And, what other wars ever disclosed such valuable and holy ends, as these which ennoble and sanctify this grand War of ours? Let us patiently and honestly specify but a few of these many justifications of War, in itself so unnecessary, cruel and unnatural. These soldiers died to save our Nation’s life. And what a Life it is? Consider its history and career. A new, fresh, people, for the first time in history started forth as a Nation, in the fullness of its civilization. Not rising together with their customs, laws and institutions from a state of barbarism, into the developments of slow experience, into its civilization, but like a modern Minerva, our Nation sprang from the pregnant mind of England, then the freest and most civilized Nation of Earth or Time—full grown and full armed for all the enterprises of her National life. She fixed her home upon this distant, virgin Continent, across the Seas. And what a continent it was? Unbroken and boundless forests; vast and unploughed plains; Mountains of Mineral with the iron frame of the Earth protruding its black skeleton, up through the thick mould of richest valleys, glistening with streamlets; Whose waves were amber and whose sands were Gold,—grand chains and systems of Rivers, Lakes, Bays and Ocean-harbors and every other faculty and facility of Nature, essential to the developments of Agriculture, Manufactures, Navigation & Commerce, composed here a land for the growth and maintenance and happiness of the largest homogenous Nation of history. With such a European Civilization from its Mother-land, as an out start in its career and with such an inheritance from its Father—the God of Nature—as its domain, we cannot fail to perceive peculiar opportunity for the fair and full trial of a new system of Government which such a wilderness with this its isolation, afforded to our fathers. For the first time, again and necessarily, their form of government, could not become, like others, the result of mere usages and precedents—a growth. It was, inevitably, a design & a creation. This condition of things, directed to the study of the nature and ends of human government, a mass of thought, which as the circumstances of no antecedent population had ever invited, or allowed, and whomsoever, the immigrants and their descendants, could suffice in numbers and development to become independent of the parent-government and people,—as purely a question of time alone, as in the case our natural offspring or of maturing fruits—necessarily, also, that separation in mere space, left that experiment in its practical workings wholly undisturbed, by the neighborships and entangling alliances of unlike governments. Here then was the first and only fair trial of self-government,—of a government of the people, for the people, ever made on earth. And it was also made amidst circumstances, the most favorable for success, which ever concurred or could be imagined. In the light of these simple truths, is it not most plain, that the success of this experiment of a Government of free and equal laws, would prove not only the very highest direct blessing to its own citizens, but a boon beyond estimation, as our example to all other peoples in all future time? What a disaster and disgrace to ourselves and what a calamity and a curse to our race, therefore, if we should destroy all these institutions—the product of such rare opportunity—such combined wisdom and such heroic virtues? But let us here recollect that it was this great ruin, which that Traitor Army marched hither expressly to accomplish and which these dead heroes died to prevent.
Do any of my hearers distrust this frequent citation of the value of our experiment in government, in its example to the world, as being only another of the manifold delusions and exaggeration of National vanity? Listen then to the neutral testimony of one, who was at once a great Poet, Scholar, Philosopher and Philanthropist.
There is a People, mighty in its youth,
A land beyond the Oceans of the West
Where, though with rudest rites, Freedom and Truth
Are worshipped; from a glorious Mother’s breast,
XXIII
That land is like an Eagle, whose young gaze
Feeds on the noontide beam, whose golden plume
Floats move less on the storm, and in the blaze
Of sunrise gleams, when Earth is wrapt in gloom;
An epitaph of glory, for the tomb
Of murdered Europe may thy fame be made,
Great People! as the sands, shalt thou become;
Thy growth is swift as morn when night must fade;
The multitudinous Earth shall sleep beneath thy shade.
XXIV
Yes, in the desert, there is built a home
For Freedom. Genius is made strong to rear
The monuments of man beneath the dome
Of a new Heaven; Myriads assemble there,
Whom the proud lords of man, in rage or fear,
Drive from their wasted homes.
My countrymen, let me repeat, in the cause of such an inheritance to ourselves and such a Refuge and Example to our Race, have these inanimate forms yielded up their labors and their lives.
