Break up our union and you mar all our history. You write all backward the lessons of our country’s glory that we have learned from earliest childhood. You take from us the only object we had learned to regard with patriotic fervour. It is like taking from one’s home the only being that gives it life and loveliness. It is like blotting the sun from the heavens. It is taking from us, at a single stroke, what men, in all ages of the world, have fought for with the most undaunted courage, what no nation on the globe to-day, civilized or not, would ever think of yielding without first risking annihilation. No; we are satisfied with the union that our Fathers founded. We are satisfied with the[14] eighty years experience by which it has been tested. We are satisfied with the place it has taken among the nations. We want no new experiments in Government. Especially do we want none initiated upon the fragments of our own. We know that to the union we owe all our progress and our power, all that we have, all that we are, all that we can hope to be. We know that it is the flag of our union that is recognized on every sea and honoured throughout the world. We know that our little, petty, pompous States sink into insignificance when we leave their soil, and that it is the name of an American citizen that we prize at home, and that gives us character abroad. It is not “the rocky hills and stone-clad valleys” of New England, nor the rich soil and undulating surface of the Middle States with their great wealth-bearing mountain ranges, nor the fertile prairies of the West, nor the broad savannas of the South, it is no one of these, but all in one that we have learned to call our country. It is not Adams and Hamilton and Harrison and Webster alone, but Washington and Henry and Jackson and Clay that we have learned to venerate among our heroes and Statesmen. It is not the battle-fields of New England and the Middle States alone, but of Virginia and the Carolinas that make up the glory of our Nationality. It is impossible to blot these names from our history. It is impossible to erase these memories from our hearts. And it is impossible to educate a people, with such an ancestry, in such annals, and have them enjoy the blessings of such a government for the larger part of a hundred years, and then undertake to break up their government, either by domestic or by foreign foes, without creating a convulsion that will shake the world. There is another reason why we will not accept the destructive alternative demanded by the South. It is because we believe that by dismembering the union and establishing two or more separate governments upon its ruins, there can be no such thing as permanent peace. We believe that if you cut the Mississippi in two by the border[15] line of an alien nation, and deny the boundless wealth of the Mississippi Valley all access to the ocean, except under the frowning fortresses of a foreign power you cannot expect to have peace. We believe that to keep our rival systems of tariff and revenue from clashing, along a line extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, without natural defences, through vast regions of wild and thinly populated territory, is an impossibility.
And then there must be settled all the preliminaries of a dissolution—questions of boundary, questions of ownership of forts and public property—questions of division of the national debt, and of individual obligation—questions of river and harbor navigation; and then would arise, under forms vastly more difficult of adjustment all the old political questions that have alienated the sections; and then would come treaties and intrigues with foreign powers, and alliances entangling us with all the petty quarrels of Europe, and keeping us ever implacable enemies, thus rendering us impotent and without influence among nations. And this is the future to which we are invited. Now we have one cause of war; attempt to negotiate a dissolution of the union, and we shall have fifty. And the number would be all the more, by reason of the parties with whom we should have to negotiate. For, I maintain that a set of men, who, like the leaders of this rebellion, would destroy a government like ours, upon pretexts such as theirs, could not be negotiated with, without war. And until their pride is humbled, their power broken, until they have been made to endure somewhat of the bitterness of that suffering they pour out so overwhelmingly upon others, until their arrogance and haughtiness are utterly abased in exile or on the scaffold, there can be no peace upon this continent.
There is still another reason why we will not consent to the disruption of the union. Because the probability is too great that it would end here, and in all the world, and for a thousand years the experiment of popular government. Already the South disdains the rule of the people. In a[16] population of ten millions, they have but three hundred thousand slaveholders. Yet, almost every man in power is a slaveholder. Hence, government with them is already in the hands of a class. And then, the tone of their press, and the speeches of their statesmen have aimed for years to degrade labour, have betrayed a growing dislike for the equality of rights demanded by our institutions, and have been coloured with all the assumption and the arrogance of an aristocracy.
