SPEECH

DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF A SERENADE, AT THE KIRKWOOD HOUSE, WASHINGTON CITY, August 1, 1860.

[On a casual visit to the National Capital in the summer of 1860, Mr. Dickinson met a most cordial and enthusiastic reception, and among other demonstrations was tendered the compliment of a serenade at his Hotel by the Democracy of the District. He was introduced to the assemblage by Gov. Stevens of Washington Territory, Chairman of the National Democratic Committee, who, in the great and deadly struggle which followed, sealed his devotion to the cause of the Union with his life, on the ill-starred plains of Manassas.

GOV. STEVENS: Fellow-citizens of the City of Washington, this is a most important occasion; an important crisis in the history of our country. At this time I have a most agreeable duty to perform. On the 18th of July we heard the sound of the trumpet from the city of New York; that sound reached the remotest limits of this broad Confederacy; a sound so pure, so clear, reaching to the skies, extending in every direction, that aroused the heart of every citizen of our land. But the voice which came to you through the press on the telegraph you have here to night. That voice has been heard in this city before, in your Congressional halls. It has been a voice always standing on the immutable and invincible right. It has been a voice which in every political crisis in our country's history has stood by the equal rights of the sovereign States of the Union! Without detaining you any longer from the great treat that is before you, I now introduce to you that veteran, that clear-headed Democrat, that whole-souled, that warm-hearted patriot, IIon. Daniel S. Dickinson, of New York.]

Ir is always gratifying and pleasant, my fellow-citizens, to be thus greeted and thus remembered personally; to be thus remembered for services to the country, or to the great Democratic party of the nation; to be thus greeted with soul-stirring music; to be thus introduced by complimentary eloquence, by so distinguished a gentleman as he who has addressed you, to

so numerous and respectable an auditory as the present. The only return I can make you, my fellow-citizens-the only return I can make to the committee and its organ, is the tribute of a grateful heart; and that is freely tendered.

The lines of the American people, my friends, have been cast in pleasant places. Heaven's warm and golden sunshine bathes all God's children within the vast area of this Republic. The tree of liberty, planted by the fathers of the Revolution, though but a slender shoot, watered by the tears of its daughters and nurtured by the blood of its sons, has, under the fostering care of the democratic party of the nation, grown to be great and mighty. Its roots have sunk deep into the fertile earth; its vast trunk stretches upward to the very heavens, and its mighty branches reach to the frozen regions of the North, down to where they are fanned by the tropical breezes of the South; to the broad Atlantic, and across to the far off Pacific. It invites not only the children of America, but the children of liberty everywhere, the down-trodden and oppressed of all the nations of the earth, to come and sit down under the shadow of its protecting branches and subsist upon its fruits. And throughout this vast country, with its fertile soil, its grand mountains, its pleasant vales, its heaving oceans, its winding rivers and its murmuring streamlets, under such institutions as the sun never shone upon before, every interest is protected, every industry rewarded, and the great and sacred principle of equality crowns the moral beauty of the whole.

But in all this prosperity, amidst all these benefits, under all these mighty blessings that are vouchsafed to us, one canker gnaws at the root of our domestic peace. One subject alone, like a wild and fevered dream, disturbs our land, and causes consternation, care, anxiety, and deep solicitude for our political safety. It is not, my fellow-citizens, merely that one of those great periodical struggles approaches for the election of a Chief Magistrate; for amidst all the stirring conflicts of the times (and they are many), we have an Administration that guides the ship of state in a manner that gives confidence to the American people that it will be brought over a prosperous ocean to a harbor of safety and peace.

It is not, my fellow-citizens, that political parties are in the field; for that has been before. It is not that political weap