But they fought for far more than an Idea, or the right to try an experiment. Our Nation had made attainments and acquisitions in its short progress, with amazing speed and of incalculable values. What student of history will pretend, that any former nation, within a period of tenfold our time, can be compared with our past progress either in Agriculture, Manufactures, Commerce or, especially in maritime developments? And, although, with equal numbers of the same population, broken into lesser nationalities and under more absolute governments, the sum of its products in several of these departments of labor might possibly be as great as they would be in our Nation undivided, yet is it most certain, that after Disunion and its other consequent disintegrations the maritime powers and resources of this people, for example, would almost disappear, in fact, from the Seas of the World, as well as in name, from the its shipping lists. Amongst these positive acquisitions, and as a specimen again, we must remember, that the champions of this war are fighting for the exercise and enjoyment, by our Nation, now and through coming ages, of its strict rights, to the use of that vast system of the Mississippi—more that thirty thousand miles of Steamboat navigation. And this absolute right and possession, were bought by the Nation proper, with money out of the National Exchequer, and without the least pretext for any States-rights appertaining to the title, either in its origin or its uses. Yet these Traitors, without notice of claim or excuse either for separation or war insolently seized this special National property,—this actual artery of our commercial System and circulation,—choked and blocked it up by fortifications and artillery. And, forthwith, upon the perpetration of these frauds, treasons and insulting outrages, with the curling smoke of actual war drifting over the face of that river, proposed to dictate to us, its owner, the terms of our future use of it and all its tributaries. And only think of that insult to our understandings, which alone could surpass that upon our flag;—the basis of our acquiescence was to be our faith in the honor of Mississippi; of the wisdom of Louisiana and the moderation and justice of that band of gentlemanly conspirators, plunderers, rebels, and traitors, self-called the Southern Confederacy!
To return to our summary of facts; what Nation on Earth, in the sphere of material interests, could have ever alleged such vast possessions, or such unquestionable rights as its cause of War? For these covenanted rights; for these vast properties of inheritance from and for our Nation, have these men died. But my countrymen they were martyred. They died for rights and interests, far more precious and exalted than those pertaining to material possessions. They died in the cause of our civil and religious liberties. To take only one of the many values, which this point suggests, nothing can be plainer, that that a government of fixed territorial limits, founded on Slavery in order to repress the constantly increasing dangers and horrors of servile insurrections, must necessarily and perpetually maintain, as a branch of its established institutions, a vast standing Army with all its accessories, otherwise the Slaves would cease. These fixed limits for Slaves, cannot be fixed as to the freemen. Hence, the emigration of the latter and the non-emigration of the former class of population, must inevitably, year by
year and generation upon generation, so diminish its white and free population and so enhance its black and slave class, as to give it an awful preponderance. As a consequence of this certain truth, that standing army and military organization of this Southern Confederacy, must, from the nature of its case, bear such a proportion to the entire population of freemen as never had a parallel in history. Nor is this their own proper affair merely. It is ours as much and as directly. For, no neighbor Republic could trust another, although of like institutions with such an ability and ready preparation for assault, without supplying itself constantly with an equal or superior means of defense. Add now to those general reasons, for our being perpetually armed and fortified, we shall also add, these special and peculiar necessities of our case—Viz; that, our new Neighbor is to be an Oligarchy, pure and simple, in form and sprit;—that this is a government, which, as a class, is by its intrinsic nature, ambitious, intriguing, cruel, implacable and full of warlike vigor;—that the inheritance and possession of domestic slaves not only enhances and envenoms each one of these vices of abstract oligarchy, but under pretext of the violation of one of our treaties for the return and redelivery of their fugitive slaves on account of its expansion of its slavery-limits and of their many other like requirements and demands must furnish multitudinous and virulent causes and provocative to mutual War, And our doom must become apparent to every mind.
A great standing Army, as a constituent portion of any government, is not merely an invariable source of the most heavy and grievous of all taxations and public debts, but—far worse,—it is utterly incompatible with civil liberty. Such a standing Army makes ours a Military Republic. A Military Republic is the most despotic form of Government except alone, an Oligarchy. And so, the sum of all is, that the free Republic of the United States, would eventuate in two forms of government—theirs the Southern and strongest a Slavery-Oligarchy, the worst government tried or imaginable and ours, the Northern and weakest, a Military Republic only less bad than the Southern Confederacy only less weak than Mexico. And all this unparalleled load of taxation, and public debt; all this degradation and loss of liberty, be it observed, will have been made eternal necessities to each portion of the broken and divided Nation from a Disunion, conspired and executed by one section alone, in the special interests of Slavery, an institution peculiar to itself! Did ever the rights of property before, find so reasonable and honest a cause of war as these? Did ever Freedom arm herself against dangers, so many or destruction so sure? It was for civil liberty then, that these martyrs here shed their most precious life-blood.
