PATRIOTIC UNITY AND EMANCIPATION.
Letter to a Public Meeting at New York, July 14, 1862.
Washington, July 14, 1862.
DEAR SIR,—I welcome and honor your patriotic efforts to arouse the country to a generous, determined, irresistible unity in support of the National Government; but the Senate is still in session, and my post of duty is here. A Senator cannot leave his post, more than a soldier.
But, absent or present, the cause in which the people are to assemble has my God-speed, earnest, devoted, affectionate, and from the heart. What I can do let me do. There is no work I will not undertake, there is nothing I will not renounce, if so I may serve my country.
There must be unity of hands, and of hearts too, that the Republic may be elevated to the sublime idea of a true commonwealth, which we are told “ought to be but as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an honest man, as big and compact in virtue as in body.”[103] Oh, Sir, if my feeble voice could reach my fellow-countrymen, in workshops, streets, fields, and wherever they meet together, if for one moment I could take to my lips that silver trumpet with tones to sound and reverberate throughout the land, I would summon all, forgetting prejudice and turning away from error, to help unite, quicken, and invigorate our common country—most beloved now that it is most imperilled—to a compactness and bigness of virtue in just proportion to its extended dominion, so that it should be as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an honest man, instinct with all the concentration of unity. Thus inspired, the gates of Hell cannot prevail against us.
To this end the cries of faction must be silenced, and the wickedness of sedition, whether in print or public speech, must be suppressed. These are the Northern allies of the Rebellion. An aroused and indignant people, with iron heel, must tread them out forever, as men tread out the serpent so that it can neither hiss nor sting.
With such concord God will be pleased, and He will fight for us. He will give quickness to our armies, so that the hosts of the Rebellion will be broken and scattered as by the thunderbolt; and He will give to our beneficent government that blessed inspiration, better than newly raised levies, by which the Rebellion shall be struck in its single vulnerable part, by which that colossal abomination, its original mainspring and present motive power, shall be overthrown, while the cause of the Union is linked with that divine justice whose weapons are of celestial temper.