And then, the doctrine of Secession, which, thirty years ago, we had supposed was crushed forever under the gigantic tread of Webster’s logic and the strokes of Jackson’s iron will—this principle of disintegration upon which they would base their government, would sooner or later drive them into despotism. And this principle would not be without effect upon the North, for it has many advocates here already. Men are as apt in learning lessons of evil as of good. One successful rebellion would become the parent of others. The theory of our government presupposes the existence of various and diverse local interests, to be controlled by local governments. It is impossible for these interests not to be sometimes subordinated to the general welfare. Establish two confederacies, and the constant temptation would be held out to States with similar local interests, fretting under imaginary grievances, or maddened by party spirit, to strike off from the parent State on the one hand, and form alliances with similarly disaffected portions on the other. The interests of the Western and Southwestern States are quite as closely connected by the waters of the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Missouri, as the interests of either are with the States upon the Atlantic seaboard, and would be quite as likely to be formed, ultimately, into a third and independent government as to remain united with the old. Oregon and California, washed by the waves of another ocean, and thousands of miles from the central government, would be especially difficult to hold by the North. And the worst future of any such subdivisions would be the necessity that[17] must arise for large and ever-increasing military establishments, both of the army and navy. A frequently recurring or a prolonged state of war not only eats up the substance and palsies the industry of a people, but it is incompatible with the enlarged liberties we claim for the citizen. The qualities of mind and heart which make the greatest generals are not commonly those which inculcate the highest regard for individual rights. The glare and glitter of military reputation cannot outshine, in all the avenues to power, the less ostentatious merits of the statesman and scholar without imperilling free institutions. We risk little from these causes now. No American general now, were he to manifest within a year more than the genius of the first Napoleon, could undertake to establish a dictatorship over the American people, without immediately falling from the pedestal of power. For we have not forgotten our earliest teachings. We have not forgotten that the name of Washington belongs to our history. We have been educated in the meaning of his great and glorious life, and no man now can command any large influence in American affairs, who is not as ready to lay down power as to take it up. But, let this people learn to lean, for half a century, upon the military arm; place them in a position in which questions must frequently arise to be settled only by the sword; agitate the peaceful current of their lives with ever-recurring waves of war; allow their individuality, their liberty of thought and speech, to become absorbed, year after year, in that oneness of purpose, that subordination to another’s will, which military law requires, and they will become as ready, as others have before them, to seek rest, stability and peace at the expense of liberty and equality, under the rigour of despotic rule.
There is one other thought I would refer to, in considering these causes, which keep the North so true to the union. It is this: these same causes must operate powerfully in hastening the return of the South to her allegiance, when once her military power is broken. I speak, now, upon the supposition that her military power can be broken. This I[18] have never doubted, and never expect to. If we crush her political and military leaders, stop for a season the systematic lying by which she has been deluded, give her time to cool and consider, she will cheerfully return to her allegiance. If her territory were separated from ours by great natural barriers, if she were a distinct and oppressed nationality, like Poland, or Hungary, or Italy, or Ireland; if her people were of a different race, spoke a different language, professed a different religion, and were fighting in a righteous, or at least a reasonable cause,—then we might doubt the possibility of the restoration of good feeling. There is no doubt but that the South is carrying on the war with great unanimity, for war creates its own arguments; but there is no reason to believe that the masses of the South have ever been convinced that their leaders were right in beginning the war, or that the breaking up of the union could ever ultimate in anything but disaster to themselves and their posterity. There is great reason to believe that the arch leaders themselves did not contemplate, at the outset, the destruction of this government, with a view of establishing two or more independent ones as a final result. They wanted a new constitution. They could not change the old one in a constitutional way; they chose to make a new one in an unconstitutional way. They expected the Border States would immediately come under it; they expected soon to absorb the Middle States, and the lower tier of the Northwestern States, and finally all the rest, when these had become suf............