We are admonished and exhorted by very strange apostles at home and abroad, that—“Blessed are the Peace-makers.” Well; my friends we say too, blessed be God! For that truth and its promises. As we pass, however, we only express our astonishment, that Great Britain preaches it, with the ink of the warlike menaces of the Trent-affair, yet moist on her dispatches, or that Napoleon the third, while the sulfurous smoke of Solferino, slow rolls away before our eyes and the thunders of his artillery at Puebla are still resounding in our ears, should so suddenly and so zealously be preaching to us this new gospel of peace. We are for peace. But neither the God of Nature; nor the God of Revelation, has taught us of those changes, in which, Fire shall consist with water; light with darkness;—truth with error; —virtue with vice;—Liberty with despotism—nor, Loyalty with Treason. “The good time coming” when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, can only be when the Lion shall become as a lamb, and not that the Lamb shall become as the Lion. And in brief, if darkness and error and crime and despotism and Treason, or their friends for them, crave peace and respite in their own unending war with Light and Truth and Virtue and Liberty and Patriotism, why let them ground their arms; do works meant for repentance and cease thus to afflict mankind and to insult God.
What offers or promises of peace however did these conspirators tender us in advance of their revolt? What acts or signs of peace, did they show in its beginning? What pacific or honest purpose, have they exhibited in its progress? And, leaving the men and considering things, what prospect of Peace,—A real, permanent Peace,—Peace as an institution—can we perceive, in all the probabilities of this new Foreign Government as our Neighbor? It will have a boundary-line of Twenty five hundred miles for all its accidents of border wars;—the rapacity and arrogance of an Oligarchy, for its spirit of encroachment thousands of fugitive slaves, tens of thousands in all their generations, fleeing across that long line of emancipation, from the lash, the goad, or the brand and each trembling fugitive unconsciously enkindling, as he flies, such many and endless feuds and wars and conflagrations as shall startle “Pale midnight on her starry throne”; What prospect of peace, to yourselves or your children, do you perceive in the future of these conditions? But, my friends, we must look yet further. For I am resolved to justify these Dead, in what they have done and suffered, by specifically disclosing the chief causes and ends of this war. Let no vague generalizations mystify the cleanness of their cause. Let no affectations as to customary funereal rites, silence us from uttering, in their full vindication and their highest honor,—these clear truths of History.
This Southern Confederacy designs and strives to found a separate government, upon Slavery, as a corner-stone. The founders vaunt before Christendom, the originality, wisdom, and benevolence of that foundation. The interests of that property and institution are openly alleged to be the justification for the violent destruction of the former government and in like manner, to be the end of the new. I make no controversy here, upon those propositions. But whatever one may think, or may affect to think about the morality, justice or political economy of Slavery, two results must clearly follow from their success in these enterprises. That people, which in the very outset of their undertaking, suffers so much in behalf of slavery and which moulds the very foundations and framework of their new government mainly for its preservation and propagandism, (instead of in reference to the infinitude of other rights and interests that compose the usual purposes in the founders of all other new governments,) must necessarily, in its future, prize and love that institution of Slavery with an increased estimate and ardor.
Dear is the helpless creature we defend
Against the World!
The second result is equally evident. The other fragment of the old Nation, which is without slaves itself, and which will have suffered such infinite losses of property, such insults to personal independence and national love and pride; such wounds, murders, wars and loss of peace and liberty at the hands of Slaveholders, must perforce hate, yes abhor Slavery with a unanimity and intensity, before unknown to itself, or any other free people on Earth. Now then; suppose these two Nations arrayed, face to face, across a Continent! What will be the result? Peace or War? We must know that the only result could be a war and nothing else, so far forth as these states of feeling should influence their action. Let us now look beyond and at other motives and probabilities. We shall see that every other of all their conditions would only increase and intensify these horrid tendencies.
