Have we not war enough now? Are you so enamored of funerals, where the order of Nature is reversed, and parents follow their children to the grave, that you are willing to keep a constant carnival of Death? Oh, no! You all desire peace. But there is only one way to secure it. So conduct the present war, that, when once ended, there shall be no remaining element of discord, no surviving principle of battle, out of which future war can spring. Above all, belligerent Slavery must not rear its crest as an independent power.
5. There is another consequence not to be omitted. War would not be confined to the two governments representing respectively the two hostile principles, Slavery and Liberty. It would rage with internecine fury among ourselves. Admit that States may fly out of the Union, and where will you stop? Other States must follow, in groups or singly, until our mighty galaxy is broken into separate stars or dissolved into the nebular compost of a people without form or name. Where then is country? Where then those powerful States, the pride of civilization and the hope of mankind? Handed over to ungovernable frenzy, without check or control, until anarchy and chaos are supreme,—as with the horses of the murdered Duncan, which, at the assassination of their master,
“Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,
Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,
Contending ’gainst obedience, as they would make
War with mankind. ’Tis said they eat each other.”
The picture is terrible; but it hardly exaggerates the fearful disorder. Already European enemies, looking to their desires for conclusions, predict a general discord. Sometimes it is said that there are to be four or five new nations,—that the Northwest is to be a nation by itself, the Middle States another, the Pacific States another, and our New England States still another, so that Rebel Slavery will be the predominant power on this continent. But it is useless to speculate on the number of these fractional governments. If disunion is allowed to begin, it cannot be stopped. Misrule and confusion will be everywhere. Our fathers saw this at the adoption of the National Constitution, when, in a rude sketch of the time, they pictured the Thirteen States as so many staves bound by the hoops into a barrel. Let a single stave be taken out, and the whole barrel falls to pieces. It is easy to see how this must occur with States. The triumph of the Rebellion will be not only the triumph of belligerent Slavery, but also the triumph of State Rights, to this extent,—first, that any State, in the exercise of its own lawless will, may abandon its place in the Union, and, secondly, that the constitutional verdict of the majority, as in the election of Abraham Lincoln, is not binding. With these two rules of conduct, in conformity with which the Rebellion was organized, there can be no limit to disunion. Therefore, when you consent to the independence of the Rebel States, you disband the whole company of States, and blot our country from the map of the world.
II.
I have said enough of surrender by recognition of the Slave States, or, in other words, of the Slave Power, out of the Union. It remains now that I ask attention to that other form of surrender which proposes recognition of the Slave Power in the Union. Each is surrender. The first, as we have already seen, abandons part of the Union to the Slave Power; the other subjects the whole Union to the Slave Power.