentious and baffled ambition, they are stabbing at that bosom with the ferocity with which the tiger springs upon his prey. The President of the United States is heroically and patriotically struggling to baffle the machinations of these most wicked I have unbounded gratification in knowing that he has the courage to look traitors in the face, and that, in discharging the duties of his great office, he takes no counsel of his fears. He is entitled to the zealous support of the whole country, and may I not add without offence, that he will receive the support of all who justly appreciate the boundless blessings of our free institutions.-Hon. Joseph Holt, 1861.

men.

THE FRUITS OF SECESSION.

Ir this rebellion succeeds, it will involve necessarily the destruction of our nationality, the division of our territory, the permanent disruption of the Republic. It must rapidly dry up the sources of our material prosperity, and year by year we shall grow more and more impoverished, more and more revolutionary, enfeebled and debased. Each returning election will bring with it grounds for new civil commotions, and traitors prepared to strike at the country that has rejected their claims to power, will spring up on every side. Disunion once begun, will go on and on indefinitely, and under the influence of the fatal doctrine of secession, not only will States secede from States, but counties will secede from States also, and towns and cities from counties, until universal anarchy will be consummated in each individual who can make good his position by force of arms, claiming the right to defy the power of the Government. Thus we should have brought back to us the days of the robber barons with their moated castles and marauding retainers. This doctrine when analyzed is simply a declaration that no physical force shall ever be employed in executing the laws or upholding the Government-and a government into whose practical administration such a principle has been introduced, could no more continue to exist than a man could live with an angered cobra in his bosom. If you would know what are the legitimate fruits of secession, look at Virginia and Tennessee, which have so lately given themselves up to the embraces of this monster. There the schools are deserted; the courts of justice closed; public and private credit destroyed; commerce annihilated; debts repudiated; confiscations and spoliations everywhere prevailing; every cheek blanched with fear, and every heart frozen with despair; and all over that desolated land the hand of infuriated passion and crime is waving, with a vulture's scream for blood, the sword of civil war. And this is the pandemonium which some would have transferred to Kentucky!-Hon. Joseph Holt, 1861.

SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE.

THE arbitrament of the sword has been defiantly thrust into the face of the Government and country, and there is no honorable escape from it. All guarantees and all attempts at

adjustment by amendments to the Constitution, are now scornfully rejected, and the leaders of the rebellion openly proclaim that they are fighting for their independence. Fighting for their independence! Independence of what? Independence of those laws which they themselves have aided in enacting; independence of that Constitution which their fathers framed and to which they are parties, and subject by inheritance; independence of that beneficent Government on whose treasury and honors they have grown strong and illustrious. When a man commits a robbery on the highway, or a murder in the dark, he thereby declares his independence of the laws under which he lives, and of the society of which he is a member. Should he, when arraigned, avow and justify the offence, he thereby becomes the advocate of the independence he has thus declared; and, if he resists, by force of arms, the officer, when dragging him to the prison, the penitentiary, or the gallows, he is thereby fighting for the independence he has thus declared and advocated; and such is the condition of the conspirators of the South at this moment. It is no longer a question of Southern rights-which have never been violated-nor of the security of Southern institutions, which we know perfectly well have never been interfered with by the general Government, but it is purely with us a question of national existence. In meeting this terrible issue which rebellion has made up with the loyal men of the country, we stand upon ground infinitely above all party lines and party platforms-ground as sublime as that on which our fathers stood when they fought the battles of the Revolution.

I wish solemnly to declare before you and the world, that I am for this Union without conditions, one and indivisible, now and forever. I am for its preservation at any and every cost of blood and treasure against all its assailants. I know no neutrality between my country and its foes, whether they be foreign or domestic; no neutrality between that glorious flag which now floats over us and the ingrates and traitors who would trample it in the dust. My prayer is for victory, complete, enduring, and overwhelming, to the armies of the Re public over all its enemies. But, if in this anticipation we are doomed to disappointment; if the people of the United States have already become so degenerate-may I not say so Ι craven?-in the presence of their foes, as to surrender up this Republic to be dismembered and subverted by the traitors who have reared the standard of revolt against it, then, I trust, the volume of American history will be closed and sealed up forever, and that those who shall survive this na

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