such a pass that my own property may be
confiscated," &c.
It was this war upon one of the constitu-
tional guarantees of property, thus made and
thus persistently urged with all the zeal of
bigotry and fanaticism that has deluged the
land in blood and broken up the government.
Sir, every body knows what has occurred in
the last few years, how Congress passed a se-
ries of compromise measures, that patriots
everywhere fondly hoped would cause the
subsidence of angry strife. Everybody knows
that "the fugitive slave law," admitted to
be constitutional, was disregarded, and if en-
forced at all, it was done at the point of the
bayonet and the mouth of the cannon. Every-
body knows that a peaceful State was invaded
by armed fanatics, who seized at midnight
upon Harper's Ferry, imprisoned the citizens,
and were only dislodged when an armed force
they could not resist drove them out. Every-
body knows that when Virginia hung, as she
ought to have hung, the traitor who had
dared to break her laws and invade her terri-
tory, he was then and has been ever since
deified as one of the martyrs of the age, and
the irfamous name of John Brown is to-day
worshipped in the North as one of the house-
hold Gods—"the bravest and best man of
the age."
Everybody knows how the last Presiden-
tial canvass was conducted, and the result of
it. And yet you toll me in the face of all
these facts, that the institution of slavery
which was here before the nation had an ex-
istence, and which has lived with it contem-
poraneously from that hour to this, and until
the past. three years without a jar and with-
out a conflict—you tell me that that has
made the war and broken the Union It is
not so. It is not true; it was not slavery,
It was the abolition party. It was the doc-
trines of the higher law, that doctrine that
the Constitution and the laws of the land
are subordinate and secondary to some un-
defined and shadowy myth existing in a
distempered and disordered brain, and which
has so obtained at the North that it has
overturned reason and common sense, and
to-day finds friends and advocates upon
this floor. Gentlemen have also said, that
the lust for power and place, that ambition
and pride led the Southern leaders to take
the step they did. Sir, why will men,
sensible, intelligent men, be so blind? Why
shut their eyes to facts so palpable and plain
before them? is it credible? is it to be
believed that if the people of the South were
betrayed by their leaders, that those leaders
would not have been hung long ago, by an
injured and an outraged people, and yet what
do we see? We see that whole people, with an
unanimity wonderful and unparalleled, rising
as one man, and sustaining those leaders, and
bearing up and battling against a power and
a force, before which in other times and |
other days empires would have been swept
away. Again, sir, those men who are now
sitting in Richmond, and controlling the des-
tiny of the Confederacy, were, for the most
part, fitting at Washington before these
stormy times came over us. Thy were the
Representatives of these States and these peo-
ple in Washington, under the Government
they have discarded, honored, trusted, and
beloved to a degree that has certainly been
unexampled in the North.
If it had been their object to gratify human
ambition; if the desires of the human heart
for pomp, place and power, had alone been
their motives, there was in the possession and
enjoyment of these men, who represented the
South at Washington, enough to satisfy the
utmost for 'which they could wish or desire.
I say, sir, and perhaps I say it at the risk
of incurring the admonition of the gentleman
from Baltimore, "that I may perhaps not get
paid for my negroes,"—that the people of the
North have not done justice to the motives
that have prompted this great uprising of an
entire people. We may believe, and I do be-
lieve, there was no sufficient cause to justify
secession when it took place. Our views and
our opinions are influenced by the circum-
stances surrounding us. We as Marylanders,
living upon the BORDER=0, where the first shock
of the conflict would be felt, where the first
flash of the thunderbolt would fall, did not
and do not think that there was sufficient
cause for the disruption that took place. But
does it follow that they did not think differ-
ently. Does it follow that they do not feel
justified in their own consciences and in the
sight 'of high heaven, in the course they took.
And I beg gentlemen to remember that
whilst we are forming opinions for ourselves
and acting upon them, other men have the
same right, and are doing the same thing.
I mourn over the condition of my country as
deeply as any member of this Convention.
I believe that no greater calamity could befall
this nation than a separation—but that has
come. They have gone off, whether right-
fully or wrongfully, they have gone in the
face of war and battle and bloodshed, at the
sacrifice of life and fortune and family, and
of everything that makes life desirable, or
gives a charm to life. They have dared to
risk the battle, to throw themselves upon the
issue of war, relying upon the God of nations,
and I am bound to believe, I cannot help be-
lieving that these people—no matter what we
think of them—must think, must believe,
that they have right and justice on their side.
What is the prospect the future holds out
to us? Can this Union be restored by the
abolition of slavery ?
Notwithstanding the insertion in your bill
of rights of the doctrine of paramount allegi-
ance; notwithstanding the edict is about to
go forth from this Hall, in the language of
gentlemen, "that the shackles are about to |