ons are burnished for this contest and the knights are entering the lists; for they have been there before. The great democratic party of the country, with its principles of progress, is in the field; and it has been there before. The rich fruits of which our country has boasted are the results of its rule and its benign policy. Its opponent, too, has been in the field before. The old Whig party has nought left but its memories. I will not discuss the party ordinarily called the American party, because I do not regard it as a considerable element in the great and stirring controversy of the times. The Republican party, the present antagonist of the democracy, upon its own record is a sectional party; for it comes into the field ignoring fifteen States in the Union and their institutions, and manfully—manfully I say, because it does it openly and boldly -places both its candidates within the Northern or free States, and enters into the conflict with sectionalism upon its banner. And here, with all its errors, with all its wrong-doings, with all its elements of mischief, it throws off its concealment, and stands before the American people to-day in its sin, as our first parents stood before Heaven in their innocence, naked but not ashamed! The democratic party to-day, armed with the panoply of the constitution, with the sympathy of the masses of the people, could literally drive it from the face of the earth. It conquered it before, and in the struggle that is approaching, and is even now at our doors, can overcome it again. It has not an element of success. It has appealed to sectionalism, and passion, and prejudice; but it will appeal in vain to the confidence of the American people. Yet, though it is fraught, as we have seen, with elements of evil, there are other elements of evil in our midst to-day that threaten us far more than the republican party. Its disguises have been stripped off. It stands forth avowed in its purposes, and therefore it is robbed of nine tenths of its power to harm. It is the division of the great democratic party that endangers our success and jeopardizes the safety of the country. This is the absorbing question of the day and of the times, and that to which we must practically address ourselves.

The Democratic party is in the field with Breckinridge and Lane as its standard-bearers in this contest. They are names that are no strangers to the country, but are inscribed on its

highest page; that are no strangers in the public councils, but have honorable place in the records of Congress and of their respective States; no strangers on the field of battle, but intrepid soldiers who answered and honored the country's call to arms, by bravely battling for its rights on a foreign soil; no strangers to the Democratic party, in whose ranks they have done honorable service, and now bear aloft the banner under which the Democracy are going to fight this battle of the Constitution. But the chief impediment to our success is division in our ranks, under pretence of another nomination called Democratic-a nomination based upon the idea of Sherwood Forest:

"For why? because the good old rule

Sufficeth them, the simple plan,

That they should take who have the power
And they should keep who can."

I have nothing to say, at present, of the candidates which faction has put in the field against us, for these are questions which reach lower, rise higher, and spread out in extent clear beyond personal considerations. They go beyond mere men, and have nothing to do with them as such. Questions of organization; movements of political bodies; principles, that underlie and form the foundation of all these, are fit subjects for discussion, and I will treat of them and lay individuals out of the question. Nor do I dwell upon the technicalities of regularity of convention or delegates; I start with this broad proposition, that the party-the division, or faction, rather, opposed to us-is as sectional to-day as the Republican party, and ten times more mischievous. You need not tell me that it is not sectional because it has a small support here and there in the Southern portion of the Union. It was conceived in sectionalism, brought forth in sectionalism, and it has all the mischievous elements of sectionalism around and about it. What was it that disrupted the Charleston Convention? An effort to force upon a portion of the States a candidate whom they would not accept. What was it that finally dismembered the Baltimore Convention? It was precisely the same issue; and then we find both Conventions unequal to the task of nominating a Democratic candidate for the Presidency, in this time of extra

ordinary interest and extraordinary peril, according to the regular course and usage of the party, because a nominal majority held the rule of the Convention in its hands, and was determined to force a candidate upon it who was unacceptable to a portion of the States-even to a majority of the States of the Union. I insist that it is essentially sectional; that all the mischiefs and objections of a sectional candidate, under whatever name it may be called or pretended, attach to its nomination. I care nothing either for its particular platform, real or pretended, original or amended. It is an organization formed and supported by a portion of the States against another portion, when numerous considerations, at this time of all other times, suggested that no such sectional issue should be pressed upon the National Convention or the country. I admit that a great many of the elements enter into this that have entered into other struggles, and that many who participate in it do not believe it is intended for a sectional movement; but it has one element in it that, if it has been discovered, has not been as fully exposed as it deserves to be, and which is the great and controlling consideration in this opposition to the Democratic party. And it is this:-laying aside all other elements, worthy or unworthy, that enter into this campaign upon the part of this organization, it clearly has a secret motive power that propels this terrible train of evils that threaten the Democratic party and the country. Has not every observing and reflecting man been surprised that a section of the party should have spent nearly two weeks at Charleston in the effort to press upon the Convention a candidate for the Presidency that was unacceptable to those States that must be relied on to give Democratic votes? Has not every reflecting and observing man been sur. prised that when they came to Baltimore, after returning to their constituencies, all this effort should have been renewed with re-doubled power and virulence?

There are those who have belonged to the Democratic party who would rather reign in hell than serve in Heaven. They have seen four hundred millions of spoils, and have hungered and thirsted for them like famished wolves. Some of them are lacking principle, wanting power and wanting bread; and they determined, if possible, to take possession of the treasury of the country; and how are they to do that? They are unwilling to