They begin their separate national existences, in all the bitterness of their previous malignity and envy. So much for the Past. Their present must evolve yet numerous other unsettled and, to this hour, unconsidered grounds of debate and dispute, preliminary to the act of separation. Their Future, amongst other obstacles to a peaceful neighborship, promises only great and rapid changes in the views, passions and conduct of all three of the parties henceforth concerned in the matter of Slavery—viz: the slave-holders, the Slaves, and the new Anti-Slavery Nation. Let us note the drift and extent of these changes. The segregation of this nation of mere slaveholders, cut off from its former intercourse of trade education and friendship with their former fellow-citizens of the Free states and from the general society of Christendom and nursing this particular property and its fanaticisms, with increased morbidness in its dreary isolation—will wonderfully enhance that wild self-will and spirit of unrest
raint,—that intolerable arrogance,—which so distinctively marks this class of men in all their histories. No wind or current from the free, pure, moving Ocean, or without, can be permitted to stir and to freshen the stagnant waters of their embayed and lifeless societies. The putrid stillness of the Dead Sea, windless and waveless and fatal to the Air above as in the Deep below, were motion and joy, when compared to the existence of such a people in their own home. To deplore their general calamities, however, is not now my office nor desire. How their state shall affect others,—us—is my present aim. It is obvious enough that in such a state of things, or in one anything like it, that those vices of Slave-ownership in King-Cotton proportions, must more and more, become morbid down to a chronic and general fanaticism. Meanwhile, and with equal pace, the bondage and suffering of the Slaves would become more and more cruel and intolerable. And see; how again other causes, opportunities and temptations must unluckily conspire to endanger the peace of these neighbor-Nations. The increased severity of the Slaveholders must increase the numbers of their fugitive slaves, beyond the proportions of their mere multitude. That greater loss makes it necessary again to tighten and harden their fetters. And so on, in this action and reaction of the enraged master and the desperate slave upon each other, to the end of those relations. But we must also remind ourselves,—that there can be then no fugitive slave law to capture and return the escaping slaves to slavery—better or worse—to deter the much greater number from the attempt to escape when Freedom to the bondsmen will have been brought from the great, cold distance, across states and over the Lakes, in Canada, within their sight—aye, to their touch—yes—only across an Air-line! What increased motives to fly? What temptations and opportunities will draw them to Freedom? But there is a third party to this business—The people of these and yet other Free States—yourselves. How will they and you feel and act in and after these many rapid and wide changes of opinion, feeling, and legal relations towards Slavery? Let us consider yourselves. First, you will have no constitutional compact, nor fugitive-Slave-Law, commanding you to do, or to forbear, towards Slaves, or Masters. This latter class will have adroitly discharged you all from any, the least, obligations or law towards them in these regards. You will stand upon the precise legal platform of the British and Canadians in all that matter. Next, The promised non-intercourse in trade and society, will leave here no class, whose avarice or vanity would make them Kidnappers for, or of your loving brethren or sisters. Thirdly, you will have no large and able class of politicians deriving all their wealth, powers and fame, wholly from their political alliances with their Southern brethren, as the consideration of helping them, by your own misguided votes. Fourthly: You would have all the hatreds and loves, I have mentioned, to impel you to help the fugitive and to hinder and resist his pursuer. And, in general is it not self-evident, that the public peace of these two nations would become the sport or accident of every casual flight of the slave; of every word, or act of arrogance of the Slavehunter with or without his bloodhounds and of every throb of pride or love of liberty upon that line between Slavery and Freedom, which is as long as the continent and narrower than a hair? Do you not perceive, that the worse the slave-holders shall become, that the more their increased despotisms shall frighten, or drive away their slaves and the more you shall improve in morality, Christianity and in love of independence for yourselves and of liberty to others, each necessary result—that the more and more, forever, would fresh causes of War spring up, like saurian dragon teeth, to afflict these new Nations. And what a frightful consequence; that God’s inspired love for your own Liberty and pity for the oppressed and hatred for the oppressors, should bring down endless and bitter wars and woes upon you an innocent and a Foreign Nation?
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